A spring prayer & a free offering
The eve of our Spring Equinox ritual at the Body & Soul Sanctuary brought a fresh visitation of rain.
I stood at my altar in my office, having cleared it completely for a full reset, lit incense, and cracked the window to hear and smell the wet air.
Stepping beyond mere professional space-holding—while doing ritual in private—and into welcoming others into my sacred altar space has not been a small thing.
I have often felt like the Easter hare who is still half-bird, laying rainbow eggs while learning to scavenge, lope, and nibble grass on the ground. Integrating the part of me that is fully unfettered with the part that carries the weight of suffering has been a continuous journey. Sometimes it’s hard to know if it has been fruitful. Are the rainbow eggs doing anything other than sitting around, merely decorative?
Shedding skins of conditioning, questioning habits, beliefs, and ways of operating, and waking up to the unconscious ways culture promotes mis-truths, has been an uncovering both external and internal—and has heightened my desire to ensure that what I do here has substance, not mere decoration.
As I placed items on my altar anew last week, each thing vibrated, each thing lived in my hands. And when I planted each seed from our Village ritual and covered them with flower water, whole portals were activated. I actually believe that. Not just symbolically.
I think the reason it’s so hard to believe in magic these days is not because it’s not real, but because so much has become decorative. So much has become about reputation, performance, perception. The false allure covers over the true gold, but it doesn’t mean it’s not there.
I am feeling grief as I write this.
Magic isn’t feeling happy or successful every day. It’s knowing that everything is held in a field of Grace, and that it’s possible to traverse the full spectrum of experience and never be outside of Original Blessing. Once we know that, it’s possible to work with life—not to rescue it or be rescued by it, but to be present with it—while holding the memory of flight.
Many of the women I work with, and myself included, have wounds of codependency and feminine oppression we’ve had to heal. Part of coming awake is reclaiming our body wisdom and our connection with greater forces than the institutions that structure our modern culture—not because structures or institutions are “wrong,” but because they are designed to contain and create with those primordial energies, occasionally collapsing and reconstructing in more evolved ways, as informed by that mysterious soup—the beneficial “chaos” that makes renewal possible.
I’ll admit I often don’t know what I’m doing, even as I continue to sharpen my container so that my eggs come out fully formed and not as gooey messes all over the ground. But like all birds (and even birds-turned-hares) have the wisdom within to lay an egg, so too do we have the wisdom within to birth creations that restore magic to the land.
Stepping into creatorship sometimes threatens the forces that rely on our dependency to operate. But operating from mere individualism is lonely and antithetical to our nature. True interdependence, as I understand it, is a practice of leaning into a coherent field—a reliable and ordered universe that is benevolent in nature and wants us to flourish—while fully pursuing our authentic expression supported by that field. It is not anarchy, nor disempowered approval-seeking, but standing upon one’s feet like a sturdy tree: alert to our own sense of choice and our right to be fully ourselves, while connected to the web of existence in which we are nested, never losing our sense of being cradled, supported, and held—even as we fully inhabit our individuality, even our eccentricity.
My prayer this spring is that we all remember we are held by greater forces than the ones we are outgrowing, that we lean into that support and allow it to buoy us as we reach higher and further than we have before. That we allow our innate power to pulsate through our bodies as truest expression into the world—to shape it collectively, to regenerate the forest with the intelligence of the wise mycelium, the memory of renewal contained within the sprout, the tree-needle tip, the tiny bud.
And may the process be ecstatic.
🦋🦋🦋
NOTE: Now is an ideal time to enroll in the Sanctuary, as we are entering a phase of renewal and stabilizing our foundations for the next cycle of growth. If you are interested, I highly encourage you to take advantage of the metamorphosis blueprint session I'm offering right now, FOR FREE. There is no obligation to enroll (and in fact, I won't enroll anyone who isn't a full yes to the experience) but you will walk away with further clarity about your path and what you need to support you next, whether or not we pursue enrollment. The session is not a sales call but an opportunity for me to hold space for you and map your metamorphosis in this chapter of your life. If you are interested, check out the classroom HERE and book your session: https://www.skool.com/body-soul-village-3993/classroom/b4d3d710?md=b4c2adf31b57445cba03f8e81636854e
(tagging those of you who have recently attended rituals or who have expressed interest in the Sanctuary!)
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Elizabeth Stauder
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A spring prayer & a free offering
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