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Welcome back to Priestess Initiations.
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I'm Casey, and I'll start with good morning.
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It's good morning for me.
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I am waking up to a partly cloudy day out in Colorado.
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And partly cloudy feels right for this time between eclipses.
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So we just had the eclipse in Pisces on Wednesday last week.
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Depending on where you are in the world, it's possible it was on Thursday morning.
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Um but we are now in the portal between eclipse seasons.
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So every year there's two eclipse seasons.
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And occasionally there's a few years where there happens to be three.
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Um but this year we have eclipse season in August.
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And then a few months later, we'll have eclipse season again in the fall.
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And so right now we're sitting in liminal space.
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And that's what I want to talk about today.
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And partly cloudy weather feels like liminal space.
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You don't know whether the sun's going to break through the clouds or the rain is going to come.
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And liminal space is Hecate's domain.
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And so we've talked about Hecate before.
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She is the queen of witches, she is the goddess of the crossroads, she has three faces: maiden, mother, crone.
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Um she was too powerful to be given a story of her own.
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But she is a Titan.
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And Zeus was not able to exile her to Tartarus, the prison, because she was too important, because he needed her.
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Because without her, there is no interdimensional travel in the realm of the gods.
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Um there's no one guarding the crossroads, there's no one guiding anyone through the crossroads.
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So without her, there's stuckness.
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Which is so interesting because sometimes liminal space itself feels like it is the stuckness.
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And yet it's actually the place where things move.
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It's the place where integration occurs.
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In therapy, we use the word integration.
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And usually we're talking about a time period when you let the lessons land, when you let all the work you've done, all the changes you've made settle.
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And in depth psychology, it's a rearranging in some ways.
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It's a rearranging of the self, of the ego in relationship to the self.
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Um, in parts work, we could talk about it as our parts are rearranging, the system, the internal system happening.
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Basically, you're letting the unconscious shift.
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You're letting the unconscious parts of you shift into new paradigms that you've been doing conscious work to allow.
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And that is exactly where we're at, between eclipse portals.
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And right now, eclipse portals, I mean like between two two main seasons.
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Um, and so I wanted to talk about that today because it feels relevant.
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And the reason it feels relevant to me is because I go through phases, even though I do all this goddess work, and I've done all this goddess work over the years, but I go through phases when I feel like uh distant from the goddesses.
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Um not that no one's there.
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I know that if I like really called or really needed them, they'd show up.
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Those energies still exist within me and in the collective.
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But it's just it's not called.
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I feel very much called into my human life, my daily life.
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And during that time, there can be a bit of loneliness, a bit of loss, grief even, around loss of magic.
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It feels like loss of magic.
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Like there was all this magic happening, and now we're kind of like, oh, back to like day-to-day, back to rewiring what our daily habits look like.
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Um in astrology, that's your sixth house if you want to look there.
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That can be a good house to lean into when you're in integration period.
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It's your house of daily habits, health, wellness.
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That's a good space to lean into right now.
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But then I remember that this in-between place actually is ruled by two goddesses for me: Hecate, because I'm in liminal space, and hygiene, because I'm being asked to clear out the habits that don't serve and to practice daily habits that do, to tend to my human self, to tend to the body.
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And that is an important time.
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It can also be a hard time.
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And so I wanna I want to acknowledge that that if you're going through a liminal space and you're feeling disconnected from goddess work um ever in your life, you might have already experienced this.
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This also happens with magical practice.
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Um, people involved in witchcraft circles occasionally talk about this, not as often as I'd like to see them.
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But it's like you'll get really excited
Load full transcript
and really into tarot for you know a few years, maybe, and then it'll just kind of not have the energy and charge it used to.
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It's not that you can't do it anymore, you can still do it.
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You're just not quite as drawn to it.
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That happens with magical practices, and the reason is that those are tools.
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And so when you're no longer drawn to tarot or pendulums or whatever it is that you may have been using, candle magic.
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Um being asked to lean into a more innate way of being, a more internal way of relating, to let go of your tools and trust your internal compass, to trust your intuition without them.
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That is a hard ask to really hone your intuition, your ability to receive messages, downloads, um whatever it is that that means to you, trusting your intuition to do that without the tools that you felt like were the things that brought the magic in the first place.
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But they didn't, you did.
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Your interpretation, your attunement to your unconscious has always been what brings the magic.
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And so I think right now we are in that portal.
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And Hekate is here, Queen of Witches, even if it doesn't feel like it.
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And Hygia is here, and that one might be easier to tap into.
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And the way to work with these two goddesses is to trust your inner knowing, to trust your intuition, to keep coming back to that, and to keep coming back to it through daily habits, through small little moments, whether it's having your cup of tea outside in the morning and tuning in and setting an intention for the day, whether it's doing some some meditative breath work at the end of your day and letting things go rather than piling up.
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Um, Hygia in particular, I also love working with the elements of water.
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Um, she's the goddess of hygiene, right?
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Um, but she is also the one who turns the snake's poison into medicine.
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And so really sitting with that as a concept, that sometimes that which feels like poison, you can transform it into medicine, and this does relate um to this theme that I'm talking about of grief and the in-between, and grief is interesting, it's it has a window of tolerance, so all of our emotions have a window of tolerance, right?
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I've done an episode more specifically on that, but when we're talking about emotional window of tolerance for a specific emotion, we're talking about how much of that emotion you can let yourself feel before you either shut down or become overly anxious, so overstimulated.
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And so that's arousal and shutdown on either
end of the window.
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And everything in the middle is how much you can hold.
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And we're always working to expand this, and the way you expand it is by sitting with the edges, so by sitting with just a little more grief than is comfortable, right?
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And not shutting down and not getting anxious, not by trying to sit with an astronomical amount that you've never sat with before.
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Tends not to work.
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But the reason I'm talking about that is because this time period is also a time to receive.
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So integration is a time of practicing your daily habits and trusting that the universe in some way is working in your favor behind the scenes.
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But in order to be open to that, you have to be open to receiving, to receiving the magic that this last eclipse cycle was trying to give you.
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So receiving is an edge for many of us.
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Receiving is a feminine state, many say.
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It's a yin state.
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And to be in receiving energy requires a bit of a yield.
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And so that's why sometimes when it feels like the magic is not as blatant, it's not as potent in everyday life, change is not happening quite as rapidly, you're actually being asked to just yield rather than push and try to find try to find something that that isn't yours to find yet.
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And the way we yield is through the body.
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And so a practice I love to do for this is to yield into your feet or your body on the earth.
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And so if you have access to the earth sometime this week, taking a moment to lay down on the grass on a tapestry on the earth if you don't have grass.
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And just close your eyes and let your body sink.
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Let your body sink into the earth.
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Just let your body become heavy, let your breath become slower and deeper, breathing into your belly, and with each exhale, just letting yourself sink deeper into the earth.
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And so, sometime this week, I encourage you to try that and see if you can open to receiving.
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Another great practice, and you can do it from that place of just yielding into the earth, is heart openings.
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So, any kind of heart opening yoga pose, great thing to be doing this week.
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Um, and this month, really, it's not just this week.
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So, heart opening yoga poses, opening to receiving again and again.
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And when we do heart opening in portals like this, there can often be grief there.
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And
so when the heart feels grief, the muscles around the heart tends to protect it, like in a literal sense.
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I just experienced this again.
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Um we experienced this many times in our throughout our lives.
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But it's important to notice it, to honor it, and to give it space to move so that you're not bracing, because the body can't brace and receive at the same time.
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You cannot be tensed against and also open to receiving.
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And so we have to we have to open ourselves back up coming out of this eclipse season in order to receive, in order to really let things land that may have gotten shaken up, and being open to miracles, to the miracle field, to whatever is sent your way.
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Um, yeah, recently last weekend, I was not here with y'all, and I was officiating a friend's wedding.
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Um, it's another coven sister of mine, and so all like uh there's five of us in the little mini coven of somatic therapists that met in grad school, and four of us were staying in a house, um, and our partners came with us, and then the fifth one, um, my friend, she got married, and it was gorgeous.
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She looked like a fairy princess queen, and um it rained, it rained during the ceremony time, and I was kind of calmly hustling around trying to talk to the the people there and see what we were gonna do.
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Um, but we could kind of you could kind of tell it was one of those rains that was gonna stop.
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It felt like it was a blessing, and it did, it stopped about 15 minutes later, and so we just started the ceremony late.
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Um on fertile ground, on ground that had just been blessed.
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And it was really beautiful.
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Um my friend and her husband, you know, you get to you get to see the love in their eyes really close when you're standing up there holding space for them.
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And as an officiant, I really view it as my job to hold space.
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It really relates to being a therapist, funny enough, because you're you're holding space for big emotions to be felt.
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You're saying it's safe to feel that here I've got you.
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Um, and to see the love that they have for each other, that they've built through years of hard work, of choosing each other, of love as an action.
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They really live that.
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Um it's beautiful, and then to spend, you know, the weekend with friends and um dancing and hanging out in creeks.
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Um and the the most funny thing happened, and this was all, you know, very in between eclipse, in between eclipses, the the wedding was occurring.
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Um, and on the way home from the wedding, I found myself crying in the car.
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And my partner, Matt, he kind of, you know, he gave my hand a squeeze, let me know he was there, but he kind of just let me.
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Um, and I was just hit by this wave of grief for a few different things, but one of them is something that I think everyone here can relate to.
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And it's when you have such a beautiful moment, such a beautiful little spell of life, and then you come back, you know you're going back to your day-to-day, and you're kind of coming out of this place that is surreal, this place where you let yourself feel embodied joy, embodied safety, and then we're driving back, and we're in the beautiful mountains, and I love the beautiful mountains, but we're going toward Denver.
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And to be honest, I don't love Denver.
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I love it comparable to other cities, but I don't like cities.
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I am not a city person, I never will be.
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Um, it's overstimulating to my nervous system to be in cities.
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And you know, we're between Denver and Boulder, so it's not like we're in the most city city.
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Um, many people who live in an actual city would say I do not.
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But to me, it's it's enough.
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And one of the reasons you might hear right now is I can hear a plane going overhead as I'm recording this.
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And to me, I don't I don't want that.
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I don't want to hear industrial sounds, I don't want to smell industrial smells.
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I want to be in nature with the people I love.
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Celebrating together, celebrating life.
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And that's exactly what we were doing.
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And so coming back from that, there's this grief.
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There's this grief that hits.
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And that is part of what happens when you really let yourself feel joy.
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Some of you might have felt this when you go on vacation.
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If you've ever gone on vacation somewhere super cool, super different, that you let yourself feel joy when you open to it.
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And then you come back, and all of that um gets feels like loss.
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It feels like loss of that joy.
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Because joy is a state of emotion, it's not a permanent state of being.
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But we can open to it.
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We can be we can be in a permanent state of well, I don't know if it's permanent, but you can you can be in a state where your heart
gate, and I think of it as a gate, continues to open to joy, no matter where you are.
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And so even here in what many would say is not a city, um close to Boulder, and I feel like is a city.
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There are moments of joy, right?
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It's not that my day-to-day life has no joy, but when you come back from something that feels so perfect, you you close, your your heart gate closes, and then you can't you can't feel it, you can't feel the joy.
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And so that's that's another piece of why I'm saying to do some heart openers.
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And another situation where it makes sense to is noticing when the whatever grief you feel is bracing against joy.
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And ultimately, I would have rather felt joy that weekend and cried in the car than not felt joy that weekend and not cried in the car.
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And I think that's the hard part of life is that in order to feel the good, we have to feel the bad.
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You can't feel Joy and love and happiness more fully, if you don't also feel grief and sorrow and sadness more fully.
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You can't let go of fear if you don't allow yourself to feel anger.
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You can't let go of anger if you don't allow yourself to feel grief.
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So to open to the good in life, we have to trust ourselves to be able to grieve, to get through the other side and choose to open again.
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And so during this integration period, I think that's that's a big ask.
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And it's an ask that is a daily practice, it's an ask that's in Hygia's realm, right?
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Of tending to the self, of cleaning stuff out, of cleansing practices, and of transforming the pain into the medicine.
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So when you feel grief, right, it only means that you felt joy.
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And so when you're feeling grief and it feels like this, you know, painful poison, this heartbreaking thing to open into, remember that you feel it because you love.
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And that's the that's the antidote.
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That's hygiene's medicine.
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So I think that is most of what I wanted to say today during this time between eclipses, and in terms of the podcast, I will see you when I see you.
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I I am trying to be on a relatively weekly schedule, but I'm not gonna guarantee it right now because I am reshaping my relationship as an artist to and a creator and what that means to me.
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Um I don't identify as a content creator.
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I'm not interested in that, but I do identify as a creative.
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Um for me that that has a natural flow to it that I think sometimes I was trying to force into a into a schedule, into a container that wasn't quite roomy enough.
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So I'm giving myself some more room.
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And this time of year is its own portal.
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So I will see you for Wheel of the Year episodes.
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Um and we have another one coming up soon.
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So fret not, I will I will still be here.
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Um check your app when episodes drop.
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Hopefully, you get the little dot on Spotify or Apple or wherever you're listening.
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And I wish you the best of luck through through this integration season.
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Let me know in the comments if you want um how laying on the grass went for you.
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What yielding felt like if you were able to do it, if not, um letting go of judgment, because it's hard.
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It's hard to yield.
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Um, you need to feel safe, and that's why I say to yield to earth first.