Magic and the Queen

Tales from a descent into magic.

[magicandthequeen]

S: “I love the deep red color you chose during our work today to fill your energy bubble. Very soothing. Very sanguine.”

Me: “The phrase that keeps coming to my mind is more along the lines of ‘bathing in the blood of my enemies.’”

S:

[magicandthequeen]

How does one catch the eye of someone? And begin the game of shyly looking away, and slightly smiling, and looking back, and pretending to get caught?

Asking for a friend.

[magicandthequeen]

Visions

I remember talking to M.

“But I don’t see myself as super magical, or super manifesty, or being powerful or attractive. I’m barely able to articulate my visions.”

“Don’t worry,” she would say. “I’ll hold that vision for you. I’ll keep seeing you as attractive and powerful and magical and a great manifestor. I’ll keep what you can only see as fantasy as my vision for you. I know you can be and do all of those things.”

I don’t have M to hold those visions any more. And I was delegating them to her because I didn’t have the ability to hold them myself.

Where do these visions go? Who holds them until I’m capable of doing so?

That’s what I miss the most so far, and what feels like the biggest uncertainty.

[magicandthequeen]

Boundaries

Sometimes you don’t know you have a boundary until it gets crossed. Over and over. And then, somehow, you hoist yourself out of the emotional collapse and stare the pain down and realize what it means. If I can salvage anything out of the wreckage of the rupture with M at least it’s that.

So, boundaries, then.

No one is allowed to tell me what I think, feel, experience, or desire. 

This was the first boundary that I found, and the one that gave me strength through all of this. It’s very NVC-esque, and I like the simplicity of it.

(As a side note, I felt uncomfortable with my last post. Isn’t declaring that L and M have unaddressed emotional wounds violating this boundary on their side? I think I struggle with the precision of language here. Their wounds don’t look healed to me. I certainly would never insist on it or debate the truth of what’s inside of them with them. On the other hand, I don’t think I’m interested in connections with people who are so unaware of their wounds that they would not at least be open to me sharing my perspective of them. Is that another boundary?)

If I have a rupture with someone, they must have some recognition that they played some part in that rupture.

This is the “steamrolled” feeling that I mentioned before, that I mentioned that I felt this for a while with M. There is a deep sense in me that wants to be a peacemaker, to find the space where everyone is a little right and everyone played a role in what happened. So this is self-defense, allowing me to stay that way without getting crushed.

I still don’t like conflict with people. There’s always been a dread that I would hurt them, and M would say that I have to let go of that fear, and acknowledge that I will hurt people and be willing to repair, and that willingness to accept that I might hurt them would end up meaning that I would hurt them less.

Perhaps that’s the case, but the other side of not liking conflict is that I know I get crushed easily. Maybe this boundary will help.

[magicandthequeen]

Years ago, I met L. L was hot for me. Thought I was gorgeous, really fell hard. I didn’t really get it. Partially because self-esteem on my part (am I worthy of such love and affection?) but partially because it really did seem too powerful and too fast.

We were lovers for a while, but L had deep wounds that they refused to acknowledge existed. L’s father was going through a medical crisis, and I tried to use my experiences helping with consolation, but L played a sad song on their phone and deliberately wallowed in the pain caused, bawling while supposedly trying to fall asleep. Talking about still hating themselves for allowing themselves to be abused as a child and then insisting they were fully healed and over it.

It felt like I was seeing a reflection of myself, seeing my own wounds in someone else, though deeper and with not any self-awareness. I found myself having to forcefully disconnect with L just to keep myself from getting pulled down too.

And now M.

I’ve loved the work we’ve done together, and what we’ve awakened in me. But there was always this slight feeling of gears grinding, of this incompatibility between us. M would talk about “rupture and repair,” about the cycle of conflict between people and the subsequent examination of the clash and the reconstruction of the relationship. In ruptures with M, I would get this “steamrolled” feeling of being crushed, of always being wrong while she was always right.

And while I was growing from working with her, it was something I could ignore. I could always take a deep breath, talk through what happened, reconnect. Keep growing, keep developing.

But during the last week that I worked with M, we had a conflict one night. A rupture. Over and over, with increasing magnitude each cycle until I was emotionally crushed and she was furious. We repaired things enough to end the week, but I left it still feeling misunderstood.

We had a follow up video call last week, and I brought up what happened. The call did not shed any light for her or me. Later that night, I realized that we were fundamentally incompatible in a way that wouldn’t allow us to work any further and I ended things.

Only now, though, I’m realizing that this feels like a repeat of the same pattern I had with L.

M, like L, is a wonderful person with a terrible childhood. There are wounds in their pasts that they believe they’ve healed but that from my perspective don’t look healed at all. And their wounds conflict with my wounds in such a way that I’ve had to disconnect from them for my own emotional protection.

With L it was their self-hatred and grief conflicting with my self-hatred and grief. With M it was her over-protective boundaries about yelling and emotional blaming conflicting with my exasperation about not being understood and self-blame. It’s the same thing again and again.

On one hand, I can take some solace. I know I contributed to the rupture. I’m quite aware of my wounds, of how, when I feel misunderstood I tend towards exasperation and desperation, and how in conflict my sense of self evaporates in self-hate. I’m to the point where rather than saying, as I did a few weeks ago, “I don’t think I’m healed enough to work with M,” I now can say, “I don’t think M is healed enough to work with me.”

And yet, there are two few dark sides to all of this that are eating away at me.

One is the adoration. I haven’t had many admirers. L was absolutely gaga over me. M made it clear about how much affection she had for me. Yet I had to disconnect from both due to irreconcilable emotional wounds. Will I find someone who is hot for me or likes me who isn’t emotionally incompatible? It’s hard to not see a pattern here. And speaking of patterns:

Me. I am the common thread here. Is there something about me going on here? I don’t mean to be the psychiatric hypochondriac here; I don’t see myself as, say, codependent. I would like to say that I’ve walked away once I saw the relationships weren’t healthy. But am I ok?

I really really really don’t know.

[magicandthequeen]

I love self-development gurus as much as the next girl, but I swear that the next one who uses the phrase “how’s that working for you?” will get a fucking punch in their fucking face. I fucking swear to god.

[magicandthequeen]

My manifestation journal arrived today. Amazon may think they sent me a bullet journal, but with a blessing of my power of manifestation I created a magical artifact.

I then spoke a simple declaration:

By putting pen to paper, I hereby manifest and create my reality.

And then I picked up my pen, a purple pen, filled with purple ink, the most regal of colors as befits a Queen, and wrote my first entry.

I, my friends, my family, and all who connect to me or who are mine live long lives full of health and happiness.

That includes you, my dear reader. You are mine, and I am yours.

👸

[magicandthequeen]

A few visits ago to S, he asked me to summon an angel.

“Let’s summon some angels. You’ll summon one, and I’ll summon one. Feel into yourself; what angel feels right?”

I felt into myself and for whatever reason the movie Spinal Tap came to mind. I want to turn the volume on myself up, but I don’t because the static (pain) level is so high that turning up the volume brings an unbearable amount of static (pain) too.

I explained this to S. I said that I wanted to call upon the Angel of Radio Repair, to fix the dirty connections so that I would get a clear signal and not static.

“Let’s call that... the Angel of Clarity. Does that sound right? I’ll summon the Angel of Self-Love.”

I suppose there is an Angel of Clarity, but if there is an Angel of Radio Repair out there, an old, gruff angel who smokes a cigar and wields a soldering iron and an old-school Boston accent, I summon you. Do your work.

[magicandthequeen]

I’m getting a little notebook. It’s going to be my little notebook of manifesting.

And it’s private. No one will be allowed to read it.

And it’s going to have a curse, like King Tut’s tomb. Or maybe not quite a curse. What it’s going to say is:

A curse blessing for those who read uninvited from this book: may the universe heal you of whatever condition you suffer from that causes you to want to snoop around where you are not wanted and not invited.

Property of MQ. Reward for safe return.

[magicandthequeen]

An ongoing question that I keep asking of myself is, “what do I want?” Like deep down. What experiences would make me happy? What would I like to do?

The usual answer to this is, “I don’t know!” I won’t know if I like something until I give it a try, and then hear something deep in me say “give me more!” That doesn’t happen often, and I find myself angry at the prospect of having to bumble around trying things until I sense that it’s right for me.

But I’m reading a book about artists and something just struck me. The book was talking about their drug use. One particular drug is “like having a million universes mainlined into your spinal column for three minutes.” When I read that sentence, my body screamed “yes!”

Now, I’ve done drugs before. Mushrooms. Ayahuasca. And my body does not react well at all. Noooooope it does not. With my mind turned off, a descent into the pure experience of my body is a ride of pure existential terror. Every time.

And so this is both fascinating and deeply bothering me. Why is there a part of me, deep down, that feels called to do something that I know I have a terrible reaction to?

Talking about drugs reminds me of Burning Man. Never been. But I’ve heard about it, and there’s that same “yes, I must do that” feeling. A year ago when I was talking to M about her experiences with it, I felt that drive of “yes” run me and I told her that I had to go the next time. (I didn’t.) But in feeling into that “yes”, there was this deep realization that if I were to go, I would feel lost and lonely.

This, over and over. I feel a strong “yes” to glamorous parties, mingling among the gorgeous people, being all enchanting (heh) and bewitching (heh heh), charmingly spinning my web. Yet, in reality the chatter of crowds freaks out my body and shuts me down.

And at an even deeper level, I’m taking an abundance course, and the question of “what do you want to do with your life?” comes up. On one hand I’ve been struggling to answer that question; I don’t know! But lately I’ve felt a tickle of “I want to help people” with a faint echo of “being in healing relationships with them.” Just the slightest sense of Purpose there with a capital P. And yet, again, relationship is exactly the area in which I struggle.

I understand that the path is always through the swamp. However, I’ve been complaining for a long time that I haven’t been able to hear my inner voice state its desire. Now that (perhaps) I’m starting to hear it, I’m not sure how to deal with what it’s saying.

[magicandthequeen]

Magical wiseassery

I’m a bit of a wiseass. It comes pretty naturally to my by now, though I do struggle a bit at times to make sure it’s positive and not mean.

I just finished up some time with M, and there were two wiseass moments I’ve been thinking about. One was a comment while talking about meeting M’s friends. This particular conversation was private so I can’t be more specific, but M immediately called it out as a magical moment, pointing out on her phone how my comment perfectly meshed with conversations she was having. Another wiseass moment was while I was walking with M to her hotel, and it started drizzling. I looked to the sky and said, “Hey, can you knock it off for ten minutes?” It kept raining and we hurried the last block to the hotel, but after saying good night to her, it was dry all the way back to my apartment.

(I do love that the story of “oh I told the rain to stop and it did” is only a side note to the larger idea. Weather magic.)

I was relating these two incidents to S. One of the things that I feel like I’ve struggled with in the past is getting in touch with my true desires. Perhaps being a wiseass allows me to bypass my discomfort?

S replied with two points.

First, sure. It’s a crutch for now, as I really do need to practice being in touch with my desires, but as long as I’m aware that I won’t be able to keep on relying on it forever, it’s not a problem.

Second, it might help with relaxing. Magic happens in the periphery, when you’re not focusing on it. Wiseassery and other humor is in the moment, a touch on a topic and then a release, so the requirement to let the joke breathe and then be left alone would mesh well with how magic works.

That’s it. Something I’m still feeling into.

[magicandthequeen]

Burn it.

Burn.

The.

Jungle.

To.

The.

Fucking.

Ground.

[magicandthequeen]

Jungle

There’s a jungle. In that jungle are tigers and bears and spiders and asps. Walking around that jungle is terrifying. There’s no knowing what will happen. Is this step going to be your last? How about the next? One bite when you’re not looking and you’re dead.

You’re standing on a little paved circle in that jungle. You don’t feel entirely safe while standing on that circle, but the anxiety and terror at least are at tolerable levels. As the years go by, you take small trips outside of the paved circle. Stepping outside the circle for the first time fills you with dread, but as you survive and make it back to the safety of the circle, the following trips get easier and easier. You eventually pave paths you walk a lot, and the baseline fear and terror doesn’t move much as you walk them. Other paths are somewhat beaten down, but still bring up fear.

And the rest of the jungle continues to exist beyond the edges of known safety.

This is, of course, obviously a metaphor. When I say “you” I of course mean myself. The jungle is the world full of people. And the terror is... well... terror.

I remember the first time I took a taxi. I hopped in the car, told the driver where I needed to go, and I got there. It was Seattle. I remember it vividly, because it was a terrifying experience. The whole time my brain was looking at how reasonable everything was. Here’s a guy who takes money and moves people around. He’s friendly. I can ask him to help me, I can give him money, he will take me to where I need to go. And I was in terror the whole time.

I even have faint memories of being terrified talking to cashiers the first few times. The memories are fainter because they’re older, but I still distinctly remember being wooden and full of anxiety and doing my best to act normal, to not spook the cashiers.

I’ve paved many of the paths I need to walk in my life. My job is a paved path. Chatting with neighbors is a paved path. Buying groceries is a paved path.

But many of the paths remain unpaved trails through the undergrowth. Friendship is one of those. I have people who I do my best to be friends with, but while I am proud of my ability to relax and be “normal” around them, there’s still this fear of spooking them, of freaking them out so that they run away or hurt me. That’s not a logical fear, of course. I don’t allow people who would actually hurt me into my life. But my body doesn’t know that and I don’t know how to make it listen.

And just about anything new feels like it’s deep in the jungle. I’m working with M, and last night we needed to get dinner. She smiled at me conspiratorially, saying, “I need room to have my notebook out, so I’m going to reserve for three to get a bigger table.” I was terrified. That’s not following the rules, that’s stepping out of bounds. That’s inviting trouble.

That’s an invitation to get hurt.

Even writing this, I feel terror in my body. A real terror of being physically hurt, being put into a place of pain, being in the place of wanting to die.

There’s no logical reason for any of this. And that doesn’t matter at all.

A few days ago I had a conversation with M.

“Why do you have no trouble talking to some people but not others?”

“I have a reason to talk to the cashier. I have a reason to talk to the waiter.”

“Isn’t that you find someone hot reason enough to talk to them?”

“No. I feel ashamed. It feels shallow.”

And we went and talked about shallowness.

But the jungle is what’s going on here. Years ago I was in a situation where I was forced to talk to a cashier, so I pushed myself to do so. Now that’s a paved path, and there’s little anxiety. Years ago I pushed myself to talk to waiters, and now that’s a paved path. The anxiety is under control, and sometimes I can even relax and bring out the charm and the flirtiness.

But if we go beyond that, the anxiety starts building again. Yes, having a reason to talk to someone is helpful, but all that does is give me some ability to push into the terror. The further out into the jungle I go, the scarier it is. Reasons stop being strong enough to work, and no matter how desperately I want to explore and find kinship and really start living, the terror shuts me down and I retreat to the paved path.

So hi from the paved path.

I hope to see you soon in the jungle.

[magicandthequeen]

Last weekend I went to get some tea with a friend. The place was busy. I ordered pots of tea.

“You ordered pots. Is there an open table?”

“Don’t worry. We’ll get one.” Calm faith in the universe to provide.

I walked over to the seating area. Just then a guy started packing his stuff. I asked him if he was leaving, and he was, so I grabbed the table right as the tea pots were ready.

The universe obeys! Magic!

I think.

Telling this to W, he was wondering.

“Was it you asking the universe for a table that got you one? Is the universe listening to you? Perhaps you were so relaxed and surrendered to the universe that it decided to provide you a table, and you just knew at a deep level that one would be provided for you.”

Hearing W say that, I started wondering.

My friend wanted to talk to me about some relationship issues she was having. Perhaps the universe needed to give my friend a message, chose me, and gave us a table for the conversation. All for her sake, and I had nothing to do with it.

I’m not sure which is the case.

I’m not sure it terribly matters, either.

[magicandthequeen]

Why wait until you’re dead to reincarnate? Who has that kind of time to waste?

MQ

[magicandthequeen]

Magick result!

I ordered some stuff from Amazon, and was eagerly awaiting it. Wednesday the tracking said it was delivered, so when I got home I talked to the doorman. Nope, it hadn’t shown up.

Thursday, I asked the doorman again if it arrived. “Nope,” he said, “but the post office often delivers things to the wrong address. Heck, this small white package is meant for a building three blocks down. I’m going to leave it out for the mail carrier to pick up tomorrow and redeliver.”

I didn’t believe that the carrier would pick it up. I decided that if the small white package wasn’t picked up tomorrow, I would deliver it myself, and that would mean that my package would make its way to me.

And so yesterday, Friday, arriving home I saw the white package, so I told the doorman I was delivering it. Three minute walk down the street, buzzed the apartment a few times, caught a woman leaving and had her drop it on a ledge inside the door, three minute walk back.

Ten minutes total. When I got back, the doorman was excited. “Hey, look what arrived for you while you were out! Your missing package!” He gave it to me.

I didn’t think about my belief as a spell, but it was a deliberate decision: I would deliver the white package and my package would come to me. The universe listened. Yay!

#packagedeliverymagick

[magicandthequeen]

I had a session with S yesterday. He started me with a sentence, “I forgive myself for ...” and I felt compelled to go from there. I went on and said statements about forgiving myself for dozens of things that I hate myself for or feel ashamed about. I went on and on for twenty or thirty minutes.

S said he liked how the session went. He said that he felt me in all my statements, and they all felt real. And yet, at the end of the session I felt compelled to say that I didn’t know for sure if I really did forgive myself for all of those things, or if those were all things for which I wanted to forgive myself but that I didn’t actually do so.

I have an unusual relationship with Truth.

I know people who have an unusual relationship with the truth, but that’s actually the opposite of what I’m talking about here. Those people have a disconnection from reality, and whether what they believe lines up with what’s really going on is fifty/fifty.

For me, it’s almost an obsession to be truthful. To be precise. To be able to justify and back up every word that I say. When I feel into the strength of that compulsion, it reads almost as a moral value. Thou Shalt Be Truthful. In every deed, in every word.

Where does that come from? There are lots of answers to be had. Maybe it was the Scouts when I was young, exhorting being truthful. Maybe religion. Maybe it was from when I was growing up, when anything that I said could be used as a weapon against me, leading me to only say things that were 100% true and I could defend in depth.

In any case, though, I remember adopting Truth to be my guiding principle. It was literally a decision, that always being Truthful was the Right Thing to do and therefore I should do it. But it felt like my lone virtue as well. I wasn’t what anyone wanted me to be. The more I tried to fit in, the more I was reminded of that. I had no virtues in my own eyes. Seeing Truth, I saw an appealing virtue I could have, to feel better about myself. So I took it on.

The problem is that Truth isn’t exactly good for conversation. Not that conversations are necessarily untrue, but the idea of being truthful doesn’t exactly help. And once you learn that when someone says, “you can tell me what you really think,” that they really mean they desperately want to be lied to, you get tired of talking to people.

And being my lone virtue, Truth became my main weapon against myself. “What’s going on for you?” I would be asked, and I would reply in brutal harshness, laying forth all of my perceived faults and ways that I hated myself. “Wow,” they’d say, “thank you for your honesty.” I would always reply that honesty was all that I had.

That was my real perception, not thinking about the ways that honesty, the devotion to the perceived Truth, was as distorting to me as disconnection from Truth was distorting to others. Thinking through the lens of “is this True or not” was polarizing. If I’m not as good as I thought I could be, I was bad. If I wasn’t as socially successful as I wanted to be, I was terrible.

Even knowing this, it’s still not something I’m over. Anyone who’s worked with me knows that sometimes, while describing something, I’ll ask for the freedom to not be held to using precise words. “I’m going to throw some words at this, trying to describe it. Please don’t hold me to what I say,” I’ll disclaim. And it’s not like I’m trying to get away with telling untruths, but there’s a part of me that won’t allow me to speak unless the words are 100% true and defensible. So I disclaim, and then that part of me relaxes and allows me to speak. And I still feel uncomfortable whenever I do that, but I’m getting better at it.

The reason I bring this up is because of magick.

Is my struggle with magick due to my insistence on my version of Truth?

Working with S, there was a sense that, as I was declaring that I was forgiving myself, I was casting spells to unwind things inside me. While I was saying those words, I felt something pulling me along to say them, and it felt good. But at the end, the Truth kicked in, and I started wondering how Truthful I had been with those statements, and things felt like they were unraveling a bit as the concern about Truth went on.

Magick requires Imagination, to be able to see things how they could be rather than how they are. And there is a core conflict between Truth and Imagination. In that session with S, I could feel the desire to be healed pull me along. Imagining myself healed was inspiring. And at the end, Truth came back to administer the self-hatred that I had neglected the whole session, that I wasn’t actually fully forgiving of myself.

So I have to take a stand.

Truth, I love you. You know that. And what you are doing is unacceptable.

Stop “well actually”ing me. You know what I mean.

My attempts are genuine; stop second-guessing me. My imagination of a better me is real; stop pulling me back to a cruel self-interpretation.

Seriously. Just. Stop.