Friends at the Standstill

Four Friends who’ll never let you down 🤗

It’s right in the middle of the Standstill – the solstice, when the sun appears to rise at the same point on the horizon for the three days of 22^nd, 23^rd, and 24^th of December – so I’m doing my solstice sit-with. I spend the three days sitting with the projects I want to work with in the coming year and this year they’re in three main categories …

• Books to be written and published
• Phoenix Rising, the alchemical transformation workshop I want to offer this year
• The Garden; after the terrible drought last summer I need to prep the garden to handle it more easily … climate change is not going away!

The list looks like quite a load but actually I don’t feel it will be. I’ve changed my way of working in a big way and that’s made, making, it possible to work far more in sync with my body, feelings, thinking and intuition. Working that way – with our energy bodies – takes 90% of the stress and worry out of life; it’s a real shame that isn’t one of the major things in every parenting and school curriculum, we just would not have freaked out people all suffering from some form of mental distress all the time!

If you’re wondering what the heck I’m talking about let me give you a rough idea. As some of you know, I’m both an Awenydd (sort of witch-shaman) and a transpersonal psychologist. When I first discovered transpersonal psychology back in the late 1980s I quickly saw how it fitted hand-in-glove with the Old Ways I grew up in, so I’ve been twining them together ever since. Both ways work with what Jung calls the Subtle Bodies; they are …

• Body – physical sensing body
• Feelings
• Thinking
• Intuition

In the old ways, they’re a very personal part of one’s spirit family, they take care of the cauldron, grail cup, that houses our spirit for each incarnation. If we don’t stay connected with and take notice of them we end up sick, stressed, working badly, having chronic relationships, and perhaps worst of all never living the life that makes our heart sing. I’ve got it wrong, got disconnected at times during my life and it’s never worked well, now I’m careful to notice when I fall out of connection with my subtle bodies and get back on track.

And that’s a big part of working with the two solstice points each year, Midwinter and Midsummer. Midwinter I work with the planning, what to focus on for the coming year and how to work so I can bring it to fruition; midsummer is the half-yearly checkup when I can revamp the plans to cover all the unexpected things that have happened.

Doing the planning, over the Midwinter Standstill, the first thing I do is to list the projects I’d like to accomplish over the coming year, and check with my tylwyth that they really do line up with the universal plan I’m a coworker with. That’s very important, if me and the universe are diverging it just ain’t gonna end well!

Having got the go-ahead on the plans I take each one in turn to each of my subtle bodies and ask how they see, what advice they can give me, and most importantly what my first step for each will be.

So, for instance, I take each book firstly to my body, and ask Body, ‘How do you feel about me finishing Hollowbone by spring equinox?’ Body then brought up things like, are you going to be sat still too long? You need sunlight and vitamin D. Have you sorted you workroom out? So I go through all those, things I’d brushed under the carpet in my enthusiasm to write, and work them into the plan.

Then I take precisely the same question to Feelings. Feelings says things like being emotionally invested is good but you’ll need to feed yourself with love, not just the book. You need to experience a wide variety of feelings yourself so you can write them believably for you characters, have you planned that experiential stuff in? Again, I sort through the advice and plan it in.

Next, I take that same old question to Thinking. Thinking often gets quite excited about my projects and can have a tendency to want plan in far more than I can possibly do, so I always ask both Body and Feelings to lurk around in the background to put the brakes on when needed! Thinking always comes up with stuff, research, timescales, remembering to add in posts (like here on the blog) to keep you all up to speed with what I’m up to. Really useful stuff and, again, stuff I may well have overlooked.

And finally, I take the question to Intuition. This is always a fun-one, intuition will always pop in crazy ideas that never appear on the usual project plans but, if I follow them through, always add the cordon bleu taste to whatever I’m doing! With Hollowbone, Intuition has given me a couple of leads already that have opened up the writing enormously. One is rediscovering Basque food; it’s many years since I was last there so all the old dishes and recipes were hidden on an old mental-hard-disc, covered in dust! I looked a load of stuff up and not only have I rediscovered dishes but the research has given me places and pop-in characters who’re adding really good stuff to the plot. So cooking gives you character depth – who’d a thought it!

That’s only a tiny wee taste of what my subtle energy bodies give me when I work with them. if I get stuck, like writer’s block, they give me something completely different to do that gets me right out of the mire. Similarly, if a household issue crops up and gets in the way they dream up off the wall ways through the problem.

Why not give it a go yourself?

And, if you’re interested in learning more about this way of working it’s an integral part of the alchemy work I do so there’ll be webinars on it on the Phoenix Rising section of my Substack.

See you on the other side …