Six weeks into my work with the sun and I’ve just ground my way through the most excruciatingly gritty & slow waning moon I can remember. The Sun has given me a vivid experience of the cyclical nature of well, everything. Day & Night, Waxing & Waning, Ovulation, Menstruation, the slow shedding of leaves and shortening of days in this time of year. And yet, my sun wants to shine, it wants to be reflected in a full moon, it wants to radiate, to celebrate, to grow, to reign and yes to control.
So this waning was a real slog. I had a whole list of banishings to get through and I do love a good banishing. Aversion to exercise, attachment to fried, fatty foods, feelings of overwhelm around cooking. Resentments of neglectful parents. Shadow desires to eat all the food and drink all the booze and do whatever I want because I am special and the rules don’t apply to me. Yup. All this and more was my perfectly timed playground during the waning moon. I did the work but none of it felt…juicy. Everything fell kind of flat, kind of…blah. Like I could take it or leave it. My body was craving the radiance of the sun – Apollo driving his golden chariot across the sky in a blaze of glory.
I realised in these states my confidence falters. How do I know my magic is working if I don’t get that ego boosting buzz of magical experience in my workings? How do I know it’s real.
Synchronicity: Unconnected Connections
Back to basics. Synchronicty is the first thing I turned to when opening to living a magical life. By synchronicity, I mean those encounters with similarities in completely unconnected events. For instance, on Wednesday I was driving through Islington talking (via handsfree) on the phone with a friend about her upcoming psychedelic journey with the toad medicine. I passed a huge lorry called ‘Frog Movers.’ I laughed about it with my friend and we turned our talk to my work with the sun for health and vitality. The next lorry I passed carried the logo for a company called ‘Vital Systems’. Funny coincidences?
Unconnected events connected by meaning. Here’s another example.
Last Wednesday, I had a very mercurial dream. I received an unexpected parcel that I couldn’t figure out how to open while the delivery boy laughed and laughed at my fumbling. Later in the day, I found on the street a beautiful wool, tartan blanket just like ones I have always admired in the English Heritage gift shops – in the colors of Mercury. Then a client rang me out of the blue to ask if they could put me on a retainer, pay me even when they didn’t need me. Uhhh yes! For those who don’t know, unexpected small gifts are just Mercury’s style. I got home, marveling at my small victories for the day but not yet getting the connection to Mercury. Just to ram the point home, I found the Hermes delivery guy at my door trying to deliver a package that didn’t belong to me. Again unconnected events, connected by meaning.
Of course I’m working with The Sun, not Mercury. But maybe Mercury is working with me? I listened to his call and made offerings and gave thanks to Mercury that evening.
These moments are an important aspect of living a magical life because they shift us out of our own egocentric world into connection with a greater wholeness. We get actual experience of being both the dreamer and the dream – part of a unified field of existence rather than a linear, temporal story with a start and a finish. We discover interconnections between ourselves and others, the natural world as well as the realm of high weirdness. The yoke of time loosens its grip on us. Which came first, the chicken or the egg? In a synchronous world of meaningful coincidences who can really say? Maybe they both dreamed each other into existence?
How to Dream the Dream
You can read all about synchronicity and Carl Jung in countless other places. I’m more interested here in how to stay open to it. There’s a perceptual shift that happens in our consciousness that allows these experiences of connected meanings to come through. Let’s call it a wide perceptual field. Instead of having the narrow experience of seeing what is just before your eyes, try for a minute sitting very still and allowing the influx of sensory information from all of your senses.
What can you see around you, including your peripheral vision?
What can you smell and hear?
What sensations do you feel on your skin?
What things do you just know?
Now take this is and widen it out, even if you have to imagine it. What things can’t you actually see but know they are there? What is behind you? Above you? Can you sense into the homes two streets over? Can you get a sense of your whole town? How far out can you take your awareness and still be here in the present? The trick is to stay firmly grounded, while holding a very large perception of where you are. If you have a middle pillar practice this is the time to use it. Otherwise, just mindfully breathing up and down the spine will root you firmly in place.
It’s a kind of dual consciousness – being present here but expanding your sensory range enough that all manner of information and experience can come through. Wiith practice it’s something you can shift into quite elegantly. You learn how to open and close at will and you develop a default state of more openness. When the synchronicities start turning up fast and thick then you know. This is where the magic happens.
So even when the real work of magic is feeling less than magical, when you open to synchronicity and allow yourself to marvel and, yes, laugh at the sheer wealth of unconnected connections then you guide yourself gently back into relationship with your own innate magic.
