Category: Apprenticeship

Looking Forward, Looking Back

I’ve held on to this email message for a couple of weeks, and every time I almost hit ‘Send,’ I hesitated.

So, instead of declaring this as my position, I offer it as a position I have considered, that we may talk about it.

Personal growth is a vital and necessary component of living.

Sometimes, it comes at a price.

When we went through the Elements class, I started with extremely high prospects in my life and career. I was rolling in money, had a great job, and things were really exciting.

By the time it ended, I was broke, unemployed, with no idea what I was going to be doing with my life.

I’ve often felt there is a correlation between the activities of Western magicians and conditions of financial lack, mostly due to scraping away native energies in banishing rituals. I’ve become more cautious about this, now that I’ve seen how my spiritual activities can affect my ability to provide for my family.

Granted, the destitution I achieved 18 months ago directly led to my present locale; had things continued going swimmingly in Portland, I would have stayed, and never considered a move to central america.

Now that I am here, I find myself without the failsafes I had in place in my former country. Being broke here, with $160 to my name, is a very different experience; one misstep, and my family (currently in between nationalities) is destitute, as well.

I relish the growth I have made during this journey, but I am unprepared to continue it, while maintaining my responsibilities as the provider of my household.

I appreciate the time and energy you have taken in guiding me along this path, and I will continue to work on your book trailer, as soon as I can secure an internet connection that does not die every fifteen minutes.

In the future, I would love to work with you again, in any number of capacities. But for now, I’m out.

With the new moon approaching, now is a good time to consider; do we move forward, or do we stop here?

Let’s Skype about it.

Ascended to Tiphareth.

I feel balanced. Whole. Complete.

I feel like I can legitimately let go of all the worries that used to creep into my consciousness, and without these fretting thoughts taking up my thinking, I can really relax into the majesty of existence.

This world is majestic. We live within Beauty. Our curse as humans is that we can neglect to notice it, or rather, we forget. Without continual reminders, we can easily slip back into dissatisfaction with the world, instead of ecstatic fascination with it.

Previous spheres have ended with a stagnation, a miring in the vice of the sphere. Is the same possible here? Will we descend into Pride, or can we truly stay in continual appreciation of Beauty?

I bring this up, because spending two months in this sephirah sounds mighty nice to me. If we are going to pace ourselves so we can meet in person at the right place along this journey, I nominate this stage as a good place to spend some extra time.

Balance, on the equinox.

And on the tree.

I’ve been adrift lately with regards to our work, not sure what I should be focusing upon. With the earlier sephirah, we were invoking the energy of one sphere; now, we are suspended between four of them, at the intersection of the Tower and Temperance.

Catastrophic taming, I suppose.

We are not in Hod or Netzach; the point of equilibrium between us, where we are, is more than just a balance between right and left. It is also a balance between Yesod and Tiphareth.

As I look to the left and the right, I also need to look above and below.

The splendor of the intellect is a place I spend most of my time anyway, with the work that I do. I understand Hod very well. At first, I assumed I would need balance with Netzach, and that was the great lesson for me here.

My emotions, however, are known, and tamed. I may lack in the ability to use my emotions for manifestation, a very potent force, which is why I created the ALF project, to ensure I practice this power diligently.

The most I am out of balance, when I examine my known self, is with thoughts of lust.

I have a very high libido. Thankfully, I have a lusty wife, and access to a world of porn. I never go dissatisfied.

My satisfaction takes temporary precedence over my other thoughts, however, 3-5 times per week.

Sometimes, this depletes my chi, dulling my effectiveness, all because idle lusty thoughts creep into my mind and consume my thinking and feeling capacity.

So today, I looked at the Tree, and asked where these lusty thoughts originate.

It is, of course, in the imagination, in Yesod. Corresponding with the second chakra, of course.

I imagine sexual fantasies frequently, and not because I need to, or because I am recently deprived. It is idle. In a word, masturbatory.

I hold of my intellectual thinking time to an appropriate portion of my day; if I have a great idea that needs further development, I record it into my voice recorder, and when I am alert and caffeinated, I review my notes and implement them.

Likewise, I should not be indulging in lusty thoughts when it is not the time for me to be indulging in them.

During the other portions of my day, I do not want to descend into baser thoughts. I want to look higher, into Beauty.

This, then, is my final lesson of balance at this point of the tree.

In my right and left hands, my intellect and my heart.

Below me is my desires. Above is my higher self.

I do not wish to completely abstain from my baser desires, but I will refrain from continual indulgence, in order that my higher mind can spend time untarnished in the forefront of my thoughts.

Full Moon and the Kabbalistic Prayer

I’ve been waiting for this prayer.

You gave it to me once before, when you cleansed my house in Portland.

(I’ve got a note to ask you about my office – let’s chat about that sometime.)

While you and Karl were at work, I was given your spellbook, with the authority to copy only that one spell out into my grimoire. I used that prayer frequently, gaining access to deeper levels of spiritual immersion, by calling the names of every angel on the tree in turn.

It was my favorite.

But, I did not bring that spellbook with m when I moved to Costa Rica. I only brought a handful of books, out of my huge library (I kept about half of it in a storage unit, which is where the spellbook is now). See, books mold here, and without a room with air conditioning where you can keep your books, paper will mold in under a year. I’m already seeing it happen to my books here.

So I’ve been without this prayer for a while, and I’ve really been missing it.

Now, I’ve got it in digital form.

I’ve been sitting on it, not reading it since you sent it over a few days ago. I’ve made a commitment to perform the Middle Pillar every full moon, as a way of keeping the ritual in tune and increasing the strength of my aura.

I just now realized, I actually missed the whole ‘middle pillar’ part of the ritual tonight.

  • Going up through the sephirah and calling them by name, check.
  • The Pattern on the Trestleboard, got it.
  • The three circulations, oh yeah.
  • The Kabbalistic Prayer – knocked me into my first seizure in months.
  • But did I actually move Jakin and Boaz into the Middle Pillar?

Oh, I forgot…

I was pretty trancey, and I was looking forward to

  1. jumping back into my favorite meditation/ritual/prayer of all time for the first time in more than half a year, and
  2. using my new wand.

I didn’t consecrate it, but I realized, I have a wand. I carry it around all the time.

I was looking to the East, where the full moon dominated the sky, and I looked through a fence made of sprouting logs. The top of my mountain has a great elemental spot for ritual work; to the north is the mountain face, to the south is the majestic view, to the west is the creek behind the foliage of the jungle (and even a tower of water, a cistern that feeds the houses below) and to the east, I can see the city in the distance, obscured by two rows of twine that join parallel wands, branches of jungle trees that were cut down, and then regrow when one end is stuck in the ground.

Quintessential Air, over there.

And since that’s the element I am most comfortable with nowadays, I looked at my iPhone in terms of this element, when I had to transfer the digital version of the Kabbalistic Prayer out of the pages document you sent, and into the body of an email that I emailed to myself.

Atop the mountain, amidst my rituals, I took my wand out of my pocket, called down this prayer from the heavens, and it appeared within my wand. (It was even playing music to set the mood for my meditative space.)

This realization that my phone serves structurally as my Air Wand was very fulfilling for me. I’ve got a new appreciation for it, in an elemental sense.

Going through the Kabbalistic Prayer was majestic. At the end it felt as if a thunderbolt struck me from the sky, and I shook with the power for some minutes. Looking around at the moonlit landscape, still in a trance, I stomped the ground and exhaled, pushing the energy into my roots, to keep it from agitating me. It helped to ground me further, thanks to the grounding and root chakra work I have been concentrating on for the last week.

Now, I am simultaneously wiped and energized. I’m going to write on affirmations for a while (such is the task of being a writer, is sticking to your own self-imposed production deadlines) and then meditate before a long, restful sleep.

I really enjoy this apprenticeship. Thank you so much.

Re-grounding.

I’ve been working a lot on the root chakra.

(Did you see that? A link to existing content – a good WordPress deeplinking strategy. Try it out.)

This weekend I’ve been spending lots of time with earth energy, visualizing red in my root chakra, feeling roots growing into the earth, invoking the earth energy into me, and it’s been helping a lot. I’m really ungrounded as a rule – my business is very airy, I just left my home country, I don’t have a heritage or a clan to refer back to, I’m severed from my childhood; so I’m giving some extra special effort to my earth energy, and it’s been helping.

I’ve spent so much time within this womb, I have not been within the Netzach/Hod balance as a point of intention. Well, it could be said I am working on rebalancing myself, appropriate for this stage of the tree, so I’ll count it as a win.

I worked a bit with the four worlds meditation you sent over, but I think I’m missing some deeper esoteric interpretation. The 4 worlds has been eluding me for years now, I have become content with putting off full realization of it until the time is right. I’ve probably got some grand recognition in my destiny that involves that meditation, so I’ll wait until that happens.

There’s some pretty powerful days coming up, so I’d like to move into Tiphareth this week. I think during the full moon. This weekend was a study in beauty, with the ease of my family life, and the joy I feel with my children and my home, so it seems like a good time to make that transition into the next sphere. (I’ve been looking forward to this one for a while – for obvious reasons. It’s freakin heaven.)

So, I’m ready for the next step up, whenever you are.

Balancing it out.

I’ve got power in Hod. Its where my head (ha-ha) naturally goes when I am thinking. I am always in motion, like Mercury, seeing myself an extension of the activities I am in the midst of doing, and the places I am in the midst of going.

Even now, in the writer’s trance, I feel most at home, looking behind at the letters I have already typed, and ahead to the ideas I have yet to translate into words that are eaten up by my fingers clattering on the keyboard.

This motion is natural to me.

It doesn’t mean I need to fight it, in order to rectify any imbalance; I simply have to Know this about myself.

In order to achieve balance, I have to manually insert Netzach into my experience regularly.

I am finding this works best through periods of meditation.

I’m a digital ninja, fer crissakes. I took the twenty minutes necessary to find the right meditation apps for my iphone, complete with binaural beat frequencies. Now I have the tools to enter trance, and shut off the raging intellect for a few minutes, sporadically throughout the day.

Then when I return to the domains of Hod, I am balanced while I am there, and I have the powers of Netzach behind me to fulfill the manifestation,.

I can see the next step: incorporating an emotional state. Next I need to invite in an emotion and hold it for a period of time. (I’m guessing this is touching on Four Worlds Meditations, where I am already lacking in knowledge.) Do you have any exercises for me?

Reviewing Netzach

The receptivity is where I lack.

I like taking these two sephiroth in a pair; they interplay so much, being on the same level (but different pillars) I understand them much better now, in the context of one another.

I am very will-driven. My tagline is “I make things happen.”About a year ago I realized the error of this, trying to continually inflict my will upon reality. Privately, I changed my tagline to “I let things happen.”

It’s more difficult for me to ensoul this mantra into my being, so I’m going to make me some subliminal audio affirmations to help do that. (Thanks to the ALF, I know how to do that. And so will you – module 4, coming up next month.)

By letting things happen, I allow in the massive powers of the universe to create the universe that is in truest alignment with the energy I am putting out. I could very well be consciously evoking one intention, and subconciously evoking another, and the result is a pile of bleh.

Using the powers of Netzach, I can relax myself into the flow, and dance my way to manifestation.

I’m exhausted, frankly, of trying to define and manifest everything myself. It shouldn’t be laden with effort. Instead, I’m going to vaguely outline what I would like (in terms of the specific feelings I would like to have manifested) and then step out of the way and let the heirarchy do its work.

I let things happen.

It isn’t as catchy, but it’s a lot more effective.

Moving on, to bigger and better lessons…

I made a deal with myself a few months ago.

I was tired of having money issues. (Okay, I still am, to be perfectly honest.) I’ve been stuck in resource lessons for a while, repeating some old patterns, and decided I was ready to step up on Maszlow’s Heirarchy of Needs. Getting beyond survival issues, I can start working on higher level issues (relationship, existential, etc) that can only really be fully addressed once the survival state is taken care of.

“So,” I said to the Universe, “I’m ready to step up now. You can give me bigger lessons, and I’ll just keep the wheel turning on this whole money making thing, so no more problems there. Deal?”

For a while, yeah, that worked.

I’m kinda glad I went through another period of scarcity, because I’ve come to handle them a lot better now. I don’t get wrapped up in the emotions, and perpetuate it for six months, like I used to. I’ve learned how to remain calm, and optimistic, and gently decline the opportunity to freak out, and just focus on what saves me in the long run: working hard, getting clients, doing my thing.

The times I have been most scarce in my thinking (and therefore my wallet) have been the times I paid the closest attention to my budget. When I’m counting every penny, it’s like they all count waaaay more than the should.

My new philosophy, “Fuck a Budget,” has only gotten me so far.

But, it’s getting me through, with a better state of mind than I usually carry. So I call that a win. Like I told my wife, it’s not that these periods of financial tightness don’t happen. It’s how we deal with them when they do.

I’ve also gotten better at identifying when the periods of scarcity end.  I made a sacrifice of my favorite vices (beer and pot) until I got through this period.

And then, aha, I realized how to get out of this state.

I had a beer and smoked some pot.

And wouldn’t you know it, today I have much more money.

It’s a funny manifestation structural crutch: by defining, internally, what the characteristics of two different states will be, then when you change those characteristics, you can successfully change your state.

I was driving back from a client meeting this morning, and my car started having heave-ho problems going up the mountain. I listened to my intuition; which I will always follow, especially when it leads me to a bar.

A drinking lunch on a school day, with $8 to my name, of course I’ll have a beer!

I did, and met some potential new clients. Got home, and said, yes, intuition, I will have a bit of pot. It is, after all, the literal last few leaves I can scrounge together, packed into the bottom of my pipe.

(Nothing like rock bottom to clear you out, energetically.)

So I don’t interpret this as a breaking of my own vow to myself, I interpret it as a recognition that yes, my period of financial scarcity is over. Because those were the boundaries that I set for the change between states, and bam, it happened.

I had two loans come in today (and when you’re a bankrupt with no credit lines, thats a feat, let me tell you). The month will now take care of itself. You’ve got money coming to you in the next 24 hours, and the short term loans I’ve used to bolster myself up over the past two weeks can get paid back.

Now, I’m working at digging myself out of this financial hole. And I do this with a greater knowledge about the truth of myself.

(It took me awhile, but I started this ramble in mind of eventually getting to the subject of this blog.)

The big thing I learned about myself is that I have serious hungers. My two favored vices (beer and pot) are strong, deep hungers within me. After having one beer today, I really wonted another. Like, really wanted another. I could have drank four, happily, and then finished my drive home – mostly straight.

So, I log this in the inventory about what I know of myself. I have strong hunger for my two favored vices.

I understood this before, but didn’t recognize it as a truth about myself. Hod is all about recognizing the inner truths, and I’m grateful for this recognition.

I’ve also come to face my full understanding of my own root. On a resource level, I have scarcity issues. I have no contact with my ancestry or my childhood. This isn’t something to be overcome, but something to recognize and adapt to, which I can do better now that I see this as a truth about myself.

Before moving into Netzach, I felt way off balance with only Hod. I expected some sort of symbiosis, a collaborative energy like when we moved into Air in the Elements class, where I felt most at home.

This was different, though; with Hod, the realm of the intellect, I’ve got plenty of cylinders firing there. By immersing myself in that energy, I am imbalanced.

So when you sent over the expansion on the correspondences for Netzach, I was able to put the intellect in its proper place. By using these two energies in tandem, I can fully focus on areas in which I am deficient (the root chakra).

I have enough intellect in my daily existence, so much that I don’t really need to invoke more of it. (I’m not deficient there, at all.) But I am deficient, on a lot of levels, in incorporating emotion into my daily experience, and into my manifestations.

So, Netzach. I want some more. Whattaya got?

Ah. It’s the root.

I’ve been doing a lot of introspection to try and uncover the cause of the recent life lessons. Once the lesson is uncovered, it’s generally time to move on to bigger and better things. (If, that is, we are ready to learn it.)

So last night I check in with my chakras, to see if everything is okay in there. Turns out my root chakra is seriously unhappy.

This makes a lot of sense, since I’m having resource issues right now. I spend some time meditating on my chakras, giving them colors and light, and I spend a bit of time in inquiry with each of them.

My root is traditionally underfunded, with an early break from my family, and a disconnection from my heritage and ancestry that came with it. I decided to spend some more time coaxing this chakra into health.

The second chakra showed me something interesting. It’s the seat of desire. not just sexual desire, but of all desires we have. I looked around to see, what does Caelan really desire?

Looking back over the past few years of my adult life, it’s money. And not just extravagant money, but money to be safe.

I am always trying to get ‘enough’ money to provide for my family, and this is usually the overarching consideration and greatest desire that rules my days.

The second chakra is being flooded by the lack in the first chakra.

So, I’ve got some big root issues to deal with. Starting now.