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I'm Michelle Saya!

ABOUT MICHELLE

I'm a psychological astrologer and intuitive business coach located in California. I help conscious creatives and practitioners step into soul fulfilling work using the wisdom of their birth chart. 

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The Ugly & the Good: Coming Out of the Spiritual Closet

 

Today is my 26th birthday. The first thing I noticed when I woke up was the swollen lymph nodes around my neck. Maybe it was from all the incessant laughter from last night’s fiasco when my dear friend surprised me with a birthday cake – made out of 1-year-old marshmallows and chocolate pudding. Or maybe it was from my uncontrollable sobs as I look back at the last three years of my life. Three years ago was when I hit rock bottom. But despite what people would imagine what “rock bottom” would look like, mine was a silent, invisible bomb.

Rock bottom happened when I was at the highest peak of living a life that looked pretty fucking great from the outside but had no depth whatsoever. I was a living, breathing, walking imposter.

I was on a comfortable career path, with my whole life plan laid out in pretty wrapping paper.

On the outside, I looked pretty happy. I had what seemed like the perfect job, complete with my own 401K, pension plan, and stock options. But the career path was unfulfilling and killed my creativity.

I had a relationship that looked perfect from the outside and was on track to the marriage route, with children, and all. But we both knew this relationship had more cracks in the foundation that we’d care to admit.

I also took pride in my false sense of liberalism. I labeled myself as left-winged, feminist and atheist. I didn’t know it at the time, that I was simply following the herd of generalizations upon generalizations. I didn’t have the cojones to actually have an opinion different from others.

I adopted an identity that made sense to other people. What made sense to my family. My friends. My bosses. My exes. The higher I rose into other people’s perception of me, the more I felt hollow. And in this state of existential depression, the more I started to hate myself.

“What gives ME the right to be unhappy? Isn’t this the dream? Isn’t this what everybody fucking wants?”

My life crisis didn’t have one singular defining moment. This was a slow, excruciating build up. This was death by a thousand cuts.

Then one day, my Jim Carrey moment arrived.1

I handed in my 2-week notice. Sold everything I owned. Booked a one way trip to California [from the East Coast], officially cut the cord to a dead-end relationship and left my entire life behind in one fell swoop.

I accurately anticipated what would happen the several months that followed would be:

– Feeling like a complete failure
– Struggling to stay financially afloat running my own business from the ground up
– Cripping self-doubt – Did I just fuck my whole life up? Did I throw a good thing away?

What I didn’t anticipate, would be a full-frontal spiritual awakening. It was an open door I unknowingly walked into the moment I middle fingered my way out of that old life and into a new one. I didn’t know it at the time, but what I experienced the year leading up to the big life change was what a lot of Christians and spiritualists alike would coin, “The Dark Night of The Soul”.2

It’s a fancy term for a complete lack of consolation that your life is going in the right direction. Everything you’ve come to know about your identity, beliefs systems, and your perceived reality comes into question. So much so, the confusion brings about excruciating pain. Pain that cripples you to the point of emotional and mental withdrawal with no end in sight.

If you stay in this space of pain long enough, eventually- after what feels like an eternity, you’ll start to begin your growing pains.

I’d say it’s still pretty fucking painful, but this pain becomes productive.

This is the point in your journey in which you undergo a spiritual awakening. No two spiritual awakenings will look or feel the same. But there is some solace in knowing you’re not the only one experiencing a spiritual crisis.

The best way I can describe the beginning of my own spiritual awakening would be comparing it to someone learning how to drive manual for the first time, but…going on top of a hill. To say that a spiritual awakening is daunting would be an understatement.

You look off into the distance and faintly see a blurry silhouette of what your life could be if you got out of this existential rut. You imagine that what’s on top of the hill is your peace of mind. It’s complete liberation. Liberation of what no longer serves you.

And…as you try to [unimpressively] shift gears, you stall. And stall. The stalling of self-doubt. The stalling of the weird looks you get from your friends when you embark on this awakening process as they shrug and slowly back away hoping you don’t crash and secretly thinking to themselves that you’re completely out of your mind.

Sometimes your mind and spirit go blank from all the terror. So you lift up the emergency brakes to take a breather. In that moment of rest, you may even begin to doubt your own journey. Because it’s lonely. Because sometimes you still have people in your life making you doubt. And self-doubt is the biggest killer to your potential of living a life with impenetrable conviction, unconditional love, and radical purpose.

You can’t lift down the emergency brakes because you know you’re going to crash in backward-ass fashion from the incline of your own momentum [if you grow too fast].
Being aware of this, you realize your halfway up the hill. You know you’re too deep into your spiritual awakening to give up now. You’ve seen too much. Know too much.

If you gave up now, you would essentially be declaring your soul up for a black market sale.

You might as well be holding up a sign to the universe that screams: I’m giving up! I’m settling! My beliefs hold no weight and my potential, refundable!

You also get the looks of “WTF” as you look out of your own spiritual lane and see drivers in other lanes, taking different exits and moving at different speeds because their journey is different from yours. They have a different destination to get to. One that isn’t meant for you, because that’s not where YOUR home is. So, keep your eyes on the fucking road. Stay in your lane. Because if you stay persistent, the rewards are great.

An Invitation to Have Faith In What We Can’t See

“I see a pattern, but my imagination cannot predict the maker of that pattern. I see a clock, but I cannot envision the clockmaker. The human mind is unable to conceive of the four dimensions, so how can it conceive of a God, before whom a thousand years and a thousand dimensions are as one?”
– Albert Einstein 

This year, I’ve slowly transitioned my message to be more spiritually aligned in both my personal life and what I choose to share online. It hasn’t been the smoothest process.

This project I’m building isn’t a hobby. It’s a life calling. It’s ongoing. No endings. A lifetime of being the student, and providing others who are struggling with their own spiritual crisis, a supportive community where we can make the process of spiritual growth less excruciatingly painful.

Although I’ve experienced a lot of progress and insight in my own spiritual growth, I’m not immune to my own self-doubt and fears despite diving headfirst into this journey with you all.

We’re quite honestly all in this together.

I want you to know a few things about some of what I’ve been trying to grapple with (thoughts, questions, personal notes) with when I was creating this project. Deciding to make this move to create this community wasn’t an easy decision based off of the reasons below:

Is it possible to build a truly inclusive community when some people by nature, polarize their viewpoints?

Should discretion be used in my writing? Some of my spiritual experiences aren’t for the faint of heart. If I omit parts of my core truths I’m trying to spread in hopes of helping others who are along a similar path, I’m doing a disservice to those that genuinely need my help by making pathetic attempts to appease the ones that will never fully accept or come to understand what I have to share. This I must eventually come to fully accept.

Nothing about the experiences I will share can be proven with conventional methods of science. People’s definition of the truth on what is real is usually dependent on what can be seen or proven in tangible terms.

Despite these reservations I have, what I know to be true is my unshakeable faith in helping others move out of their own spiritual depression. This calling is ridden with challenges that I’ve come to fully accept and take on because I can’t imagine my life NOT doing this. One of my biggest beliefs is that we must run towards the very thing we fear because more often than not, fear is an invitation to grow.

Before we can accept growth, here are some things we must acknowledge first that is detrimental to our spiritual journey if we’re unaware of it.

Western society has alluded to the implication that what we can’t prove or see, can’t exist or be recognized as true.

We have been programmed to find safety in the predictability our perceived timelines. We’re comfortable controlling within the realm of what we can see with only the naked eye.3

Using your intuition is just as important as seeing. Your intuition is a form of a much higher intelligence that will help to close the gap of uncertainty when reason is out of reach.

A healthy balance of the information you receive through perceived thought and intuitive knowing is what keeps you ultimately grounded. When left imbalanced, you may find yourself completely detached from your connection to other people and the 3D world around you.

On the other side of the spectrum, you may fall prey to living a life that barely scratches the surface of depth, of meaning – never knowing that if you’re brave enough to lift that veil, there are infinite potential and possibilities as to what you can accomplish in your life. Anyone can tap into this skill if they make the effort to cultivate it.

Whether you’re down for the ride, or you’re skeptical through and through, I’ll leave you with the old paradigms I had to overcome to break myself out from self-imprisonment and actually have a spiritual awakening – not just be stuck in a state of existential depression. I’m excited to kick off our journey together through this awakening process with these personal tenets:

It’s paradoxical to blindly accept what we see with our eyes as the proven representation of what our actual reality is. Empirical evidence falls short when the definition of faith is believing despite the absence of proven knowing [I’m not referring to blind faith. I will get more into the concept of faith in future posts].

We assume that our perception of reality and what is true “should” be the same perceived reality and truth of other people. Our desire to prove our belief is correct rather than allowing ourselves to find common ground to the opposing spectrum is counterproductive towards human progress. This representation is parallel to how divisive our society, our country has become when we become intolerant to the blind spots of our own fixed mindset.

Overriding your intuition with skepticism kills the ability for you to achieve your [false] perception of what is impossible. Intuition invites you to create belief systems that can shape your reality rather than accept your circumstances for what it already is.

You’ll find that when you become a renegade to your old identity and let go of the foundations that no longer support your vision, you unlearn. You unravel. You “unbecome.”

Welcome it. Because that is where you begin to find the courage to live your life with integrity.

This is your era of conviction-building.

_______________________________________________________________________

Endnotes

Jim Carrey is a celebrity who has been public about coming out of the spiritual closet.
The Dark Night of the Soul terminology is based off of Christian theology. However, many different religious and spiritual practices acknowledge this period of existential crisis.
The context of the “naked eye” refers closely to David Rudd Cycleback’s interpretation. David is an art historian and authentication expert who studies the physiology of seeing and explores optical distortion.

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your empathic gide

I'm Michelle Saya!

LETTERS & NOTES

   I'm a scorpio moon-INFJ biz owner, mindset coach based in New York and love leaning into all things sacred. I help empaths transform their pain into purpose using the wisdom of the birth chart and tarot archetype embodiment.

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business astrologer

I'm Michelle Saya!

LETTERS & NOTES

I'm an evolutionary business astrologer and intuitive business strategist currently located in California. I help conscious creatives and practitioners step into soul fulfilling work using the wisdom of their birth chart.