I reflect on the lessons I learned in 2022 and share my vision for what I plan to manifest in 2023. I also discuss the false intimacy of social media and share why I’m making some changes in what I share on here and on social media in general.
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 I'm learning to choose myself
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.
How to Apply Awareness to Magic
I discuss how to apply awareness to your magical practice in order to get better results, but also put together better magical workings. I discuss why awareness can help us with the process of letting go of the lust for results so that we can focus on the magical work we need to do.
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.
How to Cultivate Awareness and Let Go of Attachment
Attachments come in the form of ideals, concepts, categories and all the other ways we try to define the world and ourselves. If we want to cultivate awareness we need to recognize how our attachments actually get in the way of genuine connection. In this video I discuss how to cultivate awareness and let go of attachment.
How to release your neediness and discover your actual needs
In the last few months I have had a great opportunity present itself to me. I have come face to face with my neediness and co-dependent behavior and I’m going through this process to recognize and release the neediness in order to discover what I truly need. That probably sounds a little contradictory until you consider that the root issue of neediness is based in fear. When we feel needy, we often feel that way because we are afraid to discover ourselves and what we truly need.
This journey of mine has involved me learning even more about my relationship with fear. I already knew a lot about it, but I’ve come to recognize how fear is the root of neediness. When I feel needy or clingy, what is operating at the root of that needy clinginess is the fear I feel. Part of what has helped in doing this work is connecting with Saturn, because in a very real sense Saturn is an embodiment of fear.
Goetic pathworking for internal work
Over the course of this year I’ve been taking a Goetic Daemon a week course offered by S. Connolly on her Patreon. It’s been a fascinating course to take and its helped me expand my experiences and knowledge of working with daemons. While I already had some experience working with them going into the course, I’m glad I’ve taken the course because of the insights I’ve gained.
One of the suggestions that S. Connolly is working with the Daemons for the purpose of doing internal work and I’ve found this to be a great practice. Often it seems that people think of working with the Goetia when they need an external result or want to do an evocation, but there is a lot of value to be discovered in doing internal work with them.
How to become resilient in Magic and Life part 2
In this week’s video I share how resiliency must come from within, but also why the right resources can help you cultivate that resiliency and strengthen your inner core. I also share how to identify those resources and why it’s important to develop an approach to self-care that carries you through any situation you encounter.
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.
How justification and rationalization can get in the way of magical work
One of the books I’ve been reading lately is Mistakes were Made (but not by me) (affiliate link). It’s been a hard book to read because what it naturally causes a reader to face is how they have justified their own mistakes in order to avoid taking responsibility for them. While I’d like to believe that I do take responsibility for my choices, I’ll admit that reading this book did cause me to examine some of my perceptions and beliefs about situations and recognize how I had justified my own behavior or painted other people in a specific light to justify my choices. Needless to say, it made me squirm a bit.
As I continued reading the book I also considered how such justifications can show up in magical work. While I have written and shared my own failures with magic with a fair amount of candor, I still revisited various workings as a result of reading this book and asked myself if I ever justified why a working failed or succeeded. It was a good exercise to take on, because it required a willingness to put aside whatever justifications I had applied to a situation and ask myself if there was anything else that could have contributed to the situation.
Now Available for Pre-Order! Inner Alchemy of Wintering
Inner Alchemy of Wintering: How to Recover from Spiritual Burnout is now available for pre-order!
Restore and reinvent yourself through the inner alchemy of wintering
Sometimes we hit spiritual burnout because of events in our lives, or in our spiritual work, or because we’ve just hit the wall and can’t go any further. We hit a state of wintering, where we need to rest, reflect, and reinvent ourselves. In this book you will learn:
What wintering is and how it applies to spiritual and magical work.
How to make peace with spiritual burnout, instead of trying to fight it.
Why we need to integrate rest and reflection into your spiritual and magical work.
How to discover what is truly essential in the face of burnout.
How to use the ritual of reinvention to transform your life.
If you’ve hit a state of burnout or wintering, this book will help you work through those states. You’ll learn how to use the inner alchemy of wintering to turn the burnout in your life into inspiration that drives the reinvention of your life through practical magic.
How to work through ancestral blockages
Once you identify ancestral blockages you need to work through them and let them go so you don’t continue to perpetuate the ancestral blockages, but also do you can let your ancestors rest. I share some ideas on how to do this and let your ancestors and you move on.
How to Identify Ancestral Blockages
Sometimes the blockages that we deal with are ancestral. In this video I share how to identify an ancestral blockage and start dissolving and working through it so that it no longer haunts your life and breaks the cycle that is inherited from your ancestors.
What Saturn is teaching me about Truth, Connection and Boundaries
I share my experiences with my Saturn work and how it is effecting my understanding and work with the elements of truth and connection as well as where boundaries fits into all of this.
The Mysteries of Death and Rebirth part 2
We live with death everyday, but we don’t always recognize it. In this video I discuss not just the obvious examples of death, but the subtle nuances as well. I also share some of my previous near death experiences and how they have lead to different rebirth experiences.
Memory Resonance technique
I recently saw the movie The Green Knight. It was a fascinating movie to see because of how it evoked specific experiences during the watching of the movie. Whether this was intentional or simply a byproduct of my own spiritual sensitivity, I couldn't tell you. But what I can tell you is that any such experience can be stored away and used as a way to help you sync up with related experiences.
I call this the memory resonance technique and the way it works is that you use the experiences you are having to connect with the memory of other experiences, and in turn you use those memories to enhance the current experience and open you further to liminal reality.
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.