Resilience Magic 1. An Invitation to Journey

Adapted from original image by Noah Eleazar on Unsplash

Out of chaos comes the seed of potential order. The ouroboros dragon prima materia – via the alchemical individuation process – produces the Master Work. You are your own guide to yourself and you are the one who can make the ordinary, extraordinary.

Once you begin to get intouch with your higher self (and this goes by many names: God, Soul, Self, Spirit, Consciousness, Holy Guardian angel etc) the magic of YOU starts to be revealed and unpeeled, layer by layer. You are your own personal lucky charm, your own diviner, your own protectress. If you can master the art of grounding yourself in daily practice and study, you can be your own miracle, like your own personal myth and legend. 

You don’t need to have a PHD in Psychology, Counselling, Theology or Mythology. You don’t need to be a Jungian analyst or student of history and folklore. You don’t need to be a writer or business leader; you just have to be you. For this is all about YOUR magic.

If you find your own personal path, you’ll begin a journey. One of imagination, spirituality, immersion in nature, moving through an entire ecosystem of thriving tradition and esoteric practice. You’ll reconnect with the land and deepen your response to ecology. You’ll root yourself in our sacred spaces and geography. You’ll pursue wisdom, enjoy the art of ceremony and little rituals. 

You’ll become your own shaman and deeply appreciate the axiom that everything connects, this is the real meaning of holistic.

You’ll re-assess old identities, old masks you wore that perhaps no longer serve you in the ‘new normal’ world. For example, you might embrace more rebelliousness or more creativity and open-mindedness. You might learn a new skill and practice pursuit such as Herbalism or Astrology, one that might have seemed laughable or ‘woo’ in the ‘old normal’ (aka February 2020).

You’ll seek out your own truth, not the ‘truths’ to be found on Facebook, Instagram, Google or YouTube. There will be nothing fake about you (except maybe a Janus-face you might choose to wear as disguise for when discretion is needed, for sometimes we need to go dark in dark times.)

You’ll be your own god or angel and your own vulnerable mortal in this game. You have the power and magic to hold both realities at once, for you have spell over you.

You’ll re-enchant yourself and your life with what’s important to you, with what you value – not anyone else’s values. These will be your tiny hills to defend and die on.

No one will rescue you or your family, no one is coming with a rescue plan. There’s only you. You are the rescue. You are the mission. This is your resilience story, your magic to bare. But what is magic?

A wise magician once said, “magic is the Science and Art of causing change to occur in conformity with Will.” What is your will? What do you wish for? What do you want?  What is your need of and vision for?

Here is your opportunity then to execute on that, to act and create. For you are boundless, you are aglow with fire lit from within. You can choose to be your own sanctuary from the storm of life.

Indeed, you are a beautiful thing in this beautiful world. You can make your experiences be art. 

You are like a living fairy tale and this, all this, is your magical landscape with which to play in. Your soul (or as the depth psychologist influenced by Jung, James Hillman, calls it, your daimon) is like the acorn within the giant Oak. Your soul is like a tiny seed of order growing within a tree of elemental chaos in nature. And this tiny seed /acorn /daimon /soul yearns. It yearns for this journey of new order, it longs for its magic trip into coherence, the coherence of YOU. It wants you to regenerate.

As you take your tiny acorn on its much-awaited soul-trip, healing will occur. As you integrate more parts of yourself and mend old wounds, you will increase your intuition and your creative thinking. You will unlock hidden talents, embrace forgotten passions, discover potential brand-new vocations and ways of being in the world. You’ll feel a deep sense of fulfilment and meaning as you start to live on purpose. You get a chance to follow the call of your true self and inspire others along the way.

You can tune-in to this quiet voice, this presence within waits to be heard. The lockdown this Spring and Summer 2020 (at time of writing) has been an experience of isolation, distancing, quarantine, staying at home and being fearful. Yet this shared time has also been an invitation extended to us. It invites us to examine our lives – every nook and cranny of them. In the silence and the slowness, we begin to hear ourselves, for some it’s again for many like for the very first time ever. You must listen. Can you hear the small still voice within yet? Can you receive its little signal? Imagine the heartbeat of an unborn baby, tiny but strong and regular. The more you listen, the more persistent it gets. Say hello to your soul. It is reaching out, yearning for its message to be received, understood.

Yes, its voice is deep and hidden – but its voice is true, it is your personal truth. And it is within you. It knows all your lies and deceits and vanities. It is not tricked by the masks you wear in the world. It knows you and it serves you. Your soul serves you like the best life coach you ever had. Mark its words. What is your soul coach telling you? What aims and goals is it asking you to reach for? What magic does it hold within?

What is your soul inviting you to awaken? Who or what does it demand that you become? When does it insist on you starting your journey? How does your soul promise and commit to supporting and helping you on the road ahead?

This is your opportunity now, perhaps the only time for you in your personal history that the chance will be offered so easily and willingly, to initiate yourself in the ways of your own Resilience Magic. You get to become an authority on you – you could teach a class on yourself you’ll get so good!

In the death pangs of old-world colonial capitalism, amidst the chaotic painful birthing of something new (hope perhaps, being born) your soul invites you to be artist and scientist in the study of YOU. 

Take this space and time to look-out for its party invite, to create silence for hearing its clarion call.

You might live in a city or a small village, it doesn’t matter – the voice will find you. For wherever you go, there goes you. You are your own personal saviour and devil. Who else will ever love you so much or destroy you so much, but yourself?

I invite you, like some anthropologist, to study yourself deeply to uncover magic resilience within. What language do you speak? How do you move and interact in your community? What drives you? Be a professor of you, study your own weird freaky culture, your own indigenous species of one. Ask yourself, are you asleep or waking up? When you watch a sunset do you really feel it? If so, when you feel that sunset, just who (or what) is it that is doing that feeling? When you walk in the wilderness with nature, or pet an animal or grow a beautiful plant from seed – when you connect physically, spiritually and emotionally so intensely with the natural world in those moments – who or what in you is doing that connecting?

Consider, as you probe you like some examiner, is the divine in you or are you part of the divine and in it? Ask yourself, where do you feel at home and why? Then, who or what is feeling that feeling of being at home – who is doing the feeling of the being? I’m inviting you to ask and to pay attention to the answers. Get to be more sensitive and attune to you. Reach inside-out rather than grasp clumsily for outside-in. 

You are like a gorgeous rose garden. A garden full of life and flowers, insects, and healing herbs. But your garden also grows weeds and fungus and has stuff rotting down and stagnating too. You are the old established tree, the new shoot and the dead leaves and debris – all at the same time. Please remember to tend your soul’s garden so it may continue to thrive. Simultaneously release judgement from positions of ‘good’ or ‘bad’ – recognise that weeds have beauty and meaning too.

Resilience Magic teaches us that you are energy. This is your power. We all have energies. Some folk are fiery and combust in flames at the slightest spark. Others (such as my son) prefer to go with the flow all watery and chilled-out. Many (like me your writer) are dreamy airy thinkers whilst some (like my husband) have grounded earthy terrestrial roots. All these four energies are at play everyday in our Universe and lives. The four energies interact, balance each other out, sometimes fall out of balance, can fight, make-up with love and just generally intermingle with each other a lot sociably.

Their symbolic interconnected relationships and interplay, the tension between them, causes life – in all is glorious order and splendid chaos. These forces are not stuck out in the fringes, stuck at the back of the refrigerator shelf of life – they’re upfront centre, they are the entire soup we swim in. They may not be visible at all, but they are always in-play always in the game. The game never stops.

And those energies, those elementals, well boy are they curious about YOU! They communicate with you (via your little daimon) everyday – oh, if only you’d listen! You can communicate back. Talk to them – in ritual, prayer, dreams, breath, meditation, yoga, poetry, music, and dance for example. Do pull up a chair and drop by for a cuppa n’ a chat with them, who knows what you’ll find out.

So, this initiation into some of the secrets of Resilience Magic, it offers you an alternate path to walk on and to walk with those energies and your soul on together, as a family of YOU, everyday forever. Take this elemental soul stroll and it just might surprise you. It might heal your ills and cure those sleepless nights.

This isn’t just a system or another belief to impose, its about creating your system, finding your way, cultivating, and nurturing your very own personal beliefs. You don’t have to embrace every new shiny thing that pops into your inbox as gospel. Just find what works for you and (importantly) is from you. Draw forth from the well inside, like pulling up a bucket or supping of a fresh clear spring. Drink up!

Having resilience magic is about building up your own connections, weaving your own traditions, stumbling through your own back alleys to find a new road. Just begin. I’ll be your guide, that’s all this blog series is really, see it like self-help online. These are not the answer, nor are they dogma nor holy grail. This is just a mirror you see, and it reflects YOU back. And all I ask as the writer, what I invite you to do, is to take a closeup look at you.

See yourself in the metaphorical mirror, gaze and look upon you. What do you see? What inspires this person who is looking back at you? Who IS this person that is looking back at you? Ask yourself.

In my next post, lesson 2, we deep dive into all those uncomfortable questions. Until then, go light a fire in your soul.