On today’s New Moon in Aquarius, I want to talk about energy flow and release, and we’ll be exploring this in the context of creativity, magic, and the psyche.
Over the weekend, I hit a snag with the cover design of my novel, and I’m not sure the artist will have it done on the original timeline, which means…I might have to delay the launch. 😞
After working on this book for nearly three years and devoting a lot of time this month to prepping the Kickstarter, this news felt like energy slamming against a brick wall, pressure mounting behind the dam. In the past, I likely would have sought a steam-valve I’d later regret, like getting drunk or buying a truckload of books I couldn’t afford. 🚚 📚 While those tactics invariably generated more problems than they solved, I have more compassion for that urge these days, because…
It’s freakin’ uncomfortable when energy flow is blocked.
As a Structural Integrator (a type of bodyworker), I never met a single person, myself included, who didn’t have numerous holding patterns in their body, many of which were unconscious because these patterns had become their baseline. People were sometimes aware of tension or pain, but frequently elsewhere in their body.
When I think I’m standing in a neutral position, my right hip is actually rotated forward and my right shoulder is held back, one perhaps compensating for the other. When I really, truly pay attention, I can feel the subtle energy drain of this holding pattern and how my entire body, from my head to my toes, has to accommodate.
Interestingly, this holding feels like being caught in a state of waiting for something to happen, which feels connected to the urge to fantasize—more on that shortly. Where do I notice the effects most? Not in my hip or my shoulder, but in my jaw 😬 which will get very tight, and this, in turn, will cause headaches.
When pockets of our body (or psyche) are tasked with remaining frozen in time, stuff starts to hurt.
Let’s look at a similar scenario in the psyche…
Earlier this month, I had a dream that made such an impression, I’ve begun thinking of it as a before-and-after event. When journaling the dream, the memory of receiving a 14-page, hateful letter from a parent last year blazed in my mind. The connection wasn’t immediately clear, so I closed my eyes and sunk back into the “mood” of the dream.
Here’s what arose 👉 This person sent me a nearly identical letter roughly 20 years ago, and it was sobering to wonder how much had actually changed if that strategy still seemed like a good idea to them, all these years later. This dream showed me areas in my own psyche that have been walled off and protected—frozen in time—and if I choose not to explore them, I could be doing the equivalent of sending the same letter 20 years from now.
Just like physical holding patterns, psychic stuckness requires the rest of our system to compensate, finding what are typically energy-intensive workarounds, like my former habit of getting wasted to avoid feeling stuff. Sure, I may have fended off an evening of loneliness and anxiety, but it was an awfully expensive work around.
And like my hip rotation manifesting as jaw pain and headaches, the underlying source of the pain can be tricky to spot. 🔎 We might get distracted by louder areas of discomfort, wondering why our efforts at healing are successful only in the short term, if that.
Changing, whether we’re talking about neuromuscular/fascial patterns or psychic patterns, requires vulnerability. This might sound head-whackingly obvious, but we can’t change while keeping everything precisely the way we want it. Change is like a cat; it might agree to cooperate on some things, but it’s just as likely to dart off and do whatever it pleases.
Stepping into the unknown is super duper vulnerable.
🐈⬛ We might be asked to shift our beliefs about how the world works.
🐈 We might need to let go of long-held identities.
🐈⬛ We might have to behave differently, sometimes radically so.
(And we might not know how to do these things yet, which can feel unsettling and scary.)
🐈 We might disappoint people—we might disappoint ourselves.
One way the psyche attempts to freeze time…
…in hopes of minimizing risk, is by swaddling us in fantasy. I’ve talked about this in previous essays, but fantasy and imagination, as I define them, are quite different. With fantasy, we create a static, controlled scenario, served up on repeat. (This isn’t always a positive scenario, either. A negative fantasy can give us a sense of control, because even if the outcome is bad, in the fantasy, we know what’s coming.)
While imagination is generative—it surprises and sometimes challenges us, ushering in fresh ideas and possibilities—fantasy is a dried-out husk. It’s a sterile environment where we’re no longer subject to the risks and uncertainties inherent in reality.
A creative project is a useful way to see this in action. Releasing something you’ve created into the world can be cringy and scary. If you, like me, have inner parts intent on protecting you from the risk of rejection, shame, and other yucky stuff, they might kick up fantasies to keep you “safely” stuck.
While writing my romance novel, the first draft was a thrilling flurry of creative energy. ⚡❤️🔥 But then I sat down to do revisions, and the reality of getting this book ready to publish slowly sank in. I noticed major issues with the plot (namely: what plot? I need a plot?), and when I shifted one chunk around, ten more chunks became unmoored. The characters were a bit of a mess, and the ending was more a whimper than a bang, and so on it went.
There was a period of five months, maybe six, where I didn’t touch the book at all, because I had so. much. resistance. I didn’t want to be confronted by all the things in need of fixing, or by the gap between my current skills and the skills required to tell the story I wanted to tell, so…I procrastinated.
If an urge to work on the book came up, inner parts would spin out a fantasy where the book was already finished and a wild success—no effort or risk needed! 👏👏
Remember what I said about stuckness in my body generating a nagging sense of waiting for Godot?
I’ve found a strange paradox in stuckness: it serves both to prevent me from moving forward, so I don’t have to confront scary things, but it also generates an intense impatience around this lack of momentum. I might become reactionary, making rash decisions from this state of impatience, and if they blow up in my face (as they often do), that reinforces the fear of taking action, which leads to more stuckness, and around and around it goes…
This brings us back to energy flow.
Creativity is about, well, creating something, and part of that process is releasing that thing into the world. You don’t necessarily have to do this in a public sense—you might be creating something for your private enjoyment—but there is nonetheless a threshold between “this exists solely in here” and “this now exists in the world.”
When we have a resistance to the releasing phase, we’ll often experience many of the things I’ve described, from a sense of stuckness to a reactionary speed-release that can lead to more protective stuckness.
This plays out in magic as well. If we cast a spell but don’t release the energy, perhaps in the form of trying to micromanage how the spell unfolds, it’s unlikely to work. We’ve halted the flow; our spell is in a holding pattern.
This can happen in subtle ways: Perhaps we think we’re letting the spell do its thing, but if life starts changing in uncomfortable ways, we ignore or resist. For instance, a money spell delivers a job opportunity, but we discount it so we can stick with what we know, and the energy grinds to a halt. ⛔
In my personal practice, I’ve been paying attention to habits that cluster around a sense of stuckness. I asked myself, When I’m feeling bored, restless, impatient, or frustrated, what do I tend to do?
Aside from the urge to buy books, which, I’ve learned, is one way my inner parts simulate a feeling of progress, fantasy is my biggest indicator of stuckness. If the urge to fantasize is more frequent, I’m likely feeling pretty stuck, even if I’m not consciously aware of it (like that hip tension manifesting as jaw pain).
On days when it feels harder to resist the urge to fantasize, what’s helping is to recognize and name this struggle, often by saying it out loud—one of the benefits of working from home. When I do, it’s like I’m standing with one foot in the fantasy, one foot out, because now I’m aware the fantasy is unfolding rather than being wholly immersed.
I also get useful intel from watching the inner drama; it’s a bit like lucid dreaming. I can get curious about the elements the fantasy dishes up—why these elements, in particular? Do they help me cultivate or avoid a particular feeling? Help me stay motivated? Help me procrastinate? 🧐
Often my fantasies are a way of mimicking a satisfying release of energy without the risk—for instance, getting to launch a book, but without the chance of people not buying it, not liking it, etc.
Fantasy can also be a way to speed up time, if only in my mind. Instead of having to put in consistent effort, say, by marketing and writing more books and giving these efforts time to blossom, the fantasy allows me to fast-forward to the point when all of this stuff is already working.
✨ With your own habits, interesting things can arise when you get curious:
- What need is this habit (or story that I tell myself) attempting to meet?
- Is it effective?
- Does it come with any costs or downsides?
- What am I afraid I’ll lose if I relinquish this habit or story?
For instance, I learned that my inner system is afraid that if I give up fantasies, I’ll lose all sense that the world can be a safe, welcoming place.
Based on childhood conditioning, a false dichotomy was established: Either the world is totally safe and welcoming or I’m living in a world as described by family members who use cynicism as a shield. In that world, there’s no point in doing anything creatively vulnerable, because you’re guaranteed to be humiliated and destroyed. (And if you are destroyed, well, it’s your fault—you were warned! Cheery, eh?)
The irony is that living in fantasy makes me more fragile in the face of criticism. Instead of learning how to support myself even when things don’t go exactly how I’d hoped (i.e., life), the fantasy imprisons me in an illusion where I never have to deal with that.
♒ Aquarius is a sign of change, so we can ride these currents toward new horizons. With Aquarius’ wind in our sails, we’re more apt to see change as positive and exciting—take advantage!
♂️We’re still in Mars retrograde, so it’s not uncommon to experience stuckness more acutely, that sense of action, energy, and drive being road-blocked.
Use these energies in tandem: Let the stuckness draw your awareness to those areas that are ready for change.
Happy New Moon! 🌑
P.S. If you follow my romance novel Kickstarter, you’ll be the first to know when it launches! And as part of the launch, I’ll be offering a companion tarot guide with practices you can do IRL.
