The Magic of Changing Your Field

Something I spend a lot of time mulling over is how does the stuff within our psyches exert an effect on the stuff outside our psyches? 🤔

This question seems integral to the practice of magic, because at least part of the unexplainable effects of spells and rituals and whatnot must, I think, result from the psyche impacting the world around us in ways we don’t understand.

I’d wager there are other mechanisms, too, but today, I want to share a story about the first. A story about a bizarre case of cause and effect…and cats.

Two years ago, I was refilling my bird feeders when a cute kitty came slinking out from beneath our deck. At the time, I was blissfully unaware of the staggering amount of feral cats living pretty much everywhere. 🕶️ Looking through Disney-esque glasses, I thought this was simply an adorable animal in need of my help.

Fast forward two years…

…and that cat—Kittania—had three litters before I was finally able to trap her and get her spayed, during which time I also trapped all of her kittens and had them fixed, too. All but three I was able to rehome, and I took care of the rest, building them a tricked-out house with a sunroof and making sure they never wanted for food and belly rubs.

This might sound fun and snuggly, and at times it certainly was, but I was also completely, utterly fixated on my “feral cat situation.”

I talked about the cats all the damn time.

I worried if we were hiking and came home after their scheduled meal times.

I schemed and plotted ways to safely trap Kittania and finally put an end to the revolving door of kittens.

When one of the cats, Gustav, got injured by an “enemy” cat, I fretted myself sideways, losing sleep and doubling down my efforts to trap the bully, while letting Gustav spend more and more time inside, even though I’m allergic.

I could go on (and on), but I like you too much to subject you to all that, and the point is: I was obsessing over these cats.

About a year and a half in, I finally had a lightbulb moment.

This pattern was a carbon copy for one I’d witnessed in other family members. For ease of writing about this, I’ll choose one and call them “Vince.”

Countless pages of journaling later 📝 (and working with my spirit guides and interpreting my dreams), an insight blazed neon in my mind:

Cats were a handy receptacle for disowned vulnerability—for Vince, and now for me.

If I were to condense four decades of personal history into sound bytes, here are the key notes.

In my family’s wounded system, expressing vulnerability is risky business. Vulnerability has been disowned and shoved into the collective shadow of the family, and if you express it, negative consequences often ensue.

When the ego encounters unconscious material, it experiences it as being highly polarized—it’s either AMAZING or TERRIBLE with no in between. Thus, when disowned family vulnerability arises from the unconscious it’s experienced in very either/or terms.

Either you can be the “weak,” vulnerable one or you can be the “strong,” controlling one. In reality, there’s much more nuance, but one of the hallmarks of a wounded family system is the prevalence of false dichotomies such as this.

Understandably, no one wants to see themselves as being weak (certainly not in a wounded system that equates weakness with permission to mistreat you), and one of the psyche’s strategies when dealing with unconscious material is to project it “out there.”

Ideally, these projections 🪞 ​serve as mirrors​, allowing us to see our otherwise hidden facets of ourselves, but all too commonly, we get stuck in the trap of believing this stuff exists solely “out there” and has nothing to do with us. (Or worse, it’s something we must fight to eradicate until the bitter end, no matter who’s harmed in the process.)

In the latter scenario, our growth grinds to a standstill, because we’re so busy battling ourselves in the guise of outer forces.

Enter the feral cats.

Watching Vince growing up, I saw him project vulnerability onto cats that he then organized his life around protecting and “saving.”

Vulnerability is a vital part of being human. We might think of it as an energetic pathway supplying psychic nutrients required for survival, and the psyche will find any way it can to relate to this disowned material, ensuring this channel isn’t entirely cut off.

By projecting his vulnerability onto the cats 🐈‍⬛ Vince could tend to this channel without recognizing it as his own. And even better, he could view himself as powerful, competent, and do-gooding, all while firmly situating “weakness” elsewhere.

And that is precisely what I was doing with my feral cats.

One aspect of vulnerability, in particular, that I rigidly disowned was the vulnerability of being unable to control my surroundings. The feral cats were an ideal training ground for this, as it turns out, because there were endless things I couldn’t control. (There’s a saying about herding cats for a reason, and then you add in factors like other cats, the weather, dogs escaped from their leashes, and the list goes on.)

Growing up, not being able to control my surroundings was terrifying on multiple levels.

For one, if anything bad happened, the adults weren’t reliably available to help, and two, I was often blamed and punished for not being able to prevent the bad thing in the first place, adding to whatever shittiness was already happening.

Rather than learning that unpredictability and uncontrollable things are a built-in feature of life, I learned to fight against this reality, tooth and claw. I doubled down on my energy-zapping efforts to control everything, working myself into a state of frazzled impatience when reality refused to oblige.

👉 Here’s the piece I want to call particular attention to: Throughout the cat saga, I saw my actions as things that I had to do. I wasn’t acknowledging that I had a choice and, in fact, a responsibility to choose how I was responding.

Instead, the cats, and life in general, were doing this “to me.”

Growing up, Vince saw me as doing the same to him. When I was an infant, he saw me as controlling his life, and this view continued into my adulthood.

Vince was frequently unable to maintain a sense of selfhood in his relationships, one where he was aware of his own needs relative to other people’s, and instead of viewing this as something he might work to heal within himself, he saw other people as forcing him to abdicate his selfhood and needs.

Just like the cats were “forcing” me to organize my entire life around their existence.

When I began to explore why I felt so much pressure to do what I was doing with the cats, I started to tease out my personal values from unconscious patterns, and I saw how, in truth, I had a lot of choice in the matter.

Yes, I wanted to make sure the cats were well fed and sheltered (my personal values), but I didn’t need to organize my entire life around trapping new cats every week, letting cats inside in spite of my allergies, and endlessly discussing the latest cat stressors (unconscious patterns).

💡 This was a real turning point in realizing that, to some degree, I was choosing to ruminate and fixate. In the past, these felt like experiences dictated by outer events: X happens, and then I have to fixate; Y happens, and I must ruminate over it.

Really, though, fixating and ruminating were the limited skillset I possessed when faced with certain situations, and it was my responsibility to build new skills. In this case, I needed better boundaries…with the cats. And I needed to tend to my mental health when setting and maintaining those boundaries led to feeling guilty, antsy, etc.

And now we Arrive at the trippy part of this tale…

Throughout this process, I realized that I also needed to step back, at least for a time, from my relationship with Vince. So, one Saturday I sat down to write a letter, one in which I gave myself the space to clarify what I needed in our relationship and the change I was going to make.

That very day, the cats disappeared.

They went from sitting on the patio for hours at a time, waiting at the sliding doors for their three meals a day, and trying to dart inside at every opportunity…to vanishing as if they’d never existed.

⌛ I waited a week, then another, and finally I began to give away their leftover canned food and treats and toys. Another week passed, and I gave away their house with the little sunroof.

Then, the day I received a response from Vince, the cat I was closest to, Gustav, came back.

In marveling over this with my therapist, she used the phrase “changing your field.”

She observed a seeming connection between the collective unconscious and outer reality, and when we change our relationship to that realm, we shift our field, which can alter outer reality.

I wish I could end this email with a tidy explanation, but I can’t. What I do know is this is far from the first time I’ve taken (often long overdue) action in my life, and things…shift. Not merely in the ordinary cause and effect sense, but in ways weirder and more miraculous than logic alone could capture.

Today on the New Moon in Cancer, I invite you to look within.

🕯️ Create a gentle space in which it feels safe to reflect, and ask yourself what feels ready to change.

Is there a boundary you need to set? An application waiting to be filled out? A project you want to begin? Something you need to say to someone? An identity that needs to be released?

Magic is woven into the fabric of our lives. It occurs outside the bounds of casting spells and pulling tarot cards.

The now-famous words inscribed on the Delphic Temple of Apollo, know thyself, beckon us into a world of cosmic interconnections. A world in which, the more we know ourselves, the more our world changes and expands.

Happy New Moon. 🌑