Into the Cocoon: When Everything Familiar Dissolves

Your meditation still happens, the journal still fills with ink, the rituals still look "right" from the outside, but inside you feel… nothing. That hollow, restless dryness can be terrifying, especially after years of sincere commitment to your spiritual practice, self-care, or healing work. In this episode I name that moment clearly: it isn't always burnout or failure. Sometimes it's a threshold, a sign that you've changed and the old form can't feed you the way it used to.

We walk through Saint John of the Cross and the Dark Night of the Soul, including the unsettling idea that we often use good feelings as proof of spiritual progress. What happens when the consolations disappear and the practice stops giving relief on demand? I share why "nothing happening" can be a profound teacher, especially in a culture shaped by smartphones, algorithms, and constant consumption.

From there we move inward with Saint Teresa of Ávila's Interior Castle and her invitation to stop striving our way through the dark. I weave in art and music, including Tori Amos's "Saint Teresa," to explore desire, shame, and the body as sacred terrain. From Rumi's longing to Plato's cave, we look at why transformation so often feels disorienting, and why descent and surrender can be more honest than chasing "higher vibes."

If you're in a spiritual drought, take this as permission to slow down, simplify, and make contact with yourself again. Subscribe, share this with someone in a liminal season, and leave a review so more listeners can find grounded spiritual support.

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Transcript

Why The Practice Feels Empty

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to Blooming Wand, your home for grounded spiritual content. I'm Emily O'Neill, Evidential Psychic Medium, Intuitive Healer and Mentor. And on today's episode, I want to build on my previous episode. So if you listened to the first piece in this series, you might be interested in exploring the emptiness that settles in when spiritual content or spiritual practices fail to satisfy. Now you don't need to have watched or listened to that last episode to follow along here. Join me now if that's where you're at, it's all good. In the last episode, we unpacked the traps that we can fall into, including algorithms designed to exploit our attention, parasocial relationships that trick our brains into one-sided bonds with strangers, often whose content we consume a lot of, and the Barnum effect that makes generic advice feel profoundly personal. In this piece, I want to take the conversation a little bit somewhere different, because here's the thing: the hollow feeling doesn't only show up for people who watch too many tarot videos, it shows up for people who have been genuinely engaged often for years in a consistent self-care and spiritual practice. In fact, this feeling and this experience that we're describing can appear in many areas of your life. It's not limited to self-care and spiritual practices. Now, what I'm talking about happens to people who meditate daily, sitting on the same cushion every morning, and then suddenly realizing that the silence feels hollow and empty. It happens to people who keep a journal, filling the pages with their deepest reflections, only to find the words feel like an empty loop of scattered ink on endless pages. This has happened to me where I journal, journal, journal, and it used to fill me up. And then all of a sudden I'm like, this is not helping me. It happens to people who go to church every Sunday, sitting in the pews they love, yet feeling disconnected from the sermons and the hymns. It happens to people who practice yoga, moving through the postures that once felt so good to them, only to find that the mat the magic has like vanished from the mat. It happens to anyone who spent years seeking, learning, and finding deep fulfillment in their devotion, only to wake up one day and realize the very things that used to feed their soul now feel empty. And what this shift feels like is simple to name, but it's really hard to live through. And it boils down to this what I was doing isn't working anymore, or just as often, my connection to it is a changing, and I don't know into what. Now, if you can relate, I want you to know like this isn't a sign that you're failing, or even that something is wrong. It's a sign that you've changed and you might have outgrown whatever it is that you've been doing. Mystics and poets and philosophers and artists and psychologists have been naming this threshold for centuries, each from a different angle, and each arriving at some version of the same recognition. The falling away isn't the end of the path, it's the path doing what it was always going to do, and that's change. Now I want to make a clarification before we go any further. The shift that I'm describing is the dryness or hollowness that settles in while you're still inside a practice or a tradition, when something that you've kept doing simply stops feeding you. And I'm not talking about the harder work of leaving a tradition, institution, or community altogether, especially one that's harmed you. That's a distinct and often more difficult journey, and it deserves its own conversation, which I will take up in future content. I'm starting to work on something around that. I don't know when it will be done, but I just wanted to name that some of what follows may speak to that experience, but this episode wasn't intended to address that specific experience. I feel like that needs its own conversation.

Dark Night Of The Soul Basics

SPEAKER_00 4:00

Now, kind of going back to what we were talking about earlier and that sense of spiritual dryness, sometimes they call it, or spiritual drought or hollowness or emptiness, or just a feeling like this isn't working for me anymore. You've probably encountered the phrase Dark Knight of the Soul. Maybe through Joseph Campbell's Hero's Journey, where it shows up as the ordeal a hero faces right before transformation. But I want to just point out the phrase didn't start there. It comes from the 16th century Spanish mystic Saint John of the Cross, who gave us an incredibly precise map for a universal experience in his text, Dark Night of the Soul. He wrote of contemplative prayer, but I feel he was also mapping the anatomy of deep transformation. And he talks about two nights. The first is the night of the senses, where the warmth and meaning drain out of things that used to nourish us, practices that once felt alive go flat. And it's tempting to read this as failure, like we're doing something wrong. But John saw it as a sign of weaning or kind of weaning, a release of a reliance on good feelings as proof that something real is happening. And as I was working on this, that really stuck with me. Our reliance on good feelings as proof that something real is happening. When we're having a hard time, we want to feel good and we want to feel better, often right away. And we try different things, and if we don't maybe get that gratification of feeling better or feeling good, we don't think anything is happening. And I think that that's an interesting idea to explore. I think it appears for each of us in different ways. I know that it's deep in my psyche that when I do things, spiritual things, self-care things, go to therapy, go to a healer, do whatever I need to do to take care of myself. I will judge it, judge that experience if I'm not feeling better after it. And maybe that's right, maybe that's wrong, but I think it's something to explore. I know that in my experience, there are times where I'm not feeling that great, and I engage in certain practices or habits, or you name it, and I'm doing it because I want to feel relieved. And when I don't have that relief, I'm like out with that. You know, I'm not gonna do that anymore. But it's often not the practice itself that's the problem. It's that I'm not acknowledging my experience with it or even without it. I'm not exploring the uncomfortable feelings that I'm having. I just want them to go away. So, this idea of releasing our reliance on good feelings as proof that something real is happening is interesting to me. I wonder if it'll be interesting to you. I just kind of wanted to speak to that. Now, the second is the night of the spirit, and it goes a little bit deeper. This is the loss of our footing and our foundation. The beliefs and structures we used to hold so close to ourselves, they and that we used to hold ourselves together, they give way, and our very sense of who we are can feel shaken and it can even dissolve. And this is the night that maps most closely to what we call ego death or a full collapse of a world view. Both phases feel like an abandonment, both feel like an ending, but St. John insisted that neither night is an absence of grace, only a form of it so unfamiliar that it doesn't register as such while we're inside of it. He believed that this, what he called darkness, was the very engine of deepening. When we begin any practice, we live on its consolations. I know I did. The warmth, the quiet joy, the sense of being held, and I would say I still do. And that sweetness is a gift, it truly is. It's how we find our way into any practice. But eventually that tide goes out, and our ego has to let go of needing a reward before something truly sacred can take root. And it when when it feels like your practice is dying, it's simply traveling to a new depth you have yet to explore.

Releasing The Need For A Reward

SPEAKER_00 8:36

Now, before we shift into another spiritual figure that I find fascinating and that I think is pretty, I don't know if you guys will know about her, but I'll we'll see. I want to name something that happened to me. I do a meditation with a group of people every week. And sometimes we have really profound experiences. In fact, that happens quite frequently. And sometimes other people are having profound experiences, and I'm not. And there was an extended period of time where I was showing up to this spiritual circle, this meditation circle, and I was really just meditating, watching my thoughts come and go, noticing, acknowledging, and releasing, and nothing like too crazy was happening. It was quiet, it was contemplative. I wouldn't say that it felt empty or anything like that, but not a lot was going on. And I feel like that was a really good lesson for me because I do think in some spiritual communities, the quote-unquote reward for your practice is having some kind of profound experience. And I know that those are valuable experiences and I know that they happen, but I also know that a lot of times a lot of nothing happens, and we just kind of keep showing up anyway, and it's in that consistency and it's in that showing up that something quiet and something still and something strong and something true does begin to take root. I feel like John O'Donohue said it best when he said, he's an Irish priest and spiritual person and poet. He said, it's a coming home to yourself. It's a being radically present in the given moment, which I think in our culture today, man, I'll tell you what, those smartphones are really feel like they're rewiring our brain and making it harder and harder for us to be present for what is as it is in any given moment, and to be in that quiet where not a whole heck of a lot is going on. And I've noticed that I'm not always comfortable with quietude or contemplative kind of spaces where you're just sort of being rather than doing. Sometimes I am, sometimes I'm not. But why I bring it up is it's a pretty radical act to be able to do nothing or look out the window, not just because there's a lot we have to do to survive in this busy world and it's getting harder and harder to get by, to make a living, but also because of the quick and rapid advancement of technology that keeps us consuming and really taking on board a lot of information within a single five-minute even time frame sometimes. So I like this idea of not needing any kind of reward for something sacred to take root. Nothing, maybe nothing fantastical or crazy needs to happen. Maybe it's being comfortable in the quiet is where the sacred lies. I don't know. I'm gonna be very curious to know what your guys' thoughts are on that. But I really do like this concept of that when your practice feels like it's dying or that it's not filling you up, it's traveling to a new depth that you haven't explored yet. Because I have found this to be true for myself. And I think I've talked to other people and they've they've talked, they've agreed with me. They said, yeah, I've experienced that as well. Now,

Saint Teresa And The Interior Castle

SPEAKER_00 12:12

if St. John of the Cross mapped the anatomy of that darkness that we're talking about, Saint Teresa of Avila, his fellow reformer in the same Carmelite world, mapped out what to do when you're inside of it. And I've always been really fascinated with Saint Teresa of Avila. If you don't know about her, look her up. I mean, she was writing and creating works and thinking and doing things that women were just not allowed to do at the time, especially in the religious world. And her masterwork, the interior castle, imagines the soul as a castle of seven dwelling places. And in her view, spiritual life is a slow movement inward from the outer rooms toward the center where the divine awaits. So the divine awaits, the divine within you awaits. And she treats the emptiness not as failure, but as a crucial boundary line on that inward path. It means you've crossed a threshold. It's an indicator of your deepening, you're going further into that interior castle. And her counsel is to stop trying to think our way through the dark. So if you're moving through that interior castle, you get deeper and deeper, it gets darker and darker. And we want to have a plan, right? We want to be like, do I go left? Do I go right? What do I do? And she's saying, you can't think your way through this. You have to let go of expectation and simply be in the dark, simply sit with it. And what she describes on the far side of striving, so she's like, no striving is going to get you where you want to go, is what she calls the prayer of quiet. One of those interior rooms. So the prayer of quiet is sort of one of those interior rooms, and it's a state of infused peace that no amount of human effort can force or manufacture. Her work speaks to the idea that the barrenness you might be feeling is not a sign that you've lost your way. This is a theme. This is a theme in this episode. It's a sign that you are on your way to something deeper. But spiritual drought is only one pillar of St. Teresa's work and what she spoke to. She knew rapture just as intimately. And it was that side of her that unexpectedly piqued my interest by working on this piece. So we're talking about this dryness and all this stuff. And then I'm thinking about Saint Teresa of Avila and her work. And then I'm thinking about, I've taken a lot of art history and things like that and studied art. I was like, I'm pretty sure she's got a sculpture. And so I looked it up, and it's the ecstasy of Saint Teresa. And so I'm like, oh, she's not just talking about dryness, she's also talking about ecstatic states. So while I was doing research for this, Tori Amos, one of my very favorite artists and musicians, released her new album, In the Time of Dragons. And on it is a song called Saint Teresa. I was listening, I had to laugh when I was working on this and got the album, was listening to it and kind of thinking about what I wanted to say and thinking about St. Teresa. And I look at the track to listen, there's St. Teresa. And I was like, well, there you have it. And when I saw the title, as you can tell, I was so excited. And the track draws directly on this imagery of the interior castle and its seven mansions and on transverberation, which is Teresa's name for a vision in which an angel pierced her heart with a golden fire-tipped spear. And she described the experience as so painful that she moaned, yet so sweet she never wanted it to end. And the pairing of pain and sweetness in a single sensation is it drew me in. It draws me in. And most of us know what it's like to be undone by love, or at least I hope you do, and to feel it as something close to wounding, even is as it opens us. I mean, have you ever just loved something so much it hurts? Obviously, there's people in my life that I really love, but I had a sick kitty in the last couple of weeks, and I had to go to the ER with her a couple of times, and I just love that cat so much. Her name's Freya Ferringulli. And my love for her was so huge, but it was just like, I love you so much, it almost hurts. And Teresa, Saint Teresa speaks to that, and I think it's really interesting. But you know, I also think it's interesting that Saint Teresa named this fusion 500 years ago, that bittersweet pain, that love so sweet it hurts. But I really was interested about how in Tori Amos's song, she adds her own emphasis, and it really shifted some things in me about when uh the way I viewed Saint Teresa and her work. So Tori's song lingers less on the wound and more on the shame we often wrap around our desire. And she sings of a woman mortified by her own wanting, taught to feel guilty for it, and then asks whether God's honey might heal Teresa's wounds. So there's something interesting at play when we talk about the spiritual dryness juxtaposed with moments that we've perhaps experienced something more ecstatic or more profound, and that really cracks us open. And I like to bring it into the conversation because one isn't better than the other. And I think what I'm inviting into this conversation is that time when we're not feeling all of these amazing things, when they fall away, and they're just as valuable, but I think that we don't view them that way sometimes. So, in her telling, that's Tori Amos's telling about St. Teresa, the piercing that St. Teresa described in that feeling of I have to I always want to say this the wrong way, transverberation. She tells it as a blessing rather than a punishment. It's like a blessing laid on desire rather than a punishment for having desire. And the body is named as sacred instead of suspect because we often feel so much through our body. And I think we're really taught not to trust our body, that it can't be trusted. It's impulsive, it's passionate, it has desires, it has longings, it has yearnings. These are all things we feel in the body. And we sometimes are suspicious of those feelings or think they're gonna misguide us or think that it's gonna hurt us, or things like that. And sometimes even our desire to feel better is something that we might feel frustration around or shame around. So this just gave me a new connection into a figure, Saint Teresa, that is, that I thought I already understood. And there's something particular about meeting a centuries-old mystic again through a contemporary artist's voice, especially Tori's. The song is so haunting. I love it, and it really makes that gap between St. Teresa's time, which was 500 years ago, around, I think, and now feel thinner than I expected. And obviously, I'm interested in St. Teresa because she was a woman doing things that women were not allowed to do at the time. That she described that transverberation moment where she was had that vision of being pierced by that angel's arrow, and the feeling was it hurt, but she moaned and didn't also want it to end, compared to these times where we also feel nothing, frankly. And I think that's what strikes me most about St. Teresa is her plain-spoken honesty about experiencing a spiritual drought and her account of transverberation. So they're they're very different experiences, right? But she made room for both, and that's what I'm trying to invite in here. She made room for both the emptiness and the ecstasy, and trusted that everything living between these two extremes belongs to the journey, too. And she trusted the ecstatic piercing as full as she as fully as she trusted the long, hollow silences that come after and in between. And that trust feels like a really important invitation. Her work resonates with me because it was written from a not from like a the perpetual mountaintop, like I'm always gonna feel good. You know, if you're doing something and it's not lifting you up, don't do it. It maps the shadow-filled caverns just as deeply.

Rumi On Longing Without Quick Fixes

SPEAKER_00 20:57

Now let's look at another popular spiritual figure, Rumi. And for quick reference, Rumi's the 13th century, Persian Sufi poet and mystic whose Maz Navi opens with one of the most beautiful image, images, at least to me, in spiritual literature. Sorry, I had to take a little drink there. The reed flute cut from a reed bed crying for its origin. I'm really interested in this idea of yearning or seeking, and that perhaps that longing is because we're in physical form, we're separated from where we came from, our origin, which might be the feeling and sensing realm. I I don't believe we came from nothingness, I think we come from somewhere, right? Not everybody believes that, but that's an idea that it is feels useful to me. And back to the Masnavi, everyone who hears the little who hears the Reed hears their played. So that's the reed flute that is. Sorry, I got twisted in my mind. But everyone who hears the reed flute hears their own longing in the sound, and the reed doesn't seek to have its long longing answered or explained or soothed, it stays open to it and it lets the longing move through the music. So as the reed is played by whomever plays it, however it gets played, that that music moves through it and gives motion, movement, form, shape, maybe community, connection, recognition to the longing. And I think sometimes when we have spiritual practices or any practice or any experience that used to fill us up and suddenly doesn't, we're reminded of our longing. And I think that longing is within all of us. I think it ebbs and flows as many things do. But when things fall away, or when we fall away from things that once filled us up, whatever they are, we're reminded of that deep longing that perhaps resides within all of us. And this idea of letting the longing move through you, it's a direct counter to what spiritual content consumption and the modern wellness industry offers us, which is a temporary soothing for our deepest longings through the illusion of a quick answer. And who doesn't want a quick answer? I mean, let's be honest, who does not want a quick answer? Algorithmic fortunes promise a message from the universe, a prediction of what's coming, or a fleeting confirmation that we're seeing. And for a moment, the inner seeking pauses, but then the cycle repeats. And whether you're looking at tarot readings, energy readings, astrology readings, or just any self-help person saying, This is my monthly message for you, it feels comforting for a while and we feel seen in the moment, and then the seeking might cease, but the cycle will constantly repeat itself. I feel like on a pretty rapid time time frame, meaning very quickly, because we're consuming things quickly. And I think when we move away to a slower pace in life, if we're able to, the cycle of these sensations stretches out a little bit more. I might be wrong about that, but that's what I have felt in my own body. But the reality is the longing was never meant to be permanently answered or subdued. It's meant to be sat with, breathed, breathed through, and allowed to become the opening through which something real can move. It's a living testament to Rumi's truth that the ache of the longings itself is the path. The ache of the longing itself is the path, and that your desire for the divine is the divine within you, calling you home to your own interior castles. To borrow from St. Teresa. Now, this is another one that I felt like is a good one to bring into this conversation.

Plato’s Cave And Spiritual Deconstruction

SPEAKER_00 25:12

It's from Plato's Republic, written around 380 BCE, where Plato describes prisoners chained inside a cave, watching shadows cast upon a wall and mistaking those projections for reality. Have you all heard this one? I think I got this, I know, in one of my college courses, and I hadn't thought about it in a while. And it came to me when I was contemplating this piece for everybody. I was like, isn't there something about people in a cave? And it actually came up in my mysticism course that I took with Britt Hartley from No Nonsense Spirituality. So I got to like revisit it a couple times. Sorry, I had a little cough. So you've got these people in the cave watching shadows cast upon the wall, and they're mistaking these projections for reality. Now, this is the only world that they know, and they spend their lives interpreting and naming these fleeting shapes. And when a prisoner is finally freed, their transformation to the outer world is agonizing and disorienting. Didn't feel too good. The actual world is far harder to look at than the comfortable illusion. And when the liber liberated prisoner returns to share their truth, guess what? Guess what happens? Others resist, preferring the safety of the shadows to the blinding reality of the light. Meaning the light they experience outside the cave. As a metaphor for entering spiritual deconstruction, Plato's cave wall feels pretty precise to me. The inherited beliefs, certainties, and structure we grow up with are compelling. They give us a familiar framework to live by. We experience this dogma firsthand, accepting it completely because we have never been given a reason to question what has always been true or what has always worked for us. When those structures begin to collapse, and they can begin to collapse for a variety of reasons. Lots of things can cause this to happen. Turning away from the familiar shadows and into a new phase of development feels deeply, deeply disorienting because you had a structure, right? You have a framework, it falls away, and then you're like, how do I navigate? Like, what am I, how do I navigate my life? The old definitions no longer hold, and the light of a deeper truth feels blinding at first. But that disorientation is not a sign of failure or a loss of faith, or that there's a sign that anything's wrong with you. It's the first shock of the light. It's the first shock of coming out of the quote unquote cave and into a new area, a new realm of perhaps your interior castle, perhaps your consciousness or your awareness, perhaps just a realization that some of your values are changing. Maybe your essentials are changing. That's an episode I did a long time ago on like what's essential to you and how we figure out what that is, because what's essential to us can be very, can become a guiding light for us. Not to sidetrack on that, but all of my episodes do connect in some weird way, at least in my mind, and build on each other. I'll work on one episode and then it'll often inspire the next and the next and the next. It's an interesting way my creative process works. Now let's loop back to Joseph Campbell, who drew from world mythology in The Hero with a Thousand Faces. That's a book he has, to argue that every genuine sort of transformation follows the same universal arc. Side note, not to flatten out the mythologies that exist across the worlds into this one statement, but there is often a theme, which involves a departure from the ordinary world, a threshold crossing into the strange and into the difficult, a series of stripping ordeals, so ordeals that really try you, that strip you down, that make you really have to focus, and a return with a gift that could only be found through the journey, through the descent, perhaps. But Campbell also named the refusal of the call. The moment the invitation to go deeper arrives and the hero turns back toward the familiar, we've all done it. I've done it. I'm like, I hear the call, and I'm not, I don't want to answer right now. Fair enough. Today, staying trapped in passive consumption is our ultimate refusal. Just go on your phone and consume and consume, consume. But it cover it it carries a heavy cost. And even if you're not a person that uses a lot, consumes a lot on your phone, it can be easy to do it in other ways. I'm somehow being reminded of being a kid, and my mom, I know she won't mind me saying this, so I'm gonna share it with you because it just came into my head. So her impromptu story time. She read a lot of self-help books, so she's always felt something inside that little bit of disorientation and growth, and she would go and just bring in all these different spiritual and self-health books, a lot of new age spirituality stuff, and other stuff too, from different cultures and whatnot. But it was a lot of consuming of content through all of these books, but then never taking any of that and applying it, just consuming and consuming. I'm not saying we always have to apply everything that we read or take on board, but it stayed in a state of consumption and never moved into like I can embrace this discomfort and see where it takes me. It was almost like consuming all those books was a way to avoid the discomfort, which is what we've been talking about. So you don't have to be on your phone a lot for this to happen. We can find a lot of interesting ways to distract ourselves when we're realizing our day-to-day routine or certain things within it that used to feel good to us just don't anymore. And like I said, this feeling can come at any time in our lives, at any age. And it does, I think, happen several times in our lives for all of us. And it can be like this feeling of the job that you're in isn't right and you don't like it anymore. It can be a partnership, it can be a creative practice, it can be you decided to go to this one school and you loved it at first, and then it just starts to not feel right, and you know it's not right, but you're like, uh, I'm just gonna keep, keep on, keeping on and find ways to distract myself from that feeling. So there's a lot of layers to this conversation, not to convolute the message, I don't think that I am, but just I want to add that the nuance and layers to

Descent, Wild Woman, Cocoon Transformation

SPEAKER_00 32:11

this. Now, Maureen Murdoch, a young analyst who studied with Joseph Campbell gently but firmly, departed from his framework. And I'm so glad that she did. She offers a, I think, pretty meaningful counterpoint to some of his work. In the heroine's journey, she mapped a different movement observed in her female or femme clients. Rather than an outward conquest of achievement, the heroine's journey is a descent. It's a reclaiming of what was split off and a return to the body, the relational, and the cyclical. So the reclaiming of what was split off. So living under patriarchy or living as a woman, I think a lot of us know that we've had to compartmentalize, strip away, ignore, turn away from certain experiences because they didn't fit into the societal mold. And again, there's a lot of ways that this has come into culture. And it's across many, many different cultures and and and times. So I just want to point out that, you know, this is can't cover every little possible scenario, but I want to point out that rather than an outward conquest, it's a descent. That that that's what Murdoch was talking about. And where Campbell's hero goes out to slay the dragon, Murdoch's heroine goes down to meet what she has been running from. The transformation cannot be won. It can't be won. It has to be surrendered to, which feels to me very vulnerable. And I know in my spiritual and self-care practices, I have encountered myself becoming very vulnerable and having to let my defenses go. And let me tell you, we come up with some incredible defensives to keep ourselves from experiencing and surrendering to the transformation, whatever that transformation might be. Another work that really impacted me was Clarissa Pinkola Estes' work, which extends into the territory of the Wild Woman archetype. And she's the one who wrote Women Who Run with the Wolves. And she drew from fairy tales and folklore and the deep tradition of oral storytelling to map what she calls, as I mentioned, the wild woman archetype, the instinctual knowing layer of the psyche that gets buried under performance, compliance, and the accumulated weight of not belonging to yourself. Estes writes about the cost of that burial and the long, unglamorous work of reclamation, often an acknowledged work. And like Murdoch, she's not interested in ascent. She's interested in the return to the self. And I just want to say that compliance, being a good girl, all these just interesting ways that we think we're protecting ourselves, because it is actually probably a protective mechanism for many, does come at a cost. We have to leave something behind. And sometimes these points of discomfort are saying, look at the discomfort, be with it, because beyond the wall of that, or that that is those feelings are actually a portal to a part of yourself that's been waiting for you for a really, really long time. So we're interested not in ascent, but in the return with Estes work. And I think this distinction matters now because the spiritual algorithm reward is tilted towards entirely ascending, higher vibrations, portal activations, collective upgrades. But Murdoch and Estes, Murdoch and Estes, that is, I had a little tongue tie, they point to something I think that's more honest, not up but down, not more but less. Not acquiring new spiritual experiences, not going on your 10th ayahuasca trip. If you like ayahuasca, I'm not I'm just using that as an example of like, or your mushroom trips over and over and over, but releasing what blocks the experience of where you already are, of what's already happening within you. And I think sometimes we feel like we have to do something to get past that. And I think that there's this invitation as maybe you don't need to do anything, but be present for it. And I think the answer to that question or that situation that I'm posing looks different for different people at different times. I'm not here to dictate to anybody's personal experience. I'm just trying to invite analysis, conversation, and see if you relate to it. I think you're going to relate to this next thing. Consider the cocoon. The caterpillar does not simply reorganize inside its casing. It dissolves. It literally dissolves. It enters a phase of genuine liquidity, a state where nothing of the old form remains before a new structure can emerge. It all disintegrates. If you cut open a cocoon min process, you will find nothing recognizable, neither caterpillar nor butterfly, just dissolution. This liquid phase is not failure. It is the exact mechanism of transformation. It's not to be rushed. It can't be rushed. And sometimes it can't be observed. Like sometimes we're just so in it that we don't have perspective on it. And it can't be consumed from the outside. Nobody else can tell us what's going on either. They can hold space for us, they can guide us, they can be present for us, but it must be lived through and from within. Now, if you recognize yourself in this discussion or feel that your internal ground has shifted, consider these three truths. I'm sure there's more than three truths. First, this is a threshold, not a dead end. Every mystical tradition agrees that a sudden hollow dryness, the real realization that what once worked no longer does is not the end of spiritual life or whatever it is that you're doing. It's the beginning of a deeper register. The question is whether you can tolerate the emptiness or if you will reflexively reach for something to fill the gap. Second, you do not have to know what comes next. The threshold is not a doorway into a brightly lit room. It's the blinding disorientation of stepping out of the dark cave and into quote unquote kind of this light or this new phase where your senses are literally readjusting. So something to think about. It requires a different way of seeing and a different way of moving through the world that you're probably going to have to learn. Third, threshold practices require simplicity, not effort. I have found this to be true. Your current spiritual practices or whatever you've been doing have stopped working and doing them harder, like working harder and striving at it. And this is what St. Teresa was saying isn't the answer. You need slowness, silence, and you need your body, presence with your body. And returning to simple things like quiet time alone, breathing intentionally, light journaling again and again, returning to the simple, breaking things down to the bare minimum, not for what it produces, but for the quality of attention that it demands. Ask yourself: can I sit with my own discomfort and confusion even for a little while? Can I give it my attention? You don't need more content. You need more contact with yourself, with the living world, and with whatever it is you are seeking underneath the seeking. And when I was writing this, I was like, that's a weird thing to say. But I want to describe it further. It's like we point at something, we're like, I'm seeking, you know, I'm looking, we're kind of casting our gaze off to the horizon. I'm seeking, and we think we're seeking. Maybe we can even name what we're seeking. But underneath that, oh, the seeking, it's there, it's it's just beyond my reach is something underneath the seeking. And I think that it's the difference between seeking something externally, like it's out there versus, yeah, maybe underneath the seeking is you. I wonder if you've ever experienced that.

Mentoring Support And Staying Connected

SPEAKER_00 40:28

Now, navigating this liquid phase of seeking and deconstruction, it's disorienting and it's almost impossible to do it entirely on your own. It's easy to mistake the structural collapse of your old beliefs for absolute failure. And this is why I created my mentoring program. I don't often pitch myself, but this is one of my favorite things to help people through as an evidential psychic medium, ancestral medicine practitioner, and spiritual guide. My role will never be to hand you a new set of rigid rules or tell you what's happening to you or who you are or what to be, or even narrate your experience. Instead, I offer an ethical grounded container to help you meet yourself where you are. And together we sit in the dryness, the drought, and listen to the wisdom from your lineage, from your own intuition, and help your body tolerate the weight of the unknown because it is a practice. Nobody modeled this for me. Like I didn't see people working through this or they didn't share it with me until much, much later in life. And somebody that I have a lot of respect for gave me a compliment. I don't often toot my own horn, but it felt really good to hear this. And she said, Emily, you have the incredible capacity to hold space for people and to witness what they're going through without trying to fix it, without trying to stop the emotion that arises. You don't, you're not afraid of the big emotions that come up. You hold space for them and you don't, you don't tell us what to do. You don't try to fix it. You let us experience what we're going to be experiencing and you witness us. And that being witnessed is really profound. And I have to say, that is a skill that I've been working very, very hard to cultivate. And to hear somebody mirror back to me that I was doing it in a way that felt good and healthy to them really meant a lot. I will always try to walk beside you through the descent and not rush your transformation, but to hold the space securely until the new structure that you will discover for yourself begins to emerge. So if you're ready to go into that work, you can check out my spiritual mentoring program. You can find it at BloomingWand.com. If you're not, just keep following along with the newsletter, the podcast, and the YouTube channel. I'm so happy that you're here. My primary way of staying in contact with my community is my newsletter. You can sign up for it at BloomingWand.com. If you like to read, I have discovered that a lot of the Blooming One community are readers, that that's the number one way that they consume a lot of what I do. You can find my blog on my website again, bloomingwand.com, click explore and go to the blog, and there's quite a few of them there. That way you can engage them in a time frame that feels good to you. A slow and steady pace, and maybe not such a quick one. So thanks for being here. Thanks for joining me. You know what I'm gonna say. Take good care of yourselves, get those journals out, and I'll see you soon.