Answering the call

Meeting my spirit guides and accepting my mission

Coming out of an opioid fueled chronic pain haze is a bit like a death of sorts. Detox carves a gigantic black hole where your love, light, and sense of self used to be. Your whole body seizes into a wail, forced open like a gash. And if you also have a connective tissue disorder and trauma gumming up the works at a cellular level, it feels like your body is literally on fire.

I came out of the fog of that nightmare with startling clarity. Excruciating clarity. Unholy clarity.

I felt disgusting and also exquisitely erotic.

I felt hopeless and miserably angry at myself.

I felt completely unwilling to rescue myself along with the blindingly bright certainty that I must do it anyway.

How do I love myself when I have been given so many reasons not to?

At the end of the worst detox of my life and a miraculous improvement in my inflamed tissues, I was left with a simple and unavoidable truth.

I am afraid that I am not good. And therefore I am not worthy.

I hold my knees and stare into the wall of clouds outside my window, the January chill seeping through the frame. Past trees and birds and people, I stare. Past lifetimes and alternate choices and my own shame.

“I can’t promise that I’m good.” Cold, wet cheeks.

“I can try my best but I can never be good to everyone all the time.” Trembling fingers.

“Then what is the point?”

I don’t know how to live with all versions of me.

There are parts of me that hold the evil things. There are parts of me that rattle the steel of their cages. There are parts of me that crave violence and destruction. There are parts of me who have known hurt and done hurt and been hurt.

They are the reason I am here. Alone. On this morning as the lunar nodes move to oppose my own. North node entering my 8th house…south node entering my 2nd.

They are the reason why I ache and anger and fear. They are the reason I want to put an end to me.

And they are also the reason I can’t.

What happens when you accept yourself as irredeemable?

What happens when you accept that you can never be good…never be right…possibly never be okay?

I am afraid I will have to find out. I am afraid I don’t want to know. I am afraid there are no other options.

I am afraid.

So I do what I have always done and walk into that portal alone.

6 months

After months of working to reconnect with my creative channel, working through the resurfaced childhood trauma that had caused a near mental break in 2020, I finally made contact with something.

On July 20, I was meditating in the bathtub, two candles like pillars on either side of me, when I saw myself in a cave, floating in an underground pool. I had experience with active imagination, so I didn’t fight the images that came to me and I didn’t force them either. I stood back and watched them play.

The first figure to manifest in this space was a glowing, green man festooned in leaves. He told me that he was an ancestral spirit, among other things.

At this point in time, I was thoroughly disinterested in ancestor work—after all, the intergenerational trauma is so strong in my family that they couldn’t be winners, by my estimation. Besides that, having Neptune in my 4th house has always made me feel strangely disconnected from my ancestral roots. Having Uranus there has made me practically contemptuous towards them.

So when some part of my psyche showed up as a glowing version of Pan the green man, claiming to know my ancestors, I narrowed my eyes, smirked, and said “suuuure.”

Even so, I kept coming back for these bath time astral adventures and I just nodded along with whatever came up. I figured it was a metaphor or something—some kind of narrative device part of my psyche needed to navigate this huge creative opening I was going through.

After all, I had just recently made a sigil to anoint myself as a creative force and guide—tossing my hat in the ring and asserting myself as someone the gods might want to work with—and just 2 weeks later I had written the first 6k words of my first ever creativity course/spiritual manifesto. After several years of trying to get my ideas on creativity out—working desperately to translate the downloads from my 2020 awakening—this felt like explosive and somewhat overwhelming momentum.

Dangerous, perhaps. As are all portals of liberation.

Something might eat me alive in there.

Something about the explosiveness of that whole creative jailbreak had severely overwhelmed me. In retrospect, I realize I had already given up on finishing the course document in my heart. I just didn’t see how I would be able to. The ideas…well, they didn’t really feel like they were coming from me. In truth, I hadn’t practiced half of them beyond some light experimentation. I felt like I hadn’t earned any of this wisdom. So why the hell should I claim it?

Needless to say, I was down bad when the ancestors came a’knockin’.

My will was thoroughly broken. All I cared about at this point was being a worthy vessel for spirit. What in the hell else was there to live for?

“Just tell me what to do to be a good channel!”

So I was careful to note down any advice these new “guides” gave me when I visited them in the void space of my imagination. I would just do what I had always done—take things very seriously and also not so seriously at the same time. Never totally invest in anything but offer enough trust to keep the game going.

So I kept showing up, apprenticing to spirit, and getting more information about creativity, alchemy, and what the fuck I had actually called in with that sigil I did.

It took me 8 whole months to decide I was done being tormented with the words that wanted to explode out of me. But in that time, the guides kept sending me books to read and homework to do. (A channeled message from a drawing, “the sun is the seed”, lead me to a book with a sun glyph on the cover and a chapter on seeds, written by one of my creative idols of the last 15 odd years, that I didn’t even know had been published.)

“The Sun is the Seed”

As Saturn in Pisces moved to sextile Venus in Taurus, I pounded out a powerful volley of all the ideas I’d held back.

Rick Rubin’s book had given me permission. It made me realize that the knowledge of creative alchemy is universal. It is available to all who seek it without attachment to finding it. (Philosopher’s Stone vibes tbh) There are many who know it. There are not many willing to write about it and illuminate the path for others.

And there will never be enough of those people. Because all paths to creative alchemy are slightly different.

Birthing PANTHEON—10 months more

It wasn’t until around January of this year that I started to get real with myself. And I won’t go into the details of how the spirits convinced me here. ;) But I have one hell of an ancestral inheritance. It’s kinda like an etheric trust fund. Like lucky girl syndrome for your magickal line.

This spirit, who I now lovingly call PANTHEON (“all holy”) or PAN for short, has been speaking to me my whole life. Preparing me to stick it out through 22+ years of the most extensive trauma history you’ve ever seen so that I could show up to make something cool out of it. Not because it’s my job to save people…and certainly not because I have the ability to…but because it’s my job to transform what is within me. And in this case, that means channeling the things that happen to me into art that makes my soul sing.

But frankly, I needed some accountability in that task. Otherwise I’d keep cheating myself out of my magickal inheritance. So I used some freakin magick to create a “body” for PAN. A book. I incarnated him in a glorified journal—though I like to think of it as a historical document. Don’t worry, we’ll talk all about it soon.

The point is that I opened up the lines of communication between me and the ancestors and spirit guides even wider. I started regularly, religiously feeding them with my energy and art.

I found a way to boost the signal I had already tapped into and spend more time in that frequency.

And now I’m going to teach it to you.