The Italian Isis Temple

Grief, Grace, Rage, Repair

Hi loves! Happy Friday the 13^th : )

I’m currently on a train zooming towards Paris. The past five days I’ve been visiting my friends Makenna and Chris and my goddaughter Magnolia in the south of France.

Last week I was in Italy. Tomorrow I’ll be flying across the Atlantic Ocean to New York, then to Austin, TX where I’ll spend a few days with my sister. Then hopefully I’ll pick up Mystic (my border collie companion) and drive back out East, to my Woodstock waterfall house for six weeks or so of a personal writing retreat. I am ready to settle down for a bit!

This week I’m sharing two upcoming online events I’m part of: a three-hour When Grief Comes Calling workshop and a free event: Year of the Fire Horse: Community Gathering. Scroll to the bottom for more info. Hope to see you there!

Here is this week’s writing, with two gifts for Valentine’s Day for you, sweetheart. Thanks for being here at Out of the Fire.

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I stood in the Isis Museum in a little Italian town of Benevento, wanting to both scream and cry.

The woman at the front desk had shared a brief overview with my friend Mary: This was the second largest Egyptian museum in Italy, but the only museum to have Egyptians artifacts recovered from the town it was in.

Here was the heartbreak for me: When Christianity came to Benevento in 662 A.D. the Isis Temple, build in 88 A.D., was destroyed and the pieces scattered across the city. Pieces of Isis and her son Horus, female worshippers and sphinxes, and two ancient obelisks were found in the huge walls that surround the town, used for fill in foundations, and purposefully buried.

This museum (and another larger museum down the street) was where the pieces were brought back together again, catalogued, and displayed for the public.

Standing next to a mostly-missing stone mural of Isis I felt rage building in my belly, a fire of fury at how the goddess is cut into pieces all over the world, her parts scattered.

As I walked around the tiny museum I stayed with the rage, breathed into it, honored it, listened to it. Hello, rage.

In my mind’s eye I saw the faces of both the young teenager and the adult Virginia Guffrie who courageously opened the door and the faces of the brave women currently asking for justice as the horrors of the Epstein files are revealed, but no responsibility is taken. How many young women (and young men) are currently being sexually exploited and trafficked around the world. About the sickness of adults preying on children and with their words and actions hacking apart their self-confidence, clarity, and self-preservation.

As I stayed with my rage and breathed it soon enough shifted, loosened. As as the rage fell away like a heavy curtain dropped to the ground it revealed sorrow. Ah, hello grief.

Grief was more an ocean than a fire. It felt like a relief to let myself rest in these connected waters, feel the waves of the long history of harm and hurt.

This grief and rage is not about any one person, religion, or time. It is about the exhaustion of systematic abuse. Of power over. Of believing we have to go against our intuition, to have our soft innocence pierced by those who only have their interest in mind. Of harm past, and realizing the immensity of interrupting that harm.

We must refuse to let the cruelty of humans harden us. To refuse to believe in a version of love that requires us to shrink, perform, or abandon ourselves to be worthy. We must stand up and claim our power; stop abandoning ourselves. Protect the young. Speak up for the vulnerable, the abused, the forgotten, the neglected.

I know how many of us are dancing in the fire of rage or swimming in the waters of grief. I believe what we all need is more steady, rooted presence.

We’re talking about the fierce, grounded, wide-open love that holds both your warrior and your heart at once. The love that says: “I will show up for myself with presence AND compassion. With clarity AND tenderness. With commitment AND grace.”

This is Warrior Heart love and it’s a practice, not a feeling you wait to arrive.

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This month, I’m sharing two tools to clear and open (put together by my fabulous team at warriorgoddess.com:

🎧 A Warrior Heart Meditation: Connect to Your Warrior Heart

A guided practice to help you ground in your warrior presence (centeredness, stillness, clarity) while opening your heart to compassion, love, and gratitude. It’s about learning to hold both energies at once—grounded AND open, strong AND soft.

📄 The Warrior Heart Practice Worksheet

A powerful tool to work through any situation that’s challenging or upsetting you. Move through the four chambers—Feeling, Story, Truth, and Intent—to transform your relationship to what’s hard and reclaim your power.

These are tools you can return to again and again, love letters you can write to yourself whenever you need to remember: You deserve your own fierce, unwavering love.

How to Use These Gifts:

• Start with the meditation. Give yourself 15 minutes to ground in your warrior and open your heart. Notice what it feels like to hold both at once.

• Then use the practice sheet. Pick something that’s been weighing on you—a relationship tension, a difficult decision, a pattern you keep running into. Move through the four chambers and see what shifts.

• Keep coming back. The practice deepens each time you return to it. This is how you build the relationship with yourself and learn to separate out emotions from story, truth from intent.

Loving yourself fiercely doesn’t mean everything gets easy. It means you stop abandoning yourself when things get hard and you hold your warrior heart with the same tenderness you’d offer your dearest friend. It means you focus on your vision and speak up for your values.

You deserve that kind of love, dear one. And the world needs you grounded, creative, and available for mischief and good trouble.

Big hug,

Ash

P.S. Sometimes loving yourself means learning to hold your grief with compassion. If you’re ready for support with that, our “When Grief Comes Calling“ workshop is coming up this weekend.

NEW! Year of the Fire Horse: Community Gathering | Online | February 17, 2026

Welcome the Year of the Fire Horse with a free live community celebration. Join HeatherAsh Amara and Sarina Harz-Tolbert for ritual, reflection, and a spark of bold momentum as we step into a rare year of fire, courage, and leadership.

Baby Magnolia, November 2018

Magnolia and me, February 2026