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.

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.

For more than a decade I studied my spiritual path under a teacher whom I’ve named and honored and cited frequently enough. I was drawn to them in particular because I was seeking discipline, structure, and accountability in my path, and those were qualities for which they were famous.

During my time in study, however, occasionally I would ask questions or communicate what I thought was an expectation of my practice and my teacher would gently chide me. One treasured moment was hearing, “Tony, you don’t always have to work so hard.”

I remember one time we had a one-on-one check in about my practice and they gave me a piece of feedback that I cannot remember with complete accuracy but it was along that theme. The specifics of the wording may be less important than the message I received, though I hesitate to attribute my interpretation to them in case we had two different conversations.

Caveats named, what I remember was them expressing that I held my spiritual practice with a kind of rigidity and devotion that at some point would no longer serve me, and I would eventually need to let go of it.

Whatever they were seeing in that exact moment, I find myself thinking back to that frequently. In 2016 I felt myself approaching a peak of fervor, holding myself to impossible ideals and naturally falling short. Becoming fully self-employed forced me to face the limits of my idealism around, for example, money and labor.

Like many mental health therapists motivated by care for others and outrage at injustice, I wanted to be accessible to a wide range of people with varying incomes—but then I had to reconcile that longing with the reality of needing money for myself, my family, my needs, my goals. It became harder to take refuge in the joy of serving a higher purpose when I could not afford to take a vacation, for example, or imagine planning for retirement.

A part of me still has internalized the Catholic injunction to become a saint, an exemplar of virtue who shows humanity what it is capable of. When I was younger, I felt my failure to become a saint was a sign of my intrinsic awfulness. At this stage in my life, I now appreciate that saints are rare because that life is incredibly taxing. I further appreciate how many saints could only accrue the spiritual and internal force necessary to hold that virtue by renouncing other paths such as marriage, family, career, or living in the society of their time.

There is a spiritual path of living in the world and cultivating one’s soul and being, and it’s been known in many religions and cultures. Gurdjieff called it the Fourth Way, but I think of it as the path of the Red Mage—in the original Final Fantasy video game series, the Red Mage had some skill in fighting and some skill in general magic but mastery of neither.

That is the path I walk, and in walking the path I find these moments of feeling the costs of not committing to one or the other. A part of me dreams of the monastic life of solitude and devotion to spirit and my awakening, while another part of me wonders what would have been possible if I’d dedicated my considerable discipline and willfulness toward accruing money and power in this world.

All of this to say, even before the COVID-19 pandemic I was personally forced to look at all the ways I was incapable of being the person I thought I was supposed to be. I couldn’t be as generous, as unselfish, as loving without consideration of how it impacted me, because I have limits. I had to learn how to draw lines and create containers, work that was primarily about making money and work that was primarily about service. When I didn’t prioritize my own goals, my own needs, my own hurts, I was in a dark and painful place and hurt by people that I thought were more unselfish than they were.

In my spiritual life, as we are all expressions of God Hirself, I had to remember that my expression is of equal worth to every other person’s, and to prioritize my own joys and work as much as I served others.

Following this path has in some ways felt diminishing. I can say now that I have truly learned to love myself—as a practice, as a continual relationship of nurturing and care—and as I’ve learned that, my need for the validation and approval of others has diminished. But so too has been my drive to make a name for myself and be seen in public doing good works. I truly wonder whether the motivation to accomplish and succeed is proportional to the ferocity of one’s shame and self-loathing.

In the past couple weeks, I’ve been particularly present to a pattern of thinking that is consistently self-focused and angry and critical of others. There’s a sort of unhappiness with everyone and everything—I call it my “Aries Brain”—that seems to emerge from the basic and inescapable conflict between what I want and what is available. Even in the most beautiful place imaginable, floating in the ocean, meeting new people, there’s a part of me tallying all the minor discomforts, the failures of attunement, the disappointments.

It is exhausting. I think much of my childhood was spent avoiding this kind of thinking because it was too sinful, too selfish, and so I focused all that energy on being okay with whatever happened to me and caring more about other’s suffering than my own.

These habits of thinking I think are the polar edges of the focus between self and other. Disappointment, misattunement, minor conflict are all realities of being in this world. Even in the best relationships we have moments of miscuing and misconnection—one person wants to fuck and the other wants to cuddle; one moment we want encouragement and the other sympathy and our best friend offers the wrong one at the wrong time; we try to be allies but express our sentiments in a way that arouses suspicion and hostility instead.

Along with that, I find myself feeling more on the edges of my community again, mostly by choice and action. I’ve stepped out of leadership and gone quiet on issues that I know are still important but feel exhausted by all the times I’ve tried to speak on them and been ignored.

This past year of my life has been governed by The Hermit in Tarot-based numerology, a time of reflection and solitude but also a time of harnessing and distilling inner wisdom into the lantern that pierces the fog. In many Tarot decks, the Hermit carries this lantern that shines their insights as an invitation for those to follow rather than a demand for their attention. The Hermit also leans on a staff that has accrued all the hard-earned lessons and skills necessary to survive in this world.

As The Hermit, loving myself, I find my relationship to healing and spirituality is changing in ways that I’m not ready to declare in a definitive way. I see how much my healing journey and spiritual practice were rooted in a self-loathing and self-mistrust, an attitude of trying to eradicate my flaws so I could be okay. Now I see that I am okay and I am flawed, and there is nothing to fix, and that even illness is a part of me to love and include.

The Hermit’s staff also evokes the shepherd’s crook. I think of shepherding as a solitary activity, you alone with your flock for hours, not trying to do anything but keep them together and keep them safe. The journey of inner knowing and integration feels like the relationship between shepherd and flock. My job is not to punish, kill, or fix my parts. My job is to tend them, to witness them, to bring them together in connection and community. They are truly all doing the best they can, and they need the wise guidance of spirit and Self to grow beyond their limited perspectives and skill sets.

In that way, my practice feels much softer these days, much less ambitious, but still requires discipline. I still need to do the work of showing up and bringing presence into my life. Without presence, the lantern has no light.

Reflections upon the eclipsed moon in Scorpio under the rays of Algol.

The other night, I dreamt I was in a game, and every time I was on the verge of progressing to a new level, I needed to remember everything that happened before. This happened multiple times, and in the dream I felt a sense of “Of course this is how it must be.” The review of what has been must occur moving to what is next.

After waking, it made me think about reports of near-death experiences and the now-pervasive trope of seeing one’s entire life in the moments before death. Then, surprisingly, it made me think of the role of witnessing in Internal Family Systems therapy.

In IFS our “parts” may be so developed and discrete that they have their own story, their own memories, their own experience of our life. One part of us, concerned with protecting ourselves against financial setbacks, carries formative moments of scarcity or fear, all the threats that could have or did take us down. Another part of us, carrying an essential terror of being abandoned, carries every moment that we were hurt or terrified and reached out for support but no one reached back.

Every time we felt alone in suffering, or learned to survive hardship, waits for us to be capable of returning to witness that pain. Our suffering deeply longs to be felt and understood fully; that’s why it seizes upon us in our weak moments when we don’t have the strength to push it away. Or it lashes out at loved ones, hoping they have the strength and capacity to hold it for us. But when we are too vulnerable to give it the caring attention it seeks, we only feel mired more deeply in it, and caught in the battle of those parts of us desperately trying to keep it hidden.

There’s no shame in any of this and no urgency—to witness suffering before we’re ready is not useful. Nor can we expect others to recognize this suffering for what it is when it arises, for it often reaches out in the guise of an accusation, an attack, an explosive reaction that seems far bigger than merited by the situation.

Sitting with the dream, and this work, I imagine there is a psychic law: a thing must be fully witnessed for it to become ready to surrender to transformation.

What is therapeutic is when we can separate out these wounded parts from a place of calm, supportive, wise listening, and then attend to them as they show us all the memories and feelings they’ve been carrying alone. When we can stay with it, the Self’s calm caring and understanding helps that part of us to finally feel understood, to feel deeply felt. Once it has been felt all the way through, it will let us know it’s ready to release that pain and move to the next level.