Sometimes the best response to a situation is to call back what belongs to you, while also returning what doesn’t belong to you. I recently decided to do a return to sender working, using a meditation shared by a friend. I have been working with it a few days and I have noticed some experiences that I have found useful. I share my thoughts on this work in the latest episode of the magical experiments process.
Saturn Retrograde Reflections
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.
Inner Work leads to better results
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.
Interpersonal Growth and the Magical Life
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.
Shadow Work Initiatives
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.
Fear as an Ally in Your Magical Practice
Fear, in all of its guises, can be a force in our lives that either stops us in our tracks or motivates us to make changes The relationship we cultivate with fear can either turn it into one of our greatest allies or one of your greatest enemies. In this video I explore both aspects.
How I apply self-love as a magical practice
I share how I apply self-love as a magical practice and explain the practical benefits of self love but also share why there needs to be a practical application of self love in order to benefit from the practice.
The nature of attachments and how to liberate yourself from them
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.
Cracking the Code to Lucid Dreaming
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.
How to get unstuck in your life
Photo by Andrea Piacquadio: https://www.pexels.com/photo/sad-isolated-young-woman-looking-away-through-fence-with-hope-3808803/
There is nothing worse than feeling stuck in life.
You're going through your daily life and everything seems to be going swimmingly, but at your core you feel something...off. A deep feeling of dissatisfaction, a sense of feeling stuck somewhere in your life. Maybe it's with your job, maybe its with your relationship, maybe it's something else altogether.
At the core of that feeling of stuckness is an experience of anxiety that we often try to bury deep within ourselves. That feeling of anxiety could come from a desire for approval or a fear of abandonment or something else altogether, but it keeps us trapped in a cage of our own making.
How standing can transform your spiritual practice
Photo by Debbie Pan: https://www.pexels.com/photo/woman-standing-near-rock-in-front-of-lake-1365211/
I recently decided to reboot my qi gong practice.
I’ve been practicing qi gong for a few years now and what I have encountered is the inevitable experience where you do something long enough that you start taking what you do for granted, because you know it.
Challenge what you know by discovering what you can learn.
In the midst of all the other moments of truth I’ve been having lately, something which really rang true for me is that I need to start my qi gong practice over again. I decided to do this in two different ways.
One way involves attending a live qi gong class in Eugene and learning it with a group of people. By putting myself in a group of people I don’t know and learning what they’re learning I’m removing myself from what I know and opening myself to discovering what I can learn. And I’m making some friends too.
The other way involves starting the practice of what I know from the beginning, bringing myself back to the basics. And that brings us to this topic, where what I’m doing is standing for a half hour to an hour and just focusing on the sensation of standing, adjusting the alignment of my body and connecting with the qi (internal energy) as well as with the environment around me. It seems real simple, but its also quite profound.
The act of standing is something I think most people take for granted. I certainly have. I stand and if I’m standing I’m usually scrolling through my phone, looking at the latest distraction, when I could be taking in the environment around me and connecting with the deep wells of being within me.
The benefit of standing, with qi gong, is that it lets you feel the areas of tension and start working through them. When I stand, I’ll stand with my knees slightly bent, my pelvis gently seating itself to support the rest of my body. I rock forward from my heels to the bubbling well, where the foot connects with the toes, and then rock back to my heels, loosening up the stress by cycling the qi back and forth from the top of my head to the bottom of my feet, and from the stellar energy of the cosmos to the underworld current of the earth.
When I stand with presence I let go of the everyday tension and discover the depths of the numinous by taking in everything around me and being with it. And all I’m doing is standing.
Well there’s a bit more to it than that.
When I stand I wrap the muscles of my body, grounding myself into the sensation of standing while also stabilizing myself so I can really connect with the world and everything that might come up. I let my thoughts go and become aware, simply being with whatever is there, sinking my qi into the earth and if I do it long enough, I may even start dissolving blockages, turning the icy blockages of shame and guilt and other toxic experiences into water and then space, letting them drift away, relaxing and releasing and in the process going even deeper to the hidden well of my being from which my inner genius makes itself known.
I stand and be…
Everything else can sort itself out.
What does it mean to have Awareness?
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.
Healing the soul through nature
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.
The importance of self-care in magical work
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.
What is the benefit of internal work?
One of the questions I sometimes ask myself is what the benefit of internal work is. I ask this question because it can be easy to get so caught up in the internal work that you don’t seem to really make progress because you’re busy dealing with whatever is coming up internally. You can get stuck in your head and your heart at times because of how intense internal work can get. Yet I think that staying the course with internal work is ultimately beneficial. After all, when you are doing internal work you are getting the opportunity to recognize your issues and triggers and work through them in a way that can liberate you from them. A life unexamined, in contrast, is often messier in the long run, even if in the short run it seems less complicated.
Lucid Dreaming patreon post
This month’s patreon post is all about lucid dreaming and how to do it.
I was recently asked by one of my patrons about how one could do lucid dreaming. This month's Patreon article is all about lucid dreaming and how to do it and use it in your magical practice.
What is Lucid Dreaming?
Lucid Dreaming is an altered state of consciousness you cultivate that allows you to become conscious within your dreams, but can also be used to cultivate an altered state of awareness in waking life.
How to get out of your tunnel vision
One of the challenges a person faces is their own tunnel vision about what they know and what they experience. I share some thoughts on how to recognize your own blind spots in your life and practice and share why I think this is essential, because it is very easy to get in our own ways and limit ourselves with the perspectives we don’t cultivate.
Falling apart and coming back together again
The last couple of months have been really intense for me. I’ve had experiences where things seemed to come together and then they would fall apart. Some of that, a lot of it, was my own doing. My life has felt like a jigsaw puzzle and every time I thought I had the right pieces, I’d realize something was wrong and I would take the puzzle apart again.
What I discovered in the last couple months is that I really needed to allow myself to break down, and come back together again. Then break down and come back together again. It’s not an easy or fun process and many people will try to avoid it, but we really can’t avoid such work, especially when we need to do it, because what we are breaking down are the patterns of our lives that no longer work. We try to put them together again, in some new variation and maybe some of it works and maybe some of it doesn’t.
How to accept and work through uncomfortable emotions
We all have feelings and emotions that can be intense. Some are enjoyable, but some such as misery and unhappiness and fear can be emotions we try to avoid. I explain why you can’t avoid them, how they can sabotage you and what you can do to be more accepting of them, and actually find peace with them.
Dealing with Burnout part 2
I share why it’s important to stop doing activities that create or sustain your burnout and share why sometimes this may mean you need to go back to the drawing board with whatever you are doing. I share a couple of examples from my own life.