A trip into the underworld will ultimately bring you up-close and personal with your relationship with power.
There are any number of definitions of power including economic, social and personal power — and also what you might find in shadow work (such as Benebell Wen’s course at the Tarot Readers Academy).
My definition of power is simple: the ability (and capacity) to effect change internally and externally.
Power, Electricity, Energy and Eclipses
I’ve been thinking a lot about power this week, as one of the analogies that comes with eclipses is the uncertain and flickering nature of energy during these portals — like living through an intense summer storm, with all the candles lined up on the bench waiting for the lights to go out. Wondering how long the power will be out if it’s lost.
And I mean, in parts of the US, the lights literally went out for four minutes as the moon covered the sun exactly.
Elsewhere, we have felt it. (As astrologer Diana Rose Harper pointed out — we are mammals and mammals have instinctual knowing and fear around these anomalies!)
For me it’s been like living in surges. Then blackouts. And if we think of electricity, of power, it gets kinda interesting (or least is does for me).
Have you felt it these past weeks?
A surge of certainty, physical energy, focus, determination and motion. Watch me fucking do all the things. I have the power!
Only to be swept in the extreme opposite direction by exhaustion, self doubt, confusion and either the freeze or flight response.
Could someone please stop messing with the current?
My head, heart, body and soul have all taken a battering. And the trauma in my bones has been rising, making it an additionally “fun” time to navigate.
(I know the moment I initiate my winter work container, my shadows are going to come roaring up. It’s one of the ways I trust the work I’m offering others, knowing it’s already shifting things in, and for, me.)
Containers
I’m a huge fan of the word container and this week I discovered Ursula K. le Guin wrote an essay called The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction.
It’s the idea that before we had spears we had bags. A very different story is told when it is centered on a container, not a weapon.
It’s a story of life. Rather than conflict.
And I like contains because they are known and represent embodied possibility.
Containers have a known structure and edge and composition. They have space within them. But what you do with that space — well, that’s up to you.
It makes me think of my backyard pool. It’s a long, kidney shape, deep at one end and deeper at the other. It’s a known quantity. But what happens in it changes dramatically depending on who I invite over and what we decide to do once everyone gets here. (At my graduation party it was my friend’s dog who fell in!)
The pool is a tangible container.
But it’s also an anchor. Swimming is one way to calm my nervous system. To move my body when it’s too tired to move without the weightlessness that water provides
In that way the pool is both container and anchor for me.
Anchors
In times of uncertainty I have to remind myself I have anchors — non-negotiables — that position me in the world exactly where I am most comfortable and safe: with a book, and tea as the sun comes up; in my journal where I can let my erratic thoughts tumble out and maybe (maybe not?!) cohere into sense; plus there’s the people who know, love and hold me. Who know how to guide me back to my center.
Do you know what your non-negotiable anchors are?
Those rituals and practices that support you, and keep you steady in challenging and disorientating times. In the flux of change.
And the people who hold and strengthen you without needing to fix anything. Who guide you back to yourself, tweak the lens of perception you’ve warped.
I love what Esther Perel says about anchors:
The nice thing about an anchor is it is inside the water but the boat moves. You’re not stuck. You are rooted.
Last year the depth work we undertook from April to September gave us that anchor as well as always being the container.
A Different You, Seeds A Different Future
Depth work is a potent place to generate a different you, from whom new ideas, new creative projects, new business trajectories, new ways to be with clients are birthed.
You ripple in new ways and the world can’t help but respond.
Between the three of us last year, we explored our relationship with rest, nurturing and success. We dove into how our power intersected with those relationships, our fears, our desires, our core values, the stories (old and new) attached to them and our actual real world, lived experience of them.
Then as we ascended from the Underworld the three of us were all flung, in very quick succession into new external lives. My two clients both started new jobs in the same fortnight, and Kate Wildrick and I laid the foundations for Prosperity Consciousness, also in the same fortnight.
I came into a Summer Year that would not have been possible without the deep exploration, healing and reorientation that the depth work over winter gifted me.
What we explored and learned in the Underworld gave us tools for what came next. I mean, we’re always messy and imperfect, but we all felt we had new insights that guided the next six months.
It’s a relief to not be wandering lost (at least for a little bit.)
Last(ish) Call
If you’re yearning for an anchor, if you’re ready to add new/old aspects to the kaleidoscope of you, if you’re ready for something different in your professional and creative life and you’d love to be in a supportive container, Unseen offers all of that.
Doors close tomorrow afternoon and our first call is Friday/Saturday (depending on where you are in the world!)
Regardless of your interest in Unseen, comment below and let me know what your eclipse experience has been.
Being sans social media is wonderful for the quiet in my head and nervous system, but it sucks in terms of having a finger on a wider pulse of experience.