A Year of Devotion to Our Capacity to Change
How do we engage in the practice of creating change, when change is both our divine birthright and purpose, AND poses a threat to our nervous system?
Do you choose a word for the year? My word for the following year usually visits me sometime in October or November. In 2022, my word was DARING, and it’s taken me on an exploration of my relationship to risk: how to get into action, leap into the unknown, after a long season of focusing on building safety.
My word for 2023, which appeared at its appointed time last fall, is DEVOTION. Devotion is the answer to the question: What is the force that motivates me to act, to begin, to create something new when that force is no longer domination, coercion, extraction?
And what am I devoted to? Call it Spirit, call it Source, call is Life, Love, call it connection–it’s the thing that connects us, animates us, embraces us, nourishes us, inspires us. It’s all of this. But I think that, ultimately, at the root of it, what I am devoted to is our CAPACITY FOR CHANGE. Yours, mine, ours.
Every creature that’s alive is born with a unique blueprint for change: a form to become, a relational function to grow into.
In an acorn is the blueprint for an oak tree; the life of the acorn is devoted to the possibility of becoming an oak tree. Spurred by an ancient, inner knowing, salmon swim upstream toward their spawning grounds; Canada geese and monarch butterflies fly thousands of miles when it’s time to migrate; the caterpillar knows when it’s time to start weaving a cocoon, and when it’s time to emerge as a new being.
The same is true for us humans. We come into the world with a sacred expectation to connect with our surroundings, with our caregivers, because we hold an acorn-like knowing of what we’re here to become, and we know that those early bonds form the soil that we can root into, and that will nourish and hold us as we expand and grow into our true form.
The collective tarot card for the year is The Chariot, and I’ve always thought of The Chariot as the blueprint for becoming that lives inside an acorn, as the inner compass that guides the salmon, the geese, the butterflies as they travel unseen distances to their homelands: it’s inner force of desire that compels us to change, the compass that points us to where our becoming needs us to go.
Our capacity for change is what connects us to each other, and to our more-than-human kin. It’s the divine, and the magic in us. It’s how we know we’re alive.
All that you touch you Change.
All that you Change Changes you.
The only lasting truth is Change.
God Is Change.
-Octavia Butler
And yet, to a nervous system that’s experienced trauma, which is to say, a rupture with the ground that was meant to support and nourish our becoming, change can be experienced as a fundamental threat to our safety, to our very life.
I’ve been so scared of change lately, even as I crave it. I’ve devoted the last several years to creating safety in my relationships: with myself, my body, my knowing; with my partners and loved ones; with my surroundings & environment; with my community.
Building safety is the first, necessary layer of repair when we’ve experienced trauma. But, as I’ve experienced first-hand, it’s possible to be so focused on safety, on staying small and the same so life feels manageable and predictable, that we forget that we’re not here to remain an acorn, a caterpillar. We’re not here to stay put. We’re here to change and grow and become. Last year’s word, DARING, taught me that, once we’ve rebuilt the ground of safety that we needed and didn’t have, the next step is to leap. To exercise the capacity for change that is our birthright, that is our connection with all living things.
And yet. And yet. The very thing we most want–to feel connected, to be seen, to experience pleasure and joy and wonder, to play, to make–is often the very thing that our nervous system fears. This apparent binary between what our hearts want and what our nervous system fears is what keeps us stuck, as if our chariot’s wheels are mired in mud.
So, as we begin this new year, a time when we, especially in the realms of witchiness and wellness, collectively engage in the practice of setting intentions, what I’m asking myself is:
🌈 How do we engage in the practice of creating change, when change is both our divine birthright and purpose, AND poses a threat to our nervous system?
🌈 How do we take the internalized shame, pressure, and urgency out of our becoming?
🌈 How can we be enlivened by possibility, excited about the not-yet, as opposed to shaming & punishing ourselves for being in the messy middle?
🌈 How do we allow ourselves to move at the pace of the nervous system, the pace of the body, the pace of sensory pleasure?
🌈 What are the practices that support being with the unknown, that support imagination & experimentation?
🌈 How do we move our becoming out of survival mode?
Our collective card of the year, The Chariot, provides us with a model of change that integrates all the parts of our being–the parts that want to change, and the parts that are scared to–into working together to get us to our desired destination.
It’s possible to be so focused on safety, on staying small and the same so life feels manageable and predictable, that we forget that we’re not here to remain an acorn, a caterpillar. We’re not here to stay put. We’re here to change and grow and become.
Change usually starts with an intention: a desire about where we want to go.
Intentions are tools, and like all tools, they are capable of both building and tearing down. In the context of trauma repair and healing, this means that we can use intentions to either transform our trauma patterns, or to reinforce them.
In the landscape of whitewashed, capitalist wellness, we often pursue intentions in a way that reinforces our trauma patterns by ignoring, denigrating, and/or shutting down the parts of us that are resistant to or fearful of change. We rely on drive and willpower to the exclusion of building safety, which usually leads to shut down, withdrawal, and abandonment of our intention.
We may tell ourselves that we’re just not good enough, that we’re fundamentally flawed, that we don’t have what it takes to create change the way other people seem to be able to. We may forget or deny our true nature as changemakers in favor of shaming and blaming ourselves for having a hard time. We most certainly are going to isolate ourselves and punish ourselves for not being the paragons of independence and individuality that our toxic neoliberal culture tells us we need to be.
Many of us have been on this merry-go-round enough times that we may be wary of attempting anything new, anything different, because a life’s worth of experiences has taught us that, if we’re going to end up stuck and hating ourselves, why even try to change?
The Chariot offers us a different possibility for creating change, one in which ALL parts of us, the motivated AND the scared, can work together to get us where we want to go.
Not only that: it insists that including the scared parts is the only way that we’ll sustainably, and with integrity, get to where we want to go.
In the Rider-Waite tarot, The Chariot is depicted as being pulled by two sphinxes, one black and one white. In the Fifth Spirit tarot, The Chariot is rendered as a roller-derby femme, with one black roller skate and one white, symbolizing that both parts need to work in tandem for us to reach our desire. Black skate, white skate, rinse and repeat, over and over and over. That, says The Chariot, is how we move forward toward change.
Conventional wisdom around achieving goals and intentions only prioritizes the desire to change and the willpower to get into action which, if we hold to the roller-derby Chariot metaphor, would be akin to moving in the direction of our desire on only one leg the entire time, which might look graceful and impressive for a while, but which is definitely going to be exhausting, and will no doubt send us crashing down partway to our destination.
Conventional wisdom around achieving goals and intentions often proceed from domination, coercion, and extraction. It views our scared, tender, traumatized parts as wayward, inconvenient, and undisciplined, needing to be tamed, to be forced to fall in line. Not only does that not help us to pursue our desire, but it also risks reinforcing the very trauma patterns that we’re most likely trying to change.
When we’re setting trauma-informed intentions to follow our inner impulse towards change, we affirm that working with the scared parts doesn’t hold us back, doesn’t mean we’re moving backwards: trauma-informed intentions, like The Chariot, trust and affirm that our scared parts hold knowing and medicine that are essential to the journey. Not only are they not an impediment: they’re an indispensable fucking asset, our very own secret weapon.
We cannot cultivate devotion to our inborn capacity for change without making a practice of tending to the parts that are scared of change. Like everything else related to trauma repair & liberation, the work is learning to hold the both/and. We get free outside of binaries.
We cannot cultivate devotion to our inborn capacity for change without making a practice of tending to the parts that are scared of change.
I’ve been dreaming for years about teaching a workshop on trauma-informed intentions, and it’s finally happening, this coming Saturday, with the good folks at Seagrape Apothecary.
Together, through a mix of teaching and exercises, personal reflection and (always optional!) group sharing, we’ll learn to tap into our native desire, and to integrate all of our parts to help us pursue our inner becoming blueprint.
This will be a highly experiential workshop (bring your journal supplies & tarot decks!) and will include a blend of lecture, personal reflection, and group sharing, as well as ample time for working on our intentions for the year, for integration, and for questions.
Rarely has developing content for a workshop has worked on me for so long, and so deeply. I am truly so excited to share this workshop with you.
SETTING INTENTIONS FOR TRAUMA REPAIR IN A CHARIOT YEAR
with Seagrape Apothecary | Saturday, January 14th 2023, 12pm-3pm Pacific
// $45-$65 sliding scale //
The Chariot, the card of the year for 2023, is a wonderful ally when working with intentions. With its theme of harnessing resources of intuition, momentum, and motivation to pursue our heart’s desire, The Chariot can teach us how to bring all of our seemingly disparate parts into working together towards the same goal.
In this 3-hour workshop, we’ll explore:
The Chariot card through the lens of developmental trauma repair.
Why many standard intention-setting practices have the potential to reinforce our trauma patterns.
How to discern whether our intentions support patterns of protection rooted in developmental trauma, or patterns of connection that will facilitate trauma repair.
How to be a safe caregiver to ourselves through the challenges of pursuing our intention.
How to open to receive & celebrate the moments when our desire becomes reality.⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
The workshop will be recorded, and the replay will be made available for 30 days in case you can’t attend live.
😍 xo beautiful xo