Anxiety as a Non-Ordinary State

I’ve been a mostly unwilling disciple of anxiety going on 3 weeks now. They are steering the ship hard and if I don’t fall in line, I suffer badly. This has me thinking about psychedelic states, and how resisting them when they arrive causes all sorts of friction. 

Persephone was perfectly happy to pick flowers at the edge of the world when she was abducted and raped. 

Taking a stupid walk for my stupid mental health this morning, looking at the cute homes that have been around since the 50’s in this neighborhood I’m living in, I think, “How did we get from Persephone to Suburbia?” How did we get from Inanna traveling to the Great Below, to here?

As a White ethnically Jewish woman, I descend from refugees, from a tribal people, but by the time I was raised, the enculturation was already saturated and while I was made to attend Hebrew School 3 times a week growing up, I feel more American than anything. But I also suffer from the pain of culture loss, a sense of disconnect~ not entirely knowing where I come from. I look in the mirror, and it isn’t ancestors I see. I am actively seeking to heal from a colonized mind and reframe to an indigenized one. But this is no small task, reframing a world view doesn’t happen in one swoop. It requires constant tending to, just like boundaries. As Martín Prechtel says, we may work towards a future we do not live to see. We do it anyways for those who come after.

When I have been in ceremonial spaces with indigenous leaders or those who have a more embodied indigenous framework than I, land acknowledgements feel most grounding. Ancestor acknowledgements feel grounding. Grounding seems to be a trending word these days but with anxiety, it feels most appropriate. Without having something to do, without things to tend to, there is nothing but mind. And untethered minds are dangerous. 

To appease anxiety requires a sacrifice. What can you place at the altar of Anxiety? Something mildly uncomfortable, perhaps it’s a breathing practice or a stupid walk, or exercise. Microdosing pain is a way we can avoid overdosing on pleasure. If there is anxiety, perhaps more offerings need to be made. Perhaps this is a sexier way of saying, “use your tools.” 

For Persephone, perhaps she didn’t know how to offer acknowledgement to the flowers she picked, to the ocean she picked them by, to the very hands underneath the very sky with the very sun. Too much pleasure, little Persephone, is not Mother’s Medicine. But had she not been swallowed up by Hades and the Underworld, we would not have transitions. We would not know how to be reverent of life. 

We are in a time of pain, collectively, and the structures of the past seem outdated and constricting. We are being swallowed up by the Underworld regularly. The Earth cries out for us to remember who we belong to. And we fight conditioning that taught us we only belong to ourselves and to the systems that allow us to self-actualize. What will become of us? I, for one, hope to feel more authentic and vulnerable, to connect with every being I encounter in a way that bridges differences. I want there to be more spaces of wildness, of grief and anger, of holy rage. I want there to be a place to go to when I want to be covered in mud and clawing at the earth, to scream and to sob. And to reach ecstasy through midwifing pain. 

For now, I keep going in the direction of getting through the day, and writing my stupid thoughts down because Anxiety seems to be appeased by this, at least for a little while. I keep navigating all the dark corners of my mind and reminding myself to breathe, letting songs I’ve memorized surface and maybe even sing them aloud. 

tangential thoughts while working on a poem…

We all know the adage, “what doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger.”

Life is the most psychedelic state there is. Every experience is a macro or microdose of reality on an otherwise blank canvas. What does your painting look like right now? What do you want it to? Is your experience that much different than anyone else’s? I heard a multiculturally competent counselor is one who relates through the feelings, as all human feelings are the same, not the experience itself, as that is wholly one’s own, and respected as thus.

Kali and Sekhmet and Ereshkigal are the devouring parts of us. This is where grief, fear and rage are all consuming, and we must surrender to their power until we process and transform it as the witches we are. We must let it burn us up until we are nothing but a corpse hanging on a meat-hook, our bodies fit for her appetite.

She births in us humility, truth, ambivalence; compassion, kindness, Beauty, Strength.

She is guttural.  

She is us. And these parts can’t be separate anymore.

The question isn’t “why us?” but “why do we fear it?”

Why should we fear our own nature?

We like to think of ourselves as known. We have known who we are up until this point. We will likely continue to know who we are moving forward. Perhaps until our last breath, if we are lucky.

But we are equal parts unknown. Science has proven there are vast distances within us. We are the explosion on the sky of stars, just like Kali. If it weren’t true, why does it feel so good to recognize that? Perhaps this is only a promise of what it could feel like to not be so attached to our ego, to an inherited vision of the world we aren’t so sure we believe in. It feels like being a giant, continuously inflated balloon to be in the world right now. When am I going to pop?  

One interpretation of Persephone’s name is “destroy” or “slay”, even “bringer of death.”

This is terrifying. Death as a symbol is different from actual death. We know this. Don’t we? Persephone doesn’t die though. She’s a goddess. What about us? We definitely die. Does she truly know how this feels? What kind of guide will she be?

One description of her I came across was as an infernal nymph~ which to me means fire fairy, who reminds me of the amazing character in the animation, “Adventuretime”: Flame princess.

She’s a goddess. Balanced. She is sweet unless she is wronged. Then, she is ferocious.

This means not to forget that she is not simply death, fury, and horror. She is also the opposite, thanks to Persephone’s abduction. The one that paved the way, building a bridge to totality, bringing us back to the light~ to the gratitude for life. She knows when she’s gone too far and takes a dip in the river to cool off. She remembers that she too used to love singing cheesy pop songs, that she can make people smile, that there’s a pureness in her heart that nothing and no one can touch. She makes this experience something to care for, to be grateful for.

It brings me back to the question of why we fear ourselves?

Another aspect of what she births in us is the fighter, the warrior, the survivor, Strength. It’s worth bringing it up again. Strength eats fear. As Nina Simone said, “I’ll tell you what freedom is to me, no fear.“ If we can grow stronger due to our challenges, Persephone will grant us passage. To bravely face the unknown, we can practice using our imaginations. We can practice with dream images, those medicine symbols that come in the night. To imagine being fearless is to imagine being the night sky, comfort. To greet the darkness with our willingness, to acknowledge the land, to make offerings, to trust.

This is what she offers us.

She must be fed our offerings, our growth and scales, our courage.

Creating Things

I’ve had two tasks lately, as a creator.

One was to come up with the opening circle movement practice and ritual format and playlist for Navaratri, the 9-day devotional ritual practice for the Goddess. I was asked to channel Kali for this.

The other was to write a poem for a friend’s novel on Demeter and Persephone. They asked me to write about the inherent struggle in a mother/daughter relationship. A great task, indeed. My experience is only one take, but the magnanimity of these myths are epic.

For the Kali ritual, I pulled a card from my Kali Oracle Deck, by Alana Fairchild. I pulled the card Gauri Devi

Her message is one of balance. She is the light aspect of Kali, the Great Mother we adore. The story from the oracle book is that Kali goes to the river and comes back as Gauri. A demon bothers her and she turns into Kali and destroys them, but transforms immediately back to Gauri. It’s having Kali embodied deeply, knowing the ferocity and violence and survival is appropriately balanced. It’s trusting the impulses.

This is also like Demeter and Persephone, in that they are not actually separate goddesses, despite the myth that Demeter is Persephone’s mother. In a way, they are separate, but they are more like points of light along a continuum, and the continuum is a circle. Persephone was taken by Hades to the Underworld and Demeter was so distraught that she cried oceans and her plea for help to Zeus resulted in getting Persephone back for half the year. The Underworld feels like a difficult thing to define, perhaps because it is so big that I can only hover on it’s edges. trying to peer with my little light into eternity. The cosmic soup of creation. The darkness. Back to Kali.

Kali is not a goddess that you invoke at your convenience. She is a goddess you go and seek out, making sacrifice and offering. She is the night sky, and the backs of our eyelids. She’s who we are humbled by our smallness. Martín Prechtel speaks of our purpose in life is to create Beauty. And in order to create Beauty, we must be very present and create a space for Beauty to live. We must draw Her in. We cannot expect her to come otherwise.

The last time I journeyed with the Mushroom, as I was going into the experience I asked Great Mother how we help her. She said, “Serve the Mothers” and showed me a cosmic ear of corn. Through my hunt on corn mythology, I came across a story of great significance, and what’s funny is I can’t find it anymore, so I’m wondering if I have made up a version that is suiting my needs right now. I’m just gonna go with it because researching instead of writing is making me anxious. The part of the story that resonated was that the gods tried many ways to create humans and in their effort, failed a few times. What finally worked was creating them out of corn, for this would always humble them to be in reverence of the Creator. Humans are made of corn and must continue to eat corn to survive. What I took away from that was to check my ego, to be honest with myself, to be worshipful as much as I remember to. One of the ways I felt deeply that night was to apologize. That the trees and the flowers want our apologies. They want to be worshipped and considered. It’s so easy to forget this living in a city. One of Prechtel’s practices was to greet everyone and everything (I have been attempting to do this and it does make a difference).

In the Egyptian Goddess Sekhmet’s story, the lion-headed goddess is called upon to balance the world with her fury. She becomes blood-thirsty and out of control and ends up tipping the scales in the other direction. Eventually, she is tricked by the gods and given wine to make her drunk and from there she calms down. There is more to this story but that is the part that is standing out to me. (For more, check out Nikki Scully’s book on Sekhmet).

I began to think about the process by which the blood-thirsty form of the goddess is turned into her light aspect. For Kali, it was a river. For Demeter, it was Baubo her interrupted her sobbing with her Trickster-display of flashing Demeter, thus making her laugh. For Sekhmet, it was various Gods that intervened, namely Thoth and Ra, that got her drunk and loved on her. What does it mean for a river to heal? The Great Mother, The Ganges Herself.

My take-away? We gotta know when it’s time to cool off.

A Dream

I am right outside of a small apartment in the sky peering into a window watching as men feast on the dying Earth. I am horrified but tempered in objectivity. We, me and my fellow companion who feels shadowy and masculine, go inside the apartment afterwards, in the moment after Earth is dead. There is a pause as we await our own demise. But right then, two plants begin to bloom right before our eyes. One is opening with leaves thick like aloe and shaped by a vesica pisces.

The other one looks like a classic sprout unfurling in fibonacci spirals. We stand there in awe at the miracle. Life is not over. And our bodies are touched by this magic too, as we grow these beautiful angel wings. We spend time like this, so much time that humanity has ceased and then begun again. Each week up here is hundreds of years for humanity.

One day, I am inside with the door open and in the doorframe is the roadrunner, the trickster himself. I see him and tell the others that the trickster has visited. Something that comes is not what it seems. We hear a pained expression from outside moments later and find the head of a horse, attached with what seems like a foot, or some means of perambulation as it gets up from the couch and walks down the hall the opposite direction from which we came, like a bloodied “Poor Things” creature.

My attention is directed to directly below me, where seemingly the head has lept from the apartment and down below and as I look down, it grabs ahold of my angel hair and pulls it to earth. I reach down and grab it, and feel like I achieve this; however, now I am on the Earth in the middle of a compound that feels Arabic. I get a sense that I’m a stranger here, and no one seems particularly interested until I feel a sense of danger. I feel human now, but I find a spot in the yard to focus my energies on being lifted and flying, a sense of lightness more difficult to achieve here on Earth. But I manage and fly up, not as high as the apartment but close to the tops of the trees.

The dream goes on to show me my own personal relationship with this vision, so I won’t share it here as it feels too personal.

But I would happily listen to how anyone takes it on “as their dream”. And am happy to share my own experiences as well.

The Formula for Life

Hope and despair

rise up

through hollow feet

from the earth

to the sky

to activate

this heartbeat

ba da ba da ba da

Fire sparks the mind

Mind wills the body

Mind wills the body

fire sparks the mind 

ba da ba da ba da

this heartbeat

to activate

the sky

from the earth

through hollow feet

rise up

hope and despair

Time

gives and

Time

takes

in through the nose

out through the mouth

a bone 

pillar to the body

to be still standing

without this bone

What is the last bone?

Who will be there?

Who will be there?

What is the last bone?

without this bone

to be still standing

pillar to the body

a bone

out through the mouth

in through the nose

takes 

Time

gives and 

Time

Dream Journalling

Don’t be surprised if your dream journaling happens slowly. There’s recording the dream and then there’s working with it. Recording it and then forgetting it, doesn’t do too much except maybe for posterity and for practice. But it’s an important part of the process. Jung theorized that we have a personal unconscious and then a collective unconscious. The personal unconscious is largely, in my understanding, like the monkey mind in meditation. The thoughts are not us, they are a byproduct. Just like these dreams are not us, but they come from us. Sifting through the personal unconscious dreams can be quite harrowing, which is why Justina Lasley’s book of practices, “Wake Up to Your Dreams”, and the practice of honoring the dream and crucial bridge builders. After some time, you will share your dreams, be asked a billion questions by the listeners (if you’re lucky),play around with drawing it or acting it out or wearing the outfit it reminded you of, or reaching out to that person. Certain dreams will stick to you like your favorite hoodie, or cape. And you won’t help but be able to tend it~ to read about the symbology, to journal, to find others who want to play. Because that’s all dreamwork is~ bringing more awareness to the images. Some traditions speak of Image as Soul. Soul as Image. To engage with the images this way is to bring not only your attention but your devotion to them, and in turn, your psyche learns new ways to communicate, just as you learn new ways. It is bi-directional, happening simultaneously. Our love affair with our reflection, or Reflection itself. This is all to say that it’s worth it to stick it out, through the nightmares, through journalling, and the sharing. 

Dreamschool Reflection

I’m nearing the end of my year of Dreamschool with This Jungian Life. 

The most recent Q and A contained lots of questions about the Self and inflation. 

The concept of Self is the Transcendent part of us, connected with every other being that has ever existed. It’s pure energy that is sometimes loud and sometimes a whisper. 

Inflation is when the ego identifies with symbols of the Soul as some kind of definition for who they are. I.e. I dream of this Goddess so I must be her, in some aspect. And in some way, this is true, but no more or less than any other individual. And it doesn’t do to cherry pick your dreams. 

I was inflated long before I found the term. The first time I found that steered me toward shadow work, was Spiritual Materialism, a term coined by Chögyam Trungpa~ “the belief that a certain temporary state of mind is a refuge from suffering.”

I was inflated because intense synchronicity, and visitations by holy beings who led me to significant changes in my waking life, and led to questioning myself in regards to what reality was composed of. I don’t really blame myself for this, as I didn’t have a strong sense of spiritual guidance growing up. I grew up in a secular household and fought really hard to discover what is meaningful for me. Being psychic was always seen as something special by my mom. Everywhere we went, different cities we went to (which was a lot because my mom is a traveler), we visited a psychic. 

I was drunk on the stories of gurus with Siddhis, of meditation masters and their magical abilities. I wanted holy experiences in my life to unfold. And this I received. Recognizing the inflation that came to me through Dreaming took many tumbles and falls. I still do this. The Self sends us dark images and light ones, and we have the capacity to be inflated by either one. This is taking dreams literally~ I dream of this monster so I must be one. I dream of this magical being so I must be magic. The Self activates when something in the unconscious psyche needs to be activated. The idea is the Self is Balance, and corrects the ego attitude. If one is very depressed, the psyche may generate an image of inspiration. If inflated, the psyche may generate a disturbing image. 

To be brought low, Joseph Lee commented in his recent Q &A from Dreamschool, is a correction on the part of the ego. This happened to me recently. I stumbled, but laughed at myself, was embarrassed but not fatally so. Recognizing dismemberment is a catalyst for this coming year for me. I am fertilizer, mulch. I must remember to bow my head. The rewards in darkness are many. I must remember this. We must remember this. And bow our heads to the Unseen with every move we make. And one way to do that is to honor your dreams. 

Part of me is ashamed that it feels like I’ve been on this journey for so long with such little change, with such little awareness, and with that, another reminder to bow my head.  If I feel ashamed, I have not been in devotion. 

But I also show self-compassion in that everybody is on their own journey, and none of us are in it alone. 

I have had so many beautiful gifts of Awe in my dreams, and to think of these as a way of my psyche trying to get my attention feels more complex than when I just spent a day in devotion to the symbol because it was so amazing. That isn’t dreamwork. When we think of these things in terms, not of hierarchy, but energy, we focus less on amplifying symbols and more with recognizing where the energy lies. This can help us make sense of things. 

Naomi Sangreal was the first person I heard speak about the need for us to be stabilized before doing shadow work, which dreamwork can be a form of. This made me reflect on clients unwillingness to take on their dreams and I recognized in me, the need for a sense of safety

Anger

The word does not begin to encapsulate the experience. It does not even come close. I rarely come close to it either. 

While studying to become a Shakti Yoga teacher, I found the module on Fire to be the most difficult. Astrologically, this is the least represented element in my chart. I have Aries rising, and that’s it. Other than that, I have predominantly water and earth, then air. 

This year, I’m embracing the element of fire. Part of that intention requires that I meditate with it. 

During the teacher training, Jasmine Rose was really good at reminding us that spiritual practices are cultivation ones, so not to be dismayed if we struggled with certain ones more than others. My favorite module was the Heart, and Air. I did not realize my intimate love affair with air until this year. 

Fire comes in slowly. One of the practices we were asked to do during this module, was to get in touch with everything we are angry about. I mostly danced with numbness. The organs associated with this module with the ovaries. It makes sense that I had one removed when I was 19. I struggled to connect with the “energetic imprint” which is what Jasmine refers to in the body when the organ is not present. I’m recognizing as I write this, that I am holding a lot of tension in my pelvis, due to the way I’m sitting, due to years of sucking my stomach in. As I breathe into my ovaries, I feel my sexual energy root deeper down within me. This is much more than I could do during the training. We journeyed with Kali, and Lioness breath. We danced to music with louder bass. We work the muscles and work up a sweat. We are at the ovulation phase of the cycle here. This is also resonant, as I’ve always struggled with summer months, even when I didn’t live in the desert, and struggled with ovulation. For me, the bleeding part of my cycle is a relief. The fire is associated with the solar plexus, digestion, the ability to assert yourself, and to steer the course of the life as a sailboat captain, and not being dragged and screaming. 

In Somatic Experiencing therapy recently, I discovered an arrow piercing my right shoulder and left hip. I was under the water, a common dream experience for me. To empower myself, to hold the spear in hand on the beach, I shifted from anger to understanding. I don’t need anyone’s approval for anything. That’s not to say that I don’t ask for advice and have my trusted band of voices to listen to, but it  means that I don’t have to take on someone else’s projection or my assumption about that projection anymore. I get to proud of myself for whatever I’m proud of myself for. 

That arrow is connected to a long line of things. Many home videos of myself as a toddler were ones where I’m enraged. My brother was mean to a dog. Enraged. My brothers are wrestling and knock my new piggy bank out of my hands and don’t apologize. Enraged. I would shake my fists and yell. It was a treat for my father, who lived most of his life not feeling like he could really stand up for himself. He encouraged my brothers and I to, all the time. It is hard when the person you need to eventually do that for, includes him. 

A cousin a while back spoke about the anger inherited through my grandmother to my dad and his sisters, was one we had as well. She spoke about it matter-of-factly and I was able to consider it then. Yes. I am angry. I have that edge inside of me, the sharp potential to be cruel. The benefit of this is a total lack of struggle with boundaries. The drawback is the poison that causes erosion. How does one use the fire safely and effectively?

It was men’s anger I was first introduced to, through my father. He would anger when we didn’t listen to him the first time. He would anger when we cussed or burped at the dinner table. He would anger when we didn’t finish our food, or when the TV was too loud. When we were really bad, we were sent to our rooms, or spanked. 

I’m 24 and I can’t stop having the same nightmare. I’m running and being chased by this sort of demonic being. From the neck down, it looked like an average person, but the entire head was blurry, and looked like the blur was of a head wrapped in a sort of potato sack garment. I’ve told this story before, about how this nightmare helped me let go of the fear of sleeping. But this angle is different. This time, it was also healing my fear of men’s anger. 

I didn’t want to wake him up. The Druid priest I lived with for a while. That was what I feared most. Waking up the bear. For that was when he was very anger, and that time of the night was unfortunately when my thoughts were the loudest, and my inner voice was a scream. 

I woke up 2 or 3 times from that nightmare and paced around the cabin before I stood by the foot of his bed. I couldn’t ask. I couldn’t wake him up. But he woke up on his own while I stood there, blocking out the light of the moon shining through the sunroof windows. “What is it, sweetheart?” he says tenderly, a warm invitation to come closer, that it’s okay, that you are not a bad thing. 

You tell him of the nightmare. Of the demon. He says you must embrace it. He says you must confront it. Invite it in. I went back into sleep with a plan this time. And became lucid as I’m being chased up a spiral staircase, in a lighthouse. I pivot on the steps and face this demon, with my arms wide open. We collide and his atoms disperse. 

The fear of men’s anger coincided with the fear of going to sleep. 

This anger is inherited. 

I burn the anger in the cauldron of my womb, tending it for my ancestors. 

So, dreaming of fire over the last 6 months, feels like the collective psyche approving of my transformation, of my cultivation practice with the element. She came to me from the Goddess. I swallowed her up. I sweat her out. I dreamed her up. 

When I learned I could be more powerful than men’s anger, I felt vivified. I began exerting it everywhere I went. Towards anyone that let me. The pendulum swung in the opposite direction, one that is very human, but also one that appears to create a lot of shame at first. I made sure it was justified, and I studied the eroticism of submission and dominance tactics with the priest. It was part of my practice to send him to his knees and squeeze his balls progressively harder and harder when teaching him a lesson, when creating matter with  my own hands, which he said was the purpose of the priest, so that women can know the power that is divinely theirs to hold and to exert. 

I learned about rituals of Dionysos, and that eroticism was cultivated by an inner sense of Divine Feminine Justice and Beauty, using fire to stir up and water to cool down. I found a young man who happened to love Dionysos and love the relationship that me and the priest had~ which was novel. Most people didn’t really ask too much about our relationship, but he did. His name was Morgan. Morgan one night at the pub, started getting in all the women’s faces, bothering their sense of personal space. He was at least 6 feet tall and pretty built. I marched right up to him on the dance floor and grabbed him by his ponytail and then told him to get on his knees, which he did. I began to fantasize about alchemizing these behaviors of men with service to the feminine. I continued this with a big young man, very stocky. He was buying shots for a friend of mine on New  Year’s, clearly looking for a hook up. He was a tool and she tolerated him, but I did not. He told everyone his family bought the cabins near where we were, to rent out. He didn’t live on the island. 

I didn’t bother with him until opportunity arrived. I was outside during the evening, and he asked if anyone had weed. As my practice of carrying around two freshly rolled joints at all times, I responded affirmatively, and offered to share. He agreed but wanted to go to his cabin to do it, which we did. He poured me some kind of very exotic, expensive vodka and we smoked on the porch. He got too close to me and thought the vibe was hook-up and that wasn’t my vibe at all. Because he was big, I could have been scared. But I wasn’t. I reached down into my skirt and made him watch as I stuck my fingers into my vagina and pulled them out and held them under his noise. I then turned around and walked inside, spread my knees apart for him to see inside me on his couch and made him sit across the room. He did not listen to me tell him to stay there and approached me, and this was when I slapped him across the face and walked out. Later at the party, he spotted me sitting with a group of people and exclaimed: “this is the bitch that slapped me.” Everybody could see that he was a tool though. And most of them appreciated my presence on their island, or at least tolerated me. The next time I saw him was when my own energy was out of whack, and I was becoming inflated on this vibe of control. A couple of us were playing pool in the pub. He waltzed in and as it got darker outside and darker inside, we decided to turn the light on. I somehow knew how bright it was and warned everyone to close their eyes. He wouldn’t. He looked directly at me. I barked at him, demanding he close his eyes. He came over to me with a bear hug, one I did not want or ask for and I bent my knee and used it to fuck up his crotch. He did fall to his knees this time. And then he ran outside and again, announced it to the crowd who, again, did not bat an eye. 

This energy grew and followed me back home to the desert, to which it began to feel more dangerous and I hit a breaking point, luckily I was safe through it, though it take a few years to journey with it. 

When I empathized with the plights of many peoples, I became angry for a little while, at their injustice. When I found anger for the plastic surgeon that gave me liposuction at 18, or anger at my parents, I was able to do something about it, versus the anger I held for all the people experiencing injustice for a little while. It’s not very possible, or maybe even helpful, to try and co-opt another’s anger. It is performative. We forget that anger is a universal emotion, that we can all share, regardless of the specificities, and this is how we heal, not fighting another’s fight, but fighting the part of us that does not recognize their own anger, because it’s covered under the shame of not doing enough, or not being enough. 

And anger is one face of the fire. There are so many others. Fire is a good reflection for this part of the year~ a time when we celebrate the rebirth of the light, the immortal and everlasting Sun/son/Sol/Soul. From now on we will be entering a growth phase. So what is it we want to pour our fires into? I want to be kind to myself, specifically when I feel like I’m not giving enough energy to certain aspects of myself, and they are needing attention. To recognize their tantrums as a need to go within. To be in touch with my anger, but not to lose myself in another’s. To use it to find solidarity with all people. To feel proud and empowered with myself. To speak with the fire. To welcome it in. To connect with my ovaries and my ovarian energy, to breathe into my root, to breathe my sexuality in. To cultivate it more. To finding the shared energetic frequencies between people, and harnessing the power of the positive ones. 

What will you bring your fire into? 

12/22/23

The rainy, overcast day makes night seem to last. 

Will the Sun return?

Our people, our ancestors, weren’t sure. 

We seem to be, because of history, because of science. 

We’ve come a long way to find that we have created ourselves into complacency, to forgetfulness, to thinking people will be around forever, that the earth will be around forever, to forgetting that empathy makes us human, and without it, we are cultivating too deep a connection with the mirror neurons of machinery. 

As the darkness progresses due to the earth widening Her axis, we wait knuckles gripped. The night grows into day, until we can’t ignore it any longer, and the liminal space is such a sliver we are beginning to lose our minds. Violence everywhere, inability to control the masses. 

We watch more and more television and sit on the internet, just to try to get as much light as we can out of blue light. The government manufactures and sends Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) lights to everyone. Those with Solar Powered homes have to move. 

Spiritualists devise darkness rituals in order to bring people purpose and meaning. Psychedelics are doled out by humanitarians, to try and combat the violence with ancestral wisdom. 

We begin to accept our fate, and survive the days with wailing and grief. We channel healing energy from within us, as our deepest resources are being activated. 

Just then, when we reach a place of peace, the vitality from within, the sun rises. 

A new calendar is born. One nearly double the length, but just short. 

Who will we become?

Nightmares

It can be easy, and maybe even natural, to wonder what is wrong with us when we have nightmares? I’ve often felt shame in the dreaming community with the interpretation that nightmares are alarm bells, warning signs, visions of distress. It can inspire panic, anxiety. 

I have recently been in a phase of somewhat sensitive psychic attunement. Synchronicities are common-place and it  makes me feel more at ease, as if I can truly let go and trust that i’m in flow. 

(words of the year….unapologetic and trust)

(I’m grounded by my apologies to the Earth for lack of witnessing Her and I’m inspired by a sense of unapologetic-ness in human beings. I thrive towards this expression)

So, my ears perked up when a sister shared something she’d read about a shaman who said that nobody can expect to go through a healing process without dismemberment.

I had woken up from a disturbing dream in the wee hours of the morning and was rattled by the amount of dismemberment I witnessed. 

It can be easy to take this personally. Is something wrong with me that I can see this coming from  my own mind? This despite the studying I’ve done about Jung’s Collective Unconscious, or the Autonomous Psyche, which is independent of my ego position. 

But then there was fear. Is this going to happen to me? But I recalled something about my reading up on Sekhmet, the Egyptian Lioness Goddess, and how her devotee Nicki Scully, wrote that her medicine is one of devouring. She is simultaneously that which causes drought, plague, pestilence, while also being The Healing One that you pray to at times of desperation. 

This reminds me of times of being really sick. And awakens me to the polarity at the heart of all Life. The heart, and more specifically, the Heartbeat. For fire symbolically represents vitality, life force, activation, power, the heart of the Zodiac is Leo, the lion, represented by the Major Arcana card “Strength” in the Tarot. It is leadership by natural and divine right. 

My ears perked up when the following evening of the dream, a friend reflected on her experience with the word of her year of “2023” being “remember” with something she’d heard recently about how one cannot expect to be on a spiritual journey without dismemberment. This led me back to Sekhmet, who’d came to me in a dream before the Summer Solstice.

The dream:

I’m riding passenger in a car driven by my mom. I think we are in North Tucson, in some neighborhood, clear skies ahead. A lioness struts on the sidewalk to the left of the car. Or is it the right? We are stopped now, and the lioness jumps through the sun roof, into the car, and onto my lap. The power is immense. I have my mom very quietly and slowly open the door, and I kick my foot a little to gesture for the cat to leave. She does. 

I read about her during Tucson summer, the heat maddening. Reading about the hot desert breath that is Sekhmet, this desert Goddess’s, I felt immediately transitioned from desperation to devotion. I also read that to be a devotee of Sekhmet, one must be willing to be digested in the belly of the Goddess. 

The disturbing dream I have, the one of dismemberment, of some part of me pouring acid on the skin of beautiful young women, so that the bone is clean for sawing or chopping off. The image of clean bone. The implication of chemicals being poured. The panicked faces of the women, the other parts of me, horrified. That it is all true. And also, so is the Observer, or the Dreamer, the egoless state of awareness within us. This is the part of us that can do dreamwork in an analytical sense. 

What happened earlier in this dream sequence, is as follows:

I am at some kind of summer camp for women. Lots of young women, me included, though I felt much younger. I felt a part of myself that I haven’t been in touch with for a while: the self that feels very alone and like an outcast, reminding me of the mask that I used to wear with social anxiety, when I felt so disconnected from everyone, with no way out. I tried to connect with old friends, and it didn’t happen. They weren’t interested. My efforts were too late for that. Then a game of tag emerged. A very intricate one, with rules and technique. The second person who was “it” instead of tagging just anybody, she went back to the beginning of the game and tagged the most valuable player, some kind of trickster/wizard, and when she tagged them, gold and beauty poured out. 

I was in awe, judgmental of myself for not being like that, for just accepting what comes to me out of this need for survival and belonging. Now I’m driving and we are just about to enter the highway when we are stopped, due to a cop pulling over the car in front of us. The driver has very dangerous chemicals. It’s a small bag of them that I see sort of waved around. The cop orders the man to get rid of them. That’s when there’s a vision of what the man is going to do to get rid of them. He’s going to pour it on his prisoners, this room of beautiful young women. In the first part, I have an ego role, or rather strong one, and then in the second part, driving but being stopped, I become the observer of the action in front of me, and then I become a sort of floating awareness. Is the dismemberment part coming for The Outcast? The part of me that doesn’t belong, that can’t go for the gold. To enter the freeway, or freedom, I must become digested in the belly of the Goddess. 

So a re-frame from seeing this as a “nightmare” is to embrace it as The Mystery~ that which terrifies and fascinates—mysterium tremendem et fascinans— for as a sacrifice for the Goddess at this altar of life, one must be devoured over and over again. To become unapologetic, I must sacrifice this younger version of self, so desperate to belong, this younger version of self that wakes up from the dream scared, this version of self that believes any truth other than all life is a paradox, and most important is how we treat one another and the earth, this young woman, this young woman that isn’t kind to other people, this young woman that is so concerned with what she looks like, this younger woman that is trapped by anything. With Sekhmet’s help, perhaps this is a real possibility. Perhaps she’s hard to let go of because she’s very angry. Her blood is on fire with rage. She cuts right to the bone. But her fierceness is not one-sided. She Strength is Coeur de Leon~ the Heart of the Lion. And perhaps this is what we miss when we are too frightened. That poison also heals. Don’t psychedelics teach us that? 

Nicki Scully writes in “Sekhmet: Transformation in the Belly of the Goddess”:

“Although Ma’at is the goddess of truth, order, harmony and cosmic law (not people’s laws), whenever the balance of cosmic law swings too far in one direction or another on this planet, it is Sekhmet, as fierce Protectress of the Divine Order, who is called to bring things back into balance.”

It seems natural to associate this Goddess with the bleeding phase of the menstrual cycle. The need for solitude, for darkness, for the Wailing Woman to come and sing her song, for praises of Grief and Letting Go, for the rage that wells up inside with the sickness and sadness of the world. 

Perhaps this dream doesn’t belong to me, but perhaps it’s for us, as a collective. That we are never going to make it out of here alive. 

And perhaps that’s why we have these disturbing dreams. In what ways do we grow complacent of this fact? In what ways do we hold ourselves and others back? In what ways can we pay tribute to this Goddess?

Her myth, from the aforementioned book by Nicki Scully:

“Sekhmet’s most common myth speaks of a time long, long ago when Ra-the sun god who was said to have created the Earth, the Sky, and all that dwelt herein, including humans- was seen to be growing old. Although he had ruled over our precious planet for millennia, humans began to perceive him as aging and losing his power and ceased to pay their respects, not only to Ra but to each other and the planet as well. no longer did they express their gratitude for the blessings and miracles of life, and they openly disrespected the sun god, having forgotten the source of life itself. 

As Ra felt mocked and disregarded, he called on his daughter Sekhmet to incarnate on Earth to deal with the upstart humans. When she saw how disrespectful people were to one another and to Ma’at as well as to Ra, she went into a rage and began a slaughter that evolved into carnage with no end in sight. Her bloodlust knew no bounds, and it appeared as though no human would escape her wrath. She started her rampage in Nubia and continued northward throughout Upper Egypt and into the Delta in Lower Egypt. She became so intoxicated by the taste of human blood that she made no distinction between good and evil. 

Ra loved the children of the Earth; they were his creation. So he called upon all the great Egyptian deities for help, but no one could temper the rage of this out-of-control goddess. Finally, Thoth, the god of wisdom, came up with a plan. He told Ra to have the women of Heliopolis brew seven thousand vats of barley beer spiked with powerful herbs, such as poppies brought from Elephantine Island in the south, Andrade root, and other magical, mind-altering substances, with pomegranate juice to dye in the color of blood. When Sekhmet lay down to take a nap, the priests and priestesses crept as close as they dared and poured the beer around her in puddles that she would not miss, hoping she would mistake the beer for human blood. 

Sure enough, when she awoke, Sekhmet discovered the beer and gleefully lapped up the bloodline brew, counting until she became intoxicated. Most versions o the myth say she became drunk; however, I believe that rather than being subdued into a drunken stupor, Sekhmet’s mind was expanded and her heart opened. When she was able to see with the new eyes of compassion what she had done, her rage was transformed int love. 

As the story continues, Sekhmet, having been pacified and now of a more docile nature- some say as the water buffalo, the Egyptian cow, while others say it was as Bast, the tamer version of the cat- traveled south to Nubia and disappeared. Ra was quite upset at the loss of his daughter and finally sent Thoth and his entourage to coach her back to Egypt. Thoth promised her that she would never be forgotten, that there would be a great feast awaiting her return and a celebration every year in her honor. Always one to love a good party, Hathor/Bast/Sekhmet returned to Egypt, and the celebration continued every year probably practiced in some for to this day.”

So long story short: go experience a non-ordinary state of consciousness. Just kidding, not really. 

But also, what can we learn about this really? How can we honor her rage and her love? Ma’at might seem to us very simple and obvious, but when we take into consideration that our sense of time is not cosmic time unless we’ve done the work in order for it to be so, then we become too small to be receptive to Her, and then we act discordantly. But what else are we but little humans with god complexes? 

Through suffering, we earn humility, that which orients us to Ma’at, that we are actually not in control and that we are humbled before a greater power. And that which tries us also teaches us how to be the best versions of ourselves. The struggle is hard and ugly and painful, and it is arguable whether to be grateful for it or not, whether it was worth it in the end (which is a very personal decision for every individual). But it’s not evil, in a damned way, it’s nature. It’s part of the experience, and if we can survive, and even procure medicine from it, if we the heart of the lion is beating from within our apex predator hearts, we will live another day, with burgeoning and deepening wisdom in tow.