Happy Full Moon in Aquarius!
I have two Jungian Magic goodies to share with you today. The first is a story of perfectionism, procrastination, and magic. The second is a brand new course! Here’s a sneak peek, and I’ll share more at the end.
Sneaky Procrastination
Two weeks ago I typed The End on the almost-final draft of my romance novel!!! 🥳 💘 I’m now entering the last phase of editing, and in a future post about energy and deadlines, I’ll share my tentative release date.
After finishing the draft, last week it was time to read through the entire manuscript, all 285,439 words of it. Some of the chapters I hadn’t touched in months, and I needed to refresh my sense of the plot, character arcs, pacing, etc.
And oooohwee, did I feel a surge of resistance. 😬
It wasn’t because of the reading itself. My childhood habit of having my nose in a book at the dinner table (and in the bathroom, the waiting room, while standing in line…) hasn’t changed one bit.
No, the issue was a pesky false belief trying to tempt me into ye olde trap of procrastination.
In my wounded family system, a powerful unconscious mantras is: Anything worth doing is worth doing right perfectly.
No, that’s not quite it. More like: Anything you do had better be done perfectly, or don’t bother doing it all. Seriously, just don’t.
And the very specific way this belief was rearing its head was in twisting the purpose of doing a read-through.
In the language of Internal Family Systems, my young inner part who carries this perfectionist rule was viewing the read-through as a test. Is the book perfect? It better be!
Well, it’s definitely not, and I knew this, having just written a whole batch of scenes at the end that were very much not perfect.
But it was the perceived consequence of not having a perfect book on my hands that was the true procrastination-driver. This inner part believed that if we found any mistakes, this would mean the book hadn’t been worth writing in the first place, and we needed to give up.
Give up. Like, stash the entire thing in a drawer and never touch it again? I’m sorry…what??
According to my Google Doc history, I started writing this book back in 2022. (Btw, if you’re writing a book in Google Docs, I highly recommend switching to Scrivener. Holy cow, it’s so much better!)
Somewhere along the way, I created a mood board to deepen my understanding of the world and my characters, and wow, was that ever fun. 😍
I’ve learned so much about my creative process, about writing craft, about what lights me up and drains me dry, and the list goes on—but I’m just supposed to shove the book in a drawer and call it quits??
In the past, this would have made perfect sense, which is utterly baffling from where I’m standing now. 🤨
Know this: If you’re struggling with limiting beliefs or unconscious patterns, no matter how many years you’ve devoted to them, they can change. You can change.
At its core, this belief isn’t really about my book. It’s about me. It links what I do with who I am, and that’s a precarious scaffold to stand on. It makes me brittle and terrified of feedback, and it’s hard to roll up my sleeves and improve my work if, deep down, it feels like an indictment of my worth as a human.
This time, instead of letting this limiting belief bubble in the background and steal five months of my writing time (yep, that’s how long I put the book aside in 2022-23 because I was unconsciously afraid), I gave that inner part a whole lotta love and sat down that very day to read my manuscript.
I transformed 😰 “Oh god, if I find a single error, everything is dooooomed” into 🤠 “I’m so proud of myself for creating this! I’m excited to find opportunities to make this book the best it can be.” Cultivating curiosity and an intrepid energy made the read-through a billion times more fun (and way faster without all the fearful feet-dragging).
Want to know something else?
After reading previous drafts, I was worried that I’d forever find things to nitpick and indefinitely postpone the book’s release. But now, it feels validating to see that in those earlier drafts, yep, there really were plot holes and pacing issues and other stuff that needed to be addressed, and I’ve more or less done that with this draft.
It’s still not perfect, since that’s not achievable IRL, but I’ve told the story I want to tell, and that’s what matters. Once I clean up some of the scenes and do a careful line edit, it will be done enough. (And then I can start writing book two, which I’ve already outlined and am dying to get into—eeeeee!!!! 🤗 )
At the beginning, I said this story had something to do with magic.
The limiting belief I’ve just described and the inner part who harbored this belief—that’s one of my psychological complexes in action. At the heart of every complex is an archetypal image (for reasons we don’t have space to go into here). Given that archetypal images are conduits of the collective unconscious, which is a vast repository of energy, our complexes can be used to supercharge magical operations, like spells and rituals.
But we have to liberate that energy from the complex first, otherwise it exists beyond the bounds of our conscious will (i.e., it’s unconscious). A symbol of the will is the magic wand 🪄 which is used to channel and direct energy. When we transform unconscious material into conscious change, we’ve just used our magic wand.
In my example, I transformed the energy bound up in the belief that I either have to do everything perfectly or I have to give up into the motivation to read a very long manuscript in three days.
But I didn’t stop there. That inner part who was previously in charge of enforcing the limiting belief (for instance, by kicking up the urge to procrastinate so I wouldn’t find out that my book wasn’t perfect) was now available to partner with me magically, and I’ll show you exactly how I did that in a few days, so this doesn’t turn into the world’s longest email.
If you’re ready and raring to liberate potent unconscious energy from your psyche, my Shadow Golem course will show you how.
To help you identify complexes that can keep you stuck in frustrating patterns, I use the archetypal image of the golem, one, because the lore is super duper fascinating from a Jungian Magic POV, and two, because a golem is an excellent metaphor for a psychological complex.
💡 We’ll draw on Jung’s Collected Works and magical theory to understand what we’re dealing with, and then we’ll use the four elements (Air, Water, Fire, and Earth) to heal and integrate the shadow golem so you can transmute self-defeating patterns into power + purpose.
Oh! And this week only, you can use coupon code GOLEMHUGS to take 20% off. Expires Sunday.
See you in class! 🤓
