Shame is the magic-killer

Believe it or not, you are casting spells at every single moment. Your words, your actions, the looks you give yourself in the mirror and the looks you give to other people. Your clothes. Your perfume. Your songs. Your smiles. Your laughter. Your reactivity and resentment. All spells. You constantly communicate with your own individual unconscious

The Game of an All-Powerful Being Write in your journal in response to this prompt: Notice that the making of drama, of theater, of fiction, is one of the great pleasures of human life. From the pettiest gossip to the most refined tragedy, all dramas come from the same exquisite impulse to feel the fun of tension, conflict, uncertainty. Imagine

To change the locus of your agency means to stop aligning yourself with your ego's one-sided choices (the ego tends to want only what it labels “the good stuff”) and to instead align yourself with the kinkier, more adventurous choices of the underlying total divine presence that we all are: the strange, vast Self which enjoys

So “because I have deep fear that other people will hate me” becomes “because I have deep fear that I am unwilling to feel the sensation of other people hating me.”

“Oh no no no, not feeling wrong & bad, anything but that! Please, please, no, I just can't stand feeling . . . mmmmm . . . wrong & bad!”

Persephone suffers through her ordeal (kidnap, rape, control) and then one night, deep in reflection on her miserable fate, she eats the food of the Underworld, seeds from a pomegranate. When she eats the seeds, she accepts the Underworld back into herself (literally ingests it) and remembers that she herself created Pluto by her own choice in

Everything the conscious mind puts in this spotlight—were we to get it—would, we believe, gloriously prove that we're finally and truly the ideal selves that we think we need to be in order to be okay.

The thing about guilt is that most of us continue to use it long after its value expires.