Taking the Stairs

You walk into a dark stairwell and the door slams shut behind you. You panic! You stand there with no way out; frozen to the spot…numb. It’s pitch black, you can’t see anything. You can’t hear anything, except the loud fearful thoughts in your head. “What do I do now? Where am I? Where am I going? I am lost. I am scared. How did I get here? I can’t do this. Why did this happen to me? Who is going to rescue me?” And after screaming and fighting and denying that it is really happening, you realize no one is coming to save you.

So you finally start moving forward and up the stairs. The stairs are steep, some are very unstable and you feel like you could fall through them at any time and back down to the bottom. And sometimes you do trip and fall on them, especially when you start going too fast and try to miss some steps in order to get to the top sooner.

You still can’t see where that is though, you still don’t know where you are going and your thoughts get louder and your imagination more wild with images of creatures that could come out and hurt you at any time. So loud are the voices in your head and so vivid the images, that they have now become your reality…they are real. You panic more from this false reality you have created with your thoughts and imagination.

The stairs seem to go on forever. You have become so weak and you resign yourself to believing that you are stuck here forever in this dark, scary stairwell, with no way out. So much energy wasted on your fear-filled, delusional thoughts. You are so caught up in your own delusions and fears, in fact, that you can’t hear the laughter that is coming from the top of the stairs.

Finally as you sit down, exhausted from all your fighting and denying of what is, your mind starts to quiet down and you begin to hear faint voices, perhaps familiar voices of friends, coming from above you. You find some hope and you get back up and start climbing the stairs again. Yes, you continue to meet more fears along the way, but you keep going towards the voices above you. It feels like an eternity, and then you finally reach your destination.

A door is opened. There is a party going on with people you know.

They toast you – the Guest of Honour! Still shaken and confused by your journey, you walk up to a friend and she puts her arms around you and smiles. She knows what you know – the way to the light isn’t easy.

Then, you are given gifts: Clarity. Truth. Authenticity.



Something I read: You have been given a gift of seeing clearly while others around you may not. Allow others their reality, even if it differs from yours. If they are in denial, this is a time to honor that.

Allowing others their process is the best gift you can give someone.

Meet my Inner Goddess

I have found my Inner Goddess. This is the Goddess that lives within me. She speaks of my experience and my process. A feeling and a knowing I have had with me my whole life.

Queen of the Night, Goddess of the Dark Moon, Guardian of the Underworld

The triple-faced Hekate is one of the most ancient images from a pre-Greek stratum of mythology and an original embodiment of the Great Triple Goddess. She is most often linked with the dark of the moon and presides over magic, ritual, prophetic vision, childbirth, death, the underworld, and the secrets of regeneration.

Gifts of Hekate: Vision, Magic, and Regeneration

Hekate is every woman's potential as a witch, seer, medium, healer.

Guardian of the Unconscious

Hekate stands at the crossroads of our unconscious. As she watches us approach she can see both backward and forward into our lives. When Hekate is honored she bestows the gifts of inspiration, vision, magic, and regeneration. However, when we reject and deny Hekate, her shadow side manifests as madness, stupor, and stagnation. Her creative activity takes place in the inner world. As Dark Moon Goddess of the dead, she not only represents the destructive side of life, but also the necessary forces that make creativity, growth, and healing possible. The paradoxical function of this goddess of the moonlit crossroads is to pierce the darkness.

As the Queen of the Underworld, Hekate is a guardian figure of the unconscious. She enables us to converse with the spirit and thus is mistress of all that lives in the hidden parts of the psyche. This Goddess of the Dark Moon holds the key that unlocks the door to the way down, and she bears the torch that illuminates both the treasures and terrors of the unconscious. Hekate guides us through this dark spirit world wherein we can receive a revelation. She then shows us that the way out is to ride on a surge of renewal.

Hekate may inspire us with a vision, insight, or prophetic foretelling, but the way to her wisdom most often involves a descent into the underworld of our unconscious. When Hekate comes upon us we can experience her as a plunge into darkness. She is often present in our nightly sleep and casts her glow to illumine our dreams. She is also hovering over us when we are immobilized in long, sleeplike stupors of addiction, depression or blocked creative energy. During times of drastic change, when we face the loss and death of that which gave our life structure and purpose, Hekate is there. And when we encounter her through the vast transpersonal realms of the collective unconscious, her light can show us God/dess or the Devil as she fills us with divine inspiration or deluded madness. Hekate guides us whenever we do our inner work through both spiritual and psychological processes.

The symbolic images found in our dreams are messages from Hekate. They show us in visual form the drama of our internal personalities and the issues that live in the unconscious, as well as the shape of the future and the delusions of our minds.

Hekate embodies the cycle of death and renewal. Death always brings us face-to-face with our fears of the unknown, which surface during these critical crises of our lives. The process of renewal necessitates change and the sacrifice or letting go of the old. As our life forms begin to deteriorate, the phosphorescent light of decay begins to glow and illumines the landscape of our inner darkness.

This vast transpersonal dimension contains both positive and negative energies, which are constantly changing and shifting back and forth into one another, and here we can easily lose our sense of individual self who has an identity, purpose, and direction. Because the shape of things keeps changing in these more fluid realms and we do not understand what is happening to us, we can be filled with fear, anxiety, and feel as if we are going mad. There is a sense that we are out of control, this can't really be happening to us, everything seems unreal. A descent into what appears like madness may often be involved in the coming to terms with this ancient Triple Goddess.

Incubation Period

Hekate also suggests the motif of incubation as we go down deeper still into the darkness of unconscious sleep as a necessary step in the cycle of transformation and renewal. The silence, stillness, and solitude that descends and envelops us in a cocoon of what seems like non-being. This is a space of inactivity and unknowing when nothing seems to be happening. Because Western culture emphasizes action and productivity and devalues those times of lying fallow and waiting for what one knows not, we sometimes label Hekate's incubation periods as being immobilized, getting stuck, being in limbo, spacing out, depression, despair, feeling numb, blank, or frozen.

Journey of Becoming

This time encompasses the formless void in the transformation cycle when what was, is no longer and what is to be has not yet appeared. Like the ebb tide, which is the still pause between the tidal Waters going out and those coming in, this extreme stage generally occurs prior to the creative freeing of bound-up energy. The still pause of nonactivity is Hekate's contribution to the journey of becoming.

Hekate teaches us that the way to the vision that inspires renewal is to be found in moving through the darkness. As we enter into Hekate's realm, we must confront and come to terms with the dark, unconscious side of our inner nature. If we are to receive her gift of vision and renewal, we must face this Dark Goddess within ourselves, honor, praise, and make our peace with her. By giving her our trust as guardian of our unconscious and surrendering to her process, we can allow ourselves to grow into an awareness of the rich realm of our personal underworld.

Set the Dark Alight

The passage from darkness to light. 

The Winter Solstice – daylight is the shortest due to the tilt of our planet, leaning it the furthest away from the sun - occurs on December 21^st.

The longest night of the year has long been celebrated and heralded as a turning point – the day that marks the return of the sun. The rebirth of the sun.

In darkness we turn inward and reflect on the past year – our joys and our challenges and garner the lessons learned. This earthly shift is the perfect time for creating and accepting change, and realizing our personal growth over the past year. Our own rebirth of sorts.  

Many cultures the world over perform solstice ceremonies. At their root: an ancient fear that the failing light would never return unless humans intervened with anxious vigil or antic celebration. In darkness we must face ourselves, our fears – the monsters in the dark and we must intervene with anxious vigil so the light can enter and dispel our darkness.

A celebration of changing dark into light. Celebrate who we are, our lives and all of our lessons.

The Winter Solstice is a time to release our fears, our pains and let go of our difficulties and as we do, the light of a new day can enter. A perfect time to set positive intentions for the year ahead.

Trust. Faith. Light. 
This is the meaning and magic of the Winter Solstice. 

Trust that at the very darkest moment, the light will start to return. 

A Winter's Night song

One day, if you are lucky...

...you will be in pain.

Why do we hang on so long after someone is gone or something is done? We go over and over it in our heads, rehashing the conversations, what we said, what they said, what we should have said. Keeping the story alive. Giving the “sad” story more power than it had even to begin with. We feed the demons, feed the sadness, feed the pain, feed our own story that we created a long time ago about who we are. Or rather, who we believe we are. Our conditioned self, the role we played in our family, our patterns of behavior, our way of coping and surviving in our family structure. And we take these roles and wounds out into the world, projecting them everywhere and on to everyone, especially in our intimate relationships. 

Whether we want to admit or not, or whether we are even aware of it, most of us recreate our family patterns in our relationships. We approach love the same way we did as children, whether that is through shutting down, acting out, seeking constant approval or trying to be really good to prove our worth. We keep chasing that wound. Searching out there so we can feel good in here.

And it works for a while; all the same familiar patterns over and over again feels strangely comforting, feels like home, feels like what you know even if it isn’t healthy. 

But one day if you are lucky, you will hurt so much that you will no longer be able to bear the pain of living these old beliefs, behaving from your conditioned self and allowing that wounded child to steer the wheel that keeps you from the path of finding who you really are. Keeps you from owning your own power and from living from that space. The very space that will provide you with what you are seeking out there for: love…happiness. 

One day, if you are lucky, you will be cracked open so wide that you will need to look inside and from there the real you will begin to emerge.