The Harvest of My Year. (And how I did it.)
Mending internal conflict, healing mental health, walking my path, establishing a business, and moving across the world.
The Winter Solstice and the holidays are a time to invoke the abundance of the Sun in the darkest part of the year.
All around the world different traditions celebrate this time through acts of invocation and sympathetic magic, holding feasts when food is scarce, lighting candles in the dark.
It’s the perfect time of year to reflect on our blessings. On all that has been cultivated this year.
Through doing this we summon our experience of growth, abundance, success and in so doing we plant these sow these images in the darkest part of the year.
What we harvest becomes food for today and new crops to plant tomorrow.
The year’s harvest.
I turned thirty this year which has made it a good year for reflecting.
A decade ago I was an alcoholic with intense depression, massive trauma, incredibly codependent with an attempted suicide under my belt. Meanwhile, I was heading straight for a mental breakdown, bipolar diagnosis, and way too many meds.
It’s been an interesting decade. . .
I never imagined being able to feel this stable, consistently happy, content and driven. All without meds.
Just five or six years ago I thought my life would end if my friend left. I was terrified of going crazy and not being able to put myself back together without him.
He’s been gone for a few years now after the codependency became too toxic and I’m more stable than I’ve ever been.
Embracing the bright and dark twin.
The year started with a struggle. My business was less than a year old and I didn’t realize how much it would die down over the holiday season.
I was broke and stressing, doubting myself while my relationship struggled under the financial burden.
It took a while to reframe and pivot. Eventually, I was able to see the extra time as a means to learn, create new content, and rethink the way I present myself and the work I do.
After some deep digging, I discovered that one of my struggles was an inner conflict I’ve had for ages, a divide in my mind that invoked the themes and archetypes of the bright and dark twins.
These twins are found in myths all over the world. In the Mayan tradition, they were actual twins, Xbalanque and Hunahpu, in the Norse, they were blood bound, Thor and Loki.
The dark twin works in the realm unseen weaving their magic, causing change to occur, they are often misunderstood. The bright twin is the public figure, the hero, the socially acceptable one.
The dark twin shines in the other world, the realm of wisdom, madness, and shapeshifting. The bright twin feels charismatic, stable, rational, and warm.
The dark twin wields magic, works in the unconscious, has insight beyond the “practicalities” of this world. The bright twin keeps an eye on logistics and works in the context of the known world, our cultural language, our systems, our science, and tools.
These themes ran through my mind, my life, my relationships, they were reflected in story after story of the world’s mythos, its dreaming mind.
Growing up I felt like the dark twin and while I had visions of a better world as Merlin and Moses, I wanted a shining brother, someone to be the face of it, an Arthur, an Aaron or Joshua.
This led to a lot of codependency and projection of the bright twin on others as the source of strength, charisma, and stability while feeling myself as an unstable outsider.
While I had worked on this codependency before this year the theme was still affecting my business. I didn’t want to be seen as the dark twin, too much of that was still in shadow, wrapped up with my worries of what others would think.
So I cast myself as that of the bright one.
When presenting myself and my business I stuck to scientific research, behavioral coaching, neurobehavioral psychology, and nutrition.
It worked well but I found my clients needed more, they needed the bits that I was hiding, the deep dives into the unconscious, the intuition, the stories of one who had gone mad and returned. They needed the magic.
In 2018 I worked to bring these two pieces together. I started telling my story more and more in life and online.
I forced myself to publically display the traits of the dark twin, started doing astrology readings with an archetypal and coaching twist.
I identified the traits of the two twins and started using them together. All while doing dream work, journaling, and active imagination in order to better feel into these two pieces of self.
Where I saw myself identifying with the dark twin and being ashamed of it I pointed out the dark twin’s positive traits and how they’ve helped me.
My intuition, my love of depth psychology and mythos, the stories I weave, the way spiritual traditions come alive for me, the depth of my emotions, and lived experience.
I then pointed out the ways I am also the bright twin.
I reviewed my codependent relationships and identified where I was actually the bright twin.
Often I realized that I had projected the bright twin on another when the traits really weren’t there. So I had to reverse engineer the glimmer, find what I thought was shining and figure out how to be that myself.
I gathered these parts of me and held space for them. I gave them my attention and they began to shine.
Owning my myself.
All this inner work led to a lot of outer work.
I embraced my role as a peer for mental health and addiction.
I started doing facebook lives and writing up more articles. This required a lot of work on my perfectionism. I stalled on the intent of creating FB lives until I went manic one day and just said “what the hell” and did a live talking about mania and how it feels.
If you need to stretch yourself beyond perfectionism, challenge yourself to fall on your face.
Its a rough exposure therapy but it can help. People reached out to tell me how much they benefited from the live video I did and how it spoke to them.
This became the theme, the things I was most scared to share were the things people were most thankful to hear.
The challenges of the day, the week, the year, and my mind became learning lessons I could share with others.
This had been my intention since 2011 but in 2018 it became a reality because I let go of worrying over how I appeared, let go of trying to find someone else to be my bright twin, and simply shared what needed to be shared.
I cultivated spaces to do this more, created communities of people working on their self-development and loved when people shared their stories.
None of this was easy. It was incredibly difficult but it has led to a much better life.
A healthier relationship to myself and my mental health.
In the last few years, I’ve gone from being depressed most of the time and manic some of the time to feeling manic or depressed for a couple hours once or twice a year.
Overall my relationship to my mental health has been shifting.
I’ve been playing the game for a while now and I’m getting used to it.
I’m not worried about losing my mind anymore. It is still scary to think I might lose it for a day or two but I know I have the tools to get it back and process the experience.
I’m also confident that in my own experience there is always a lesson to be learned, something to be integrated from these experiences.
My mental health isn’t an affliction, it's my magic.
Its a source of inspiration and insight. It helps me better understand myself, others, and the depths of the mind.
As I become happier, healthier, and more content I become more accepting of my mental health.
Of course, this is made easier by the fact my mental health isn’t as overwhelming as it used to be which is the result of a decade of work.
I’ve worked on everything from nutrition, meditation, mindfulness, thousands and thousands of pages of journaling and active imagination, dream work, a couple years of therapy, working to feel my way into my body, and my emotions.
This is the work of devoting myself to healing, growing, and connecting in spirit.
It feels good to sit with the harvest of what I’ve planted and see the changes that have been made.
Psychological and spiritual integration like a MOFO.
I have to joke at this because its still way too weird to claim “archetypal integration” or “spiritual development.”
These things certainly happen and when swapping stories with a friend or a synchronistic stranger I tell my story but to type it here causes the narrating voice in my head to switch to Trevor Noah’s impression of a “woke” Californian.
I’ve still got some shadows projecting on people who talk a lot about depth work flippantly.
The thing is, this is the most important harvest of the year. Before this year my mind would do a lot of shifting.
Sometimes spiritual concepts were felt to be as real as they are in their tradition’s perspective, God was God, Shekinah the presence, Venus a goddess of delight. Sometimes these experiences felt more psychological, just bits of self afloat in an unconscious lacking numen.
Sometimes I felt distant from it all.
This year the distance is rare and the Divine and its many faces are nearer than ever. I may call these faces archetypes in my writing but that’s only to make room for other’s experiences. What I am experiencing feels far more connected than a psychological state.
The difficulty of calling something an archetype is that it gives it a sterile psychological tone. This can be useful in creating a neutral dialogue amongst peers but in our own personal experience, it may lack the necessary numen to invoke a powerful internal experience. When speaking to others I say “archetype” when sitting with myself I behold the work of the gods, the One and Many.
This year, that sitting with Self have invoked a consistent experience of connection. One that would wax and wane in years prior.
Just writing this is causing a stirring in the chest. Awe and gratitude.
To try and say how I arrived here would invoke too many of the old debates. Is it work? Ritual? Imagination or grace?
I think its a bit of them all but beneath the rituals and the work (which I don’t always do) there is a love affair. I run, I cry, I scream out and there’s always something there to hear.
It started with my desperate need, not wanting to live anymore. Not knowing how. I called out and the presence came and its been coming to lift me up every time I hit rock bottom for the last decade.
What I have now is the memory of all this. I have trust because of this. I have faith because of this. I have rituals and tools that work because of this.
I have my life because of this.
Determination to create my vision.
All this harvesting, all this work, and grace has fueled my determination to turn my visions into reality.
I’m a dreamer and I dream on a cosmic scale.
For most of my life the dreams soared but they were so high up and I felt so broken and depressed there was no way to reach them, to really believe they could happen.
My dreams became an impossible standard to measure myself against.
Now they’re the goal. I am reaching for them and I may not fully attain them but I’m going to try my damn hardest.
Vision of the future.
I am working to continue this process of growth and evolution. To feel into the depression when it comes, the mania, trauma, and anxiety. To transmute these experiences and help others transform their own.
There are three realms I am devoting myself to:
- Informing and working with people to heal trauma.
- Helping people find sources of meaning in their life.
- Making a change in how we handle poverty.
I have the overarching life goals and the cosmic vision of how I’ll do it. Now its a matter of breaking these huge goals down into smaller steps.
I have to remain open to learning and growing.
I am open to teachers who can help me go deeper into my own practice. Teachers who can help me shine brighter in the world. These might be long-term mentors or people I meet for an hour with something to teach.
A lot of growth will have to happen in order for me to fully realize my goals. A lot of ignorance has to be transformed into competence and so I have to keep an ear out for all the lessons I’ll need.
I am working to have the biggest impact I can in the world so I need to set smaller goals that increase my ability to affect change.
Creating a network of peers, other visionaries doing large-scale work will be important as well as people who don’t want to be seen on the stage. People who excel at all the things I suck at.
Together we can work to grow communities. Not just audiences or consumers but interactive communities of people who work with each other, who learn from each other, who further the dialogue and vision.
To support this work I have to increase my access to resources.
I grew up incredibly poor and I’m still poor. I always have just enough to survive but I need to change that if I want to have a larger impact than my personal survival.
So I’ll be working on creating more paid content this year and finding other revenue streams to support the work I am doing.
I’m also working on several books I want to finish as a way to get my thoughts and the tools I’ve found useful out there for people.
These are the seeds I am planting. The goals and visions of working to help people heal, increasing our sense of meaning in the world, and finding ways to reduce poverty.
I’ll be doing this through community, working with others, writing a bunch, working with clients, all while gathering the resources I need and learning the lessons that come my way.
What about you?
What have you reaped this year? What are you sowing?
Love and share.
I’m starting something new. Writing every day as I put my random thoughts down on binary paper.
If you’d like to join me on this journey you can sign up for my email list here. I share thoughts, tips, adventures, and goodies.
