how my approach to consultation works

Consultation, or mentorship, is rooted in building a relationship. My past career in social work was based on one-on-one connections with clients, meeting them where they were, and honoring their individual journey. It meant being flexible, recognizing that one-size-fits-all approaches to problem-solving aren’t actually that helpful or realistic. In the context of spiritual expansion, it took me quite a bit of time to figure out that practices and traditions that work for others weren’t necessarily going to work for me. This isn’t to say that I am somehow so special that what works for most people will not work for me, but rather I have much to learn from those practices and traditions and can play with them until they meet my needs.

I grew up in a fundamentalist Christian household. When I was in third grade, my best friend’s mom led me in The Prayer that would redeem my inherently sinful and wicked soul. From then on, it was about desperately trying to fit into the model of sanctity that everyone around me was demonstrating. Read my Bible daily, pray daily, participate in my AWANA meetings, show my youth group leader my weekly devotional book, and of course, be obedient in all things. What I learned from this long period of my life (I went on to attend a Bible college and did not deconstruct until I was ~23) was self-loathing. Reading the Bible was kind of a drag. It was hard to stay focused while praying. You could find me in the hall at church on Wednesday night scrambling to fill in my devotionals before youth group started. I desperately wanted to “be good” at these things. I believed in God so sincerely, but struggled with “discipline”. There must be something wrong with me.

Fast forward to my late twenties, and I am into the Tarot, re-opening my tender heart to the possibility that maybe there is some kind of divinity that didn’t find me inherently evil enough to burn in hell for eternity. There have been so many workshops, classes, books, etc., showing me how to connect with the immaterial. There are intense rituals for meeting your Holy Guardian Angel, devotional practices to different deities that demand daily devotion, recommended meditation practices… a lot of ways of engaging that seemed so beautiful but overwhelming. The lens I saw those things through was the lens I had adopted as a shitty Christian, “I’m not disciplined enough for those things, remember?”

It turns out that when something is harmful to your spirit, you are going to struggle with conforming to the expectations. Being able to reframe my perspective away from personal failure to personal agency was liberating. Those attempts at reading my Bible daily and praying and fasting and daily devotional were not resonant for me, and that is why I couldn’t maintain it. Now when I look at the other practices and traditions that I have tried and “failed” at, I can simply shrug and say “it wasn’t for me”, while honoring what I enjoyed and learned from them. The spiritual practice that I have today, and more importantly, the relationship to spirit that I have today, is liberating and affirming.

To get to this point of clarity, I had to reckon with a lot of things. There were narratives and beliefs I had internalized over the years that prevented me from engaging deeply with spirituality. I found myself projecting a lot of the toxicity from Christianity on unrelated experiences with divinity. When I started working with the Akashic Records as a devotional practice, I had to come to terms with the fact that in my mid-thirties, I could not tell you what resonance or desire meant to me. That’s where shit got wild.

After all of this time, searching for resonance without knowing that was the missing piece, I am now in a place where I can sense my way into practice and relationship that is nourishing and expansive. While taking a “Frankenstein approach*” to spirituality can be quite dangerous, there is certainly a way of indulging in exploration and clinging to what settles our spirits. That is the crux of what I bring to consultation. How can we work together to identify the narratives that are holding us back, replace them with narratives that liberate us, and then use desire and resonance as a compass to guide us into relationship and practices that help us expand? (By the way, if you have made it this far in my exposition, enjoy 15 percent off a consultation with me, using code avidreader, all caps).

I don’t have all of the answers. I’m not enlightened. Not a guru. Certainly not a bodhisattva. But, I have done a lot of experimenting, a lot of unlearning, and then learning, and then examining myself, and then experimenting again… You get the picture. It’s spirals, not line graphs. It’s the magic of mycelial networks, not rugged individualism. I sure as hell did not get where I am today walking these paths alone. If any of this resonates with you, if you know the feeling of “Why can’t I make this work? What’s wrong with me?”, let me assure you, it’s not you. Let’s meet and talk and commiserate and then roll up our sleeves and explore and play.

*When I say a “Frankenstein approach”, I am referring to folks who treat spiritual & magical traditions like a fucking buffet where you can just pick and choose what “feels good” with no regard to cultural context, closed practices, or traditions that work as an interconnected system. I am not out here looking for divine retribution from the gods for being a culture vulture.

tl;dr

• If you have tried different practices and they didn’t stick, you may have internalized this as a “you” problem, but that’s not true!

• If you come from a background of religious traditions that told you that you are inherently evil, etc., you may be running programs that act as blocks to experiencing new spiritual ideas.

• Consultation with me is about collaborating to identify narratives and blocks that make connecting to the divine overly complicated or painful.

• Together we can explore those narratives and create new narratives that foster liberation.

• We can tease at what it means to find resonance in a relationship to spirit and spiritual practices.

• We can play with what it means to connect to and indulge in your desires in spiritual expansion.

• Do you want more magic in your life? I have practiced A LOT* of magic. We can explore how that may look for you.

• What about more mindfulness? Self-help? Inner worlds? Journaling? LARP-ing through life? These are just a few examples of what I have played with over the years…

• Together, we can revolutionize what it means for you to experience spirituality. I am so excited to work with you.

*seriously, I have done a lot of magical experimentation and research. Is Goetic magic your thing? I’ve worked with a few demons myself. Did you know that some folks use human skulls as an equivalent to a spirit box? Did you know it’s damn near impossible to ethically source a human skull in the United States? What about banishing rituals? Energetic hygiene? Blessings, curses, planetary magic, tulpas, etc. As long as it’s accessible to the mayo folk, I have probably at least considered it (and managed to not end up with a poltergeist or some shit).