10 Mar Monsters of the Deep: a Ritual for Shadow Work
In yesterday’s post, I showed you how to use the fire element to invoke the power of Saturn and calcine the fear that stands between you and achieving your number one goal.
This time, I’m going to show you how you to work with water to invoke Jupiter and dissolve your deepest fears so you can learn to let go.
But first, I want to address some concerns.
If you’re at all like me, there are days when you have accept that maybe you got duped, that there was no global awakening, and perhaps it’s just time to accept the new normal…
…but then there are days when you know that you were right all along, but true awakening comes from within and it’s up to you to decide what the new normal will be.
In other words, there will be no power to the people until every person reclaims their own power.
If you don’t have a plan, you become part of someone else’s.
In order to transmute the fear and heal the trauma that has consumed the collective, you have to start with yourself.
It goes back to Gandhi’s famous maxim that you must be the change you want to see in the world.
This doesn’t just happen by recycling your plastic, driving a hybrid car and donating to Greenpeace…
…nor does it come from hopping on the latest activism bandwagon, voting for the wokest political candidate and checking your privilege…
…and it certainly doesn’t come from meditation, yoga or crystals.
All of those things are good (and make you feel good) but when you’re sticking by them alone, you’re not going to change anything except for maybe your mood temporarily.
At the end of the day, it’s all spiritual bypassing.
If you really want to be the change you want to see in the world, you need to deep reach within yourself to face the monsters that you hide from.
Shadow work is in.
It’s impossible nowadays to scroll through Instagram without seeing a grayscale stock photo of a melancholy girl wandering through a dark forest with that Carl Jung quote superimposed over it…
…the one that goes, “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”
But there’s a reason for that.
It’s because shadow work works.
Not only does it work, but it’s an absolute necessity when you consider the amount that mass culture forces you to repress your natural emotions while manipulating them through propaganda and advertising, which has resulted in a true pandemic of emotional toxicity and psychological trauma that seems like a maze without an end to the countless people stuck in it.
Get ready for a little shadow work.
Remember in the ritual I gave you last time, how you wrote down your number one fear and burned it while visualizing it as a lead weight being incinerated by the fires of hell?
This method of active imagination is an example of the alchemical dictum as within/so without, as without/so within. Alchemy is often considered to be proto-chemistry, but it was so much more than that. It wasn’t just a natural science, it was a spiritual science. In addition to being chemists, astronomers and physicians, alchemists were poets, artists and magicians.
They would use imagery to symbolize each stage of the alchemical process. For example, imagery of hell was a symbol for the stage of calcination, because hell is where the wicked are punished and sins are purged in flame.
And the next stage that you’re going to work with, dissolution, was symbolized by sea monsters—that’s because dissolution addresses the monstrous titans that were hidden from calcination and washes them away with the power of water.
Here’s what you’re going to do.
Get out a piece of paper and a pen. Set a timer for five minutes.
Shadow work demands that you face your fears. So ask yourself,
What is the worst possible fate that would befall me if I gave up everything to follow my dreams?
Live it out, feel it happening. Feel it in your body, in your emotions. See it clearly in your mind’s eye. It might look and feel something like this:
If I quit my job to follow my dreams, then I would have no income. After a few months my spouse would leave and I would be without health insurance. Then I would get cancer and die because I couldn’t afford treatments and my children would be without their mother and/or father.
Well, that escalated quickly.
Capture everything you see and feel on the paper. Get it all out!
Write nonstop about the worst possible thing that could happen for five minutes and then stop.
It’s time to dissolve these fears.
Like you did last time, burn this piece of paper—but this time you’re going to save the ashes.
Take the ashes to a water source (like a toilet) and wash them away.
However, as you do this, don’t just see ashes flushing down the toilet. Close your eyes and imagine that you have at your command a great sea monster, and that you pulled a lever to unleash it from the deep. These aren’t just ashes you are washing down the drain, either, but the charred remains of traitors you are sending to their watery fate, to feed the leviathan within.
Close your eyes and take a deep breath.
Feel a wave of relaxation wash over you, like you just stepped out of the most calming mineral hot tub soak of all time.
It feels like you just cleaned out your closet of clothes you haven’t worn in over a decade…
…or that moment when a long good cry comes to an end and you see the world more clearly than you ever did before.
This ritual works miracles.
I’ve pulled myself out of many dark places with this ritual in the past.
It’s a shockingly powerful tool for shadow integration. By letting your dark fantasies have a voice, you realize how empty they truly are.
And once you’ve washed it all away, a new courage rises up within you.
And it’s time to carpe diem.
If you’re pickin’ up what I’m puttin’ down in these emails, then I really can’t wait for you to join SPIRITUALIZED.
You’ll use exercises like this and much, much more to initiate your spiritual transformation and the discover your own Philosopher’s Stone.
Registration opens Monday, March 15, 2021.
Space will be limited.
Stay tuned.