Author: Anthony Rella
Spiritual Transformation, Abrupt or Slow
Since entering a community of practice that favors intuition, direct apprehension of the spiritual world, and personal transformation, I have encountered a range of attitudes toward growth and seen a number of journeys. What I notice often is a tendency in my communities toward fearing and desiring a form of spiritual realization imagined to be like a lightning bolt striking the Tower and changing the landscape utterly and forever.
There is a variety of language I’ve heard around it. Often the words use images like “broken” and “shattered.” They evoke wounding, destruction, and dissolution as almost necessities for growth. The language seems to suggest a belief that the main obstacle to perceiving and comprehending the spiritual world is a kind of rigidity of mind and firmness of the psychological container that will not allow the truth to enter into awareness.
In my life and work I’ve known people who experienced psychotic episodes in which their experiences of the world are decidedly different. To describe it as purely chaotic seems wrong, though chaos is present, but there is often a way in which the mind in a state of delusion is actually more fixed and rigid. Perhaps it is a way the psyche continually strives toward some kind of balance, off-setting the intensity of being open to so many scary thoughts and sensations by holding very tightly to a story about reality that is different from our consensus reality.
One of the chief distinctions between a delusional belief and any other belief is the capacity to which a person is willing or able to question and explore the belief and consider alternatives. When a song I was just thinking about comes on, I might simultaneously think it’s the universe sending a message, or it’s my phone listening to me and tracking my data to send me the right song, or it’s just a funny coincidence. The capacity to entertain all three possibilities, or even more, is a sign of a non-delusional mind that is flexible but contained.
On the other hand, I’ve interacted with many sincere spiritual folks who experience traumatizing and deeply unsettling experiences that might be labeled as delusional by people who don’t share that context. Often these folks arrive at an understanding of what’s happening to them through happenstance, talking to a lot of people and trying to find someone with a similar enough experience that they can make a story that makes enough sense to hold the experience without it completely throwing their lives into discord. They’re trying not to be broken by putting a name to what’s happening.
So much freedom comes when we can name what’s happening to us and separate it out from a story of being “broken.” Whether we can label it with a medical diagnosis, a psychological diagnosis, a political analysis, a family story, a myth—all of it serves to bring the struggle into the light and let us work with it. Writer Misha Magdalene wrote a really beautiful and related insight into identity labels being like the handle on a coffee cup. Our raw experience is like hot coffee, a wonderful brew that is tricky and dangerous to handle directly. Instead, we need cups with handles to contain experience and give us a way to work with it. Misha spoke to our identity labels as the handles to these cups, but I want to gently stretch that metaphor to encompass the stories we tell about who and what we are, that includes identity but also includes our stories of illness.
Getting back to the point—my peers who have experienced traumatizing, life-upending spiritual crises and incursions of the other-than-human world into their bodies and lives have found a way to get a handle on these experiences by telling a story that is very different than the delusional belief of a person in active psychosis. It retains the flexibility of mind, the humility to acknowledge when what’s happening is beyond our capacity to fully understand and name, and the containment of identity that allows for an integration of the disruptive experience. In an active state of psychosis, integration seems to be much harder. I have an image of gripping tightly to the bucking bronco while it’s actively trying to kick you off—that seems, from the outside, to be the paradox. But that’s also incredibly adaptive. It makes sense to hold on tightly to the story that seems to explain it all, even if it’s a horrible story, instead of letting go and feeling whelmed by the chaos.
There was a time when I envied and yearned for that same level of mystical spiritual disruption, while fearing the psychotic splitting and discord. Now I am not sure there is anything to envy or fear in either direction. My bias is toward a grounded state of self-awareness, contained by a sense of identity but open to a sense of interconnection with the material and non-material worlds. States of active psychosis may be scary, dangerous, and destructive, but the person experiencing them remains a human being who’s just having an intense experience and needs support. The mystic, too, needs support and community in integrating what they’re experiencing.
But neither, getting back to the original point, is necessary or intrinsically validating of your spiritual practice. Enlightenment isn’t always the lightning-struck Tower, it is also the gradual flowering of the dawning sun’s light that transforms the sky. My own sense of growing spiritual awareness started a long time ago with a wish to live in a more magical world, and a hope and fear that spiritual realities were real, and now has progressed into a simple curiosity with some knowing. As I use this computer without really understanding how it works, there are spiritual experiences that I’ve come to trust while recognizing my way of understanding and talking about them is at best a guess that will continue to evolve with time and practice.
The lovely thing is that we don’t need to believe anything to start practicing, we only need to be willing to try and interested in where the practice takes us. Eventually, practice introduces to us what we need to learn and experience. A regular practice, like daily meditation and prayer, offers a great deal of support in holding and integrating these revelations that might otherwise be shocking. So the experience that we might have feared would “break” us may, when the time comes, feel like a sudden shock that settles easily, like a chiropractic adjustment.
The work is never finished and cannot be ignored.
You see litter on the ground. One day, you get it together to be part of the solution—to pick a part of the ground to monitor, gather all the scraps that do not belong to the land, and put them in the trash.
It feels good to see the ground cleared of garbage, to participate in making things better for your cousins—the trees, animals, bacteria, fungi.
Then, later, there’s garbage again. It’s sad and upsetting. All your work undone by other people’s actions.
So you pick up more. Maybe you start bringing trash bags with you wherever you go. But the more litter you pick up, the more you see. You’ve trained yourself to pay attention to the world in a way that the litterers do not. You can’t help but notice it and feel responsible for cleaning it up.
The good feeling becomes overwhelmed by resentment and anger. How exhausting is it to keep doing this work that is never done. Perhaps there’s rage at the insensitive idiots who keep throwing their shit on the ground and do not care about the greater world. Perhaps there’s a sense of martyrdom of why do you have to be the one always picking up other people’s garbage?
So maybe at some point you stop. You become numb for a while. Really it’s unfair to expect one person to do all this work. It’s a collective problem and there should be collective solutions. Perhaps you yell at people who litter, hoping they’ll take responsibility for once. Perhaps you petition for more cleanup workers. Perhaps you completely give up and stop giving a shit, throwing your own litter here and there.
The distance is soothing, but too much. You’ve lost that feeling of participation. It’s all someone else’s problem now, but you’re still living in it. You still see the garbage and that the trees, the animals, the bacteria and the fungi cannot gather it themselves. In fact, it’s killing many of them.
How to live in a world with a caring heart when your own work will never be enough? How to participate in restoring problems you didn’t create? Is it enough to pick up only your own trash? To do an hour in your neighborhood once a week? Once a month? To organize a crew?
Perhaps picking up trash isn’t your passion, simply a feeling of responsibility. There are things you’d rather be doing but it feels like you can never prioritize them because there is so much litter and so few people stepping up. Perhaps you grow to resent even your cousins the trees, the animals, the fungi and the bacteria for being so vulnerable and needing so much care.
There are so many big questions. Cynicism covers over the deep well of caring that made you look at this in the first place. You may feel despairing and trapped. You cannot escape this dilemma of caring about an issue you cannot solve.
Perhaps there are well-meaning people who tell you that this dilemma is “meant” to do something, like soften your heart, or teach you a cosmic lesson. Perhaps this gives you some solace, or perhaps it further outrages you, because in what universe is destroying the environment to teach one person a lesson in patience something that makes any sense?
And yet there is no escape. Destroying yourself to save the environment offers no escape. Numbing yourself in complete disconnection is no escape. You are embedded in this world.
You go back to picking up litter when you find it, when you can, when you’re prepared. It’s not enough. It’s what you can do.
The Three Centers: The Head Center
Over the past several years, my spiritual and personal practice has become more organized around the energetic structure of the three centers in the body—belly, heart, and head.
In this video, I continue with the discussion of the head center that supports watery, intuitive, receptive listening connection when supported by a connected heart and strong belly. I also discuss concerns about holding critical thinking with intuitive practice.The Pearl Pentacle and Relationships
If you have no idea what the Iron or Pearl Pentacles are, you might want to skip this chapter or buy my book Circling the Star .
It is said that the work of the Iron Pentacle is the work of a lifetime, while the work of the Pearl Pentacle is the work of many lifetimes. There are so many pathways one could explore with this statement. We could speak of the polishing of souls over multiple incarnations. We could speak of the long-term evolution of culture.
What calls me the most is an interpretation that we are speaking of relationships. Pearl energy is not a solitary pursuit, but one that emerges in connection with others. With Iron, we draw upon the hot, passionate energy of our “animal” nature and differentiate its energy into five qualities, naming them, giving them form, opening communication between our conscious and unconscious selves. What we might consider “base” becomes elevated, suffused with the energy of our divine self, and a quality through which we can express our whole being.
It’s such a beautiful transformation. When treated as undignified, “primitive,” or otherwise as objects of disgust, these qualities are ones we tend to simultaneously suppress and become obsessed with—power, sex, pride, passion, and our sense of self. Once named, explored, and claimed, they become energies we can cultivate and use with ever-increasing skill. The intensity of repression or obsession ebbs.
Before getting to Pearl, a further quick aside on this. Recently I was spending time with a friend’s children and got to see a nighttime ritual that astounded me. They keep a tin of miscellaneous sweets and every night their oldest is allowed their choice of one of those sweets. I was put in charge of administering this sweet and the young one asked me to pour them all out so they could look at their options.
If it were me, I would’ve taken three. If I were that kid, I would’ve tried to con the adult into saying it’s okay.
Instead, this kid looked, chose one, and said thank you. I put all the rest of the sweets back. End of story.
My complex, which this kid does not have, is that my craving for candies is split by shame and self-judgment. One part of me says sweets are bad and I’m unhealthy for wanting them. Another one wants them so much, and sneaks as many as it can get away with, because there’s a polarization in me between indulgence and restraint.
This kid, though, has had it modeled that it’s totally okay to enjoy a sweet, and there will be more. So they don’t have hangups about it. They have the one they want, and they know they’ll have more later. My complex says either I should deny myself completely, or I should have a bunch because I’m at risk of denying myself.
This is the kind of splitting that the Iron Pentacle starts to heal within us around these qualities. Because we have so much shame, judgment, and competition, most of us have some kind of similar splitting around at least one of these things, and culturally we see all kinds of polarizations between whether sex is good or evil, whether power is righteous or immoral, whether passion is the only thing that matters or a dangerous abyss, whether the self is the most important thing in the world or something to be annihilated, or whether we must have pride because “either you’re on top or you’re on the bottom” or we must abase ourselves because “pride goeth before a fall.”
Two people holding hands, with a tree between them. Coming into right relationship with ourselves, and being in relationship to others doing this work, allows those Pearlescent qualities of love, law, knowledge, wisdom, and liberty to emerge in affirming ways. When we cease to be at war with ourselves, we learn how we can be in connection without coercion.
We learn what love is when we feel it toward another, or we experience it from another. And some of us cannot tolerate the intimacy of being loved by another until we have taken the time to build the capacity for love within ourselves. And some of us cannot know what is lovable within ourselves until we see ourselves through the perspective of someone we love. Don’t get hung up on arguing about the reductive meme statements. Loving and being loved is mutual, and we can grow in either capacity, and growing in one gives us more opportunities to grow in the other.
While in Love I open my heart to those in my life, I do not look to them as the only source of energy, passion, and connection. If they need to step away, I can know I’ll be okay and don’t need to chase them in terror. If they come at me with big energy, I know my own relationship to my self and my power so I do not need to run away, but I could have a firm boundary.
The agreements of our relationship emerge as their own kind of Law. Rather than following some prescribed model of what relationship is supposed to look like, we can negotiate our needs between us and find what works for us. For some, that could mean a deeply intertwined life with shared home and a shared business. For others, that could mean a very spacious relationship in which there are multiple partners or living in different cities without a need to move in together.
These Laws reflect our actual emotional needs and likely vary from relationship to relationship. I have friends who I know to be consistently late to things and I’ve accepted that as something not personal that I can use in planning our time together. In other relationships, I experience lateness as a sign of disrespect and lacking care for my time or energy. This may seem inconsistent but these reactions emerge from the larger context of relationship—how communicative does this person tend to be? Do I feel respected in other ways or is this detail a sign of a larger pattern of disrespect? From one friend, I can allow grace without feeling compromised, but from another friend I might feel consistently compromised and realize this is one place where I need to draw a boundary and insist on timeliness.
This Law takes Liberty for granted, that I neither wish to control nor be controlled by the people in my life, but to be connected we need to have shared understandings. We need to have a common center and container in our relationship because too much Liberty is a centripetal force that spins us away from each other, but our shared Laws keep us connected. Making agreements from a place of self-knowledge, mutual love, and valuing our respective freedoms also helps mitigate resentments—resentment is a sign that something needs to be renegotiated.
That’s the Wisdom that emerges from this state of being. Instead of seeing emotions and ambivalence as flaws to be corrected, we can use them to guide our actions wisely. Knowing that agreeing to something will bring up resentment, and resentment is a relationship killer, helps me to be clearer when I need to say no or see if there’s another option.
Knowledge, too, compliments Wisdom in the engagement of our higher faculties of reason and contemplation to gain more precise and nuanced definitions of reality and relationship. Knowledge offers new possibilities for action and relationship that were not available before. If I’ve never experienced another country, I might think my life is normal and all there is. When I know things can be different, then I have choices. I have room for negotiation.
None of these qualities of Pearl remain stable if they are purely emerging from the individual. I can know myself intimately but still founder in relationships where the other person is unknown unto themselves or unable to tolerate honesty, intimacy, and clear communication.
Abuse, deception, manipulation without clear boundaries that protect our Iron energy makes it impossible and perhaps even unwise to keep hold that Pearl energy. What kind of Law is tenable when one person will always do what keeps them in power and refuse accountability? What kind of Liberty can we have when others in our lives require us to be small and meek in the face of their unchecked anger?
Only the Liberty of cutting those chains and getting free, and that’s often easier said than done. Better to go back to our Iron, cultivating strength and the knowing we deserve better, and find our way back to Power.
The Three Centers: The Heart Center
Over the past several years, my spiritual and personal practice has become more organized around the energetic structure of the three centers in the body—belly, heart, and head.
In this video, I continue with the discussion of the heart center that supports airy, spacious connection when supported by a strong, energized belly. I contrast this with watery, possessive, intense connection.The Smartest Guy in the Room
There’s not a single gift that doesn’t come with consequences. Being smart is absolutely one of those—revered, honored, and despised all at once. We love smart people when they agree with us and uphold our beliefs, and we hate them when we feel belittled and condescended to by them.
There’s a particular expression of this, the Smartest Guy in the Room. This person could be any gender, but he’s usually a guy. Not because guys are smarter—in fact, the Smartest Guy in the Room is sometimes very ill-informed and utterly lacking in self-awareness. More because guys tend to be the ones who confidently put forth their views, right or wrong. It’s socialization, it’s how testosterone increases confidence, it’s whatever.
Smart men, smart people, are lovely. Intelligence is one path toward humble awe of the complexity of the world. The more we learn, the more we realize it’s impossible to learn everything. The more deeply you understand a subject, the more you understand its limits.
So many smart people get ignored because they offer their views with a well-earned humility, unwilling to pretend to know more than they know. This is one of the reasons why reporting on science and medicine tends to be so misleading and awful. Disciplined scientists would never come out and say “This drug will cure cancer” after research. They’d at best say “99.9% of all cancer patients who took this drug completely recovered with no signs of cancer.”
The discipline is to stay with what you can observe and prove. To only say what you know for sure, and leave space for future growth of knowledge, and the possibility of being proven wrong. That’s when science is a living discipline.
But pop science is awash in certitude and grandiose statements. And the Smartest Guy in the Room is the one who lives in that world. They’re more certain than everyone else, even if only to be certain that everyone is wrong. They’re the contrarians. They see which way the wind is blowing and find a way to move against it.
There’s a wisdom in contrarianism. Contrarians are good tests of tolerance and safety in a group. Often contrarians grew up in places where dissent was punished or harmful certitudes put forward without question. When they experience a space where they feel there is too much harmony and agreement, it’s almost instinctive. They have to test it. “You can’t really be as enlightened as you pretend to be.” “There’s always a flaw in the argument.”
And there is! There is always a vulnerability in any argument. There’s always an exceptional case not accounted for in one’s generality. There’s always something left out.
Where the Smartest Guy gets annoying is when they act like nobody else has ever considered this before, and they’re in a room of people who could calmly explain why they’ve considered the contrary perspective and find it not compelling.
As they grow in influence, the Rebel becomes the Tyrant without even noticing it, because parts of them still experience the world as the marginalized child they once were. Now people calling them out or genuinely critiquing their perspectives are examples of those oppressive forces that wanted to shut down dissent, without the Smartest Guy realizing he’s now the one shutting down dissent and unwilling to engage in honest, humble dialogue.
Smartest Guy in the Room is a posture of disconnection. It’s a suit of armor draped over the body of a child who really needs to be seen, needs to know they belong and that they’re safe. But people on the outside can only see the armor, not the child within.
When someone comes to your party in a suit of armor, it’s hard to be soft and welcoming. It’s a moment of tension. It’s like police coming to a peaceful protest in riot gear. The implicit message is We’re not together, I do not trust you. When we’re not trusted, we’re not safe.
When we see someone show up to our party in a suit of armor, we’re going to get a little aggressive. What’s the armor about? What are you planning here?
And the child within feel justified in wearing the armor, clings more tightly to the armor, because who would be vulnerable with people like this around? Good thing I showed up prepared!
The older I get, the less I feel the need for others to know how smart I am. This has opened up a space for more curiosity and connection. I realize I still have much to offer, and I am still loved, even if I’m not the know-it-all pointing out the contradictions in the room.
It’s a relief, too, to not have to be the smartest guy in the room. We can feel is the value within our words and perspective without anxiously proving how we arrived at that space. We can hear the beautiful echoes of all the ways other people came to the same kinds of knowing without feeling diminished. We can unshoulder the burden of that armor and that sense of mission.
Astrological Aphorisms
Three battles that cannot be won: forcing a Gemini to commit; compelling an Aquarius to change their mind; demanding a Libra pick a side.
Three unpardonable offenses: failing to remember an Aries; offering mild praise to a Leo; boring a Sagittarius.
Three utterances never heard: a Capricorn admitting defeat; a Taurus conceding your point; a Virgo saying, “Yeah, that’s good enough.”
Three great mysteries: the true opinion of a Pisces; the reason that a Cancer is mad at you; a Scorpio’s entire personality.
The Three Centers: The Belly Center
A link to a YouTube video of Anthony presenting on the Three Centers for psychospiritual healing and development. The Trials of the Magician
A reading of Kat Black’s “The Magician” card from her Golden Tarot.
The deepest pleasure comes from pulling it off. Putting one’s self into a situation so inescapable, so improbable, that failure seems predestined. And then to succeed! To pull a coin from the air and astonish the crowd. It’s a rush.
So often clients come into my office feeling overwhelmed and exhausted by the demands of life. There’s so much that needs to be done and managed, so many expectations upon us. In corporations, one employee might find themself pulled in eight different directions, at least four of those coming from people who aren’t actually their boss but somehow are able to demand things of their time, and three of those coming from their boss’s boss or the CEO or someone so high up that there’s no way to explain how unrealistic these demands actually are.
In this version of the card, The Magician is surrounded by animals and stands in front of a table with all the weapons of the Tarot represented. He seems quite like a humble stage magician doing a show, trying to entertain these gathered creatures, or perhaps responding to their multiplicity of desires and demands.
One of his hands is wrapped inside his cloak, unable to help much. Is it a deliberate ploy? Look, I can do this one-handed! Or is it part of his trap, unable to admit he’s struggling?
When we go inside and get to know our exhausted parts who are struggling to do so much—to manage all the doctors’ appointments, to finish all the things, to attend to everyone else’s needs and one’s own and never to show them you’re sweating—so often an image like this magician comes to the surface. Sometimes it’s a juggler, or a plate-spinner. It’s a performer doing the impossible for an audience.
Only when it’s our lives, our Magicians may never get to step off-stage. All of their energy goes towards keeping those plates spinning, those balls in the air, those audience members distracted so they see only the coin appearing from midair and not the subtle flicking it from it’s hiding place.
It’s a rush! How many weeks have I felt such pride and self-congratulations when I’ve gotten through a whole lot of tasks and done most of them with success. How often do I like to tell people about my day by listing off everything I’ve done. Celebrate me! Rejoice in my magical powers!
And it’s so, so, so exhausting. Can I keep this up? What will happen if I fail? The Magician may live with the ongoing terror of the moment when one of the plates finally crashes.
When the gathered cheering masses suddenly turn and start to boo and see you as a trickster fraud. They’re not even a real magician!
All the materials of power lay at The Magician’s disposal and yet she forgets in her seeking of approval that she is divine. The symbol of infinity burns over her head, conveying the eternal nature of work and change, as well as her participation in the unfolding of all things. In this card, she does not even touch her tools, instead gesturing to the crowd as though imparting a great lesson.
When you’re being the Magician, it’s easy to see everyone around you as a dupe you need to keep entertained. But in this gesture, there is a way out: to show those who admire you their own power. To renounce the need to be special and indestructible and instead take your place in the community of animals. To share all the burdens and responsibilities you are carrying, and to lay some down if you cannot tend them all.
Honor and gratitude to our Magicians who work so hard to advance our goals and protect us from the contempt, ridicule, and abandonment of others. May they know when it is safe to step off-stage and rest. May they learn what they no longer need to juggle or spin, what’s safe to let fall. May they be surrounded in community.
“The Magician” from the Rider-Waite-Smith tarot, a different representation than the one explored in this post.
