Last night I saw you embodied in the actress Aubrey Plaza as a character in a fun and surprisingly moving television series based on comic books. The morning before that, I saw you in a Tarot card I’d drawn for a friend, riding a fierce steed but holding a bony child in your arms with exquisite love and tenderness. The image surprised me, because that is how you appeared to me a few months ago when I spent a month contemplating you and your beingness in life. You presented in my imagination as a bone woman with swarming snakes for hair, holding your bone child to your ribs where your breast might be, and pointing.
When you came to me then, I was not dying in body but in spirit, having had to confront patterns of being in life that were weighing me down and needed to be released. My approaches to work and caring for others were burning me out, and in need of transformation, and to make those changes confronted me with my own guilt and fear. And you were there, not so much doing anything, but simply witnessing me as I witnessed you, and in your presence those rigid expectations began to rot and fall away to become soil for new growth.
What the comic book show really got right about you is how much witchcraft is about loving and befriending you, beautiful Death, and how that love awakens the vigor and fierce joy of being alive. To love you is not to surrender to nihilism, not to allow our most violent impulses to rule us. To love you is a balm to those aggressive urges that want to hold on to what was and avenge what is already hurt. When our fists, bloodied and bruised, still cling onto what poisons us, you enfold them in your soft palm and gently press until our fingers relax and open and let go of what no longer serves.
It is normal to hate and fear you, because you take from us so many in untimely ways, people who deserved better or longer lives, but fairness and rules are not your concern. You simply are, and you show up when the time comes. Those of us who remain must remember you. Our lives depend upon you, because we feed upon other creatures who must die so we can live. And we cannot escape you, and we cannot know when you will take us, and that knowledge is bitter, and that bitterness makes the orange sweeter.
Dear Death, I am sorry already that I know I will forget my love for you and your kindness, and I will fear you again, and I will hate you for what you take from me, and I am so grateful to know that these feelings do not touch you because you know exactly what you are. You are life. Through you new life comes. If you were not, I would not know how orange blends with pink and then dark blue during a sunset. I would not have felt the sweetness of a melting popsicle running down my fingers on a hot day. I would not have had so many joys and blessings that came because I finally surrendered to you and let go of that which weighed my spirit down.
I was at a friend’s party, having just had a personally beautiful and moving psychedelic experience, in which the god who experiences life through me showered my parts with praise and gratitude even as it encouraged them to lighten up and stop spending so much energy on stress and anxiety. I’d mentioned the trip in passing, not intending to dump it on people, but two of my friends seemed interesting and affirming so I spent longer sharing the story. Afterwards a part of me that always comes in to find something to cringe about and imagined these two friends walking away with a bit of an eye-roll. I was a cliché. White Man, Tripping, Discovers He is God – News at 11.
There is this cynical, dismissive part of me that gets so concerned about spiritual narcissism and so worried that I will succumb to it. The tone is quite judgy, but it’s not always been so harsh. It’s watched my sincere, enthusiastic parts run toward the spiritual world with a desperate longing to be told my purpose and meaning in life, and that running toward has gotten me into great hurt and confusion. Every wise teacher I’ve had, human or otherwise, has responded to my seeking by holding up the mirror. Even in this psychedelic connection to the divine, the message remained the same: look how hard you are searching outside of yourself for what’s been here always and forever.
My good friend and spiritual compatriot once sent me an episode of Teen Creeps in which the podcasters, themselves seemingly not occultists, do a hilarious survey of theosophical occult ideas and the tendency for spiritual teachers to eventually “reveal” that they’re incarnations of important deities. “Oh my god, you guys. Me and my wife Alice are actually descendants of Osiris and Isis. Isn’t this crazy?”
If you practice long enough, it seems, eventually a spirit will tell you you’re a manifestation of a god, or something like that. There’s a way to take such experiences and use them to stop growing. One could make such an experience and turn it into an identity. This is akin to finding a balloon and forcing your whole being inside of it. Feelings of specialness and importance inflate us, lifting us high off the ground. It feels amazing! The perspective is profound. And it feels safe! Because we are held aloft by this warm air and we are separated out from the poor ignorant ones who still live on the ground.
What we’re missing is that we’re still living inside a latex vessel. We can’t keep growing inside of it. Eventually the material starts to chafe against our efforts to grow. We feel vaguely suffocated and panicky and don’t understand why. If we want to stay afloat, we have to keep the feelings of specialness warming and filling our balloons—no wonder people like this position themselves as gurus and human gods for their devotees to inflate. Fear the day when that special identity punctures, and we fall hard back to reality.
Instagram’s algorithm offers up a lot of inflated balloons to my feed. And my cynical part wants to protect me from the foolishness and the fall of such inflation, so much that it mistrusts the beauty and nourishment of these moments of connection. What feels most true to me is that, being a facet of god—whatever that is—is both profoundly special and extremely mundane. You, too, have god within you. The fiddle leaf fig that lives in my office is a facet of god. We all emerge from the same material, if only the soil of the earth, and so we are all composed of the body and of that god. Even the people I would judge and dismiss.
This truth need not be inflating. Such a realization frees us of the relentless urge to fix ourselves, constantly scrutinizing for deficiencies and flaws to correct and excise. My first true message from the divine came in response from repeated entreaties to be changed and freed of something about myself that I thought was awful, and it turned out it was nothing to worry about. It was fine. I could go and live. When you feel how profoundly loved you are, it’s easier to stop being a surgeon constantly operating upon one’s self and instead become the soul from which our lives grow. This is spiritual experience that ripens us.
Lately I feel my cynical themselves becoming inflated, bitter in attitude toward those they perceive to be prioritizing prayer over action, intention over getting one’s hands dirty in the business of living on this earth. Yet this is a projection of how I myself feel, my own feelings of powerlessness and inadequacy. Parts of me miss the idealistic belief in sincerity and spiritual purpose. They do not miss the impossible state of moral purity I felt pressured to perform.
I would reconcile these again, the parts that believe life is worth living, that it’s worth trying to be more than we are, and the parts that say I am just enough and do not need to carry the world’s sufferings on my shoulders all the time. Neither idealism nor cynicism need be at war, for both can drive us off the cliff while together they can keep us on a human, healthy path. We are not gods responsible for redeeming the world, nor piles of shit whose every effort is meaningless. This moment matters, and how we act in it is important, and that is enough.
I turn 42 today, on eclipse day, and it has been a strange year leading to this moment. Some practitioners who work with Tarot use a numerological procedure to identify the Major Arcana card that represents the core themes and lessons of the year. This year has been, for me, the Wheel of Fortune, which one of my teachers described as a time of “really high highs and really low lows.” Coming into this year with this perspective offered me great solace and grounding. Instead of clinging to one or the other, I settled into the acceptance of both, that pain would follow joy and eventually return to joy.
That is simply the way of things, whether one works hard or not, whether one is intentional and present or sleepwalks through life, there is no escaping cycles and no escaping pain and joy. And when that feels true, it is okay. Many of us have parts that do everything in their power to avoid pain or fix happiness in place. Many of us have parts that fear to relax and enjoy life out of concern that bad things will come if we let down our guard. Those parts are so loving, and work so hard, and it’s so tender because life is filled with hard things and lovely things no matter what.
The Wheel
In this past year, I had some lovely soaring personal achievements in completing a book for a larger publisher than I’ve worked with previously and success in my martial arts practice, which remains a surprising part of my life that I would never have imagined I could be any good at in the past. And in the past three months, we’ve had a lot of lows. We’ve had some sad and sudden losses at home. I had some new body changes that required medical intervention that set me back further than I’d expected.
Some associate the occult and astrological significance of the planet Jupiter with the Wheel of Fortune. Jupiter tends to make things a lot bigger and gives us a certain amount of swagger and bravado that can veer into overconfidence. What I also appreciate about Jupiter is there’s a certain amount of redemption whenever this planet is involved—even setbacks and suffering may have a quality of luck about them. Because I was laid out by surgery at the beginning of the year, I decided to return to my exercise routine really slowly and gradually, starting with light weights or bodyweight exercises.
As I did this, my awareness of my form in weightlifting deepened, along with the feedback in my body that told me when I was doing things badly. I’ve had this knee pain that has been growing over the past year and really began to demand attention last fall, but then the other stuff took precedence, and now I am back to the knee pain and discovering that all this time I’ve been compromising my squat and deadlift form and not letting my glutes and hamstrings do the work of stabilizing. Humbled, returning to basics, I am amazed both at how better form seems to be making great strides in resolving the knee issue, and I’m noticing greater stability that makes martial arts more enjoyable and life a lot easier.
Slowing Down
For the past three months, that phrase has been everywhere—in trainings I’m taking, in classes, and in the work of my book Slow Magic which does not yet have a release date but has a beautiful cover. As an Aries, slowing down is something I hate and desperately need. Often I conceal impatience by avoiding things that would bring it out, which leads to situations like progressive knee pain because instead of being with the discomfort of the weakness in my form, I just plow ahead and keep adding more weight. I want to get to the good stuff, but hurrying has problems.
When we’re hurrying, we might cut corners that don’t seem to matter and then learn they actually mattered a lot and now you have to go back and undo a lot of work to redo it correctly.
We might make decisions without talking to important stakeholders who will then oppose what we’re doing if only because they don’t know what the hell is going on and they’re impacted.
Even if we do communicate, we might rush through in a way that doesn’t really let the other person process what we’re saying and talk through their needs and concerns, which—you guessed it—causes problems down the line.
In trauma therapy, we say that to go fast we need to go slow. That is true of much in life. When learning a new skill, when healing, when doing important work, slowing down lets us be more thorough and not overwhelm our systems with information and feedback. It is funny, of course, to have written an entire book about slowing down only to find myself learning even more about the importance of it. I can imagine some antagonist saying how I could write a book about something I’m still trying to do?
I often say that I suspect Mary J. Blige does not sing all those songs about loving yourself and setting aside the drama because she’s naturally good at those things. Buddhists don’t have meditation practices because their minds are already spacious and calm. All of us are dealing with our uniquely messy closets and learning, and relearning, and reminding ourselves of what helps us and who we want to be. When things come too easily to a person, they don’t really have a lot to offer to someone who is struggling. It’s only those who are struggling beside us, or have struggled longer than us, who can really relate to and help us understand our struggles.
This year I am turning toward Justice, a season I imagine will involve a lot of adapting the structures of my life and my relationships to accommodate all the changes of fortune the wheel has brought to my life. I am so grateful for those who share my life with me, and for the clients who entrust me with the responsibility of their care, and I am so grateful for all of my teachers.
“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, ‘Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?’ Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”
Our deepest fear is not that we are powerful beyond measure. Our deepest fear is that we are solely burdened with the responsibility to make life work. It is the endless feeling of inadequacy, of not doing enough, of failing in some core way to be big and bright and bold enough that frightens us. We ask ourselves, ‘When is it enough? What is wrong with a quiet walk and hours spent admiring the variations of bark on a tree, its subtle colorations and textures?’ Actually, who told you that accomplishment was your purpose on earth? You are God experiencing herself in the fullness of her being, through your unique body. Your suffocating your soul for the sake of money or attention, reputation or influence does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about constantly striving to be brighter than your neighbor, to be an influencer, to feign superiority of knowledge or insight over someone whose life you could never understand. We are all meant to be kindred, each fulfilling our unique niche in the ecosystem of life. We were born to delight in the body of God who is our mother and the ground of our being. We alone are not meant to save the world; it is everyone’s job to do our little part. And as we let go of the need to dominate at all costs, we stop suffocating everyone else and allow them to breathe for once. As we stop demonizing our fear and accept it as one of many beautiful sensations keeping us vital on this beautiful world, our presence invites the presence of others.
It’s like spending your entire life on a mountain, only there’s no nice professionally graded pathway dug in for you, it’s mostly a cliff wall and below so much distance inviting you to fall for minutes before the earth breaks and collects your body. You press your back along the rock wall and inch, inch, inch cross the narrowest outcropping of rock which is all you have for stability. You know—or you believe so hard you’ve convinced yourself it’s a knowing—that if you keep going long enough and don’t fall you’ll find a plateau, a nice grassy area with fresh water and enough to eat, and you’ll be able to rest and maybe even live, but until then you have to cling and keep surviving.
But days and days exhaust you with effort. For many moments you wonder if there’s relief in letting it go and being done with it. You doubt there’s a plateau at all. Who told you there would be one? Why did you believe it? But you have to believe it.
And then finally the effort tenderizes you to softness. It’s not so much a giving up as it is almost an intuition, now is the time to let go, and if you ignore it then your foot finds a crack to stumble upon and spill you into the abyss. Only you’re not falling. A lift of warm air keeps you aloft.
You would imagine this to be a wonder, a delight, a rejoicing, but all you know at first is bitter resentment. How could I have been so wrong all this time? How have I wasted these years in this endless fucking effort and terror when all I needed to do was the one thing I worked so hard not to do?
Was it a mistake? You’ve seen people fall. You’ve seen the horrors they become from their slippage. What if the chasm was only giving back what you gave to it—trading horror to terror, giving release to surrender? Perhaps you were a fruit clinging to the branch. Plucked too soon would have been a tragedy. You needed that joining so your tree could feed you until you’d ripened and could let that connection delicately snap so you could fall, easily, easily, into the hands of sky. Another birth, a new life in an old world, a new self in an old body. Everything is new.
The other night, I had a dream in which a group of us discussed a quote about “the serpents of our lesser nature.” The group hosted diverse viewpoints and one participant was a strident, cheerful Christian who spoke as though we were already in full agreement with her. I raised the point that the serpent was linked to both Jesus and Satan in the Christian tradition, and she laughed at me as though I was the most silly, ignorant person alive for coming to that notion.
This sparked a fierce anger that followed me into my waking life, whereupon I got out of bed to google research and confirm that what I said was true before I brushed my teeth. Thus I was reminded that Jesus, in John 3:14, likens himself to the serpent statue Moses lifted up to heal the Israelites. This led me to reread the story told in Numbers, and it is intriguing: it begins with the Israelites wandering the desert, following the leadership of Moses and their god. The wanderers complain of their suffering, the bad food, the lack of water, and this is what spurs their god to send the venomous serpents who killed many with their bites. Then the Israelites repent and recognize they’ve sinned against their god. Moses prays on their behalf, and god gives him the instructions to create the brazen serpent so that whosoever is bitten will survive the bite.
The serpent is thus venomous and medicinal. It kills and it heals. On its belly, it crawls on the surface of the earth engaged in the survival necessary for all animals with cunning and wisdom. Put on a pole and lifted up, it becomes a medicine, as in the staff of Asclepius. This is a common religious practice that shows up in all kinds of traditions: the figure who causes suffering turned into the protector against, and healer of, that suffering. Who better? In its original sense, a “hierarchy” is the arrangement of qualities by their proximity to divine. Our earthly survival would be lower, or perhaps lesser, than what is more connected to the divine source of things.
In the story from Numbers, I see so many serpents of lesser nature. The text suggests that the Israelites recognized their complaining and bitterness as a sin that incurred this punishment. If Moses had called me in to do therapeutic mediation between God and the Israelites, I would likely point out that it makes sense for a group that just escaped slavery to feel ambivalent about these conditions. After taking great risks and sacrificing much to escape, it might feel like things are worse in the desert with bad food and little water. I might encourage God to explore what about their complaints bothered him so much, and see if he could communicate his needs with a boundary instead of venomous snakes.
Yet it makes more sense to read this story like it is itself a dream, with the snakes a manifestation of the wanderers’ discontent. The venom might be akin to the emotional poison they inject into each other with their frustrations and resentments about an admittedly harsh and painful fight for bare survival. What’s intriguing is that when the Israelites repent, they ask Moses to pray for the removal of the snakes, but God does not fulfill that request. Instead, Moses is given instructions to make a medicine that instead heals those bitten by the snakes. There is no undoing, only transmutation. The poison itself may be part of the medicine.
A Jungian reading would see this at this as the mythological enactment of a psychological process by which the lesser serpent becomes the greater serpent. First we must witness the harm done from reactivity—when we lashed out because we felt scared, or weak, or small, or vulnerable. Then we transform that lashing out into the symbol of its healing, lifting it up to be witnessed and offered to those who offended us. We let everyone know that we see what happened, what transmitted the harm, and what can restore us back into health.
Yet this does not complete the process the dream is trying to enact in me. Dreams do not tell you what you already know, they point to what you need to recognize. In my own soul, I begrudgingly must wonder if the serpent of my lesser nature might the anger that motivated me to google Bible stories before my morning coffee, then wish I could go back to sleep to tell off that lady in my dream. As hard as it may be to believe, I think some folks might question whether that is a reasonable use of one’s precious life force. Being belittled, mocked, or thought stupid has been a big button in my life—it riles up all my protectors in a fruitless battle to demand to be taken seriously.
Which suggests that chipper, mocking Christian woman was herself another serpent of my lesser nature. For I can see her venom within me at my lowest points in life, when self-righteousness and sneering intellectual superiority sneak out to give my wounded ego a band-aid. Even when I think I’m calmly rising above a disagreement, the fangs come out. “I’m not going to argue about this,” I’ll say like an exhausted reasonable adult, immediately following it with a parting jab or argument that shows I am arguing about it. It’s dishonest. To name these vulnerabilities feels like giving a weapon to those who now know how to rile me up. Yet now here they are, woven to this pole, so I can lift them up as medicine.
Lately I have been taking inventory of my beliefs, my ideals, and my guiding philosophies. One focus of reflection is language that once felt vital and inspiring but now feels dead, or at least murky. Words like “health,” “liberation,” and “manifestation,” once felt so vibrant. After years of repetition, mission creep, and marketing campaigns, I no longer know what they mean to me.
All of these leaves grow from a living tree, and my hope is to find the vitality at the source of the tree. At times I doubt there is a tree at all. At other times, I feel the tree with such vitality and urgency that it sends me back out into the world fighting and laughing. But I can confuse the leaves with the tree, which becomes problematic when the leaves grow dry. Are they shriveled dry leaves ready to be shed, or are they simply needing more light and water to be renewed?
Health and Wellness
These words feel increasingly like knives, like “shoulds.” They are judgment words pointed to promote a political or marketing agenda. There’s no coherent philosophy or objective measure to use in assessing health. A culture war, rather, rages around definitions of health. Is it healthy to take pills or supplements? To be vaccinated or to drink your own urine? What attitudes and behaviors are healthy? Is it healthy to eat a high-fat diet or a carb-heavy diet?
The etymological root of “health” is wholeness, making it a synonym for integrity. These days I think “health” is measurable by our values, goals, and behavior. We can be healthy with chronic disease, if we accept the disease and what must be done to live as close as possible to the life we want. We can be healthy in accepting our limitations and giving up the life we thought we wanted. We can be healthy in working to be less limited. But that’s a very psychotherapist-y view of health.
Manifestation
Once this word conveyed a world of magic: to manifest something that before did not exist. We could manifest spirits, books, special objects, relationships. These days, I mostly see the word on social media advertisements about manifesting lots of money or markers of success and status. It’s implicitly I-centered, as though the one who makes manifest is the elevated one who does things to the world to get manifestations. In that realm of thinking, the elevated individual, lies this increasingly disturbing rhetoric about other people being “bots” or “NPCs” with no subjectivity of their own.
What feels vibrant in the term is the sense of participating in the world and being in relationship with larger forces. I’ve never loved the term “co-create” though the concept is useful—it’s just a word that doesn’t feel flowing to say or write. Yet it’s approaching what I think is true. Whatever is manifested arises from a field of relationships in which you are only one ingredient. To make a beautiful wooden sculpture manifest, I could have the money to buy it—that’s the easy way—or the blade and the skills to carve one from good wood. But I don’t create the sturdy branch from which I carve the sculpture—that was manifested by the tree. And I don’t possess the spirit that inspired me to discover the sculpture within the branch, that emerges in a flash from beyond, or from the dance of skill, blade, and wood.
Liberation
When I first learned about liberation theology movements in high school, the word “liberation” had so much edge and potency. Using the teachings of Jesus Christ to validate direct action and the resistance of political violence, disenfranchisement, and oppression. It’s become a central word in my spiritual practice, comparable to “enlightenment” in its expression of a state of spiritual realization that comes from diligent work.
Yet these days the word feels not so much dead as murky and conflicted. What warrants the word? Is it middle class white liberal self-serving to use the word “liberation” for my own spiritual and therapeutic practice? Does it diminish those fiercer forms of liberation?
When I think of liberation, I think of consciousness and agency. We are laden with cultural conditioning, habit, political oppression, and economic exploitation. All of these, to very different intensities, encourage us to live quiet, unconsidered, asleep lives of bare survival. Bringing the light of awareness into this domains, waking up to their realities, and seeing the potential within that has been compromised by these forces makes the work of liberation possible. What feels liberatory is having more power, more choice, the will and capacity to influence the conditions of our lives according to our personal and collective wills.
Quitting nicotine use could be a smaller liberatory act. It requires looking at my conditioning and habit and creating a space of awareness that makes choice possible. It divests my energy and money from the people who profit off my actions and makes it available for whatever else I wish to do. Going on strike seems a bigger liberatory act in demonstrating the power of the group and using it to set the terms of your labor. The work of creating autonomous spaces within oppressive regimes would be a much larger kind of liberation.
Aliveness and Vitality
These words feel the most fresh and intriguing. Aliveness and vitality convey a subjective feeling of being in the world that is a step beyond awareness. For a long time, my work on awareness and consciousness was in the employ of scared parts of me that resisted aliveness. One of my counseling mentors used the word “aliveness” for one of her consult groups, and then I began practicing Aikido, where we occasionally speak of the aliveness in our practice. The word kindled a fire within me and scared me. Being alive is quite vulnerable. You have so much at stake and so much to lose that’s not hidden behind veils of distraction and numbness.
But also it makes life so much sweeter, so much more satisfying, and in a paradoxical way it makes life easier to lose. What I notice is those who are most afraid of death also tend to avoid aliveness. The fear of losing everything is so great that they avoid having anything worth losing. Yet the people who seem most alive to me take in more nourishment, and seem to have an easier time accepting the little and larger deaths that come with living. Losing is less scary because there’s a confidence that they can get more of what they need. Losing is less scary because they’ve delighted in eating as much of the apple as they could, and the rest is a gift to the earth.
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.
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.
