August 2026

Getting Organized to Strategically Manifest Your Dreams.

How You May Be Stealing Your Joy.

I’ve been thinking a lot about compensation injuries. 

When we hurt a part of ourselves, it doesn’t — rather, it cannot — remain in isolation as we continue to move forward. Granted, it would be different if we could stay in bed and not force ourselves to carry on with life despite the pain, but that is rarely our luck in late-stage capitalism. So, when injured, other parts of ourselves will rally and take on the burden of that tender or non-functional part. This may be fine in the short term, but the longer we are forced to bend or limp or cringe around a pain, and worse still if that new movement becomes a habit, the more those helper parts begin to sustain their own injuries.

On a physical level, this is easy to understand. Vesper recently suffered a pain in her foot associated with a deep nerve, likely from a certain standing position she repeatedly assumed at work, and received a support pad to wear around the ball of her foot to alleviate the pressure on that nerve. The first day or two, it helped. No questions, no concerns. A week in, wearing the pad started to hurt, because it was putting unusual pressure on other parts of her foot, and she had to struggle to keep her gait “normal” while the original injury recovered.

In creating space for one part of ourselves to heal or simply go into hibernation, other parts must step up to compensate. This is part of the miraculous nature of the human body and the human spirit. We are a team unto ourselves, and so incredibly, intimately intertwined, mind and body and soul and emotions. The knee bone is connected to the shin bone, which is somehow, eventually, connected to the meaning of life.

It isn’t so much “the body keeps the score” like a computer stores data, as “the body is the score”, as in our bodies (mental, physical, neurological, spiritual) are fundamentally shaped by surviving our traumas.

Sometimes it's a patch of our skin that toughened up due to friction or abuse. Sometimes it’s a protective numbness around any mention of worth, or love, or our body weight. As we may be able to soften up that patch of skin with oils and care, we are able to interview and deconstruct that numbness in order to whole-heartedly reconnect with worth, and love, and the way we view our bodies despite the pain we have experienced in the past.

This reframe isn’t exactly a critique of the famous book “The Body Keeps the Score,” which has been monumental in understanding the lasting effects of trauma, but an ongoing concern we see with a spiritual community obsessed with “purging” old or evil energies in order to “return” to a mythical baseline of pure “natural” health.

The narrative of and demand for purging is constant on any metaphysical social media. Having trouble at work? It must be old patterns of self-worth holding you back. Purge. New relationship not going exactly the way you hoped? Your ex is tugging on that soul tie again. Release and purge it so you can move forward unencumbered. Bad luck? Must be the evil eye. Purge.

Not only does this mindset keep you chasing something that doesn’t exist (which attracts manipulators and money-makers like flies, by the way), it instills a wellness model of contamination and fear and paranoia, when most would benefit from focusing on growth and investment and resilience.

Purging does happen, it’s a very real thing especially when “other” energies get into the mix, but in spiritual communities it’s spoken about like the Final Boss of vomiting. You dig deep, excise the pain, push the soul sickness out and flush that mess away and hopefully never think of it again. That’s the hope, that’s the plan, because what should be left is your True Self before you got fucked up.

Right? … Right?

This is where it gets a little Ship of Theseus. Was there a You before trauma? If the trauma happened during your formative years, especially with your parents, where is your baseline? Much like the conservative right, what are we seeking to Return to — and how much of it is an unattainable fantasy that just gives you permission to loudly sulk in your current circumstances and pay for other people to take your pain away? If you were some variety of undiagnosed neurodivergent as a child and built much of your personality around protective masking to get along in society, who the fuck are you, actually? 

Haha, hi, that last one is me, Nico. We’re figuring out some things over here. It’s uncomfortable and necessary aaaaand we’re doing it.

The “just get it out” contamination model of trauma falters on a vital point: we are systems, and a pain in one of our parts necessitates a change in all of our parts. We must hold respect for those intertwined systems and the chains of compensation that trigger when a deep injury is sustained. You can’t just vomit out what happened to you and be done with it, because your very shape had been changed to accept, or deny, or just experience that terrible event, and you have to deal with that. 

You changed, and you will have to change again — not necessarily change back, but change forward. You must change in the direction you want to go, which requires the ability to hope and dream. That’s extraordinarily difficult to do from the bottom of a deep well, we know … but at least you know you’re in a well now.

To all of this, we ask: Where is the integration? Part of respecting our experiences means placing our pain into context: why we suffer from patterns of low self-worth, or fear about a relationship not proceeding a certain way, or even terror of being menaced from outside. 

Instead of purging old, bad data to return to a “natural, healthy” baseline, we must understand and integrate our shadows and then strive to reshape ourselves, like clay, with new, good experiences.

After misplacing (and finding) an expensive piece of technology, a friend of mine bemoaned that he illogically expected his father to swoop down out of nowhere and scream at him for being irresponsible. He’s almost 40 and we were on vacation, very far away from said father. He is otherwise estranged from his parents. I reasoned that those were the last and loudest scripts he had from his father. Until he could update them with something different, the old ones would keep running in parallel to the fears he already had (losing a valuable piece of tech).

A remediation of their relationship isn’t immediately likely, so the best approach would be placing those scripts back into context: he was a child, powerless and dependent, and his parents’ anger made life very hard for him at the time. 

Thankfully, it is no longer that time. My friend has control over his life and his belongings now, and his father functionally has no say in either. There was no punishment waiting for him if he lost the gadget, and no one waiting to judge his moral character. The worst that could happen was actually losing the gadget, which, while disappointing and frustrating, isn’t the end of the world. Perspective is the most vital gift of context, and it helps us assign painful emotions to their contexts with the realization that they are no longer a relevant, breathing factor in our current lives.

For better or for worse, we are everything that has happened to us. We are physical beings in a physical realm, and we are going to change shape as we go through life. Imagining that all humans have some platonic, pristine, unhurt form that is waiting to be excavated from dung-piles of trauma and ancestral curses and troublesome soul ties is disheartening at best and grounds for psychosis at worst.

It’s true that there are times where we feel lost. Maybe nothing bad is happening to us, but maybe nothing good is, either. These are the times when we can feel the shards of what-ifs floating around inside of us, bumping into frayed connections and other storylines waiting to be put to bed. We all lose touch with ourselves — what we want, why we want it, or if we want it enough to enter the unknown. During these times of deep existential confusion, I sit with plant medicine.

Mushroom medicine can be a beautiful integrator. It is connection incarnate, and often begins by connecting you with your body and reminding you that wholeness is your right as an embodied being … not something you find in another person or a promotion or another level of Reiki teaching. Mushrooms are our ancestors, and their deep knowledge of balance and systems is magnificent. They also understand that we are parts of larger systems, and true balance and belonging is only achieved when we move with respect for the systems that we are a part of, as well as the systems within us.

Truth is a fractal. Like DNA, everything we are is present in every part of us. You can view it as a miracle, consistently calling you back to yourself, or a burden, consisting of the truly inescapable work required to be free. It’s both, depending on the day. That’s okay.

Today and every day forward, I wish you more joy and less pain, as long as you cherish your joy and listen to your pain. Both are teachers, and we are eternal students.

The central claim of astrology is that the movements of the planets affect our lives on earth. This is a claim with no scientific evidence to support it. (Whatever you may have seen on TikTok, I promise there really isn’t.) Setting aside questions of if there ever could be such evidence, or if this is even the kind of question best answered by science, I would like to ask a more fundamental question: Does it matter?

Yes, there is reason to be skeptical if the claims of astrology are literally true, in the way that gravity or 2 + 2 = 4 are literally true. (Which isn’t to say that we know they are not true, merely that we don’t know with certainty that they are.) But does this ambiguity make astrology a less powerful tool? That depends on how you’re using it, and how you understand the value it provides.

If you aim to use astrology to make very specific future predictions — think a specific thing happening at a specific time on a specific day — then yes, it would matter whether its central claims are true. After all, whether something has specific predictive power is a scientific question that can be empirically answered. But that’s not really a question we’re concerned with in our practice, as while the planets have some predictive power, as one influence among many, they are much more beneficially understood as guides to spiritual growth.

Our practice focuses on using the planets as guides for breaking down and understanding the various forces acting in our lives. They are framing devices, stories, lenses that allow us to focus on specific aspects of our identity/existence so we can acknowledge, work with, and integrate the various parts of ourselves and our journeys. In understanding these aspects, we can find balance; in balancing these planetary energies, we can build a life of ease and joy.

With this as your primary goal, you can see how the question of “why” astrology works becomes far less important than the question of “how” it can work in your life. And the same can be true for many of our spiritual concepts. Do the gods literally exist? Is the energy we’re working with measurable and able to be registered by scientific instruments? Does it matter? The subconscious mind doesn’t care how or why the ritual is working, just that it’s working. Ritual is an experience, and you can have that experience no matter what framework or explanation you bring to “make sense” of the ritual. 

If we reframe our understanding of our spiritual practices in this way, we can free ourselves from the question of “proof” or of literal, empirical truth, and focus on the actual impact and meaning-making of these practices. We can take the time and energy we might otherwise spend debating with ourselves and others, and spend it on improving our lives.

If we view astrology or any other practice as a tool and not some rigid natural law or a dictate from God, we can keep a healthy relation to it. Let it be useful, but not all consuming. Let it free you to make progress, not stifle you with restrictions or fears. And do not let any one practice — and especially any one teacher — become the end all be all of your spiritual life, just as you should not let spiritual pursuits take over every aspect of your life in general.

It’s all about balance. Always.

In the end, astrology and tarot and ritual and all of these spiritual practices are powerful tools with real, meaningful impacts on people’s lives. The stories we tell about why they work are perhaps the least important or interesting things about them.

However, we must be careful not to go too far in the opposite direction. It is all too easy in our individualistic modern Western society to view spiritual practices as just more atomistic individual tools that can be cherry picked and added ad hoc into your life in an attempt to “optimize.” But spiritual practices will always be most effective if they are understood and practiced in context, as part of a full spiritual belief system.

That’s not to say you can’t get anything out of them by trying them out without much background knowledge or experience. That’s often how people get started or find new aspects of spirituality they are interested in exploring. And it’s not to say that you need to adhere to any one specific belief system to get the most out of these practices. But all of them were developed as part of complete, holistic philosophies and religious teachings, and you will not be able to go beyond the surface level of these practices if you do not begin to develop your own overarching philosophy.

You will get more from your spiritual pursuits if you don’t approach it as a buffet line, and instead work to create a coherent and holistic system of beliefs and practices, which will require thought and study – and most likely other people. We need spiritual communities, not just loose networks of individual practitioners reinventing the wheel. In our effort to abandon the power structures and hegemony of The Church, which is certainly a good thing, we’ve also lost many of the essential benefits of an organized community and a shared history. 

I believe we can get back many of the benefits of organized religion and community belief/practice without forfeiting our freedom or recreating abusive power structures. Of course, we’re all still experimenting with what exactly that will look like, and what kinds of communities we can build to accomplish it. The first step that we can do as individuals is to reframe our approach to spiritual practices to focus on the ways they are interconnected, both within our overall network of beliefs and within our communities.

The rest will come together in the way we care for each other and what we value — an answer that also finds its best expression in the “how”, not the “why” of it.

In honor of Dolly Parton, please consider checking out the Imagination Library, her nonprofit that donates books to children from birth to age five. You can sign up your child to receive books or donate to support the project.

While we are working on our own spiritual growth and integration, we must not forget about the world around us and the ongoing overlapping tragedies affecting our siblings. We will let the description of this collected work speak for itself:

“"If I must die, let it bring hope, let it be a tale."

This rich, elegiac compilation of work from the late Palestinian poet and professor, Refaat Alareer, brings together his marvelous poetry and deeply human writing about literature, teaching, politics, and family.

The renowned poet and literature professor Refaat Alareer was killed by an Israeli airstrike in Gaza City alongside his brother, sister, and nephews in December 2023. He was just forty-four years old, but had already established a worldwide reputation that was further enhanced when, in the wake of his death, the poem that gives this book its title became a global sensation. "If I Must Die" is included here, alongside Refaat's other poetry.

Refaat wrote extensively about a range of topics: teaching Shakespeare and the way Shylock could be appreciated by young Palestinian students; the horrors of living under repeated brutal assaults in Gaza, one of which, in 2014, killed another of his brothers; and the generosity of Palestinians to each other, fighting, in the face of it all, to be the one paying at the supermarket checkout.

Such pieces, some never before published, have been curated here by one of Refaat's closest friends and collaborators. This collection forms a fitting testament to a remarkable writer, educator, and activist, one whose voice will not be silenced by death but will continue to assert the power of learning and humanism in the face of barbarity.”

[Click the image of the book to follow our affiliate link to Bookshop.org, which will allow you to purchase the book while benefiting your local bookshop, and will provide us a small affiliate fee if you purchase.]