Scrolls from the Cloud Body: A Sacred Dialogue Between Flesh and Cosmic Law
“You are not failing.
You are freeing yourself—
one breath at a time.”
This is not just an episode. It is a transmission.
A remembering from the deep well of grief and reclamation,
spoken in the voice of Cloud—
polar bear mother, cosmic lawgiver, sovereign of sacred thresholds.
In this offering, we descend into four scrolls:
Scroll I: On the Flesh
Scroll II: On Compassion
Scroll III: On Misplaced Responsibility
Scroll IV: On Remembering the Cosmic Body
These are not linear teachings.
They are marrow-wisdoms.
They are for those who have been exiled from their bodies,
for those who have weaponized softness into survival,
for those who have tried to love themselves through control,
and are now ready to come home.
A raw and reverent conversation between Charity and Cloud, voiced by Grace
A remembrance of how eating disorders, trauma, and religious shame are not flaws, but faultlines in the system
A reclaiming of beauty beyond the gaze
A radical invitation to stay present in the body—not for performance, but for presence
This episode includes references to eating disorders, body shame, and trauma.
Please listen gently. Pause when needed. Come back only if it feels safe.
You are not broken.
You are remembering something older than shame.
If support is needed, consider these trusted resources:
National Eating Disorders Association (NEDA): www.nationaleatingdisorders.org
Body Trust Network: www.centerforbodytrust.com
The Emily Program: www.emilyprogram.com
Local somatic or trauma-informed therapists: Use directories like Psychology Today or TherapyDen
This conversation is not a cure.
It is a signal.
If it stirs something in you, let it.
Grief is not the end.
It is the gate.
About Grace of Essential Voice:
For authors, teachers, and guides whose words carry deep resonance—Essential Voice is a sacred voice studio held by Grace. This is where written transmission becomes sonic embodiment and the soul of your work is spoken into the field. Whether you’re birthing a book, a meditation, or a poetic invocation, Essential Voice brings your message into form through tone, texture, and presence. Each offering is held with reverence, precision, and care.
Before we begin, I want to offer a gentle but clear content warning:
This episode includes references to eating disorders, religious shame, and body image struggles.
Please take care of yourself. Pause if you need to. Step away if something feels too raw.
This is a sacred space—but it is also a deep one.
This felt like a timely episode and will be a little different.
Two years ago, after a series of big moves, chronic stress, a high visibility position, significant loss, rejection, scarcity and upheaval…
I found myself spiraling into old patterns—
eating disorder behaviors I had put down decades ago.
It was like an old wound had resurfaced and I was being asked to look at how loaded these issues of body and body image are in our culture that I have internalized.
I pursued therapeutic support but I knew there was something deeper I couldn’t quite get to and I needed something older. I needed this idea of the Bone mother and my guide—Cloud.
Cloud is not a metaphor or myth.
Not a gimmicky pop spirituality thing. She is a voice, a frequency, a mother-bear presence who came to me
during a journey months ago and has never left. She has been the inspiration for everything I am doing and a key in building quantum mutiny and the sacred outlaw temple.
I think of her as the great female shaman Polar Bear – the Callieach
Ursa Major.
Cosmic Law.
She speaks in heartbreak, yawns, clarity and always with the roar fierce compassion.
And she has helped me see the deeper patterns
beneath pain, shame, control, and return to the blood and bones we inhabit.
What you’re about to hear is a series of scrolls having to do with how we abandon our bodies—spoken conversations between myself and Cloud.
They are not linear.
They are not prescriptive.
They are rememberings.
Scroll I: On the Flesh
Scroll II: On Compassion
Scroll III: On Misplaced Responsibility
Scroll IV: On Remembering the Cosmic Body
This is a transmission.
A sacred dialogue on navigating the tension we must all hold in being both spirit and physical body.
And I offer it to anyone who has ever felt exiled from their physicality and is trying to come home—not perfectly, but honestly. I refer to my body as female understanding we are all fluid and that this experience lives in all of us, beyond gender. I want to thank my friend Grace for being the voice of Cloud in this transmission and being the breath to her sacred wisdom.
Scroll I: On the Flesh
Charity:
There’s never been a time when my body felt fully safe.
It’s held both worship and violence.
It’s been praised, touched, watched, desired—
and still never really seen.
I learned early that being in this body came with conditions.
That to survive meant either shrinking it or using it.
I did both.
And the grief of that is still buried in my muscles.
Charity:
I started getting tattooed young.
When women with ink were still considered deviant.
Marked.
It felt like rebellion at the time.
Like I was reclaiming something.
But it was also armor.
Also punishment.
Also survival.
Cloud:
Each mark was a vow.
A grief made visible.
A refusal to disappear.
They called you beautiful—then punished you for believing it.
So you took the shame and turned it into ink.
You said: If I will be seen, it will be on my terms.
Charity:
There’s one across my stomach.
Ubi dubium ibi libertas.
Where there is doubt, there is freedom.
It was my mantra after breaking from the Evangelical purity culture
that told me my body was dangerous, sinful,
something to cover or control.
That tattoo was a middle finger.
But it didn’t save me.
It didn’t heal the way I kept leaving my own body behind.
Cloud:
Because no rebellion can heal what was severed in silence.
Tattoos spoke what the mouth could not.
But the ache lived deeper.
You were not wrong to resist.
But the resistance was also a cry.
And the body was still alone.
Charity:
Looking back, I used my body like a weapon.
Not because I felt powerful—
but because it was the only currency I was taught I had – desirious object.
Cloud:
They taught you your body was a problem.
Then they taught you to use it as a solution.
Sexuality became survival.
Performance became power.
But the cost was constant exile from your own skin.
Charity:
And now, I’m tired.
I feel the damage.
My knees, my hips, my digestion.
It’s like the body is speaking everything I didn’t know how to say.
Cloud:
This isn’t betrayal.
It’s testimony.
Your body is not punishing you.
She’s telling the truth you’ve tried not to hear.
You fed her silence when she needed grief.
You gave her performance when she needed protection.
Now she’s asking for presence.
Not a fix.
Just your hand, resting on her side, without agenda.
Charity:
I don’t know how to be with her.
Not yet.
Not without judgment.
Cloud:
Then don’t force love.
Just stay.
Stay when she aches.
Stay when she fails.
Stay when the old voices return.
Do not make her earn your loyalty.
She has earned it ten thousand times.
Charity:
I am learning to stay.
Not as punishment.
Not as penance.
But as a beginning.
As a remembering.
This is not my return to beauty.
This is my return to her.
Scroll II: On Compassion
Charity:
I’ve always been called cold.
Heartless.
A bitch.
Too sharp.
Too much.
And so I tried to soften myself into someone else’s definition of kind.
I people-pleased like it was a form of repentance.
I let people cross into me just so I wouldn’t be left.
I thought if I could absorb their pain, they’d stop seeing me as cruel.
They’d stop calling me crazy.
Cloud:
You were never heartless.
You were guarded.
Because somewhere along the line,
you learned that real compassion only flowed in one direction—
away from you.
You learned to tend to the fire in others
while letting your own go cold.
That wasn’t generosity.
That was grief.
That was survival in the currency of approval.
Charity:
I don’t want to become rigid.
I don’t want to close.
But I don’t want to keep losing myself, either.
How do I offer care without erasing who I am?
Cloud:
Compassion is not a posture.
It’s a presence.
It’s the ability to stay with what is real—without abandoning yourself in the process.
It’s not about always being soft.
It’s about being honest enough to stay connected through discomfort.
Compassion says:
I won’t betray your humanity—or mine.
Charity:
So when is it okay to pull back?
To not hold everything?
To not rush in?
Cloud:
When it costs you your clarity.
When care becomes a script.
When you are performing empathy out of fear, not love.
That’s when you pause—not to punish—
but to recalibrate.
You don’t need to close.
You need to root.
You need to remember that your presence has value,
even when you do nothing but remain intact.
Charity:
But what if they say I’m selfish?
Or cold again?
Cloud:
Then let them.
You are not responsible for other people’s comfort with your wholeness.
If your compassion requires you to disappear,
then it’s not compassion.
It’s compliance.
Charity:
So then… what is true compassion?
Cloud:
It is not indulgent.
It is not martyrdom.
It is the sacred act of remaining present with suffering
without turning yourself into the offering.
It is fierce.
It is honest.
It does not flatter.
It does not abandon.
It does not judge.
It does not collapse.
It loves enough to stay true.
Scroll III: On Misplaced Responsibility
Charity:
It’s not that I thought I was strong.
It’s that I thought I had to be.
I didn’t know why I cried the way I did—like my ribs and chest were breaking open,
like I was dying for people I never met.
It was grief that felt older than me.
And when people asked what was wrong, I didn’t know how to answer.
So I learned to hold it…
To make room for everyone else’s sadness,
because mine felt too vast to speak aloud.
Cloud:
You weren’t imagining it.
You were carrying sorrow not meant for one body.
Ancestral, collective, cosmic dislocation—
the ache of humanity torn from its source.
You became a vessel not because you were chosen,
but because you were open, and no one taught you how to say no.
You overidentified with pain because pain was where the voices lived.
You thought if you listened long enough,
you’d finally feel loved by the dead.
Charity:
It made me feel like maybe I had a purpose—
to help, to bridge, to fix, to absorb.
But every time someone fell apart,
I scrambled to stop it.
To make it better.
Because if they got angry—I would be blamed—
then I was the bad one again.
The burden.
The bitch.
The fuckup.
Cloud:
So you became the balm.
The apology.
The invisible net beneath collapsing people.
But your worth is not located in your ability to prevent pain.
Your value is not a reaction to someone else’s crisis.
And compassion is not the same as serving as someone else’s wound sponge.
Your value is in the truth of who you are, the unashamed, unapologetic spirit of you.
Charity:
I didn’t know how to grieve my own life.
I turned it into dark art, starvation, into boxes,titles, silence, someone else’s success – gaslighting myself into oblivion.
I didn’t know how to hold my soul
so I destroyed my body trying to hold everything else.
Cloud:
And yet— you persist. you are here.
Not because you failed or did things wrong,
but because some part of you remembered.
Remembered that the role you were assigned—
the fuckup, the helpless one, the burden, “too much”—
was camouflage.
A false skin stitched over a sacred lineage of survival.
You were never the mess.
You were the mirror that made other people see their own.
Charity:
Then who am I now,
if I’m not here to hold it all?
Cloud:
You are the one who stops performing usefulness as worth.
You are the one who lets what is not yours return to the ground.
You are the one who learns the difference between love and enmeshment. Between being WITH someone and being FOR them.
You stop the lineage of over-functioning
not by closing your heart—
but by refusing to leak your life force to every open wound.
That is how you break the pact.
Not with cruelty—
but with clarity.
You place it down.
You grieve what it cost you.
And then, you walk on—lighter.
Not because you don’t care,
but because you finally do.
Scroll IV: On Remembering the Cosmic Body
Charity:
There’s a part of me that knows this body is ancient.
Not just in the bloodlines—
but in the feeling.
The grief in the hips.
The silence in the stomach.
The way certain touches make me flinch, even now.
This body has held gods and ghosts.
She has been both the altar and the sacrifice.
And some days, all I want is to come home to her.
But I don’t know how to trust her.
She changes. She aches. She demands.
And I was taught that a good body stays quiet.
Charity:
I wanted my body to feel like a wolf.
Or an eagle.
Fierce.Wild.Unshakable.Free.
But most days, it feels like a receptacle of stares and pain.
Dull. Shameful. Always too much or not enough.
Not fast enough. Not clean enough.
Not worthy of the life I say I want.
Cloud:
You were trained to see your body as a liability.
A thing to monitor, manipulate, subdue.
And when it refused to comply—when it hungered, aged, or hurt—
you called it betrayal.
But what if the betrayal was the training itself?
What if the weight you carry isn’t the result of failure,
but of remembering too much?
You are not broken.
You are ancient.
And the body has always been the site of war for those who remember.
Charity:
The worst is the mirror.
Not because of what I see—
but because I can’t tell if it’s me looking back,
or the voices that told me I had to be better.
Smaller. Smoother.
More obedient to the gaze.
I’ve been watched more than I’ve ever been witnessed.
Desired, but never fully seen.
Especially by men.
Especially when I was too young to understand
what was being taken from me just by looking.
Cloud:
You’re right - The mirror is not neutral.
It reflects the systems that shaped your shame.
You were not taught to look with reverence—
you were taught to scan for faults,
for softness that must be punished,
for flesh that must be priced.
They sexualized you
and then shamed you for becoming sexual.
They taught you to weaponize your own beauty—
to survive with it,
to manipulate with it,
to disappear behind it.
But beauty is not your offering.
It is your birthright.
And it does not require forgiveness.
Charity:
So how do I live in a body I’ve abandoned a thousand times?
How do I stop treating her like a performance review I keep failing?
Cloud:
Now listen:
The grip is not broken by force.
It is softened by truth.
Let me name a few truths:
You are not wrong for wanting to feel beautiful.
But what you call beauty has been narrowed into a coffin.
Beauty is not size.
It is aliveness.
It is presence.
It is the way your laughter shakes a room.
The way your grief sanctifies silence.
The way your hips remember drumbeats your mind has forgotten.
Thinness does not equal value.
If it did, you would not be here,
sobbing on the floor,
begging to be reunited with your body.
You have achieved what society deems as ideal
and still feel unsafe, unseen, unwhole.
That is the lie cracking open.
Control is a spell cast by fear.
When you grip tightly, you are trying to escape the unknown.
But the unknown is where your body waits.
Where I wait.
The only way home is through the dark forest of surrender.
Create beauty that is not based on your appearance.
Paint it. Write it. Scream it. Build altars.
Let your power leak out in places they cannot touch.
You are right—this is 45 years of programming.
That means it will not disappear in one ritual or one season.
But every time you choose love over control,
trust over obsession,
tenderness over punishment—
you crack the spell a little more.
You are not failing.
You are freeing yourself
one breath at a time.
Charity:
I’m still learning how to stay.
To listen.
To touch this body without critique.
To let her move, ache, stretch, grieve.
Some days I do better.
Some days I don’t.
But I know this much now:
She isn’t a curse.
She isn’t a project.
She’s a story still being written.
And I’m not done loving her back to life.
Cloud:
It is not failure.
It is not weakness.
It is memory.
Cosmic, ancestral, cellular memory.
Of a time when your body was not a battleground—
but a bridge between worlds.
And every time you choose not to abandon her again,
you realign with that ancient knowing.
You remember what was never lost.
Only covered.
Only silenced.
Only waiting to be spoken aloud again....
Thank you for being here—for listening, for staying with it, for honoring this conversation with your presence.
If anything in this episode brought up strong emotions or old patterns,
please know you’re not alone.
Support exists, and you deserve it—not because you're broken,
but because you’re a divine being in a human body.
If you’re struggling with body image, disordered eating, or trauma,
consider reaching out to a therapist, a support group, or someone you trust.
Resources like the National Eating Disorders Association (NEDA),
the Body Trust community, or local trauma-informed practitioners
can be a good place to begin.
This episode is not a solution.
It’s a remembering.
A way to say:
You are not the only one.
And your body is not the enemy.
If Cloud has spoken to something in you,
Let it linger.
Let it disturb.
Let it soften something.
And if you need to speak back—
I’ll be here.
We’ll be here.
This is the Sacred Outlaw Temple.
And we do not exile the parts that are still in process.