Witches

Putting it all on the altar

“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will rule your life and you will call it Fate.”

Carl Jung

While this post will not speak at any length about the terrible war that is being waged, my hope is that through close investigation of personal processes that something new or liberating will be revealed about the collective. As above, so below. As within, so without. My longing is for everyone to be free and safe, and I know that war is not the path to peace.

My therapist said to me a few weeks ago that everything is a reflection of everything else. I’ve been contemplating what this actually means. How can I feel this oft recited, seemingly universal truth in a more embodied way? What does it mean? Is it even true? Then, Sebene Selassie, in her most recent substack post wrote this and something clicked:

“…here’s some straight up mystical birthday wisdom from Kooky Old Aunt Sebene: The planets and stars are reflective, not causal. Also, all of reality as a whole. Hence, the whole “Cosmic Connection” schtick. Because if everything in our universe is inextricably intertwined (as it irrefutably is), then we are in fact seeing ourselves everywhere around us. Absolutely everything in life is a mirror. Greed, a mirror. Fear, a mirror. Hatred, a mirror. War, a mirror. Also: compassion, truth, courage, justice, liberation… mirrors. Shit’s bananas in our world right now… so, we may be feeling bananas. That’s understandable if EVERYTHING (and everyone) IS A MIRROR! That means we too are mirrors… with agency. We are affected. AND we affect.”

We are affected. And we affect. We have agency. It’s not a one way mirror. John O’Donohue writes that wholeness is holiness. So bring it all to the altar, nothing left out, because none of it is separate, all of it is holy, inextricably connected. What we are unwilling to bring to the altar, what we make separate rather than sacred is where we get into trouble.

Protecting my own goodness, protecting my own image, and my certainty about being right has to be set aside in order to operate outside of the illusion of us and them. So I place my longing to be good on the altar right next to the need to be right, and let these offerings be a portal to my own awakening. I pull them out of the shadows, set them in the light, and set myself free in the hope that I can do less harm, that I can be in my own humanity to the extent that I will not dehumanize others.

I am not the best activist. I am a better spiritual guide, metaphor queen, and wordsmith, and yet, I am using my considerable privilege and platform to speak for peace. I have been calling my state representatives in congress and senate and asking them to demand a ceasefire. A sweet student donated in my name to Jewish Voices for Peace. The news I take in has changed. When I read, or listen, I ask the question: “Is everyone’s humanity being honored here?” If it’s not, I don’t read it. And, if not, I write the editor a letter and ask them to please call for a ceasefire. Despite push back from folks who want me to keep the outside world out of the yoga classroom, I keep talking about peace in my classes because this is part of the lineage of tantric yoga. We would not have yoga as we know it without the tantrikas. They were some of the first to wonder what it would be like to place it all on the altar. Can we find God even in our discomfort? Can we connect to the divine through what was once considered to be the profane? Being with the world as it is is not easy. The temptation to spiritually bypass is there, I would be dishonest if I did not admit that. And, being with reality as it is, is our path to liberation. If we can’t speak about the challenges of our world in a yoga classroom than I feel a loss of hope, and hope is mandatory right now.

Community does not mean we all have to agree, and yet I often feel shame when someone writes to tell me I am doing it wrong, or that I am out of my integrity, or worse yet, that I somehow harmed them. My inner critic is the most loudest, I promise you. So when I get called out, or hurt someone, and get fingers shaken at me, it does take a toll, and it takes a tremendous amount of effort to pull myself up and out of the shame muck to continue speaking for peace. And, I refuse to let my fragility silence me. The inner voice that says, “See, you ARE doing it wrong,” can, in and of itself, be paralyzing. So I say, “Okay, buddy, even if you are doing it terribly, you still speak for peace. You still get to give love a voice. That’s your only job right now, even if you suck at it. Suck at being antiwar if you have to, it’s fine. It’s enough.” Maybe that pep talk helps you too?

Here’s what my therapist said a few weeks ago when I was in a shame spiral about something someone wrote to me: “Everything is a reflection of everything else. What are these individuals reflecting back to you when they write to you and tell you you are doing it wrong? What are you believing about yourself?”

To be honest I was super offended by the question. I got defensive. I cried. I told her I felt accused. I really wanted her to say that I am right and they are wrong. In other words, I was unwilling to place my righteousness on the altar and let it burn. I would rather rage war. Me against them. My rightness over their pain. Welcome to the thunderdome of the binary. As within, so without. Here I was waging war on the inside with the same tools of separation we see being used on the outside.

Luckily, my therapist is a really tough human, and did not jump in to comfort me. She let me wrythe in my defensiveness until I was done. The squirming, I think, is a part of it. The discomfort a bridge we cross, a rite of passage.

Eventually I settled a bit, and connected with the small, obviously young, part of my nervous system that was feeling so upset, so injured, and I said, out loud, something very obvious if you have read my other essays, but absolutely necessary to name in the moment. Sometimes we need to hear it a new way, at the right time. This is the magic of repeating spells.

“I have walked around my whole life feeling like I am an alien, like I can’t get it right, like I’m always being sneaky or getting away with something, even with just existing. There is always a voice in my head that is telling me I fucked it.”

My therapist said, “That’s what these emails are reflecting back at you. The belief that you are not only doing it wrong, but that you are wrong. You don’t have to live like that.”

I said, “I cannot imagine who I would be.”

“You’d be free,” she said.

Here’s where we get to the witches part.

When I was visiting Veda in NYC recently, it was the first time I had ever been with my adult child in their own home. Because I had Veda so young, I often waltz into these new situations without a lot of peer education. Most of my friends have kids who are much younger than 22, or their older kiddos are still at home. So I had no idea how intense it would be to exchange the role of mother as caregiver for the role of guest, visitor, and most horribly, the visiting mother. This was a major disruption in our normally close and easeful relationship. I am no longer needed for the basics—food, love, and shelter. In fact, the world flipped on it’s head, and here was my child providing me with food and shelter, taking me to the spa for my birthday. Never in my life have I experienced my own internalized misogyny with such instantaneous force. If the patriarchy is the system that upholds and protects those in power, misogyny is the police force of that system. Misogyny keeps us in line.

Here’s a short list of the ways I witnessed myself, policing me:

• Don’t insert yourself too much

• Don’t take over the kitchen

• Don’t clean too much

• Don’t have too many opinions about their life

• Don’t be a burden

• Don’t be controlling

• Don’t take up too much space

• Don’t annoy the roommates

• Don’t be the mom who comes visits and then everyone is SO happy to have leave

  • How do I do this? What do cool moms do?

• Don’t be too much fun

• Don’t be lame

• Don’t be the wild mom

• Don’t be the boring mom

• And on and on and on and on and on

I felt like the crone, the witch, the old woman with no purpose, puttering and useless. Birthing and caring for this person for 22 years, and now tossed to the side, to do what? Who am I now, if not first your mother, Veda? I could feel the tentacles of control wanting to exert themselves, to re-establish myself in the role as capital M Mother. The temptation to be bossy, to over clean, to have big opinions and try and control my kid was very real. This is the horrible glimmer of truth I saw in witnessing myself over those five days, and I am proud to say that I did not act on these impulses in order to try and preserve some old-order that no longer reflects the truth of our relationship. Preserving the old order can be dangerous.

It’s uncomfortable to shed a costume I’ve worn for so long, and it was very tempting to try and shove myself back into it, even when it’s obviously been outgrown. We all want to revert back to a behaviour that once gave us comfort and purpose. It’s very human. Kids do it all time, and yet the question remains, why did I want to go backward so very badly? Why all the internalized misogyny?

It is worth noting that I cannot think of one stereotype about visiting dads. Can you? I’ve been asking around and someone suggested, “Golfing?”

Is it that they don’t visit? Is that the stereotype? My own dad never came to visit me in any of the places I lived. It was always my mom making the effort, risking travel, taking time out of her life to come to me, and I feel horrible that I very likely contributed to the story of the awful, controlling visiting mom.

Our culture hates women, at every juncture—pregnant, not pregnant, hot, but not too hot, smart, but not too smart. Go watch America Ferrera’s monologue from the Barbie movie for a more extensive list of the rules. The patriarchy most especially hates women who will be moving into menopause, who harbor deep, earned, wisdom, and who are unpartnered and now childless. The crone. The witch. The one who is alone.

Lisa Lister, in her beautiful book Witch, explains this legacy of hatred toward women. Disempowering, and then ultimately torturing and killing women was a political tactic used to prop up the Pope’s agenda and escalate the influence of the Catholic Church by declaring that women’s wisdom about birth, plants, growing food, and curing ailments came from making deals with demons, with evil. They made women’s wisdom not only a sin, but a crime, something to be feared. Something less than human. During the witch hunts, over 13 million women were killed, and this systemic terror created a new model of woman that was better suited to capitalism—to keeping power with men, within the body of the church. This new woman was ideally sexless and subservient to men. A woman’s body and monthly blood was now shrouded in shame. And a woman’s role, their only role, in this capitalist system was to give birth, to mother. Persecutors encouraged women to turn on each other to save themselves, and older women were killed too, “…as they were the ones who remembered. They went from home to home, circulating stories, sharing secrets and wisdom and weaving together past and present events,” (Lister, 70). I’m not sure what was taught about the witch hunts at public schools, but at the private Catholic schools I attended this history was erased. Obviously.

An older woman recast as a burden rather than a resource is less of a threat.

In yoga there is a witch Goddess named Dhumavati who has always been one of my favorites.

“Perceived as the Void, as the dissolved form of consciousness, when all beings are dissolved in sleep in the supreme Brahman, having swallowed the entire universe, the seer poets call her the most glorious, the eldest, Dhumavati.” Ganapati Muni 38, 13

Her name means the smokey one, and she is also called the widow, and in some parts of India, there was no more inauspicious form of the divine feminine because there is nothing worse than being alone, without a partner. She is the only goddess portrayed without a male companion. In tantric yoga, Dhumavati is one of the ten goddesses from the Mahavidyas, who incarnate as different stages on the path to wisdom. Dhumavati is said to be the void stage, which we all must go through on the journey to a higher, more connected wisdom (Kempton, 2013).

Dhumavati is described as tall, unsteady, ugly and angry. She rides in a chariot decorated by crows carrying a broom, a torch, a spear, and a bowl made of a skull—a reminder of old age, and death itself. She is disheveled, old, and wears dirty clothes. In other words, Dhumavati is familiar to all of us—the witch, the crone, the dried up old hag. In my very Italian American neighborhood, we called her “The Fig Lady,” and she was as fascinating as she was terrifying. It is said that if we allow ourselves to look at Dhumavati, straight in the eyeballs, we will see that she is beingness in its most pure form, and if we can look upon her ugliness and still see the beauty of creation, maybe we can have the courage to give up performing our own goodness, our own rightness. Maybe beauty becomes something we don’t have to perform? Sally Kempton, a great tantric teacher I was blessed to sit with before she passed, writes that Dhumavati “…lives in whatever is desolate, abandoned, unfortunate, and unpleasant. She is dead coral reefs and foreclosed homes. She is refugee camps and displaced peoples moving without passports over desolate ground. In these ways she denies the ordinary sweetness of life. She is everything that we want to run away from and refuse to admit to our lives,” (Kempton, 2013). In Christian contemplative practices, she is the dark night of the soul. Dhumavati is an invitation to see clearly. She is non-duality, and if we have the courage to look beyond the pain and anger, she is grace. She lives in a chariot going nowhere, existing just because she exists, because she is divinity itself.

I can think of no better witch to call upon as we seek to have the courage to turn toward not only the parts of ourselves that we have abandoned, that we think don’t belong, but the collective shadows, the smoke, we find so hard to place upon the altars of our hearts. As Barbara Kingsolver, put it so beautifully, “…to not hope is dangerous.”

Here’s to hope.

I love you so.

A