October 2022: Treating Yourself Humanely

Hello my darlings,
 
Fall is hands down my favorite season and I’m feeling vibrantly alive! I wish this feeling for everyone! And I wish you cinnamon toast and a big bowl of café-au-lait, with a dash of cinnamon and nutmeg.

With so many planets retrograde over the last few months, we’ve been living through a big pause. Spacey on top, with lots of activity underneath. Activity you can’t quite put your finger on. Changes you don’t really have the words for yet. Wanting to break free, but not sure how. What’s happening is a new way of being is forming, triggered by the aftershocks of the pandemic. You don’t know what it’s going to look like (yet) You’re not even sure what it’s going to feel like. What you can be sure of is a powerful, growing, refusal to judge yourself against society’s “shoulds,” threading its way through your being.
 
We all know the “should” voice. It’s the nasty critic telling you, you should be further along in your life. The voice that tells you how you should, and shouldn’t be; what you should feel and what’s wrong with the way you’re feeling. The nasty critic is an interject; a piece of the culture that’s splintered off into your psyche. It can be familial, social, religious, etc. The point is IT’S NOT YOUR VOICE. You were not born with this voice, like you were born with lungs and a liver. When the nasty critic gets noisy, it's like apocalypse now in your head.

When I started the metaphysical dance of knowing self, back in the early 80’s, teachers were always telling me to love myself. When I got sober in the late 80’s, sponsors and allies told me to love myself. But nobody could tell me how. It’s not like I didn’t ask, I asked. The answer was either pray and/or meditate. Except for one sponsor who had me buying a rose for myself every week for a year. It did absolutely nothing.

We’re programmed, to be ever on the alert, to find fault/defects with self and being, and fix it.  This mechanistic approach works quite well for machines, but you and I are not machines. We are life force, the divine made flesh. We’re here to evolve; to love beyond all reason, and be loved beyond all reason. I’ve often wondered how the fuck we’re supposed to remember that, when we live in a world that has been purposely set up to disempower and defeat us.  There isn’t one person reading this, who hasn’t wondered the very same thing, and experienced the resulting feelings, of rage, depression, and what’s-the-use. New Age thinking will tell you it’s all illusion, but I don’t agree. New Age thinking will also tell you to rise above, BE POSITIVE(!),
 
The cult of positive thinking devalues, harshly judges, and criticizes the not-so-pretty feelings of human experience. Being positive is a brand, earning billions of dollars a year. I am not against being positive, I love feeling positive, but to cut your feelings off at the knees, to deny your intellect, instinct, and intuition, and jump to positive, because you’ve been told the so-called bad feelings are creating your reality, is insane. As I’m writing this, someone is dying from hunger every 4 seconds, and no, the people who are dying are not creating this horrifying reality. An economic system that serves an oligarchy is creating this reality. Man’s inhumanity to other human beings is creating this reality.
 
I've decided the best way to love self is to treat yourself humanely. Learning to treat yourself humanely takes some time, especially if you’re used to beating yourself to a pulp, or holding yourself to standards, that the Christ himself couldn’t follow, or the critical voices in your head are destroying you. Learning to treat yourself humanely is an incremental process. Giving up the “shoulds,” is THE beginning. Pay attention to the feelings, the interjects (nasty critic) trigger. Honor those feelings. Keep in mind, you are not your feelings, and feelings are not facts. Feelings are a barometer of your weather, and one of the greatest tools you have, with which to create. No question all great art is born from feelings.

You can write the feelings down, you can paint them, dance them, see the face of the feelings in the mirror, act them out, the list goes on. The not-so-pretty feelings are as much a part of the symphony that is you, as the pretty ones. When I think symphony, I think of the ocean. I think of calm, I think of the wave building, I think of the crash, the rush, and the flooding. The water recedes, everything is changed, and once again there is calm and the wave begins to build. Again.

I am witch. I hold true that human beings are as much a part of nature as rock and tree, sun and moon, sea and river, stars and tide. Like nature each of us has different shapes, textures, colors, timing, and purpose. All feelings, whether they make sense, or not, are comfortable, or not, are human. Vitally human. Alive. Necessary and needed. Feelings are guides, sign posts. The human contains the humane; without the human, there can be no humane.  Spirituality  (as it is commonly taught) is about transcendence, being out of body. Transcendence feels great, opens you to new possibilities. But, if the experience is not embodied, the sense of oneness, of wholeness, is lost. The glorious feeling dissipates and soon enough you're back to same shit, different day.  
 
The humane act is what embodied spirituality looks like. Treating yourself humanely is how you embody the spiritual experience.
When I am having a hard time getting to and/or feeling the humane, I watch animal rescue videos. Without fail, I am reduced to tears. The tender, the caring the compassion, this is what human beings are capable of. This is what you and I are capable of. This is what you and I are capable of giving to self. And then, to each other.
​ In this way, we strengthen collective humanity, and set ourselves free..

Live loud, love fierce, and suffer no fools. Katherine Manaan x0x0
 
P.S. Mercury goes direct October 2nd at 5:07 am est. Slingshot those desires out there! If you’re trying to figure out what those desires are, contact me, and we’ll set up a reading.

​Art: Egon Schiele