The Story of My Hawk
I’m currently facilitating a group around religious and spiritual trauma called Reclaiming Our Divine Spark. I love leaning into this group and exploring this topic together and this week we focused on deconstructing and reconstructing meaningful symbols within our spiritual practices. This discussion led me back to the path of the origin story of Aloft Healing Studios and my logo and I thought I might share this story here.
About 7 years ago, my life looked quite a bit differently than it does today. I had a three-year-old and a newborn at home, I was struggling with recently leaving a faith community, feeling quite alone and depressed a lot of the time, and generally struggling with my body and making healthy choices. I loved being a parent, but trying to find my own voice, take time for myself, and figure out my next move professionally felt completely overwhelming and out of reach for me. One day, I was driving to run an errand and a hawk swooped down right in front of my car. It stopped me right in my tracks and left me a little disoriented. I went about my day after that, but that first encounter with the hawk opened the door for so many more. After that, nearly daily I would find myself with a hawk encounter. Sometimes they appeared in my backyard, gazing at me from my fence post, sometimes flying low around me as I walked, sometimes appearing while I was driving. I was not much of a bird person before this, but I found myself becoming quite attuned to the call of the hawk and could recognize its presence by its shape and form in the sky.
At first, all of these hawk encounters felt pretty terrifying. I truly didn’t understand it and I was pretty sure at one point they were a symbol I was going to die. I remember driving in my car to a hair appointment, seeing three hawks on the way there, and thinking “this is it. They’re telling me my time’s up.” Little by little after the hawks started to appear in my life, I began making some changes. I started moving my body, creating some time and space to question my beliefs, and eventually went back to work as a social worker. The hawks kept appearing and after a couple more years, I was ready to dig deeper to see if I could decipher their message and meaning. With guidance and patience from my spiritual teacher Cindy Olah with Sacred Garden Yoga, I started to recognize the hawks as a symbol and message of divine love and guidance. Their message to me was about a death of sorts, a death of my current life and a continual call towards transformation and looking upwards and outwards.
I began to embrace the symbol and energy of the hawk and in that spirit, went about getting my first tattoo and forever etching this love and energy into my right foot. I found Malia Rifkin with Empire Arts and she created the most beautiful image for me, a color blocked hawk in my favorite blues and teals and adding touches of the ocean and my favorite sunrise. My hawk is more than just an image, she is the energy of my life force, my connection with the divine, my reminder that I am never alone and part of a universal movement towards love and healing. Not long after my full embrace of the hawk, I got the nudge to open up my own private practice, and with the guidance and love of my hawk guide, Aloft Healing Studios was born. As I went about creating a logo to symbolize who I wanted to be as a practice, I could think of nothing else more fitting than my hawk.
I get to see my hawk every day now, both on my foot and in the image that guides my practice. It is hard to put into words all the lessons I’ve learned from the hawk because the hawk, like all meaningful symbols, is more than just words. She is a felt sense of love and peace, acceptance of change, a reminder to look up (or aloft if you will lol), and to trust both myself and the direction the universe sends me. My hope is that if you come to Aloft Healing Studios for counseling or just find my website in passing, the energy of my hawk guide moves and changes you too.
Peace,
Cassie