Initiate Yourself: Recipes for Collective Healing in May 2020
Theme for May – Counterbalance
While March dragged on for what seemed like an eternity, April slid toward May at terrifying speed as we all learn how adaptive we really are. Already, we have established our individualized concepts of normal, and many are clamoring for an end to the shelter-in-place restrictions.
Though governments are beginning to run reopening experiments, it is likely that Corona will be a part of our daily consciousness for a long time. Your habits have changed, and the gravity of your actions has shifted. Honor the weight of your initial decisions as you emerge into this new world. What compromises must you make as you balance your current and future well-being?
Below, you will find self-care suggestions, activities to bolster you, and experiments for reactivating your microcosm of community.
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 May
1. Find Flexibility in Structure – There is a point each of us comes to when doing whatever you want whenever you want is no longer a source of satisfaction. This listlessness means you are ready, and perhaps even eager, to intentionally restrict your own freedoms. If you don’t already have a schedule for yourself, write a list of things you would like to do and schedule a time (I like Monday morning) to plan those activities out for the week. Do what you can to alternate between activities that require screens and ones that do not.
Rather than saying exactly what you will do in your schedule, give yourself a category and a time limit. Allow yourself to do whatever you want in that category for that period of time to experience flexibility within your rigidity. Be realistic, and schedule breaks at different times every day.
Challenge Mode: Irritation with freedom often comes from a lack of guidance, so why not get direction from your past self? Give the version of you making the schedule authority to be the taskmaster. You are your own boss, but you’re also your own employee. Allowing these relationships to exist at different points in time keeps them separate and holds you more accountable to yourself.
2. Spiral Back in Time to Create the Future – The future is a blank slate of unknown right now, so you may feel called to reach backward to remember stability. Revisiting a favorite piece of media elicits not just nostalgia but also charts a line from there to here in time. Who are you now that you are seeing this again? What do you notice differently? How can you project that progression into the future?
Challenge Mode: Music and other forms of media contain within them an attachment to their time period; they never existed in a vacuum. How can you play with this by creating a playlist that mixes musical time periods? Can you combine two eras of artistic expression into the same work of art? Who are you when you are a mixture of then and now?
3. Sustainability in Progress – Your rewards in doing almost anything come not because of spikes in your ability to perform but from your overall commitment to the process. Crash dieting may give you quick results, but the rebound steals the satisfaction you feel after progress. Be honest with yourself and your body about what meals plans and exercise goals are sustainable for you and work toward that. Consider a cyclical dieting or exercise practice in which you have scheduled off days or weeks to decrease the likelihood that you will want to cheat yourself out of progress.
Challenge Mode: Add a 30-minute period into your weekday schedule for “something active.” During this period, work on counterposes (see this link for examples). Think of the ways your body has been positioned for much of the day and make efforts to pull your muscular structure in the opposite direction.
4. Intentionality and Reality – We understand that intentions are powerful, but they often feel ethereal or ineffable in how they function. Sure, having a theme helps us frame our actions in a direction, but what types of intentions do you make and how does each type manifest?
· Blessings – These intentions often relate to community, home, and protection. They are far-reaching desires and hopes for a brighter world or set of circumstances (often for others as well as ourselves) in the near future. Manifest a blessing with a mantra or an anointing ritual with a sacred substance of your choosing (mindfully harvested sage, essential oils, flowers, incense, etc.).
· Wishes – While wishes are similar to blessings, they typically relate more personally to you or your comfort. They might be above and beyond what you need but still represent a strong desire. Manifest wishes by putting them on sticky notes and burning them when they come true or by sharing them with loved ones.
· Plans – As my favorite Death Cab for Cutie song states, “every plan is a tiny prayer to Father Time.” These are intentions rooted in a specific moment in time, and as such, they are always subject to change. Manifest plans by making a schedule and devoting yourself to rescheduling or hosting an event online if something alters the course of events.
· Processes – Process-related intentions take time to manifest and therefore are less rooted in a specific moment but still play on the same dimension of time. Manifest your process by creating a sustainable daily ritual of meditation, exercise, or healthful eating.
· Offerings – There is logic in the concept of sacrifice. By giving something up, you invest yourself in both the process and outcome of your ritual, lending it potency. What is the entrance fee for your magic? Remember that you often get much more out than you put in. Manifest offerings by trimming off a piece of your hair, lighting a candle, or putting food on your altar.
Please tell us how these experiments are working for you! We would love to hear from you at r/highpriestesses.
Recap of April’s Experiments
The offerings for April included creating sacred space wherever you are, communing with Corona, doing something even if you must do it poorly, and determining your role in a crisis.
I found myself immensely grateful for the amount of effort I have put in over the years to make my home space as comfortable as possible. As such, I felt like I had been preparing for quarantine for much of my adult life. In the moments when I wanted to meditate or feel safe in my space but found that difficult, narrowing the scope of the space I was trying to control did wonders. I would sit on the middle of my rug and call that my sacred space, and all the clothes on the floor around the rug didn’t need to matter for the duration of my stillness.
To commune with Corona, I held a plant medicine ceremony at my home. I even invited a few close friends to be part of the opening meditation digitally. My major takeaways from that journey were as follows. First, it’s okay that I can only see the fangs of this beast right now. Mother Nature is angry, and she has every right to be. But, I feel in my heart that this will be a net positive for our existence overall, and I suspect that seeing the whole creature, whenever that is possible, will shed light on that. Second, I have a tendency to force myself to do something all in one sitting because I am afraid that I won’t finish it if I don’t. While that might be true sometimes, it was limiting the scope of what I could accomplish, and I needed to be okay with risking failure in order to give myself some longer-term projects.
Admittedly, I have been exceptionally exhausted almost every day since the stay-at-home orders started. Giving myself permission to do something poorly when the alternative was not doing it at all helped me stay invested in the online events I was hosting even if I could not show up at my best. I also gave myself some leniency regarding cleaning and such and did a little bit rather than not doing anything at all where I could.
I spent a lot of time thinking about the roles I am playing in this crisis, and it is difficult not to see ways in which I am doing and being all of them. While this is perhaps a good thing as it means that I have a diverse set of skills, I do think that it might be causing a disproportionate amount of fatigue because I feel like I need to do everything for myself. Narrowing my focus and allowing myself to specify feels like the direction I am being called in presently. I haven’t come to any solid conclusions on this, but I appreciated thinking about it.
I hope you benefit from May’s experiments! Stay safe out there.
Photo by @mikejudkins. Find him on Instagram.