Just like magic: How to fix your whole damn life in just one step

Stay awkward, brave and kind, y’all – Brené Brown

Scene one: Awkward spiritual interlude

In the trance vision, I slump on the worn wooden bench beside Brighid’s well. “I don’t like how I acted,” I say, hanging my head.

She smiles and sits beside me. “Then the solution is clear, yes? Just don’t act that way again.”

But I protest: I should know better. I shouldn’t make these mean-spirited mistakes.

“Why is that, little animal?” she gently prods. 

I sure got that awkward part down

Writing little scenes like the above in a public blog and sharing them on my personal social media with 454 separate people is incredibly awkward and vulnerable. My Facebook friends list includes not only fellow Pagans and poets, but family and friends from every corner – people I’ve met through music or political engagements or aikido, coworkers and former coworkers. And famously, I don’t curate: Everyone gets the same technicolor view of the real me, complete with bad sitar-playing, poetry, weird memes, discussions and rants about various topics, and spiritual musings that a fair number of those people might find concerning. 

You see, I am one of those super-annoying people that brings my Whole Self to everything – exactly what we are cautioned against doing in the “real world.” People will judge you. People will think you’re crazy. There will be consequences!

Yes, there are consequences to vulnerability but, like taxes, I willingly pay them. After all, taxes are the price we pay for creating a community with parks and paved roads.

I’ve only read one Brené Brown book to date, but if you’ve read one, you pretty much have the gist of her message. Hell, you can skip the books entirely and just steer yourself over to her famous TED talk. 

Need the off-the-cuff Cliff Notes? Here: It’s okay to be vulnerable. In fact, it’s more than okay. Vulnerability is the heart of authentic relationships of all sorts because we have a deep, soul-need for love, belonging and having our personhood seen and recognized.

Back to my own musings: A few pulses of the blender, and the combination of those three elements – having your personhood witnessed, love and belonging – turns into unconditional love. Love itself is composed of acceptance and empathy or compassion; it grants you permission to exist and welcomes you into the family of things (belonging).

That’s it: That’s the recipe, whether you’re a human, a housecat or a Divine being.  

Photo by Erik Mclean on Pexels.com

Learning the recipe

Trying to figure out those precise ingredients took a lot of discernment – years and years of spiritual practice and, yes, years and years of actual therapy with a licensed therapist. (Fun fact: I’ve gone through six, but only the last one was worth her salt.) 

Both spiritual practice and therapy can get you closer to wisdom, but you have to stick with them. All too often, we feel a bit better and then give up that practice, settling back into the familiar wagon tracks. So, yes, in addition to my spiritual practice, I do have half-hour check-ins with my therapist every month to make sure that I stay off I-am-an-unredeemably-awful-human-being-and-should-spend-the-rest-of-my-days-hiding-in-an-attic-crawl-space Road.

When it comes to soul-healing, I was not a quick learner, and I blamed and shamed myself for that. Maybe I need to forgive myself, I thought, and then I turned over that thought some more. 

Forgiveness is the wiping away of debt, right? So, what debt are we talking about here?

If I were to put words to it, it would be this: I believed that I owed it to everyone to be a certain socially acceptable way. As my price of admission to the human race, I owed it to people to make them comfortable and happy, to fulfill every expectation – even the batshit, soul-killing ones – without complaint. I owed it to people to be “good,” which we can define as “self-erasing.” I owed it to people to keep my weird little mouth shut.

You know those scammers who try to convince you to pay debts you don’t actually owe? That’s what this is: a scam. Yes, we do owe people certain behavioral commitments as the price of being in community — honesty, integrity, decency, kindness – and they owe the same to us, as participants in Enlightened Bonobo Land.

Our selves and souls – who we really are – aren’t negotiable. You don’t owe it to anyone to be a particular person – to fulfill their dreams for you, to live life in the way they want or understand. You don’t owe comfort to anyone at all, including yourself. You get to be your own particular bonobo in Bonobo Land and if that means that you play the sitar badly while wearing a tin-foil prom dress, then hop to it.

In other words, I didn’t need to forgive myself because there is no debt. The debt was an illusion, a holdover from my childhood programming in a culture built on hierarchy and domination.

All I needed to do was shake the Etch-A-Sketch and erase everything I learned as a kid. 

And believe it or not, that’s not a super-big job once you get the swing of it. A few pointers:

• Go with your second or third thought, because the first is social programming in a culture marked by hierarchy, domination and late-stage capitalism 
• Don’t judge yourself for having those first thoughts because we’re all perfectly imperfect
• Live as if you can step right back into the Garden of Eden (because you can) 
• And dare to be dorky.

“The Magic Circle” by John William Waterhouse (1886)

Enjoy the dorkfest

“Dare to be dorky” was the tagline of Reclaiming teacher and priestess Claudia Manifest, whom I met in the long-ago. It’s since become my guiding principle.

To set the scene for the unfamiliar: At Witchcamps and in Paganism overall, we engage in ritual practices that may seem childish or bizarre to “sophisticated” onlookers. But to truly experience spirit, you need to let go of the desire to be cool – which is the desire to be invulnerable. That’s what “cool” means in a human context.

Dorks aren’t cool; they’re authentic and therefore vulnerable. They have feelings you can hurt because dorks are fully themselves.

Friendships between dorky people are really refreshing. They have fascinating conversations about unusual topics, pursue hobbies without giving a shit about what other people think, and share a childlike enthusiasm. In fact, a childlike attitude is what makes a dork: They engage in play, shrug at hierarchy and don’t have a strict efficiency mindset. You know, like kids.

It’s time once again for Unitarian Universalist bible study! There’s a line in the bible I really detest:

When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things.

We pack away the imagination and vulnerability of childhood, the unbridled affection, the willingness to talk back and to state our needs – with tears and tantrums, if need be. We stop playing games, making art and having fun, and instead buckle down at work and saddle ourselves with joyless and unremitting duty.

And then we wonder why adulthood is so fucking miserable and lonely.

With each UU bible study kit, you receive scissors, a pen, paper and tape so you can create and swap in your rewrite. Here’s mine:

When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child. But when I became an adult, I dared to become a total dork. I added knowledge and wisdom to childlike honesty, creativity and authenticity, and embraced love for myself, other people and All-That-Is. All in all, it’s been an awesome time, with an emphasis on “awe.”

Children live as-if; we call this “make-believe.” But make-believe is a super powerful tool, one that can re-create the human world. Live as if your ideal world were already here, and you actually are doing the work to create that world.

Within reason, of course; I mean, I’d love to live in a world with affordable interstellar space travel, but that’s not obviously happening. But if you want to live in a generous world where you can be yourself, be loved for who you are and have community … just duck right under that flaming sword and you’re right back in Eden. You are there, friends: Just act like it.

And “acting like it” may mean trusting others, letting go of suspicion and being wildly generous with strangers. It may mean following your interests and passions without considering the market value or your reputation, or making mistakes – even boneheaded ones — and learning from them.

 Being a dork, in other words. 

John William Waterhouse, “The Sorceress” (1913)

Taking the hard fall

Live as if you were to die tomorrow; learn as if you were to live forever – Mahatma Gandhi

I will admit it: I struggled when the world emerged from COVID lockdown, although lockdown itself was a pretty peaceful time for me. I’m super-tired of dealing with depression, so I did a lot of thinking of what I value and how I wanted to live my life. My cousin’s death of despair – after a life of despair – also led me to question the lessons we learn in childhood, particularly those related to self-worth.

Like all human beings, I deeply want to be seen and accepted for myself, to belong to community, to feel the warmth of connection. The social messages we’re surrounded with tell us that this isn’t possible, that authentic connection is “trauma dumping” and sharing an imposition. Classical stoicism became a fad (really!), an antidote to the weakly expressive “snowflakes.” 

I returned to therapy, and wondered if I was a weak person for needing it. Talking about what’s in my heart actually heals what’s in it – whether with a therapist, friends or strangers on this blog. Why? It seems so utterly stupid when you think about it. 

Why should talking about vulnerable things fix a perpetually broken heart? But I thought about something I continue to learn in aikido.

I’m afraid to take falls, so I will often stiffen myself and resist. But the more rigid you become – the more you try to avoid failing, or cover up for failures, or protect your reputation – the more you injure yourself.

The more you run from pain or fear or consequences, the worse they become. But if you turn and look the monster in the face, you’ll see that it isn’t a monster at all … just a lesson because life is a dojo and we’re all students.

Truth can sting, just like the slap of an aikido mat after a hard fall. But you get back up and you learn how to take a fall better the next time. Hell, once you get the hang of it, it’s even fun.

Photo by Ilya Kovalchuk on Pexels.com

Omens and wands

In my introductory vignette, I brought a weight on my heart to Brighid. In the vision, she continued: “Quite frankly, the way you acted wasn’t that bad at all. Not that it couldn’t stand some improvement, sure. But you act as you do because you are human, little animal, not a god. We don’t expect you to be a god.”

Back in the Green World, I reviewed the circumstances that I was judging myself for … and I found that she was right. Things were certainly messy, but I wasn’t acting like some reprobate. I actually did some good in the end, even if the kitchen was a mess, so to speak.

I am hugely fond of Thalia Took’s art and around the turn of the year, when I was still struggling with changing the nonfunctional patterns of my life, I received a year-reading from her. The omens were Ceres, Arianrhod and Kali Ma, with the last being the crux. 

In her oracle deck, Kali Ma is destruction and ending, but necessary destruction; it’s a fearful omen to get, much like the Tower in the tarot. Ceres is creativity and growth, while Arianrhod is centering; I tend to think of Arianrhod particularly as centering myself in spirit, owing to my involvement in SOA.

I read Thalia’s email, closed my eyes. I centered in my spiritual path, my poetry, the inherent dignity of my self-expression.

I wiped the Etch-a-Sketch. I ducked under the flaming sword.

In that one, strange moment – in a guest bedroom, reading an email on my iPhone – I changed everything about my life … the way I chose to live it, how I thought about myself. On the outside, the nuts and bolts look the same, but the insides are all different.

It’s been a bit strange, in the way of a butterfly leaving a cocoon: For a while, I felt unsure about my wings as they dried in the sun. Sometimes, I still feel that way, but then I remember my wings.

Here’s a strange truth: Magic is real. You can change yourself, your entire life, from one breath to the next with the wave of a hazel wand. You can change yourself, your entire life, even if you still have the same job or family or health condition. You can choose to live as-if and step back into Eden. 

And you who seek to know Me, know that the seeking and yearning will avail you not, unless you know the Mystery: for if that which you seek, you find not within yourself, you will never find it without. For behold, I have been with you from the beginning, and I am that which is attained at the end of desire.