So, in class, we’re in a guided meditation to find our personal guide beside Yggdrasil, the World Tree. Keep in mind that I’m still recovering from this horrible cold, which makes me break out into rib-cracking coughing without warning, and has made my nose run like a waterfall. I also have been too sick to really practice anything at home the way I should have been, even if you don’t take into account the complete chaos I’m living in, until I get fully unpacked. So I am not as easily able to follow along as I normally do. We had already tried astral projection and I couldn’t see anything – all I could focus on was trying not to cough or drip anything unsightly out of my nose. I’m already feeling bad about how I’m doing in general.
But I manage to envision searching around Yggdrasil’s massive trunk. The picture I have in my mind of Yggdrasil, by the way, is the massive tree in the movie “Avatar”. I’m wandering around it and eventually encounter a man who sorta reminds me of Z, with the exception that he’s wearing pastel blue and not red clasped around his shoulders. He looks like a Roman centurion, in a way. Like he was sitting there waiting patiently for me to meander my way around the tree. I say,
“Hello?”
He nods pleasantly in greeting, so I pose the questions I’m supposed to ask: I ask him his name, and ask him what I am supposed to be learning from him. He answers, “Gregory” with an accent that sounds almost Russian, and answers, “Peace. And focus.” Actually, as soon as he said “peace”, I completely forgot all about my bad cold and felt extraordinarily peaceful.
The facilitator now asks us to return to normal consciousness (my first thought: “Nooo! I want to stay here longer and talk to him!”) but things are already fading. I blame myself for envisioning Yggdrasil with such a huge trunk. Took me forever and a day to get around it, when I could have been chatting with this guy.
When the class describes their individual experiences, I relate what I’ve just related, and tried to pronounce the name exactly as he did, with a slight Russian accent. The facilitator asks, “Did he say ‘Gregory’ or ‘Grigori’? Some angels are called ‘Grigori’.”
I’m momentarily stumped by the question, and know that I look like a deer in headlights. Truthfully, I can’t remember WHAT he said. I also – and this is what amazes me – have completely forgotten that I was already familiar with the word “Grigori”. Back in December of 2012. On this blog. I’m listing the Watchers – from the Book of Enoch – and have copied the alternate description for the “Watchers” into my blog several times: “Grigori”. And, consciously anyway, I had completely forgotten about that until I went and looked up “Grigori” after class, and gasped, “Holy [bleep!]! I completely forgot!”
How perfect for me would THAT be! To have a personal guide from the Grigori! Actually, I’m still not sure whether he said “Gregory” or “Grigori”, but I will definitely go looking for him again and this time pay closer attention.
Meanwhile, I later made an amazing discovery about myself. I know, I know – who cares? Really. Although .... I have discovered now and again that as soon as someone says, “The most amazing thing happened to me!”, an entire football stadium’s worth of people immediately announce, “That happened to me, too!” – which immediately puts an end to the self-aggrandizing drama you’ve woven around yourself - so here’s hoping that there’s someone out there who figured out how to solve this.
I was reading Brain Magick: Exercises in Meta-Magick and Invocation by Philip H. Farber (Llewellyn Publications, 2011). The book has a lot of exercises you can do that are designed to limber up your brain to perform magick. One of them was to pull up from the deep recesses of your memory banks the most peaceful and contented experience you ever had, so that you could analyze the physical sensations of the experience and then recreate them with a trigger.
So here was the mental process I went through:
Me: Oh, I know! What about that time I ...
[Pause while memory surfaces]
Me: That was nice. But it reminds me of [fill in the blank with a horrible, embarrassing, shameful moment that came on the heels of the happy one]Me: [cringing] Oh no! Forget THAT one!
And this went on and on ad infinitum until the “eureka” light bulb went on over my head. A pattern seemed to be emerging here: I had developed a habit of connecting great memories with horrible ones, and I had no idea why I did that.
An example: my family, sitting together in our living room at christmas season, when I was a child. Not that I was overly fond of christmas, I just loved how my mother decorated the living room during the holidays. Sparkling lights, silver balls in crystal vases, the (fake) tree all decorated and covered with lights and reflective balls, a lifetime’s worth of meaningful decorations and bubble lights. Then my father would dim the light switches and get a fire burning in the fireplace and put the Mormon Tabernacle Choir on his awesome turntable, and we would curl up on the couches and chairs, mesmerized by the lights and the sounds: the crackling log in the fireplace, the choir with their resonant soft crackles in the speakers – people who grew up in the digital age have no idea how nice that sounded!
Then the peaceful loving memory quickly shifted to another christmas when, as an obnoxious teenager, I had a screaming argument with my mother and pissed her off so badly she nearly pulled hair out of my head. When that memory surfaced, on the heels of the nice one, I was completely overwhelmed with guilt at having behaved so horribly in my teenage years that I’d sent my normally calm, placid mother into an uncharacteristic rage. And believe me when I tell you: I had a mouth on me you wouldn’t believe. Or – maybe you would!
Thus ended THAT wonderful memory. And, may I add: WTF?
Why couldn’t I allow a happy memory to exist on its own, and not immediately cancel it with a horrible one? Especially since I’d apologized to my parents repeatedly as an adult for my teenage behavior, and had been forgiven for it by both of them a long, long time ago. They certainly never held a grudge – why did I hold one against myself?
This came on the heels of Gregory – or Grigori – telling me he was guiding me to a new sense of peace. He never said it would be an easy road, but I found at least one tendency that I needed to work on, within myself.
Next up on the list of things to add to the chaos: making astral travel incense. I’m still not sure what ingredients I have in my boxes ... I cannot wait until I’m fully unpacked!
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