Welcome to the Trust Talk Sessions. Join a collective of former guests and I for a 19 day dive into Trust to celebrate 100 episodes of Trust your Sacred Feminine Flow. Each conversation offers an intimate glimpse into the challenges and extraordinary moments experienced in our journey to trust.
Semerit is an artist, poet and elder in the African community in the Minneapolis and St. Paul area. She worked for 40 years as a medical doctor in both national and international settings and since 2013 has been exploring visual images and imagery as a healing modality.
To contact Semerit: dr.semerit@gmail.com
For all details on today’s Trust Talk Session Giveaway: https://bit.ly/2Y0I6m2
Listen to Semerit’s Trust Talk Session by clicking the play button on the audio player below.
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Read the Full Transcript here:
Joni
Welcome to the Trust Talk Sessions. I’m your host, Joni Advent Maher, and it is a treat and a delight and an honor to welcome one of my soul sisters, Semerit Strachan to join us in conversation today. Semerit is an elder in the African community in the Minneapolis and St Paul area. She worked for 40 years as a medical doctor in both national and international settings and since 2013 has been exploring visual images and imagery as a healing modality. And she has the distinction of being the most frequent guest in the last 100 episodes. Her very first episode almost four years ago was The Power of Vulnerability and that was number 012. And then a few years later, episode number 045 was the Liberation from the Mother’s Daughter. And our walk together over these years has been a deepening in trust and connection. And so welcome Semerit.
Semerit
Wow. Joni, I’m tearing up at first at the fact that there has been a 100 podcast episodes and then just mentioning that titles, the Power of Vulnerability, and Liberation from the Mother’s Daughter. These are such potent energy filled epochs of my life that we shared together. So I’m very, I’m thrilled at the opportunity to be here.
Joni
I do, I just want to give a shout out. I do recommend listeners, if you haven’t heard those, that they are very powerful episodes. And I think in your experience of Semerit today in our conversation, you’ll understand, the possibilities that come with them. So Semerit, I want us to just dive right into this theme of trust, just to hear where trust is showing up in your journey these days. How it, how it’s making your life easier and more complicated.
Joni
Oh, Joni, it’s so powerful. And both of us are chuckling because we touched on this in pre-broadcast when we connected with one another. So definitely at this point, trust is complicating my life. Trust has come up to ask me to trust the power of truth. And this invitation to trust the power of truth has highlighted in a very uncomfortable way the many places in my various relationships where I’d rather, in a very Minnesota expression, I’d rather be nice than tell the truth. I’d rather second guess what you want or what you expect or what you would like from me rather than speak the truth of where I truly am. I’d rather kind of mambe-pambe the relationship rather than trust the robustness of the relationship and the light that’s being shown onto these contradictions is it’s very uncomfortable. The fire is that my backside and Ooh, you know, yeah, that’s where I am.
I’ll add a little bit, which is that sometimes, you know among people who walk a spiritual path. And I mean, really walk it we like to think of trust, like do I trust the feminine? Do I trust Spirit in my life. These are kind of bigger, a bigger dimension to trust. And in a way, for people like us, a little bit easier, but right now the spiritual, the feminine is, is like holding me by my lapel and saying, sister, this has got to come and penetrate into these very, I would call them tiny but into these very pragmatic, practical parts of your relationship life.
Joni
Yeah. I would say perhaps ordinary, I mean extraordinary, but ordinary in it’s like this is a part of life, relating to other people. Being intimate with other people is a part of life and if we don’t bring the sacred or we don’t bring that into those places, we’re operating at a loss.
Semerit: Yeah. But often the sacred is also put in the category of nice.
Joni: Yes. Yes.
Semerit
I think what I’m being shaken up and called to order about bringing my feet to the fire and holding them there is the recognition that neither the sacred nor the truth is always nice. Okay. And having to wake up, to finding some kind of backbone by which I forgo being nice.
Joni: Mmm.
Semerit
Yes. Especially when it comes to the expense of something we were just talking about honoring what is true for me, not in generalistic terms, but what is true for me in this precise second.
Joni
Yes, yes. So I think you are speaking to an issue that so many of us can relate to that wanting to be pleasing, not wanting to make waves in our intimate connections and, and then either denying ourselves, betraying ourselves, just minimizing the truth of what we need.
Semerit
Yes. What we need, what we are, what we do. Excuse me. I mean the, the repercussions, are both endless and the impact of them is staggering.
Joni
Yes. Yes. And for me, because I, I’ve had a similar journey in terms of this honoring of self. It is, am I being trustworthy? Am I being trustworthy for myself? I mean, can’t, can I trust myself to be an advocate, to be a stand, to be a voice for my truth.
Semerit: Mm hmm Yeah. Yeah. I might be trustworthy to myself.
Joni
Yes. Yes. And I think of that, that statement to thine own self be true, which is a simple statement, but oh my goodness. All the impact and repercussions.
Semerit
Yes, yes. It’s interesting how what I felt in myself was an instant distancing to thine own self be true. And somehow it plonked me probably in some kind of, oh either intellectual or spiritual, education back in my childhood. You know, there’s a way I can’t relate to it just because of the language and probably not the language as much as the associations from childhood and of course everything that we’re talking about in terms of the tendency to be pleasing, not to make waves, to smooth the feathers, are adaptations to traumas from a very early age.
Joni
Yes. And in particular relational traumas of course. So traumas in relationship with those that we were most dependent on or most needed their love.
Semerit
Those who were placed on the planet to teach us about relationships.
Joni: Yes.
Semerit: You know? Yeah.
Joni: Yes, yes, yes.
Semerit
I keep shuttering. You can’t see me. As the impact of what we are diving deep into and then coming back out, taking a breath and diving back deep into the impact of how deep these messages, these conclusions, these adaptations … How, how deep they are, in the construction of who I know myself to be.
Joni: Yes. Yes.
And so how difficult to reach in and do that kind of surgery where we are very close to the operating system of the watch and we do not have the luxury of putting the watch to sleep while we tinker with the operating system. I’m very aware of how scary it is and how truly close to a life and death is at stake place we are operating in right now.
Joni
Yes. That it feels that way to our human awareness and even sometimes
to the body. So I would love to hear what enables you to keep risking then.
Semerit: My love with the Beloved.
Joni: Mm.
Semerit
My daily practice, sometimes multiple times a day, but at least daily when I first awaken. And right at the last minute before sleep takes over. The practices that allow me to drop all of this stuff you were talking about to the human consciousness, it feels like life and death and yes, that is what’s going on. We’re learning to transcend the human consciousness without separating ourselves from it. So when I do those practices, either in terms of contemplation, a deep reading of sacred texts or creativity or, all three, there are times when everything falls away and all that remains is being flooded with love.
Joni: Hmm.
Semerit
And knowing that I’m in the presence of the Beloved and in fact, presence of the Beloved is also not even adequate language because it’s not like there’s me and the Beloved. Experience of that Oneness and the ecstasy of that is such that it is worth risking everything.
Joni
Well, it’s interesting to me because you have this rich, I’m going to say satisfaction or fulfillment in that area. And it is, I could see that there would be some people who might say, okay, I’m just going to hang out with the Beloved and just forget about the rest of the human race. But somehow that is fueling your desire to deepen in your relationships. And to, I don’t know, is it to bring a piece of that into your human relationships? Or it’s just the calling. Do you know?
Semerit
I do know. What I know and what I have been shown, the Beloved has shown me multiple past lifetimes of being this mystic. And the mystic’s practices were to reach the bliss of oneness and hang out there for as long as possible. And what I was shown is that I chose this lifetime to bring the strength that comes from that bliss, to bring it into every aspect of the mundane. So it used to be “I’ll go in a cave and practice and experience the light and the sound and be this beacon up on the mountain top that people will be drawn to”. But this lifetime, it’s about get off the mountain top, go walk among the people, find the darkest places and go there. And again I want to emphasize that it’s not about the darkest places out there. It’s the darkest places within myself as I am going about my humanness, the mundane details of my human life. So in a way it might be a lot easier for me to be profoundly intimate in terms of truth telling with you, Joni. But the Beloved keeps pushing me into, you know, that man that you’ve been living with day in and day out for 33 years. That’s where I want you to be telling the truth. Yes. He knows every button, every fact. So he can come back if you dare tell the truth, he might come back with some pretty unsettling, painful, hurtful things. And that’s what I’m asking you.
Yes. To face into that. To risk, even that, Oh yes, yes, yes.
Semerit
But you know, I think, but I’m even getting further, further clarification. I don’t know if that’s what’s the word is, but anyway, deeper than even that, I keep talking about it as my relationship with the Beloved and the Beloved asks me to do that.
And so the language that we have, which is limited, appears to be talking about a relationship with someone else. Right? But what the image that just came to me is that what keeps me risking, it’s the same thing that keeps a plant growing, There is this sap, this urging, to develop myself into the wholeness of the plant, flower, tree. I don’t really know. The genetic material, the both human and spiritual genetic material is deep within me and it won’t be stopped. It’s like when it’s like when you see the grass that is pushing through the layer of snow and you say, well, how does it do that? It’s, it’s more like, so what keeps me risking is really something much deeper than my human willpower or whatever. It is a force that says I am here to unfold.
Joni
Yes, yes. And I’m having a sense of, and that is something we can trust in the, the perpetual nature of that, the ongoing, the committed like the devoted to us and us expressing in our most full way.
Semerit
Yeah, yeah. And, and you know, when it comes to that, and I’m given, for example, I was just given this image like right now, there’s no question that I trust it. The image came and within the image energetically is woven such a level of trust. It takes my, it takes my speech away. Takes it. I’m forced in a way to concede. Well, yeah. That is how I’ve been kept alive for 68 years. Wow.
Joni
Yes. Wow. Well, this is quite the dive we’ve taken, so we need to bring it our time to a close, but so deeply grateful for you. For all that is expressing through you and for your willingness to keep showing up.
Semerit
Hmm. And I am, equally, I’m deeply grateful to you, Joni, because what we have over the years uncovered over and over and over again, that’s something else that we can trust in, is that which comes through each of us is clearer, more amplified when we come together. There is a collectivity
Joni: Yes.
Semerit
that amplifies, supports and guards the personal unfoldment that cannot be found anywhere else, including the deeply personal unfolding.
Joni: Yes, we need each other.
Semerit
We absolutely need each other. And at some level of course each other is One.
Joni
Yes. Yes. So if listeners wanted to be in touch with you or follow you, is there a way they can do that?
Semerit
Thank you. I’m working on that one. So right now the easiest way to be in touch with me is to my very simple email dr.semerit@gmail.com It’s easy to find me on messenger or Facebook, but I think the email is the best way, texting me. I trust your audience. So texting me at (952) 240-2536 and emailing me are the best ways to be in touch with me.
And please, if you’re getting in touch with me to identify that you are a listener from this show.
Joni Right. Associated with Trust Your Sacred Feminine Flow. Yes, absolutely.
All right, my dear. So we’ll bring this to a close, and I do want to honor and acknowledge you, dear listener as well, for all the ways that you are leaning into trust and working with that in your own life and as always to remind you to trust what your heart knows.