Emotional Mastery

A Path to Liberation

Caged Spirituality

This time last year, I began a very deep and explorative journey into my emotions. Little did I know that it would be a year-long journey that got worse before it got better. (I’m just starting to come out of it now.)

It began with a decision to let go of ideas that I’d learned along my “spiritual journey”. These beliefs, I was beginning to realize, weren’t actually helping me at all. I knew it was time to stop ignoring the parts of me that make me human and fully embody all of myself—including all of my emotions—into my physical body. Which was going against everything I’d learned about being “spiritual”.

The Sophia Code became a powerful activation in this decision with transmissions that would change my life forever, in a way that I could never look back to old-school spirituality. The Sophia Code is a sacred text with teachings and initiations—all about the embodiment of the Divine Feminine—which was already something I’d been exploring in a mystery school the year before.

My discovery of these Divine Feminine teachings felt like a call home, a remembering, a soft place to land that said, “It’s safe to rest here. It’s safe to feel all of your feelings.”

Up until these teachings entered my life, I’d fallen into spiritual practices that were really just religion tied up in a prettier box but with the same message—to separate your soul from your body and make you believe that to create anything of value in your life or the world you had to “transcend” the body and everything “negative”.

Some examples are: think only good thoughts, ignore feelings that don’t feel good and only pay attention to the ones that feel good, focus on what you want and it will come, etc.

What I realize now is that teaching people these beliefs before they’ve done the deep work that is going into the dark places within only brings harm. It certainly did for me. For years, I thought I was broken because I couldn’t create or change anything even while implementing these practices intentionally every day. I watched others around me find some levels of success with it and was certain that I was a faulty human because I couldn’t make it work for me.

Maybe you’ve experienced this, too?

The truth is, it didn’t work for me because it’s not intended to work like that in the first place… not for anyone. Some people may have less trauma to heal than others and can find some success with these outdated spiritual teachings because they have a clearer channel to begin with, but more of us signed up to go deep, to do the real work, the empowered work, of healing ourselves on all levels, and not to escape the body to manifest a desired outcome through transcendence.

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Rising Feminine Fire

After deciding I was leaving this old spirituality behind and stepping into a more embodied way of creating, I’d begun going in deep with Divine Feminine teachings. This meant a lot of stagnant emotions had to rise—emotions that weren’t pretty to feel or look at. On the surface, the way these emotions would arise out of nowhere didn’t make any sense, and this created daily unrest within myself and in my most important relationship at the time.

The struggle came from an underlying shift happening in the unseen places of the primordial spaces in my heart and womb. A healing had sparked that called me to feel all the feelings I’d not allowed myself to feel before because I feared attracting something terrible into my life. And quite honestly, I was too afraid to feel them. The person I was in a relationship with knew me better than anyone else in my life, and he knew well about my struggles and my desire for change, including how passionate I was about discovering the teachings of the Divine Feminine.

Yet, he also became my biggest trigger. Whether intentional or not, his words and actions daily set me off into a rage of fury or tears that I couldn’t even explain to myself, let alone to him. And he misunderstood too, even suggesting that I “shouldn’t” be feeling so angry. At the time, I believed him without knowing how detrimental that suggestion was.

I don’t want to make this about him because it isn’t. I had a lot of relationships fall apart last year as I released these stagnant emotions because who I was becoming wasn’t someone who could be part of them anymore. He just happened to be the most important one that I chose to walk away from. And I don’t point blame at him or anyone else because that isn’t the point either, nor does it help. I only share this because it depicts an important message about journeying with the Divine Feminine and your emotions—especially after spending a lot of time weighed down by patriarchal religious or spiritual systems.

What I didn’t understand at the time, and what he misunderstood, was that I NEEDED to let those emotions rise, no matter how ugly it got. They’d been shoved down so deep inside of me that I didn’t even realize they were there, and through saying yes to my emotional journey and Divine Feminine embodiment, I opened the door for them to begin flooding out.

This is because Divine Feminine teachings honor the dark and the light. Of course, the balance of dark and light is the balance of the feminine (dark) and masculine (light) energies within each of us. To return to the balance within, you must begin with the dark, for there can be no light without it. This means, when you say yes to return to the Divine Feminine teachings, which is the same as to say returning to the ancient, primordial teachings of our ancestors who honored the dark within themselves and Mother Earth as something sacred, you say yes to going into ALL of the emotions including the ones society, religion, and even old-school spirituality want you to believe are evil, bad, or inappropriate.

This is what I said yes to last year, without fully knowing that’s what I was doing. It was a year of burning, a year of healing, a year of anger, a year of grief, a year of empowerment, a year of courage, a year of remembering what had been forgotten—the good and the bad.

I remembered traumas that I’d blocked for years, and some of them brought me to my knees. I realized I’d survived far more than I had been ready to acknowledge previously. I discovered that not only did I enjoy anger and rage moving through me, but it was healthy to cultivate a loving relationship with them. I began speaking truths that before I would have been terrified to say aloud.

It’s important to be clear that these releases don’t give you permission to be hurtful to others as they rise. That’s spiritual and emotional immaturity. To be the master of your emotions, you learn how to feel them without being hurtful or causing damage.

A year of mastering my emotions in a way I never imagined possible has brought me to a place where, even when I feel grief, anger, sadness, hopelessness, I can sit in my power and let those feelings move through me, listening with love to what they have come to share with me. This is the way of the Divine Feminine. There’s still deeper and wider to go in this mastery, but I’ve come a long way in a year, and it’s because I was willing to go into places that most aren’t willing to.

But if you’re reading this now, I know that isn’t you. Either you’re already doing this work (thank you), or you’re ready to begin. We need more people willing to embody the fullness of their light and dark in balance—the Divine Feminine and Divine Masculine qualities we all possess no matter how we identify.

To do this, you must be willing to sit with all of your emotions as they arise and even actively go within and search for the places where you may have stagnant repressed energy because you were told at some point in your life it was wrong to feel or express it. That just isn’t true.

Now is the time for us to feel it and express it—all of it. For ourselves and for all of those who came before us who couldn’t. Because the only way beyond the darkness is through it. And then one day, you’ve done it enough times that you realize there’s nothing to fear in the darkness, that your truest power awaits you there hoping that you’ll find the courage to dig deep and release it one breath at a time.

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Oracle Reading

I felt a nudge to pull a card from The Healing Waters Oracle Deck for some extra guidance for those of you who may be wondering if emotional master is calling you, too.

Don’t hold back. It’s time. Go for it. Dive in.

This is a card of confirmation and clarity that if you feel the call to go deep, it’s time. Consider this your invitation. If you’re someone who waits for permission, this card is it. Becoming the master of your emotions is becoming the master of your life.

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If you’d like help in this work, read on…

Though I’m an Aquarius Sun, I have a lot of Scorpio in my birth chart. I have a Pluto Complex, too. If you know astrology (I’m just beginning), you’ll know that the sign of Scorpio and the planet Pluto are the death/rebirth/transformation/dark children of their associated groups. Just for kicks, I decided to come into this lifetime with Pluto in Scorpio, as well as Mars (the planet of action/aggression) and Saturn (the planet of discipline/structure) in Scorpio. I mean, talk about not making it easy on myself. That’s a lot of heavy emotions to navigate, and my life has pretty much been that!

After last year, though, I realized that these placements in my chart and the life I’ve lived up until now have been preparing me to master the dark places within myself so I can face the dark places in the world with unwavering courage. This is something we can all benefit from right now as our world continues to move through a collective dark night of the soul. The most powerful way to navigate what’s ahead is to be so familiar with the dark places within that facing darkness no longer scares you but brings you into your power. Because it’s only from your inner power that you can bring great changes of good into your personal world and the collective world.

And, I want to offer something to help you. I wish I had someone who’d taken the journey ahead of me who I could have confided in as I kicked and screamed my way through a release and awakening last year. Yes, a community, and a book, and spiritual guides, and one very amazing friend (you know who you are) made a big difference, but to have a mentor by my side, one-on-one (without bombarding my amazing friend with my shitstorm every day), to listen as a compassionate witness, and who knew the road I was walking because they’d walked it ahead of me would have helped me ground a lot of the turbluence I went through.

So, I want to offer this to you. I’ve been looking for my way to help in this world, and I’m feeling into if this could be it. To be your compassionate witness as you get courageous and go into the deep, dark emotions calling to be released. To listen. To offer tools or practices that helped me. To create space for you to get real and let it all out without judgment.

If you’re interested, say “yes” in the comments or private message me, and we’ll schedule something. The most liberating journey you will take in this lifetime is to stop the shame game that institutions want to place on your shoulders and to instead embody all of you—the anger and grief too—fully into your body.

Moonrise Mystic is the journey of a novelist connecting her love of story with her passion for the mystical into one moving, breathing prayer. It’s for those who love to read fantasy stories and intuitive writings that explore expanding through the initiations of life, death and rebirth, and transmuting shadow to light. Thank you for being here!

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