The Nephilim Rising

Lux in Tenebris Lucet

Posts tagged with Shadow Work

THE RETURN OF THE TOO MUCH WOMAN

October 13, 2026


(An invocation for the Witch who remembers herself)

The call was in my blood.
In my bones.
In my Soul.
Magick was a language
I knew before I could speak.
Before the world taught me
which words were dangerous.

Before I learned
that a Woman with a voice
could be called a problem
by everyone
who benefited from her silence.

Then Hekate called.
And I answered.
Not with a whisper.
Not with a pretty little prayer
folded neatly between my palms.
I answered in fire.
My Craft was fire.
My writing was fire.
My voice,
a blade dragged
against the throat
of everything I had been taught
to swallow.

I said the things
other people wouldn’t.

The things they knew
but dared not name.
The things that made polite company
shift in their chairs
and call me too much.

Too loud.
Too strange.
Too sharp around the edges.
Too unwilling to kneel
at the Altar of other people’s comfort.

I mistook their fear
for a warning.
And slowly,
so slowly
I almost didn’t notice,
I began to make a smaller Woman
out of myself.

I softened the language.
Rounded the teeth.
Put a leash on the lightning.

I learned the choreography
of being palatable.

How to enter a room
without disturbing its delicate lies.
How to swallow the sentence
that might make someone
think less of me.
How to fold my wildness
into something tidy enough
to be loved.

And for what?
Approval?
A place at a table
where I had to amputate
pieces of myself
to fit?

I stopped speaking so loudly.
And the world rushed in
to fill the silence.
It filled it with its rules.
Its expectations.
Its convenient little stories
about who a Woman should be
if she wants to be kept.

I drowned.
For years.
Not in water,
but in the slow suffocation
of becoming acceptable
to people who had never
been asked to become smaller
for me.

I drowned in the opinions
of people who did not know my Soul.
In the hunger to be liked.
In the exhaustion
of trying to make myself
understandable
to those determined
to misunderstand me.

I begged the mirror
to show me someone
the world could love.

Until one day
I looked into my own eyes
and could no longer recognize
the Woman doing the begging.

And something primal
inside me
bared its teeth, and growled:
Enough.

Not the polite enough.
Not the woman-at-the-end-of-her-rope
enough.

The primordial enough.
The serpent uncoiling.
The gate swinging open.
The black dog lifting its head
at the Crossroads.

Hekate had not abandoned me.
I had simply become
so busy asking the world
for permission
that I could no longer hear
the Goddess calling me home.

So here is what I know now:
Not everyone must like me.
Not everyone must understand me.
Not everyone gets a vote
on the Woman I am becoming.
There are Elders
whose wisdom I honor.
There are voices
I hold close because
they have earned their place
beside my fire.

But the crowd?
The chorus of strangers?
The endless tribunal
of other people’s expectations?

Let them talk.

I have a Soul to answer to.
And every night
when I stand before the mirror,
I will ask myself:

Did I betray my own knowing
to make someone else comfortable?
Did I abandon my voice
to avoid being misunderstood?
Did I live this day
as the Woman I am
or as the Woman
I thought would be easier to love?

If I can meet my own gaze
without turning away,
then let the world
keep its verdict.

I am not returning
to the Woman I was.

I have no desire
to crawl backward
into an old skin
just because it once fit.

I am the Alchemy
of every Woman I have been.
The girl who knew Magick
before she knew the names for it.
The Witch who spoke in lightning.
The Woman who drowned
trying to be loved.
The survivor
who found the bottom
and pushed herself
back toward the light.

I carry them all.

I am not choosing
between my fire
and my wisdom.
Between my fury
and my tenderness.
Between the Woman
who burned the world open
and the Woman
who learned what to do
with the ashes.

I am the tempering.

The marriage of flame and iron.
The blade that knows
when to cut
and when to become
a key.

I am becoming
something neither
my former self
nor my fear
could have imagined.

And I am doing it
without asking
to be forgiven
for the space I occupy.

I am returning
to my roots.
To the too-muchness
that was never a flaw
but a force
the world had no language for.

The too-much Woman.

The Witch with ink beneath her nails
and a storm behind her teeth.
The Woman who wears her darkness
like a crown
and her tenderness
like a hidden blade.
The Woman who can love you
without making herself smaller.
The Woman who can tell the truth
without wrapping it
in sweetness for your consumption.
The Woman who has stopped
mistaking self-abandonment
for goodness.

I will be too loud.
I will be too original.
I will be too in your face.
I will be too strange
for your little boxes.
Too difficult
for your convenient narratives.
Too alive
for the grave you dug.
And if my voice makes the windows shake,
perhaps it is because
the house was built
to keep Women quiet.
If my words leave a mark,
perhaps it is because
the truth was never meant
to pass through the world
without touching anything.
If my fire makes you uncomfortable,
you are welcome
to step away from the flames.

But do not ask me
to put them out.

I was not born
to be a candle
in someone else’s window.

I am the Witchfire
at the Crossroads.
I am the key
turning in the lock.
I am the name
I buried beneath the need
to be chosen.
I am the voice
I traded for approval
and have come to reclaim.

And I am done
calling my power
a problem.

The world does not need
another Woman
who has mastered
the art of disappearing.

It needs the Woman
who enters the room
whole.

The Woman who speaks
before permission arrives.

The Woman who makes art
that cannot be mistaken
for anyone else’s.

The Woman who refuses
to confuse being liked
with being alive.

It needs the Witch.
The unruly daughter.
The difficult Woman.
The holy fucking nuisance.
The one who remembers.
The one who returns.
The one who stands
at the threshold
with a torch in her hand
and no intention
of handing it over.

Because the world
has had enough
of our silence.

Now it gets our voices.
Our visions.
Our rage.
Our unrepentant,
unrepeatable,
unmanageable selves.

Let them call us too much.
Let them choke
on the words.

We have spent centuries
being told to take up less space.

Let us become
impossible to contain.

The call was in my blood.
In my bones.
In my Soul.

And this time,
when the Goddess calls,
I will not make myself
smaller
before I answer.

I will reply with a roar.

Poem will be featured in the upcoming Anthology from Girl God Books, Hecate: Underworld Guide and Holy Hag

Pre-order here:

https://www.thegirlgod.com/hecate.php

The Net Was Never Coming

September 6, 2026

Being without family
is like falling with no net.

Tightrope walking
with no safety beneath you,
no hands waiting
to catch you when you fall.

It’s terrifying.

Family estrangement
is a particular kind of grief

one without a funeral,
without a body to bury,
without the permission
to say:

I lost them.

Because sometimes
you didn’t lose your family.

You had to leave them.

There is a difference.

Sometimes blood
is not sanctuary.

Sometimes the people
who share your name
are the very people
you must survive.

And sometimes
the most loving thing
you can do for yourself
is walk away
from the Altar
where they keep sacrificing you.

I know what it is
to look behind me
and find no one.

No familiar hands.
No soft place to land.
No chorus of voices
calling me home.

Only the long road
and the sound of my own footsteps
becoming louder
the farther I walked.

And yes, sometimes it is lonely.

Gods, sometimes it is SO fucking lonely.

There are moments
I would give anything
for the kind of family
I should have had.

For a door
I could open without fear.
For love
that did not come with conditions.
For arms
that did not become cages.
For home
that did not require
the surrender of myself.

But I have learned something
on this road:

loneliness is not the same as captivity.

And solitude
is not the same as abandonment.

I would rather walk alone
than be surrounded
by people determined
to make me disappear.

I would rather sleep beneath
an unfamiliar sky
than live beneath a roof
where my existence
requires permission.

I would rather carry
the ache of absence
than carry
the burden of becoming
someone I am not
just to remain loved.

So I cut the cord.

Not because I was heartless.
Because I was alive.
Not because I didn’t love them.
Because I finally learned
that loving someone
does not require
the destruction of myself.

There are some doors
we do not close
out of hatred.

We close them
because there is fire
on the other side.

And sometimes
survival looks like
turning your back
on the people
who taught you
that leaving
would kill you.

Then discovering,
you breathe better
without them.

I walk alone now.

But look at me.

I am walking.
No net.
No safety line.
No one holding
the other end of the rope.

And still
I do not fall.
Because somewhere
between the breaking
and the becoming,
I became my own ground.

My own shelter.
My own witness.
My own home.

They told me
family was everything.

Perhaps.

But I have learned
that self-abandonment
is too high a price
to pay for belonging.

So let them call it estrangement.
Let them call it selfishness.
Let them tell whatever story
allows them to sleep at night.

I know the truth.
I did not abandon my family.
I stopped abandoning myself.

And there is a strange kind of holiness
in that.
A sovereignty
that cannot be inherited
or bestowed.
A freedom
no bloodline can revoke.

I am no longer
waiting for someone
to throw me a rope.

I have become
the Woman
who learned to walk
without one.

And if I must cross
this wilderness alone,
then alone I will go.
Barefoot.
Bloody.
Unbowed.
Free.
Sovereign.

And finally,

mine.

Jaclyn Cherie

All Rights Reserved.

What They Taught Her to Believe

September 3, 2026

Patriarchy poisoned her.

Not all at once.
Not with a blade,
but with a thousand quiet lessons
slipped beneath the tongue
until the poison tasted
like truth.

Imagine being so detached from yourself,
from your Womanhood,
that you would turn on her,
she, you.

Me.

Imagine being taught
to look into the mirror
and see yourself as lesser.

To believe a man carries
more intelligence,
more power,
more authority,
more everything
simply because he is a man.

More,
more,
more,

as though maleness itself
were a crown
the rest of us were born
kneeling before.

And so my brilliance
goes unacknowledged.

The brilliance of my brain
measured against
a generalized, imaginary he.

An invisible man
who has never met me,
never sat inside my skin,
never carried the weight
of my becoming

and still somehow
stands taller.

Not because he earned it.

Because he was born
with the right anatomy.

“Power of the P*nis”, she calls it.

What a f*cking spell.
What a vicious piece of Magick
they taught our Mothers
to cast against themselves.

They taught her
that the voice of a man
must carry further.

That his knowing
must be deeper.

That his authority
must be unquestioned.

And she learned it so well
she began handing the lesson
down to me.

Mother to daughter.
Wound to wound.

Generation after generation
of Women taught to sharpen
the knife against their own reflection.

But I..
I will not inherit
the Altar of my own diminishment.

I will not bow
before an imaginary he
just because the world
taught my Mother to.

I will not make myself smaller
so someone else’s masculinity
can feel enormous.

I will not apologize
for the architecture of my mind.

For the fire in it.
For the strange, beautiful machinery
of my knowing.
For the things I understand
that he does not.

For the things she was never allowed
to believe about herself.

Because perhaps this
is the generational curse of all generational curses,

Not simply that men were placed
above Women,
but that Women were taught
to enforce the hierarchy
with their own hands.

So here I stand,
not with hatred for my Mother,
but with a torch.

Because I know now
that some curses
do not break with forgiveness alone.

Some must be named.

Dragged into the light.
Stripped of their Sacred disguise.
And burned at the Crossroads.

I will not become
the Woman patriarchy made her.

I will become
the Woman it could not.

And if I must walk backward
through the bloodline
to find the place
where they first taught a Woman
that she was less,
then so be it.

I will go there.
I will find her.
I will take her face
between my hands
and whisper:

You were never less.
You were never meant
to kneel.
You were taught to.

And I..

I am here
to end the lesson.

All Rights Reserved.

The Fire Beaneath the Bones

July 27, 2026

Suffering
is not
a requirement
for life.

Nor is it
the price
of Spiritual evolution.

It is simply

one destination

along a road

few would choose,
yet many
will someday
walk.

The Plutonian Healer
does not seek
the Underworld.

She simply knows
what to do
once she arrives.

She descends.

Again.
And again.

Not because
she is broken.

Not because
Spirit delights
in suffering.

But because
there are medicines
that only grow
beneath the earth.

The world teaches us
to fear
the darkness.

The Plutonian
knows better.

She enters
the belly
of the Underworld
with empty hands
and returns
carrying fire.

She learns
that grief
isn’t punishment.

Rage
isn’t failure.

Loss
isn’t the end.

They are Crossroads.

Every death
asks a question.

Every ending
demands
another name.

The Plutonian Healer
does not emerge
without scars.

She emerges
speaking
the language
of those
still trapped
below.

She remembers
the pathways.

The hidden doors.

The monsters
that were never monsters —
only abandoned
pieces
of herself
waiting
to be loved
without illusion.

This is why
people find her
when life
falls apart.

She does not
flinch
at ruin.

She recognizes it.

She has built
Altars
from ash.

Gardens
from graves.

She has learned
that compost
and resurrection
have always shared
the same soil.

Do not mistake
her tenderness
for innocence.

She has dined
with Death.

Sat beside
Grief.

Held hands
with Madness.
Walked home
with Shadow.

And still,
she chose
Life.

Not the polished,
performative version.

The wild one.

The blood-soaked,
root-bound,
earth-scented
miracle
of becoming.

Because the Plutonian Healer
knows
what few Healers ever will.

The Underworld
was never
her prison.

It was
her apprenticeship.

Lux in Tenebris

Jaclyn Cherie

All Rights Reserved.

The Forgotten Daughter

July 23, 2026

Left behind.

Never chosen.

Parentified
and infantilized
in the same breath.

Too young
to have a voice.

Old enough
to carry everyone’s pain.

Tell me
how does a child
become both
the family therapist
and still be treated
as though
she knows nothing?

How do you become
the one
everyone leans on,
yet no one
thinks to hold?

I learned early
that love
could be earned.

That usefulness
was safer
than need.

That if I became
indispensable enough,
perhaps…

someone
would finally
choose me.

So I became
the bridge.

The peacemaker.

The keeper
of impossible silences.

The daughter
who swallowed storms
so no one else
had to taste
the rain.

No one noticed
that every flood
left me drowning.

The forgotten daughter
doesn’t scream.

She studies.
She adapts.
She watches every room
like prey
studying predators.

She learns
which version
of herself
will keep
everyone comfortable.

Until one day
she wakes
unable to remember
which version
was ever
her own.

People mistake
the forgotten daughter
for resilient.

As though survival
wasn’t simply
the only language
she was ever taught.

They praise
her strength.

Never asking
who she had to become
to deserve
those words.

But forgotten
does not mean
unworthy.

It means
someone else
failed
to remember.

I was never
too much.

Too sensitive.
Too difficult.
Too intense.

I was simply
growing
inside a home
that had forgotten
how to see me.

Perhaps they never knew how.

There comes a moment
when forgotten daughters
stop waiting
to be found.

We descend


Not into despair

into ourselves.

Into the dark places
where abandoned children
become Wise Women.

Where grief
is no longer
a prison,
but a forge.

The world calls us
forgotten.

Spirit
calls us
initiated.

Because those
who are never chosen
learn
the oldest lesson
of all.

To choose themselves.

Again.
And again.
And again.

Until the echo
of abandonment

becomes

a declaration.

I was never forgotten.

I was hidden.

Hidden
where no one else
could name me

until I remembered
my own.

They called me

the forgotten daughter.

As though forgetting
was ever
my name.

I crossed
the threshold.

I entered
the fire.

I buried

the child

who begged

to be chosen.

And the Woman
who emerged

did not ask

to be remembered.

She remembered

her own name.

Jaclyn Cherie

All Rights Reserved.

Blood Remembers

July 21, 2026

Her presence triggers me.

It cuts deep.

Memories flooding
that old ache
I keep convincing myself
has finally gone quiet.

Then she walks into the room

and suddenly
I am every age
I have ever been.

She is my home.

My safe place.

My refuge from the storm.

She is also
the storm itself.

She is both

curse

and cure.

Burn

and balm.

How can one Woman
be the place
I run toward
and the place
I have spent
my life
trying to outrun?

This is the inheritance
of Mothers and Daughters.

We are stitched together
long before
either of us
learns
how to speak.

Bound
by blood.
By bone.
By memory.

By the unspoken language
of Women
who carry one another’s
grief
inside their own bodies.

I see her.

Not just
the Mother.

The little girl
she buried
to become one.

I see
the fear
she swallowed.

The dreams
she folded away.

The love
she never learned
how to give
without it first
passing through
her own wounds.

And because I see her
I ache.

Not because
it excuses
what hurt me.

That she hurt me.

But because
love becomes
far more complicated
when you can trace
the wound
back through
the Women
who carried it
before either of you
were born.

People want
simple stories.

A villain.
A victim.
Someone to blame.

But life
rarely offers us
that simplicity.

Sometimes
the Woman
who broke you
is also
the Woman
who held you
when the rest
of the world did not.

Sometimes
the safest place
you’ve ever known
is also
where your deepest wounds
were first named.

This is the impossible
geometry
of Mothers
and Daughters.

The centuries-old question:

Who hurt whom more?
Mother?
Or child?

Perhaps
that is the wrong question.

Perhaps
the better one is:

Who was hurting first?

Who carried
a grief
so Ancient
it forgot
which generation
it belonged to?

I do not know
where she ends
and I begin.

Perhaps
that is the tragedy.

Perhaps
that is also
the miracle.

Because even
when I rage,
even
when I retreat,
even
when her presence
awakens every scar
I have fought
to heal
I still know
she is bound to me.

And I to her.

Not by obligation.

Not by guilt.

But by something
older than language.

Older than memory.

A cord
neither of us tied.

A love
neither of us
has always known
how to carry.

So I will not ask
who wounded whom more.

I will ask instead

How do we become
the first Women
in our bloodline
to love each other
without bleeding
quite so much?

The Woman Who Broke The Spell

July 19, 2026

Some wounds are generational.

They connect us
through unspoken bonds
of blood,
bone,
and memory.

They are inherited
like old recipes,
family heirlooms,
and names carved into weathered gravestones.

Except no one speaks
of these inheritances.

Only the silence.

Only the tightening jaw.

Only the little girl
who learns to apologize
before she knows
what she has done wrong.

Only the mother
who loved
the best she could
with hands that were never taught
how to hold themselves.

I used to believe
the mother wound
was born
inside one Woman.

I know better now.

It is older than her.

Older than her mother.

Older than the grandmother
whose laughter
was swallowed
by survival.

It travels.
From womb to womb.

From daughter to daughter.

A ghost
wearing
different faces.

We inherit
the unfinished grief
of Women
who were told
their hunger
was dangerous.

Their anger
unbecoming.

Their voices
too loud.

Their bodies
belonged
to everyone
but themselves.

Until one Woman…

says:

No.

Not because she hates
the Women who came before.

Because she loves
the Women
who will come after.

Do you know
what it costs
to break a generational curse?

Everything.

You become
the family disappointment.

The difficult one.

The Woman
who asks forbidden questions.

Who names
what everyone else
has learned
to survive by denying.

You mourn
people
who are still alive.

You bury
versions of yourself
that were built
only to keep
the peace.

You become
the fire alarm
inside a house
that has grown comfortable
with smoke.

And no one
thanks the alarm.

Not at first.

Breaking the curse
is not beautiful.

It is ugly.

It is blistered hands
pulling roots
that have wrapped themselves
around your spine.

It is learning
that forgiveness
does not always
mean reconciliation.

It is discovering
that compassion
does not require
your continued sacrifice.

It is standing
at the edge
of your bloodline
and saying:

It ends here.

Not because
I am stronger
than my mothers.

But because
their prayers
finally found
a body
willing
to answer them.

Perhaps
I was never born
to carry
this pain forever.

Perhaps
I was born
to become
the threshold.

The Woman
who looked
an Ancient wound
in the eyes
and refused
to pass it
to the next generation.

This is how
the spell is broken.

Not with perfect love.

Not without grief.

But with one battered hand
reaching backward
to bless the Women
who could not escape
while the other
reaches forward
to children,
to daughters,
to sons,
to every future soul
I will never meet,
unburdened.

Because I chose
to carry the wound
only long enough
to teach it
how to become
an ending.

Jaclyn Cherie

All Rights Reserved.

Do Not Give Them Your Fear

July 16, 2026

I have a million other things to be doing right now.

Yet Spirit has reached into the quiet,
wrapped its unseen hand around my wrist,
and whispered…

Write, child.

Because someone is forgetting.

Someone is standing at the Crossroads,
convinced that fear is the only language left.

It is not.

So hear me.

Not as a Prophet.
Not as a Saint.
Not as someone untouched by darkness.

Hear me as one who has walked through it.

Who has swallowed ash and breathed fire.
Who has slept beside grief.
Who has learned that monsters are not always found in forests, dark corners or beneath the bed
sometimes they wear familiar faces,
sometimes they echo inside our own minds.

Hear me as one who knows that Shadow
is not the enemy.

Fear wants you to kneel.

Despair wants you to forget your own name.
Silence wants you to mistake survival
for surrender.

Do. Not.

Do not give them your fear.

Do not feed the machine with your Spirit.
Do not offer your terror as tribute.
Do not become the architect of your own cage.

Your fear is Sacred fire.

Guard it.
Transform it.
Temper it until it becomes resolve.

To every Witch who has ever hidden their Altar.
To every Soul whose existence has been treated as an inconvenience.
To every Seeker.
Every exile.
Every strange child who learned too early that the world does not always welcome those who refuse to fit neatly inside its smallest boxes.

I see you.
I have always seen you.

The road beneath your feet has never been easy.

It was never meant to be.

We descend because wisdom waits below.
We speak with ghosts because they remember what Empires forgot.

We carry bones, herbs, Cards, prayers, scars, and stories because every generation leaves breadcrumbs for the next.

We are not born from comfort.
We are born from remembering.

Remember who you are.

Remember those who stood before you when the fires burned hotter than they do today.

Remember those who whispered prayers beneath their breath when speaking aloud carried consequences.

Remember those who buried their books,
hid their symbols,
passed Sacred names from trembling lips to willing ears,
believing someone,
someday,
would continue the work.

You are that someone.
And so am I.

Darkness has always existed.

So have we.

The night has never belonged solely to those who wield power.

It belongs to the owl.
The wolf.
The Ancestors.
The dreamers.
The Witches who know that every seed first breaks open beneath the Earth before it ever reaches the light.

We are children of thresholds.
Liminal Spaces.
Students of endings, and beginnings.
Keepers of impossible hope. Not the fragile kind that pretends suffering isn’t real, but the fierce kind that looks directly into the Abyss and refuses to become it. We study it.

No one is coming to save us.

Perhaps that has always been our greatest strength.
Because we remember how to gather.

How to tend the Flame.
How to bind one another’s wounds.
How to laugh in the face of uncertainty.
How to sing while surrounded by ruins.

That is Magick.
That is Alchemy.
Not escaping the darkness.
But becoming so familiar with it
that it no longer tells you who you are.
You are united as One.

So let them have their fear.

Let them build kingdoms from it if they must.
We will build something older.
Something that cannot be legislated away.
Something that cannot be silenced.
Something rooted in memory,
in courage,
in Spirit,
and in the wild, untamable heart that still beats beneath every scar we carry.

Stand.
Breathe.
Remember.
Then walk forward.
Not because you are unafraid.
But because fear was never meant to be your Master.

Do not give them your fear.

Not today.
Not tomorrow.
Not ever.

Remember who you are.

The Temple They Could Not Take

July 16, 2026

They called it necessary.

Clinical.
Routine.

As though language could bleach the blood
from memory.

As though white coats
were incapable of carrying empire
beneath pressed collars.

In 2008,
they cut the seat of my power
without my consent,
because somewhere,
buried beneath textbooks,
protocols,
and signatures,
a Woman
was, is, still considered
an acceptable experiment.

Laws made against my body.

Decisions made for me.

Hands that never learned
the difference
between healing
and permission.

By 2012,
my Womb was gone.

A room in my Temple
emptied by strangers
who would never have to haunt
its silence.

And afterward…

I ran.

Not because I was weak.

Because prey learns
the shape of pursuit
long before predators
learn mercy.

I ran from hospitals.

From fluorescent lights.

From waiting rooms
that smelled of antiseptic
and forgotten prayers.

I ran from every echo
that reminded me
what it feels like
to have your body translated
into paperwork.

But there comes a day
when the hunted
stops measuring the distance
behind her
and remembers
the fire ahead.

Listen closely.

They mistook my scars
for evidence of defeat.

How little they understood
the language of Witches.

These are not wounds.

They are sigils scorn into my skin.

My sacred scars.

Each one
an initiation.
Each one
a threshold crossed
without a map.

I no longer ask
why I was made
to walk through fire.

I ask instead:

What was forged there
that could not have been born
any other way?

They took some organs.

They did not take
my abilty to Create.

They mistook flesh
for power.

But power has never lived
inside a single chamber
of the body.

It lives
in the voice
that returns.

In the Soul
that refuses
to become
what violence imagined.

It lives
in every Woman
who gathers herself
from the places
she was told
she would never bloom again.

Do not pity me.
Stand beside me.
See these scars
for what they have become.

Not disfigurement.

Consecration.

Not absence.

Alchemy.

Not the ending
of a story
but the crossing
of a threshold.

I am no less Sacred
because my Temple
was altered.

If anything,
I know now
that sanctity
has never depended
upon untouched stone.

It depends
upon the flame
that still burns
inside the Sanctuary.

And mine,

Mine has learned
to consume
every name
they ever tried
to give me.

I am no one’s experiment.

I am the Woman
who survived
the hands
that mistook themselves
for gods.

I am the scar
that became scripture.

The threshold
that became a road.

The fire
that remembered
its own name

and burned it
into eternity
until even the stars
learned how to pronounce it.

Lessons in Magick: The Dangers of Shadow Work

November 14, 2022

 

I have been wanting to write this as a blog or Facebook post for a long, long time; the urge has increased over the last few months, and finally I am sitting down to write after a long hiatus.

I feel like people don’t read blogs anymore. They want bite sized information, they want quick read memes with cute font, they want 30 second Reels and TikToks.

People don’t want to take the time to read anymore, or so it seems.

The thing is, that’s the only way you will learn anything, from me at least.

I am a writer. I bleed on the screen for the world to see and that will never change; I bleed on pages, too.

My pen is my sword, my words are my fire.

Back to the topic at hand, and I am just going to get right to it:

Shadow Work is dangerous, and I wish more people would talk about this.

Don’t take that statement and think I am suggesting avoiding it, no, no.

NO SPIRITUAL BYPASSING ON MY WATCH.

Shadow Work is 100% necessary. The integration of Shadow is 100% necessary.

Did you know that I consulted a Psychiatrist and a Psychologist when creating my Shadow Work Course for The House of Twigs? For reasons I learned from them I didn’t dive too deep when giving assignments because I do not know where someone is on their journey and real, irreparable damage can be done.

I had to be sure that I was not leading folks to danger, or worse to the or a space where they re-traumatize themselves.

I see the term Shadow Work thrown around like it means not a goddamn thing, and I am perplexed because it is NOT TO BE TAKEN LIGHTLY.

If you want me to be honest, like really honest: Shadow Work is more dangerous than Evoking Spirits.

Why is this conversation not being had more?!

First, let us define Shadow Work for folks who may not be familiar.

Shadow Work is a Jungian (Carl Jung) Psychological concept that our Persona is who we strive to be and show to the world, but our Shadow is who we are, or at least what makes up most of who we are.

Like the moon has a hidden side so do we.

That is the Shadow.

The hidden aspects of ourselves.

In Jungian Psychology it is our Persona first, our Ego is center, Anima/Animus and Shadow last.

The Spiritual World, not just the Witchcraft Community, have taken this concept and morphed it into their own thing.

Therein lies one of the main problems.

You can’t tweak the concept of Shadow Work.

Regardless of your opinions of Jung himself as a person, his work remains a masterpiece and masterpieces are not altered. They are especially not to be altered to fit some narrative the creator had no intention of it being used for.

Jung was a Psychoanalyst and he did nothing, NOTHING in the shallows; this is deep, deep, heavy work.

Then there is the whole issue that Shadow Work itself is an Egregore and taps into a Collective Unconscious that cannot be altered. There is also the Personal Unconscious.

Archetypes exist in the Shadow and they are: Sage, Innocent, Explorer, Ruler, Creator, Caregiver, Magician, Hero, Rebel, Lover, Jester and the Orphan.

Intense, right?

Shadow Work is alive, it’s constant motion.

Ever changing and evolving as we add more experiences and information to the Collective Unconscious.

It’s not just your Shadows, it’s not just your work.

You are tapping into immense power, and immense emotion.

Then there is the end goal which is the integration process and that is a whirlwind.

Do not diminish these dangers.

Working with Shadow is extremely beneficial, but it brings up a lot of shit that you have buried, things you might not even be aware of (there’s that Unconscious part); it can bring up and stir up Collective emotions that are not even yours to unpack.

There are so many variables, so many potential outcomes.

Be mindful when suggesting Shadow Work as if it’s a walk in the park.

It is not.

Be mindful when venturing down the path to Shadow Work.

It is full of perils.

Know your limitations, find a support system of some kind, and do not push yourself.

Your psyche is powerful and it’s strong, but it is not unbreakable.

Be gentle and fierce. Be aware and alive.

And don’t take yourself too seriously, or your Shadows.

You can laugh, you can love, you can ease your way into the Work and don’t let anyone tell you differently.

Lux in Tenebris Lucet