scared to make magic

Let me start right here: this is a tough post to publish. My inner critic is going berserk right now: “this is way too conceptual and esoteric and woo woo, it’s completely self-absorbed and it’s about making yourself feel/look spiritual rather than helping anyone else”. It also feels dangerous.

So I’m diving in…

This past week, with help from a dear friend, I looked into my reluctance to take and claim space. The behaviour was showing up as being so easily distracted whenever anyone else was around that I couldn’t make time for a morning routine or homework for different courses I’m completing or even for reading a book. I wanted to get to the bottom of it now, while I’m still sharing living space with another person, because I want the ability to remain centred while also being in the world. Because I don’t want to have to live on top of a rock for the rest of my life in order to feel connected with Her.

The core issue (as is so often the case in my world) was safety. Part of my psyche had decided it wasn’t safe to be alone with my Soul in this body and it wanted to merge with the other person in order to have some company. But because other people can’t be trusted and are inherently threatening, merging is also unsafe. I saw a kind of ‘double bind’ that I’d seen before, where either choice ends in terror… even if that terror is buried in the body instead of being fully felt and acknowledged.

But this time, I also saw something fresh. I saw that all those movements – towards and away, inside and outside – are choices. Even as an infant, before I had the language to describe or understand it, I was choosing to separate from my own Soul and from other people and from the present moment and from the world.

All the ideas I’d ever had about separation suddenly showed themselves to be a story. But in the context of that choice, it was a story of victimhood. And in the seeing, the story lost most of its power.

And then I saw something much bigger. I’d been getting a sense of some fear around the magic that could emerge from inside this space I’ve created. Suddenly I could see witches – every kind of witch that has ever been. Pagan and dreadlocked hippy and herbalist/midwife and indigenous elder and even cartoon witches, being vilified and persecuted and murdered.

There was a lot of fire. We were all connected to a huge cauldron. In reality, what we were connected to was the shared consciousness of the victim.

I suddenly got very clear that, although bad things were most certainly done to us, we chose to abandon ourselves in response. We also chose to abandon Mama Earth when we severed our connection with ourselves, with each other and with her. And we’ve all been grieving those choices, mostly unaware of the cause of our collective sadness, for eons. For a moment, I thought the grief would tear my chest apart.

But my chest stayed whole (turns out the human heart really can hold it all). And in seeing the choice, a new set of options showed up. Because we can choose differently now. We can choose to move away from fear and towards love, again and again and again, in both huge and tiny ways.

And even though the world feels overwhelming, it shouldn’t. Even though it’s easy to believe the forces of darkness are winning, they aren’t. Even though it feels easier to collapse into fear, we would do better to resist the temptation.

Because there is no greater force than all of us, choosing to be here for ourselves and for each other and for Mama. We are the magic we’ve lost. And in our recognition of our collective power to choose, lies our salvation.