DOMAGICK DAYS 22 and 23
When I started this challenge, I said that if I lowered my anxiety at all I would consider it a win. I still experience some panic but I’ve discovered situations that make it flare up. My heart pounds whenever my family’s financial future gets mentioned. Put me in a living room with five friends, and I’ll worry at least once that I’ve scared them all off.
In both cases, I’m taking little steps to stretch my boundaries. I’ve looked realistically at how far off my husband’s retirement is and decided I can occasionally spend money on myself. I’ve also used my preferred name in two different classes now. The name’s a little different so I’ve had to get used to people asking me about it. I end up feeling anxious because I’m committing the grievous sin of “deviating from the norm” but I haven’t died yet. It’s a process.
During my sound healing class last night, I was asked to consider whether healing truly is a process at all. My teacher theorized healing is a form of remembering. For example, if we bruise our arm, it doesn’t have to be told how to return to its original state. It might need help yet it still knows intrinsically what it wants to do.
My teacher suggested that over-thinking could get in the way of emotional healing at times too. We might want to know why we feel the way we do rather than focusing on the symptoms of the dis-ease itself. I could see his point. Using the bruise analogy again, if we notice that we have a bruise but cannot remember how we got it, we don’t stop the healing process until the mystery is resolved. This idea left me wondering if disease exists when we cannot remember how to heal ourselves. Should that be right, I’d diagnose my habit of letting nay-sayers from my past run my life as a spiritual ailment.
During class we went on a guided visualization to meet alternate versions of ourselves. I chose to encounter a Me who had already conquered his self-esteem issues and learned much of my social anxiety rests on a single moment from my past. Since then, I’ve punished myself for not conforming to a specific person’s plans for me. My more-confident self pointed out that I’m doing so needlessly. He’d sought that person out and told them how inappropriate trying to shape me in their image was. I don’t want to do that. Just the idea of talking to them sickens me. Yet time is a river. There are ways of confronting them magickally and rescuing the youth they harmed. I plan to do so before the end of the Domagick Challenge.
In addition to going on this journey, we learned how to tune into the frequency when resonate at during a state of rest. Once we figured out our “personal hum,” we tuned into parts of our bodies feeling pain and expressed what they sounded like. By slowly turning the sound back into our hum, we created at least momentary relief. The back pain I had been ignoring went away as soon as I paid attention to it and didn’t return that night. I tried this again today to the same effect and think I will use the technique when my carpal tunnel acts up next. This method could be applied to emotional symptoms as well, but I’d have to feel them physically anchored somewhere in my body for it to work well for me.
Today’s Tarot was the Five of Swords reversed, warning me not to overwhelm myself with too much. After a day of errands, I left my magickal practice at some sound healing and shuffling my Sharman-Caselli deck and left it at that. No art completed and no direct work with the daemon Sitri, though I did sign up for more art classes and plan to sleep with her sigil under my pillow.