"Expansion" sculpture by Paige Bradley As I lay face down and naked on the massage table, whatever it was, came unattached, and began to pour out with each exhale, some moments it felt like liquid, others like a chain link slithering out, others almost like a rubber band unmoored from points stretched throughout me and snapping out. It seems to have been attached to every nerve strand in my entire body. Then it felt as if a crust was cracking all over my skin and falling away in pieces and chunks. After the crust was gone more seemed to break to the surface in tiny openings everywhere - I had a sense that the Earth was absorbing all of it, taking it and repurposing it. Finally I felt a swirling galaxy expanding from my solar plexus through my whole physical and etheric body, swishing through and making sure there was none left hiding inside my cellular, and even subatomic structure.
I have made it a practice to get body work done once a month for decades, sometimes it’s about a hip tight from too much driving, or shoulders tight from too much writing, but mostly it’s about my own energy, memories, or traumas needing to be loosened and released. For the last two years it’s also been a lot of deep ancestor work as well, as I have negotiated with several lines of my ancestry to release their energy, memories, and traumas from the DNA that they passed down.
This was different.
Afterwards I said to my amazing body worker and healer, Kaelynn Waggoner, “I feel about a hundred pounds lighter.” She smiled wisely and we debriefed the experience from her perspective and mine.
I am still unsure exactly what it was, but for the past three months I have been obsessively monitoring and engaging with the political situation in my country, the USA, and around the world. I have been carefully curating conversations with, and sometimes among, folks from all points on the political spectrum, encouraging civil discourse, vetting news sources, trying to understand and honor the lived experience of others, even when it is very different from mine. I have been doing this in person as well as in the world online. I think what I was also doing, without clear cognition, was absorbing out of circulation a portion of the energy of the pain, anger, vitriol, lies, fear, and violence that I encountered, especially online. What I think I was doing, without cognition, was taking it into my own body and attempting to alchemically neutralize it.
This is not my usual mode of magick. I have not, to my knowledge, brought work into my body to change it, I generally, with their permission, let power and healing flow through me to others and situations, or pull pain and trauma out of people and, without taking it into my own body, ground it in the Earth, or dissolve it in the Water, or burn it in the Fire, or scatter it on the Wind, or offer it to The Mystery.
I am not sure why the whole of me decided to do this other kind of magical work without letting my cognition in on it. Maybe I knew that if I knew, I would be too frightened to even try it. I have seen the damage that mode of magick can do to everyone involved if not done carefully.
I have been working for years with some unlikely allies within my body, including a common virus that now lives throughout my nervous system and seems to have reworked it. It may be that that process has finally reached a point where I can also use absorbing and transforming magick to take out of circulation a portion of the swirl of fear and hatred we are finding ourselves awash in right now. Although I am still cautious about that process.
I am curious to hear about other people’s experiences with this kind of magick. In any case, as I check in with myself I seem to be fine, and certainly feel amazing now that the portion I absorbed and transformed has been released.
Blessings on all of us as we move through all the work to be done in this world, both on a personal level, and widening out to the whole.
I have made it a practice to get body work done once a month for decades, sometimes it’s about a hip tight from too much driving, or shoulders tight from too much writing, but mostly it’s about my own energy, memories, or traumas needing to be loosened and released. For the last two years it’s also been a lot of deep ancestor work as well, as I have negotiated with several lines of my ancestry to release their energy, memories, and traumas from the DNA that they passed down.
This was different.
Afterwards I said to my amazing body worker and healer, Kaelynn Waggoner, “I feel about a hundred pounds lighter.” She smiled wisely and we debriefed the experience from her perspective and mine.
I am still unsure exactly what it was, but for the past three months I have been obsessively monitoring and engaging with the political situation in my country, the USA, and around the world. I have been carefully curating conversations with, and sometimes among, folks from all points on the political spectrum, encouraging civil discourse, vetting news sources, trying to understand and honor the lived experience of others, even when it is very different from mine. I have been doing this in person as well as in the world online. I think what I was also doing, without clear cognition, was absorbing out of circulation a portion of the energy of the pain, anger, vitriol, lies, fear, and violence that I encountered, especially online. What I think I was doing, without cognition, was taking it into my own body and attempting to alchemically neutralize it.
This is not my usual mode of magick. I have not, to my knowledge, brought work into my body to change it, I generally, with their permission, let power and healing flow through me to others and situations, or pull pain and trauma out of people and, without taking it into my own body, ground it in the Earth, or dissolve it in the Water, or burn it in the Fire, or scatter it on the Wind, or offer it to The Mystery.
I am not sure why the whole of me decided to do this other kind of magical work without letting my cognition in on it. Maybe I knew that if I knew, I would be too frightened to even try it. I have seen the damage that mode of magick can do to everyone involved if not done carefully.
I have been working for years with some unlikely allies within my body, including a common virus that now lives throughout my nervous system and seems to have reworked it. It may be that that process has finally reached a point where I can also use absorbing and transforming magick to take out of circulation a portion of the swirl of fear and hatred we are finding ourselves awash in right now. Although I am still cautious about that process.
I am curious to hear about other people’s experiences with this kind of magick. In any case, as I check in with myself I seem to be fine, and certainly feel amazing now that the portion I absorbed and transformed has been released.
Blessings on all of us as we move through all the work to be done in this world, both on a personal level, and widening out to the whole.
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