Eating a Mystery

A few weeks ago I was getting ready for my shower when I suddenly got this memo that went something like “don’t forget that you need to be preparing for the Mysteries this year.” It struck me as odd, since I haven’t really done anything for the Year of Rites since October, and for the NTRW to not harp me on that, but instead decide I needed to perform the Mysteries really seemed out of character.

I asked the “memo” what I needed to focus on for the Mysteries, and I received one line, it said “Glorify your father.”

In the matter of a few seconds, my brain raced in several directions with this. First off, the word father really seemed highlighted to me, and there are two reasons for that. First is the mythological component. Osiris’ myths are frequently centered on Horus and his quest to avenge his father and take back what’s his. Second, you’ve got the historical context in that every Osiris relies on his eldest son to give him a proper funeral and to maintain his cult to at least some degree. Both of these aspects would place me in the role of Horus glorifying my father, and have fairly straight-forward heka connotations.

But what really caught me was the third place my brain went.

While I understand that the NTRW can use familial terms for some people, it’s never been the case for me. Further, if there was a NTR out there that I would use familial terms with, it certainly isn’t Osiris. But there is another person that frequently gets labeled specifically as father (as opposed to “dad” or some other similar label, it’s always father) and that would be good ol’ Father-Lover. Would I need to incorporate aspects of my rebirth/rebuilding process into this? Or perhaps more accurately — had the NTRW decided to insert themselves into my process without letting me know? I wasn’t pleased with the idea.

Between all of these concepts, though, there is one vein of similarities: you become your father.

Ultimately, the reason Osiris gets it on with Aset is largely to make sure that he continues on through his son. Ultimately, the son and father overlap and become one mythologically speaking (hence Bull of His Mother) and so in some respects, I would argue that you could potentially interchange the two to some extent. And when it comes to Father-Lover, well, its just that we are literally the same being spread across two forms. We are ultimately one and the same on some level or another.

So I began to mull on this. If glorifying my father ultimately ends up glorifying myself… what would glorification look like? The word “glorify” means to praise or present admirably, perhaps unjustifiably so. It is what nearly every Kemetic ritual aims to do — to beautify the NTRW in the hopes that they will remain gracious to us. It is also through this process of glorification that we ensure that the rhythmic needs of the Duat are sustained and maintained. Re needs to go into the Duat each night, he needs to push back a/pep each day, he and Osiris need to meet in order to revitalize the Duat and its residents. Just like nature, everything has a rhythm and a cycle. Part of our end of the deal is performing the rituals and doing the acts that sustain these cycles.

To consider this concept on myself, we all need a healthy attitude about ourselves. We would all lead more fulfilling and less-miserable lives if many of us weren’t constantly being self-defeating or putting ourselves down. To glorify yourself would ultimately mean to feed into your inherent regenerative nature. And so I asked myself what would help sustain me most?

I then switched back to considering the historical contexts of glorifying your father — what do akhu value most from their families? What do we often see most often for helping the akhu? And the answer I came back with was:

The voice offering, in my opinion, is the quintessential akhu rite out there. There are lots of people who know nothing about Kemeticism, but know about the “thousands of beer, bread, and every good thing” voice offering that was left to the akhu of the necropolis. The most important thing a son could do for his father was to offer the basic necessities of life so that his father could continue to live in the Duat. And when I think about what the best offering that you could give would be, I thought of the foreleg. The foreleg is, by far, the piece de resistance in the Opening the Mouth ceremony. Everything in the ritual crescendos when you pull out the choice cut of meat and offer all of its contained vitality to the statue/mummy.

I thought to myself, could I offer myself the foreleg instead? Could I offer it to both of us simultaneously?

One of the suggestions after my post about my eating issues interfering with being able to offer to the gods regularly was the idea of drawing foods, and offering the drawing. In response to this, I began to offer my paper foreleg amulet to the NTRW as a stand-in meal. And so the connection between the foreleg and the offering of foods went full circle, and I thought to myself “what if I offer a meal to myself every day? So that instead of doing offerings at a shrine that are couched inside of a larger ritual, the act of feeding myself becomes the ritual.” And in response, I heard “what if you did it three times per day?” (since, you know, we’re supposed to eat three meals a day.)

So I guess that means I’m eating three times per day for the Mysteries.

I admit, this is strange to me. It feels like a cop out, like I’m just using something I “already do,” and saying that it’s a good replacement for “proper rituals” at a shrine, as I have been doing all year. But to cite that post I mentioned above: I don’t really eat regularly. Or at least, I don’t eat as regularly as I should. So it’s actually quite a challenge for me, since I won’t be able to eat depression meals and call it a day. Even though it feels like a cop out, it’s going to actually be a challenge for me to do this for any length of time.

I decided I needed to check through other means to make sure that I was on the right track, and the response I got was so direct and straightforward that it was hard to deny the answer, so I guess this means I’m eating three times per day for the Mysteries. Which O dictated that it’s to be a month, as it’s always been. So I’m eating three times per day for a month. I’m sure that’ll be riddled with success.

The general idea of how this is supposed to go is that I’m to treat each meal as an event that requires my full attention. I’m to focus on myself, the food I’m eating, and try not to let myself get super distracted by the Internet, my phone, thoughts, or what have you. The meals need to have enough substance to them that they can be called meals. So for example, just eating a piece of bread and walking away is not good enough. It needs to big enough to fill me up (a challenge.)

The biggest question I am left with when it comes to doing this is the following: when we typically do rituals, there is a layer of separation involved. You offer to the gods, separate from you, and then you take the food into yourself afterwards. The path is outwards (to the gods) then inwards (when you eat it.) But what happens when you skip the outwards part? What happens when both the offering and the consuming are done in one step, at the same time, with both parties being overlapped? And is O doing this because he wants me to take care of myself, or is he wanting me to do this because of the overlap I just mentioned?

I guess we’ll see.

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True of Voice

We are often raised with fundamental “truths” that are established by our caregivers. These truths are bestowed upon us from the moment we are born, and they are reinforced regularly so long as you are around those people. Sometimes, these truths are healthy, accurate, and useful to us. Things like “you are loved by your parents” or “the world is safe” or “you can rely on your caregivers” are truths we all want to be instilled within us within the first few months of being born. This is because the truths that are given to you at that tender age will often play a significant role in how other aspects of your Self are formed and defined.

However, if you are like I am, you were raised with a lot of less-than-healthy truths. Truths that I would be willing to wager you speak to yourself everyday. This is a post about heka and truths, and how abuse distorts our truth, and therefore our heka. This post will discuss many aspects of verbal abuse, so this is a massive CW/TW to anyone who could find these topics upsetting or unbearable at the moment. Please proceed ahead with caution.

Before I dive fully into this, I want to talk about what I mean by “truths.” In this case, I’m talking about any bit of information that we have been taught or learned and have then internalized and have now accepted, without any question, that this information is the honest-to-goodness truth. Truths of this nature may be good or bad, accurate or inaccurate, depending on what you’ve experienced in your life. Many of us are carrying around a lot of systemic truths that are perpetuated by our culture. Many of us are carrying around a lot of abusive truths that were pushed on us by our immediate family. Both types of truths often feed into one another, wherein the truths given to you by your family are reinforced by your surrounding culture and vice versa. Of course, the “truths” that hurt us are false, but they often feel very very true, even if we don’t necessarily realize it, so when I am using the phrase “false truth”, what I am meaning is a truth that is unhealthy for us, a lie that has been sold to us as truth. You’ll see me using “trauma” pretty regularly alongside “false truth” because you’re most likely to receive false and unhealthy truths from abusive people and traumatic situations.

So let’s get into it.

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The worst part about how humans develop is how long it takes our brains to finish developing. It doesn’t help that our brains are something like “a sports car that has been given to a three year old,” especially because these sports cars take about 25 years to finish growing, and if you experience any sort of trauma or abuse before those 25 years are up, you’re more likely to have that trauma hardwired into your sense of self. Which means you’ve got 25 years to learn a lot of garbage that you then have to unlearn again in order to be healthy. Although most of us consider ourselves to be very objective and rational and removed from silly things like ideas we absorbed in childhood and never really outgrew, the truth of the matter is that most of us have a lot of ideas we absorbed in childhood and never really outgrew. If we were all truly rational and capable of removing ourselves from emotional hard wiring, cognitive dissonance wouldn’t be a thing, nor would racism. The cold hard truth of the matter is, we are not separate from our emotions, and our emotions can cause us to lie to ourselves regularly in order to protect our sense of self. It takes constant and diligent work to push back against our own ability to lie to ourselves.

The cherry on top of the “takes 25 years to finish growing” thing is that that some of the most important years for our development are the first few years. How you are raised by your caregivers will usually determine core aspects of how you view the world. Whether you think the world is a safe place or not, whether you feel nurtured and loved or abandoned, whether you can trust people or not. If your parents manage to mess up the first five years of your life, you usually will have resulting mental health work that needs to happen once you’re an adult. To quote someone who has done more work in this field than I have:

When parents do not provide safe enough bonding and positive feedback, the child flounders in anxiety and fear. Many children appear to be hard-wired to adapt to this endangering abandonment with perfectionism. A prevailing climate of danger forces the child’s superego to over-cultivate the various programs of perfectionism and endangerment listed below. Once again, the superego is the part of the psyche that learns parental rules (read: truths) in order to gain their acceptance.

The inner critic is the superego gone bad. The inner critic is the superego in overdrive desperately trying to win your parents approval. When perfectionist driving fails to win welcoming from your parents, the inner critic becomes increasingly hostile and caustic. It festers into a virulent inner voice that increasingly manifests self-hate, self-disgust, and self-abandonment.

The inner critic blames you incessantly for shortcomings that it imagines to be the cause of your parents rejection. It is incapable of understanding that the real cause lies in your parents’ shortcomings. The critic-driven child can only think about the ways they are too much or not enough.

The child’s unfolding sense of self (the healthy ego) finds no room to develop. Their identity virtually becomes the critic. The superego trumps the ego. In this process, the critic becomes increasingly virulent and eventually switches from the parents’ internalized voice: “You’re bad” to the first person: “I’m bad”.

You can see some of these false truths that many of us get saddled with in the quote above. Core ideas about whether you’re lovable or not, whether you’re fundamentally good or not, whether you can trust people or yourself — all of these things take root in your first few years. All of these truths will play into how you behave towards others, how you behave towards yourself, etc.

There is a saying that always reminds me of heka: it’s like playing a guitar, everyone can do it poorly, and only a handful of people can do it well.

The best and the worst parts about heka is that it is something that is very accessible to everyone, and we all have the ability to utilize our words, our body language, our actions to influence the world around us. In antiquity, we have stories of the lowest classes of society being able to bring the king into a swoon because their heka was that good. We’ve got stories of gods changing key aspects of the cosmos with their fine-tuned heka. It is everywhere, and it is free for the utilizing if you want to.

But its best selling point is also its downfall. Everyone can utilize heka, and everyone does utilize heka whether they realize it or not. It’s very easy to have the subtle, abusive heka of your childhood manifesting in the very heka you use as an adult. It’s so easy to carry false truths in our words, and it can be very hard to unroot those truths from our minds.

If the very things we tell ourselves daily are not true, how can we really know that we are true in our voice, or that our voice is carrying truth upon it? Humans often engage in daily dialogue that is based off of these falsehoods we were raised to believe as truth, and I can’t help but wonder how it influences the very heka we construct, and by extension, how we construct the world around us. I mentioned in my inertia post that people often behave based off of their expectations, and if our inner dialogue expects us to eternally suck, then how will our heka have any truly lasting power? If you’re getting in your own way before you’ve even tried, how can you hope to succeed?

There are many ways to un-knot false truths that are stuck in our minds. The path to fixing such things is not straightforward or easy. For most of us, we don’t have the resources to really tackle these issues head-on in a way that makes the work timely. Gods know that I have regressed on this issue many times in the past, and will likely regress many times again in the future due to lack of resources and fucks to give. However, that doesn’t mean that the work shouldn’t still be done, even if it will be a grueling task along the way. This post is less about solutions (I could write those posts in time, if people wanted them), and more about opening the table for discussion, so if you’ve got thoughts, I welcome them.

When you look at the things you tell yourself, the truths you have been fed throughout your life, how many of them are true? How many of them feel true, but probably aren’t? How do these things influence your daily life? Do you think it influences your heka? And of course, most importantly, when you do come across these false truths, do you want to do something about them? Why or why not?

 

How to Build a Heart: Carrying My Father

Father-Lover proved to be a surprisingly easy task.

When I first realized that I would need to still do work with his remnants, I was daunted. I expected to be overwhelmed by the emotions and trauma of our past, of his past. I spent weeks avoiding putting his stone into the heart jar where it needed to go. And then I spent weeks ignoring the fact that I needed to pull it out again. And then I spent days doing everything I could not to touch said stone, for fear of what would come rushing forth. Each step seemed to inch me ever closer to resolving the situation at hand, but each step also evoked the deep-seated fear I ultimately have of the man that I once called father.

It was early morning, and we were having tea at the table. I found myself staring at Father-Lover’s stone as it rested on the table. There was a pull in me, a desire to touch it, but the desire was always tempered by fear. But because I had enough substances rolling through my veins, I guess I was in enough of a mind space to ignore my baser fears, and I found myself flipping the stone between my fingers, rolling through black fabric in my mind’s eye as I floated forward towards some unforeseen ending to the tunnel that the stone was pulling me down.

This was the first time in years since the stone had anything active in it. While it had always continued to carry its feeling with it, touching it up and to this point hadn’t rendered anything of note. But now? Now I was going somewhere.

I sat there for a while, waiting to reach my destination, and when my feet finally hit the closest thing I can consider ground, I saw that someone was sitting there waiting for me. I’m sure everyone can infer that it was Father-Lover sitting there in the backlit darkness, waiting for me to find him. However, he felt nothing like the versions I had been forced to interact with all of these years. In this crystallized moment, he was so close to who I had always been told he was, but had never gotten to witness on my own.

With his form as I knew it removed, it barely felt like Father-Lover. For a brief moment, I could look past the trauma, the hell we had been through together. For a moment, there was the tiniest possibility of healing. You could see it in his eyes, the sorrow, the unfairness of it all. In this section, he was neither Father-Lover, nor his predecessor. He was somewhere in between.

Of course, this place was not to last. Like so many other healings I have worked on, once the person in question gets what they need, the blockage is removed and everything starts to flow again. The problem being that flow usually means a lack of direct access like this, and so I was no longer able to find him again. All in all, I had less than an hour to soak in the emotions before I had to let go again.

But at least I could handle the stone freely, and I was no longer afraid of its contents. Though the trauma of Father-Lover still exists, I no longer seemed to fear that he would show up and wreck my life again.

And as soon as I had finished that bit of work, the next bit rolled in. And this time, it was my old pendant that I used to wear to represent Set and O as a sort of singular unit. My Ptah pendant that has skeeved me out so badly that I’ve barely touched it in years. It’s spent a lot of its time living in my heart jar, where I could forget that it exists. Every time when I would go to check the contents of said jar, a small part of me would be like, “Oh yes, this is a thing that exists, I forgot.” but I never felt inclined to pull it out or wear it. And as the years have progressed and my love of the religion and its gods has waned, my desire to wear the pendant has diminished greatly.

By the time that Someone was trying to convince me to bring it out and work with it, I didn’t want to touch it at all.

I have toyed for months now as to whether I should be opening up about it or not. Truth be told, most of the times I mentioned my growing issues or complications with the NTRW, I ended up with people either telling me its my fault for things being as they are, or to quit complaining, and so I’ve mostly been keeping it to myself. But when they made me pull the pendant out, and then made me wear the thing, it became much harder to ignore, and has since been very hard to ignore.

For whatever reason, I was inclined to hang it on two different strands of yarn, which you may recognize from this old post. And then I wore it for a few days until the feelings about the pendant itself started to float away. So I can touch it now without feeling completely put off, but I still don’t want to wear it.

Throughout this time, I received a handful of visions or experiences, and one of the most notable things that occurred during this time is that  the nerve damage that is present in my physical body began to show up as a sort of scarring on my skin in the astral. It’s not something I’ve had happen very often, and I’m not sure what working on these two items might have done to cause it to occur, but here we are.

Slowly, I’ve also noticed that I am sorta being dragged away from using my heart jar shrine as a sort of living shrine, and have instead been encouraged to co-opt a pre-existing setup that was in another part of my room. It’s left me wondering if the jar is meant to be temporary and not permanent, and honestly, I’ve always had this nagging question in the back of my head as to whether a heart jar would be a permanent fixture in a person’s self care, or if its something you only need during times of healing.

As this progressed, I began to question if maybe I should scrap my entire heart jar heka idea all together (though I am still using aspects of the shrine, albeit, sparsely), not to mention the slowly-rising anxiety about how I’d even begin to put into words what I was experiencing. It can’t be ignored that this series is now six posts deep, and I have no clue how much closer I even am to finishing this project, much less if this will ever reach any sort of logical conclusion. It has led me to feeling like the work will never be done, or that the hope of being healed is some sort of unattainable dream. It’s why I don’t usually write about a project until after its done, because if I can’t wrap it up in a pretty, edible package for everyone, then it usually never sees the light of day. But now that this is out in the daylight, it also feels weird to not write about its progress.

I guess if it does say anything about rebuilding your heart, its that the process is long, messy, and rarely feels productive.

Previous posts in this series, for those who lost count:

• The curious case of Father-Lover
• Building a Base
• The Maze
• The Void
• Devo Adultmenz

 

How to Build a Heart: Devo Adultmenz

Late in the summer of 2018, everything started to slowly flood back into my head. I could feel my menz more. I got more visions. I had heard from O out of the blue. I found myself wandering back into this space. Like spring thawing the earth out after winter, its as if everything started to wake up all at once.

But things were not the same.

Instead of going over to an astral location and being able to see people separate from me, I found that most of my menz were… inside of myself? I have no clue if it’s close to what it’s like to be in a multiple situation, but around that time I began to joke that I was three people in a trench coat because I could feel two of my menz always hanging around in my periphery, as though they were stuck in my body. Ever since I more or less left the void, the astral has largely been this way. Where I sense what is going on inside of myself, but I don’t really exist Over There in any real way, and I can’t interact with anything Over There in any real way. Its as though I am stuck out here fully, can’t really see or sense anything around my astral self (if that even exists), and everyone has to seemingly center onto my physical location to really communicate with me.

The gods aren’t quite the same as my menz, in that they aren’t fully in my form when they talk to me. But at the same time, I also can’t seem to separate from myself enough to see who is talking to me or what things look like where said god is at. It’s like they leave a memo to the back of my head, and that’s all I can ever discern of what they’re wanting or what is going on.

There have been some exceptions to this, where I can travel in the same way that I used to, but its been limited. Very limited.

To reflect this, I changed out the jar that I was using for my heart shrine. I picked a donabe that I had around the house as my main vessel to replace my old jar. I chose a donabe because it felt like it would incorporate room for more people — the same way that my body seems to have. Eating a meal from a donabe is usually done with multiple people, and since I was no longer “riding solo” anymore, I felt like it was fitting to try it out.

I found a wooden base hidden in my grandma’s stuff, and I placed everything on top of it — thereby giving my heart a “firm base” to rest upon. I also cleaned out a lot of the stuff from the inside of my old jar. And as it turns out, I had hit more of my goals than I had realized. I guess I had made more progress than I expected.

Most of my focus from there has been on my own body. Watching different menz roll in and out. Watching them work on things, how their behaviours effect my own, how we overlap and how we don’t. The assets they have that I could fold into my own behaviours vs. the things that we could all do without. Bringing the experience to my body like this helped me to understand a different side of my menz, and it helped me to see how we all fit together as an entity.

In this time, all of the fragments and stories and experiences I had collected from the astral slowly began to fall into place. Holes were filled, and suddenly the story began to make a lot more sense. As I began to fold people into myself, the gaps began to disappear.

In many ways, this reminds me of the work that therapists often assign people who have experienced trauma. When we are young, we have no concept of ourself as being separate from the world around us. As we develop, we will start to explore ourself, and in the process, you begin the process of separation from those around you (mainly, your caregivers/parents.) When the process is done correctly, you are supported and loved while slowly branching out from your caregivers, and eventually, you are able to fully explore your entire self and become whoever you want to be.

But for those of us who were told directly or indirectly that our genuine selves were bad, we are inherently taught to reject parts of ourself. When you’re a toddler and your parents consistently shun things that you do, you’re taught that some part of you is inherently bad or wrong. This will ultimately lead to you rejecting parts of, or even all of, yourself.

One of the ways to heal this sort of splintering of the self is to slowly learn to love and embrace each of the parts of yourself that you’ve been taught to reject. There are many ways to do this, but it generally seems to follow a trend where you will find a part of yourself that you have been told to reject (and you’ll know it because this behaviour, desire, or action will usually feel weird or wrong somehow, and often will bring up feelings of discomfort.) And when you find this part of yourself, you should do your best to fully embrace what you feel and experience, without judgement. Accept it for what it is, and don’t criticize what you experience. Doing this will often heal the judgement we have for ourself, and allow us to reincorporate all of our traits back into our person. Ultimately, it allows us to continue the growth process that was interrupted as a child. It allows us to fully explore all of ourself, and to become whoever we want to be.

And this is what the past year has mostly consisted of for me. As I and my menz share a physical space (my body,) we are allowed to experience all of our emotions (because they can feel mine, too) and as we work to embrace and accept these hard truths about ourselves, we’re more able to merge into one cohesive entity.

Which is not where I expected this to go. At least, not really. I expected that some of us would merge over on the astral plane, but I never expected this to manifest so strongly within my own body.

Of course, it begs to ask, why would I be trying to merge with these people? Wouldn’t that erase them? Doesn’t that mean that my astral family is now gone entirely because I gobbled them up and meshed with them? For most of my time doing this work, my answer for this felt like a resounding yes. That by bringing these parts of myself that I have lost back into the fold that is my personhood, that I would be losing them. But now that I’m halfway through the process, I don’t know that I feel the same way about it. Of course it’s scary, of course I worry that I’m ultimately going to end up closing myself off from the astral by doing this. Of course I worry that this is all just some weird psychology thing where menz are aspects of myself and that this is all “not real.” Of course I worry.

But the process of coming together happened so naturally that it couldn’t fully be stopped. Or stopping it felt wrong.

Some of my menz blended with me very easily. Some of them didn’t need any work at all. But some of them took a long time to make any progress. Before they could come to do their work with me, they had to iron out the kinks between themselves. It turns out that when you’re doing deep-level bonding, you absolutely have to work out the finer details between people if you want the bonds to be strong. One of the many reasons we had issues perfecting this healing earlier on is because small discrepancies between people kept eroding at connections we’d make.

It’s a lot like working with a coworker you can’t stand. Eventually, the tiniest minutia become obnoxious, and we needed to find a way to heal or harmonize those issues out in order to finish the work at hand.

Slowly, one by one, each of us managed to fix our connections. Slowly, we were able to seamlessly shift together. Slowly, I felt less and less differentiation between those of us who had come forward.

But there was still one left. Father-Lover.

 

How to Make a Heart: The Void

The void is, by far, the longest, most awful part of this entire “journey” that I have been on these past few years (though March 2019 gives this a run for its money.) I call it the void because it was, for all intents and purposes, the closest to being cut off from everything that I could have ever imagined. It was the absence of all that was familiar, and it was devoid of what felt like any true growth, change, or improvement.

It is, for all intents and purposes, what it’s like to be inert.

I’ve mentioned being inert several times now since trying to scrape my life back together, and I sort of feel silly every time I bring it up, because I feel like I’m constantly bringing it up without ever really being able to grapple with what this inertia actually means for my journey. It’s a thing that I notice, but I never know what to do about it, or with it. And I think that that is partially because I feel that, even now, I am just as inert here in 2019 as I was back at the end of 2016. Even though I know that this isn’t true (read a post from 2015 or 2014 and tell me that the cadence even sounds the same,) it still feels true. It feels as though I’m in exactly the same place I was then, and it feels awful.

Nobody likes to be inert. As humans, its antithetical to what we need to thrive. We’re not meant to stop, to be stagnant, to remain static. It’s not good for our mental health, and yet many of us are stuck throughout our entire lives being effectively stuck in our past. Ideally, you want to be cognizant to your ever-changing surroundings, and remaining open to new possibilities until the day you die.

However, I have come to believe that sometimes you need to be inert. The same way that we need to rest a broken limb, or sleep in after being sick, sometimes we need to slow down and stop what we’re doing. Because if we don’t, we’ll eventually be forced to stop. Or as I liked to call it, being curb checked. My time spent in “the void” was life’s curb check for me. Every post so far in this series contains a number of subtle warnings about what was going to eventually happen. I wanted to try to prevent it from happening, but the bottom fell out anyways. What started as a steady decline ultimately turned into a complete nose dive towards the ground.

And that’s when the screaming began.

One morning I woke up, and I could hear a part of myself screaming and wailing from somewhere. Nonstop. I’d get up and get dressed and go to work and be trying to pay attention all while this consistent, constant AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH went through the background.

I had issues with crying almost all of the time anymore. The tears would just flow and wouldn’t stop. It was as if it was beyond my control. I forgot what time of year it was, why I walked into rooms, where I left things. I dealt with heavy depersonalization combined with dysphoria and derealization. I looked in the mirror and felt this vague sense of “who is this person I’m staring back at” with side elements of “I am a man in a dress” (which is new for me, I’ve never felt this before.) All of my clothes quit fitting because my body ballooned from whatever was going on with it. It became hard to get up. Hard to move around. Hard to walk.

It was as if everything had finally decided to shut down. All the while AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH just kept playing in the background. Is this a bad time to mention that screaming can border on being triggering for me?

One of the strangest things that happened during this time was that I would frequently get visions of being drowned. I could never tell who it was that was doing it, as the distortion from the water I was submerged in masked too much. But I knew that they were familiar, and that it wasn’t right, but I could never seem to stop it.

I lost contact with everything. Religion, astral, myself. At the end of it all, the only thing I could find any solace from while in this darkness was my art. More specifically, my traditional art. Even though I was a designer by trade, I hadn’t touched traditional artwork since college. This is largely because it costs money and supplies to be able to do traditional art, and that was a luxury I didn’t want to afford until I had nothing else to do with my time. Can’t walk? No worries, you can take a drawing pad with you wherever you want. Paint all of the pretty colors you want to ignore the fact that everything in your life feels a shade of grey or black.

Slowly, things began to leak out. Experiences from the astral suddenly spilled out on the page in front of me. My therapist would later tell me that art therapy would be ideal for me (it is,) but it turns out that I had been trying to come to grips with everything that had happened long before I even realized it was a “thing.”

The largest thing I took away from my time in the void was my art. Because I was forced to stop doing everything, I finally made enough space for art to exist within my life again. And even though I can do much more now, I still make time for art because I feel its an ideal processing method for me. I also think it makes for great heka — which is something I’ve been toying with as I (hopefully) move in the final phases of this heart building that I’ve been trudging through.

The second thing I learned from my time in the void is that there is a real raw grittiness that comes with reaching the bottom of your depth as it currently exists. When you’re being drug along the bottom of your life and you can barely tell where you’re at or why you’re even bothering to continue to draw breath, your priorities shift massively. You learn to accept the help that you’re given because its impossible to do everything by yourself anymore. You learn to accept that things will not be to any sort of preferable ideal because you’re so short on energy that you truly have to accept that “what you can do” is better than not at all. Something I tell people all the time, but never really wanted to tell myself.

The third thing that I learned is that the void is sometimes unavoidable. To some extent, if you don’t stop, you will be forced to stop. Even if you feel you can’t stop, or shouldn’t stop, we all have our limits. We need to pay attention to those limits before we hit them.

The screaming did not stop until after I got into therapy, almost a full year after it had started. When I was finally desperate enough to try an SSRI, I found that the ocean that I had been drowning in for a full year suddenly dried up, and that I could no longer access the water anymore. In a lot of ways, the SSRI cut me off from my emotions too much (a sign that it’s not the right medication for me, but alas, I’ve not been stable enough in the past year to wean myself off of it…), but at the same time, I was desperate for any reprieve I could find, and so I relished it.

The void is an awful place to be. It’s a place I’ve spent various phases of my life in, and this particular session pushed me to my limits in every capacity. If there is anything I could tell anyone about their own time in the void, it’s this: don’t give up. As uncle Iroh said:

“Sometimes life is like this dark tunnel. You can’t always see the light at the end of the tunnel, but if you just keep moving… you will come to a better place.”

I can’t say that where I’ve ended up is currently better, but the place I arrived at the beginning of 2017, after ages in my own void, felt amazing. It was a beautiful place where I was even capable of feeling happiness — something I have woefully little experience with. Sometimes life is absolute shit, but if you can remain curious about what the future holds, you will always find reasons to keep going.

I am glad I kept going. Even as I sit in a new void, hoping that I will eventually find a way out again, I am glad that I kept trying.

 

How to Build a Heart: The Maze

The last post that I released in this series is the last bit that I had written back in 2016. Which is to say that everything you read moving forward was written in the here-and-now in 2018.

I bring this up because when I first started this project in April 2016, I had some weird idea that this would all wrap up and be finished around the same time I celebrated Wep Ronpet (early August.) It was an ideal goal because it would be finished around the same time that my astral work would be finished (late July.) A death and a rebirth that coincided on both planes. If timed out well, it’d synchronize perfectly… right?

The problem being that rebuilding yourself is not something that can be rushed. It’s not something you can really control or hold onto tightly. It’s a process that largely is passive and occurs to you — until it doesn’t anymore (see my late 2017-era posts.) And while I felt a burning desire to process what I was going through (hence the tiny bit of writing from 2016,) I quickly realized a few months in that there was no way that this process would be over soon enough to draw any conclusions on what I was experiencing. I usually like to wait until a sequence as complex as this is finished before I write about it, because my perspective and understanding of things often changes as I am, by effect, changed. And once I realized that I wasn’t going to be finishing anytime soon, I stopped trying to write about it all together.

I often question if I did myself in by not writing throughout the entire process. On one hand, I feel like something was gained by completely immersing myself in the process and losing touch with the world around me (this blog included,) but I find myself questioning if I would have saved myself some hell if I had been letting everyone else know what was going on while it happened…. as opposed to two years after things got started.

And I suppose the answer doesn’t matter anymore, since that time has come and gone and my decisions have already been made. However, two years later, I decided that writing about this process was more important than waiting for it to finish — and that’s if writing about it doesn’t turn out to be completely vital for the work to be able to be finished at all. And so here we are — with me trying to remember and make some sense of what all transpired during the past two years of murky transformation.

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When I first started this project, I decided to use a physical representation of myself wading through this mess. I had a copy of the maze used in Westworld, and I moved a small marker representing myself each day through this physical copy of the maze, hoping that somehow it’d help me figure this mess out. I remember being told which ways I could move my marker, in that I wasn’t allowed to cheat and just head for the center. Whoever or whatever was directing me initially made me go the longest route we could find. So I feel like on some level, doing this accomplished something, but ultimately I couldn’t really tell you what exactly it accomplished. If anything, I could only come to assume that perhaps I was teaching myself a path, a way out, that would play out in the here and now over the next few years.

Each time I came to the center I spent a few days there, trying to figure out what to do. And when nothing happened and I couldn’t figure out if I had done something wrong, I started the maze over again, but decided to run it as fast as I could. I reached the center at a much faster rate this time, and once again, I sat in the middle and waited for something to happen.

And eventually, something did. Was it due to being in the maze? Probably not, but I feel like sitting in the epicenter was probably the best place I could have been when it happened.

I feel like I’ve only mentioned it in vague references and passings, but my astral work over the past 5 or so years has been specifically to reach a particular goal. And in the summer of 2016, in the midst of me trying to figure out how to secure a solid state of existence after doing myself in a fit of spite, this goal finally reached its climax.

And it was a messy one.

I’ve found that you can have the best-laid plans, but sometimes things don’t pan out well. I mean, it was well in that we were successful. But if we were going to get a grade for the level of success achieved by our endeavor, I feel the grade would be pretty low. C level if we’re lucky.

In the process of securing my goals, I managed to get myself done in again. This time, it was a complete reset, which is good, but it wasn’t done with an anchor, which makes it risky. I got lucky in that I came back with most of myself intact, and for about a week or so, things were amazing. I felt like I could connect in a way I hadn’t in months. I could see my family, I could be with everyone.

But then everything cut off again, and I was back in the same old darkness I had spent the previous seasons in. I was sent notes about how things unraveled, and I was being assured that everyone was doing as much as they could to speed things along, but ultimately we all knew that this was going to be a long ride.

Eventually, I decided to move the maze under my heart jar. I felt like I was showing that I had conquered that which sought to conquer me. That I would build a better version of myself on the ruins of what I had been through, and that maze was the base of my heart until I moved in 2018.

But as summer faded and I realized that this process was not going to be triggered by completing my astral goal, and that my ability to rebirth myself was in jeopardy for reasons that I didn’t fully understand. Fall finally settled in and the world slowly started to get darker.

And it was about that time that the screaming started.

 

How to Build a Heart: Creating a Base

If there’s one thing I can say about this entire process that I’ve gone through, it’s that you can’t and shouldn’t underestimate the power that physical items can have on the Unseen. I usually felt like a lot of physical items were there to mainly help myself visually make connections with what I was doing. But that ultimately, a lot of the power was coming entirely from me. However, as I’ve gone through the process of trying to heal Father-Lover, and upon failing that, pushing Father-Lover out of my life, I’ve found that items can definitely do a lot more than I had originally given them credit.

The more I looked through comparisons between what was going on astrally and the items that laid around my house that were connected to astral people, I found that moving items in the house could have an effect on what was going on Over There. So as I began to move forward with rebuilding myself, I knew that I needed to be particularly careful about what I did with the items that I was attaching to myself and to my purpose/goal. To treat the items carelessly could very well undo a lot of the work we were undertaking.

When I first decided that I was going to rebuild my heart, I was pretty excited. I thought the notion of being able to rebuild myself into whoever or whatever I wanted to be was pretty cool, and I looked forward to tailoring who I was into someone more like what I wanted to be. However, I found very fast that this is an incredibly daunting task, and once my health tanked a month after starting this project, I found myself bitterly hating even coming up with this thing.

The first thing that I did was work to establish my ib jar in some capacity. Since it still smelled of weird cherries, I decided that the scent was the first part I needed to work on. Smells are important in Kemeticism, after all. The fine scent of incense is what draws the gods close to us, and I felt that having a nice-smelling heart might help to attract my inner divinity back in.

So first I placed a bunch of coffee beans in the bottom. I was hopeful that they would help to neutralize any remaining cherry smell that was in the jar. I then ground up several flavors of incense and placed them in the bottom of the jar as my base. On top of that, I added some salt for purity purposes, and some of my MMJ tea to help keep myself calm on all levels. I let this steep for a week or so and eventually added another kind of tea that reminds me of my family and considered the scent portion good.

I also added a ma’at feather, to keep myself balanced, and I placed my Ptah pendant in the bottom. I felt that both of these items could help to keep myself more balanced, and to help drive myself to become better at handling my various moods and emotions.

But then I was stuck.

On the astral, we had run into hiccups with my healing. There were several reasons for this, most of which are irrelevant, but the main takeaway was that I should have either woken up and “resurfaced” into my body by this point. Or I should have been able to create an interior space for myself where I could begin to heal. I was still sitting in a black void, though, which meant something wasn’t quite right.

I was urged to embody myself in some capacity. Take a form (whatever I’d like!); create a space to call my own (it can look like whatever you want!); or make some sort of item that reminded me of myself (any shape! any size!). But in every attempt to do these things, I found that I couldn’t. The more I tried to figure out who or what I was “supposed” to be, the more upset I got. The notion of trying to create a space that was all to myself sent me into a panicked frenzy, and it got to a point that even bringing it up made my chest tighten. For someone who knows themself so well on the physical, I apparently don’t know much about myself on the astral. Trying to recreate myself after eons of being merged with someone else was causing me a lot of mental hell.

And I stayed in that hell until the middle of May.

I got so frustrated with my project that I had to put my ib jar away for a while. The simple act of looking at it would make me so upset that I couldn’t stand it. So I thought that some space would be helpful. I still couldn’t see anyone in the Unseen, either, and that was not helping. Usually when I get stuck, I go and talk with the gods or converse with one of my menz or contacts to see what they’d suggest on the matter. But I was still locked in the darkness with everything cut off from me. I would have to figure it out on my own somehow.

Some how.

I would love to tell you that I pushed myself until I really got a deep understanding of who I was or what I wanted to be, but that’s not really how everything went down. It happened very suddenly one day without a whole lot of explanation, when I was kicking around ideas about how to proceed with all of this. At first, I was telling myself that creating my own space wasn’t really that bad, and that I should look at it like being moved from a cubicle jungle to my own office. It’s really not that scary, and nothing says that I have to spend the rest of my time alone because I’ve made my own space (a huge fear I seemed to carry was that I’d be all alone). So think of it like a new office! I just need to figure out what I want my desk to look like.

I continued to kick this idea around until I could suddenly find myself standing in the darkness. Once there, I almost forced myself to envision what I thought my core might look like, and I fine tuned it until I could at least tolerate what I was looking at. And when I finished, I was pulled into that item into an interior space. It wasn’t much, but it was a start.

I also got very lucky while out shopping one day, in that I found a piece of jewelry that screamed “this is it” to me. And by this is it, I mean: this is the piece that will represent yourself. I wasn’t sure if it was correct, and I worried and stressed that I was picking up the wrong thing. However, I was pushed to get it anyways, and so I did. While I still wasn’t sure what exactly I was doing, I at least had enough to get going.

And so the building actually began.

For this project, I decided to take a multi-pronged approach to rebuilding myself. First was to create a sort of “trap” jar that would capture anything harmful that was coming after me. I was in a period of instability, and I wanted to make sure that I protected myself during this time. This involved taking a black jar and filling it with grounding materials and a magnet, and then placing an item inside of the jar that is “like me, but isn’t me”. I then placed it in a safe spot to attract all of the negativity away from me. This way, I wouldn’t have to worry about dodging punches while I healed.

I then made another container that allowed me to let go of some of the negative stuff that was happening around me and stressing me out. I used some of the basic ideas in the post that I got the idea from, but modified it a bit. I chose to use salt and rice as my base, as I consider both to be soothing. This would hopefully allow me to stay calm while I worked on letting go. I used hematite beads that I had laying around in a craft bin, and then I wrote things that I wanted to let go of on paper strips. This included things like the names of people whose negative words needed to leave my mind, bad anon-hate, negative things I tell myself, doubts I had, etc. I left this out in an open place so that I could shake it whenever I felt these things taking hold of me.

Through making both of these items, I felt like I had made a level base to get started on the real work at hand.

I took out my ib jar and added several more things to my scent and ma’at base. I added in pieces of paper that had phrases and sayings on them that I wanted to keep in mind as I moved forward. Things like “You exist beyond someone’s perception of you” or “I am able to connect with myself and those around me”. Things that I felt would help keep the negative self-talk down, and allow me to better exist in the world around me. I also added origami stars to my jar that had dreams and things I’d like to achieve written on them. And for a final touch, I added in a small (fake) fish to eat any negativity that happened to slip in.

I then created a shrine for the jar to rest upon. Everyone needs a place to rest and to recover, and that’s what the shrine was meant to embody. As such, I was careful in what I chose to place in the area, trying to keep in mind that everything here could have some sort of unforeseen effect on the work I was doing.

And with that, the first phase of recreating my heart had begun. But how far would it actually carry me?

 

In a World Full of Yes

Deciding to finally live for myself couldn’t have been more timely. I knew within a matter of days that the situation I found myself in earlier this year would have done 2016-era me in completely. This is largely because I was suddenly finding myself dealing with my family on a daily basis in ways that I hadn’t had to in the past. I never had to get into it with an aunt about finances or with an uncle about caring for their elderly father.

As the weeks dragged on, I found that most of my family hadn’t changed much from my youth, and that most of them were just as shifty in their behavior as they had always been. With each new round of drama that would crop up, I found myself having to choose between keeping the peace and actually protecting myself. In my youth all I had ever done was work to keep the peace. I chose to make myself smaller so that I might not get ousted from the group, and what I didn’t realize when I decided I was going to go “all in” with life is that you can’t really take the path of least resistance when you’re actually trying to take care of yourself.

With each new experience where I felt like someone was taking advantage of me or trying to hurt me, I could suddenly see my younger self looking back at me, asking me why I was allowing this person to hurt us, to hurt them. I noticed that I was always more willing to put myself in the line of fire for others, but not for myself; a well-known trait for those of us with anxiety. Which meant that if I wanted to walk the walk and not just talk the talk, I’d have to start sticking up for myself in the same way that I would for others, and drawing boundaries in the sand as to how I would allow people to treat me.

For someone like me, this is actually quite terrifying.

Of course, when I talked with my therapist about boundaries, some part of me knew that this was going to happen eventually. She told me that I wasn’t very good at drawing boundaries to keep myself safe. She said that this was partially what caused the violent emotional responses that I was prone to. Because I couldn’t separate myself from everyone around me, I couldn’t help but feel their feelings as though they were mine. I almost felt like I wasn’t being a good person if I wasn’t flinging myself headlong into everyone else’s issues so that I’d know what it felt like to be them in that moment.

And in those moments, I seemed to imagine that drawing boundaries would be empowering. That I’d basically be learning how to cordon myself off from things that would hurt me. That I’d make sure I was safe. I think that my initial concepts of drawing boundaries banked on the notion that I’d be able to actually disengage with anything I didn’t want near me. Which, in its own way, means I was planning on drawing my boundaries by running away.

But what if running away isn’t possible? As is the case when you’re being a caretaker for someone who still has living family that they want in their life. I hadn’t thought about this until I was already in it. You see, for all of the years of being labeled as being aggressive, mean, bitchy, overbearing, etc. I actually do not get off on telling people what to do. I feel uncomfortable asking for simple, basic things, and when I have to do so regularly, it can cause me to have anxiety attacks. But in order to actually protect what I had managed to cultivate, I had to find a way to tell people — family — no.

And so I tried. At first I often would try to soften anything I said. “Could you maybe, possibly think about how that might have come across. It was kind of mean.” or “I’m not really comfortable with that, would it be possible to maybe do something else?” And you know what happened?

People got mad anyways.

[[image of quote that says “If I say no to someone and they get angry, it does NOT mean I should’ve said yes”]]

If there is anything that 2018 has taught me, it’s that you can be as accommodating as humanly possible. As nice as humanly possible. As non-intrusive as you can possibly be. And people who are committed to not meeting you halfway will still call you Too Much, Extra, and my personal favorite, Bitchy. People who are not interested in developing healthy relationships with you will never acknowledge or respect your boundaries without a fight, and that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have set those boundaries.

Above all, I’ve learned that setting boundaries feels less like taking care of yourself and more like fighting a war against people who won’t take no for an answer. The problem being that as awful as fighting a war everyday is, fighting this war is necessary, if not mandatory in order to be healthy. The more I found myself not defining what was okay in terms of how people treated me, the more I found myself not saying no, not standing up and speaking my needs, the more miserable I became.

So it begs to ask — which is worse? A slow death by suffocation via those around me because I was too scared to stand up and say no? Or a slowly-fought battle where I potentially lose people, but can ultimately breathe?

[[image of a quote “It is crucial for deeper level recovery that we learn that feelings of fear, shame and guilt are sometimes signs that we have said or done the right thing.They are emotional flashbacks to how we were traumatized for trying to claim normal human privileges.”Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving, Pete walker, pg 78”]]

In Kemeticism, we talk about how isfet has to be battled back every day. The gods have no choice but to engage in this daily battle, or be destroyed by the thing they fight. Every time I’ve talked to the NTRW about fighting back isfet, they don’t seem to be too distraught over it. It’s just a thing that they Have To Do if they want to live a certain quality of life, and there is very little baggage tied to it at this point.

As I continue to work on drawing boundaries for myself, I begin to think more about this comparison, and how if I allow other people to constantly take advantage of me, how my life will be overrun with isfet. How I can’t, in good conscience, tell myself that I’m trying to live in ma’at while not actively trying to dispel the isfet I’ve inadvertently let in my life. I remind myself that anything worth having is worth fighting for, and if I’m not worth fighting for, then what is?

And so the battle continues. May it get easier to do, and feel less like a battle in time. For all of us.

How do boundaries play a role in your life? How do you create boundaries in your life?

Resources for developing boundaries:

• Boundary Myths
• Kaleidoscopes of Chaos
• Normalizing No
• You Must Validate Yourself
• Boundary Reminders
• Befriending Yourself
• https://satsekhem.wordpress.com/?s=boundar&submit=Search

 

How to Build a Heart: The Curious Case of Father-Lover

This is a series that I have been working on since 2016. Some of the parts of this series were written back in 2016, and other parts were written here in 2018. This series will focus on astral work and the heka I’ve been experimenting in tandem with said work. Abuse will be discussed, as such, viewer discretion is advised.

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There is a saying about times and measures and desperation. In the astral, it seems like rocks and hard places are always the norm. This is a story of when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object, and the aftermath that comes with it.

This story is long, and so I am breaking this into a series of posts for your ease of reading. This work is still ongoing, and as such, it may be a while before I am able to draw any heavy or final conclusions about certain aspects of what will be discussed and its possible that there will be long breaks in between posts in this series as I wait for things to develop/happen. In many ways, you can consider this series to be similar to my Mysteries and Cycle series back in the day.

Late in the summer of 2015, I wrote about losing an astral partner that was close (and yet oh, so, far) to me. I bring this up, because as it turns out, there was another part of this person running around on the astral at the same time. Lo, this other shard had been around just about as long as the person I lost (about ten years our time), and was still hanging around when my partner finally passed on. The biggest issue was that I didn’t realize what or who he was until after the other piece had passed on. I didn’t realize a lot of things until after that person passed on.

Nothing brings families together or tears them apart quite like death.

I had learned that my mentor was not only a shard of the person who had passed, but was in fact the creator and source of that person. To say that the man we eventually called “Father-Lover” was a shard of the person who had passed was technically incorrect–the man who had passed was actually a shard of Father-Lover.

As I began to sift through the history between all of us, I found that this goes deeper than just that. The mentor that I had been working with since college was far more than just a father-figure to me once upon a time. Oh no, just being a mentor is not enough for this dog and pony show. We call him Father-Lover for a reason, for he was more than just my “father.” He had been a lover of mine once upon a time, too.

But wait, there’s more!

It turns out that he and I used to be one, except at the time, he was whole and complete and looked like someone else entirely. But after he lost too much of himself, he changed. The problem being that we were still attached at the hip and technically have been ever since. My musings about my heart feeling literally broken after Rosetjau suddenly made sense to me: when I had “reset” my mentor, I had inadvertently reset part of myself. Killing him meant killing a part of myself.

There are many take-away lessons that I could pass on to you from trying to heal Father-Lover.

One is that you should never place your most important bits into someone else. It’s a surefire way to be screwed over. If not by you, by someone else. Ultimately, you need to be responsible for your own well being. No one else should do it for you because eventually that someone else will be compromised, and its just easier to keep track of yourself when you contain your most-important pieces.

Similarly, cutting yourself off from yourself doesn’t work, either. Like magnets, eventually you will attract yourself back into yourself, and if you’ve been trying avoid that scenario, the results are usually pretty catastrophic when the inevitable comes to pass. For those of us who can’t literally cut ourselves into smaller beings that are separate, the equivalent would be ignoring parts of yourself that need addressing. Repressing feelings and issues that need to be worked on only works until it doesn’t anymore. And by the time that it doesn’t work, things are usually going to be in shambles.

Another lesson is that you should never put all of your eggs into one basket. Trying to push off the work because it’s too painful only goes so far. As I found out, Father-Lover had been banking on my partner to “succeed” him, but when my partner firmly refused because he didn’t feel it was his place (him being a shard, he felt it was more proper for the source to have that honor), two wills clashed and my partner’s won out. Father-Lover had spent so much time banking on this other person doing the heavy lifting that he was nearly crushed by the weight of his choices.

And keep in mind that if he is crushed, I get crushed, too. Being one person will do that to you. His actions not only affected himself, but myself and others that are contained within me or attached to me. That’s a lesson, too: things rarely just affect you. There is always collateral damage. You should be considerate of who you are screwing over in the process of saving your skin or avoiding work. The main reason my partner could never heal is partially because his source refused to heal. None of our attempts ever took because we were treating symptoms, but never addressing the source. Separating himself (my partner) from himself (Father-Lover) wasn’t stopping the bleed-through from occurring. If anything, it just made the healing process more difficult.

Once I knew who Father-Lover actually was, and what role he played in all of this, I set out to finish what I had started with my partner. To an extent, my partner’s death didn’t change anything–we still needed to fix the source of the problem in order to un-knot all of the threads keeping us here. My partner dying didn’t relieve Father-Lover of his duty. Instead, it forced it upon him.

I began working on him at the end of 2015. I don’t know if you’ve ever had to suddenly learn that someone you’ve thought of as a father was actually your lover before Things Happened, but it makes for awkward situations and tension. Even if Father-Lover had been intent on fixing himself (he wasn’t), I think we would have had issues doing the work simply because his facade had been destroyed. He could no longer hide who he was, or what we were “supposed” to be. It’s like when Christine pulls the mask off of the Phantom. By removing his veneer, I had changed the relationship permanently.

While our relationship as mentor-mentee was pretty smooth and drama-free, as soon as we began to shift into whatever-this-is-supposed-be, I found that he became drastically more and more unstable. As he worked to take up his “proper” role (that is to say–as an equal, and not so much as a mentor–the lover stuff was only as relevant as we wanted it to be), I found that he began to bleed into every other area of my relationships. He’d co-opt songs and symbols that had already been claimed by other menz. He’d infect, claim, and overlay onto others bond lines without consent. He’d have bouts of jealousy and anger where he lashed out at my other menz for being around me, or at me for being around them.

For all intents and purposes, the act of healing him was doing the exact opposite. But as I’ve mentioned before, if you don’t want to heal, odds are you won’t.

As the weeks began to span into months, his actions got worse and worse. I soon found myself locked in a black space where I couldn’t get out and no one else could get in. His being a part of myself was becoming my downfall as he had access to every part of me. It wasn’t hard for him to control things from a deeper level because he had his hands in nearly everything, and to a degree, knew my innards better than I did.

By the time that April 2016 rolled around, I knew that something needed to give. I just wasn’t sure how it was going to give. This is that rock and hard place, those desperate times and measures. In the same way that the unstoppable will of my now-dead partner collided with the immovable will of Father-Lover in 2015, my unstoppable will to survive this was about to collide with Father-Lover’s immovable will to heal or let go.

I took actions into my own hands. Well, asleep me took action into my own hands.

I went to bed on Saturday night, and everything was fine (as fine as being locked in an endless vat of black can be), but by the time Sunday morning rolled around, I had found that I had had some sort of altercation while asleep. There were Taint stains on my hands and shirt, and it was obvious to me that something had happened.

It would take most of the day for me to figure out what exactly, though. The short version was that I was tired of Father-Lover’s waffling on the issues at hand, and in order to force a change, I removed all of his pieces from myself. Now, for those of you who don’t know much about bonding, this process is usually not easy or fun. After my partner died, I had to go and have everything removed from my person for safety reasons, and it was a thoroughly-planned week-long affair. This, on the other hand, was done very haphazardly, and it wasn’t just bond lines. As I had mentioned above, we were merged on a core level. Which means that removing him from my person involved removing the bulk of my core and giving it back to him.

I had essentially ripped the heart out of my chest and given it to him. That way, he had everything that was “his” (what truly is “his” or “mine” when you are technically one being…) and I was no longer liable to fix his problems. And before I even hit the floor from the pain, he had left.

Ultimately he never came back. He drew his final breaths a few months later when things truly drew to a close for us.

This, of course, left me wondering what to do about my missing core-bits. Losing small chunks of yourself is not a huge deal, but this was probably well over 3/4th’s of my core that I had forked over in a possible fit of spite. I had people who could help me on the astral for stabilizing myself out, but the bulk of the work would fall to me. You can’t rely on someone else to make you, after all.

It was on the very same day that I had woken up a complete Taint-stained mess that my partner (in the physical) had found an old jar in the cupboard. When I looked at it, I knew that I wanted to use it for an ib project of some kind. And by the end of the day when I had figured out what all had transpired, I knew that which ib project I would be relegating it to. Now I just had to figure out how to actually make it happen.

 

 

Inch by Inch

One of the things that marked my two years of hell was an overwhelming sorrow that I almost always felt. I mean, the sorrow wasn’t new — I knew it was there. But when my brain finally gave up the ghost, the floor that had separated me from that sorrow seemingly disappeared and I was dragged into the sorrow-filled depths below. I have no clue if its accurate, but I feel as though I’d been stuffing all of my sadness into this big ol’ hole in my head, and then disassociating myself away from it as not to let it effect me. Likely, this is due to the fact that my family doesn’t deal well with emotions. Crying is just not something you’re really allowed to do, and so I did everything in my power to never cry and never show any emotion that could be used against me.

But when the floor disappears and you’re drowning in it 24/7, there is no real way to escape it. It becomes an all-consuming totality that is your waking existence.

As such, we tried to address this in therapy. We didn’t talk about the Ocean of sorrow very often, but whenever I’d brush up against it, I’d tell her that my sadness was too large to handle or figure out what to do with. And whenever I got too close to it, it became too overwhelming and Too Much for me to even maintain any semblance of control or ability to even do anything with the feelings that were consuming me.

During one of our last sessions together, I went into a place that existed astrally, but had seemingly been inaccessible to me since 2016. I navigated through these dark hallways and came to a large sphere where my ocean of sadness was seemingly held (don’t ask me, that’s just how it goes with this stuff.) I told me therapist that it hurt to look at it, hurt to touch it. That there was no way I could do anything with such a large sphere. It was too big and too precarious to move, and any attempts to make it smaller were not producing anything.

But because in EMDR-styled therapy we’re bypassing a lot of your conscious brain and letting the subconscious bits do the work, my mind showed me that we could poke a bunch of small holes into the sphere. And that slowly the water would drain, making it more manageable for me to handle. I remember the therapist asking me why I didn’t do these smaller things that would help with the sadness, and I told her that I didn’t fee like it was actually doing anything. She reminded me that Rome wasn’t built in a day and that each journey is made of a bunch of small individual steps. That if I wanted to make progress, sometimes that progress has to be made one tiny little inch at a time. But reminded me that it’s still progress.

I spent years not handling the sadness, partially because I didn’t know how and partially because I didn’t want to, and by the time it came to a point where I needed to do something about it, lest it end me, I found myself expecting to be able to do one or two “somethings” that would make huge dents in this sorrow, and therefore bring me relief.

If there is something that I think many of us do that ultimately hinders our progress in life, it’s that so many of us seem to walk around with the idea that we just need to perform one or two Big Actions to make a Thing happen for us. We lose track of the fact that all of our decisions matter. Every single one of them. And if we want to make the most progress, we shouldn’t only place an importance or emphasis on one or two choices, but on each and every choice we make.

Not to make my segue too harsh, but I saw a couple of posts a few weeks back that were spawned from a series of tweets that Ed Butler had put out into the world. For those who don’t want to click on the link, here is a copy of the tweets in question:

Someone says they want a relationship with the Gods. Tell them to wander out into the desert and nearly die, or to take an entheogen that will have them puking and hallucinating for hours, and they will do it. Tell them to put a little food in front of an icon and they will not. This is because the former, as hard as they are, are easier insofar as they support the person’s vanity, whereas the simple acknowledgment of the reality of the God embodied in the offering of food to an image is like a mortification. One could say that this is because the sinfulness of idolatry has been peculiarly thoroughly indoctrinated into people, but I think that the strangely stubborn aversion in those otherwise nominally inclined points instead to a resistance based in narcissism. Or perhaps a person feels too self-conscious making offerings to an icon; after all, one can hardly feel self-conscious while dying of thirst in the desert or imagining insects swarming over one’s body. But how interesting it is that they fear the one more than the others.

When I read these tweets, I had so many thoughts as to why someone might choose to do something big and grandiose but not something simple and basic or mundane. And while I do think that Butler is correct in that there is a percentage of us who only want to do things that don’t make us uncomfortable or speak to our vanity (or are, for all intents and purposes, performative), as sat talked about in their post, I think another factor of it comes down to the notion I was talking about above (which is similar to the take that this post over here took.)

Which is that so many of us seem to think that one or two Big Things is better than regular/daily smaller inane “useless” things.

I can give you countless examples where I’ve seen this play out in so many different ways across various communities. Where people discount things that appear to be too simple, too small, too mundane. We’re waiting for the One Important Thing that we have to do that will kick off the middle-of-the-movie montage that will rocket us towards our future Selves that we were always supposed to be.

And in that context, I feel its less about appealing to vanity, and more that we’re waiting for one or two major decisions to balance out all of the smaller decisions that we neglected to own or make–for a multitude of reasons (giving up power is another post.) Just like my younger self choosing to tuck those emotions away instead of handling them, I gave up the chance to work through that sadness while it was still small and manageable, up until I had no choice but to face it in its overwhelming totality. And even then, I thought that the idea of letting out a little bit of sadness here or a little bit there was never going to amount to anything of note. I wasn’t trying to turn it into a big production for my ego, I was simply underestimating how much power can be found in these smaller bouts of release.

Now, I want to add a caveat for all of my spoonie readers out there — please keep in mind that this isn’t a post about running yourself into the ground. This isn’t about doing all of the things all the time, nor is it about bludgeoning people in the head with ideas about how gods won’t ever possibly like people don’t do “enough work” in their religious lives or anything like that.

If anything, I am urging everyone reading to remember that every decision has weight. That we can all accomplish more in our lives if we do the tiny things that seem insignificant now, but will ultimately bear fruit later on. That there is no shame in making a practice or life of small, simple things, because those things may lead to amazing places if you let them.

I have found that handling my sorrow a little bit at a time, scratching out some notes here or there, drawing a picture or two, writing a blog post… that these little things slowly allow me to let my sadness out, and allow me to heal a little bit at a time. I don’t feel healed or 100% better yet, but I can tell that it’s getting easier because I keep working at it little by little.

Even if it seems too simple, remember that there is power in simple things. Just because its small doesn’t mean its insignificant.

What role does simple acts play in your practice or life? How often do you consider the weight of these simple acts?