Practice Resistance / Shifting Energy Insights

On Thursday I had a fascinating experience with shifting energy in my body, one that led to a couple of important insights.

I was home sick that day, after Wolfling had the flu for three days and I spent most of the earliest hours of the morning awake, in a mild fever, and fraught with fear and pessimism about my ability to provide for myself and my child in the years to come. I got up sometime after 9am, twiddled around the computer for a while, then took some aspirin and went back to bed. I didn't fall asleep, but eventually the headache which had plagued me all morning subsided.

I lay there in bed and realized that my energy was too jangled to sleep. I called on LM, and he helped me "comb out" the tangles -- but then I realized that it felt like my center was full of the energetic equivalent of pus. I had the unusual desire to take a spiritual knife to the place and lance myself, letting all the nastiness drain away.

Hmmm. . . . just now remembering that it's only been a few week since I felt like I was putting my guts back into that space. Maybe this is an indication of a need for additional healing around that process. . .

My phone beeped, and I found a site notification from a friend, A, asking if I was alright, because he hadn't seen me online for a while. I decided I might as well get up. I logged into chat, and one of the first things he said was that it felt to him as if I was "filled with miasma" -- which startled me. He then strongly suggested that I do a full-day cleanse.

( Cut for your friends page )

Then I called my teacher to tell her about the experience. We agreed that this is pretty firm support for the hypothesis that I have some kind of binding that's trying to keep me from this particular aspect of my work. We don't know where it comes from, but a past-life situation seems the most likely, that someone -- whether myself or someone(s) else -- at some point decided that it was not desireable to have me practicing ceremonial magic.

I'm intrigued and curious about the possibilities, but I'm not going to spend much energy worrying about when/why/how. My immediate task is to continue to do the work of facing my internal obstacles as they arise. When I flail and growl and get upset, they get stronger. When I sit quietly and look them in the eye, they slink away.

The challenge is remembering to stop and look them in the eye rather than muscling my way through or allowing avoidance patterns to take over.

Surprises / Ritual To-Do

I had some very surprising things come up in last night's meditation, having to do with the gendered nature of certain energies -- at least as I experience them -- and how they relate to my personal power and sovereignty. More on that as I work through it.

In the latter part of that meditation session I realized that I need to do a power reclaiming ritual. I could suddenly see so clearly the different aspects of myself, my potency, my sovereignty, my sense of possibility, that I had surrendered to others -- usually to people who never asked for it to begin with or who would have been dismayed to realize what I had done. I've also siphoned off pieces of myself and given them to characters I've created in gaming or writing, and I need to take back myself from them as well. (I worked through the initial understanding of that in a series of posts about my "glorious shadow" on my primary journal a couple of years ago.)

I need to go into ritual space, name the power I've given up, and to whom, and why it seemed like a good idea at the time, and then take that power back -- while re-affirming the relationships but on new terms.

As always, the primary comfort in realizing I'm revisiting old work is that I *am* doing so in a new way, which means that I have been making progress.

Community

I need to re-learn how to do commumnity.

I feel so isolated these days -- and have for quite some time.
Not having the day job makes it even more acute.

The last communities I had were the WIT group of women from my former church, four or five of us who met regularly for mutual support and encouragement -- including three of them coming over at 9pm one night to help me bail out the all-time worst flood in my basement -- but that group dissolved several years ago. The other most recent "community" was Hob and the Welshman and I are the rest of our gaming group imploded. We were confidantes, did things together. . . Then, a few years ago, the Welshman simply stopped returning emails and phonecalls. Hob and I are still friends, but the sense of community was lost.

I have friendships, but none of them are within the context of community. I see them all around me, but feel bewildered as to how to hook in -- and part of me isn't sure that I want to. But I'm growing to hate the feeling of isolation, of having only myself to turn to, of not having any place to share face-to-face and do things with others.

I guess I need to check the MeetUp site again. . . I'm not sure what else to do.