As far back as I can remember into my childhood, I wanted to live a life free from regrets. Now that I am in my 40’s I have a rather large number of them, but I also do not feel like I let myself down. When I said “free from regrets”, what I really meant was “wouldn’t go back to change it if I could.” Accumulating regrets is a natural part of living, and although I do regret how things turned out now and again, I respect and understand all my choices that led up to those things. I can’t think of a single one where I look back and genuinely wish I had made another choice.
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Chapter 3 – Critical introspection is the ability to objectively and critically evaluate the internal workings of your own consciousness. No matter how daunting that may seem, it is an essential tool for improving or healing your mental/emotional self, because without it you are never going to be able to address the root causes of any issues. Developing this skill was essential to my healing journey.
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One very common practice in witchcraft, paganism, and most pagan-tangential traditions is divination. It is found worldwide, in every culture, in some form or another, throughout history, and is one of the few fundamentally human activities found anywhere and anywhen. Even when divination is vilified and outlawed, it is still present, practiced in the shadows. Just about anything can be used as a vehicle for divination, but tarot is fabulously popular currently, even in mundane circles. But why do we do it? What exactly do we get out of it?
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I have mentioned repeatedly in various articles that it is important to be completely honest with yourself, especially when engaging with shadow work. I also usually include a few words about how critical it is to be compassionate and non-judgmental in your honesty, but what exactly does that mean? How do you avoid being hyper-critical or beating yourself up when you are honest with yourself about things you do not like? It is far easier said than done, but I believe that process works best with loving honesty instead of brutal honesty.
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As cases of COVID-19 are surging throughout the United States, I cannot help but wonder about my birth family, how they are faring, and if they are safe. It is a strange thing to have no idea, to be aware that I may never know, to be glad for the estrangement which prevents that knowledge, and yet to wonder and hope that they are well. It creates a paradox of conflicting emotions, a cognitive dissonance, to be so concerned, and yet know that it is far and away in my best interest to retain the distance of estrangement I created.
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Doing shadow work is hard. Managing chronic pain is hard. Both have less negative impact on quality of life when they are managed in healthy ways.
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When I started blogging about paganism and witchcraft, I expected the hardest part to be deciding what to write about. I did not expect the hardest part to be having confidence in the public relevance of what I was writing.
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Shadow work is profoundly important. If you do not understand what lives in your shadow, you are never going to fully understand yourself, or why you do and believe all the things you do.
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