My journey with kinesiology started many years ago, and after experiencing so many benefits myself, I wanted to become qualified so I could share the benefits with the world. Kinesiology can assist:
Improved sleep patterns
Relaxation techniques
Chronic pain/illness
Muscle/Joint/TMJ problems
Improved energy flow
And much more!
If you'd like to make a booking, click here.
Or read: What is kinesiology?
Tarot
I've been reading tarot since 2019. I read for myself, as regular self-care practice, and for others, when they want some direction they're not currently getting.
I read tarot and I do a damn good job.
What happens when you want to re-route your energy? When you want to feel more clear-minded? Tarot cards have a way of inviting us to look at life just how we need to when we're trying to solve those tricky little mysteries.
Tarot can be for:
Grounding
Meditation
Relaxation
Self-reflection
Look at my instagram if you like ;) but there aren't many current things up there.* If you want to make a tarot booking, here is the link.
I'm looking at putting up some testimonials from other people who've received readings soon!
With love xox
Hi! Welcome to my booking page for kinesiology and tarot in Townsville, QLD. You can read more about me at https://gardenofhera.tumblr.com/
Image: Ramon Casas, Au Moulin de la Galette, 1892, oil on canvas, Museum of Montserrat, Barcelona, Spain
*Sorry, I don't really update insta much lately because the algorithm is a nightmare, but it shows you a bit of what I'm about.
The tarot has been through many iterations since its inception. Originally, it was made popular in French and Italian parlour games.
These days, Tarot is a popular tool for future telling, connecting with the spirits and the Universe, and entertainment purposes.
A damn good tarot reader in Townsville
My history with tarot starts in 2019, at a bookstore. I was with my friend, who had been reading tarot since her early teens. She told me it was a fun thing to do at parties or hanging with friends, and it was a nice way of connecting with her inner self.
So, I bought a deck and a book, and we sat for a couple of weeks with the tarot cards, and any time we had a funny question, or a philosophical riddle, we'd pull a card and talk about its relevance to our day.
From that time onwards I became friends with the Tarot. I've read heaps of books, and done readings for friends, family, and paying clients.
Why get a tarot reading?
Tarot can be used for self-reflection, meditation, and problem-solving. In fact, I use it in my everyday life to ground myself with the energies of the day.
People come to me asking for tarot for:
Fun and entertainment
Self-enquiry
Curiosity
Wanting to connect more with their intuition
Guidance and decision-making
Some things to note
The tarot cards can be used to shed light on your life. Instead of thinking tarot is a future-telling crystal ball, think of it as a magnifying glass, or a mirror. There are many things that the mirror reflects, but once you're done with the mirror, it is you who decides what clothes to wear and which direction you walk in.
If you want, you can sit in meditation and take a few deep breaths at the beginning of the reading. This will help ground your energy and calm the nervous system, allowing for deeper focus and an ability to fully be present during the session.
1. I do tarot readings for people who are 18+ only.
2. I will hold space with anyone who seeks a session from me. No matter your sexual orientation, gender identity, racial identity, ethnicity, cultural identity, religion, beliefs, ability, socioeconomic status, social class, etc
3. Your reading will be treated with the utmost respect for your confidentiality in accordance with the Australian Privacy Act 1998.
4. Your reading will be private. I will not share the contents of your reading with anyone (because you are a sovereign being with your own needs, rights, and energies). You have a right to privacy.
READING ETIQUETTE
Sessions are ~your time to connect~
You are welcome & encouraged to ask questions about how I am deciphering the current information within our allotted reading time. You are also welcome & encouraged to ask for more clarification should something be unclear.
I will be transparent, honest, and forthcoming about my abilities (e.g. I will tell you what I can & cannot sense or intuit for you). By agreeing to a reading, you acknowledge that the reading takes place in a sacred space of integrity and love.
I do not answer “quick follow-up questions” (or the like) after the reading has finished. Readings will be timed, and an alarm will sound at the end of the reading. Please be sure to ask me whatever you need during our session & respect my time as I respect yours. If you have follow-up questions, please consider booking a follow-up reading.
Disrespectful, abusive, threatening & violent behaviour is not tolerated & will result in the instant termination of the reading without refund.
Please arrive at your appointment sober. If you are under the influence of drugs or alcohol, Ruscello Holistic Health reserves the right to cancel the appointment.
Hi! Welcome to my booking page for kinesiology and tarot in Townsville, QLD. You can read more about me at https://gardenofhera.tumblr.com/
ADVICE POLICY
The tarot process is about empowerment, reflection, and information. The cards may or may not advise you on certain courses of action to take, but it is up to you to action these or not. You are in charge of your life, and your choices are your responsibility. Therefore: I am not going to tell you what to do; your decisions are 100% your own.
If I have an opinion regarding the reading or your queries, I will only give it in the knowledge that it is a subjective opinion which in no way constitutes advice.
Examples of things you might want to ask about include relationships, career, friendships, family, finances, relaxation techniques, self-compassion techniques, and personal growth.
Things I will not read for include (but are not limited to):
lottery numbers;
readings about or on behalf of another person without their knowledge or permission;
predictions of death or illness.
It is a general policy of mine to not make predictions of the future. My tarot practice focuses on self-reflection, personal growth, and meditation.
If you are currently experiencing precarious circumstances regarding your basic needs and resources e.g. food, shelter, healthcare, personal safety, please seek professional assistance from relevant sources (see Disclaimer below).
CANCELLATION/RESCHEDULIING
Should you need to cancel or reschedule please give me 48-hour notice. If you need to cancel less than .48 hours in advance, you will be charged the full fee of the appointment.
PAYMENTS
All readings and services require payment in advance of your appointment. Payments can be made with cash in person, or bank transfer. Payment must be made prior to commencement of the session or the session will not proceed.
DISCLAIMER
By participating in my services/using website you acknowledge that I am not a licensed psychologist, lawyer, financial advisor doctor. You further acknowledge that my services do not replace the care of lawyers, financial advisors, psychologists, doctors, or any other relevant trained professionals. Tarot and numerology are in no way to be construed or substituted as a replacement for any professional service, therapy or medical advice.
I will at all times exercise my best professional efforts, skills, and care. However, I cannot guarantee the outcome of reading efforts. I cannot make any guarantees other than to deliver the services purchased as described.
All my readings are intended for entertainment purposes only.
Interview by Sarah Rowley | DUMBO FEATHER | January 2020
Claire Dunn leads the way, barefoot, down a winding track behind her house to the banks of Birrurung, or the Yarra river. As we sit on the dry grass in the late afternoon of a 40-degree day, the cicadas chirp and there’s a sense of ease despite the intense heat. The only giveaway that we are in Australia’s second largest city is the distant hum of traffic. As I talk with Claire in this little patch of nature, I start to sense how, as humans, we can also find our way back to the wilder parts within ourselves. The chatter of my domesticated mind begins to fade to a distant hum.
Claire is a guide to the wilds inside and out, and her passion is nature-based human development. Since quitting her job campaigning for the Wilderness Society over a decade ago, she has travelled her own mystical path. She left the confines of the offices, shopping centres and other concrete boxes of modernity to discover something deeper, more instinctive. She spent a year in the bush, which she recounts in her memoir My Year Without Matches, and now runs re-wilding events and guides Vision Quests. Since settling back into city life, she’s been writing a second memoir about re-wilding the urban soul.
Why does all this matter right now? One of Claire’s mentors, wilderness guide and psychologist Bill Plotkins, puts it well. He says that reconnecting with nature and our own wildness “not only re-enlivens us as individuals, but also erodes the outworn Western worldview of a meaningless, disenchanted universe upon which life-assailing business-as-usual depends.” For Claire, delving into direct connection with nature helps us to know ourselves more deeply, so that we can grow up and show up for each other—and for the more-than-humanworld—at what is arguably one of the most crucial times for the health and longevity of the planet.
We’re by the river in your garden in Melbourne’s northern suburbs. Do you want to acknowledge the land that we’re on? And also talk a bit about the wildness that’s here?
Sure. Well I just feel incredibly grateful to be living here. To be renting here. And it was one of those strange things where I feel like the land found me rather than me finding the land. Which happens to me with places. But I’m very aware of the long history of human caretaker-ship on this land, by the Wurundjeri people. I’ve spent a lot of time on this riverbank and I’ve often imagined or wondered what was happening on this land. What gatherings and songs and stories were being shared here. So it is a patch of wild-ish nature in the city that I live on. And it deeply feeds me, inspires, grounds, informs my work, my days and doings.
I’ve been thinking about the layers of experience that are present in places. So if I go for a walk along the river here I might think it’s really nice and green and I really enjoy being by the water, it’s better than walking down the street in the suburbs. But if I’m with a friend who has an ecology background she might notice all the invasive species and ways in which the ecosystem has been degraded. And then if I’m with someone who can understand birdcalls then there’s a whole other layer there. So I’m wondering what layers have emerged for you here?
It’s a good question. ’Cause it really is a choice, you know. What am I aware of? What escapes my awareness and what am I attending to? I feel like I’m quite a generalist because I encounter the land through different layers, which overlap to form quite a rich conversation. In one sense I encounter the land like a naturalist—identifying the birds and plants, edibles, weeds. And then there’s the felt sense, how I feel in the place. What does it invite me into? What does it evoke? Then over time, and it’s not something that can be rushed, there’s the layer of dropping into a deeper belonging and conversation and connection. So that layer of mythical relationship with the land takes time. Just like any long-term relationship I guess. You keep uncovering layers, which cultivate this much larger story that’s going on that you can tap into. Mm.
I read on your website one description of your work as “connecting to the wilds both inside and outside of us.” I really liked that, and I wondered if you could talk about how you came to that path and what it means to you?
Another way of saying connecting to the “wild inside” for me is connecting to soul. Because soul is inherently wild. Soul is that unconditioned, mysterious, untamed, undomesticated, unique individual wild core of ourselves which is inextricably connected to the mysteries of wild nature. There’s a reciprocal relationship between soul and wildness. Soul won’t come to know itself inside a box. The language of soul is embedded in all the wild mirrors. Our dreams can be another expression of that wild core. So in essence we are wild. We all have our own ecological niche, our own piece in this giant puzzle—the one thing that only we can bring to the world. And a core part of the spiritual journey is discovering that.
But I’ll double back, how did I come to be focusing on this? Well I was always drawn to the wild. And in my early twenties became an environmental activist. So that was one way of defending the wild in a tangible way. It was a passionate calling, it consumed me. By being the voice for the voiceless, I deeply connected to the plants and animals and birds and wild ones that I was speaking for. Then during that time I started to feel a very strong calling away from that kind of work. But this calling became stronger and it wasn’t a conceptual idea of “I need to do something else,” or, “it’s time for a vocational swap.” It was kind of unbidden and unwelcome in a way, it was like, well, life’s really good and I’m being paid to do this awesome work in the world, so what’s going on here? I became very interested in exploring the human nature connection, spending solo time in nature, depth psychology, dreams, altered states of consciousness and realms of knowing beyond the rational. Because really the world I’d been working in was for the most part very rational. I started having a series of really strong archetypal dreams that were littered with wild creatures, gypsy women, images of dismemberment. Some were truly numinous encounters, both in waking life and dreams. By numinous I mean an encounter beyond the ordinary that feels like it has a strong meaning or significance for you; a communication from the mysteries. I started reading about the stage of life that is initiation and recognised that was what was calling me. I just needed to say yes to it. So the particular path I took then was studying shamanism, wilderness survival skills, tracking and nature observation, earth-based ceremony such as sweat lodge and vision quest. And I went deeply into that path, spent a year living in the bush practicing, living, experiencing, discovering, all those facets of earth-based mysticism essentially. I didn’t call it that at the time but it’s certainly what it is.
This story originally ran in issue #62 of Dumbo Feather
Before you carry on I’m curious about these numinous encounters. Can you describe one of those?
Yeah. So one of them was a dream. In the dream I am looking for the power tree in the forest, the largest, most powerful tree. And I find the tree, a huge spotted gum. Around the base of the tree is a red-bellied black snake that crawled its way up my leg and I push it away in fear. I wander over to a rock ledge and pull out a stone tablet that has an Egyptian symbol on it with the words, “freedom.” And that dream has been working me ever since. The first vision quest that I did I went on a walk, still very much in that altered state. And I pretty much came across the representation of my dream in real life, with the black snake at the base of the tree.
Oh wow.
Didn’t crawl up my leg, but I sat near it and really felt into that fear. At that point I think it was fear of actualisation, fear of my power, fear of really stepping into who I am. And I’ve had other encounters with a powerful owl at the time. Really spoke to me of the world being animate and sentient and conversational. So those encounters opened up that dialogue with the more than human world. Opened the way for me to walk through the world, as if it’s a magical place that is full of mystery and symbolism and meaning. And that this relationship can really tell us something of who we really are.
And so does this idea of mysticism, if we see mysticism as a direct experiential knowing of something that is greater than our personalities and our everyday perceptions of the world, is that a word that speaks to you? Or something that’s been important to you?
I certainly resonate with the idea of it being a lived experience. For many people, spiritual life can be quite conceptual. You can just exist on a diet of podcasts and books and think that’s it. But my feeling about mysticism is that it’s a commitment to actually walk the path. To live from that greater sense of self. To connect to the wider field of intelligence that we’re swimming in. And to realise that as a daily lived experience, or to have regular practices that connect you to that experience. There’s some sense for me of the mystic as bridging the middle world, this daily reality that we’re in, with the other worlds. Bridging ordinary reality with extraordinary reality.
How do we discern between completely projecting on our surroundings, or maybe hallucinating, versus the kind of connection that you’re talking about?
Well the western culture has pretty much colonised our minds to be extraordinarily reliant on rational discursive thought. So much so that we think of the word “imagination” as fantasy or flights of fancy. So it would do us well to err on the side of believing, or at least playing with or entertaining the possibility that the world is conversational and full of meaning and sentience. Opening up the possibility that the world is as interested and curious in us as we are in it. So this idea of bringing back the wild imagination. And the deep imagination really does come from that wellspring of soul and the unconscious, our dream images. And sometimes we just have to have training wheels on, just be like a child again. Or the sacred fool who steps out the front door and says, “I know nothing about this mysterious world and I’m ready to play and to praise the birds and the trees and sing to them and sing to everyone who comes along.” Just playing with that idea of the world being deeply imaginative, ourselves included. And that imagination is actually a language that connects us to that.
So you gave yourself an opportunity to open up to this wild imagination a lot more deeply by spending a whole year living in the bush in northern New South Wales. How was that?
Well it was such a precious time. I mean to have the opportunity to turn my attention so wholeheartedly to nature. I was just so curious. What happens if I take myself as much as I can out of western mind and steep myself in the wild world? What happens to me? What awakens, or what drops away? And one thing was clear was I wanted to spend a lot of time alone. Even though there were others sharing the experience, there was something for me in that solitude that was very intuitively important. Well lots of things happened to me out there [laughs]. I’ll speak to it in a few different ways. Certainly some of the illusion of separateness dropped away. So that
I felt at times this deep restful belonging that is not dependent on anything, it’s not dependent on what I’m doing or who I am in any kind of external sense. It’s just inherent. There’s nothing you have to do to get there.
It’s so against all these self-help books of you know, to achieve this mystical state we have to do this or that practice, this is the opposite. It’s just through intention and time and patience. A true state of connectedness, that true belonging. Just arises like grace. So really to be able to steep myself in that place was an incredible gift. But in a broader way what I was looking for that year was a transformational experience. I didn’t really know what that meant, just that I wanted it. In hindsight what I set myself up for was a rite of passage, within a broader initiatory period. This is something I’ve come to research a lot more ’cause I’m so fascinated by nature-based human development, and really influenced by the work of Bill Plotkin who first introduced me to the concept which then became a lived reality and one that I’ve seen mirrored in so many other people’s experience. The cosmology I’ve come to understand through myth and depth psychology and my own experience is that there are two arms or realms of the spiritual path—the upper world and the lower or underworld. We exist on the middle world day to day. The upper world pulls us to transcend, to connect to what one might call spirit or source or Great Mystery or God, to realise one’s oneness with all. It’s a well-known path in the west. But the pathway that’s been most suppressed and least understood in modern times is the underworld path, which is all the descent. Many myths take us there such as the Greek myths of Persephone or Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey which all speak of this descent to soul where one explores the mysteries of nature and psyche, and often encounters great upheaval, disintegration and chaos in one’s life. And a series of initiatory experiences that shift the centre of gravity from adolescence to adulthood. It’s the capacity of the human to know its depths. To know what its soul’s gifts are, and to go through the crucible in order to come out the other side and bring back the treasures for the village. In the Lord of the Rings terminology it would be going on that arduous journey to find the ring. And then returning, integrating the experience in the middle plain, in the community.
So that year for me was my kind of self-designed initiation because it really broke me open in lots of ways. It was incredibly arduous with significant ordeal and challenge, which was really important. And it regularly altered my state of consciousness so that the deep imagination and dreams were in conversation with the land, in conversation with my soul, and it shook the very foundations of my egoic structure. So all my social identity dropped away because there’s just nothing to mirror it back in that environment. With it came a lot of terror. And that terror generally means you’re close to something really valuable ’cause the ego is freaking out that it’s not in control anymore, and that you’re going to have some kind of experience that transcends the ego. Which absolutely happened—many times, often through practices like deep nature connection, through the earth skills, through my apprenticeship to fire and water and shelter, through days and days of just wandering without time or destination. Which is really what I did a lot of the time. I was like the kind of butterfly in the cocoon just really turning to mush. It was incredibly difficult and ecstatic.
Can you give an example of a hard time and of something that emerged?
Yes. I mean what started to happen in winter was I went into hibernation. And the elements were really working me. I was soot covered and lighting fires with my hands twice a day and not really seeing many other humans and I’d been there for six months. So I was really starting to drop into that very instinctive, intuitive, animal-like nature. And I was deliberately doing things to break any routines, like sleeping at different or wandering around at night in the forest, amping up the sense of extraordinary and uncertainty. I did that primarily to train the muscle of intuition so that I was responding to the world from impulse. When do I actually want to sleep? When do I want to eat? Et cetera. And I was wandering and dancing a lot. And reading and writing. And what started to happen was all this old emotional material from childhood just started to rise up—anger and grief and fear, all of this was all very foreign to me. I didn’t really know what to do with it. All I could do was let it out and trust that there was some kind of clearing going on. One of the classic mystical analogies is becoming a hollow bone. So life can just flow through you, so creator can just flow through you. And so it was in service of that really, becoming more of that hollow bone.
[Laugh]. Yeah. I’m laughing because I feel like I’ve been going through a similar process to that this year but I’ve had quite a lot of support. Like mentors and a counsellor. And I’m just imagining you going through that by yourself.
It was mostly by myself. I did have a mentor that I’d get on a call with once a month. And he basically said, “Just keep releasing it, keep releasing it, keep dancing it and moving it through the body.” And so I dove deep into my descent, and it was real and raw and humbling. And the grief really opened me to much deeper states of connectedness, to the spirit that moves in and through all things.
So in that moment when you felt that connection to everything, how did you feel it? Did you see images or was it in your body, or did you just know? I know it’s hard to explain these things but I’m going to ask you to try anyway!
So I’m remembering one moment where I was just walking back up from the waterhole. And my mind was pretty thoughtless. Just wasn’t much chatter at all. I was walking towards the trees and their edges became fuzzy and they just appeared more three dimensional, and I could see the water flowing through them almost. And just this sense of them coming closer to me. Like this kind of ecstatic sense of connection and beauty. That’s one moment of grace, one might call it mystical. They just drop in and it could be on a city street, or just suddenly having that felt, somatic, embodied sense of interconnectedness and knowledge that I am a wild magical creature like every other creature on earth.
It’s funny that you say on the city streets ’cause I was thinking before this conversation, you know, have I had any experiences of these other ways of knowing? And I thought actually one that really stands out for me was when I was a teenager living in London. My mum had to have a serious operation at one stage and I was really afraid about it. I’d been at school all day and I was feeling really nervous. And as I was walking home, I passed this Italian restaurant that’s just before our house, and suddenly I just knew that she was okay and that it had gone okay. And I’ve no way to explain it, I don’t know how I knew. I just had this real felt sense of knowing.
Knowing without knowing how you know. For sure a kind of mystical experience. It makes it sound like they’re really uncommon, and maybe they are, but I don’t think they need to be or have been previously. I think they’re available to us all the time. It’s a lot to do with intention and then attention. It’s a reciprocal relationship. We’re not the only ones in the conversation, you can’t force it. It’s like, you take yourself to bed but you can’t force sleep. You just put yourself in the right conditions where grace might visit.
And what do you think people can do to open themselves up more to richer layers of experience? And what stops us from doing that?
I guess there are small and large gestures, you could think of them as. I’ve just come back from guiding a vision quest. Which is funny ’cause when I first got Nathan’s email about this edition, mysticism, I said, “Well, funny, I’m currently guiding 14 people who are right now out on a mountain for four days and nights fasting on their own.” It’s a contemporary practice of mysticism in a shamanic way. These people sacrifice a lot for a mystical experience. They sacrifice food for four days, they sacrifice comfort, familiarity. And when they come back in on that fifth morning, that first light, it’s so exquisite. They’re so unmasked. They’re so raw. And I’m the lucky one who gets to hug them and welcome them back, and I can feel it now, the power of what they’ve experienced. So that would be one practice, but it’s not a daily practice, it might be a once in a lifetime. But these experiences are available to us in a contemporary way that’s designed for westerners. Smaller gestures are things like simply leaving your phone at home and wandering out in nature, which could be a city park, and playing with that invitation that everything is as interested and curious in you as you are in it. It really does open up the doors of perception.
My sit spot which is down by the river here, I leave my phone inside and go down to the river and do what one of my teachers calls, “revelling in the temples,” revelling in the temples of creation. Expanding my senses to soak everything in. It’s a wild state of mind. Which of course in maybe hunter-gatherer culture was probably more of the default. Less so for us. But it’s not unobtainable. There’s just different layers of it. I’ve seen people experience significant shifts in consciousness through just wandering in the city and observing nature and tracking. Like really being curious and following your nose about what are the foxes doing and where are the birds? It’s like developing a mythic relationship with the land. Like, migratory birds and animals and the movements of weather, and for me that definitely cultivates the conditions that are ripe for kind of deeper experiences of being.
You mentioned that these vision quests are not cultural appropriation, but a lot of these ways of connecting with the land, and in particular the land that we’re on right now as settlers, do come from Indigenous people. And I wonder how you navigate that in your work.
Well I certainly wouldn’t be interested or it wouldn’t be appropriate to offer a ceremony that’s particular to one culture that’s not my own. But so much of the basics of these ceremonies are pan-cultural. They’re not specific. Like the vision quest. There’s a form of that particular kind of ceremony in so many different cultures, of going out to fast in solitude on the land. And we so need to draw inspiration from and learn from our ancestors and their practices. From diverse cultures. We desperately need it. And there’s a real danger of being so scared of doing something that could be drawn from another culture in an unintended way that we’re missing out on actually engaging and creating our own ceremonies and being inspired and recognising that inspiration and weaving it in. It’s a global cauldron of ceremonial practice. And, you know, what is universal is our inherent indigeneity to the earth. That can’t be disputed. We are all indigenous to the earth. Our birthright is to live a life of deep connection to Earth and self and other. To celebrate the seasons and know the ecology of our place and our own place within it. To know deeply how to live well on the earth. How to celebrate, how to grieve together. How to initiate our young, how to create rites of passage. All that is universal. And we so need to claim that.
And in this particular time that we’re in with the climate crisis, why do you think it’s so important that we connect to the wild outside of us and also to soul, or to the inner wild? Why should we prioritise that right now?
Well the reason we’ve got ourselves into this mess in the first placeis that western culture has for the most part failed to move us through the stage of adolescence. The stage of adolescence is all about social security and ambition and social identity and so forth. And we’ve lost the practices that move us into true adulthood, and true adulthood is all about being eco-awakened and serving the earth community rather than just your immediate family. So if we don’t learn how to initiate our culture collectively so that we are living from that soulful place, we’re not going to make the shift to a life-affirming society. So this work is frustratingly urgent and terrifyingly urgent. And this other project of rewilding ourselves, rebuilding that bridge of deep connection with nature and therefore the wildness of our soul and coming to serve the earth community, that’s long-term. So there’s a dilemma there. But I see more and more people are hungry for soul and feeling the pull to deeply know themselves in relationship to the wild earth. So I don’t know what to do about the urgency of the climate crisis versus this slower moving current of the renaissance of soul.
And the alternative of operating more within the current structures and campaigning, which you’ve done, is not simple either. I know lots of people who have done that work and have burnt out with it, got very frustrated. So it’s not like that’s an obvious solution; all the ways of addressing it are complex.
Yeah. They are. And you know we need all the ways. We need all the ways of addressing it and supporting each other. So the activists are also engaging in their own reconnection work. And those who are swimming in the mysteries of nature and psyche also turn up to the climate marches. We actually need to do it all. But asking ourselves the question of “what is mine to do?”—not what is someone else’s to do or what I think I should be doing, but truly what is mine to do? And for that answer to be coming not from the rational mind or the egoic structure but to be coming from that deeper current of soul and wild nature.
So we’re coming to an end in our conversation, and I wonder, when you look back on your journey so far, are there some pivotal moments where you’ve had a sense of being guided by something greater than your own will?
Well, beginning to study wilderness survival skills and going over to America and studying with trackers and a shaman over there. These are some of the kind of external nodal points I guess. But there are subtle ones like when someone comes up and just mirrors back to you who you are. That’s incredibly powerful. Writing my book and having my book published, that felt like something I had to do. But then I tried to give up writing a couple of times. And at one point I really did, I’m like I’m not doing this, it’s too hard, it’s a fool’s errand. And I was living in Bellingen at the time up on the north coast of New South Wales. And I put it in a drawer and went into town. And walked into one of those crystal shops, which is not the kind of shop I usually walk into. I was in such a strange mood I was like, “Okay, I’m just going to get a tarot reading.” Maybe the first time I’d ever done that. And this woman said to me, “You’ve got this project, this writing project. It’s really hard. Quite overwhelming. But you have to write it. It’s scripture. And here’s my card and please make sure I get a copy after you’ve finished it.” Funnily enough I did give up another time after that. But you know it really was that sense of something wants to be birthed in the world through me. And I even had dreams of like different stages of the birthing process. And me the midwife throughout that time. It was incredibly difficult. But there was absolutely a sense looking back of something wanting to move through me. And Elizabeth Gilbert talks about that so beautifully, the muse wanting to move through you. And that ideas have independence, if you don’t seize the idea then it’ll go knocking on someone else’s door. So it’s that idea of needing to be open enough and receptive enough for creation to move through, like the hollow bone. And it really did feel like that with my book. As much as I struggled with it.
Yeah. I guess that’s one of the hallmarks of following a deeper calling—that it’s not necessarily what you think you want [laughs]. Or what’s easy to do.
Yes, you get what you need, not necessarily what you want. I feel like the foundational kind of one-liner that facilitates some sense of mystical life for me is really surrendering to what life is offering. Really surrendering to how life is showing up for you. Fighting against reality is no fun. And there’s just such an ease and trust and acceptance that comes with that surrender. To say, “Okay, I’m going to stop scrambling, I’m just going to let go of the bank and enter the river, have fun, navigate the rapids and see where it takes me.”
Sekhmet, Bast, and Hathor: Power, Passion, and Transformation through the Egyptian Goddess Trinity
By Normandi Elis | GODDESSES IN WORLD CULTURE | 2010
Three very powerful goddesses take a single form as the oldest divine being in ancient Egypt. They are the lion goddess Sekhmet, the cat goddess Bast, and Hathor, the beautiful woman who wears cow horns. All three goddesses can be found in the Old Kingdom of pharaonic Egypt (circa 3000 BCE) and may predate the First Dynasty (5000-3150 BCE).
Hathor originated in the predynastic cult of the sacred cow, which saw the Milky Way as the body of the sky goddess. All the stars that lay therein were souls of her children waiting to be born or returning to her in the afterlife. Sometimes Hathor the cow was called Mehurt, whose breasts flowed with milk. Images of the dancing horned goddess were carved on the rocks of the Egyptian savannah as early as 6000 BE. The cow goddess appeared atop the Palette of Narmer, the first pharaoh of a united Upper and Lower Egypt. By the Fourth Dynasty, the face of the cow mother had turned into the sweet, beautiful face of a young maiden. In human form, she wore a crown of cow horns that cradled between them the gleaming disc of the moon or the sun. They called her "The Golden One." The diadem recalls Hathor's celestial home.
She was, at various times, both mother and daughter of Ra, the sun god, and the consort of many divine beings whose temples flanked the Nile. Most notably, at the Temple of Edfu, she was the consort of the hawk god Horus, who was embodied in the living pharaoh while the pharaoh's queen embodied beautiful Hathor. Through all of her incarnations for more than 6000 years, Hathor remained the most frequently seen goddess in temples up and down the Nile. In some form or another, all goddesses drew upon her attributes; even the goddess Isis, whose appearance in Egypt coincides with the cow goddess, was often depicted wearing cow horns and was, at times, called the daughter of Hathor.' Two other ubiquitous goddesses embodied the duality of her nature-Sekhmet when she manifested solar attributes. and Bast in her lunar attributes.
Bast appeared dressed in green, the color of fecundity. A nurturing presence, she exhibited those feminine qualities associated with the moon. Her presence in the niches of most Egyptian homes was a peaceful, loving one. She tended her children, fed them, bathed them, loved
them, and soothed their hurts. This cat-headed goddess was the tamed version of her bloodthirsty sister Sekhmet.
Powerful Sekhmet wore a crimson robe. Fiery, fecund, and magical-the energy of life itself--the lion goddess protected the pharaoh. More statues of her remain in Egypt that of any other divinity. On the walls of Karnak temple, the lion goddess may be seen dashing alongside the chariot of pharaoh Ramses II as he entered battle. Sekhmet was considered a great spiritual warrior. She protected the temples and borders and exhibited in female form the solar qualities most identified with the sun god Ra. When the wicked of the world wearied the god, Ra sent his daughter Sekhmet to deal with them.
The Solar Origins of Sekhmet
Sekhmet's main feast day in Egypt was celebrated when the star Sirius in the constellation of Canis Major rose prior to sunrise during the month of August. The rise of Sirius signaled the coming change and renewal that occurs each year following the "Dog Days" of summer. After the thaw of snowcaps in central Africa's mountains, the annual Nile flood begins to wend its way northward, ending the summer drought and initiating the season of inundation.
In dramatic fashion, the rising Nile waters pushed the flood from Khartoum in Sudan, down through Upper Egypt, and finally all the way to the Delta in the north. When the inundation first trickled forth, the waters looked greenish before they turned an opaque, dark ruddy color from a type of red algae pushed out of the central African tributaries and downriver by the melting snow and floodwaters. The Arabs called this the Red Nile.
The red flow soon precipitated a burst of life-generating activity along the Nile banks. It may help here to realize that the Egypt of 10,000 BCE was a different place than today's land. Rather than being primarily desert, Egypt was a lush savannah, teeming with life. Some suggest that the overgrazing of cattle and climate change may have caused the Sahara savannah to turn into desert. After this change, around 6000 BCE, life in Egypt shrank to occupy primarily the Delta and the narrow strip of arable black earth washed down into the bottomland on either side of the Nile.
One of the many festivals that celebrated the flood and opened the Egyptian New Year was called "The Inebriety of Hathor." The beer-and wine-drinking festival that followed the first sign of flood was connected to the intoxicating drink that soothed the savage Sekhmet, a solar form of Hathor. The festivities that accompany the festival of "The Ine-briety of Hathor commemorated the saving of Egypt from the ravaging power of Sekhmet.
Ra, who created all things, ruled the earth in peace for thousands of years. But as he grew old, his human subjects forgot him and no longer offered their adoration. Outraged, the god summoned his council, soliciting their advice. Nun, god of primordial waters, suggested sending forth Ra's fiery solar eye, Sekhmet. The idea of sending his lioness daughter delighted Ra, who imagined irreverent humans fleeing, trembling in terror, and cowering in the mountains.
At her father's bidding, Sekhmet began to teach humankind a lesson by devouring every man, woman, and child who crossed her path. She ravaged all the land in both Upper and Lower Egypt, through the mountains and savannahs east and west of the river. She started in Nubia and ate her way north toward the Delta. The river ran red with the blood of those she had slain (a reference to the Red Nile flood). As the fierce goddess waded through the carnage, her feet turned red with the blood of her victims.
Ra looked down upon the havoc Sekhmet had created and felt immediate remorse. The thirst of his daughter for blood knew no bounds. He tried to rein her in, saying, "Come home. Thou hast done what I asked thee to do." But Sekhmet replied, "By my life, I love the taste of blood.
My heart rejoices and I will work my will upon humankind." She would not be deterred.
Ra realized he had made a grave mistake, but neither god nor human could stop Sekhmet. But if she could not be stopped, perhaps her willful passions could be diverted. Ra turned to Thoth, god of wisdom. Thoth quickly sent his messengers to Elephantine Island, where the river burst forth from rocks. "Bring me the fruit that causes sleep," he said, "the fruit that is scarlet and its juice crimson as human blood." When the messengers returned, Thoth and Ra commanded the women in the city of Heliopolis to crush red barley and make beer. They mixed it with the juice of pomegranates and other magical ingredients, according to the recipe of Thoth. The women of Heliopolis made 7000 measures of this red beer.
At dawn, this soothing red brew was poured into a pool outside the city, where Sekhmet would find it. Thinking it was the blood of her vic-tims, the lioness lapped up the mixture until it was gone. When the potion took effect, the heart of the fierce goddess was soothed. Sekhmet lay down and purred, no longer seeking revenge. She stretched out in the field for a sweet little sleep, having transformed herself into the gen-tle, nurturing, loving cat goddess, Bast.
This myth shows for the first time the emerging dual nature of Hathor. Bast is the sensual, purring, nurturing aspect, while Sekhmet is the roaring lion, a goddess with a temper. Bast reveals the nurturing mother of her kittens; Sekhmet shows herself the protector of her pride and her cubs. When Hathor's solar qualities are the focal point, the goddess assumes Sekhmet's lion form, and when her lunar qualities are at play, she appears as Bast the cat.
The beer that soothed Sekhmet was a staple of the Egyptian diet.
Because the brewing and fermentation processes made the Nile water more potable and healthful, beer was offered at breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
But wine was the favored drink of great celebrations. Whenever Hathor appeared as the "Queen of Happiness" and "Mistress of Drunkenness, Jubilation and Music" in one of more than forty festivals held in her temple at Dendera, alcoholic beverages were in plentiful supply. The sacred wine that induced a trancelike state may have contained psychotropic plants, says Robert Masters, possibly including belladonna, wormwood, or opium? C. J.
Bleeker believed that this sacred drunkenness was "the medium through which contact could be effectuated with the world of the gods."
Triple Aspects of the Goddesses
Bast and Sekhmet are such tightly linked aspects of Hathor that the three goddesses were sometimes sculpted standing back to back on the handle of a cosmetic mirror. Because the ancestry of all three goddesses reaches back into the early dynasties of Egypt, they may be aspects of a single, superlative feminine divinity. The goddesses names evoke that divine being by her attributes: Sekhmet (the powerful one), Bast (the soul of mother Isis), and Hathor or Het-hor (the house or shrine of the gods."
In later times, the Ptolemaic Greeks (circa 300 BE linked Hathor with Aphrodite, the goddess of love and beauty. Their reasoning is easy to follow, for Hathor's consorts were many. She was consort to Horus the Younger, the falcon god. She was linked as well to a number of gods, among them the crocodile Sobek, the ithyphallic Min, and the solar Ra. She shared her power equally with the gods but remained independent of the Goddesses
The festival of "The Inebriety of Hathor" calmed that inner rage and provided Egypt's general populace with an outlet for their pent-up emo-tions. "Similar festivals were celebrated at the end of battle, in order to pacify the goddess of war, so that there would be no more destruction.
On such occasions, the people danced and played music to soothe the wildness of the goddess."
The Blood Mysteries
Together Hathor, Bast, and Sekhmet create a unified image of the divine feminine as maiden, mother, and crone. The three goddesses represent the stages of the blood mysteries that rule a woman's life as she moves across the roles of lover, mother, and elder. Beautiful Hathor is the consort of Egypt's gods and the perfect embodiment of the queen partnered with the pharaoh who embodies Horus. Bast is the mother protector of children, surrounded by her litter of kittens; she is also the bridge between the sensual young adult woman and the older, but still sexual wife and mother.
Sekhmet embodies the cyclical blood that flows at birth and death; the blood that flows from mother to child in the womb; the blood on battle-fields, and the menstrual blood or the blood of circumcision that separates the budding young adult from childhood. It is the cyclical red flood of the River Nile that became equated with the red, renewing menstrual blood that cleanses and prepares the way for renewal and regenesis. This blood is a kind of communion, in which humankind partakes of the divine drink of the gods. That is the mystery of transubstantiation.
Blood held within was called the "wise blood," and menopause marked a time for women in ancient Egypt when the inner Sekhmet produced divisions and created magic. The red henna (or Egyptian privet) that adorned the heads of women in Egypt was a tribute to her and was said to be her "magic blood." Heads, hands, and feet were dipped in the colors of the goddess. Cheeks and lips were brushed with her paint. Even mummy cloths were sometimes dipped in henna as a sign of rebirth from the blood of the goddess.
To the left of the 'Temple of Karnak sits a small temple dedicated to the great trinity of Memphis Ptah, Sekhmet, and their offspring Nefertum.
During the Eighteenth Dynasty the pharaoh Thutmose III refurbished the temple to honour the trinity. He made his annual harvest festival offering of "Feeding the Gods" at that smaller temple rather than at Karnak. To this day, inside that temple resides a large, black basalt statue of Sekhmet, who was said to be "great of magic." In fact more statues of Sekhmet can be found at Karnak than at any other temple and more statues exist in situ than any other divinity.
Thutmose III beseeched Sekhmet by calling her Mut, a word used to mean both "mother" and "death"; its hieroglyph of the vulture symbolized both. Not only does the vulture lay eggs, but it eats the dead. On a higher level, nurturance often demands sacrifice. The goddess feeds her people, who in turn feed the goddess. Thutmose III provided thrones of gleaming electrum for Ptah, Sekhmet, and Nefertum. He filled their temple with vessels of gold and silver, with "every splendid, costly stone," with fine linens and "ointments of divine ingredients." On the day of her feast, Thutmose stood before the altar and made the sacrifices that restore Egypt to "life, prosperity, and health." His gifts line the offering table: many jars of wine and jugs of beer, ducks and geese, a multitude of loaves of white bread, bunches of vegetables, baskets of fruits, and "offerings of the garden and every plant."
The Healing Arts
The healing arts were part of the magical power of a wise woman, and Sekhmet was known as an important healing divinity. Inside one of the ten side rooms that surround the inner sanctuary at the Temple of Edfu, a medical library was kept, and in this place the healing priests, called wab sekhmet, conducted healings." On the left side of the doorway was inscribed the magical, repeating image of a lion-headed cobra. A serpentine Sekhmet seemed to unwrap herself from seven coils and rise out of a shallow basket, her lioness head held high, her eyes glittering, and her tongue thrust between her teeth. Here the goddess appears as the life force itself.
While the priests and priestesses of Bast were adept at soothing jangled nerves and easing depression with herbal potions and music, the healers who were "great of magic" were more often high priests and priestesses dedicated to Sekhmet. They wore leopard skins to link them to her powerful feline energies. Because these goddesses understood the powerful visions brought by intoxication, both Sekhmet and Bast were said to bring healing dreams.
The Beneficent Role of Bast
The cat Bast offered the image of a kinder, more nurturing feline form.
She often appeared as a woman with a cat's head carrying on her arm a basket with a litter of kittens. Mythologist Robert Briffault remarked upon the cat's great adaptability to motherhood and her ability to love substitute children equally with her own. Typically, cats who have lost a kitten willingly adopt the kittens from another litter.' In this area, Bast and Isis share the role of surrogate mother. Before Isis begat her son Horus, she mothered the jackal-headed god Anubis who had been abandoned in the desert.
A number of Egyptologists cite Greek sources that describe Bast as the "Soul of Ra"; like a cat that had nine lives, the sun god Ra had nine divine beings under his command. These nine primordial gods, called the Great Ennead, were generated from Ra's light substance. Other ancient Egyptians identified Bast with Isis as the true mother of all, whether she was mothering her own children or the abandoned children of others. Nearly every household with children had a wall niche devoted to Bast. Before her were laid fresh flowers, cups of milk, or other offerings. Statues of Sekhmet may have been the appropriate energy to guard the temples, the borderlands and the pharaoh, but Bast was the welcome guardian of the home. Little cat figurines of Bast with round head and pointed ears were produced in great quantities for private devotion. Families often owned a number of cats.
Affectionate and graceful, they made great companions, and they kept away mice and snakes. When a cat died, it was mourned as a beloved family member, mummified in great ceremony, and buried with honour. Fifteen centuries later when the Suez Canal was being dug, workmen had to stop for weeks at a time to clear away the multitude of cat mummies they had uncovered in ancient pet cemeteries.
The cat goddess sometimes wore a necklace bearing the healing Eye of Horus, called the wadjet. At other times she wore on her breastplate the lion's head of her sister Sekhmet, a reminder of her fierce other self and of the mercurial ability of the feline goddess to change from lap kitty into warrior in the blink of an eye.
The dual nature of the goddess-her loving nature on the one hand and her wild anger and abandon on the other are nowhere more tightly woven than in the myths of Bast and Sekhmet. Prayers to Hathor are quick to praise both aspects, lest one offend the other. This Hymn to Sekhmet-Bast appears in The Egyptian Book of the Dead:
Mother of the gods, the One, the Only.
Sekhmet is th name when thou art wrathful.
Bast, beloved, when thy people call.
(Sekhmet) daughter of the sun, with flame and fury. . ..
Bast, beloved, banish all our fears.
Mother of the gods, no gods existed
Til thou . . . gave them life.
In the Nile Delta Bast retained her stature from prehistory down to the reign of the Ptolemaic Greeks (343 BCE. According to the histories of Manetho, Bast's sacred city Bubastis, was active as early as 2925 BE and influenced the theology of the priests of nearby Memphis, Heliopolis, and Sais." During the Fourth Dynasty, pharaohs Khufu and Khafre kept laborers busy refurbishing and adding to Bast's main temple, in addition to building the pharaohs' grand pyramids. One royal inscription found on the Giza Plateau near Khafre's pyramid reads: "Beloved of the Goddess Bast and beloved of the Goddess Hathor."? Such an inscription linking Bast and Hathor is remarkable, since no other inscriptions of any kind occur elsewhere on the site.
During the Twenty-Second Dynasty, pharaoh Sheshonk I elevated Bast from local patron to the stature of a national heroine, chiefly because his lineage descended from her sacred city of Bubastis. By 930 BE all Egypt adored Bast. King Sheshonk I, who considered himself a son of Bast, boldly moved the capital city from its long-standing home in Thebes to his hometown in Bubastis.
Although only a few crumbling walls remained in Bubastis, Sheshonk restored the Old Kingdom temples and erected new temples to honor the cat goddess. According to Herodotus, who visited the city around 600 BCE, no other temple compared with the grandeur of that of Bast. It was built in the very heart of the city, situated on an island enclosed by two divergent streams of the Nile that ran on either side of a single pas-sageway. Each stream seemed 100 feet broad, and on the banks of the river were "fair-branched trees, overshadowing the waters with a cool and pleasant shade." A tall tower could be seen clearly from every part of the city. Inside the enclosure wall a beautiful garden of trees shaded the priests who carefully tended it. Part of the temple was said to have been built around an ancient sacred persea (avocado) tree. At the center of the temple stood a beautiful golden statue of the goddess Bast.
Throughout the Delta in general, and at her sacred city Bubastis in particular, Bast was adored for her sensuality, congeniality, and loving nature. The Greeks especially loved her, and Bast festivals were never more popular than during the Graeco-Roman period. When migrating Libyans appeared in the Delta around 100 BE. the nonulation of the city soared once again.
Herodotus calls the "Great Festival of Bast at Bubastis" (April 15) one of the most important festivals in Egypt. At times bawdy, at times ecstatic, the festival celebrated Hathor as the consort, while it also celebrated Bast and her sister Sekhmet. The three were never found far apart. This may have been a result of the wine- and beer-drinking that accompanied nearly every feast day in Egypt, all the more so when one is reminded of the mystery of blood that transformed the ravaging Sekhmet into the purring Bast.
During the Great Festival visitors came from far and wide, clattering through the streets, clustering along the riverbanks, and crowding their boats onto the Nile. The festivals often drew over 700,000 people_-including men, women, and children-and the days were filled with dancing, music-making, love-making, and wine-drinking. Drinking wine was viewed as a high religious sacrament, for its color was reminiscent of the blood of the divine and a reminder of spiritual renewal. Bubastis was the wine capital of ancient Egypt, its rich Delta soil providing large pharaonic estates bearing the choicest grapes. The white wines of Lower Egypt were called the Wine of Bast, while the red wines of Upper Egypt were called the Wine of Sekhmet.
Bast's island temple could only be reached by the crowded little ferry-boats that plied the waters of the Nile. Some of the larger boats filled with richly adorned noblemen and women sailed down river all the way from ancient Thebes. As they approached the little towns along the Nile, villagers heard the swelling strains of music coming from the flute players and the women playing castanets. They heard the songstresses and sometimes trickles of laughter. Long before Bubastis was reached, the wine and beer had begun flowing. As the boats neared town, the villagers came down to the edge of the water to greet the entourage. If the boats stopped in town to freshen supplies, even more people crowded aboard to join the sailing party.
Herodotus said that more wine was consumed in Bubastis during the festival than at any other time of the year. Delicious foods included honeyed breads, raisin cakes, pomegranates, figs, roasted fowl, and meats.
The streets fairly writhed with dancing, music playing, and singing all day and night.
Hathor: Goddess of Dualities
The ubiquitous goddess Hathor who reigned in heaven, on earth, and in the afterlife was the patron goddess of all women in whatever stage of life, but she is most beloved as the consort or divine wife. Her name Het-hor literally meant "the house" or "the shrine" of Horus, the falcon god. That shrine was her sacred womb.
In older myths, Hathor was the mother of Horus the Elder when he appeared as the solar child that the sky mother birthed onto the horizon.
In later myths, Hathor became the beloved of Horus the Younger, whose mother was Isis. Whether she was connected to the elder or younger Horus, Hathor remained always eternally youthful and beautiful, even though she was older than Isis.
Her temples were found at Memphis, Thebes, the Sinai, and elsewhere.
She was honored at Edfu, Kom Ombo, and Esna. The most important and well known of her temples was the Temple of Hathor at Dendera, which in its present condition is a Ptolemaic temple built around 332 BCE, but its inscription says it was built upon the previous site where the Fourth Dynasty King Cheops erected a temple to the goddess.!* Its most famous attribute is its dramatic astronomical ceiling with symbols of the zodiacal signs that can clearly be recognized as the twelve familiar constellations.
And yet, its pole star is not in Ursa Major but in Draco, the constellation that it would have appeared as pole star around 4500 BE, an age that predates the temple having been built by Cheops. This representation of the sky and the temple of the sky goddess Hathor seems to point to the dawning of ancient Egyptian civilisation.
In her temple Hathor's statue was venerated and venerable, adored and adorned for thousands of years. Thus, the statue acquired the power to heal, to speak, and to bring dreams to her worshipers. Pure Nile water poured over the base inscriptions of her statue could heal diseased bodies, minds, and spirits. The pilgrims wrote stories of their miraculous healing in prayers, poems, and inscriptions through the Dendera temple.
As the oldest goddess in Upper Egypt, Hathor was assimilated into nearly every other goddess. Isis the mother and Hathor the consort become interchangeable. Wherever there was a temple that honored Hathor, there was also a smaller temple that honored Isis, and vice versa. In the Temple of Isis at Philae, the inscribed "Songs of Isis" praise the beauty and majesty of Hathor.
Oh, Lady of the Beginning, come thou before our faces in this her name of Hathor, Lady of Emerald, Lady of Aset, the Holy!'S Because there were so many temples devoted to Hathor, many more women than men served in priestly offices engaged in her service, a custom unlike that of other temples in Egypt. At daybreak the pharaoh engaged in a ritual in which he broke the clay seal on the door of her shrine in order to gaze in silent adoration upon the beautiful face of the goddess. To the mistress of heaven he offered incense, the menat necklace, the sistrum rattle, and maat, the image of truth. 'These were among the pharaoh's gifts to his beloved, for Hathor was the goddess of the queen and thus coming before her was the culmination of a love story.
The sacred marriage of the pharaoh (as the embodiment of Horus) and the queen (embodiment of Hathor) was celebrated in May, during one of many harvest festivals. The festival began at the Temple of Hathor in Dendera and lasted about fourteen days, ending in Edfu at the
'Temple of Horus. During the festival, the statue of "The Golden One" was carried along the Nile by boat amid music, dance, and song. The union of the two most important lights in heaven was the culmination of the meeting of Hathor and Horus in Edfu. Their marriage took place precisely on the day of the new moon, when the sun (Horus and the moon (Hathor) met in heavenly conjunction. The ancient Egyptians called this "The Day of the Beautiful Embrace."
On the inner face of the east pylon of the Temple of Edfu is a description of the annual festival of the sacred union. The ritual marriage took place privately inside the temple where the divine couple remained for three days, consummating their holy marriage. Meanwhile outside the temple walls the entire population of Edu continued their celebration: drinking, feasting, singing, and dancing.
One song performed for the wedding celebration was called "Hymn to the Golden One." It was sung in chorus by several priestesses while the pharaoh enacted the offering rituals:
The pharaoh comes to dance.
He comes to sing for thee.
O, mistress, see how he dances!
O, bride of Horus, see how he skips! ...
He offers thee
This urn filled with wine.
O, mistress, see how he dances!
O, bride of Horus, see how he skips!!?
The first record of a celebration of the sacred marriage appeared during the reign of the Middle Kingdom pharaoh Amenemhet I, around 2000 BE. Linked with the harvest season rites, it commemorated the first fruits of the field and was held in honor of the ancestors.
In the union of the god and the goddess, all life had its regenesis. Of all the festivals in Egypt, this truly was Hathor's day. It was a festival in honour of the bride, for it is she who becomes mother of the holy child.
The hierogamos or sacred marriage was a union of opposites. In this pair, Hathor is the divine mother, the sky, and Horus is the falcon god and the earthly king. It is a sacred marriage of sprit and flesh, heaven and earth. Every royal couple who ever lived reenacted the marriage sacrament as much for the renewal of the land and their people as for themselves.
Three days after the hierogamos was celebrated, the festival of the "Conception of Horus" occurred, which celebrated the seed that means the renewal of life. This was also considered the conception day of the pharaoh and of the child who would succeed him. From lovemaking came the heir to the throne. Here, father and son were merged into one.
Hathor's love was sexual, maternal and spiritual. These triple aspects represent the deep passion for love, life, and light that runs through all her cosmic creation. Her powers generated "constant and ceaseless becoming." Her love for humankind was eternal.
Notes
Normandi Ellis, Feasts of Light: Celebrations for the Seasons of a Woman's Life Based on the Egyptian Goddess Mysteries (Wheaton, IL: Quest Books, 1999), 144.
Robert Masters, The Goddess Sekhmet: Psychospiritual Exercises of the Fifth Way (Woodbury, MN: Llewellyn Publications, 1991), 44.
C. J. Bleeker, Hathor and Thoth: Two Key Figures of the Ancient Egyptian Religion (Leiden, Netherlands: E. J. Brill, 1967), 91.
Ibid., 132.
Masters, The Goddess Sekhmet, 44.
See the "Cannibal Hymn of Unas" in Miriam Lichtheim, Ancient Egyptian Literature, vol. 1, The Old Kingdom (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), 36-38.
James Breasted, Ancient Records of Egypt (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1906), 2:225-248.
Normandi Ellis, Dreams of Isis: A Woman's Spiritual Sojourn (Wheaton, IL: Quest Books, 1995), 178.
Robert Briffault, The Mothers New York: Macmillan, 1927), 594.
Margaret Murray, Egyptian Religious Poetry (London: John Murray, 1949), 103.
E. A. Wallis Budge, The Gods of the Egyptians New York: Dover, 1969), 1:445.
BY JOHN KIRKWOOD | Five Element Acupressure | 21 July 2015
Mingmen – Gate of Life – Governing Vessel 4
There is surely no point name more exalted than Mingmen – Gate of Life. It goes to the very core of our existence on this plane, our life itself. It is a very powerful point which accesses the gate where we emerge from the void with our essence, our constitution and our destiny. This point can help us reach our full potential and fulfil our destiny.
Although according to the Five Elements the Kidneys belong to Water, they are also the source of Fire in the body, which is called mingmen, the “Fire of the Gate of Life”. This Fire is needed for our survival as warm blooded animals and fuels all activity. When the Gate of Life is open, it provides free access to this Fire and there is vitality, sparkle and zest for life. If the gate begins to close, there is diminishment and depletion.
Mingmen is a remarkable point for revitalisation. It can reconnect us with our essence, raise us to a new level of consciousness, and support the achievement of our highest potential. It is a point that helps us connect us with our original nature.
Lying as it does on the spine between the Kidney shu points (BL 23), Mingmen powerfully tonifies Kidney Qi and supports the Water Element. If there is timidity, it offers courage; if there is forgetfulness and disorientation, it clears the consciousness; if there is depression or emotional withdrawal, it coaxes the person to reengage with the world.
Gate of Life addresses the crucial Fire/Water balance in the body, and therefore treats both hot and cold conditions. It clears heat conditions such as a feeling of burning up as well as chills alternating with fever. More commonly it is used to treat cold conditions such as feeling cold all over the body, especially in the low back and belly, incontinence and abundant, clear urination.
It addresses reproductive disorders such as frigidity, impotence, infertility, irregular menstruation and menstrual pain caused by cold in the uterus. Other conditions include tinnitus, poor memory, haemorrhoids and prolapse of the rectum. It is an excellent point for stiffness, rigidity and pain in the low back and lumbar pain that radiates to the abdomen
This is an important point of focus in Qi Gong exercises and is known to be one of the places on the spine where it is more difficult to move energy, one of the three “tricky gates”. (The others are at the coccyx and the occiput.)
In people who have experienced a chronic, debilitating illness, this point is usually empty and needs considerable attention to persuade it to open. However it has the power to reconnect with the jing or essence and restore a person to health and vitality, a capacity reflected in its alternate name, Palace of Essence.
Location of Governing Vessel 4
On the spine, between the 3rd and 4th lumbar vertebrae, approximately at the level of the navel. Use direct, moderate pressure.
The Chinese symbol of Ming Men (aka Mingmen) is 命門. Ming (命) means “life, fate” and Men (門) means “gate, door”.
Ming Men is a point in the body that translates to “Gate of Life” or “Gate of Destiny”. It’s also known as: "roots of the navel", Centre of Vitality, or even Gate of Power.
In “The Way of Qigong” Keneth S. Cohen calls the Ming Men the Rear Dantian and says it “improves kidney function, tonifies both the jing (developmental, sexual energies) and qi, and stimulates the body’s ability to absorb original qi from the universe.”
The Ming Men is considered the "site of the development of mechanisms of reproduction and sexuality", in addition to "the place of the conjunction of the original yin and yang." The Ming Men is the area where your kidneys blend Yin and Yang energy.
The Ming Men plays an important role in Traditional Chinese Medicine. Yuan Qi (aka Original Qi) is provided by and stored in the Ming Men.
As you might imagine, the Ming Men has many roles and functions in the body:
It is considered the strongest point in the body and is responsible for strengthening the overall body.
The Ming Men is considered essential for the development of internal power and execution.
It also balances and supplies the entire body with energy to maintain and correct the organ functions.
The energy in the Ming Men is essential for strengthening your body, balancing your mind, developing good health and longevity, and improving your internal martial arts practice.
Stimulating the Ming Men can reduce your stress, calm you down (especially Monkey Mind or a emotional disturbance), and leave you feeling refreshed and energetic.
The Ming Men helps to build energy in order to heal, balance, and ground ourselves.
Exercising the Ming Men
There are different methods of activating the Ming Men. One simple way is to breathe deeply into your abdomen. As you inhale, focus on expanding the breath towards your lower back. You may even use the abdominal muscles to push the air towards the Ming Men.
You can also try doing the following when you are stressed, late for work or an appointment, encounter traffic or construction: think about pushing each breath you take down to your lower back. You will be shocked how quickly your stress decreases and how much better you feel.
Another exercise (certainly worth trying), is to sit on a chair in a quiet area (if you can find one). Using one or both palms, gently rub your lower back (lumbar region). When it feels quite warm, but not uncomfortable, rest your hand(s) in your lap. Let them touch each other and focus on your lower abdomen (Dantian area). Rest quietly and peacefully. Repeat the exercise two more times. Remember that stillness can never be forced, and it isn’t always easy to attain. Best to just relax and observe.
Location of the Ming Men
The Ming Men is an energy centre located in the lower torso centred between the kidneys. It is associated with three acupuncture points: Governing Vessel 4 (GV4), Central Vessel 4 (CV4) and Central Vessel 5 (CV5).
Although it can be activated using the above-mentioned acupuncture points, the Ming Men encompasses as whole region of the body. It is a collective area that includes: the organs that act as filters, the blood vessels that act as highways for fresh fuel and the transportation of waste, the surrounding tissue that warms and tonifies the organs when pushed on, and the inner spine that stabilises the region.
Traditional Chinese Medicine: Five Element Theory and Acupuncture
Chad C Dupuis | Yin Yang House | 2023
Five element theory is one of the major systems of thought within Chinese medicine. From a historical perspective it is an important underpinning of medical theory and serves as one of the major diagnostic and treatment protocols. In modern clinical practice the five element theory is used in varying degrees depending on the practitioner and style of acupuncture that they practice.
For practitioners or Traditional Chinese Medicine, the theory may be used to help form a diagnosis when there is conflicting signs and symptoms. Additionally, elements of the theory are useful for assisting patients with nutritional balancing and/or working through emotional issues. The theory is used extensively by Japanese acupuncturists within the five phase treatment protocols and by Classical five element practitioners, such as those who follow the teachings of the late J.R. Worsley. The information below discusses the Five Element Theory.
Primary Correspondences Within Five Element Theory
The Five Element theory is based on the observation of the natural cycles and interrelationships in both our environment and within ourselves. The foundation of the theory rests in the correspondences of each element to a variety of phenomena. The most common correspondences are listed in the chart below:
Five Element Cycles, Relationships and Interactions
Within five element theory there are four main relationships or ways in which the elements interact. The first of these is the generating (sheng, mother-child) cycle. This cycle describes the ways in which each element, serving as a mother, promotes the growth and development of the following child element.
Examples of this cycle are the Wood element providing the generative force for Fire, Fire providing the generative force for Earth, etc. This relationship provides the foundation for understanding five element theory and, consequently, where imbalances may arise within the cycle. If Earth, for example, is weakened from a poor diet and overwork you will see that more nourishment is requested from the Fire element to nourish Earth. Additionally, if Earth is weakened the Metal element may also be effected.
From a clinical perspective you may see people develop digestive issues from irregular eating, excessive worry and overwork which leads to a proliferation of dampness which then effects the Metal element. Within this case you may see a combination of bloating, gas and poor energy with the development of Metal (Lung) symptoms such as sinusitis or phlegm-type asthma.
The controlling (ke, grandparent-grandchild) cycle provides for a check and balance system among all of the elements. Within this cycle Earth, for example, provides a control for Water and is controlled by Wood. An example of this relationship within the body is in cases of anxiety (Fire) which are related to LV Qi Stagnation (Wood) where, over time, you begin to see more Kidney (Water) related signs as the Water element attempts to control the overactive Fire.
The overacting cycle (cheng) is an imbalance within the controlling cycle where the grandmother element provides too much control over the grandchild and weakens the element. Within nature you may see Water putting out Fire, Earth soaking up Water and so on.
A clinical example of this relationship would be Liver (Wood) overacting on the Spleen (Earth). In this case you have an overactive Wood element over controlling Earth leading to disruptions in the digestive system.
The insulting cycle (wu) is also an imbalance within the controlling cycle where the grandchild insults or returns the controlling force generated by the grandmother. Using examples from nature you can see Fire burning up Water and Water washing away Earth and so on.
Clinically you may see this in cases where people have long-term psychological problems (Fire) which eventually effect the Kidneys (Water) as seen in the development of more Yin (Water) deficiency signs.
Five Element Pathology and Clinical Applications
As described in the introduction there are a variety of ways in which the theory is used clinically.
This section describes the basic ways in which a practitioner of Traditional Chinese Medicine applies the theory in a clinical setting. The Five Shu (transporting) Points, listed below, represent the relationship of the theory to individual acupuncture points. Our understanding of these points is based largely on the information within the Nan-Ching: The Classic of Difficult Issues.
Five Shu Points
The major point categories (i.e. jing well, etc.) described above are discussed in more detail here. For the purposes of this discussion an extract from the chart above showing only the Mother and Child points provides a good starting point to understand the application of the theory to acupuncture.
The Mother and Child points for each meridian are derived from the chart above using the following logic. According to the generating cycle the mother of Earth is Fire and the child of Earth is Metal. Using this information for the Yin Earth Meridian (Spleen) the mother point is the Fire point on the Spleen meridian SP 2 and the child point is the Metal point on the Spleen meridian SP 5.
Mother & Child Five Element Points
A clinical example of this theory would be dispersing the child point of the Wood meridian (Liver) - LV 2 - in the case of LV Fire Rising where a patient is experiencing LV signs such as anger and irritability along with HT related signs such as disturbed sleep and agitation.
Another example would be tonifying the mother point of the Earth meridian (Spleen) - SP 2 - in the case of SP Qi Deficiency where a patient is experiencing poor appetite and low energy.
The example above brings up an interesting point from the perspective of a TCM practitioner. While the five element theory is a useful tool in many cases, there are times where the theory indicates a point which clinical experience has proven to be less effective than another point. In the case above, SP 2 is indicated by the theory whereas SP 3 is more commonly used for this condition. Some of the points which have varying degrees of correspondence with the theory are:
HT 9 & PC 9 - are most often used to clear heat.
SI 3 & SI 8 - reduce heat, pain and stagnation but provide no tonifying effect.
LI 11 - is typically dispersed to clear heat.
TH 3 - has no tonification effects.
ST 41 - is typically used to disperse fever a/or reduce abdominal distention, although it can be as a local point in a tonifying manner to increase energy flow to the foot.
SP 2 - is not the most tonifying point on the SP meridian - SP 3 is a better choice.
Taittirya Upanishad, a Hindu book of Ancient India indicates that there are five levels of the self (known in Sanskrit as Koshas). Here, we explore the Planes of Existence as conceptualised in Hindu culture.
As we delve into the topic of planes of existence we can begin to unpack the concept that there is more to us and all of existence than meets the eye. There have been systems of philosophy developed over the millennia that discuss the concept of multiple planes of existence. Some of these include Hinduism, Buddhism, Tantrism, Platonism, Neoplatonism and Theosophy.
The Hindu Taittirya Upanishad, a book of Ancient India indicates that there are five levels of the Self known in Sanskrit as Koshas. Kosha translates as sheath or covering. These are the:
Annamaya Kosha - Physical/Food Sheath
Pranamaya Kosha - Breath/Life Force Sheath
Manomaya Kosha - Mental & Emotional Sheath
Vijnanamaya Kosha - Astral/Psychic Sheath
Anandamaya Kosha - Bliss/Seed Sheath
These sheaths can be visualised as subsequent layers surrounding the seed of the soul making up the united individual. Understanding the concept of these sheaths enables a deep dive into the exploration of our soul and potential within spiritual practice.
Leading spiritual philosopher of Theosophy, Blavatsky, continued to analyse and interpret this concept through her research and psychic investigation. She delineated these sheaths into planes of existence as well as distinguished sub-planes within these planes which brought the concept to the West in a way that could be more readily understood in Western culture.
Through spiritual practice we can gain first-hand experience and understanding of these planes. To give some idea of what to look for on that journey, I’ve written a brief description about each primary plane below.
THE PHYSICAL PLANE
This plane is the visible reality of space, time, energy and matter. This is the level at which we are born into, our daily lives play out and our physical bodies exist. We are able to experience spiritual and elevated emotional states on this level through our bodily functions such as through the nervous and cardiovascular systems. The physical plane is the first and lowest in existence. Many try to bypass it on their quests for emotional and spiritual transcendence due to the pain and suffering it can hold and bring. Developing bodily awareness through conscious practices such as yoga and meditation is the gateway to accessing deeper planes of existence wherein the energy is more subtle than solid. It is also common that many hold the belief that the physical body is all that we are, rather than seeing the body as a temple for the soul. Regardless of how the physical body is viewed, it needs to be respected and well cared for with balanced eating, periods of fasting, proper rest and healthy movement practices to have us survive and thrive in life with longevity.
THE EHTERIC PLANE
The plane of life force energy, the Etheric Plane, also known as the aura, is commonly witnessed by clairvoyants with a wide array of colours. It’s also called the Pranic plane due to Prana, the multi-faceted Sanskrit term for life force, breath, air and ether. This is a plane of subtle energy which can be felt by allowing oneself to be truly still and at peace in one’s environment and within oneself. Being alone in quiet places in nature can be one way to access its vibrations. Seated meditation with breath work is another way. A dedicated yoga practice will also have your awareness of the etheric plane emerge. This level is where the Chakras reside. They enable energy from the earth to flow through us from our base (pelvic floor and feet) and divine energy to flow into the crown (top of the head). Blockages on this plane create issues that follow through into the physical and emotional/mental levels which is why it’s crucial to cultivate and maintain healthy subtle energy flow through open chakras (energy centres) and nadis (energy pathways). This level links the physical level with the emotional, mental level.
THE MENTAL & EMOTIONAL PLANE
Also the Psychological Plane, holds the unique immortal blueprint of each individual and is typically what most people become consumed and unresolved with and limited by. It consists of our thoughts, desires, mental constructs and belief systems which develop throughout time and continually influence the motivations of our actions. Our desires, emotions and thought forms are influenced by the chakras we have most active and strong. Base chakras bring focus upon and desire for territory, money, sensual intimacy, pleasure and power. Upper chakras bring focus upon and desire for reason, love, generosity, peace, intellectual creativity, knowledge, order and genius. Having access to the various aspects of our psyche enables us to reach resolved emotional and mental states, understand the motivations behind our desires and potentially master the psyche which promotes health and balance of the lower planes and grants access to the higher planes. Through this plane, we can also develop relationships with not only people, but with everything we commune with such as animals, places and spirits. This plane also translates our experiences via the information received at sensory levels so that we can make sense of ourselves in relation to our contexts and those we interact with. In addition to healthy movement practices, fasting, meditation, pranayama and time spent in solitude and silence, this plane can also be accessed and harmonised through song, chanting, altruism and positive affirmation.
THE ASTRAL PLANE
From the Astral Plane we can access realms wherein we can traverse through worlds of our own spiritual crafting as well as those of others’, often even without their permission if they don’t have psychic protection. The astral realms are believed to be populated by immortal souls, demons, angels and other spiritual beings. This plane also deals with dreams, prophetic visions and psychic phenomena. It is believed some souls land in the astral plane after they die and stay until they are ready to reincarnate into a different life form. Once we consciously learn how to exist in the astral, we have begun to develop extraordinary psychic powers and depth of wisdom. The astral plane is often accessed through lucid dreaming and astral projection, both of which can be practiced and near-death and out-of-body experiences, which should not be practiced.
THE CAUSAL PLANE
As the highest plane of existence, the Causal plane is where matter is subordinate to consciousness and we see with ultimate clarity the entirety of All That Is. From this plane, Nirvana, Samadhi or Enlightenment are achieved. This is a blissful state arising from being in union with the Divine. Abstract lessons about the structure and origins of the universe are learned on this plane and deep self realisation is achieved. Once access to this plane has been granted, it is believed that we are able to craft universes alongside the Creator or True Self. Important to note, however, that ego does not exist on this plane and the only way to access it is through dissolving the ego entirely and transcending all previous planes. With deep, devoted spiritual development, consciousness elevated to the Causal plane becomes more readily available, however, unless one maintains an enlightened state of being such as through extended meditation (days), we only ever achieve temporary immersions into this plane. There is complete awareness of one’s union with the Source on this plane and the physical plane may no longer be required. Though, desires within and attachment to one’s physical life form will keep one confined to it and continually in the process of reincarnation.
By exploring alternate planes of existence, we are able to powerfully self-reflect and reach states of differing vibrational awakening, divine power and self emergence. Transcending through all levels via devoted spiritual practice is said to bring Nirvana and pure bliss, the uniting of the “I,” Individual Consciousness with the “All,” Universal Consciousness.
Reclaiming Anonymity in the Age of Surveillance Capitalism
BY CHER TAN | Kill Your Darlings | 16 NOV, 2020
Many assume that asserting your right to privacy means you have something to hide. Experimenting with burner accounts has allowed me to glimpse another way of being online that doesn’t hinge on being seen or known.
‘Your brain might assimilate to a browser. Let’s hope it’s Tor! Or any form of aggregate feed, constantly interrupted, distracted, fragmented.’
-- Hito Steyerl, in an interview with Andrey Shental
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On Christmas Day in 2019, I had a bad acid trip. Little did I know what was to come. But someone in my group had an analog camera, and wanted to document the night—nothing wrong with that, except I flipped out at the idea of being recorded, and ended up experiencing a violent psychosis that made me see them as some version of Big Brother.
As I slowly regained clarity the next day, I reflected on why I reacted the way I did. LSD has worked for me (as well as for willing participants in a burgeoning medical field known as psychedelic psychiatry) as a kind of therapeutic exercise to exorcise the subconscious. The unease I felt around being watched had probably been on my mind for a while, but was something I hadn’t dared confront due to my intimate relationship with the internet.
It’s what researcher Kate Crawford defines as ‘surveillant anxiety’, a fearful affect that has arisen out of Big Tech’s grip on our extremely networked lives. According to Crawford, this has manifested in distinct phenomena: ‘whitewalling’ (when people delete old posts), posting less on a public feed and migrating to private groups or chats, relying more on ‘alts’ (as opposed to a ‘main’ account) and the rise of end-to-end encrypted messaging apps such as Signal. As Crawford notes, ‘It reflects the dispersed anxiety of a populace that wishes nothing more than to shed its own subjectivity.’ This anxiety also goes both ways: Crawford argues that the agencies surveilling us are so inundated by the sheer amount of data they harvest that gaps appear, paradoxically causing them to harvest even more data to ostensibly plug these same fissures.
Since the beginning of this year, I’ve been experimenting with ‘alts’ in order to find different ways of using social media that don’t hinge on being seen or being known. Much like some people create ‘burner’ email accounts just for ads or newsletters, I have a burner Instagram just for cats (imagine, a whole feed filled with catstagrams), and a burner Twitter just for people whose thinking I enjoy but for whom I don’t socialise with. Perhaps a related equivalent would be ‘lurking’, and while there was certainly an initial dissonance to the act of starting over—letting go of a personal archive and detaching myself from the thrill of being delivered recommendations ‘tailored’ to ‘me’—it feels as if I am finally untethering my self from the machinations of ‘the platform’.
Letting go of a personal archive and detaching myself from ‘tailored’ recommendations feels as if I am finally untethering my self from the machinations of ‘the platform’.
Platform capitalism, as political philosopher Nick Srnicek has written in his 2016 book of the same name, revolves around ‘a tendency that involves constantly pressing against the limits of what is socially and legally acceptable in terms of data collection.’ Accordingly, many online platforms are built such that they are inextricable from the tenets of capital, encouraging behaviours such as the glorification of performance (via metrics), platitudinous engagement and gratuitous antagonism for the sake of spectacle. The logic of the platform is our desire for more.
As such, this experiment has brought for me a certain freedom, similar to the crushing-loss-yet-buoyant-relinquishment of accidentally closing a browser with the sixty-five tabs you promised yourself you’d get around to reading. Will I ever? The news feed simply rolls on. Meanwhile, I log on to Reddit and Discord for specific interests, and together they build for me a map of the internet that resembles the one I grew to know and love—a network of misfits who sought belonging through relative anonymity and non-curated self-expression. I find myself gravitating less towards kneejerk reaction, and am more interested in good faith communication, relishing the fluidity that comes from code-switching between my public and private accounts. Offline, this is akin to how I code-switch between Englishes or ways of being within a myriad of relational contexts. The inevitability, then, of context collapse strikes me as more manageable.
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It’s no surprise that Shoshana Zuboff’s 700-page tome The Age of Surveillance Capitalism has seen massive popularity in the English-speaking world since it was published last year. Whether or not it’s one of those books that people reference more than they actually read is beside the point—its very prominence points to a greater shift in public awareness with regard to how people consider their selves in relation to the platforms we spend our time on. What initially seemed like a fringe paranoia has now moved to the mainstream as Big Data’s privacy violations have become more apparent. The key words here, however, are ‘more apparent’: widespread surveillance, particularly that of low-income and Bla(c)k communities, both in the West and the Global South, are not new. In so-called Australia, this has long shown itself in ‘preventive policing’ programs which specifically target Aboriginal youth, and welfare surveillance both in the form of the BasicsCard, and the hiring of contracted third-parties to track down alleged ‘bludgers’. Since 2014, no warrant is required for law enforcement agencies and other institutions to access ‘metadata’ information, and individual traveller data on commuter cards (Opal, myki, et al) can be accessed similarly. Elsewhere, mass surveillance is one instrument in the ongoing genocide against Uighurs in China, as well as orchestrated through the ASPEN card issued to refugees in Britain, and via various long-standing covert operations against Black activists in the US.
This is just the tip of the iceberg. As researcher Joana Varon Ferraz has pointed out, ‘Data is the new oil. Beyond collecting information, it also means gathering power.’ But this was the Before Times. In the time of coronavirus, data collection from both Big Tech companies and governments (who, it must be noted, are increasingly colluding with each other) has only accelerated. Already, the re-opening of the state of Victoria in the last fortnight has seen QR check-ins to venues tracked and data potentially resold to third-parties, in a move towards what privacy experts have termed ‘marketing surveillance’. And as the world conducts work meetings, funerals, weddings, trivia nights, book launches and even court proceedings and cabinet meetings through the videoconferencing software Zoom, its stock value goes through the roof. Its security fallibility was first observed through a phenomenon known as ‘zoombombing’ (where interlopers unrelated to the call enter the space to wreak havoc), then later rectified after much backlash through a series of measures that has now resulted in end-to-end encryption for all users (it was initially rolled out for paid users only).
What initially seemed like a fringe paranoia has now moved to the mainstream as Big Data’s privacy violations have become more apparent.
In the Now Times, the monopoly wielded by tech companies such as Facebook, Alphabet/Google, Amazon and Apple is in plain(er) sight. Perhaps it is also during this time that people are beginning to come to the realisation that online connection is looking less like what’s advertised on the box if there is little to juxtapose against it. When the thirst for connection outstrips camaraderie, the inherent contradictions that the networked world—as occupied by humans—has always grappled with is laid even barer: intimate yet removed, authentic yet performative, together yet alone. The imposition of algorithmic technologies further reinforces this paradox: within our respective filter bubbles, what are we really seeing? And what are we not seeing?
Though Facebook has recently acted to ban fallacious content, there is still plenty that these corporations do not reveal to the public. It must be said that content moderation is often outsourced to low-paid workers, and there still continues to exist a skewed perception of ‘freedom of speech’ which has seen anti-fascist and anarchist content banned alongside QAnon groups. Apart from the discovery of tools such as ‘dark patterns’ (i.e. prompts baked into the user experience to manipulate individual choices), the specialised knowledge that tech engenders usually makes it difficult for the layperson to grasp, which further obscures abuses of power. Even if it’s not uncommon for many people in the world now to own a computer or smartphone, certain arenas of tech literacy (algorithmic practices and cybersecurity, for example) remain some of the largest hurdles. And for good reason: much as financial knowledge is often inaccessible for those who didn’t grow up with it, it’s difficult to crack through tech’s confounding jargon to understand its inner workings if it hasn’t been imparted to you in the first place.
For someone like me, one of those ‘xennials’ who saw some of my most formative years in the 2000s shaped through online connectivity, what’s changed? In the nearly two decades since I started going online, I saw the internet transform from multiple anonymised, somewhat decentralised spaces into one that seeks to consolidate power in only a few spaces, demanding ‘transparency’ as a form of surveillance. In this time, Twitter has transformed from a ‘microblog’ (I was mostly talking to myself) to a ‘hellsite’; the on-demand economy has taken shape across the world; sections of radical politics have atrophied into mere slogans; context collapse has become normalised; cynicism and irony has shot to the front of the race while sincerity trails behind. We can blame it on the rise of neoliberalism, the era of the personal brand, the conflation of work and leisure, the fetishisation of burn-out…the list goes on, and yet the penchant for envy and aversion to shame has stayed the same.
It is undeniable that there is less of that ‘weird and wonderful’ ambiance that saw some of us seek a home online in the first place.
In the last few years, I’ve noticed many wistful yearnings for the ‘old internet’: a time of MySpace, Livejournal, Geocities, blogs and the like. This is often paired with resolutions for less: less social media, less technology, a return to nature, exhortations to ‘log off’ and ‘digital detox’. It’s only par for the course: when there is an acute sense of freaky disorder, nostalgia is never far behind—which as Svetlana Boym notes in The Future of Nostalgia is ‘not so much the past as [it is] about vanishing the present.’ These longings imply an undercurrent of powerlessness: perhaps by divesting power from the institutions which seek to monitor and sell our selves back to us, we can finally break free from our problematic subjectivities. But does creating these binaries result in less desire? What do people want?
Still, it is undeniable that there is less of that ‘weird and wonderful’ ambiance that saw some of us seek a home online in the first place. Even though they have not ‘disappeared’, they require more effort to discover—and in a time of accelerationism that privileges the idea of ‘convenience’, anonymity and privacy become compromised. If you can have a phone under your pillow that tells you the day’s weather as soon as you get up, why would you go to the trouble of obtaining this information via other, less invasive means? If all your friends are on Facebook, why would you alienate yourself by leaving the platform? If you are able to have a ‘home assistant’ which you can ask for recipe ideas or to control other appliances—even if it has been found that serious security breaches are mounted through these products—it’s difficult to reimagine how it was ‘before’. Life is simplified. But here’s the rub: innovation and convenience are often used as marketable rhetoric. If it’s tough to remember a slew of passwords, then just log in with your face.
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Sometimes being online feels like work. I don’t mean this in the sense that a lot of the work I do is frequently conducted through the internet, but that the arena of pleasure has been robbed. It has become routine, at least nowadays, to work to find out if what I’m seeing on my screen is worthy of note, or in extreme cases, ‘real’. An obvious case in point would be deepfakes, but even just reading the news there is an escalating need to sift out the verifiability of the information I’m taking in.
Even Google—so ubiquitous that the brand has become a generic verb—is not exempt: Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) shows users the ‘most relevant’ hits first, which in Google’s case is most likely Google itself. In August this year, it was also discovered that the tech behemoth was providing data to US police based on search keywords. And at the time of writing, Google is undergoing an antitrust lawsuit filed by the US Department of Justice that will decide if the conglomerate is an ‘illegal’ monopoly—that will most likely take years to reach any kind of resolution, if at all. Closer to home, the Australian Competition and Consumer Association has done similar: by suing Google for misleading users about its location data collection practices.
As capitalism goes through more and more permutations of itself, the surreality of life becomes less of a crackpot idea and more a low-key certainty. Much has been made of the ramifications over the last few years—hell, the last few weeks—of disinformation, which traffic in fear, uncertainty and the human desire to ‘get to the bottom of things’, particularly in an accelerated era where news and events seem to give off an increasingly ludicrous sheen. This is made even more so as they are facilitated by right-wing power players. Not only is there the pre-existing threat of information and affect overload, the relentless grab for eyeballs in the attention economy tend to place highly-trafficked URLs front and centre, the search for an ever-fleeting truth be damned.
In other words, as James Bridle writes in his searing treatise New Dark Age, there are ‘ever more byzantine theories of the world.’ When everything can be proven online by way of a labyrinth of websites that echo and support each other, how does one clearly distinguish fact from spin?
We all have secrets: how can anyone, much less the algorithm, truly know our multitudes? Even when I’m ‘oversharing’, there are still aspects of myself that I’m not revealing.
It is hardly shocking, then, that conspiracy theories are proliferating throughout various corners of the internet. Much like the co-option of left-wing subcultures, these previously peripheral movements are inching their way towards the mainstream. The nexus of capital and the feedback loop, as well as the power of the far-right, has resulted in not only paranoia and mistrust, but also the manipulation of these affects. Since the pandemic, QAnon has attracted a massive growth in followers; just as the virus itself has struck the most disenfranchised, the rise in conspiracy theories tend to stem from institutional distrust, class resentment, racism and more. And while I obviously don’t condone or believe in unfounded theories, distrust and resentment rarely appear out of nowhere—they are often intertwined with rising inequality and frustration at poor job opportunities.
This climate has been reinforced by what researcher Whitney Philips has termed ‘the oxygen of amplification’, which sees an already-weakened media proliferate the messages of conspiracy theorists for the sake of delivering sensational page views. The bleak nature of Big Tech platforms is that in order to maintain a thriving ecosystem of communication, users will often adapt to its whims. This presents a tricky impasse, which means that little of this behaviour can be directly attributed to the people or platforms themselves, but rather the social and economic factors that encourage certain behaviours. Assimilation begets assimilation; virality begets virality. In a time of what scholars have deemed ‘neofeudalism’, Big Tech’s all-seeing monopoly looks down on the serfs as communication is weaponised for profit.
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There remains the mistaken assumption that if someone chooses to conceal themselves, they must have something to hide. As such, burner accounts are often relegated to the realm of 4chan trolls, incels, wingnuts or criminals; to demand ‘privacy’ online makes it seem as if the individual wants to engage in deception. But of course we all have secrets: how can anyone, much less the algorithm, truly know our ever-protean multitudes? Even when I’m ‘oversharing’, there are still aspects of myself that I’m not revealing.
In How To Do Nothing, Jenny Odell’s book on resisting the attention economy, she refers to ‘the difficulty of maintaining any kind of silence or interiority’ as connected to a ‘financially incentivised proliferation of chatter’. And in an especially politicised moment, the burden of transparency begins to outweigh the desire for opacity. If I don’t post about human rights abuses, does that mean I don’t care that they are happening, or not acting against them offline? There appears to be the encroaching impression that not weighing in on a topic means losing the opportunity to ‘create awareness’—however, this is already a move weaponised by Big Tech companies themselves, as shown in the aftermath of the recent Black Lives Matter protests. In the interests of ‘transparency’, such as a screenshot of my donation to an important GoFundMe or a political infographic on Instagram, speed and convenience belie the act. Within the moralised instinct to be publicly seen as ‘good’ or ‘effective’, it appears to be that I am giving up my privacy, all the while indirectly being a shill for Big Tech’s claim that their creations are a path to betterment and productivity.
To me, opacity seems an impulse worth pursuing. When the conflation of identities is something Silicon Valley execs themselves encourage—Mark Zuckerberg himself famously said in 2010 that ‘having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity’—perhaps visibility should not be the endgame. As a queer person of colour, I am already simultaneously hypervisible and invisible in society; how do I circumvent the desire for exposure or representation and harness the strengths that come with invisibility instead? I want to be able to create memories, grow, and make mistakes away from the eyes of others, returning to visibility in ways that can subsequently benefit others like myself. When I am using my burner accounts or tending to my digital garden, I am not being inundated by information or affect overload, and I find myself with more energy to engage with and organise against Big Tech’s very failures.
When I am using my burner accounts, I am not being inundated by information or affect overload, and I have more energy to engage with and organise against Big Tech’s failures.
As Byung-Chul Han writes in The Transparency Society, ‘Wherever information is very easy to obtain, the social system switches from trust to control. […] Total transparency imposes a temporality on political communication that makes slow, long term planning impossible.’ When an object’s value accrues insofar that it is seen, such as that of the compulsion towards virality, an ironic sameness becomes the result: like begets like; performed authenticity begets performed authenticity; virtue signalling begets virtue signalling. When I’m communicating with a mishmash of strangers on Discord, there appears to be more room for disagreement that does not rest on the implacable public zeal to be ‘right’. Han again: ‘Anaesthetic hypercommunication reduces complexity in order to accelerate itself.’
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Within the interconnected free market, where ideas and intimacies are exchanged on a level that makes it more attractive for them to be displayed and consumed, I don’t claim to have any answers. As I have reviewed elsewhere, and as Odell has written, our ‘margins of refusal’ are shrinking rapidly as Big Tech’s monopoly continues to tower over society. The little things I’ve tried to do—such as using DuckDuckGo instead of Google, Signal instead of non-encrypted messaging software, Jitsi instead of Zoom, among others—give me a semblance of control that sometimes feels like purchasing free range eggs over caged ones. In the meantime, I try to be optimistic in hoping that perhaps a groundswell of refusal will shift corporate interest, and that beating surveillance capitalism will mean something like going to the op-shop instead of purchasing new items from the fast fashion industry.
To put it another way, as Guy Debord writes in his ever-relevant 1967 work The Society of the Spectacle, ‘The spectacle presents itself as a vast inaccessible reality that can never be questioned. Its sole message is: “What appears is good; what is good appears.” The passive acceptance it demands is already effectively imposed by its monopoly of appearances, its manner of appearing without any reply.’ We are long overdue for a mass dérive. If there is little we can directly change in our embodied, lived realities, the digital sphere as navigated through this same reality may give us something more: by participating in a burgeoning data rights movement that seek to challenge surveillance technologies, abolitionist futures can be fought for not just on the streets, but through attempts at sidestepping algorithmic patterns that don’t hinge on optimisation or consumption. Or, as Legacy Russell said in an interview about her book Glitch Feminism, ‘Filters and algorithms mean we sometimes have to fight for our digital neighbourhoods.’ To be able to vanish completely may be a privilege I cannot afford (which is to say, help: I can’t log off), but like the many animals that undergo a process called crypsis to selectively hide from the world, I want to write a self that is unseen until I choose to reveal it.
I studied a Diploma of Kinesiology at College of Kinesiology. To become qualified as a kinesiologist, I had to complete:
2-3 years of full time classwork
150+ hours of supervised practice (with peers or volunteers)
50+ hours of clinical practice (with paying customers)
1 research project investigating a chronic illness (of my choosing)
Supervised kinesiology coaching and mentoring with 2 separate clients
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Required skills and knowledge
Here are some of the things I learned about in my studies:
Welcoming a client and making them feel safe and supported
Maintaining client confidentiality and other legal requirements
Analysing the client's health information
Responsibly interpreting information about nutrition and diet*
First Aid
Performing kinesiology assessments and balances
Recieving and analysing information regarding a client's wellbeing
Building a treatment plan for the client
*My skillset is different from a nutritionist's or general practitioner's, so I wouldn't be giving medical advice or the like.
Australian qualifications and legislation
The study I completed at College of Kinesiology means I can register as a Registered Kinesiology Professional Practitioner (Level 5) with the Australian Kinesiology Association (AKA). With this, AKA requires that you have at least 1200 hours of training and clinical work.
In Australia, kinesiology is a self-regulating modality. That means that you can go to any person claiming to give you kinesiology (regardless of their level of knowledge or training i.e. they could have been to a 2-day workshop talking about muscle monitoring (a technique used in kinesiology) and claim to be a kinesiologist). Additionally, kinesiologists, unlike allied health professionals, are not required by Australian law to display their relevant qualifications.
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Gentle, effective natural therapy, supporting growth and change in all areas of life.
Kinesiology is a gentle, effective natural therapy that supports growth and change in all areas of life. Kinesiology is the therapeutic use of muscle monitoring.
What is Muscle Monitoring?
Kinesiology’s singular defining feature is muscle monitoring, which is a way of working with muscles that enables the practitioner to gain information from the client’s innate awareness. Muscle monitoring relies on neuromuscular biofeedback.
To monitor a muscle, a kinesiologist places pressure on the muscle, moving it from contraction to extension position.
A kinesiologist uses muscle monitoring and biofeedback to get a response from the client’s nervous system to access the unconscious, or what is sometimes referred to as the innate intelligence, of the client.
What is the purpose of Muscle Monitoring?
The purpose behind muscle monitoring is to gain information from the body. The body will naturally supply information that is beneficial to the overall wellbeing of the individual who is being monitored. This information is diverse, in that it covers such topics as muscle health, organ and gland health, nutritional health, and emotional, mental and spiritual health. This intelligence or awareness that is tapped into during a kinesiology balance is referred to in kinesiology circles as the body’s innate awareness.
The concept of the innate awareness, an all-knowing intelligence that works from the responses of our muscles, is a challenging concept for some. However, as we learn and work with kinesiology, our experiences over time show this to be true. And with this knowledge we have the comfort of knowing that the wisdom we need to traverse life is always with us and accessible.
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How does Kinesiology work?
Kinesiology uses muscle monitoring as a biofeedback technique which directly accesses the causes of stress.
By understanding the deeper needs of each person (viewing them holistically) kinesiologists provide specific support and so create a healing environment and different treatments that facilitate personal growth, change, and transformation.
Kinesiology is a therapeutic tool that uses muscles in the body as a guide to uncover the causes of stress in a holistic way.
'Holistic' means that we are looking at the body as an integrated whole, where all the so-called parts of the body are represented and interrelated with all the other parts (i.e. nothing works in isolation).
Once the causes of stress are uncovered, the muscles are used in a similar way to provide the support the body needs in order to resolve the stress. Once the underlying stress is resolved, the client’s body is more able to self-heal. The client’s self-healing is the primary goal behind kinesiology.
The term innate awareness, when used in kinesiology, is quite literal. Another way of saying it could be 'something inside yourself that you (your mind, body or your subconscious) know to be true.'
Merriam-Webster Dictionary says:
innate (adjective)
existing in, belonging to, or determined by factors present in an individual from birth e.g. innate behaviour
belonging to the essential nature of something
synonyms: inherent
The Cambridge Dictionary says:
awareness (noun)
knowledge that something exists
understanding of a situation or subject based on information or experience
