Caught in the Coils

Jormungandr is one of the stranger beings that I've worked with over the years, which is probably saying something rather significant given that I work primarily with a divine force foretold to devour everything between the earth and the sky.  Fenrir is all rage and learning restraint.  Hela has been all about wisdom and diplomacy.  But Jormungandr, well, Jormungandr is another beast entirely.

Jormungandr first made itself known to me about a year ago, when I fully committed to this Rokkatru association.  It wasn't something that I anticipated, or something that I sought out actively.  In all honesty, I never intended to reach out to the World Serpent.  I hate the idea of going into water deep enough for me to drown in, I don't swim, and frankly, I didn't see much to gain in the effort of trying to connect with the snake encircling Midgard.

The first encounter was heavy.  I mean that in the literal sense.  You see, Fenrir stirs the senses and makes everything I come in contact with more intense, Hela sends a full-body chill right through me when she reaches out.  The Rokkr are very blunt when they have a message that I need to pay attention to, and don't bother much with subtlety.  Jormungandr made me aware of itself by adding an immense weight on my shoulders, this sensation of suddenly bearing a massive burden.  That burden was quickly followed by the sensation of my entire torso being constricted (it wasn't, obviously, but the sensation was still there).

I've mentioned before what Jormungandr conveys to me in terms of symbolism.  Personally, I feel that its plight and its sentence as the World Serpent is one of self sacrifice.  It exists in a state of constant, maddening pain from self-inflicted injuries.  It knows that the time will come when it can no longer tolerate the pain and will release its hold on itself.  It knows that when that time comes, it will rise from the seas and wreak havoc upon the surface, spewing not only the venom from its fangs but its own poisonous blood into the air to black out the sun.  The part that gets overlooked, however, is that Jormungandr does not wish for this fate to come to pass, any more than Fenrir wants to rush into his own death.  They both know what will come, for it is inevitable, but they both wish to delay those final moments.

For me, Jormungandr is an Atlas-type figure, to draw on myths more familiar to most.  Jormungandr bears the weight of the world and holds the burden of knowing its failure will lead to its destruction.  Jormungandr lives in a state of suffering to stave off its own demise.  There is a fury in that futile existence, but underneath that fury is a unique perspective of understanding pain and suffering and conditioning oneself to endure.

The bulk of my work with Jormungandr has been devoted to trying to gain that same understanding.  My pain isn't the same sort that Jormungandr endures, obviously, nor is it physical, but when applying that spiritual knowledge to emotional and psychological pain, it's very much applicable.  After a while, you get used to the feeling of having no way out.  You get used to being stuck in a small town with no potential for improvement and not knowing how to get out of that cycle.  You get used to the idea of just existing in futility.  Jormungandr has helped me see that for what it is.  Jormungandr has shown me that maintaining that sort of existing isn't permanent, but it's what you have to do until you find a way out.

You have to maintain.  You've got to get through it, because if you don't, then what was the suffering really for in the end?  And when you compare that sense of being trapped, or of being depressed, or of being defeated with no hope of making something change... how can you compare that to the notion of Jormungandr's plight?  How can that depression compare to knowing that if you let go of your suffering, you bring about the destruction of everything around you, including yourself?

Jormungandr and I don't encounter each other often, but its wisdom will never leave me.

The Liminal Alchemist

There are moments in everyone's life that change their entire perception of reality.  We all have them, and we all have different reasons behind them.  It can be complicated.  It can be bewildering.  But most of all, it can be so life-altering that you find yourself wondering how you avoided it for so long.  It's a complex thing to witness that moment in total awareness, and another entirely to find that threshold and capture that moment.

Speaking from a very personal place, I've realized that I've been stood on the edge of the proverbial knife for months now.  I've been struggling to balance between being the healer and the warrior.  I've been struggling to balance between my emotions and my thoughts.  I've been struggling to balance between spirit and mind.  I've been struggling to balance between what I'm feeling and what an intense empathic connection is causing me to feel.

I feel myself in liminality.  It feels the way that I feel while will-working in a ritual mindset, but drawn out and twisted in a way where it's all so mutable and malleable.  I look back on the last few months, and I see so many points where I could have stepped away from this knife-edge balancing act, chosen one course of action over another, one side over another.  As much as I want to find closure, I find myself trapped in the between, because I've been unable to say that even the outcomes I do not desire are final.

It would be easy to dismiss it as being unwilling to accept that what I want is not meant to be, but that isn't the case.  What I want exists in a state of uncertainty, neither set in stone nor impossible.  The very concept lies in flux, and the road to get there requires me to practice my continuing path of personal alchemy while standing on the razor's edge.

I find myself caught between.  It is my nature to be the warrior.  I've always been the one to confront spiritual ills head on and drive them out, be it a spirit causing unease, emotional instability making matters difficult, or anything else of the sort.  My instinct when confronted with opposition that threatens my loved ones is to fight it with everything I have.  And yet now, I am called not to be the warrior, but to be the healer for someone that I care very deeply for.  I find that I must focus my energies on compassion and understanding rather than confrontation and removal.  I find that I am expected to restrain the part of me that has always been given to aggression in order to facilitate this part that thrives on mercy.

And yet the curious part, is that I realize that I cannot simply give myself over to the healer's path.  There are still challenges that lay ahead on this road that I've chosen that will require the warrior spirit to overcome.  Likewise with the other struggles I've got going on in my head.  I can't switch off my emotions (which is just about the most unusual sensation in the world for me) and let my thoughts run the show, because the few times I've tried, it's been like the worst chill I've ever experienced.  I can't separate my emotions from another's, either, because if I do, then my efforts as a healer are pointless.

So my efforts mustn't be to choose which side I will step to.  Instead, I will make my goal being to pull myself up to the middle path, above the liminal edge, and find the balanced road.

The Lone Wolf Once Again... Sort Of.

I've made some vague mentions about my efforts as a group practitioner of will-work over the last few years, but without any real details.  I know I've said it before, but I'll say it again: There are two reasons for that, the first being that I don't discuss my own will-working openly, and the second being that I don't discuss anyone else's.

That said, I'm no longer a part of that group.  Fate has conspired to bring that bond to an unstable state, and as basic communication has fallen by the wayside, anything done in meditation has been completely eliminated.  I have, however, come to a realization about that which should have come a lot sooner: I'm not meant for the group practice approach.  I never was, and likely never will be until the day that I cement the bond with the one meant to be my mate.

My path is a unique one, and doesn't mesh well with those on more traditional ceremonial paths.  Simply gaining a meditative focus for me depends more on adrenaline than on relaxation.  Focusing my thoughts is less gently merging with the universe than it is forcefully projecting myself at the current situation.  I'm not a passive participant in the spiritual elements of the world around me, it's just not how I function.  Even efforts of Reiki style healing are more primal in approach, either focusing on driving out the pain with positive energy or trying to grasp onto pain and haul it out through force of will.  Adding that kind of aggressive will-work to more conventional relaxed will-work just doesn't mix.

So for the past few months, it's been back to the solitary path for me, albeit with a partner of sorts who has been the focus of much of my thoughts.  I've spent a lot of it refocusing my energy back to the warrior path.  Started off with more workouts at home, and especially more sword training.  But the weights I have at home stopped being a challenge a while ago, so it was time to take the next step.

I broke down and got a gym membership, and have been hitting the weights and heavy bag three times a week for the last month.  I treat every session as an informal devotional.  Thanks in large part to a good friend of mine, I've been concentrating on any sort of lift with a combat application, so if it mimics a sword thrust or a pugilist's strike, I'm all for it.  I'm gradually building into a solid routine, and it's all part of my effort to get into the best shape of my life.  So far, so good.  The bag-work has been an outstanding release of energy for me, especially once I picked up proper wrist wraps (Meister MMA has awesome prices on these, $4 for a longer, softer set than the $8 Everlast pair I picked up first).

My full moon and new moon lunar rites are back on track, with some of the most amazing alterations I could have asked for.  For the past year, I've been unable to communicate with anyone while in the middle of a devotional as part of the bans of the ritual.  Now, I've got one person that I can talk to freely throughout, who both Fenrir and Hela approve of wholeheartedly, and have welcomed into "the pack" even though her role in the future remains nebulous.  I focus the full moon rites on Fenrir's rage and dealing with spirits and problems that build up throughout the cycle, while the new moon rites are focused on divination and receiving guidance from Hela's vast connections to the dead.

Honestly, life is good.  Aside from the typical bullshit parts that get thrown at it, especially when you find someone worth caring about as much as you do yourself, if not more.  My faith is stronger than ever, my practices are more stable than ever, and I've got someone who makes me happy just to spend time chatting with.  In a lot of ways, this is the closest to being at peace that I can remember being.

Gullveig

"War, the very first war of our world,
When the treacherous witch was killed
Three times burned and three times born,
By searing flames was Gullveig torn."
Amon Amarth - War of the Gods

Gullveig has perhaps been one of the most frequently recurring figures in my internal process for the past two years.  Yes, there is a connection to Angrboda within her myth, but curiously, the recurring presence has very little to do with Angrboda's role as mother of my principle gods.  Sorting out the significance has been a very tenuous and downright odd process for me, and considering that she continues to surface in new contexts all the time, one that is far from complete.

At first, it was the connection to Angrboda that I thought was the be all and end all.  Her role as a master of magic was relevant, and her heart connected through myth to Loki siring the race of "troll women" or "wolf women" (or in some very viable interpretations where Angrboda is Gullveig-re-incarnated, Fenrir himself, but I consider that closer to UPG even though it agrees with mine) certainly fit form with what I was always drawn to.

Soon though, I started to realize that her significance was more than that for me.  In a lot of ways, I realized that she (right up to her association with Angrboda) was emblematic of my past relationships.  I'm not comparing myself to Gullveig here, I'll get that out of the way now.  In a sense, I've always had a very specific "type" for the most part, and every subsequent relationship has brought me closer to understanding what my ideal woman is actually like.

Gullveig, to me, has come to represent the same thing as the phoenix in mythology.  A conceptual entity who dies and is reborn in flames, becoming more refined and pure with each rebirth.  It's complicated, to say the least.  Obviously it isn't a literal death and resurrection, but rather the death and resurrection of the idea of what the ideal woman should be.  I've noticed a distinct pattern over the years.  Every relationship has put me through a new set of challenges that prepares me quite specifically for the next.  Now, obviously I can't go so far as to apply this to every emotional attachment, but only to the ones since Gullveig became relevant.

I'm not going to go into specific details here, because that's just metaphorical dirty laundry.  But it has been a recurring matter that I can't really brush off.  It's easy to say that it's because I have a specific "type" of woman that I'm attracted to and interested in, but that element has really been quite narrow in terms of why I've been in the situations I've been in, and the women have been very different aside from a very short list of personality traits.  Ordinarily, I'd just chalk it up to coincidence, but it's the specific ways that I seem to be receiving this guidance that makes me wonder.

What's more pressing is that the situation I find myself in currently is the fourth in the iteration since Gullveig started to show up in my meditations and my dreams.  I've always put a lot of faith in signs and portents, even if I don't necessarily understand their relevance at the time that they occur.  I've yet to receive a message that I felt was a divinely inspired signal that didn't somehow come to pass, even if it was only in hindsight that it made sense (we all know the "So that's what was..." moment).  And predictably, I don't know what the relevance of Gullveig's thrice-burned heart means to me right now.

In the sagas, Gullveig was burned three times by the Aesir, and reborn three times before becoming the one known as Heid.  How her heart wound up in the woods for Loki to find is unclear to me, but is likely relevant all the same, just in a way that won't necessarily make sense.  It's an odd thing, too, because I really don't associate myself with Loki, except as it relates to him as father of my principal deities.  Even so, I find the image of Loki finding the heart of Gullveig in the woods too full of resonance to overlook.

It's a difficult thing to sort out.  On one hand, the heart could represent my own, burning and burning and burning until reaching the state it needs to be in to find true happiness.  On the other, the heart could represent the heart of the one I'm meant to find, thrice burned and restored with my assistance.  Or it could have another meaning all together that I've yet to sort out.  No matter what the meaning, I'm confident that Gullveig will prove to be a source of wisdom in bringing me to the right outcome.

When Pantheons Collide

I'm going to go over one of the more curious things about working with the deities today.  One of the big things that I've run into, is that different pantheons react very differently and expect very different things from worshipers.

With the ones that I work with, I've gotten very much used to the give-and-take sort of bond that you get from a teacher and student relationship.  The gods show you what they want you to see, or teach you what they want you to know, and then watch as you adapt to it.  But with all of their knowledge, I still have the autonomy and the expectation from the gods of challenging them in return and questioning that knowledge.

In my experience, the Celtic side and the Fomori are the same on this.  There is an expectation that I'm not going to take everything at face value, even when face value is precisely what is right and what is needed.  The Morrigan has a habit of doing this to the point where I only half-heartedly question what she reveals to me, because I know she's not going to pull punches or send a mixed message, it's just not her way of doing things.  With the Fomori, their lessons come more in the form of "adapt or fail", and they usually leave me with a few choices, so it's more of an open-ended approach.

With the Rokkr, on the other hand, it's a little different.  Their lessons are harsher and more sudden, and tend to force a questioning in the form of fight or flight.  Fenrir especially likes to throw the instinctive reaction in my face as a sort of test, forcing me to choose between two options in a sense, because he already knows how I'm going to respond.  Hela is much the same way, but in the sense that she sends me intentionally vague or overly direct signs, and expects me to sort out which ones need to be altered to make sense.

Loki is another matter entirely.  When I'm given a sign by Loki, I never know what part of it to trust, so I question everything, which is ultimately the point with him.  Loki has always played the role of the critical teacher, and expects critical thought in return.  This usually leads me into a downward spiral of over-thinking and over-analyzing every bit of information involved.  If I ever took one of Loki's signs at face value, I'd likely wind up suffering the consequences for months (and, nearly, have).

It all adds up to a very balanced relationship with my gods.  I don't regard them as infallible, and they don't expect me to.  They expect me to question them, they expect me to test them, and they while they expect me to show them a heavy amount of respect, they also expect me to have no hesitation in asserting myself when they intentionally give bad advice.  I've grown very much accustomed to this, so when my meditations lead to me dealing with gods of pantheons that have different... shall we say, management styles... things get a bit interesting.

Of late, I've been dealing more and more with a select handful of deities from the Hellenic pantheon.  I've dealt very little with them in the past, so it was a bit jarring to all of a sudden have this new set of personalities to deal with, especially given their way of interacting with worshipers.  They actually expect worship, and intend to punish the sort of resistance I'm used to giving my own gods.  Needless to say, this has lead to some friction in my meditative travels when a conflict of interest arises.  It's an entirely different set of etiquette.

It's a huge adjustment to go from treating my own gods with a sense of camaraderie and equality, to having to treat strange gods with deference and humility (and leads to some rather entertaining conversations when my gods appear to me in other meditations and pick me apart for acting weak in front of the Greeks).  It's just not a natural transition to make.  I've had to re-train myself in many ways with some of them (those that I actually have respect for), but others... others still get the same treatment that mine get, except with the intention of confrontation.

Whether I want conflict or not, just as with some people, some gods just provoke that response.  With my own gods, it's a sign of respect and kinship.  With gods I have no association with, however, it takes on the form of sarcasm and condescending remarks, if not outright conflict.  In meditation, I've grown used to feeling a sense of personal authority that I likely shouldn't have.  It's a growing pain.

Speaking With the Bound One, Part 4

The next step in my work with Fenrir is hard to explain.  Not the actual spirit-work, but how I got to this point with it.  There's a ton of personal stuff that went on that I'd rather not put into specific words, but that I've alluded to in previous posts, and it all happened toward the end of last summer.  That's a huge time gap from the last time that I'd dealt with Fenrir directly, and there's a reason for that....

Speaking With the Bound One, Part 3

I'm overdue in getting back into chronicling this, but here goes.

After what I discussed in the previous post, not a whole lot changed for a while.  I want to say it was about three years before I resumed my training with the Bound One in the caves.  There was some insecurity and trepidation involved, to be sure.  I was unclear as to why I felt drawn to Fenrir and why I felt this certainty that understanding Fenrir was the key to understanding my own issues, when every other meditation was cautioning me of the dangers.  I eventually broke down when I hit a low point in my life after my grandmother's passing, and was having difficulty finding work and getting a start on my college education.  That whole situation was a ticking time bomb in my life in the first place, but that's what happens when you sacrifice five years of your time to help someone else; resentment and anger are quick to follow, and for me, where there was anger, there was the Bound One.

Speaking with the Bound One, part 2

So to continue on with my meditation journal, I'm going to skip ahead a bit and explain how my work with Fenrir advanced to the next stage.  At first, the meditations were just a matter of temper control and gaining focus.  It was more a state of emotional understanding rather than any sort of meditative communication.  As always, I have to stress that meditation and spirit-work is no substitute for actual psychiatric care, and that I don't advocate this as the default approach; this is simply my experience and what worked for me.

Speaking to the Bound One, part 1

I've decided to get a bit more specific with this blog in addition to the generalized theory and descriptions of my practices and ideas.  I've always treated this as being kind of out there and highly personal, but if there's one thing I've come to understand, it's that sharing personal experiences can be valuable.  I'm going to be adding a UPG tag to the blog for this post and future posts in a similar vein, which will cover meditative experience and communication with my gods and the spirit world.  As with any UPG (unverified personal gnosis, for those unfamiliar with the term), take it with a grain of salt; it's my personal experience, and I'm just sharing it to add it to the sea of other experiences out there.

So, what better way to start than by explaining my first experiences with Fenrir?  I'm going to do this as a multi-part series to frame how my spiritwork has progressed over the years.

The Bound One's Code

Let the shackles fall and devour every opportunity that comes before you.

I am more determined now than ever before to live up to that motto, and that really is the true essence of Fenrir.  Once you get past all of the rage and potential for destruction (which do actually play a large part in the motto, but more on that later), that vital, visceral thirst for life is the key to understanding the Wolf Within, and it's something that I've been failing to live up to for quite some time now.

In the Eddas, Fenrir breaks from the Gleipnir and sets loose on a rampage, his jaws reaching from the earth to the skies above and consuming everything in his path, culminating in the battle where he devours Odin and is then himself killed by Víðarr.  It's easy to dismiss this as raw destruction, and that part can't be ignored.  However, consider the concept of the Odinic Paradox -- the flow of time requires one thing to happen so that another will come to pass, and all time is parallel -- Fenrir must devour the old world in order for the new one to be born (I could likewise wax philosophical on how his being bound as a result of the prophecy of his fate with Odin causes the fate to come about, but that's neither here nor there).  Breaking that restraint and letting the primal side loose is a necessary course of action sometimes.

The only way to fully live this life is to embrace that all-consuming drive.  Every opportunity that you get is one that should be seized.  Even the ones that seem unpleasant -- they can be spat out and refused to the wayside should they be foul ones -- should be considered and sampled.  We teach ourselves so early that we should restrain ourselves and limit what we approach.  We tell ourselves that we don't "belong" doing or understanding certain things.  We tell ourselves that we can't do others.  We tell ourselves that there are limitations.  It's all in our heads.  Let those mental shackles fall and see what you can really do.  Find out what your actual limits are for yourself based on experience, not on a cultural paradigm.  Take risks, take chances, strive for the impossible.

Now, there is certainly the matter of the Fenrir rage and destructive urge to keep in mind.  I'm by no means encouraging seizing the opportunity for violent or criminal means.  We must remain responsible and considerate of others in our pursuits.  That is the one shackle that must never fail, as it is one of the foundation pieces of -- at least in my personal experience -- working with Fenrir as a patron.  Breaking that shackle means losing oneself to the primal urges and becoming less than what we are, rather than elevating ourselves as we should.  Simply being of Fenrir and serving a god with such strong destructive ties does not mean that we must become unthinking beasts.

Isolation

I find myself focusing more and more on my relative state of self-imposed isolation lately.  I'm realizing quite clearly that I am, for all intents and purposes, surrounded by people who genuinely care about my well-being -- whether that's family members, friends, or co-workers -- and yet I spend most of my time either holed up in my apartment alone with my thoughts, or faking my way through being jovial with the public while doing my job.  As I've mentioned before, my devotional walks every full moon tend to revolve around the thematic elements of my current thought processes, and this month's was no exception.

It was actually, perhaps, more literal than I've ever expected.  Last night while in the middle of my walk, a familiar vehicle pulled up alongside; my aunt's.  Let me preface what's to follow: I'm terrible at keeping in touch with people I don't see every day.  I'm borderline useless at it, to be completely honest.  And with my current schedule of work, I find very little time or motivation to be social and interact with people when I get home; I generally have time to get in my workout routine, cook and eat dinner, and then relax for an hour or so before going to bed.  It's not that the people I don't call or email aren't important to me -- they are, very much so -- it's that I'm so autonomous at this point that I fall into a basic loop and have little to share from my end of the conversation, and generally get any information updates I need through Facebook.

So, my aunt hits me with the sort of guilt trip that only a great family member can about not keeping in touch, and it hit home.  It wasn't news to me by any means, I know I'm lousy at it, and I don't pretend that I'm not.  It's not that I take them for granted, necessarily, but I suppose I forget that not everyone operates the way that I do when it comes to interactions.  Not everyone feels secure in their bonds without regular contact like I do, and that contributes to why I wind up in this isolated state.  I can maintain short-term contact with almost anyone, but long-term becomes a chore with people who don't understand how I act and react, socially.

This is all part of why I remain distant from others; it's easy to brush it off as part of some nihilistic aspect of my personality, but it's really built on the fact that I don't connect with people conventionally.  I don't need that close contact to feel connected to the people that I care about.  I value my personal space and my ability to remain distant.  I'd safely venture a guess and say that I feel more comfortable this way because so few people know the "real" me, the side that I don't show out in public, the one that doesn't hold back his opinions and doesn't bite his tongue to keep the acidic thoughts from spilling out with caustic results, the side that feels how I actually feel and not some forced socially-expected facade.  There's no risk in remaining distant from others, no vulnerabilities there.

Unfortunately, I've already seen where this distancing has cost me some very important relationships, ones that were built and fell into disrepair and ones that never had the chance to fully realize themselves.  That's probably the worst part of what I've come to see in all of this.  I've had so many opportunities to make changes in my course, socially, and because of my distant nature, I've squandered them.  Most of these I can brush off, but others I'm sure will bother me for years to come.  It's a lingering, bitter aftertaste, knowing that I'm my own biggest obstacle in forming meaningful relationships, but it's not really something that I can deny.

Worse yet, it's not really something that I want to change.  I'm perfectly alright with being so distant, despite what it has cost me.  Do I wish that I could change certain outcomes?  Yes, most certainly, but in the long run, I've had better luck being distant and avoiding getting sucked into bad situations.  It's a risk that I'm willing to take to trust that anyone worth having in my life and in my social circle will see my distance as a normal thing and understand why I am the way that I am.  Part of the path that I'm on concentrates on patience and waiting for the right time, and this is really no different.

Pattern Shift

Short post tonight, but one worth mentioning:

My lunar devotional rite for the full moon seems to be shifting to a more over-all effort than just a series of lengthy walks (for the physical exertion portion, that is).  Rather than the usual two-hour wander, I'm now focusing in on an hour and a half of weight training, followed by a minimum of an hour walking, then the hour of meditation.

Part of the whole personal alchemy concept that I'm trying to strive for is the realization of the whole, meaning mind, body, and spirit.  I can't realize that ideal without making this change.

I've taken up a regular routine of alternating biceps and shoulders, then forearms and chest, along with my usual walking routine (I average over a mile every day, not including the constant running around at work).  My new devotional practice doubles the exercise sets, and gets a fairly strong adrenaline surge by the end of it.  I'm definitely feeling the effects thus far, and as I continue to get into the best shape of my life thus far, I'm sure it will only get better.

Time to live the warrior ideal, and become the example that I wish to be, rather than put an empty idea on a pedestal.