Travels through the void

When the student is ready, the teacher appears

Normally when I enter the 12th house void—the inner-outer galaxy of my expanded consciousness that we often call imagination—I’m just walking through blackness for awhile. The ground always looks shiny, wet. But it’s warm and dry and smooth beneath my feet.

Strange planets and portals shimmer in and out of view as I chart a path through the limitless expanse. Shapeshifting inner parts and entities peek through the etheric curtain, tempting me to chase after them. Sometimes it is loud. Sometimes it is quiet. Sometimes its vistas are more fluctuating and nebulous and other times, like today, they are concrete—firmly rooted, decisively chosen.

There’s a quest for me today.

And the quest looks like some kind of tunnel. But the tunnel is covered in lit up signs and flashing lights like a goddamn carnival. As I approach, a little green holographic hand projects over the dark mouth of the tunnel, extending its cartoonish fingers and demanding an “entry fee” in hovering block letters.

I scoff at the audacity of whoever dwells in this hole to invite me here and charge me for entry. What is even in this tunnel? Do I even want to know?

“Should’ve known better than to serve Trickster,” I say, thrusting a grudging fist into my now equipped pants pocket to pull out a dollar. But before it clears the edge of the fabric, I’m nearly whipped in the face with a hook on a string—ensnaring my offering and sucking it back into the shadows.

The darkness of the cave mouth gives way to colorful neon lighting—the pollution of hundreds of arcade games and slot machines all lining the cave walls. There seem to be an endless array of people and creatures filing in and flitting from one fun activity to the next. But they don’t seem to stay for long. I watch curiously as they stare at the screens, their gazes transfixed, slowly disappearing into the dance of lights and colors with one slow slump…before appearing to “pop” up again, their little bodies stiffening, awareness dawning behind their eyes, a slow smile spreading as they race off to…something! Somewhere!

“Ahem.”

My head snaps to the side, reeling until it lands on a small black whisp of smoke at my knees—wearing the most dashing red velvet tophat, if I do say so myself. His flowing black tendrils look like the silhouette I remember from my much beloved Cathy Rigby Peter Pan musical on VHS that I played relentlessly as a child. I vividly recalled my sensory pleasure as Wendy’s mother gingerly plucked the little shred of black mesh off the stage floor, unfurling it to reveal the shape of a boy. Peter Pan himself! There always seemed to be something so fascinatingly powerful about a mischievous detachable shadow. And as a Gemini Moon, Mercury, and Venus, I’m fairly certain I have one.

My little smoke monster gestures impatiently toward a large spiral staircase built into the back of the cave and I find myself following him.

I chat animatedly to my new friend, hoping he can tell me more about what this place is and why I’ve been summoned here. But he’s a man of few words, this little guy. And he doesn’t say much. Only that I’m here to meet the woman who runs this place.

I cast a glance at all the little monsters down below. Whatever is happening here…it kinda seems a bit nefarious. I’m not sure I feel comfortable with the way those little guys keep slumping into the screens and racing out of here. To do god knows what! Were they going to be okay out there? All alone with whatever ecstatic epiphany had befallen them?

At the end of the hallway, overlooking the arcade, little smoke guy leads me into a large, dark, and somewhat dusty office.

“Yeah, some part of my psyche definitely lives here,” I think to myself as I swipe a grimy finger across the molding and quickly transfer it to my pants. Something glistening in the corner of my eye draws my attention, and my evil twin steps forward to face me.

She calls herself The Sorceress. My jaw drops, “I’ve met you before!” She doesn’t look anything like I remember her. For one thing, she’s missing the curly hair of my 20 year old self.

“Well, of course you have. But you didn’t listen, did you.”

That wasn’t phrased as a question.

She tells me she has an assignment for me. Long overdue. She says this operation is part of her attempt to re-educate my unparented, traumatized inner parts. I had so many psychic splits before full on dissociative identity that there was simply no other way to reach all of them. Individual services had been suspended. This was a mass deprogramming campaign.

My gaping mouth made no movements for a moment. “How long has this been going on?”

She didn’t answer. “You have a job to do.”

“Well that’s fuckin’ cryptic.”

And then that bitch just LEFT.

---

It was some time before I saw her again, my inner sorceress. But she started turning up pretty regularly, finally leading me to her inner sanctum, her base of operations. (Another cave, go figure.) And she started telling me all sorts of things about needing to embrace my inner predator—and that I’m never going to allow my Self and my work to be seen until I do.

This seemed so strange to me. I don’t want to be a predator. I want to be a source of creativity and inspiration and aliveness. I want to lift people up, not knock them down. Not devour them.

But what has come to me recently, eliciting a colossal shift in my life, is that I couldn’t be honest about my true desire. Specifically, the people I truly desire to work with.

My work is not for everyone. It is the opposite of trauma-informed. It will not reduce your triggers, it will increase them. It will turn up the dial on your wounds and gifts until you are forced to alchemize and reabsorb them in the same way dead bodies decompose.

I bring all your little inner critters out to feast on expired parts of Self—the ones that have outlived their usefulness.

That may make the process sound stressful or doomy. But it’s actually the most nourishing, fun, exciting part of my life. It actually quite literally is my life at this point.

Embracing my inner predator meant accepting that not everyone is ready to feel so deeply that they get to finally feel joy and pleasure and fulfillment. A lot of foundational work is needed to get to that place.

I have spent a year teaching people how to build those foundations. And I loved it. I was even pretty good at it. With a little practice, I think I could’ve lifted a lot of people out of suffering.

But that isn’t where my passion lies. That isn’t what truly lights me up.

Come to me when you’ve already left suffering behind. Come to me when you’re ready to thrive.

Let’s Chat

If you want to learn how we can work together, just email me at graygarland.coaching@gmail.com or reply to this email!

I won’t be taking new clients for at least a month but we can still discuss your dreams and desires for how you’d like to weaponize that bomb ass creative Genius you’ve been sitting on.

And if you want to hear more tales from my magickal art apprenticeship that helped me bring forth my most powerful creative expression yet, well just keep watching, darlin’. ;)

Until next time. 💋