The essay portion of Shadow Medicine is now always available to all subscribers. To gain access to the self-reflection questions, embodiment exercise, and tarot spread/questions, (and to support my writing in general), please consider becoming a paid subscriber.
To connect with our core (self, values, essence), we need to do the uncomfortable (and often painful and disorienting) work of peeling back everything we’ve been told we are and should be, examining it and then dislodging it from our body, psyche, and being to create space for who we are, who we want to be, who we could be without the social indoctrination we have internalized.
This work invites us to be curious. About relationships (and everything we’ve been told about them), what is “normal,” (and how those narratives keep us compliant and complicit to harmful, dehumanizing systems), and what of this “material” realm actually matters (the new shiny toy or the mycelium underground, the fancy outfit or feeling at home under our own skin, remaining hyper protective of ourselves or opening to deep connections and intimacy with a variety of beings). It is an invitation to deconstruct everything we ever thought we knew to be true. And more importantly it is an invitation to create something, a life, a world, that was once unimaginable.
A truth is, we know. We know our Core Self. We know everything we’ve been indoctrinated with is false. We know our ability to flow with radical change is directly related to our ways of nurturing, nourishing, tending each other and ourselves. We know that we both need to find ways to “self” regulate and that there is actually no such thing as true “self” regulation, that we are constantly co-regulating to our environments (inner and outer). We know we, as a species, are not meant to be in boxes, toiling, separate from the soil, the sun, the ever flowing water of rain, rivers, oceans. We know we are far more interconnected and interdependent than our “individualistic,” imperialist society wants us to acknowledge.
We know this, our Core Being knows this, and this inner knowing creates a dissonance within our mind, body, soul. This dissonance is then expressed through mental “disorders,” chronic physical illnesses, disconnection and dissociation from our body and each other, committing violence to other living beings. We find ourselves lashing out at the wrong things, people, places, because we know what is happening is wrong but we haven’t yet unraveled exactly what is wrong, still buying into the stories of who and how and what we should be to fit into the machine of capitalism, white supremacy, patriarchy. We are still buying into the stories of toxic monogamy, toxic masculinity and femininity, individual exceptionalism, spiritual bypassing and thereby not actually living our lives but rather playing a role and calling it a life.
Untangling the indoctrination we all have been spoon fed since conception is work that goes against the status quo and therefore can leave us feeling lost, alone, in a desperate search for our people, frustrated, angry, and feeling incredibly powerless to change the greater world.
And.
While the process of shattering the false illusions fed to us by the harmful systems of our society involves discomfort, and even pain, it can also contain joy, pleasure, and a depth of connection (to ourselves, other humans, the planet, the universe) we never before dreamed possible.
Why is it vulnerable to show up as ourselves? Why is it risky to tell or show a person how we feel? Why do we fear the very things we crave and actually need for our survival (individually and collectively)? Why do we accept the false safety promised by harmful systems, knowing in our every fiber it is not safe at all? Why are we stuck in the either/or thinking of absolutes and not swimming in the nondual reality that all things, even contradicting things, can be (and are) true all at once?
Coming home to our body, moving out of dissociation and disconnection, and allowing ourselves to feel, actually feel, the discomfort of the dissonance between our own inner knowing of reality and the fabricated reality we have been told to believe in, happens in layers, stages, over the rest of our lifetime. It is not linear and once we step on the path, once we see what was once unseeable, there is no turning back, no unknowing what is now known, what has always been known by our body, soul, even parts of our mind. Once we peel back the veil we can no longer gaslight ourselves (or allow harmful systems to gaslight us) into believing the story that it’s always been done this way nor that the harmful ways of doing and being are “right”. We cannot unsee, unknow, unfeel the reality of what actually is once the fantasy that has been woven around us shatters and disintegrates before our eyes.
We often fear this shattering, not knowing what is on the other side of it. We don’t know how to exist in new paradigms because they’ve never existed. Our brains prefer to suffer under the devil they know rather than leap into the unknown.
Our spirits, our souls, other parts of our humanity however crave this unknown, this new paradigm. These parts of us get excited about possibility, become flooded with curiosity and ingenuity. These parts want more and more and more different, new, previously unimagined.
We have all these conflicting parts, each of them fighting for our survival both individually and collectively. The parts that are trying to play by the rules and just get by alongside the parts that want to burn it all down and start on a completely blank canvas. How do we sit with the dissonance? How do we manage our needs for safety and belonging? How do we honor the parts of us resistant to change and the parts that want nothing but change?
How do we find ways back to our body, back to the earth, back to relationships that are nurturing and nourishing? Slowly. Quietly. Sometimes loudly and or quickly. In fits and starts. By allowing the natural flow of our personal rhythm of expansion and contraction while also syncing up with the rhythms of nature. By allowing the discomfort of change to be acceptable. By acknowledging the internal and external dissonance and opening the floodgates to the generations of grief, loss, and pain that live within. By finding, practicing, embracing the celebrations and rituals of the people who came before us and adapting them to our current timeline, our current path, our current world and by creating completely new rituals that could have never existed in the past for any variety of reasons.
Finding our way back to our body, back to the earth, back to the present while honoring the past and allowing the future to unfold in its own time is a practice in creating internal and external touchstones throughout our days and our lives. It invites us into playful curiosity to see what feels good for us right now, what fits, what doesn’t fit, what could fit in the future. It is acknowledging the only consistent thing in the whole of our very human experience is change, and this includes the evoloution (and devolution) of rituals that have been passed down through the generations.
In southern Italian tradition, it was essentially forbidden to write down spells, prayers, rituals, even recipes. Some say this is because we didn’t want others to “steal” our traditions and use them against us. Others say it is because many of our ancestors didn’t use written language, so everything was passed down orally. Regardless, the message that seems to have been internalized through the generations is that we cannot share our family traditions and secrets to outsiders.
In the current age, and especially since the internet and social media became a part of daily life, many who come from those southern Italian traditions have written things down and are sharing them. I don’t find this to be wrong or bad or even going against our own culture. It is part of our evolution of humanity.
And.
I am also curious if our ancestors had a deeper wisdom at play. If they knew that the prayers, the rituals, stories, even recipes, were living entities in and of themselves, that needed to be given the space to change over time, as passed from one generation to the next. I wonder if they understood on some soul level that writing down these traditions would ultimately kill them, forcing them to be stagnant and eventually left to die because they no longer worked or fit with the daily lives of their decendents. I question the idea of “preserving” our cultural traditions, when perhaps those traditions were never meant to be preserved, mummified, embalmed, but rather were meant to grow and change and adapt to the ways each generation needed them, while others were meant to be composted, buried, given back to the earth, the air, the water, the gods and goddesses.
As humans, we tend to look for our roots in the past. I believe there are important things for us to witness from the past, and that we shouldn’t stop at only witnessing them. To grieve and celebrate, to see both the struggles and the joy, to embrace the whole of our ancestors as human with very human traits. I believe ancestral work is part of our trauma work as well as our work in the (r)evolution of our current society.
And.
I also believe that a part of the dissonance we each feel within is connected to the ways we try to rigidly adhere to practices and rituals from the past, ones that very much were appropriate and fitting for our ancestors, their environment, their timeline, but that don’t fit or have meaning now. I believe that part of our dissonance is the ways we keep ourselves stuck in the past instead of allowing ourselves to flow between, and stay firmly rooted in, the past, present, and future all at once.
We cannot only look to the past for our roots. We need to see the roots we have right now, to tend to them, to prune approriately and to allow some to go wild. We cannot stay in the past nor should we resurrect it in its entirety, or rigidly, especially if those customs and traditions no longer feel right in our present day bones and sinew.
In order to become congruent, integrated, and resonant with what is, we need to come to the present moment. To become as aware as possible to what is in front of us, next to us, above us, beneath us, within us. To notice the natural rhythms most of our ancestral traditions grew from. To surrender ourselves to those rhythms and to see what is born from this connection. To feel our very present-moment body, its discomfort, its dissonance, its pleasure, its resonance. To acknowledge its cravings, its wantings, longings. To feed and nurture what is now, which may in part include a connection to the past, but and should not include a complete revival of the past. To integrate what came before with what is now, creating space for what is to become.
The lunar eclipse in Scorpio, invites us to let go of what no longer serves us, what no longer nourishes us, what no longer nutures us. It invites us to come into the now, to shed past versions of us that no longer fit. It invites us to find resolution to the dissonance and settle into resonance. It invites us to look back at the last 18 months (and or ~20 years - the last lunar eclipse cycle in Scorpio ended in May 2004) and see what has come to fruition, what is ready to harvest, what is ready to allow to lay fallow. It invites us to let go of the past to create space for the now, for what is unfolding, for what is coming into being.
Eclipses are part of the rhythm of the earth, of nature, of our universe. They inspired ritual for our ancestors, and while we may not know precisely what those rituals were, we can create our own. Rituals can be as simple as taking the day off to rest, sit in prayer or meditation, make a specific meal, light a candle, go for a hike or walk, pulling some Tarot or oracle cards… ritual is anything we want it to be, as long as we are doing it with intention. Ritual is one path to connecting to our Core (self, values, essence). It is a way of coming home, again and again, to our ancestors, to past versions of ourselves, and to the now, to our body, our mind, our soul; to come back into “right relationship” with everything and everyone around and within us. It is an opportunity to both celebrate and grieve what was and is no longer. It is a chance to practice connecting to the dissonance within and to feel the ways to create change and find peace and resonance within ourselves and in the world.
Some questions to explore…