I’ve been thinking a lot about safety and what constitutes safety for someone. What makes a person really feel safe? What does safety embody for a person? I think of fire as an embodiment of safety. The warmth it provides, and even a psychological fascination with light, and the idea that being in the light can make you safe. There’s this draw to a fire and what it represents. We can be warmed by the fire, can even have a degree of visibility and protection, and yet the fire can also be a detriment. Your eyes have to adjust each time, and what feels safe may ultimately be an illusion.

12-27-11 Today’s meditation focused on desire, specifically what desire for others is really about for me. I think that’s such a hard question to answer in a way, because it really involves recognizing that there’s some level of selfishness associated with desire, and while that seems like a given it did make me think about what that really means. Selfishness isn’t bad per se, as long as it isn’t taken to an extreme. It’s just that when it is taken to an extreme it can go overboard, to the extent that the other person isn’t even considered. In looking at my past, I can safely say that I have been that selfish before and while the short term gratification was nice, the long term result was anything but. So for the moment I’m focusing on the selfishness piece of all of this.

12-28-11 Today’s meditation focused on polyamory. I’ve been in a closed relationship for almost two years, which has been the longest time I’ve been in a closed relationship. I’ve used the time to do a lot of thinking about poly and why I’ve considered myself poly. In all honesty, I’d have to say that my participation in poly is a text book case of bad poly. I’ve made a lot of the mistakes people make in such relationships and as I’ve looked over those mistakes and also what’s drawn me to that lifestyle, I’ve come to realize that I chose that lifestyle in part based on a belief of: “There’s no one person who can fulfill all your needs and its better to have multiple relationships to get all your needs met.” Or if I flip it a little I get: “I’ve been considered to be too intense, and its better if I spread the love around so I’m not too much for anyone person.” Both reasons are ones I’ve told myself and others and yet in considering them carefully, I’ve come to realize that for me, they are unhealthy reasons.

My reasoning about this matter is as follows. If I really believe I’m too much for one person and feel the need to spread the love, am I perhaps ignoring what it is that makes me too much for a person? am I perhaps displacing my needs onto other people, without examining them and seeing what’s healthy or isn’t healthy? And also what is it I am telling myself if I believe this message? When I’ve considered these questions, I’ve realized that poly, in the way I’ve approached it, has ended up being a crutch that has helped me avoid intimacy with myself, let alone someone else.

With that said, I know I’m capable of loving more than one person and I think it can be healthy to love more than one person. However, I know that even though I am capable, I also haven’t really laid a strong foundation to support such relationships. I’ve closed my relationship with my wife, in part because I know that I can’t do good poly, if I can’t even do good with a single relationship. We may never open the relationship up and that would be okay, because I would rather get it right with one person than continue to get it wrong with multiple people.

1-1-12 New year, new me. Today’s mediation focused on judgement. In all honesty, I can be a fairly judgmental person, but show me someone who isn’t. I don’t think I know anyone who doesn’t in one form or another judge others. But what Dragon pointed out is that the best thing I can do is acknowledge the judgments as I make them and then question them. So I applied that to judgments I’d made, and I realized as I looked at those judgements, how many of them were informed by things I had learned or observed about parenting based off how my parents raised me. It’s an eye opening perspective that is helping me view the person in question in a different light, and consequently influences my interactions with him. And I guess that’s the thing about judgements…where your judgements come from is based in part on experiences, observations, culture etc.

1-5-12 To be clear I’m not suddenly anti-polyamory. I think polyamory can work, and I know people who’ve made it work really well. But when I think about my desires, what I see that is problematic is my communication around those desires. It’s not the desire itself that’s a problem, but how I’ve communicated about it. Part of communication is vulnerability and that’s not something I’ve handled well in the past. When you grow up self-sufficient and think that you can’t rely on others, you don’t let others in. With Kat, I’ve been learning how to be vulnerable, how to really open up, and also how to listen. Its taken me this long to learn those lessons in communication, but then again I think its takes many people time to learn such lessons.

1-9-12 I’ve been meaning to write this since I realized it. I was feeling antsy the other day and when I got to the heart of my restless, I realized something fantastic, liberating really. I realized how much I’ve been drawn to, addicted (that could be too strong) to newness. Neophilia. It’s something that plays out in multiple areas of my life. New homes every few years, new relationships after a year or two, new jobs every so often, new video games (those aren’t so bad), new, new, new…And I realized I’m not really used to being stable or establishing roots. I don’t have many friends from long ago that I’ve stayed in touch with. Stabilizing myself, getting stable that’s just nothing something I’ve done. That search for newness has always stirred up some kind of drama and restlessness. Stabilizing with Kat, settling into a relationship and intentionally focusing on just that relationship…That’s new for me, but a different kind of new. I don’t need a fresh injection of something new to take away something blue. I just need to settle in and trust in what I discover as a result.

1-12-11 I’m reading the Art of War, which is about blocks to a person’s creativity. One of the forms of Resistance is Sex: “Sometimes Resistance takes the form of sex, or an obsessive preoccupation with sex. Why sex? Because sex provides immediate and instant gratification. When someone sleeps with us, we feel validated and approved of, even loved…In my experience, you can tell by the measure of hollowness you feel afterward. The more empty you feel, the more certain you can be that your true motivation was not love or even lust, but Resistance.”

That quote speaks to a lot of my experiences with sex. Sex to feel loved to feel approved of, but also that emptiness feeling, that hollow sense of non-gratification, that desperate air of the hungry ghost. I know that all too well. Sex, for a long time, was just the big empty. Sometimes I used it to escape from everything, and sometimes all it really did was remind me of how hollow my life was. Nowadays it’s different, the sex is more about connection, an intentional conscious bond.

I’ve also been thinking about how I spend money. I’m mostly satisfied with my choices, but there’s also a sense of: what do I really have to show for it? I’m tired of just floating in some space. I want to make definite plans, move forward, and although I have a better financial sense of things then I used to have, and can make my pennies squeak for all their worth, I’ve also got a feeling of wanting more for that buck.

All of these things are distractions from that internal fire, yet they are also relevant to my fire, because they are shadows cast by the flames. I feel like a lot of my life has just been a shadow. I’ve never really known fire…I’ve just known a shadowy impression.

1-17-12 One of the activities that Kat and I have committed to doing involves reading books on relationships and money together. We’re currently reading Your Money or Your Life and Journey of the Heart. Both are excellent books and as I re-read them, I catch things I hadn’t previously gotten in the first reading. And what it makes me realize is how important it is to cultivate your inner fire. I’ve only seen shadows and I’d allowed my fire to gutter out, especially several years ago. Now I’m feeling more creative than I ever have been, more inspired really, and at the same time happier than I’ve ever been.

Yet I think I had to let my fire gutter out. I had to experience what it was like to lose that edge, so that I could really appreciate what I have with it. When I did the Love and Emptiness workings in particular, I put myself through the abyss and experienced my shadows fully. Identity saw me crawl out of the abyss and start a path of re-discovery, which continued through the year of Time and space and has moved into this year of Fire. But a big part of that work has also been an intentional cultivation and creation of my relationship with Kat, and that very intentional focus has also spread to cultivating that internal fire that inspires my creativity.

A fire that isn’t carefully cultivated goes out eventually, but if you know to feed the fire, you can keep it going for a long, long time. The books I read with Kat and the conversations we have around them feed my soul and creativity. There are perspectives she offers that I in turn apply to my life. I have a true partner, someone who is willing to walk this journey with me, and so I find that I have help cultivating that inner mounting flame.

1-20-12 There is something to be said for being in an uncomfortable space, because of the opportunities it affords you to grow. I’ve said that before, and I’ll likely say it again, but I realize it anew in the context of choices I’ve made in my relationship with Kat and in my life in general. I’ve always had a fear of letting someone in. Most people only get to a certain level of closeness and then I keep them there. I know where it comes from. It comes from having the rug pulled out from underneath me when I was 10. One day I had a step-mom, I called mom, and the next day I had someone taking out her anger and frustration on me. And this has been a rinse and repeat cycle several times over. It’s hard, consequently, to really trust someone, to really believe that the closeness you feel is genuine, or that it will last. My biggest challenge with Kat has really come down to opening up to her and telling her where I am at, or how I am feeling, when I feel afraid to be that honest. Coming from a life, where I learned early on that it was better to hide an unpleasant truth, learning to be truthful enough to no longer hide has been hard. Yet when I look at previous relationships, I clearly can acknowledge that my dishonesty hurt those other people far more and created far worse problems, than if I had simply opened up and been honest. Yes, the truth might not be something the other person wants to hear, but at least it will set us free to be present with each other, instead of just going through the motions.

As I was meditating today Dragon pointed out that fire didn’t have to be any of these things. That the only one who’d perceived it that way had been me, but also I didn’t have to continue perceiving myself in a particular way either. That’s something I’ve been discovering in my relationship with Kat, and also discovering that I am not too much for myself or someone else.

I’ve always been driven by my passion. That can be good or it can be bad. Just depends on what you make of it, but I’m not going to bank the fire of my life or my relationship with fire because of an ill conceived perception. If I hold onto it, I empower it…and if I let it go, I open myself to new possibilities.

12-2-11 The meditations have focused on anger this week. Dragon had me do a history of anger, both in terms of how I’ve seen anger expressed and how I’ve expressed it. When I look at the history of anger, I start with my Dad. With him, anger was always a volcanic eruption. It would build and build up and then one day explode. His anger was always fast and hard, and you never knew what would set him off. Both my step-mom and mom tended to be more passive aggressive in certain ways, though my step mom would also be overly aggressive. She encouraged it in her daughter as well, who learned early on that she could take her anger out on me with no repercussions. What I learned early on was that I had to repress my anger. I wasn’t allowed to show it, and if I did show it, I got disciplined.

Even later on I had experiences where for the most part other people expressed anger, while I kept a lid on it, except for the rare occasions when it’d pop out in a volcano. Consequently my own relationship with my feeling of anger is an uncomfortable one. Even with the internal work I’ve done, I still feel afraid of my own anger. I’ve recently been working on expressing it, and listening to it, instead of repressing it and this seems to help, but learning to listen to an emotion you’ve normally repressed isn’t very easy. Listening to my anger means letting myself be vulnerable to feelings of hurt as well. It’s not that I’m not aware of those feelings, and that I even feel them, but feeling them in conscious conjunction with anger is a whole another experience.

12-5-11 In today’s meditation, Dragon pointed out that anger, for me, seemed to really be about control. specifically not feeling control and wanting control. I think that’s true for me. When I look at the situations in my life a common theme is not feeling like I had control…feeling like I was under someone else’s thumb. And the anger I feel is an anger of not feeling acknowledged. It’s an anger that I haven’t let go, because I’m trying to cling on to some kind of acknowledgement of the hurt I’ve felt. Yet that anger doesn’t give me that acknowledgement. It just ends up being something I stew in.

I’ve come to realize as well that I’ll likely not get the acknowledgement I want from the people who’ve hurt me. and Maybe even if they did, it wouldn’t be enough. It all comes back to holding on to this anger, to this hurt that I’ve felt. Dragon asked me what it would be like to actually let go of that anger, to actually release it, instead of holding onto it and letting it define my identity. I don’t want that anger to identify my identity, but I know why I’ve held onto it so much. For so long, going back to my childhood, holding onto that anger was what got me through difficult situations. They couldn’t take my anger from me, and I could use it to prove they were wrong. That kind of motivation was what kept me going through a lot of hard times. But holding onto it now doesn’t really help. I’m not happy holding on to it. I need to learn to let go.

12-7-11 I allowed myself to articulate my anger, and the underlying feeling of rejection that seems to accompany that anger. It’s not anger toward just one person, but a lifetime of people, who in one way or another showed me that I wasn’t a high or important priority in their lives. Being able to articulate that to Kat, to share that pain and anger helped. The realizations I’ve been having about my anger and the underlying emotional bedrock that supports it shows me how important it is that I finally feel like I am an actual priority to someone. There’s a sense of relief and disbelief.

12-8-11 I always find it fascinating how the experiences in my life fit neatly into the theme I’m working on. Today at my small Business Management class, the instructor brought up the value of changing your stories. He said the stories we tell ourselves set up the scripts and situations we find ourselves in. I certainly know this, but hearing it again today caused me to experience it a different way and apply this idea of rewriting old stories into new ones to some of the stories I have been telling myself as I’ve been working with my anger this month. For example, telling myself a new story of: I am loved, wanted, desired, needed, appreciated, and supported in what I do, and how I choose to do it is a powerful change for me. I hadn’t, until recently, ever really felt supported. Now I do.

12-17-11 Owning my anger, acknowledging and taking responsibility, but also choosing to know I can feel anger. I’ve been thinking about that all week, and how I can own my anger to empower myself. Owning anger isn’t pushing it down. Owning anger, for me, is learning to let go, instead of holding on so tight. I don’t need it to define my identity anymore.

Desire has been coming up a lot as well, which makes sense, given how much fire is associated with desire. I’ve explored desire in other elements, but fire brings its own perspective on desire. Desire has such twists in it. to be desired and to desire. Am I desired for one aspect, or is the desire for the real me?

12-18-11 Sometimes the person I’m the angriest with is myself. I’ve always found it hard to forgive myself for what I consider mistakes. My first marriage is an example of that. I’m angry at myself for staying so long in what was clearly an unhealthy relationship for myself and the ex. The choices I made in that relationship are ones I’ve looked over and questioned, because they were symptomatic of the underlying unhappiness. I’m responsible for staying in that relationship for so long. Still hindsight is 20 20 and as I’ve continued the internal work around that relationship and the choices I made in it, I have to acknowledge that where I am now is not where I was then. I can look back and judge myself or I can look back and see a very fallible person who made very real mistakes and has since learned from those mistakes. I don’t feel the anger often toward myself anymore, but occasionally it still comes up, and tells me I still have healing and forgiveness to do.

12-21-11 The other day Kat and I were having a conversation and she said, “I know you’re angry with me. Let me in.” It took a while, but eventually I told her what I was feeling angry about. It was interesting for me, because even though I knew I felt angry, being so honest about it involved being so vulnerable as well. It was hard to be so vulnerable, but it was also so freeing to tell her how I really felt. So often I’ve held my anger in, until finally its erupted…how much better to simply admit it, and be open about it. As this month ends, I feel more comfortable with my anger, and with what the work with element fire has revealed about it. That’s what the elemental balance work is all about.

It’s a reinvention of identity, both for myself, but also for people I want to market my services too.  It’s an ongoing challenge, because I’m not just writing a new business plan, I’m also doing a fair amount of internal work. For example at our class, we were challenged to rewrite our internal stories into more positive ones. What does it have to do with business? Quite a lot actually, because the internal reality you believe is the reality that manifests in your life.

Each year, the elemental balancing ritual is part of my reinvention. The thematic approach provides enough structure to make consistent changes, while providing enough freedom to allow yourself to experience the lessons needed to make those changes happen. A necessary part of that process involves keeping a journal of sorts, which is why I blog on this journal about the experiences each month. The only exception has been a two year gap, wherein I focused on Magical Identity. You won’t necessarily find such personal entries in it, but it nonetheless encapsulates the experiences of two years of reinvention.

Change is a constant. Embracing change within your magical practice is how you take control of the change you experience and make it part of your identity.

10-25-2011 The last few days has involved a dialogue between Dragon and myself about Fire, passion, and consumption. What stands out most is the focus on fire as a metaphor for passion and why that’s not such a good thing. Dragon points out that fire ultimately consumes, and if passion is fire, than its more about consumption than anything else. If fire is a metaphor for passion, there can be danger in that metaphor, in terms of how people approach passion. And I think he’s right. My experiences with passion, in part, has been more about trying to experience a sensation that I might think of as fire, but in the process I’ve gotten burned a lot, because it’s not something which is sustainable. Dragon pointed out that fires eventually consume themselves, until there’s nothing left to give…Some interesting thoughts come to mind about American Culture and its focus on consumption. What does that teach us, about ourselves, others etc? Is it all something to be consumed, or can we really experience it?

10-31-2011 Fire just is. The association of doing and activity is meaning attributed to fire, but dragon asked me what it would be like to just contemplate fire as it is, instead of contemplating fire as doing something.

11-07-11 Dragon brought up something that really grabbed my attention. He said what a person fixates on or desires or obsesses over can burn him/her and the people in his/her life, because f how it consumes them. But if a person can consume and let go of what s/he desires, then it no longer takes up his/her energy in quite the same way. Now this is nothing new…you find this advice in meditation, but looking at it from the perspective of fire, and consuming something so it turns to smoke and then is wafted away…that’s what grabbed my attention. And I have to admit that I’m in this process of consuming instead of being consumed. Not an easy process, but it is freeing up a lot of energy.

11-16-11 I haven’t been as good about updating this entry as I’d like, but a lot’s happened. Kat and I noticed that the stray black cat that lives near our house had kittens. It’s getting really cold out, and this summer we’d actually found a dead kitten. It was pretty upsetting. So we decided to catch the mama cat (to neuter it) and catch the kittens as well. We managed to catch two of the kittens. The other one is gone, may be dead or alive, and the mama cat hasn’t shown up lately. I took the trap back today, but I’ll deploy it if she comes back. What does all this have to do with fire?

Dragon brought up a very important point. When you create a spark, you are responsible for nurturing it and using it wisely. When I think about the mama cat, I remember that my ex-wife chose to feed her. I don’t know if it would’ve stuck around anyway, but I do know that feeding it encouraged it to stay in the neighborhood. I realized that I should’ve tried to catch that mama cat much earlier than now. More importantly, in catching these two kittens I felt that I had chosen to take on the responsibility of doing something with them. The animal control shelter told me if they weren’t tame enough, they’d be euthanized, and that they might be euthanized anyway because of how many cats they have. There’s no way I’d let two cats be euthanized simply because they’d been caught. I’ve learned about another place, the Cat Adoption Team, where they don’t euthanize cats, but we have had these kittens for a week and we’ve all gotten attached to them. They seem to feel the same. And the point here is this: You always have a responsibility to see through what you take on. I’ve taken on those two kittens. They’re part of my responsibility, that spark of life I’ve nurtured by capturing them and taming them.

11-18-2011 Sometimes I wonder if I’ve left my passion for all things occult somewhere else. Actually I sometimes wonder if I’ve left my passion for lots of things somewhere else. And I guess that’s a reason I’m doing this work with the element of fire. I want to get in touch with that passion, and yet ironically I think I am in touch with that passion…it’s just a slow process of rekindling it. I let it get banked by personal circumstances, by my choices to try and make myself into something I wasn’t. Never again. Never again will I give my fire, my passion, my intensity away or push it down. That kind of give away can hurt you so much and it hurts your creativity as much as it hurts in other ways. I feel like my creativity is finally coming back because my passion has a safe place to be.

11-21-11 There is nothing worse than feeling that you failed yourself or someone else. And yet failure prompts growth and change. It forces you to reassess what’s truly important and then claim that importance through the actions you take to bring change to your life. The ashes of defeat are also the loam that prompts growth. What you hold dearest can fall away in a moment and yet when it falls away it reveals who you are through how you respond. Do you rail against it? Do you accept it and learn from it? Do you burn yourself or do you warm yourself? It’s a fine balance to walk. I choose to cultivate a warm fire instead of a vengeful fire. Where that takes me as a result is hopefully to a better place in my healing as well as in my passion.

I first did the closing ritual to the elements of Space and Time. I evoked the spirits for those elements, thanked them for their transformative work and promised to keep the lessons I’d learned embodied in my actions and life, and that I’d continue to work with them.

Then I pulled into the circle a dragon statue I have. I placed my hands on it, and called to the spirit of the Fire Dragon. I was born in the year of the Fire Dragon and this coming year will be a year of the dragon, albeit, ironically the year of the Water Dragon. Nonetheless I felt it was auspicious to work with this entity for the element of fire.

I invoked the dragon into me, and began to do bellows breathing, focusing on a rhythm that would allow me to simulate the feeding of fire by a bellows. Once I’d gotten to a point where I felt connected to the element of fire, I explained my desire to connect with it, and invoke it into my life for the next year, as part of my balancing work. I also explained that while all they ears of my elemental balancing work had helped me manifest many changes, I felt my fire had become banked and I wanted to develop a healthier relationship with it.

I felt this warmth go into my hands from the statue. My hands felt very warm, felt very much on fire and that warmth then spread into the rest of me. As it did, I heard the dragon speak about fire as both a creative and destructive force. It inspires, but also destroys. It burns, but from the ashes growth can come. It can warm you, but it can also hurt you with that warmth. All of these things and more said to me and I realized that fire, both as a literal and metaphoric force has many sides to it.

I’m looking forward to this year’s work. Since fire is an element I already resonate with, I think this work will help me channel that element in many useful directions.

In high school, I was one of the weird, unpopular kids, and that brought with it all the bullying and negative attention that arises. It probably didn’t help that I purposely chose to stand out, but it also didn’t help that I was a relative newcomer and as such didn’t fit in with already well-established cliques. For me, magic was a way to empower myself, both in terms of doing an activity I was really good at, and in terms of doing an activity that intimidated others and sometimes caused them to back away from me. I was labeled a black magician and I’ll admit I purposely chose to embrace that label. Ironically it was a label that would follow me into college.

I never got into Wicca. It was popular, and a lot of people practiced it, but I didn’t care for it or the practices or the Wiccan rede. In truth, I felt it was too popular. I wanted to explore the more obscure practices and techniques (which still holds true to this day). What I found in the books on Wicca and encountered in the people who labeled themselves as such was more of a religious focus. I didn’t want religion, already getting more than enough of it from my mother. I also didn’t care for what I thought of as a narrowness in the Wiccans I met. I heard too much about what you couldn’t do and I found that when such naysaying was going on, it was happening because people didn’t want you looking into something. So I looked into what they didn’t want me to look into.

In those years, I didn’t experiment with magic for the most part. Instead I read the books and did the exercises faithfully, just trying to learn them. My studies focused on a combination of neoshamanism, elemental hermeticism, and Golden Dawn Ceremonial Magic, along with Crowley’s Thelemic works. (yes you read that). I hadn’t heard of chaos magic, or of the works of other magicians. For the most part, I understood magic to be a very formal, ritualistic activity. I knew I didn’t have most of the tools, so I made do with what I had, but I did my best to faithfully replicate ceremonies and rituals. The neoshamanism was what taught me flexibility and a very practical, technique oriented approach to magic. It also introduced me to a lot of visualization exercises. The ceremonial work introduced me to discipline, vocalization, and planted the seed of my process oriented approach to magic (Ceremonial magic is very much a process).

There was one experiment I did however, and it was done because I knew it could work and that the benefits would outrank any consequences attached to it. Also I took and still take a very traditional perspective on body fluids, understanding them to be a conveyance of the power of the person. And also understanding that the land has power.

I lived in York, Pa at the time and there was this place called Reymeyer’s Hollow. It was a cursed place, cursed by the magician who was murdered by another magician. It’s a place where the air seems to stand still, where there’s always something menacing…visiting it at night brings this sense of menace out even more and people will tell you they can see spirits there. It’s a nexus of power.

One night I traveled there with a friend and I did an evocation of each of the four elements of Earth, Air, Fire, and Water, and an evocation of spirit. I had a knife I used for ceremonial work and I took that knife and cut my right upper arm. It was a deep cut. I gave each of the elementals my blood in exchange for their essence and swore a pact of alliance with them. I’ll admit, I got the idea from reading the Elric series by Michael Moorcock, but I also got it in part from some of the books on elemental hermeticism. From the beginning I understood that working with the spirits was best done as a collaboration. My reason for doing this working was that I wanted direct access to the elemental energies. I got that direct access with the ritual I did. It changed me profoundly, and changed my understanding of magic as well. It’s fair to say that my concept of the elemental balancing ritual came in part from doing this working. It changed how I experienced the world and how I experienced magic. It changed how I interacted with the land.

It wasn’t until College that I began to really experiment with magic, but that first experience taught me I could and inspired me to start thinking outside what the books were telling me.

Oregon, as a contrast, feels like home. There’s something about the land that fits me, that fits together with who I am. Whenever I leave this state and go somewhere else, I feel a shift. I know I am not home.

I have no doubt that for people who live in Washington and/or Seattle, that those places are just as much home for them and that there is a connection that is fundamentally as deep for them as Oregon is for me. I know some people have told me that in Oregon they don’t feel comfortable. It makes sense to me that the relationship any person has with the land is going to be unique to some degree, shaped in part by personality and in part by the land itself, and how it fits that person.

My connection to the land is an elemental connection. I do a lot of work with elemental spirits and bonding with the land has always been part of my work. The exchange of essence is an exchange of trust, and an acceptance of a close relationship with the land. I don’t think of the land as a place or thing, but as something living, with its own input and feedback. It may not communicate that message through means most of us are aware of, but the land speaks, if you know how to hear and feel it.

The timing of this was interesting. Kat, my wife, thinks that my body was responding to the tattoo and releasing toxicity. Given that I’d gotten all the work done in a 3 week period, I can believe that, but at the same time I can’t help but wonder if it was also a demonstration of what the tattoo represents: Balance in Identity. Achieving balance means facing and releasing toxicity in your life. It means recognizing where you’ve allowed yourself to be held up by your own issues.

In meditating on the wounds that appeared, I realized that they represented the work I’d done and continue to do with my elemental balancing ritual. I’ve worked through a lot of internal toxicity and cleaned it out of my life. It’s been painful, but it’s also freed me of so much of what I was holding in. Those physical embodiments of the toxicity reminded me of all that work. They’re also a reminder that such work can be ongoing.

In other news…

Recently Immanion Press released its latest Anthology: Shades of Faith. You can order the book via this website or via Amazon. Here’s a brief description of what it’s about:

Shades of Faith: Minority Voices in Paganism is an anthology that encompasses the voices and experiences of minorities within the Pagan community and addresses some of the challenges, stereotyping, frustrations, talents, history and beauties of being different within the racial constructs of typical Pagan or Wiccan groups.

Yesterday I went in for the last session of the identity tattoo. This time, for me, the focus wasn’t on covering something up, but being open to identity and where it could take me. Instead of trying to rewrite the past, I just allowed myself to be open to the present, and the possibilities of the future. I think part of that too came from the sense of completion I feel around writing Neuro-Space/Time Magic.

Identity has been such an interesting element to explore…it’s a meta-element really because its present in everything, no matter how much we try to deny it. It could even be argued that our denial just strengthens it. Regardless of how you look at it, however, identity is present. It goes beyond a constructed sense of self to something much deeper. It displays itself in everything we do or don’t do. It’s a cycle, and that’s why the tattoo ending up the way it has makes complete sense to me. All of the internal work I’ve done, everything I’m doing now is part of a cycle that’s my identity. And it goes beyond one life time, I think…it’s a continuing exploration of everything, changing in a dance that we can sense if we are open to acknowledging it.

As you can see the tattoo isn’t finished yet, but this is what we gone done today. I hope to finish it up in a month, but I’m really pleased with the work the artist did.

I waited awhile to get this tattoo, partially because I had to decide if I was going to cover up a tattoo I already had. In the end I decided to cover up the old tattoo as the final part of a reclaiming/purification ritual for myself. Reclaiming my identity and my freedom to be who I need and want to be. I’ve pretty much done that already in my life, but this tattoo is the final part of that reclaiming, the last resolution needed to move on.

It’s a lot more than that as well. I chose the Yin/Yang symbol surrounded by the five classic Chinese elements of Fire Water, Metal, Wood, and Earth. It represents the elemental balancing ritual and how much of a role it’s played in my life, in terms of establishing and exploring my identity and place in the universe. And the yin/Yang symbol is representative of the Taoist meditation techniques I’ve used to help me do so much of the very needed internal work I needed to do.

Today as I was inked, I did the water breathing meditation and relaxed into the pain of the needle, letting it wash over, purifying me of the past, even as it helped me embrace the present and my promise to myself: Never to sacrifice my identity for anyone else. To always strike the right balance in all my relationships so that I can honor myself and the people I interact with. To be honest with myself so I can be honest with the people in my life.

I let the pain wash over me and I meditated on the pain of change and realized how good it can be. It’s hurt while it’s happening, but the end result, the realization is you’re in a better place than you were before. And that’s how I feel: I’m in a much better place than I’ve ever been.