Initiate Yourself: Recipes for Collective Healing in April 2020
Theme for April – This Is the Moment You’ve Been Preparing for
Welcome to the Earth’s kindest apocalyptic wake-up call. In your bones, you knew this reckoning was coming.
We’ve spent the better part of a year a half and really our whole lives preparing for the seismic shifts occurring in the world now. This global crisis is absolutely unprecedented—this is the first time in human history that we have been so digitally connected and all have firsthand experiences of how the Earth has shifted under our feet. As a priestess, this is your moment.
Engage your rocket fuel. Sing siren songs to lure those you love away from the shores of despair. Arise, awaken, advocate for yourself. This is your initiation and your battle cry. We’re no longer in training; it’s time to come into your full power.
Below, you will find some self-care suggestions, activities to bolster you, and experiments for you to ride out as you surf the waves of social media and steel your ship against the tsunami of news.
These are games for your intuition. If you're not having fun, stop and go do something fun or fulfilling. You will find ease in accessing intuition, so if it isn't easy, it isn't intuition. If you don't believe in intuition, use your imagination.
Experiments for April
1. Sacred Space Is Wherever You Are – Now that many of us are sheltering in place, the importance of comfort in your domestic space has significantly increased. If you find yourself feeling trapped with people around you, create altars, rituals, and spells to separate your room from the rest of the living space. If you share a room, imagine panes of glass between you and the other person when you need space from their emotions or reactions.
If you find creating sacred space for yourself difficult, decrease the amount of space you are trying to control. Even if you can only make the edges of your body into your sacred space, returning to and breathing from this space will calm you when the crisis escalates. Feel into the deepest part of your lungs with your breath. Imagine completing an energetic circuit within your body.
Challenge Mode: Believe for a moment that you already have everything you need around you. How can you repurpose what you already have and make it feel fresh? Rearrange furniture, clean behind the ears of your home, pull out articles of clothing and magical items you had put in storage. How does returning to this nostalgia comfort you?
2. Corona Communion – Many people I have talked to who had or believe they had Coronavirus said they had strange and vivid dreams upon contracting the virus, and many of the dreams were about how the virus is actually a force for good. Become curious about the positive impacts this virus could leave in its wake, including less pollution, more awareness of economic issues, and more attention to climate change and social justice issues. Whether through plant medicine, meditation, or another vector, how could you personally commune with Coronavirus?
Challenge Mode: One of the most striking symptoms of Coronavirus is a full-body ache as your immune system activates and grows confused by the virus. Therefore, reaching a threshold of physical exhaustion through exercise or lifting objects around your home may create an opportunity to experience a small part of what the virus does to the body. How might this physical fatigue work to improve your mood and your capacity? How often in a day can you do just a one-minute workout prayer to your future health and the health of the planet?
3. Anything Worth Doing Is Still Worth Doing Poorly – You might feel your energy seeping away as you fall into a holding pattern. This is a natural stage of the grieving process. You will need more food, more sleep, more connection. In this cocoon, remember that even half-assed attempts at self-care, creativity, and domestic tasks contribute to your overall well-being. Loosen your standards for yourself so you don’t create roadblocks to survival during this time.
Challenge Mode: Anything you can do right now to enjoy your body is going to boost your immune system and make it more possible for you to hold space for yourself and others in the future. Prioritize your pleasure. Order a new sex toy. Seek out what is playful with a partner you live with. Make online connections and consensually share photos that make you feel sexy and beautiful. I’ve been enjoying the dating app, Her, which is specifically womxn for womxn. Even if you can’t meet up right now, you can develop meaningful conversations about relationships to prep for the future.
4. What Role Do You Play in a Crisis? – The larger the scale of a crisis, the narrower and more specific our roles often become because of sheer necessity. What roles have you fallen into since the shelter-in-place orders started? Keep in mind that your role might shift over the course of the month and depending what groups you find yourself in. Below are some sample roles and some suggestions for both action and self-care. Come up with your own if none of these resonate with you.
Webcatcher – You are the person who is unafraid of going first and leading the adventure. You often feel more comfortable and useful on the front lines than anywhere else. You’re the person responsible for going first into the deep woods and carrying a stick with which to relocate the spiderwebs for the group that follows you. Welcome to your station, brave and fearless leader.
Action to Take: If you’re not already, you might feel called to make steps to become an essential worker. Volunteer to deliver groceries to at-risk populations in your area. Apply to be a temporary healthcare worker or grocery store employee. Organize online groups with friends to share healing resources and strategies. Find out more about joining or contributing to our satsang to share your healing and coping strategies.
Self-care: Though you are likely chomping at the bit to play a role in this moment of history, sometimes the best thing you can do is wait. Stay home and stay safe yourself if you live or interface with high-risk individuals. Set the example. Remind yourself that you are not a failure for not leading an in-person revolution right now. Your time will come; trust that sensation.
Star-reader – You are the pattern-analyst and the strategist. You often make the final call on decisions after assessing the truth of the situation. Because you are looking at the big picture, sometimes it is necessary to prioritize the needs of the group over the needs of individuals.
Actions to Take Now – Sharing accurate information online and within your circles is crucial. Make sure that you do your research before you post something and put effort toward sharing messages that bring new and priority information to the table. This includes both facts about the virus and information about how to cope through this. What patterns of truth do you see and how do you anticipate what everyone needs to know for the future?
Self-care – It’s easy to fall into a spiral when you are looking at the news every few hours. Make sure that you limit yourself to only what you feel is essential and find time and space to connect to the people in your physical space or prioritize close digital connections. Don’t be afraid to ask others to hold space for you.
If you just need someone to listen to you for 20 minutes, log on to the Hear Me App. It’s free and volunteer run.
Mother – Whether this title is literal or metaphorical for you, you are the person who assesses and anticipates the emotional, physical, and spiritual needs of individuals in a group. This might mean looking for new ways to stave off boredom or checking in with friends who live alone. When others find themselves unprepared, they often turn to you.
Actions to Take Now – Reach out to vulnerable people in your immediate network. Who could use grocery assistance? Consider making some group chats for your family or friend group to raise overall morale. Send care packages, digital letters, and words of encouragement when possible. Share group meals and make an emergency plan so you feel prepared for whatever happens.
Self-care – When you are worried about others’ emotional state, don’t forget to check in with yourself. Since you are likely a highly empathic person, you may notice that your body feels unsettled before you even realize the next wave of grief has hit you. Give yourself time and space to sit with the grief and distract yourself as necessary. Take a bath, read a book, call a close friend, delegate tasks to other members of the household. Remember, this is a marathon, not a sprint.
Storyteller – A person called to the storyteller role may need more space and time away from the immediate crisis than others. Your method of processing and acclimatizing to the information and sensations of the situation may vary from that of the people around you. You may find your creative process blocked on account of the grief, but you know in your bones that your mind and your heart are already searching for the words, images, and actions to accurately convey the gravity of this situation.
Actions to Take Now – If you do have creative energy now, allow it to flow through you. Remove as many obstacles as possible from your creative process. Make your craft supplies more accessible. Allow yourself to get out of bed at 2 a.m. if it means making something, making anything. Otherwise, be content to sit in the strange briefness of all this. Experience your emotions and the emotions of others where it motivates your art.
Self-care – The best way to scare your creativity away is to berate it for not appearing when it’s convenient. Simply experience this moment of history. Keep a gratitude journal to be confident that you are still stretching your storytelling muscles. If you would like a community of womxn to write with and inspire you, see this online generative writing circle.
Dragonwaker – You are the person raising awareness to issues beyond just the scope of the virus itself. You may be noticing widescale systemic failures, economic injustice, and seismic shifts (both literally and figuratively). In this time where radical change is possible, it’s time to wake everyone up and speak freely about the utopia you want to live in once this is over.
Actions to Take: Right now, the best thing you can do is widen the window of acceptable discourse. Be unafraid of making radical suggestions. Advocate for your cause. Demand higher pay for essential workers. Publicize and support the strikes you see happening. Call for the release of non-violent prisoners. Become an online influencer. Hold online discussions about what you and your friends want the future to look like.
Self-care: While you might be fired up and angry about the state of the world and excited about the possibility of change, it will be easy to lose sight of your own experience of all this. Don’t let social justice work become a coping mechanism. Do only what is nutritious for your spirit and take frequent breaks from inflammatory conversations.
Plecostomus – A Plecostomus is a fish often put in aquariums to clean the tank and prevent overgrowths of algae. As a title, it refers to a person called to mitigate the aftermath and who genuinely finds nourishment in cleaning up disasters. You are the person who assesses when the solutions outweigh the actualized benefits.
Actions to Take: We are still in the very early stages of this global slow-motion train wreck. While it might be tempting to start cleaning up the mess now, we are still at the party. If you are called to perform damage control in your immediate circles, follow that impulse, but otherwise, allow yourself to wait until we know the full extent of the damages to take action.
Self-care: Coping mechanisms take many forms, and you may find yourself rooting for the virus to cause as much havoc as possible because you want the systems around you to make permanent change. Know that this is another way you are processing grief even if it makes you feel like an unsympathetic person. There are plenty of reasons to be angry at the structures that made this crisis possible.
Thresholder – You are the person drawn to transitions. Whether this refers to birth, death, or initiation, you feel called to facilitate the crossing over from one state to another. As you have witnessed many stages of life, you act as a guide for others experiencing these milestones for the first time.
Actions to Take: As the death toll rises, you may be inspired to create an altar or ritual to honor the dead in mass graves or those who aren’t receiving traditional death rites. Alternatively, reach out to expectant mothers or people with children who are trying to cope with radical changes to domestic space. You might also be equipped to ease the transition into digital connection spaces for people unfamiliar with the methods available.
Self-care: Don’t forget to offer space to the thresholds you are crossing in your own power right now. Find spaces of silence where you can listen to the voices of your magic. Create an anchor point in your space where you can reorient yourself back to this reality.
5. Integrate & Renew – The days already feel like years, and we have a very long road ahead. Take as much time as you need to block everything else out and focus on your own processing and growth in this moment. You are eating through the excess of comfort and shifting into survival mode as we wait to burst through this Corona cocoon. How do you cleanse yourself and bookend a period of your life? Consider writing down everything that has happened for the past week or two and dancing, meditating, or creating art to represent the power you found during those challenges.
Please tell us how you’re staying sane right now. We would love to hear from you at r/highpriestesses.
Recap of March’s Experiments
The offerings for March included using mantras, engaging with movement and balance as superpowers, learning to see alternatives to your own reality, and remixing your story without needing to use trauma as milestones.
I was leaning on my mantras hard this last month to get through the end of a bad roommate situation and continually reclaim the space that is mine in the house with reaffirming words. I was honestly surprised that the mantras I created felt like they had so much potency, especially when saying them out loud. It genuinely felt like they had the capacity to shift the atmosphere around me.
Before the lockdowns started, I was able to meet with several friends and show them how easy it is to do stacked planks on each other. That was a really rewarding process that elicited a lot of giggles and excitement. It feels good to have a realistic idea of how much bodies actually weigh. We are, after all, stackable bone towers.
I worked with alternative realities in combination with my mantras this month. I was worried that, in a gaslighting situation, there was a possibility that I was the one who had caused the problems in the relationship. Though, logically, I knew that wasn’t the case, it was a difficult idea to disbelieve, so I created mantras around the reality in which I did cause the harm and imagined what the path to retribution would look like. Those thought processes helped me recover from the manipulation and trust that I had acted with my best judgment.
As we finish the final draft of Light Portals, a co-priestess and I each crafted a new biography statement that paid tribute to our teachers, mentors, and resources that made it possible to share our tools with others. That was a really rewarding process and a fascinating challenge to do it without delving into our pain stories. We are paving a new path forward with our language and ability to self-identify.
Stay safe out there. We are here to support you.