Ownership of Growth

As we approach the New Hunter Moon in a few days (and the sabbat of Mabon shortly after that), I feel like this is a good time to discuss the overall philosophy of this blog.  I've been running this space for about three weeks now, and I feel like in that time, it's helped me nail down a key element of my spiritual practice that I've always felt, but didn't quite know how to put into words.  Now that I've found my footing a bit (and especially after my previous entry about affirmations), I think I am able to talk about it a little bit more clearly.

I said in my post about affirmations that I really dislike "schmaltzy, saccharine, pop-psychology" toxic positivity.  I was talking specifically about tarot-inspired affirmations in that post, but I've realized that it also applies to my spiritual philosophy as a whole.  So many people turn to spirituality because they want validation and comfort.  Those are certainly important parts of spirituality, but there has to be more to it than that.

I left Christianity behind partly because the validation and comfort were so toxic.  As a child in the church, you're taught (and you internalize) "God loves you" and "you're very special, made in God's image," and "he's got the whole world in his hands" and things like that.  That's a great comfort.  It's validating.  To be told from a very early age that you are part of some divine plan, that you were meant to be here, that you're unconditionally loved... there isn't much that's more comfortable and validating than that.  But it's a dead end.  You grow up and find out that, in fact, that love does come with terms and conditions.  And a lot of the judgment of Christianity comes from a place of saying "I love you, but I can't condone your differences sin."  You're special... until you're the wrong kind of special, then your specialness has to be eliminated redeemed.  If that's what "love" is, just give me hate.  At least hate is honest.

Toxic validation is when your thinking goes beyond saying "I am good enough" and veers into "I am better than others."  It goes past "I am doing what is right" and into "my way is the only right way."  Toxic comfort is when you go beyond being serene and into being complacent.  Toxic comfort is when you shut out the injustices of the world around you (or worse, directly contribute to them) because you don't feel that making sacrifices of your own is a fair price of living with the rest of society.  This isn't just a criticism of Christianity; there are a lot of neopagan spaces that are just as toxic.  It's the same poison, but it presents itself in different ways.

I already mentioned how so many tarot writers emphasize toxic positivity in their affirmations, but really, that's just one presentation of a larger problem: people want the instant comfort of personal validation but are not willing to do the arduous shadow work (a large part of which is self-reflection) required for true fulfillment.  As I've said before, if you want to feel the empowerment of pagan spirituality, you have to be willing to be honest with yourself, even (or perhaps especially) when it's not immediately validating or comforting.

My father used to be a Baptist minister (he eventually left the church after considerable disillusionment of his own), so I grew up hearing people say that a pastor's job was to "comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable."  In many pagan spaces, I see people who clearly view themselves as "the afflicted."  And to be entirely fair, many, many pagans do come from broken families and/or are part of marginalized communities.  One of the most beautiful things about modern paganism is how it encourages diversity of both identity and thought, and acts as a place of safety from what often feels like a cruel (or, at best, uncaring) outside world.  However, far too often we feel so caught up in the warmth of that comfort and the sense of safety it gives us against external turmoil that we aren't willing to confront the darkness inside ourselves, or consider how our comfort might be coming at the expense of others who are also marginalized.

Here's a challenge for you: go to any spiritual/metaphysical shop and see how long it takes you to find Harry Potter merchandise.  It's a bit of a toss-up; some shops might have it, some might not.  Most of the pagans I know understand that giving money to anything Potter-related is contributing directly to the unpersoning of trans people in the United Kingdom and elsewhere.  It's easy to feel some satisfaction from knowing "Oh good, I missed that, I'm fine."  (If you haven't confronted your own relationship with Harry Potter, please don't stop reading; there's a point to all of this that isn't just sanctimonious pontificating, I promise.)  Here's a bigger challenge: now go into the same shop and see how long it takes for you to find something about "chakras" or "smudge sticks" or white sage or palo santo.  Some of you may not even have to go to a shop; it's entirely possible that you have one or more of those things on your altar already.  Here's the thing: the concept of chakra (and, for that matter, the entire concept of karma) is an ancient Vedic practice that is still very much alive and well - and very much not meant for white people.  At least, not for the uninitiated.

The conceptualization of the chakras in Western esoteric practice is a bastardization of a system of beliefs that is still very much part of active (and closed) practice.  The concept of "smudging" as a form of smoke cleansing is an Indigenous American practice - again, not for white people.  White sage and palo santo, which are critically important to Native American spiritual practices, are on the verge of being endangered because of being over-harvested to satisfy the demand (of white customers) in spiritual shops.  When we co-opt the traditions of ancient (but still very much active) closed practices, often merely for aesthetic purposes, we desecrate them.  Worse, we ignore (and often actively contribute to) the ongoing struggles of their practitioners, and that is entitlement disguised as openness.  There are a lot of popular practices in modern paganism that really don't belong to white pagans.  I'm not going to go on a deep dive of that here because that's not really the overall point of this post, but Flying the Hedge has an excellent post on the topic of decolonizing your practice, and I highly recommend giving it a read.  The point is, even though many of us come from marginalized communities ourselves, we still need to remember our intersectionality and be willing to confront our own place in systemic injustice.

It's not just limited to appropriating closed practices.  How many times have you followed a pagan content creator on Facebook or Instagram, then seen them share a post with the uncanny, glazed look of an image that is clearly AI-generated?  One of the most popular tarot apps in the Google Play store right now offers AI-generated tarot readings.  That cutesy AI-generated image may seem harmless, but it takes up a space at the table that could have been given to an actual, living (and likely struggling) human artist.  Moreover, it probably burned down several acres of rainforest.

Environmental concerns aside, how can a machine understand the energy that passes through a human soul?  AI is deliberately designed to never confront you; it can only ever reinforce your beliefs, never challenge them.  The worst disagreement you are ever going to get from an AI chatbot is something like, "I'm sorry, but my programming or terms of service won't allow me to answer that question.  Please ask something else."  Go to a local spiritual shop (if you have one nearby) and ask if there's anyone there available to do a tarot reading for you; you're supporting a local store that probably needs money.  If you don't have a shop nearby, talk to another pagan online (beware of scams, of course).  If you can't do any of that, do the hard work of studying the tarot and learning what it says to you yourself.  It's time-consuming and sometimes frustrating, but it's more real than anything a computer can give you, and once again: empowerment requires honesty.

Philosophy and spirituality, to me, are useless when they are limited to internal psychology and beliefs.  It's easy to say all the right things and check all the right dogmatic boxes to fit into just about any spiritual practice, especially when your practice is a syncretic blend of ancient traditions and folktales and aesthetics, no matter how beautiful that practice might be.  What's much harder to confront is how our beliefs lead us to treat real, actual people - our participation in our communities, our understanding of actions and consequences, and our stewardship of the living world around us.

I don't want my spiritual practices to be a shield against my own self-accountability.  I don't want to just "believe in Jesus and be saved."  I don't want to "let go, let God."  But neither do I want to lie to myself and convince myself that a stack of cards on paper and ink is magically telling me exactly what I want to hear to feel better about myself.  I don't want to believe that holding a crystal is giving me "clarity" to move forward with something I already wanted to do anyway.  These things are tools for helping me think.  They don't do the thinking for me.  More importantly, they don't do the acting for me.  If I am imperfect (and I am), I want to be an active part of my redemption to my higher self.

I want stewardship over my own self-improvement.  I draw a card from the tarot not because it's a magic message from beyond, but because it's a point of ordered thinking from a shuffled, chaotic stack of thoughts.  I hold a crystal not because it magically lets me see more clearly, but because it holds part of the energy of the wise earth that gave birth to it, and when I hold it, the connection acts as a reminder that I, too, hold some of that energy in myself.  I thank the flower for its place in my ritual not because I think it can hear or understand me, but because the deliberate action of gratitude for the things the earth has provided is important for me to recognize.  I work with Anubis and Thor not because I see them as actual metaphysical entities, but as visual ways of conceptualizing parts of my own psyche in tangible ways that I can understand (Anubis as the part that values thinking and balance, Thor as the part that values action and strength of intention).

I'm wholeheartedly including myself in all of the criticisms here; I don't always succeed either.  I snap at people.  Social media tends to bring out the worst in me.  I aim at the wrong targets a lot; people around me get hit by friendly fire.  I make consumer choices that aren't ethical.  The list goes on.  I'm not sitting up here on a mountain of moral high ground preaching "you're doing paganism wrong."  I'm not saying all of this as some kind of "holier than thou" sermon.  The things I express in this blog are aimed at (even if they don't always succeed) carving pathways for my readers to take ownership of their own journey.  I don't want to give pat answers and trite, cheap validation.  That's not what I'm about.  That's too easy. What I'm really trying to do is articulate that the overarching philosophy of this blog (the whole page, not just this post) is that I want to be better, and I want you to be better too, because the core of everything that I believe is that inside each one of us, there is a better version of ourselves wanting us to draw closer.

That involves cutting out the toxic positivity and being honest with ourselves, and cutting out the toxic negativity of hopelessness that leads us to abandon our agency.  For all that the world is terrible, I refuse to believe that we can't hold humanity (including the systems we live in, the people in control, and ourselves) to a higher standard.  I refuse to believe that we can't live up to a better standard. It's so easy to become jaded and cynical when we see all the injustice in the world around us, but the world - and we ourselves - can be better if we believe there's a better version of the world waiting for us to build it.  We're on this journey together.

Blessed be.