Just Keep Moving

I spent the weekend in Greenville with friends, which was really refreshing. I'm still struggling with depression-related awfulness, but the trip helped get me out of my head to refocus on what I need to do in order to get through this.

We did some really fun and energetic ritual work, and despite my feeling really scattered and unfocused, it helped in a big way. Laughter has been fairly rare these days, so getting a good gleeful cackle was wonderful. I also picked up some orange calcite and moss agate to help with things, along with a smokey quartz mala for my meditation practice. Slow and steady, slow and steady...

  

#10kbefore10am

I'm also back on the workout horse, as it were. I didn't want to -- it was so cold this morning and I just wanted to stay in bed -- but I'm happy I did. I kept my heart rate in the peak range for 40 minutes to get that sweet, sweet runner's high and my body didn't disappoint.

Things have been good with the SAM-e. Nothing huge to report, but I've felt a lot less hopeless and less fatigued. I'm not frolicking through the halls, but I'm able to get out of bed in the morning and that's nothing to sneeze at.

I'm still here and working through things. I'm going to go walk in the (cold) sunshine at lunch and run through my breathing exercises. I'm going to do my very best to accept the turning of the year by honoring and letting go of this fear and panic as the weather gets colder. It's hard, but I can do this.

If You Can't Walk, Crawl

I'm having a really rough time tonight.

Depression is a tricky beast. It's easy to believe that you're seeing life for what it really is, that the veil has been lifted and the soft glow of whimsical self-delusion has been ripped away. It makes the condition of depression feel more like a personal belief instead of a disorder, because while you're miserable, some part of you whispers that you're finally seeing life for what it really is.

Depression is a dirty liar.

Tonight I'm feeling desperately unwanted and irreparably broken. I feel unloved and inconvenient, like I ruin everything I touch. I feel like human trash. I feel like I make people uncomfortable. I feel out of sync and out of place, that my words are never right and my actions are always off. It's physically painful and I feel like I will never be able to convince myself to be happy again.

I also know, distantly, that it's the depression talking. It's hard to separate the two on a regular basis -- sometimes I lay paralyzed in bed just wishing I could convince myself that the stories that the depression tells aren't true. I, like a friend I talked with today, get as far as imagining a world where I'm healthy and awesome... and then come crashing back to this world with fresh cargo of guilt and shame at not being what I wish I were.

Sometimes you have to ride it out. I imagine that this is my underworld, that this is the biome in which my shadow self thrives. I imagine her standing tall and solid in a landscape that is crushing me. She lives and breathes this every day. My personal demons are her neighbors and she invites them over for tea. She is not afraid.

She is me. I just have to find her again.

Walking in Shadow

Traveling as we are through the dark time of the wheel, I walk a fine line between embracing the lessons of the shadow self and the dark face of the goddess, while also trying to find light to get me through the seasonal affective problems that have been ramping up. My previous coping mechanisms have leaned strongly toward taking root on my couch or in bed until the sun came back, but that doesn't help in the long run.

I haven't really exercised since Samhain due to injury, but I started again this week with a gentle half hour on the elliptical. It's not much, but I'll get there. I also started taking SAM-e for depression (with a B complex vitamin) and will see how it goes. My hope is that it'll at least lighten a little of the thick, heavy blanket of numbness that keeps creeping over me. I made all these great plans on how I was going to fight off SAD this year, but when you don't have the energy to actually do those things, it makes the best made plans rather useless. 

Freehand drawing makes for a
wobbly triskele, but I like it

One thing that's really come through is gentle exercises in no-pressure creativity. I'm a lot more likely to partake in something that my brain would try to convince me is frivolous if I've committed to doing it with friends, so a couple of us planned a trip to the ceramics studio. It's a paint-your-own affair, so there was no pressure to create a masterpiece from scratch (although that'd be really fun). It was my second time around, so I'd learned from my bigger mistakes and made something that was forgiving of uneven paint application. 

I went for something bright and green that would remind me of spring's promise. It diverges from my focus on the darktime and my shadow self, but I'm not quite fully able to embrace the dark on this journey through the wheel while also battling depression. I'm not shying away from the darkness of the internal underworld, just making sure I have light when I need it most.

Responsibility in Anger

Letting go of anger is one of the most difficult aspects of "knowing myself" that I face. There's a sort of seduction in it -- the promise that your rage can level those obstacles that stand in your way. So today, when faced with...let me take a moment for a deep breath and some centering... a person who I have difficulty with, it took a tremendous effort to scale back and away from wishing grievous harm upon him.

In many ways I feel that as a witch I have a greater responsibility to control my feelings. That sense of responsibility feels unfair sometimes, particularly when watching someone else have a cathartic meltdown.

That said, giving in to anger is to allow another to manipulate us. And that, my dear, will never do.

Into the Dark

With Samhain behind us, I find myself tiptoeing around the edges of the Dark Time between now and Yule, terrified of what this means for me but also strangely hopeful.

The Dark Goddess
(picture found here)

Much of this is a spiritual fear -- there's so much that I've buried within, so much that I've not faced or have arrogantly glossed over that I'm shaken and terrified of going into the underworld of the self to meet it. Up until this point, I've always seen the Dark Time as being symbolic or a reference to the quiet slumbering of the natural world, tying it more closely to the beginning of seasonal affective disorder than a journey of the self. I've learned a hard lesson these past few days: the Dark Time is both, and more.

I'm frightened. The Goddess is dark, unwilling to coddle me with boughs of spring leaves and flowers or to shine down upon me in the height of summer. She commands that I do the work that must be done, and doesn't let me make excuses.  She is wise and she has spoken.

I'm working to embrace the terror, to understand it and respect the lessons it has to teach me. Going into the underworld of the self is something I've done before, something that I've often associated with the lessons of the shadow self, but this feels bigger somehow, and darker than I've faced. A lot of big changes need to be made and a lot of truths must be acknowledged -- truths that I've been running from for as long as I can remember. I know that the Goddess isn't all sunshine and rainbows, but I've successfully explained away her call in the Dark Times up until this point. I feel that She's been understanding, but the loudest message I'm receiving right now is that I can't grow if I continue to deal with things as I did when I was younger.

I'm a grown woman now, and I have work to do.

I sat outside this morning to watch the rain. I injured myself last week, so taking the break from working out meant that I had no excuse from the spiritual, and went up to breezeway on the third floor at work to watch the cold rain. The trees are clothed in their finest colors, but I can't help but dwell on what this means -- the leaves will fall, the earth will slumber, and I will be alone.

As I watched that bleak sky, I remembered the raw emotional scraping I felt when I woke up this morning, the first glancing scuff of seasonal depression telling me that nothing is worthwhile and that there's no meaning to anything. I won't give in. The path I am walking in the Dark Times is frightening and requires a lot of work, but I won't give in to the grey nothing that tells me to give up.

I'm having a hard time finding my words this morning, but I'm not apologizing -- I'm accepting it for what it is and moving forward. With practice, they should come with greater ease.

Themes and Readings

I've been trying to make more time to do tarot readings lately. I did a reading back in September for a friend and found myself stumbling and second-guessing my read on things; thankfully, as a practitioner herself, she made me a cup of tea and was very patient. Since then, I've made it a point to do at least a read a week as I work through some other difficult areas of my life.

I've been using the Fenestra deck, which is lovely (and chatty!), but when another friend let me use her Shadowscapes deck last weekend, I ordered it immediately. Working with both decks has been really helpful as they have different "voices" and directions, which have been essential in getting me back into the swing of things. 

Nine of Swords
Shadowscapes Tarot

Part of this practice has been drawing a card a day. I've had some really great insight earlier this week, so when I drew the nine of swords today, my heart sank. Swords as a suit have never heralded anything I've wanted to hear, so I braced myself and looked up the meaning. 

There's a lot to unpack with each card, with multiple applications of meaning to different areas of your life. The nine of swords is the card of fear and nightmares, settling squarely in the psychological/mental realm. It speaks of something within causing fear and anxiety, of internal stories we tell ourselves causing problems in the external world. 

In a small way, I had to laugh at myself -- my minor anxiety at drawing a swords suit proves the point of the card's meaning. 

The nine of swords speaks of negative self-talk, of limiting ourselves by the belief that we can't do something, or aren't good/pretty/smart enough to achieve something we want in our lives. 

I don't know exactly why the title
makes me giggle a little

In a beautiful sense of parallel, this is also what I'm reading in Warrior Goddess Training (gods, that title made me snicker the first -- and second -- time I read it). The first lesson is to commit to yourself, to close the gap between self-rejection and acceptance of who you are. It encourages us to let go of the avalanche of expectations we heap on ourselves and to look inward past our interpretations and cluttered narratives and really, truly learn who we are as women. 

Today I'm working hard to honor -- but ultimately let go of -- the narratives and interpretations I have that inhibit me. In action, that means less apologizing or justifying my opinions and working to be firm but fair in my actions instead. I'm giving myself permission to just BE -- to be myself, to exist without apology --  instead of explaining and justifying myself.

My Heart is a Thrill-seeker

My heart is a thrill-seeker.

I'm not -- I do things because I enjoy them, not because I'm not sure I'll survive them. I don't get a thrill from that razor edge of fear and exhilaration. I actively avoid the adrenaline-pumped frenzy of extreme danger and uncertainty, mostly due to my preference to have a sense of safety and/or control while indulging my sense of adventure.

My heart is a willful and stubborn beast, satisfied only with reckless abandon.

I mean, of course, that my endless chase for the endorphin rush of a runner's high is only satisfied when I've kept my heart rate at about 175 bpm for at least two minutes, which transforms me from a laser-focused workout machine to an awkward asthmatic llama, having been chased to the end of its ability by a pack of roid-raging coyotes. The rush of endorphins is worth it, though, even if I have to keep upping my resistance/incline/speed to make it happen.


It's been a rough couple of weeks. I moved out of the toxic environment I was in, and while I know it's a good thing overall, the guilt is real. One of my former roommates has some mental health issues and needs support, but it was becoming a full-time job that started affecting my real job in a big way. I was always stressed and unable to sleep, and was never sure what I was going to be walking into when I got home. For the past month and change, he's been telling me I need to move out and then changing his mind the next day. I was never sure if I needed to be looking for a backup place to live or if he was just working through some things.

My other roommate moves out in November, citing a need for a healthier environment.

That said, when do we make that call? In trying to be supportive and work with someone who's a lot more likely to be dismissed and marginalized in life due to mental illness, when do we draw the line to protect our own well-being? My (now former) roommate is in therapy and on medication and by all accounts was doing everything in his power to manage his illness, but the stress was such that I just couldn't take it anymore. In a matter of hours, he'd change his mind about something that, for me, was huge.

I don't have a satisfying answer. My usual fallback is the old "put your own oxygen mask on first" adage that airlines tell you in case of an emergency, but that doesn't settle this guilty weight. I feel like I let down someone who already has the deck stacked against him, even knowing that I could barely breathe for all the stress.

Merry Monday

I spent this weekend at my parents' house, where I applied most of my time to trying to sleep or reading/crocheting. It was a good break from the steady stress I've been under, although I didn't sleep much (thanks to stormy, restless weather).

I also didn't exercise this weekend, to which my body responded by tightening all my muscles until sitting still was physically painful. I suppose there are worse problems to have, and it made my gym time this morning feel like sweet, sweet release.

I'm feeling really positively about today. Things have been rough lately and it's been hard to keep my chin up, but I feel pretty optimistic about today. Merry Monday!

Growing Climber

Tonight's climb was really, really good. I completed a 5.7+ which, to anyone who knows the rating system, is admittedly low-end-of-average difficulty. For me, though, it's a huge success. It's been eight months since I started climbing; at first, I could barely make it up the VB (jokingly called Very Beginner) courses on the boulder, which are honestly glorified ladders made out of very easy holds. Even though I struggled, I would climb laps on them until I could make some progress on the V0s. I'm still working on my advancement on the boulder wall -- my fear of falling without a harness to catch me tends to keep me from the more ambitious courses. Top-roping, however (climbing much, much taller walls with a safety harness) is coming along really well.

There was a moment on that 5.7+ where the only footholds I could use put me in a near full split. I honestly didn't think I was going to be able to make it -- how do you even move from there? I had to put faith in my arms, and then sort of gecko-walk up the wall to the next foothold. I've always felt that my arms were extremely weak compared to other climbers, and that I had to rely heavily on my footwork to get me up the wall. Today, though, I felt very coordinated and balanced. My legs and arms shared the load and evenly distributed the work throughout my body. It was a profoundly centering feeling that helped me power through and complete the course.

I feel amazing. There is no way I would have believed a year ago that I was capable of this.

Rain, Endless Rain

Office decor that turned out surprisingly
relevant for this post

It's October 1st, which means I skipped my morning workout in favor of decorating my office with Halloween decor. I'm still climbing tonight -- something I was actually hoping to weasel out of because I'm not feeling it today, but my climbing buddies are (thankfully) having none of it.

This weather is sapping the motivation from me; it's been raining for over a week and my once-bright spirits that delighted in the end to the drought-like conditions are now soggy. I want to eat cheese-smothered foods and hide under the blankets until the sun returns. I'm trying to see this as a dry run for the awful soul-sucking sadness that is winter seasonal affective disorder, but all the carefully laid plans I've made on combating the cold grayness aren't holding up under this rain. Methinks I need to revise my approach.

I need to get a fine point sharpie 

I did do some minor crafting today, though. Behold my tiny putka pod jack-o-lanterns! I set up a little station at work for people to make their own since I was having trouble mustering the energy to make a bunch, but people have been enjoying them.

I'm not really feeling the writing flow today, but thinking about how I feel in winter has me considering something else I read in Spiral Dance about the darker sides of ourselves. Starhawk calls it "Starlight vision" -- but I've seen it referenced in Jungian psychology and a bunch of pagan vloggers as the shadow self, or shadow aspect of who we are. In psychology, it's usually the subconscious parts of our personality, while in pagan discussions, it usually refers to the darker parts of ourselves that isn't all love and light. It's the counterweight of death to life, of sadness to joy, of yin to yang. If we don't explore the parts of ourselves that exist in the dark, we can hardly claim to know ourselves at all. As Starhawk states:

“But the final price of freedom is the willingness to face that most frightening of all beings, one’s own self. Starlight vision, the “other way of knowing,” is the mode of perception of the unconscious, rather than the conscious mind. The depths of our own beings are not all sunlit; to see clearly, we must be willing to dive into the dark, inner abyss and acknowledge the creatures we may find there. For, as Jungian analyst M. Esther Harding explains in Woman’s Mysteries, “These subjective factors … are potent psychical entities, they belong to the totality of our being, they cannot be destroyed. So long as they are unrecognized outcasts from our conscious life, they will come between us and all the objects we view, and our whole world will be either distorted or illuminated.” 

I'm taking this grey, sodden time to look inward at my shadow side and see what she has to teach me. I've done meditations on this in the past, but it's easy to forget to keep up regular internal conversation.

My "Before" Post

Before my workout this morning (at 6am, this is relevant), I took some pictures to serve as my "before" images. I've done this before, but I was so depressed about things that I ended up deleting them in shame. That said, that's not the path I want to walk down again and was determined to change the course of my thoughts this go-around.

6am Bleh, feeling gross

I took the usual bleh picture that mostly shows that it's 6am and I didn't get much of sleep. I started to feel the same awful shame and disappointment in myself for letting it get this bad, but I know that hasn't served me in the past at all. So I took more, and gave myself permission to be okay with my body, rolls and all. I'm a lot stronger than I used to be, and I was determined to show it to myself. No make-up, no cover-ups to hide my rolls. Just me.

Strong and laughing at myself

I think that it's easy to get lost in how we don't look the way we wish we did, and ignore the organic machine we drive through our lives. For me personally, I tried to shy away from the shame and embarrassment of having my body so at odds with how I felt I should look -- which meant that I ignored it and continued to feel bad. I wore strictly colors that, as my sister pointed out, made me invisible in a crowd. As a person who is typically drawn to vibrant jewel tones, this impacted my psyche and how I felt about the way I presented to the rest of the world. It combined with pre-existing depression and became a terrible self-fulfilling cycle wherein I was depressed, and felt completely blocked off from the things that had previously helped.

Nothing to hide

Feeling that I wasn't good enough for the fashions and lifestyles I wanted to be a part of was a strange thing to deal with. I envied the people who could just go without having to wade through the internal litany of reasons why they weren't allowed. I would comb through the galleries after the events were over, wishing I had half the confidence in myself to take part as the women of all sizes I saw. But looking in the mirror made me cringe. It's one thing to brush off the judgmental or critical comments about one's size from a stranger -- after all, you don't have to value what they say because they aren't important to your life. It's even slightly less difficult when a loved one says something, because while it hurts -- it's someone whose opinion you care about -- you still have your own back.

Not embarrassed by pudge

Having that deeply critical voice come from inside the house as it were, has been an extremely difficult challenge to overcome. Who has defenses against themselves? By the very nature of our internal voice, it's not something you can just run from. For me, I just remained miserable, feeling awful for eating anything at all (even if it was healthy), which only sapped me of any energy I might have used for exercise. I'd eat unhealthy foods for comfort, which resulted in more guilt. It was a terrible cycle.

I looked back over the times when I had the most success in my fitness, and upon review it became obvious that I do best when I'm happy and truly engaged in what I do. Fencing in college was something I'd always wanted to do, and I dropped twenty-five pounds over the course of two semesters. Of course, when team politics took a nose dive and I lost my love of the sport, I gained twice what I lost. It took me a long time to realize how closely tied my emotions and my fitness really are.

Booty

I lost some of the weight I gained back when I graduated and moved to Georgia for my first real Career Job™ and was filled with the kind of professional enthusiasm that comes from a recent college grad who just barely squeaked into the workplace before the recession hit. As the long hours and stress took their toll over the next seven years, I gained most (but not all) of it back. I was cut off from other pagans and lived in fear of discovery in one of the darkest, most bigoted parts of the bible belt. I was miserable and felt too trapped in my situation to leave (you're seeing a theme here, yes?).

Thankfully, as this increasingly wordy monologue winds to an end, the Goddess intervened* and literally out of nowhere I found the strength to leave. I'd saved up to cushion the fall and took a leap of faith, moving without having another job lined up. I absolutely love my new job (in a completely different industry); after a year of washing away the crud that built up in Georgia, I'm motivated. I'm finding reasons to love this body. My spiritual practice is becoming more regular. I'm learning how to be happy, and it's wonderful.

We can do this. 

Height: 5'5"
Weight: 168
BMI: 28.0 (overweight)

*You know, I used to get annoyed when people would attribute things to divine inspiration/intervention, but having experienced it firsthand, I'm now a believer. It was very sudden and I felt Her influence very strongly. It was pretty much the only thing that could give me the confidence I needed to not talk myself out of it.

Starhawk: Fitness as a Daily Practice

    I've been reading Spiral Dance (finally), which I'd put off despite it being high up on the list of required reading for my branch of folk under the pagan umbrella. I'd heard mixed reviews, and while it does have some problematic areas (most everything about the Burning Times), I'm really enjoying it. I particularly like what Starhawk has to say about fitness.

As a basic discipline, I recommend three things. The first is regular physical exercise. The importance of this cannot be overstressed. Unfortunately, it's one of the hardest things to get people to do. The Craft tends to attract mental and spiritual types rather than brawny athletes. But magic and psychic work require tremendous vitality -- literally, the energy of the raith, of the Younger Self. That vitality is replenished and renewed by physical activity -- much as the motion of an automobile's wheels turns the generator, which recharges the batteries. Too much mental and spiritual work that is not balanced by physical exercise drains our etheric batteries.

    She goes on to say that yoga, while nice, tends to be more of a spiritual discipline, and that cardio (jogging, swimming, cycling, etc) better serves this purpose. The other two things she recommends as basic disciplines are daily relaxation practice (I'll have a post about this another time) and keeping a BoS -- but as a diary of your magical life, not necessarily in the recipe book sense that it's usually used.

    To her point regarding daily fitness, I do find that when I'm physically stagnant for long periods of time, it's harder to get where I need to be for ritual work. During these times, I tend to feel that what I'm trying to accomplish is just out of reach, but for all my efforts I just can't get there. Sure, I can do basic work, but the energized OOMPH just isn't there. For a long while I chalked it up to depression (which plays a part, sure), but on the days that I would come home after a long hike or a good climb, things would just click. Fitness as a basic discipline for craftwork ties in nicely with my other fitness related goals, and I'm interested in seeing if/how it improves those days when I'm just not feeling it.

    I had a great climb last night and an excellent run this morning, so here's to day two of regular daily fitness.

I'm doing a thing. Eventually I'll get around to the long, meandering start-of-my-blog post, but every time I've done that in the past I lose the momentum that got me here. So I'll get to that eventually.

The boulder is especially grounding; no harness means falling can happen

Right now, I rock climb. It's awesome and grounding (as weird as that sounds, since I spend a lot of time up in the air clinging gecko-like to a wall), and I'm working up to doing it much more regularly than I currently am. I love how I feel when I'm climbing -- strong, capable, and focused. It makes sense from a sort of elemental standpoint, in that stone is solid and centering. It's helped with a lot of underlying restlessness I have, and gives solid, unyielding obstacles around which I must work and be flexible. It's been fantastic.

I've also grown physically stronger, which is a perk I can't emphasize enough. I can do things now I could only dream of six months ago, and I'm really excited to see what other internal doors this opens.

Which brings me to my next thought. I've always loved watching aerial silk performers, and with my increased upper body & core strength, I think I could be reasonably comfortable beginning intro classes in about a year. I have a lot of other padding to lose before I'll feel ready, but this is something that is actually feasible for the first time in my personal history.

This also got me thinking: I've got Earth. I've got plans for Air. Why not seek out something for Fire and Water as well?

I'm still thinking on things. For fire, I'm considering either internal fire (cardio) or external (poi), but I'm not feeling a strong pull to one or the other yet. Water will likely be swimming, but we'll see. For now, though, I'm going to work through the elements with dedication and intent, one at a time. I'm looking forward to the journey.

Wonders: An Anthem

It's the wonders that I'm after, 

even if I have to fight.

It'll all be hard and bloody, 

even when I get it right. 

I know stories change their faces 

on an inconsistent basis, 

but I swear I am not afraid. 

-SJ Tucker, Wonders