Initiate Yourself: Recipes for Evolution in January 2021
Theme for January – Elevate the Amateur
Without in-person social events, we have had to put our energy elsewhere for the better part of a year now. Many of you have likely learned or reinvigorated skills, hobbies, and habits that have not only made it easier for you to relax but have also improved your resilience in what continues to be a pandemic-centric world.
As community builders and spaceholders, perhaps you, too, have learned that people with hobbies become artists and poets and musicians and performers when they have the courage to share their passions with others. As such, we encourage you to flaunt your newfound abilities if only because you can. In letting go of culturally superimposed standards for perfection and marketability, you shed embodied white supremacy and capitalistic mindsets in favor of love, passion, desire, pleasure, and above all, art.
After all, the word “amateur” means a person who acts out of love. Remember, art doesn’t need to be “good” to be fun.
Experiments for January
1. Learn Until You Love It – Often, when we don’t enjoy doing something, part of the reason why is a lack of confidence about whether we are doing it “right.” When you notice distaste for an activity, how can you learn more about the techniques involved to boost confidence in your own process? Create more ways to offer yourself immediate internal feedback on the technical success of a project to transform the way you relate to what you do.
Challenge Mode: Alchemy requires patience above all other types of knowledge and action. As we continue to wait until it is safe to reunite, notice what creative and evolutionary processes demand more time before you reveal them. What projects do you have fermenting in your basement? Where could some of your other endeavors benefit from additional time?
2. Diverge from Consensus Reality – Because of fake news, opportunistic media, and echo chambers in social media, it is difficult to have any read on what is normal culturally. As we rebuild, hold onto the aspects of yourself that deviate from the norm. These will be your newfound strengths in the new world. Where are you wrong about the size of your echo chamber or about what is expected of you? Where do you wish you were wrong?
Challenge Mode: While you should pay most attention to how your skills or your art make you feel, sharing your work with your community will bring you further into the folds of your craft and provide you with constructive critique and criticism. Whether this means sharing on social media or performing digitally, find your preferred method of connecting others to your art, hobby, or skill. Or better yet, create or attend an event such as an amateur talent show where everyone shows off something they don’t do for income. Be weird. Be bold. Be unafraid of puritanical failure.
3. Progress Your Regression – When you revert to destructive behaviors as the result of a painful or stressful event, how far back do you regress? Are your traumatic responses just as severe every time you experience them, or is your shadow evolving with you? Rather than focusing solely on your return to health and enlightenment, spend time thinking about how to upgrade your fallback state. How is this a measure of your growth and progress? For a deeper exploration of shadow work and shadow tending, check out this online workshop.
Challenge Mode: Focus and explore inversion in the body and in your behavior. What would it mean to do exactly the opposite of what you would do normally? How does doing a shoulder stand or handstand against a wall refresh blood flow and return your vision and clarity? For an overview on inversions and which positions to try, check this out.
4. Embrace the Gradient – In the era of cancel culture, we often hyperfocus on “wrong” and “right” without considering the complexity of gray areas. We frequently abdicate our power completely rather than offer compromises for difficult situations. For example, rather than cut off friends and family members after a misstep, think about what boundaries would make it possible to continue relating with one another. Putting in additional labor now will often prevent pain later, even if that means having to be the bigger person.
Challenge Mode: When you use coping mechanisms or decide to do something that could ultimately shorten your lifespan, ask yourself why. What do you hope to accomplish? At what point do you experience diminishing returns? How little of a return would stop you? Allow the discovery of those thresholds to create the demands you have of life and how you enjoy it. Determine what you do not want to live without even knowing the probable consequences.
Please tell us how these experiments are working for you! We would love to hear from you at r/highpriestesses.
If you like these experiments, please consider donating to our Patreon.
Andra’s Recap of December’s Experiments
The recipes for November included using rest and resistance as a teacher, competing with yourself rather than with others, paying attention to when you keep secrets and surprises, and listening to the layers of the mind and body.
My experience of much of this month was colored by the fact that my dad left our world very unexpectedly on the 8th of December. While I won’t go into detail about what happened, I had little choice but to listen to the ways my body and mind needed time to recover from the emotionality of what happened. It was further complicated by the fact that I had to act as next of kin and settle the logistics of death while attempting to balance the complicated rituals that others desire around death.
As such, I took the very few days of paid leave my job offered (a measly three days of bereavement) and tried to go back to work the following week. I made it through that period, but the following Monday, I felt burnt out and exhausted, crying through the emails I was sending. As a result, I took another three days off to gather myself. Grief is a slow process, and I needed far more time with it than capitalism would allow. It was fascinating, though, that coming back to work each time carried a certain amount of reality that I didn’t experience during my time off that always made the fact that my dad was gone harder. No amount of time makes coming back to the real world easier. If you, too, are grieving, don’t be afraid to demand the rest you need to take on your responsibilities again.
In focusing this month on using my own previous personal bests to measure my progress (rather than comparing my progress to others’), I tried very hard not to compare my grief to the grief of others. I did not want to say that I was dealing with more or less pain than anyone else. Additionally, so few of the people around me had lost parents, meaning that there were few standards for how to act or how to recover. I had to forge my own path and determine which coping mechanisms were right for me and how long I wanted to use them. While everyone around me was willing to give me a pass on almost any behavior, I was determined not to abuse that. I only wanted to seek out that which I thought would genuinely offer constructive support for my grief rather than tearing down all my routines and structures.
Regarding secret keeping, I had some latent trauma come up around the ways information had been kept from me as a child and adolescent. Because my family was often more concerned about protecting my innocence than they were about keeping me informed, I ended up in very dangerous and nearly violent situations without any kind of awareness or preparedness for how to handle it. This circled back around as I was told to keep information about how my father died from other members of my family for a period of time. After doing that, I decided that those are not secrets I am willing to keep anymore. Family secrets have only ever caused me heartache, and even as a child, I would have much preferred to be informed than “protected.” I will continue to practice radical transparency. In the interest of such transparency, I am including a poem I wrote about my experience of my father’s death below.
Regarding the layers of the body and of emotion, my process of grieving really illustrated how emotions are stored in the body. On the day after I found out about my father’s death, every single muscle in my body protested. And I kept imagining closed gates or doors in my mind, knowing that opening each one would lead to a flood of tears. I knew how to open some of them, but others remain shut, waiting for the right moment to initiate a new, fresh wave of grief. Throughout this process, however, I feel as though I am most fully in my body and genuinely processing when I seek out those reasons to cry. It’s the numbness I have been afraid of.
I’m looking forward to a new year and a new set of experiences given the knowledge and awareness I have cultivated, and I’m sure you are just as ready to move on. Be proud of how strong you have stood up to the whiplash of 2020 and recognize the skills you have been moved to develop with your periods of rest and relief.
So much love to your tender hearts. Thanks for reading.
The World Keeps Turning
No one tells you
how to fill out demographic information
on your father’s death certificate
after his sudden, unexplained death.
No one tells you the creditors
will start calling before the body’s cold.
No one tells you of the need
to inform the woman your father
had an affair with
on an international number.
Leave a voicemail in Spanish: Tengo información
importante sobre mi padre, Domingo...
No one tells you how to decide
whether to pull the gold teeth out
of your father’s skull.
But, most especially, no one talks
about the way grief really acts
in the body, how you wake up
the next morning after little or no
sleep, how none of your muscles move
because they know every part of you
has a piece of him.
And no one tells you, even though
your heart is shattered
like the water bottle you slam into the floor,
that your body will ache
in all the “wrong” places, guilt wrapping
itself around the void within you
as unwelcome arousal
demands—like the rest of the funeral arrangements—
to be tended. And you can ignore it,
wish it away, deny yourself, but
it will find you in your dreams. So,
if you are truly an activist in pleasure,
you will understand that this, too,
is a part of grief because it must be.
This, too, helps your father cross
to another side. This, too, will unlatch
the gates that hold back tears.
Make a deal with the vibrator
you rarely remember to charge, offer
what small joy you find here to the spirits,
and dive into this blasphemy because
you are human, and the body
keeps moving just as the world keeps turning
after the pain and humiliation of death.