Chapter 17 - Tapping
...I know nothing stays the same but if you’re willing to play the game, it will be coming around again…Carly Simon
Hello my darlings,
Hope this latest post finds y’all well. I participated in a phenomenal prosperity workshop this past week with Melanie Moore EFT and she's fucking amazing. For those of us who started to dance the light and shadow lanes back in the 70’s, finding help can be quite a challenge, when you’ve been dancing, teaching and committed to loving self beyond all reason, authenticity, and love power to impact your world. Never forget - Right Use of Power is love made visible.
What with the cancer, what I held true was nuked and every scar I had was ripped wide open. Wise Joe used to say, scars are forever, sometimes they get ripped open and you only get better at loving yourself into healing. I had no idea how to handle the cancer diagnosis except to say - Well, of course I can cure this — and I began to negotiate my treatment based on my research and experience. I couldn't sit at my altar and I couldn't meditate; my bitterness, resentment, and negativity was off the charts. The problem with bitterness, resentment and negativity is it feeds itself and I was melting down right and left. Like a lot of competent women my age we think we have to do everything ourselves and pretty much have our entire lives.
The point is I needed help and I needed sacred help, like dance in the mystery help. So, I prayed. And then I went to youtube and typed in tapping. I have tapped before. As a modality I liked it a lot, even though a dear friend of mine starts to froth at the mouth when she hears the word ‘tapping.’
On this fateful night when I prayed - I need help! I can’t keep going like this! - Melanie Moore EFT came up. First thing I thought was, oh she’s lovely. She’s probably in her 40’s, I wonder if she’s any good. Then I checked out all her tapping video’s and all I could think was, “She knows what she’s doing! She knows what she’s doing!”
The key to any good tapping video is the script and this woman gets, really gets, feminine wounds around money. I’m convinced she’s a Pisces. ps the last time I prayed with such ferocity, I was 40 and found myself sitting across from an alchemist who told me I wasn’t on the planet to be good. I was a daughter of the Dark Goddess, an alchemist, and here to blow things up and transform them - globally. It felt like someone had thrown an transistor radio into my milk bath.
So I did the five day workshop, online in a zoom call, and I loved every minute of it. Women from all over the world, most in England where Mel is located. I have always taught that you can’t change what you don’t own - it’s like trying to return something to Bergdorf’s that you didn’t buy. Mel’s scripts start with where you are. Her real genius is her ability to sharply focus on where the block is and what words to use to make the change. She’s lovely inside and out, and she does what she does so well, you have no idea how relentless she is when it comes to helping you make the changes you want to make. It was so much fun to be in a group and not be teaching and I was soul explosion happy to be with a teacher who knew what she was doing.
PS one of things Mel shared was she’d gone to psychics but they kept telling her what to do and she didn’t like it! You know I loved that.
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At 71 most people are winding down. I am not. Tech person here tomorrow to set up you tube channel for ‘Shadow Dance.’ I’ll be covering weekly energies, using self-designed cauldron cards, and then I will be doing online workshops for women re: how to work with and dance shadow. Part of me is terrified by all this new, can I show up for this - part of me is really excited - I can do anything. So I’m holding the two feelings in my heart - they press hard against the other but they do not mingle. It hurts and then there’s a give and I’m standing on sacred ground. Sacred ground that had been waiting for me all along. I root in sacred ground.
….. “Eva’d founded the Park and her beloved Butcher protected it. Eva and Butcher were the Holy One, made Sacred Two. Alike in their power, unique in their flow, each contained the other. Love was their child….” From Genesis 2: The Passion of Emma Ray Earle
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My faith is a working faith. A priest once told me that faith if a verb - sometime you have it, sometimes you don’t. Witches say everything contains it’s opposite - not in terms of opposition but in terms of compliment. The guides years ago told me there was no such as a negative feeling. It is our judgment of them that gives them their sting. In my novel, The Passion of Emma Ray Earle, the people in EverGreen Circle Round Trailer Park - sit with their feelings until they know right use of said feelings….
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I wrote the following years ago….it is still every as applicable now as it was when I wrote it.
Goddess Speak: Thoughts on Consciousness and Change
As I was making my leave-to-the-dark-to-make-room-for-the-New-Light list, one of the things I decided I’d like to create in my life is a more positive attitude. Within two hours after I completed my ritual, my entire shadow, around why I can’t be more positive, erupted. The excuses are good ones, valid, but they are rooted in an old context, a context that is keeping me locked in a pattern of behavior that at one time was clearly instrumental to my survival. What I had to face, what I was willing to face, was that this pattern of behavior, consciously chosen some years back, was no longer beneficial; if anything it was going to strangle me. I know change is in order when I find myself finding fault with everyone and everything and I am so resentful bitter tastes like honey. When this is on me, and that is exactly what it feels like, like I’m being ridden and crop nudged into screaming, insanity, I say, ‘oh dear darling, you’re very upset today. What’s wrong honey bun?’
If I’m working I tend to scoot the monster into the cage ( just for a little while darling I say) and if I’m not working I do what I do when I take the monster out of the cage namely cry, wail, bitch, moan, feel the powerless, feel the envy, etc. When it’s all out my body, and that can take as long as it takes, I’ll sit down and get to whatever “it” is. For me it’s not about fixing, I am not in the least bit interested in fixing myself or being fixed, and it’s not about getting something over and done with and closing doors. For me, it’s about opening doors to the not-so-pretty and the not-so-sweet. I am ever curious about who I am, why I am the way I am, and why I’m here. I am ever curious about my evolution and my ever-evolving, tangible understanding of what it means to be a sacred person. These are not intellectual exercises for me; yes intellect is involved but equally important are the feelings. The old mystery school axiom, “Know Self,” is as intrinsic to my life as gravity and oxygen.
Context is multi-layered, an ever shifting combination of experience, socialization, and programming; I make my decisions based on my context. All perception is rooted in context, it’s the soil out which perception grows, if you don’t change the context you can’t really change the perception. When I was raising my son, in order to survive I had to put my armor on every morning before striking out into the day. There is no question life was a battle during this time and I lived on red alert for many years. Periodically, in my workshops, I bump into an un-initiated newbie who has read one to may Louise Hay books and tells me I should have chosen love. I tell her quietly but firmly that I did indeed choose love. I chose self and soul, I chose to say no, I chose to fight back, and I chose to learn how to set my boundaries.
Setting boundaries for me meant I had to actually acknowledge I had needs and that those needs had never been met. I also had to acknowledge that I was projecting those needs outwards onto others and expecting them to meet them. Of course the people I was projecting the needs outwards onto were just like my parents (badly wounded, narcissistic, and controlling) and in this way I was recreating the exact emotional home I grew up in. Bottom line is I had no context for what it was like to have my needs recognized, much less satisfied, and the idea of actually having my needs recognized was so terrifying that I would simply call people who couldn’t possibly help me to keep the world as I knew it intact. This is where I was twenty-five years ago; unconscious of the wounds and unable to see the connection between the wounds and the behavior. All I knew was I was devastatingly unhappy and that was not the way I wanted to live. I dove into the self-help books, which worked for awhile, but life experience has shown most of the information to be little more than piece-meal truths oblivious to the influence and play of shadow.
When you really take a look at your belief system, when you bump into your lack of self worth, insecurity, self-loathing, and powerlessness, it’s agony. When I started to accept the pain and rage that grew out of this twisted, steaming stew, one of the hardest things to do was to willing trace both back to their original source, rather than turning someone into “the other,” by projecting it onto them. You see I was taught to rise above someone’s bad behavior rather than say, “stop that.” If I had said, “stop that,” as a child I would have been destroyed, this is not an exaggeration, so when I actually began to say, “stop that,” in my mid thirties my anxiety level hit the stratosphere.
Of course it did, by asserting myself I was quite literally blowing up the foundation out which all that was me grew. I had no context for this, I had no idea what the results would be. All I knew was wherever I was going had to be better than where I was. What I didn’t know then was the uncovering, discovery, and re-discovery of self is an eternal process and that I would be blowing up belief systems, and on the flip side creating new belief systems, for pretty much the rest of my life.
Do this for over twenty-five years and believe me you will end up with a context for change, namely if you stay with it, stay with the feelings no matter how hard, take the actions no matter how gut-wrenching, you will come through no matter how narrow the opening. Sometimes it will be graceful and sometimes you‘ll feel like a chew toy for a big black dog. It will never, however, be boring and if you stick with it you can count on a new dawn, which is ever so much better than riding off into the sunset, and hope will once again spring eternal.
What I know of change is it is gradual, painful, life altering, absolutely worth it, and a constant. What I know is if I refuse to change there isn’t a snowball’s chance in hell I will be able to live a conscious, authentic, happy life. To live consciously is to not be controlled by the wounding; the wounding creates the context out which the dysfunctional belief patterns grow. Wounds are eternal, you just get better at working with them, you get better at taking their power away and using that power to your benefit. This is psychic alchemy, this is the Great Work, this is the work of the adept. It is ultimately transformative and the province of the Dark Goddess.
Synchronicity does not mean that all of a sudden everything is sunshine lollipops, far, far from it, if anything the ups, downs, and challenges intensify and there were days, and still are, days too numerous to count, when I know for fact that no one would consciously choose to get conscious, or start down the path of the Wise Woman/Mage, because if they really knew what it involved, and that once you started there was no turning back, they’d never do it. At the same time there is no other way I’d rather live. To live consciously takes an emotional courage that cannot be measured. What it takes to get out from under, to free one’s self-esteem, from the cultural and familial paradigm cannot be charted and graphed.
To be more positive in my approach is to lay down my battle mentality, a mentality that made me strong in the areas where I was laughingly weak: time management, planning, strategy, organization, showing up, setting boundary, and standing up for myself. A mentality that was not only key to my survival but intrinsic to my becoming conscious and living consciously. Intuitively, instinctively I knew it was time to release this dear and trusted friend to the dark of the Samhain season; intuitively, instinctively I knew I was going to have to give up the belief that in order to survive I had to be continually plotting my next move. My battle mentality had served it’s purpose, the foundation is secure, the learning was finished, and now it was time for something new……
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I wrote the above in the early 2000’s. The work of consciousness never stops no matter how old you get.
Live loud, love fierce, and suffer no fools. Kat x0x0x0x
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I have moved services (readings, healings, soul counseling) to the Katherine Manaan page - click here - scroll down you’ll find it. x0x0x0x0
Art is by Annie Ovenden
