​I have seen a noticeable increase in personal relational misunderstandings since the war in Gaza broke out. Some will say this is due to astrological influences, retrogrades, solar flares, etc. But I think it also speaks to the reality of the relational web that weaves between all life on this planet. I remember feeling a similar sense of dis-ease when the war in Ukraine broke out. It was an awareness that when large-scale harm emerges, it impacts the relational field in ways that are not entirely or traditionally logical.

Yes, we can reduce what is happening to logic… of course when massive amounts of intergenerational trauma, extreme public divisiveness, and abhorrent losses of life are happening, there are psychological impacts that affect the way we show up for our immediate community in tangible ways. And yet, I also feel below the layers of logic to a more subtle realm, the energetic threads of the forces of creation that connect all things as being stretched or torn or distorted in ways that are challenging what I sense as the larger relational field across the entire planet. This includes the non-human realms that have no understanding of geo-politics or historical trauma. I remember feeling something similar the summer that seemed like a tipping point environmentally when the first local wildfires began a yearly trend of devastating fire. Now that I look back on the pandemic, there were not so subtle ways in which this played out in the collective - it was so extreme that I wasn’t even aware of the subtle layers of what was happening, because I was so distracted by the gross issues we were facing.

And there is something to be said about dropping below the surface of things and feeling into and tending the subtle. In my own movement practice I am often feeling like I am weaving or tending to threads of connection, which have always been reminiscent of the Wyrd that the Norse saw as the threads that wove past present and future. This image became so strong for me since the war broke out in Gaza that I started re-watching “A Discovery of Witches”, which has some amazing imagery that reminds me of the Norns weaving the Wyrd.

What gives me hope in the face of these massive disturbances to the relational field is that if things as atrocious as this war, the impact of a global pandemic, and the dire environmental circumstances we are facing can affect the field, so can the patient tending of the field with love and compassion. In fact, I deeply feel this is what keeps the relationship field as strong as it is, those strong human hearts who seek to find understanding, reconciliation, restorative justice, compassion, protect sovereignty with dignity, etc.

And this is why tending the ancestral field is so critical... they are critical allies in the relational field and in fact most of what needs tending in the ancestral realm is what we are facing today - gross violations of the relational field. Their wisdom in this tending and healing helps us heal and tend our current circumstances.

As I feel the relational crunchiness with my immediate community, I realize that this is the part of the web that I can tend to, with the support of my ancestral allies, and, yes, it may not be ending a war, but it does support the integrity of the larger web.

What do your spidey senses feel when they extend out into the larger web of connection?

I have been working with plants as support for emotional and spiritual healing in different forms for almost a decade. I first ventured into this world through flower essences, working with Diana Pepper at Tree Frog Farm. I then started taking herbalism classes through Wildroot Botanicals and began exploring “micro-dosing” tinctures and working with plants as teas to support the system as it unwinds patterns. This led to an intensive on Plants and Planets by Sovereignty Herbs and Ritual Botanica where I started to bring my relationship with astrology to my relationship with plants. As above, so below. What I discovered in my explorations is that the wild intelligence of nature has profound abilities to support psycho-spiritual healing and the development of consciousness. They are our teachers, supporters, healers. And they do this through the relational field – the “this treats that” mindset about plants only goes so far… it is more about our opening ourselves to the relational intelligence of the plants and allowing that to change us.

Through all of this exploration I found the most profound way to relationally connect with plants is through essential oils. Through my training with Aromagnosis in aromatic shamanism I experienced how essential oils bypass the thinking brain and take us deep into the inner realms of our consciousness. The plants hold profound space for a depth of inner work that is possible when we have a wise intelligence that is holding us in our work. In my ancestral and spirit work we rely on supportive powers to hold ritual safety. Plant allies can play this part and essential oils are a very direct way to connect with their support.

The work I am trained in comes to the transformation of consciousness from a Jungian perspective meaning that we work with the alchemical forces of psychological transformation, shadow work and inner parts work (inner gender, inner child) to go through a process of evolution with the plant spirits as the allies and guides for this work. This work looks like dropping into a guided meditation with the essential oil as a support.

I usually work in-person for this work, because, well, smell-a-vision is not something that has been invented yet, but if you have access to essential oils or are open to purchasing some to partake in the work, I welcome working remotely as well. If you would like to learn more about working in this way, feel free to contact me or set up a free initial consultation.

In a recent discussion with Daniel’s Foor’s Practical Animism cohort for Ancestral Medicine and guest speaker Siv Watkins (www.microanimism.com) we touched on an idea that illuminated some of my bipolar experiences from a microorganism  perspective. I have heard for years that gut health and mental health are intimately related including claims that people have completely resolved their bipolarity by managing the flora in their gut along with taking certain micronutrients. But what was new for me in this recent animism discussion was to look at the initiatory aspect of the microorganism world from a consciousness-raising perspective. It is fairly commonly acknowledged that entheogens can be used to not only shift consciousness on a short-term basis, but that they can assist people in widening their conscious experience of the world even after the immediate effects wear off. What if instead of looking only at plant medicine for consciousness expansion we also looked at relationships with microorganisms as similar “medicine”? 

This idea particularly intrigued me as my own psychotic episodes were directly after bouts of sickness from either a virus or a parasite. Part of my medical narrative has always been “my system was already weak from sickness and so that is why I think I responded so dramatically to xyz input from my life, which ended me up in the hospital.” What is shifting for me now is that I don’t think it was just a simple matter of weakened system, but I think there was a larger shift in my consciousness precipitated by becoming a host for a new entity. When I was in the hospital I was tested for drugs, but I was never tested for parasites (which in later years I did do and they showed up as prevalent in my system). I had always felt that my time in India (which was where my first bipolar episode took place) was psychologically intense, because of the culture, but what if a large contributing factor to my experience of psychosis was due to a microorganism?

I mention my psychosis in the flow of consciousness expansion, because my bipolar episodes have all resulted in a rebirth for me in how I perceive and understand the world. It was like filters I had on the world were reduced or taken away. I could perceive energy and eventually developed my animism practice out of my new found sensitivity as it allowed me to perceive things, including the “voices” and “perceptions” of other beings (putting on the mind of the other being), which wasn't part of my conscious experience before. I think these are all skills that anyone can develop, but that they often emerge suddenly in initiatory experiences and when we are not ready for that emergence it can be diagnosed as psychosis.

And I believe that my ability to perceive other beings definitely extended to my ability to perceive the consciousness of the smalls in ways that I have not been aware of until now. During one bipolar episode (also in India years after my first episode there)  I remember trying to communicate with a consciousness which I perceived as causing the episode, but wasn’t sure who or what it was and the way the consciousness presented in our exchange would fit a virus or parasite. It felt alien to me at the time and I remember trying to speak to it of the feeling of love and it was very confused by this concept (a very mammalian one connected to our relationship with oxytocin among other things). That particular episode occurred when I was doing a homeopathic treatment that most likely from my symptoms was affecting my gut. I think that what I was taking was disturbing the symbiotic relationship I had with the smalls and it resulted in what felt like psychosis to me, but could have been a strong conscious reaction from the beings I was host to. I’ve had similar reactions to certain brands of my medication and I am curious as to if the fillers in certain medications affected the beings in my gut in a negative way. All I know is that I would have very persistent feelings of “I have got to stop taking this medication, it is poisoning me” until I found a brand that was “cleaner”.

There have been scientific studies that look at Toxoplasma gondii and schizophrenia and bipolar and have shown a link with this particular small’s effects on the central nervous system and immune dysregulation. There have also been studies that have shown recovery from bipolar linked to treatment of other parasites and this is becoming more studied in regions that have challenges with sanitation and diseases from flies and mosquitoes.

But from my experience I would say that if we looked at things from a pure scientific explanation that we would miss something that taking a more animist perspective of things provides. As I said before, I really feel that my bipolar episodes (and even ongoing navigation of this aspect of my psyche) was incredibly initiatory, as in it initiated me into a new perception of the world around me. I love Siv’s microanimism work, because it honors these entities as the oldest living consciousnesses on the planet. To “commune” with them (and becoming a host for them is certainly an intimate way to deeply commune with them) is to commune with a very direct lineage from the origins of all life… and death.

My bipolar experiences have brought me psychologically into deep relationship with the forces of death. I believe this is why the suicide rates are so high for bipolar, it is common with this diagnosis to feel life and death in the extreme. In fact, one of the medications I take simply helps me to narrow the range of shadow and light (life and death) that I feel in myself and the world around me, so that I can navigate reality in a way that feels comfortable and normal. I do dream of a day where I can handle those more extreme states of awareness without that narrowing, but am aware that it would take a higher level of conscious integration physically, mentally and emotionally than I am currently at.

Talking about the initiatory aspect of relating with the powers of life and death reminds me of the book “Descent to the Goddess: A Way of Initiation for Women.” In this book the initiatory experience is one of descending to the death realms, which is also the birthplace for all new life. It follows the myth of Inanna, a goddess of fertility, who descends to the underworld to visit Ereshkigal who rules there. When she returns from the underworld (after being killed and reborn), Inanna now has the power to not only give life, but she also has the power to send the soul of the first person she looks at to the underworld. This story of gaining new initiatory power through death and rebirth rings true from my own bipolar experiences. 

And what if one way of initiation could be facilitated by microorganisms and the more conscious relationship with them as primordial intelligences of life and death? I have a curiosity that this may have been the case for me. I know that the death and rebirth process can take place in a multiplicity of ways (through entheogens, shamanic or spiritual techniques or life events including trauma, the loss of a loved one or illness), but the influence of the smalls might be a less explored source of initiation, one that could have therapeutic implications in how we assess and treat mental health issues.
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About a year ago I married the nature spirit who tends a marine reserve near my home. At the time I did not know that this was a practice that is well documented around the world. As this relationship deepens it feels more and more important to share this with the world. We are in a time where relationship is being redefined and this is just one more way to express love as a human. 

The relationship with this being began for me when I started to get a sense of something “peering into” my thoughts as I walked in the forest. When there was an act of vandalism to one of the trees, I performed a ritual to express my grief and rage, and it felt like that opened the door a little further between me and this entity I was beginning to sense.

One day I decided to communicate with the entity telepathically and a conversation ensued. From then on whenever I would enter the forest there was a recognition of this consciousness’ presence.

I had someone in my life at the time that was initiating me into exploring conscious psychic sexuality and when this relationship was ending another entity stepped forward as a partner… that partner was the spirit of the forest. I write this with a raw vulnerability mostly to share that this is a full partnership, not just a deep friendship. 

The spirit of the land told me they could be known as Duwaenem, which translated to “life on poisoned land”. The land is near a refinery and toxic plumes come there regularly, but life still abounds. Their mother was a land faery and their father was Sidhe, so they are a hybrid. They also sometimes came in a more male form and sometimes in a more female form, so I use the pronoun “they”, but they always came with an energy that I immediately recognized.

About five years into our relationship Duwaenem asked me to marry them. At the time this was way outside of my sense of normalcy, which you can see is pretty out there (because I regularly talk with faeries). It took a year for them to convince me, not through any coercion, but through deepening the relationship until it felt right. I did enter into the relationship with the stipulation that I could have a human partner, perhaps even get married, as this felt important for my own wholeness.

We have children. I’ve been shown that the reason this is possible for me is because I have had previous incarnations as fae and carry this in me still. It is like there is a faery body within my human one. I remember as a child I was enamored with the book “No Flying in the House” about a little girl who discovered she was part fairy. But interest in fairies faded and I lost touch with any recognition of that part of reality for a couple of decades. It felt like a youthful recognition of something that I have re-discovered as an adult.

My connection to nature spirits has increased since our marriage. It is like I’m a conduit for that consciousness and sometimes when I touch a tree it feels like I’m creating a telephone connection between the land of my love and that tree.

This reality may be hard for some to understand and some may call it imagination. To those I would say that the imaginal, where the fae exist, and the imagination are inextricably linked. Think of it as the imagination as the medium that receives input from the imaginal. Well, receiving is too passive...it is co-creating which honors that we are actively shaping multiple levels of reality with our hearts and minds. 

There are many ways for us to relate to the world around us and a spirit mate is just one. I share this important part of my life in order to open new possibilities to others. Since my marriage I have discovered other people who have done something similar, including an ancestral guide, and this has helped to normalize this. I hope to pay that forward to anyone who also is discovering relationship in this new way.

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Addition: I am adding to this post a wonderful resource for more information on Spirit Mates. Megan Rose has just published a book on this topic and you can learn more in this really comprehensive interview:
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There is a secret world that floats beneath the surface of the one we mostly collectively recognize. I call it the imaginal realm, but it has had different names in different cultures, dream time, magical realm, collective unconscious, faerie realm, mythic or archetypal realm. Each name has a different nuance, but they are all pointing to a similar idea, that there is a place that our soul can access that glides silently behind the ordinary world. I name this the imaginal realm because it is so interwoven with imagination. It is this place that our prayers, intentions, imaginations access to find inspiration and to move blockages impeding our path. It is this place that the shaman accesses to find strength and helpers as well as perform healing for themselves, another person, or the collective.
There was a time when those who were able to access this realm were initiated by an elder and shown ways to navigate this world. But in the modern world those guides are few and far between and so most are relegated to finding their own way, mostly disastrously, through already troubled ground.

The imaginal realm has always been fraught with fierce archetypal entities, the things that lie in the subconscious of our collective minds, the impulses that cause us to act out the most instinctual parts of being human, desire, love, rage, jealousy, revenge, grief. So it has always been a pretty gnarly place to navigate and every shamanic tradition has some sort of guidance for navigating this space safely. But those in the modern western culture who have shamanic tendencies not only usually step into this world by accident without any sort of guidance, but also are required to deal with a modern version of this realm where knots tied by our culture’s impact on the unconscious become extra slippery. The path for healing and the role of the healer in this context begs for a level of clever awareness most of the uninitiated are not able to rise to.

I was one of the uninitiated plunged head first into the imaginal realm during my first trip to India. There I met people who are working with that realm to serve their own nefarious purposes, praying on the unaware. If there is something to abuse, humans have found a way to do it. I was ripe for initiation, my soul had been in deep grief for the loss of a friend and mentor for a couple of years and then the physical separation from my love partner during an incredibly creative period of my life sent me riding waves of sublime highs and crashing lows, sometimes in the same moment. My soul had expanded to encompass more of the human experience and it was this expansion that allowed for the alchemizing drop of initiation to take hold. The drop came in the form of a deluge, really. India was that deluge. The roller coaster of internal emotions I had been experiencing for months prior to my trip were exploded out around me. Life and death danced in a chaotic fury in the streets. My soul had found a new home. And so India brought me deeper into herself. A press of the center of my palm while exchanging money at the produce seller jolted something awake in my energetic body. And I began to dance. Life shifted into a dream and I walked through synchronicities and experiences that made only half sense to my mind but felt importantly potent to my soul. I could no longer keep to a clock, but I lived to the heartbeat of a different time, much older.

This dream state slowly turned to nightmare. I got sick and my body weakened. My neighbors’ care for me felt manipulative and one night one of them asked bluntly if I had anxiety. I had never felt that in my life but as soon as he said it my heart started racing and panic filled me. I knew I must leave. I initially went on a chaotic flight around town trying to find a place that felt safe, almost hopping on a train for Mumbai, a city I would later live in for four years.

But finally I knew I needed to get help. A coworker helped me obtain a ticket home and I left the next day. I knew I was in a vulnerable spiritual state and so I performed my first act of magic. I asked that no one who could harm me see me. It was strange to be in an airport full of people and to see people blindly walking past me. But the imaginal realm needs no eyes to find you. My anxiety found me through blind manipulations of what I can best describe as “sentries” for the many layers of the bardo. I exposed myself by answering their blind inquiries. One tried to find me by inquiring to a woman sitting next to me about my flight. Another made broad statements about religion to the crowd knowing that his words were like invisible arrows initiating a rise in fear in me. Finally the anxiety became too much and I tipped my hand. I acted on an urge to leave my belongings behind and was arrested by airport security ending up first in a terrorist detention center and then in a mental hospital.

This was my initiation and it ended with a diagnosis of bipolar disorder and a sentence to taking meds for the rest of my life.

I often wonder if my entrée into the world of what is labeled “madness” would have been different if it had been sacredly held by someone. If I had been guided. But this was my fate and a well that I have learned to drink deeply from.

I’ve been to the mental hospital three times and each time I sense the sanity of the people there. They are simply reacting in a very raw and real way to the insanity of our culture. Most people don’t realize how complicit they are with the insanity, but I have met people who are channels for the collective unconscious without any awareness of what they are doing. I’ve also met people who are channels for other beings without their awareness. We are breath-close to the unseen world, interwoven with it. And the detritus that we feed our minds is the detritus that becomes a living throbbing being in the imaginal. Like the space junk that now orbits the earth, we now have a collective consciousness that is filled with junk. But it is not inert junk. It lives and breathes and weaves, collecting power and ability. The ancient ones knew this. They told the myths of these archetypal beings and created temples and shrines in their honor. What they may not have understood was that they were co-creating these beings as they worshipped them. They were complicit in giving those energies form in the collective mind.

And so along comes the monotheistic religions and all the sudden the conscious relationship to archetypes gets monocropped, and as no one entity can do a good job of capturing the complexity of what happens in the imaginal, we start to repress parts of our collective psyche, demonizing them or shaming them. Then secularism declares that the archetypal realm never existed in the first place and so most of what happens there is now unconsciously made. We only see it when it emerges in some select few as madness. Then we suppress it with chemicals, sweeping it back under the rug.

My extended family implied that I was possessed after my first manic episode. In a way they were right. I had been opened to the consciousness of the other world. But it was our own collective mind that I was experiencing, not some outside hellish demon. I was experiencing our family’s own struggling soul, so possessed with a puritanical need for perfection that all else becomes demonized. And this is a micro level example of what is happening on a macro level in society.

Teilhard de Chardin wrote about the noosphere, a collective “mind” that surrounds the earth like our atmosphere. This exists and those who have experienced madness have peered into what is held there. It isn’t pretty. But if we are anything, we are a creative creature and there are those who tend this realm. Be it the monk that meditates or the nun that prays or the psychonaut who journeys or the dancer who authentically moves or the artist who passionately creates, we can open our minds and bodies to tend this space of collective consciousness.

We also have the gift of the earth in all of this tending. One misperception is that the imaginal realm is only the construct of human minds. But any good shaman will tell you that the greatest gift are the non-human beings that inhabit the space with their consciousness. A tree, a mountain, a lake, a little weed, an owl, a coyote, all these are part of this realm and can act as guides and wisdom keepers. We have allies, even though we are killing them off. The natural diversity of a place is one of the greatest boons our consciousness has been given. And our connection to it is infinitely precious. You do not have to be a shaman to experience the benefits of being in nature, immersing oneself in the consciousness of the natural world. It is not just the benefit of fresh air and the disconnection from electronics, there is something more happening to our minds when we step outdoors.

And when we look at who has access to nature through an equity lens we also see how the people without access are also the people who are already facing the challenges of historical trauma compounded by modern day prejudice (from systemic racism to daily microaggressions). These community members are forced to hold a very big piece of the disturbed collective mind. But as one who has struggled with madness, I know too that there is a resilience that comes from these struggles. Those that face challenges are asked to make a more perilous journey, and some do not make it, they may get caught up in the whirlpools of substance abuse and insanity, but those that do make it come out with a strength, clarity and wisdom that others will never have. This is the poisoned apple that does not kill, but rather initiates one into a deeper hold on the full dynamics of what it means to be human. As others navigate life half awake, the gift and burden of awake-ness offers an opportunity to tend this poisoned world in more profound ways.

We live in a relational universe. This is becoming a more accepted concept with people tracking synchronicities and experiences of random not-so-random occurrences. It is popular in new age circles as people claim “the universe is trying to tell me…”  It is also popular in some of the new Christian theology around the personal meeting the transpersonal - influenced by the theology of Teilhard de Chardin, Raimon Panikkar, eloquently brought to today’s Christian consciousness by people like Cynthia Bourgeault Matthew Wright and Ilia Delio. From an animist perspective it would seem like belief in a relational universe would be re-affirming, but the “rub” is really when this relationality is generalized to a unified “universe” or “Christic” presence. This misses the exquisite point of multiplicity. Life around us is responding to us, not because of a unifying consciousness or energy or spirit, but because it is filled with individuality that is alive, breathing and ready to interact. By universalizing consciousness or spirit we are actually denigrating the beauty of this multiplicity. We are missing the point of creation and creativity. 

And I know why we go for the “universality”. It is safer. If all is connected (and it is) and the underlying force of creation is love (which depending on your definition of love could be seen as a valid assumption), then why wade into the murky waters of the sovereignty of beings which on a human scale can sometimes look pretty scary? My answer to this is that getting into the murky waters is where the beauty of relationship comes alive. If I don’t even see a being, say a nature spirit, and all I see is a universal sense of spirit in the form of a tree, then I am missing out on a huge expression of my humanness with that tree spirit and experiencing a more layered nuance of who that tree spirit is. By universalizing we lose out on important aspects of the sacredness of the specific. 

And we deny the validity of a lot of spiritual traditions. To deny the existence of the “old gods” like Orishas, Hindus gods or the Egyptian deities is to deny not only parts of the fabric of creation, but important parts of the collective. And often what gets denied becomes demonized. This becomes even more troubling when the parts of us that are in resonance with these parts of the collective become demonized. This can result in mental illness, self hatred, a lot of misunderstanding. 

So by supporting the multiplicity of creation we are tending our psychic spaces. We are opening the door to greater creativity. We are embracing possibility. This doesn’t mean that we don’t need to learn to navigate these spaces wisely… there is a lot that lives in these murky waters, even more so because most of us have not culturally tended to the waters for several thousands of years since breaking with animist practices. Not all is friend, but that doesn’t mean we have to turn it all to foe or spiritually bypass it to a more universal perspective. 

I believe it is part of the gift of being human to be able to dance with the material existence of things as well as the spiritual. We are tuned into the specific and the collective in beautiful ways. We are designed in this way for a unique way of loving, a unique way of relating. Through animist ways of being with the world we are embracing the fullness of our potential. This has profound implications for our individual psyches and the collective, for our personal and societal impacts on ecology and social justice. 

What the universe is really telling us is “listen” …”see me in all my multiplicity”. And what better gift to return to the universe than to embrace what you have been given through this small life and to do just that?

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