One of the books I’m reading lately is King, Warrior, Magician, Lover by Robert Moore and Doug Gillette. It’s a fascinating book that explores the archetypes of the mature and sacred masculine. This is currently part of the spiritual work that I’m engaged in as I explore my own relationship with masculinity and heal the ancestoral and contemporary wounds that I’m becoming aware of as it relates to how masculinity is treated and perceived in modern times.
One of the aspects I’m exploring in particular is related to sacred kingship and the land. I am in the process of exploring the new city and surrounding areas that I live in. While I’ve lived here for a year, I didn’t have much opportunity until recently to really begin exploring the area and developing a relationship with the land. I find it fitting and useful that part of the process has also involved cultivating a relationship with the land, particularly on the basis of the relationship has with their home and how that relationship plays out in sacromagical work one does in connecting with the land.
Are you feeling stuck?
Caught up in the uncomfortable Discomfort?
I share how to turn that stuck state upside so you can get better results with your magical work. When we learn how to accept and relish the state we are in, that’s when we open the doors to potential and unlock the possibilities that we’ve been holding back because of how stuck we felt.
I share how you can use qi gong to help you dissolve and release emotions so that you can express them authentically or let them go. I also share how this work can enhance your magical work and help you get better results.
I share how to recognize Tower Time in your life and describe how the Tower can actually be a really useful and powerful card and energy that shouldn’t be avoided. Instead we can welcome it and use it to help us transform our lives and turn the tower energy into momentum that works in our favor.
I share some reflections on Saturn Retrograde and what you can be doing right now with this particular cycle. I also discuss the importance of reflecting, evaluating and assessing your life, career, etc, when dealing with Saturnic influences.
I discuss the relationship between inner work and result. When we do inner work it helps us get better results because we know ourselves and we are living a life by design and by specific values. Inner work helps us figure out who we are and what we want and how to manifest it.
Your interpersonal growth goes hand in hand with your magical practice. If you aren’t growing and changing as a person then your magical practice will go stale. I share why you can’t settle for less in your life if you truly want to live a magical life.
I share some perspective exercises I like to do that can increase the mental flexibility and spiritual awareness you apply toward your magical practice and your life.
Awhile back I went to a restaurant and took myself on a dinner date. I don't normally eat out alone, but I wanted to re-write and re-wire a memory and I've found that sometimes the best way to do that is to revisit a site and make a new memory that overwrites the old memory.
But what if we can't do that? What if we're too far away or if the memory is simply too triggering?
We may still want to change the memory, but we may need to take a magical approach to doing that work that liberates us from the trauma and tyranny of the past, while also enabling us to transform our present and presence.
I like to take two different approaches to this kind of magical work.
1. Use pathworking to rewrite the memory and create a new story and narrative
I have used pathworking to rewrite traumatic memories. In the book Magical Imagination by Nick Farrell (Affiliate link), there's an excellent script you can use where you create this idyllic garden in your mind.
The garden seems really peaceful, but there's a rotting tree in it and that tree represents the memories you need to work through. You go into the tree and you find a corridor of doors and each door leads to a memory.
You go into the memory but you have complete control of that memory. You can change it anyway you want and rewrite the memory and experience however you please.
You can make different choices and cause different actions to happen and transform the way the memory unfolds. It's magical and it can help you change the deep patterns in your life.
2. Transform the memories with the memory box.
You can also use a magical tool like a memory box. A memory box is a tool where you store memories in order to transmute them into energy in your life. It's similar to that magical tool in the Harry Potter fiction...the pensieve.
I created my first memory box many years ago and I've used it for a variety of space/time magical workings, but one of the workings I do is I store memories in it, and convert them into energy for transforming my life.
The traumatic memories become fuel for empowerment. By removing them from my active and unconscious memory and storing them somewhere else, I let them go from my life and this frees me from the trauma I would otherwise be holding onto and allowing to define me in my life in a way that empowers and frees me from the past so I can embrace the present.
3. And sometimes you just need to do a cathartic magical working...
I said I was only going to share two ideas, but I thought about it and sometimes what you need to do is a cathartic magical working where you release the emotions, thoughts and triggers of the memories.
In the summer of 2022 I hiked Mt. Pisgah. I took with me three letters I had written. Two of them were written to an ex. One was a letter where I just vented over my hurt feelings and another was a gratitude letter. The third letter was for me and in it I wrote about the life I wanted to create for myself. It was an act of magical writing designed to help me create a new narrative for my life.
I hiked all day and I found three different spots. At each I did a ritual where I buried a letter and did a ritual of release where I cut the ties that bound us, and in the process began healing from the traumatic experiences and memories I was feeling. By the end of the day I was physically and emotionally exhausted, but I also feel cleansed and this began a process of healing that is allowing me to radically transform my life.
Our memories don't need to define us. We can turn them into tools, we can heal them and we can let them go and live our best lives.
I recently picked up the book Become as Supple as a Leopard, which is fascinating book about posture. I’ve picked it up because I’m currently doing a lot of work with my posture in my Kung Fu and Qi Gong studies. I’m paying particular attention to how straight I stand and how I position my back when I am lifting something or otherwise bending over. This is a crucial detail that can effect your physical health and your overall well being.
I’m also continuing to focus on breathing, specifically doing a continuous in and out breath during qi gong, where I breathe in as I move my arms up and breathe out as I move my arms down. While doing this breathing I focus on my lungs and diaphragm, expanding my awareness to fully use the capacity of my organs and in the process dissolve blockages.
The blockages are dissolved by using your awareness. You become aware of the blockage and you place your awareness on it, so that the blockage is gradually dissolved. Your awareness is like a waterfall flowing around the blockage, making it softer and softer until it releases on all levels of your being. While you do this releasing work you can continue doing some type of qi gong practice. The practice I typically do is either Cloud Hands, Heaven and Earth or Gods Playing in the Clouds. Each of these practices brings you into somatic alignment with your body consciousness.
I also like to do this work with standing meditation. When you stand its important to focus your awareness on the alignment of your body with your posture. Your feet should be aligned with each other like two wheels of a car or a train and facing forward. You want arms to hang at your sides comfortable. You want to slightly squat with your hips and pelvic area so that you are “seated” in your posture. Then focus on breathing, drawing the breath in and releasing it out. As you breathe, scan your body with your awareness, starting at the top of your head and slowly going down your body. Keep in mind that the work your doing is a gradual release and it may feel like you are releasing a layer at a time.
Each release of a layer of a blockage also releases with it emotional and mental stresses that are embedded in the body. The human body retains memories of traumatic events and experiences and the best way to release those memories is through this kind of release work. You may not be consciously aware of how embedded the trauma is, but by doing this release work you can gradually loosen it and then dissolve it altogether.
You can do this work through both standing meditation and moving practices. The key is to focus on your breath and specifically on using your breath with standing and movement to help you go deeper and deeper into your body as you work to release the physical, emotional and mental blockages. Eventually you’ll reach a state of great calm and emptiness and you can fully relax into that experience allowing it to lead you to even deeper states of awareness and transcendence.
How to cultivate your internal energy through standing meditation and qi practices. The benefit of this work can be felt through the somatic practices you embrace and apply to your life. I share how I’ve applied this work to my own practices.
I discuss how to work with qi when wintering. I share why working with the element of water can be very helpful and allow you to restore and recover your energy when doing qi work.
In part 2 of Physiological Magic I share how I gradually evolved my system of physiological magic and discuss the thought process and methodology involved in the evolution of that system, as well as how this enabled better communication with the neurotransmitters and hormones.
Photo by George Becker: https://www.pexels.com/photo/pawn-chess-piece-136351/
One of the projects I'm working on in my life is what I call shadow work initiatives. Shadow work initiatives are opportunities I am taking to explore the shadows within me as it relates to aspects within myself that I feel I need to work on. For example one shadow I've been doing a lot of work has been around my identity as a man. I've recognized how I've lived a nice guy life and I am working on changing that by learning how to communicate what I really want, but also exploring the nice guy in context to the divine masculine.
What I've discovered in this context is how much the nice guy has embodied the shadow in my life. I've bent over backwards for other people, placed my own needs and wants on hold or in suspension, in a way where I wasn't fully conscious of it. Once I started exploring the divine masculine, it forced me to also explore the shadow from a conscious place of awareness, bringing it into the light, where I could see how it played a role in my communication.
My current project around shadow work involves embodying shadow as a mask. I'm going to create a mask of codependency in order to contemplate and understand how codependency has shown up in my life as a mask I've worn both in relationship to other people and to myself. I recognize as well that codependency plays a connective role to my nice guy behaviors, which is important to see, but that its also distinct in relationship to itself.
image courtesy of unsplash
Lately I’ve been doing a lot of work around attachments, and my relationship with myself and those attachments. I’ve come to recognize something fundamental about attachments: They operate from a place of fear and scarcity and possession. You think you have something or someone (you don’t) or you want to have something or someone (you won’t) and all this comes from a place of fear that leads to attachment. Attachments operate from a place of control, a desire to make the world around you conform to your will, but they ultimately weigh you down.
Understanding the nature of an attachment can help you liberate yourself from it. An attachment is ultimately informed by a sense of scarcity, but also a limiting belief that if you don’t have something or someone in your life you won’t be happy. Ironically you give away the very control you seek when you are attachment, because you are basing your sense of happiness and well being on something or someone external to yourself. Even if you temporarily attain what you are attached to, it doesn’t provide happiness. You might feel a sense of pleasure, but pleasure is fleeting and immaterial and if you don’t attain the attachment it becomes a perceived source of unhappiness because you are holding on to a limiting belief that the desired object, event, person etc., has the key to your happiness, when in fact the opposite is true. If anything the struggle around attachment keeps you from truly appreciating and enjoying whatever experience you have as well as whoever you are with. Most importantly it keeps you from enjoying yourself.
So what do you to liberate yourself from an attachment?
First you need to recognize that the attachment won’t bring you happiness. Your attachment is to a sense of happiness originating from an external source. When you recognize that happiness comes from within and that no one or nothing else has that happiness then you can let go of trying to find that happiness somewhere else. You’re looking in the wrong places when you look for happiness from someone or something else.
Recently I went to a restaurant and took myself on a dinner date. I don't normally eat out alone, but I wanted to re-write and re-wire a memory and I've found that sometimes the best way to do that is to revisit a site and make a new memory that overwrites the old memory.
But what if we can't do that? What if we're too far away or if the memory is simply too triggering?
We may still want to change the memory, but we may need to take a magical approach to doing that work that liberates us from the trauma and tyranny of the past, while also enabling us to transform our present and presence.
Picture copyright Taylor Ellwood 2023
Lucid dreaming is one of those seemingly elusive skills that can really open up the doors of expansion for a practitioner once you learn how to do lucid dreaming.
I've been using lucid dreaming as part of my spiritual path for most of my life...
In this post I'm going to share a few activities I've done to help me cultivate lucid dreaming.
I’ve never been good at choosing myself.
I’ve never been good at saying yes to myself.
I’ve recently come to realize that because I’m going through this intense transformation in my life, where I’m looking at everything that’s come before and I’m seeing all the patterns that have influenced my choices, whether those choices have been relationships, or jobs or anything else I’ve done and what I’ve come to recognize is how much the choices I’ve made have been about saying yes to other people and no to myself. And pretty much everything I’m saying yes to are old patterns that have kept replicating themselves with new masks, but underneath it all is the same narrative, the same giving away of personal autonomy and sovereignty and the person doing that isn’t anyone else other than me.
One of the books I’m lately reading is Awareness: the Perils and Opportunities of Reality by Anthony De Mello. It is a book about cultivating awareness but what I find fascinating is that it really brings up a fundamental question of what awareness is, which I think is something we can take for granted. Is awareness being conscious or is it something else? It’s a question I’ve been pondering as I’ve read the book and considered the various insights that it offers.
I can’t say I’ve always been or am the most aware person. I work at being aware, but like anyone else I have my distractions and attachments and other things which get in the way of awareness. A metaphor I’ve seen used elsewhere is the metaphor of red dirt in the water. If you let the dirt settle, it goes to the bottom of the class and the water can seem to be clear (Aware), but if you stir the water the red dirt kicks up and the water becomes muddy. Sometimes I think I got awareness down and then the right circumstance comes up and I see that I ‘ve got attachments and those attachments are showing that I’m not so aware.
One of the spiritual practices I try to do regularly is walk the land. This is a practice of communing with the spirits of the land and nature in order to develop a relationship with them, but it can also have other aspects, which can be equally important, such as healing. Whether I’m walking in my suburban neighborhood, or in a urban area, or in a park or in the countryside, I find that the spirits of the land are always with us, just waiting for us to open ourselves to them, if we are willing to be receptive.
On the 4th of July weekend I hiked Spencer Butte for the first time. I had been meaning to go it for a while, but hadn’t found a good time to do so. The long weekend presented that opportunity and I decided to take myself on a date and visit the Butte. Walking the land on the Butte became a healing experience for me, setting my soul to rest as I soaked in the experience of nature and let the land into speak to and through me.
I discuss why self-care is important in magical work and share some thoughts on how you can implement self-care in your magical practice as well as what to consider when incorporating self-care into your magical work.