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Being placed on a pedestal in pagan communities simply for being queer is certainly not the same as being vilified, but it is yet another form of othering that results in isolation. It
spiritual bypassing, or using spiritual ideas to avoid anything difficult or painful to understand or process.
In these groups, all are expected to work within a heteronormative and cisnormative framework for spirituality. These frameworks were developed by straight cis people.
invisibilizing
Just as the spiritual communities are not utopias, collections of people based on orientation or identity can also try to push away or erase differences.
wyrd-ness
This book is about the blooms that have erupted as a form of resistance. They are a chance to glimpse the diversity of practices and experiences of queer folks that rise above the voices that say that we do not exist. We do exist. We’ve always existed. We’re here, we’re queer, and we are magical.
intersectional populations who are not only queer peoples (self-defined in a broad set of criteria by those participating), but those who practice magic, magick, or magics.
attempt towards a decolonization of language and the false perception that only academic, often white, voices, are the “right” way to communicate information. Our contributors were asked to speak from their authentic voices, their home truths, and in their free and genuine style. By doing so, some authors may resonate more than others. We hope that in this rainbow of voices, there will be some that connect with you on your journey.
Calling myself a chaos magician was my first step toward breaking away from the divine binary.
Thus began my identity as a chaos magician, a label I chose because my rituals were bare bones in form and appealed to no deity beyond a wild, undefined spirit I could not yet truly grasp.
As with every religion, Jewish followers split off into different paths of ritual and belief, but the two constants are that god is a mystery, and you must study not to discover the ultimate answers, but to build a connection with god even though so many questions remain.
God is inconstant and fleeting. It is through ritual, meditation, communing with nature, and our connection to other people that we are able to touch the divine. Each of us is left to figure out how to touch this power in our own way. To me it seems very American that I am a genderqueer Jew who practices magic and whose philosophy on god comes from a British atheist who died almost two hundred years ago.
He gives no path for holding onto a connection with the divine, but that is where ritual provides framework. Simply going into sacred natural space can create a sense of divine awe, but casting a circle, calling the quarters, and building energy all work toward ensuring a connection with the divine.
It is not a named god or goddess that creates open-minded reverie, the energy needed to do magical work, but a connection to the natural world that helps us bridge to higher planes.
For purposes of invocation in a speicific ritual, gods are named. But this should always be seen as a particularizing efficacy to encourage focus for the will. Reverie and playfulness call No Name, the Unborn, The Undifferentiated, the Encompassing.
In my path, the anthropomorphization of the divine is a tool, but it can also be a barrier to growth and knowledge. The eventual goal is to be able to reach the divine in Mystery, broken free of my own preconceived notions.
Everything is sacred. Everything is holy. Everything that exists makes up the whole of god, and therefore, god encompasses all and nothing, male and female and neither.
The ENCOMPASSING
Das Umgreifende
It’s so common for us to choose our identity and our desire to belong over choosing to feel the truth of our sensations. Every time we trust our sensations and dare to communicate about them, we move towards liberation. We give permission to ourselves and everyone around us to belong simply because we exist, not because of our identity. If we can find the courageous experience of belonging simply because we exist, then we can be free to move through sensations and identities in a dynamic, nuanced, and expansive way. When we focus on our physical sensations and not on our social identities, we
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Sensation anchors us through the death and rebirth of who we are and who we are to each other.
“energetic cock,”
Be open to the possibility of your body and mind shifting.
My social identity was not big enough to contain the amount of sensations my body was feeling.
Many of us discover a new way of being, dressing, and acting, and we like it. But we don’t allow ourselves to be different and to let go of who we used to be. Letting go often means recasting our life and letting relationships transform with the people who have been close to us but who cannot companion us in our new way of being.
ERASING PERSONAL HISTORY
Our life intention, our soul purpose, lives in a realm of who we are that is not based in identity or limitations. We have the honor and opportunity to move this knowing of who we are from visionary reality into physical reality through our bodies.
Jaspers’ notion of possible Existenz
If we look at what is happening on the level of social identity we may reduce the #metoo movement to a fight between women and men, or between victims and perpetrators. But if we are open to attuning to our sensations rather than these identities we may discover something more liberating. The collective is ready for a healthier relationship to sex, gender, and power. If we invite a gender transcendence or a letting-go of the binary we can see that a lineage of trauma is coming into the light so we can acknowledge how pervasive it is and we can heal it in solidarity.
#metoo as a time to do more than reify the “natural” distinction between women and men (heteronormativity and cisnormativity) or the “legal” distinction between victims and perpetrators. Transgressive integration rather than adaptive reduction.
when Tarana Burke started the #metoo movement the focus was not about disclosure but what happens after disclosure. The purpose was to decentralize perpetrators and decentralize white powerful men so we could put our attention on the people who experienced a violation. We are called to create something more inspired and sustainable than “victimhood wearing the cloak of social liberation,” a phrase created by kink educator Om Rupani.
The body wants to heal. The spirit wants to heal. The parts of us that are ready to feel and heal are not very interested in who might be to blame. The practice of attuning to our sensations rather than our identity could not be more vital than it is now. Our healing thrives when we can focus attention on our sensations. Our healing does not depend on what happens to the people who have been called out. As much as we may want them to “get it,” or to be held accountable, our healing does not belong to their remorse or awareness.
The identity of victim can alter or limit the ability to perceive healing because it positions the healing as dependent on an acknowledgement, action, or apology from another person who committed the violation.
I purposefully do not want to use the nouns “perpetrator” or “oppressor” because we cannot reduce someone’s identity to an action they took in the same way that we do not want to reduce someone to a “victim.”
Gender is an invitation to make beauty out of our dynamic self-alignment.
Inclusivity recognizes that we as human beings can access multiple identities.
The company we keep impacts our feedback loop with our body. The more we are around people who give us permission to express ourselves with love, the easier it is to feel our truth.
This trembling and shaking is how transformation and expansion express themselves in our physical body. It’s also what releases trauma from our nervous system. When
Physical shaking like any animal releases tension built up in the muscles
Trauma is when the nervous system goes into fight, flight, or freeze, and sensation can no longer be tracked, integrated, and responded to with clarity and ease. This distinction comes from Peter Levine, the founder of Somatic Experiencing. Releasing trauma in the body allows integration when the thoughts, feelings, sensations, and expression are in communication and sync.
Releasing trauma as integration with circumstance
