Oh boy, the subject of this blog has turned out to be one tricky and triggering piece for me. Like the necessary purge shows up as the precursor to wellness. The purge that we all know and put off, because we are afraid of the not so beautiful, violent, eye-bulging explosiveness of it.
I started writing this post in May. It is now late September. Stuck-ness and avoidance are finally giving way to the stomach churning need to 'get well'... in all its euphemistic glory.....
It's time.....
It is of course utter perfection that my avoidance has shown up in such a strong way, at the inception of my self-imposed regime of 1 blog post a month, preceded by the discomfort of 4 months of creative constipation....
Not to be too hard on myself though, as this 4 month hiatus has also assisted in the birthing of a temple to the divine feminine mysteries in the west highlands of Scotland.
Exciting as that is, it is a subject for another blog.... Hopefully one that won't require such a long and uncomfortable wait!
So, plunging back now, in the balmy warmth of mid May, having finally plucked the courage to complete this piece about the arch nemesis of my creative expression -
It's time to face the motherload, its time to face the witch wound.
-------------------
May 2025
It’s been a wonderfully, deliciously, down-regulated month, by my standards.
The sale of my flat afforded time to proceed more gently with my life, and the 4am starts and asceticism that for the last year, provided my hand-hold of safety as I navigated through one of the most adrenalised chapters of my life. This regime could finally be released, at least momentarily, in favour of a more restful and meandering pace.
The cortisol-fuelled chapter of relentless and continuous faith-leaping that had characterised the last 18 months, since my near drowning in a storm-sea in February 2024, had, to my great relief, abruptly ended.
And those breakers that had slam-dunked me awake to the imperative to the take scalpel to almost every aspect of my life, seemed finally to have spat me out onto calmer shores.
As I gathered myself, and began to think about some simple tasks, that might easefully move me into the next chapter, getting new picture for the website, a seemed like a gentle activity that would be perfect for my 2 self-appointed weeks of ‘go-slow’. In my yearning for plain-sailing, this simple task seemed like a suitable fit for my gentling time.
The fact that I needed better pictures became apparent as I perused my friend Katherine’s website pics. Her wonderful, bold, embodied pictures, which distilled her soul essence. A powerful and compelling invitation into her transformative work with women.
Katherines pictures brought me to key distortion in my own promotional materials. The major surgeries undertaken on my life (a house move alongside a radical re-design of the templates of my life) were, for the most part, complete. The subtle inner surgeries to expose the most calcified forces in my life, were, however, yet to commence. In my naieve haze, I was blissfully unaware that this supposedly 'simple task' was about to unearth THE major holding pattern that skulked in my psyche.
As I thought about my own website, I began to clock a palpable avoidance hiding behind the lovely, but impersonal graphics. It became increasingly obvious that I was in obeyance to an age-old taboo in my failure to fully claim my work as my own,
I was disowning the prime archetype of my life -
The archetype of the priestess.
Underneath this avoidance, as if skrying with a black mirror, I began to see a deeply veiled fear, masquerading as a kind of non-commital ambivalence. I'd known that this was my work, since I was a young girl and yet why wasn't I fully stepping into it?
Mary Magdalen, the prime guiding force in the creation of 'The Myrrhmaid' was a myrhh bearer, yes..... But she was ALSO a preistess.
There was a time that sharing such things would have been considered heretical, and could have gotten a woman like me into deep trouble.
Would it ever be truly 'safe' to claim such an archetype? Probably not... but the paralysis of complicity with the gagging was fast becoming the greater of the horrors.
Gulp…
It was time to take the next step and stop hiding…
I picked up my phone and left a WhatsApp message for Jenny, the photographer who had taken Katherines' beautiful pictures.
Jenny specialises in photographing women who are stepping into their work with the sacred feminine, and after asking a few questions about me and the project, she agreed to work with me.
My rose-tinted reveries of a much younger, lovelier version of myself, bounding, nymph-like through bucolic scenes in flowing ceremonial robes, had coaxed me out of my long calcified hidy-hole.
The photoshoot complete with obligatory shopping trip for preistessy flowing robes was finally going to happen.
Jenny would make the dash down from Wales 2 days later, on Thursday the 1st of May. The appointment was booked and paid for and I was excited.
So, with remarkable precision, on a beautiful Beltane day, I met with Jenny, by the banks of the languorous Dart, to take pictures of me - The woman behind the Myrrhmaid.
Yiaiiiieeeeks…
I had brought with me, as Jenny had suggested, my feathers, my oils, a bowl for water ceremony, a bunch of red and white roses, and….
The all important
.......RED DRESS.
The red dress, as I discovered some years previously, is THE ceremonial priestess garb.
A successful dive 24hrs earlier to Exeter had supplied me with my very own gown of glorious crimson.
As we approached the magical spot by the river that I had in my mind as the location for the pics, Unknowingly. I stepped, in ignorance and innocence towards yet another initiation
My threshold of visibility initiation...
My Pollyanna reveries of an idealised version of myself, wafting around in flowing robes by the river, had lead me to the door of the darkest demon in the horror show of dark demons.
I was to face dismemberment by sharpened blades of
my INNERQUISITOR....
As I began the walk to the site of the shoot.... that horrible voice stared up in my head....
“Sweetheart, what ARE you doing? …
Clearly you cannot see how …
R I D C U L O U S.. you look?
“People will think you are a MAD woman… go home honey. You forgot for a moment that you were a silly older woman”
“Older women like you are not important. Perhaps you were quite pretty once, but now you are old darling, your waistline is flabby, your breasts are saggy. Can you not see your wrinkles and cellulite?
"Men don't find older women attractive. Don't torment yourself any longer honey, nobody is going to care what you have to say or find anything that you have to say relevant.
Go home!
You don't even believe in yourself, so how could anyone else believe in you? Take a look in the mirror sweetheart, it's over."
wtf !!!??
I do not get intrusive thoughts, What was this?
Consumate professional, Jenny cheerily bustled around me and took my attention off the voice and we busied with the check-list of pictures and I began to relax, the venom of that monstrous inner tormentor, drowned out by the increasing ease that I felt in Jennys’ company. I took a deep breath and stepped through the mirage of shadow and fully into the shoot.
There were such moments of profound magic during that photoshoot. Jenny and I both felt it. We were blessed and there was something magical about the light. The elemental force of the river washed me clean of all the eneretic sludge. Athough the shallow grave of that now veiled, but recently exhumed horror of horrors, had been side-stepped for now, like the memory of a particularly traumatic scene from a horror movie witnessed too young, the nauseous feeling lingered, but in faded form. I was wobbled, but was finding my ground again. It was one of those moments, where you have to push through something and the ugliness of the non-self inside us shows up to test us.
As is normal for most of us, on this planet, at this time, most of my life has spent in an unconscious dance with the what I call the 'non self', that I call interchangeably 'wetico' or the shadow (I prefer these terms to 'devil'or 'evil' that feel too polarising and simplistic) In my own decades-long dance with the 'non-self', I allowed its' fear-based voice, and a feeling of unworthiness to animate my avoidance of stepping into my service path, in my full expression of devotion and light. I dimmed my capacity to serve, by energising these non-self-generated identities and stories. This inner sabateur had been running the Karin 'plays it small' show, for decades…. To really feel the stranglehold of the innerquisitor was a necessary, if difficult awareness to sit with. In the most intense moments, I had to acknowledge the ways in which it had held me in a vortex of low self esteem, agonising repetitions of abuse in relationships, creativity stifling poverty consciousness and excruciating dumbing down.
Euuuuggghhhh. .... Icky, icky, icky, icky....
It has been horribly painful in moments to feel the paralysis of this deep stuckness, and it was high time for the light of consciousness to shine brightly on what it actually was that was festering in the basement of my/our collective psyche. Wetico had shown itself, days before in the lead-in to the shoot as I shopped for the red dress.
I was initially blissfully ignorant of the non-self's defence move that I was about to unleash. In deciding to have those pictures taken. The decision had been made mostly unconsciously but, at least at a metaphysical level, my higher self was preparing its own full frontal attack on my financial and creative stagnancy.
In having those pictures taken and framing myself as an unapologetic modern-day priestess, I gave my oversoul great powers to dislodge the stranglehold that this hitherto unseen force had on almost every aspect of my life.
Game on...
It was time...
I was ‘coming out’...
The narrative of convenience was that 'the work’ was somehow bigger, and more important than I was. And, of course on one level, this is absolutely true. But that sentiment of humility concealed a formidable shadow.
It was plastered over one m*******cker of a WITCH WOUND.
The witch wound obviously has a collective gagging and binding aspect... This is sticky sticky tricky sh*t that likes to masquerade behind all sorts of apparently valid excuses.
The rampaging inner and outer war of the false light, in its concerted effort to surpress the most potent and pure expressions of human sovereignty & beauty, and plaster-over our wounds with its seductive luciferic fakery, like a compact of inverted special effects makeup.
What absolutely, outrageously pyschopathic genius!
You gotta give it to the great I AM, we've been given quite an alter ego, to help us to wake up!
As we forceably awaken (or succumb) to the crumbling cultural edifices of eons of sedemented misalignment, and with this, the imperative to own our karma of both aligned and (please let's own it ladies & gents ) misaligned metaphysical practices over lifetimes. My personal and collective prayer is that we don't automatically 'other' the distortions that are ours to claim in our journey of re-membering, and that we don't allow our rememberings to be overlayed by the too-sparkly, seductive venir and fakery of the false light. Not that we need to carry a ball and chain of shame, not at all, but instead embrace the eminently perfectly imperfect journey of being human.
Emerging battleworn and chastened from both literal (re-membered) and metaphoric initiatory fires, I am sure that it is time for many many of us to retrieve the prime archetype of the Preistess, and along with her, the stripes earned through the life-anihilating/invigorating encounters with the non-self. Those stripes that built so much muscle and made us so strong.
At a personal level, I understand that only I can validate this title for myself, and that claiming this title this doesn't have to condemn me to grandiosity, spiritual ego and associated abuses of power. It is necessary to reclaim the long-lost archetype of the Preistess, (not necessarily by name, but at least energetically) while committing to a life of continuous shadow stalking and the cultivation of deep mutual accountability that we can find in the honed and healed sisterhood.
And so it is now that I publically claim and embrace my witch wound, for myself and for all of us who feel connected to these archetypal stories of the inquisition and the witch hunt. As I experience the honing blows of my INNERQUISITOR, I grow in strength. As I claim the long-othered Set-ian monster within, I find, perhaps unsurprisingly, that the trials of ickiness confer the needed humility that really truly 'owning my shit' without shame provides.
This shadow-stalking work is foundational work if we are to ground the firece potencies and responsibilities that attend the priestess archetype. As ever, the I AM revels its' holograhic nature in its divine dichotomies.
As I am personally finding it exilarating to welcome the initiations that cultivate courage and maturity to penetrate with lazer precision the intense heart of darkness potentiality that lies within me, and within us all as perfectly imperfect humans made in the image of the divine. As I welcome in the archetype of the preistess, she seems to be teaching me that the worm hole, presented by the inner shadow work, (illustrated so beautifully by the pinpoint of darkness in the light in the yin/yang symbol) leads directly and efficiently, to the perfect flame of the christic light. And in stepping willingly in to the inner pit of ICK within, I am learning to embrace all the inner ugliness, doubts and fears as being aspects of the black flame that are essential components of the 'Great Game'. The darkness has to be there for there to be a game to play in the first place. Through this embrace, I am brought into connection with my perfectly imperfect human/divine nature.
Through courageously facing our darkness we come strongly into the light. Together we are stronger.
With so much love to you all...
