Whether to Embrace the Inner Witch or Not (Part 2)

Not everything in the world can be explained by science and logic - but I'm definitely not abandoning them

As I ready myself for the journey to Tamera tomorrow morning, I am processing a lot of emotions. Writing has been one of the ways that I can metabolize what seems impossible to digest. My mind sometimes tries to trick my body by not allowing it to feel the grief, heartbreak, fear, and concerns that I have. My habit was to intellectualize them or distract myself with deadlines, tasks, or doom scrolling, but I have learned to sit and acknowledge that I am hurting inside, and breathe through it as best I can. Sometimes tears will silently trickle down my cheek. It’s not the kind of crying that I sense I’ve been needing to do, but it’s still a kind of release. I’m grateful that my body seems to know what to do, even in this small gesture, despite my efforts to avoid these super uncomfortable feelings.

These are difficult times for so many of us, but when I look out the window near where I write and see beauty in the garden: hummingbirds finding nourishment on bright yellow and scarlet blossoms that delight my eye or sturdy tomato plants twice the size they were two weeks ago, my heart fills with an unexpected form of tenderness. If I sit on the front steps and chat with folks walking by, especially with my favorite four-year old next door, I feel the sweetness of random and often surprising connections. My mind becomes curious rather than caught in looping patterns that keep me stuck. Choosing to notice these things and allowing them to soften my heart is a spiritual practice. It’s a kind of spell that pulls me out of the pit of my wounded-ness.

With this vulnerable preamble, most of which was written in Tacoma (I’m now sitting in a hotel room in Lisbon, far away from my garden), I’m ready to share Part 2 following my last post.

When our son began to struggle with mental health during his adolescence, I began to feel unmoored and lost. His therapists had put him on medication and his symptoms seemed to be getting worse. My anxiety was increasing exponentially and I needed more reassurance than I could find with counselors and the various support groups that were recommended.

Anchoring into the Quantum. Procreate digital painting, 2024

An old college friend offered me a free session with his wife who ran the School of Intuitive Insight in Seattle. My friend was a very practical, outdoorsy kinda guy, so I was quite intrigued that he had chosen to marry someone who was a psychic, someone who went into trance to read past lives. I did one session with Ginna Lee and became fascinated with her work, and went on to train with her for a year, learning how to read past lives and demonstrating my skill with strangers who came for readings at her school.

I must admit that this training and my practice of it was often uncomfortable. I’ve always had a good imagination and have been able to tell good stories improvisationally, so I was constantly questioning what I was offering the clients - wasn’t I just making things up? Ginna confidently said that I wasn’t; she said that it was clear to her that I was transferring a deep knowing to her volunteer clients. I wasn’t so sure. I received my certificate attesting to my many hours of training, professing that I could now open a practice. Bob was teasing when he asked me when I was going to hang a shingle on the front door saying “psychic readings.” I never did. It was not my path.

In my quest to find more tools to deal with the roller coaster of my son’s journey, Ginna suggested that I meet Dr. Astrid Pujari, a renowned energy healer in Seattle. She was a practicing oncologist who, years earlier, had begun to see spirits walking around in her cancer ward. She trained with spiritual teachers abroad to learn more about her “gift” and became a skilled energy healer. After one session working with Astrid, I decided to take her energy healing course with a group of women. We learned many techniques in her classes, but my one of my favorites, one that truly changed me, I am still practicing 12 years later. It’s a simple one: I list what I am grateful for and send that list of “gratitudes” to two of the women with whom I trained. I had many negative patterns that made it hard for me to imagine more positive possibilities; I barely recognized that it was a habit. By calling in gratitude, everything shifted, and this process went right along with Thây’s meditation practice of watering wholesome seeds in my store consciousness.

Did these trainings help me with the anxiety of co-parenting someone who was struggling to find his way? Yes, they did for the most part. Learning how to tend to one’s suffering is a life long process as is being aware that one really has little control, particularly in the lives of others you love. I continued to gather more tools for finding my center in the midst of chaos.

Casting Spells - digital painting - 2023-24

After moving to Tacoma in 2016, I became friends with a wonderful body worker and coach, Nichole L. Before the pandemic, she offered a series of workshops in Quantum Physics and its relation to magic. I was very curious if this would help me shed my long-lingering ambivalence about mystical things (even when they were proven to work, again and again). I also did not want to abandon a scientific mind. At first, her workshops opened me up to learning more about rituals and made me more confident about my altar building practice. We read and discussed material that confirmed the many experimental and not so easy to explain aspects of quantum physics, and by the end of the course, I found that I had developed more trust and faith in things that I could not intellectualize.

Just as the pandemic began to unfold, Nichole invited me to join her Ritual Academy to strengthen some ceremonial practices with the support of some younger “sisters.” The container created by the RA, one in which I was seen as the “wise crone” (a new role for me), helped me more skillfully navigate the pandemic, my husband’s cancer diagnosis, and the challenges of my son’s continuing journey. I recognized that I was stepping more fully into “witchy” work, but continued to believe in the importance of advances made by science (I am vaxed). I learned how to hold paradox in new ways.

Some of our ritual academy crew morphed into a “coven” and invited me to rejoin after a year’s absence due to Bob’s illness. We meet twice a month in person, and one or more of us facilitates our 3 hour sessions. We each bring forms of “magic” to the group to enhance our practices and skills. I have offered guided meditations to the group and have done some grief work with them about both collective and personal issues. The coven was invited into my studio to do “image making magic” and I will be sharing dream work with the group later on this summer. Out of respect for the group, I will keep the rest of our practices private, but I will share that it has been enriching to be in community with a group of younger women, all of whom are working to become their full authentic & powerful selves, as they heal from past traumas and navigate the difficulties of living in this world today.

While randomly browsing social media yesterday, I found this useful text (thanks to Canadian transdisciplinary artist, Kathleen Vaughn for posting it)

"Eulogy from a Physicist"

“You want a physicist to speak at your funeral. You want the physicist to talk to your grieving family about the conservation of energy, so they will understand that your energy has not died. You want the physicist to remind your sobbing mother about the first law of thermodynamics; that no energy gets created in the universe, and none is destroyed. You want your mother to know that all your energy, every vibration, every Btu of heat, every wave of every particle that was her beloved child remains with her in this world. You want the physicist to tell your weeping father that amid energies of the cosmos, you gave as good as you got.

And at one point you’d hope that the physicist would step down from the pulpit and walk to your brokenhearted spouse there in the pew and tell him that all the photons that ever bounced off your face, all the particles whose paths were interrupted by your smile, by the touch of your hair, hundreds of trillions of particles, have raced off like children, their ways forever changed by you. And as your widow rocks in the arms of a loving family, may the physicist let her know that all the photons that bounced from you were gathered in the particle detectors that are her eyes, that those photons created within her constellations of electromagnetically charged neurons whose energy will go on forever.

And the physicist will remind the congregation of how much of all our energy is given off as heat. There may be a few fanning themselves with their programs as he says it. And he will tell them that the warmth that flowed through you in life is still here, still part of all that we are, even as we who mourn continue the heat of our own lives.

And you’ll want the physicist to explain to those who loved you that they need not have faith; indeed, they should not have faith. Let them know that they can measure, that scientists have measured precisely the conservation of energy and found it accurate, verifiable and consistent across space and time. You can hope your family will examine the evidence and satisfy themselves that the science is sound and that they’ll be comforted to know your energy’s still around. According to the law of the conservation of energy, not a bit of you is gone; you’re just less orderly. Amen.”

Aaron Freeman

I don’t know Aaron Freeman or his work, but I deeply appreciate this marriage of spiritual with what can be measured via scientific method. When I can make peace between these parts of my psyche, what felt disjointed seems to weave together with more ease.

During Bob’s cancer journey, I was reading a book by Mirabai Starr called Wild Mercy and I learned about the Jewish ritual of welcoming Shekhinah into our lives. Since I was not raised in a practicing home, the ritual of the sabbath was not something I truly understood. I knew it was a good idea to have a day of rest, but my parents had only critical things to say about Orthodox Jews who could not drive or cook or even turn on the lights because they were so devout in their practice. My father told me a story about asking his immigrant grandmother (who lived with his family in a small apartment in upper Manhattan) why she lit the candles every Friday night, and when she did not offer a satisfactory answer, he decided that it was purely superstition that informed her devotion. I can still hear his mocking laugh in response to the idea that such a ritual had any meaning whatsoever. In retrospect, I feel compassion for this great grandmother who I never met and a bit of sadness for my dad’s fundamentalist streak. Both of my parents would have truly benefited from a day of rest, but they were committed workaholics.

Contrary to my upbringing, after reading Starr’s interpretation of Shekhinah’s gifts, Bob and I made the decision to reclaim the Sabbath blessing of the candles, the bread, and wine, and to invite the pleasure-oriented and divine feminine into our home every Friday night. After a few months of enjoying this luscious new ritual in our lives and our newfound connection with Shekhinah, the stress of the cancer treatments and Sam’s return home, derailed this ritual. At some point, I would like to rekindle this ritual with others.

Solo travels in the Quantum - digital painting - 2023-24

Last fall I took a workshop run by Perdita Finn about collaborating with our sacred dead. When I first read the material about what she was offering, I was dubious, but very curious. Because Bob had just gone beyond, and I was feeling his presence off and on, I wanted a deeper understanding of how people relate to loved ones who have transitioned.

Perdita’s practice is not a religious one, but she calls on saints, neighbors, friends, and relatives who have died, and asks them for favors. She says that she has a morning practice when she gives all of her worries to her beloved dead, after that she can go on with her day and often her requests for help have funny and surprising ways of resolving over time. Her talks are filled with anecdotes of how this process has worked for others. She has an intriguing Substack, and happens to be the mother of one of my favorite writers, Sophie Strand, who also has a Substack that inspires and offers many perspectives on the ecological crisis, chronic illness, myths, and more.

Despite my inner skeptic being on high alert when I signed up for Perdita’s course, some wily ancestor’s spirit (perhaps it’s my paternal great-grandmother’s revenge) put all of my judgments on hold. Given that I’ve had photos of beloved friends & family who have died on my studio altar for many years, it wasn’t so strange for me to expand the practice. Now I have a home office altar that holds many framed portraits of my beloved dead. One ancestor has been essential to my writing practice, Leib Naidus, the acclaimed, romantic Yiddish poet who translated his work into several languages before dying too young at age 28. His father was a brother of my great-grandfather so he’s a cousin of some sort. I have been asking him for help with finishing my next book. I’ve communicated with my mom to get help when I’m dealing with paperwork and bureaucracies. I also call on friends who have passed over (there are so many interesting ways to talk about death, aren’t there?) who might be able to help with other concerns.

I’m going to close this essay with an homage to my dear friend, D, who describes himself as a quantum energy healer. D has a unique gift to test and treat his family and friends through the quantum grid. He learned to do this after a life-threatening childhood illness left him with many continuing symptoms. The medical world had no cures for him, but his spiritual practices with the Kabbalah and Sufi mysticism did. He could energetically access friends, neighbors, spiritual healers, ancestors, and others to help test and treat whatever might be happening. He is the first to admit that his testing is not always accurate, but I’ve personally witnessed countless healings that have astounded me. He supports his friends and family to be involved in their own testing and treating. He wants to empower others to have agency in relation to their ability to heal themselves. Bob developed a strong, long distance friendship with D. spending hours with him on the phone, often in deep meditation. Bob was amazed by D’s skill at treating all sorts of physical and mental issues that plagued him and our son over the years, although sadly, the aggressive cancer cells in Bob’s body were too wily for these less tangible methods, nor did the protocols of modern medicine halt the cancer’s progress. It was his time, and eventually it will be mine and all of those I love. Mortality is a big teacher. Still, D’s friendship and generous treatments have been a huge comfort through the challenges of this period where I am redefining myself and helping my son find stability.

Of the many books written by indigenous wisdom keepers, one that keeps resonating for me is Vanessa Machado de Oliveira’s Hospicing Modernity: Facing Humanity's Wrongs and the Implications for Social Activism. Bob found some flaws in the philosophical framing of the book. I cannot recall what they were now except that he took issue with her definition of modernity. I still found the book useful in thinking about how the path carved by modern “civilization” is taking us to extinction. It seems useful to reclaim strategies found in indigenous understandings to create a more gentle and less harmful collapse, and plant the seeds for a different kind of sustainability (some of which come from spiritual sources).

There are many other books, webinars, zoom conversations, etc. that have been both grounding and helpful in widening my perspective during this very intense time, but I am feeling the call of getting outside. I’m in Lisbon for another 20 hours or so, adjusting to this time zone, with no ambition to be a tourist, but I do need to buy a train ticket, wander the streets for a bit, and get some local food in my body before I finish repacking and go back to bed. Eventually I’ll write more about this journey, but that’s not been my focus today.

Despite the doubts that I’ve expressed in this narrative about stepping into realms that cannot be explained rationally, I can say with more confidence in this conclusion that I am being held by some things that I had no access to before. Instead of being hypervigilant about when the next shoe will drop, I have learned to trust in something larger than myself, something that connects me to ancestors, the elements, the soil in my garden, the stars above, the community (those whom I love and those whom I have not yet met), and the universe. This faith in the creative energy that emerges from unknown realms has given me the courage to surrender, be open to miracles, to be more playful, put salve on old wounds, and find a deeper peace in the present moment. I hope that sharing some of my spiritual resources will help you believe in your capacity to navigate grief and the struggles of this time.