SCROLL FROM THE EDITOR
Welcome to the July 2023 edition of The Midnight Sun!
Hello, friends!
How are you? I know I’m still reeling from Gather, and floored that it’s already over. Remembering self-care is important for body mind and spirit, I hope that in these hot summer days and nights, you are listening to your body and heart and not overdoing it. It’s summer after all! Get in all the vacation and relaxation time you can!
After the long haul and final sprint to and through Gather, we here in the House have been enjoying a wee bit of a break. Clearly, reading this, there are still some things afoot, but by and large, we’re taking the month of July to sit back, catch our collected breaths and rest. In this month’s newsletter, we are back full force with good info and articles from Stef, Hex, M. Belanger, Izzy, and yours truly. Buck has a Tarot pull for us, and we have some HK Jams for your Chill Vibes to stay cool here in July!
If you joined us at Gather, be it in person or online, Thank You. From all of us, for such a wonderful, supportive, and invested community.
I know by the time this comes out, I will be just back from a family vacation, and I hope wherever your summer travels take you, be it a destination vacation or just to your front porch with a frosty beverage, that you’re well.
~Miranda (Frick)
Curator and Editor of TMS
JULy HK Jams
Unwind under the sun and chill out!
The delicate dance of practicing self-care around mental health when mental health is self-care.
Balance. How often do we hear, “You should find a balance”? There’s work-life balance, mundane-magical balance, physical exercise and rest, balance in the foods we eat, and many other things to balance. But we don’t discuss the balance between shadow work and self-care, which can be a puzzle since shadow work is self-care and self-care is shadow work.
Starting your shadow work is not always easy, and for many of us, looking deep into the crevices of ourselves is one of the hardest things we will ever do. But once that journey starts, we often find ourselves “leveling up” (as my friends say) and digging deeper into the work. In my experience, it’s near impossible to stop the introspective work once it’s started; overall, that is a good thing. But just because shadow work is a never-ending journey doesn’t mean you can’t take a break. Arguably You SHOULD take breaks because it is ongoing. Remember, this work is a marathon, not a sprint. So how do you take a break from the work often happening inside your head? Honestly, I don’t have a direct answer for you, mainly because everyone is different, and all journeys look different. Still, I compiled a few reasons why taking a breather during your journey is essential.
How we approach recovery from a physical injury and mental health are, for the most part, drastically different. Most of us can list what happens when you have an injury. Let’s use a broken ankle as an example. Stabilizing the ankle, assessing the damage, getting medication to manage the pain, and physical therapy are standard ways to treat a broken ankle. Is anyone judged for using pain meds? Do people ask, “Why aren’t you doing more PT”? No one judges someone for getting help for a break and expects anyone to do PT non-stop. It’s okay to rest with your shadow work as well. If you never take a rest day during your recovery, then you risk reinjury; the same applies to mental health.
In the journey to find balance, you can inadvertently become unbalanced. It is not always about the pendulum swinging from one side to the other. It’s about finding a balance within yourself that feels good and is healthy. When just starting this journey, we tend to want to overcorrect and suddenly find ourselves on the opposite side of where we were.
Time. It takes time to do this type of work. You didn’t learn the patterns or experience the trauma overnight, so why expect you to recover and relearn overnight? You could talk about the same topic in therapy for weeks, and each appointment would be different because you could walk away with additional insight into the issue. Therapy can be compared to school. You go, not always because you want to but because you know it will be good. You talk things through and develop plans and strategies for situations you struggle with; it is a safe place to learn. Your life outside of therapy can be compared to a career. It takes years of schooling or on-the-job training to learn how to do some jobs. You’re not expected to know everything your first day, but you learn as you go. The passing of time allows you to interact with different people in different settings, and it’s there that you can apply what you’ve learned. Don’t expect to leave therapy and be confronted with the situation you just talked through. Time is why people in the 12-step program don’t start with apologies. It takes time to show people you are doing the work and changing past behaviors.
Taking a break or a rest is less about putting the work aside or ignoring it. It’s about putting it down. You can’t be on your cell phone non-stop; you have to charge it at some point. You can’t drive your car without stopping for gas. You can’t heal an injury without resting it. It’s okay to cancel a therapy appointment. It’s okay to tell your therapist that you don’t want to talk about hard things that day. It’s okay to pick up a book that doesn’t focus on self-help, anxiety, ADHD, or depression. Finding balance is a delicate dance that varies for each of us. No one will be on the same journey, but our journeys will intersect, so remember that you are not alone in this. Each person that you have pulled into your close circle are people who can help you find this balance.
July 2023 - The World
Card pull for July is… THE WORLD
…. I CAN SHOW YOU THE WOOOORLD… SHINNING… SHIMMERING...
Okay, okay serious time though. What a perfect card to pull hot off the heels of Gather!! Unity and wholeness, we all came as single people to join a whole of like-minded people to learn and grow.
Hopefully, everyone made some new friends! But what I’m getting with my great and amazing Buck tarot-tingling senses is… You.. come here.. come closer… okay listen.. WHATEVER YOU ARE DOING… KEEP GOING!! WOO!! It’s paying off! You may have completed something or seen some success from whatever you are doing..
DON’T STOP! PLEEEASE DON’T STOP!! Keep going!! Whatever it is, you’re getting closer with every step. You got this!! Keep working hard but remember to take time to rest! Drink water! You got this, you frickin BADASS!!!
House Kheperu Member Spotlight
izlude
"Memory gives moments immortality, but forgetfulness promotes a healthy mind." - Hannibal Lecter.
What interests you about energy work?
Studying energy, and the occult in general, gives insight into the "supernatural" forces that effect us. With enough practice, one becomes able to have some say in those effects. It is both psychological and spiritual, as there are many layers of Self. The more you broaden your horizons, the more you may explore. It is never-ending, and that's what I find most interesting.
What is one of your favorite movies?
Gladiator with Russel Crowe
Learned Helplessness; an imbalance
Have you ever gone through an entire process of trying to do something, being met with an obstacle or issue, researched, tried to resolve or fix, it didn’t work and eventually you were like, “Well crap, now I have to ask somebody cause I’m at a loss.” Only to then ask someone and have them treat you like you’re an incapable Neanderthal and ask you if you’d done everything you’ve already done? It feels insulting, like they expect you to be incapable or ignorant and that you’re coming to them as the first step when in reality they are your last option, are already frustrated and it does nothing to help your situation wasting time.
And while person to person the reasons for those types of responses can change, my experience has taught me that there is one particular shared human behavior that tends to inspire that response in people; the exposure to Learned Helplessness.
Definitions from Oxford Languages
learned help·less·ness
Noun PSYCHIATRY
a condition in which a person has a sense of powerlessness, arising from a traumatic event or persistent failure to succeed. It is thought to be one of the underlying causes of depression.
So that’s the condition, but what does that look like? Learned Helplessness is a term applied when a person is unable to find resolutions to “difficult situations” even when a resolution is accessible. It can be a fairly extreme experience in cases of trauma - and much like everything, there is a spectrum. Day to day it can be as simple as asking for an answer that can be easily accessed, or found. In more extreme cases it can cause feelings of fear around having to ask for help, and a triggered response if what you ask for isn’t immediately resolved by someone else. As a traumatic response, it’s the kind of thing that can be unlearned with time and takes a lot of personal awareness and responsibility to undo. It’s a journey, and rarely an easy one.
But how does this apply to our opening example? Well, I’m glad you asked.
There’s another form of learned helplessness that our society has a way of teaching and reinforcing, that is deeply detrimental to us as individuals, witches, vampires, energy workers, and humans living together on this floating rock, as well as more directly to the people around us. It’s a mixture of drama and capitalistic practices, where nothing you ever do is good enough, or your failures are exploited and focused on without balance or proper recognition of your successes (which let’s be real, is its own kind of trauma). It’s made more prevalent by Legacy Burden and Generational Traumas to the tune of “Don’t brag”, “Nobody likes a show-off/know it all”, and other Generational/Cultural biases, bigotries, and systemic problems inherent to our culture.
There are a few magnified places within subcultures where this historically has been even more pronounced by gatekeeping, spiritual hierarchy, and systemic abuse as well. And if you are at a terminus of one or more of these subcultures, the effects can be intense and insidious. It undermines confidence, and the ability to express boundaries and needs, shackles personal power, and stalls or halts personal growth and awareness in ways that can be difficult to undo, even once the subconscious compulsions are brought into the conscious mind.
In many cases, like most things, it’s not the person’s fault that they have ended up in these patterns. And it is unfortunate that it is their burden to fix it, but makes it no less the individual’s responsibility to work on and undo within themselves.
But there’s more. The original example is not only of a situation where the person approached has trained responses to dealing with others in the grips of learned helplessness, but also perpetuating the cycle by running through all the possibilities that need to be done - therefore, potentially giving the answer without the seeker having to put in any effort.
SO GUESS WHAT. It’s not only the responsibility of the persons with the learned helplessness to not continue to engage in the harmful cycles, but the responsibility of the person on the receiving end to not perpetuate those cycles as well.
That does not mean be an asshole, intolerant, or don’t have compassion for where this may be coming from. It can be as simple as, rather than running through a list of things that are expected, asking, “What have you tried already?” and then if they haven’t tried anything, directing them to where they can find the information for themselves politely. If it’s a repeated pattern, then maybe having a conversation with them about whether or not they are aware of this pattern can be helpful. And people coming to others for help should not be discouraged at any stage. If we are to create an understanding, inclusive, brave space in this world (that is preferably one day the whole of the world), we have to be able to help each other with compassion. We have to have personal autonomy to make mistakes without unnecessarily harmful social and emotional recourse, and the space to learn personal responsibility to learn and do better. We also have to be able to step outside ourselves to find that compassion for the person to learn.
Not to get frustrated, fed up, and fall into patterns that perpetuate the cycles that caused the frustration to begin with.
So next time someone asks you for assistance on something or brings you a question, topic, issue, or content that implies you do most of the work for them, focus that frustration into something productive, like asking what they’ve done before assuming and enabling them to continue to not learn for themselves, or say “No, that doesn’t work for me, I need you to provide <insert change request here>” rather than doing for them and being mad about it. Then maybe sit down and be really analytical and objective about whether you’ve done the same.
And if you’re reading this and thinking; “Well everyone I always go to seems to be annoyed when I ask for help anyway”... maybe consider why that is. Sit with it, and see what part of the Learned Helplessness cycle you might be engaging in that you didn’t know existed until it was named.
Break the cycles. Bring the subconscious into the conscious. And as always, keep it Honest, my friends.
~Frick
July edition - Walking the Twilight Path: Balancing Light and Dark
Sunday, July 9, 2023 - 9:25 PM
Hello friends, and welcome back to Tea with Hex! This month I want to spill the tea on a topic that pops up in cycles every few years in witchcraft and paganism, and add my own spicy take. This month we're talking about balance, what that means, and why it matters.
Picture it. Indiana, 1999. I had just bought my first deck of tarot cards, and started reading the first book about witchcraft that I had not borrowed from the library and amassed late fees for. I was in high school, and figuring out who I was in virtually every sense of the concept. Most of the literature available at the time was Wiccan in flavor, and suffused with admonishments about what kinds of magic witches were supposed to practice and which ones they weren't. I had grown up in Catholicism, and was trying to distance myself from any semblance of "thou shalt not"-ism dictating how to live my life. It seemed very backward to me that witches shouldn't be permitted to use magic to strike back at people who harmed us. As the only out gay kid in a farming community high school, I took a lot of grief, and magic seemed to be one of the only methods available to me of getting satisfaction from my abusers with impunity.
This began a period of my life that included many chapters I'd rather weren't read aloud. Throughout high school I began a lengthy study of hexes, curses, crossing powders, manipulative magic, and all manner of things nice boys and girls don't do. Every slight, no matter how small, became an excuse to smear a sigil all over somebody's car in the parking lot or obtain a hair sample from the locker room. Looking back on myself at the time, I don't think present-me would have gotten along with him very well. That guy was hellbent on teaching the world a lesson, one football player at a time. Hiding all of this from my grandmother in her own home was no small task, either; I had to invest in a padlock to put on a footlocker where all of my accoutrement went when I wasn't using it. Most of my tools and materia I either harvested myself, or picked up as mundane items at yard sales or flea markets and figured out how to make them work. I was nothing if not committed.
Eventually I graduated high school and went on to college, where I met a lot more folks like myself through things like the student pagan network, queer student union, and other organizations. I even helped form a "teaching circle" with the pagan students, and this was where things got complicated in my brain pan. One of the students had a very sick sister, and asked the circle to perform a healing ritual for her. It was in that moment that I realized I had a very serious gap in my magical education. I had no idea how to perform a healing ritual.
I'd spent so much time and energy on learning how to erode somebody metaphysically that I never bothered learning how to help somebody who needed it. And now that my brain was mostly developed, I understood why that was a problem.
I spent many years correcting this on the other side of the scales. Eventually I started encountering terms like "Right Hand Path" and "Left Hand Path" in terms of personal paths and workings, met more practitioners, and found myself in a hotbed of debate surrounding whether it was morally acceptable to perform workings against other people at all, under what circumstances, using which tools or spells, and whether somebody had asked us to or if it was personal. I had never seen such intense discussion and debate. Some notions bore merit, while others were simply ridiculous in my mind (spoiler alert: karma isn't something that happens to you in this life when you do something shitty, and I guarantee you the witches of Pendle Hill didn't know what karma was, nor would they have given two juicy squirts about it if they did).
(Spoiler alert #2: being a "Left-Hand Path practitioner" isn't as spoopy and edgy as you think it is if you can't even describe to me what that means for you. Put down WitchTok for a couple days and read a book. I don't even care which one.)
After much reading, attending many discussion groups, and eventually teaching workshops all over the place and covering many different types of material, I have arrived at a few conclusions.
More important than any supposed strictures against working baneful magic is your belief in what will happen if you do. If you believe the Universe will retaliate against you for doing so, it will. We attract what we focus on, plain and simple.
Witches do, in fact, use a variety of different kinds of magic, including hexes and curses. Anybody who tells you "Real Witches™ Don't [insert X thing here]" is absolutely not an authority on what is real or what isn't, I assure you. Nobody can define what your path consists of but you. Seek your own truth, and bugger anybody who tries to tell you it's wrong.
Denying yourself a whole half of your power doesn't do anybody any favors, least of all yourself. You are a whole person, and you're allowed to be a complex one at that.
We don't need to keep a ledger or a checkbook to make sure we're keeping our magic (or ourselves) in balance. We simply need to live honestly, and with integrity, and with authenticity. Don't try to be somebody you're not, and don't pigeonhole yourself into one role, either.
I refer to witchcraft, in general, as "the Twilight Path" (sparkling vampires notwithstanding) these days. We are a microcosm of the world and spheres of existence, which keep a balance of their own. To be fully actualized people, I think it is necessary that we understand that balance, insofar as we are able, and to similarly walk in balance in our lives. A wise friend once told me, "It's important to spend quality time with your darkness, or it gets jealous and starts plotting against you." I find this to be absolutely true.
Your mileage may vary. I am but a humble Hex, with some hard-earned lessons that I hope serve you well.
Finding the Occult in the Mundane – Freedom from Occult Bondage
Hello, reader! How’s your month? Taking some time to read through our monthly newsletter I see~ Happy that you’re here, and I hope the Sun hasn’t scorched too much of your skin off. It’s HOT out there! We’re riding the good vibes and high energy post-Gather. Fantastic weekend full of wonderful conversations, intriguing workshops, and fantastic people. I highly recommend planning for next year’s Gather, you won’t be disappointed!
This month’s contemplation is about finding the spiritual within the mundane world all around us. As we return to our daily lives and allow all that good energy to settle in as we return to our adulting, I notice a shift. There is calm, a sense of still certainty, and a charge of energy that is enabling better insights into the most mundane things. The Occult is all around us, have you ever looked at a dollar bill?
“Annuit Coeptis.” means “He favors our undertakings.” And “Novus ordo seclorum” means “A new order of the ages (is born)”. Would ya look at that?~ Have you ever thought of the Pledge of Allegiance, and the oath that you swear each time that you repeat it? They knew what they were doing when they wrote that! They constructed a vast egregore known as the USA, and each pledge of allegiance, each tax dollar you pay, and every drop of blood spilled in its name grows its power. The Allegiance Pledge was something most of us did every morning in elementary school in this country, without a second thought, without understanding what we were swearing to or why. As you learn the mysteries, you start to see that the world is intensely magical, and that some of the most mundane things you do every single day carry a vast weight behind them, even if you don’t realize it.
Have you ever pledged allegiance to yourself? To swear that you will endure the pain of growth, the uncanny transformation that occurs when you swear to abide by your own law, your own truth, and to guide yourself and your family by that oath? How much of that weight, once shed, will release the binding energy of all those pledges, all those agreements to which you didn’t even know you’d acknowledged? Each of us is on the path of figuring ourselves out, and the deck was stacked with magick set in place upon you long before you were even born. This isn’t a warning to watch out for the magical boogeymen, this is a reminder that you have the power to release yourself from bonds and reclaim your freedom, magically, physically, and spiritually.
Reclaim all that you are and release all that you are not!
Have a blessed week. Seek your own Truth!
-Izzy
by M. Belanger
Our animal companions are great boons in our lives: they provide us company in our darkest moods without judgment and teach valuable lessons, like the cherished importance of unconditional love. Each companion brings something different to the table, and each species has their own suite of gifts. While dogs tend to model lessons of devotion and loyalty, cats are more aloof. They teach us about holding boundaries, the importance of asking consent before interactions, and - of particular value of a workaholic like me - how to step back and live in the moment. I can be a stubborn student, but I have always cherished these lessons - as well as the little lives so patiently passing them on to me.
So, allow me to share. Here are five lessons in mindfulness my beloved feline companions have taught me over the years:
Be still
In a word, I’m not. I’m restless. I shift, I fidget. Even when I’m parked beneath my laptop furiously typing, some part of me is in constant motion. Then along comes the cat. Little Bliss, the current queen who claims me as her person, cannot bear to be picked up and dandled. If she wants snuggles, she graces my lap strictly on her own terms - and stays only so long as I am reasonably still. And if I allow myself to set aside the constant, rapid-fire din of my thoughts, I can be, if only for a little while. And those precious moments are enough - both to appease the cat and to remind me that stillness is possible and also soothing.
Be present
Learning to be present in the moment is the only way my busy brain ever achieves stillness. But, let me be clear: stillness is not a state of doing nothing. Being present in the moment involves being still enough to appreciate that present moment. I can’t always do that for myself, but when a tiny, purring life trusts me to cradle her entire body as she stretches languorously upon me, I can be both still and present for the moments that we share. The computer gets set aside, the phone put down, and we simply exist as two beings enjoying the company of the other. It heals something inside me I often have no name for, and might not have noticed was wounded without intervention from the cat.
Just breathe
I’ve often said that the simplest meditation is to take three intentional breaths. Three breaths. That’s it. For human-shaped beings, however, a state of meditation can be wisdom hard-won. But for a cat, it’s as instinctive as purring. It’s soporific simply listening to them, but also immersively tactile - the sound, the soothing warmth, the gentle thrumming deep within their bodies, always a little louder on the exhale, as if our cats project their entire beings into that experience of relaxed contentedness. When Bliss curls against me and purrs, I lay my hand along her flank and breathe with her: content in the moment, replete with the contact, present and blissfully still (there’s a reason she bears that particular name, after all - her essence, her calling. Bliss).
Indulge sensation
This lesson is threaded throughout the three above, but if one cannot release enough of their distractions to be present and to be still, indulgence can be elusive. Not for cats, though. Never for cats. Cats are some of the most self-indulgent creatures to live among us. It’s a trait some people find off-putting, but I appreciate the wisdom of knowing what feeds you in body and soul and feeling no shame when meeting those needs. One must only observe a cat as they stretch to see how completely they inhabit their body, how easily they allow themselves to enjoy their unique configuration as beings of muscle and fur and claw. When a cat enjoys a sensation, they inhabit that sensation from quivering whisker to trembling tail-tip. They indulge as they love: unconditionally. Admittedly, coming as I do from an upbringing of scarcity, conditioned by a society to feel guilt for practically everything, this was a challenging lesson to learn. But my feline companions have been patient with me, and I’m getting there, particularly with Bliss.
Work can wait
This is the hardest one for me, but arguably the most valuable. In an era where everything is content, everything’s a hustle, a false urgency emerges where we feel driven to pack every waking moment with productive work (never mind valuing ourselves based only on the profit of that work). That’s a guaranteed path to misery and burnout. When little Bliss shoves herself unceremoniously between me and my laptop - especially when I’m on a deadline, my initial impulse is to get annoyed and push her away. And then I remember how brief and precious is her little life - and how five minutes of my time is SO MUCH to her. So, work can wait. Five minutes, ten minutes, fifteen minutes - these benefit the both of us when I carve out some space to sit quietly, immerse myself in the experience of being, and commune with this vibrant soul whom I cherish. And I always feel better afterwards. Work is supposed to support our lives, after all. What’s the use of it if we forget to take some time to actually *live* ?