#2: The Magician
Hello magical beings, it’s more than 100 of you now! Feel free to reply to this email, or comment on Substack if you feel like it. It will most definitely make me feel good and important. Let’s jump straight in!
Happiness, purpose, where to find it? I was convinced that once I have all the time in the world to just be creative and have quality days where I feel in the flow and emerged in my craft I would be happy. Creativity can certainly bring you happiness, but I have come to realise that we need a few other ingredients in the mix too. It needs a consistent spiritual practice to give it meaning. Otherwise it turns into another thing that burns you out and another field the ego can take over. On the other hand being emerged only in the spiritual and forgetting about the material world brings a similar danger of emptiness. The golden place is somewhere in the middle (like all things in life). Awareness of the spiritual combined with the action of doing something that you love is where the real magic happens.
Speaking of magic this is exactly what the tarot card The Magician teaches us. One arm stretch to the Universe, other hand pointing down to the Earth. A sweet spot of connection between the spiritual realm and the material world. Converting energy into matter. The sign of infinity and the ouroboros around his waste are symbols of ultimate potential.
Think of spiritual practice like '“prep”. It’s a ritual that gets the juices flowing, like a warrior before a battle, or like a make up artist that needs to moisturise and prep the skin before applying the makeup. Breath, meditate and then go and do whatever you need to do so you can sink into your craft even deeper. Like Abraham Hicks says:
Turned in, tapped in, turned on.
Spiritual practice can be a lot of things and I’m sure I will explore a few of them in this newsletter, but today I want to share with you something I discovered during meditation this morning. Something through the technique of noting.
Mental noting is a mindfulness meditation technique which aims to label experiences as they arise. In practice, this means using a single word to describe what one is experiencing in the current moment, for example "warmth", "excitement", "resisting", etc.
So I was meditating this morning and managed to note something I have definitely experienced before, but haven’t necessary managed to note as an experience. I could really see my thoughts separating from my being, like oil separates from water. I was a calm observer of the mind, rather than the other way around. And then something interesting happened. Random words and familiar voices were floating around my head with no purpose- friends, strangers, accents, politicians. Non of them were mine. One of the main teachings of meditation is to recognise that you are not your thoughts and to let yourself quietly watch them. However this time I managed to note this other layer, not just the thoughts of my own mind “don’t forget to do this and that”, but other thoughts that had nothing to do with me directly. Interesting right?! So I sit there and watch someone laughing, the word ‘iPad’, wear your mask, hurry up, how old are you?, just floating around my head like plastic bags in the air, which later on end up hanging on a tree or polluting a beautiful meadow. What if we started to think of our minds as beautiful meadows? Why are we never cleaning them, protecting them and planting beautiful flowers?. Crazy right. We let other people and the world pollute them, mould them and dump shit. After this serious noting my whole being realised/felt how much the mind and the emotional state are shaped by the environment. Daily. Of course we can say “well you need to surround yourself only with positive things and create a healthy environment” but life doesn’t work like that, does it haha. However something we can do is accept it’s our duty to ‘clean uptake mess’ with meditation so we can go an be our best, authentic and as much as possible not conditioned selves. Clean the slate only then go and live your big life like The Magician.
Some useful links:
👽 Great podcast about how to fix your FOCUS recommended by my dear friend Stephanie ( @_giraffed )
👽 Eckhart Tolle talking about meditation. This one opened my eyes a lot.
👽 Cymande’s album from 1972
👽 If you are in London come see my band play on the 9th of February. Tickets
Peace and love,
Dessy