KAJAMA.COM NEWSLETTER

June 14 through June 20, 2021

Things unfold pretty calmly as the Sun spends its last week in Gemini, encouraging us to integrate all the new ideas and information we've learned over the past three weeks. A Leo Moon will hang in the heavens Monday and Tuesday, bringing out our generous and heart-based sides. Details and organization will be the themes on Wednesday and Thursday under a Virgo Moon, so save those sorts of tasks for mid-week. A loving Libra Moon will move us into the weekend Friday and Saturday, highlighting relationships and a return to fairness and balance. On Sunday Jupiter will turn retrograde, but we may not even notice, as we'll be drifting through the spiritual and intuitive tones of the Scorpio Moon. After a month of information overload and two eclipses, this weekend is best spent regrouping before we move into a new season and all the wonders that await us!

Tips for Making Everyday Moments Magickal, by Phoenix LeFae

(Article originally published in The Llewellyn Journal.)

Every moment of life is magickal, but our awareness and ability to hold that awareness is the challenge. The mundane aspects of life might trick us into believing that regular tasks lack magick. This feeling increases when we have to do things we don't want to do. There are ways to make everyday moments magickal—it just takes a little shift in perspective. That shift comes through the form of ritual. Ritual is the deeply reverent practice of casting a circle, calling the corners, and performing magickal arte, but ritual is also done in the small places of everyday life.

Daily practice and rituals don't have to look like sitting in silence; long, quiet meditations; or a special drawn-out process. So, how do you add simple practical rituals into your everyday moments without the pomp and drama of a fully fledged ritual? Good news, it's totally easy.

Daily Ritual
There are parts of daily life that can be ritualized with just a simple shift in focus and attention. By shifting your energy when you engage in these tasks, you bring more of your spirit and power into them. We all have daily tasks that must be done; why not add magick into these moments?

Bathing
We all bathe. Bathing happens on the regular. Long ritual baths are delightful. Filling a bathtub with roses and salts, lighting candles, and playing soft music makes a lovely ritual. But it takes a lot of time, set up, and clean up. It's not really ideal for daily life or daily ritual.

Rather than worrying about setting the time aside to take a ritual bath, turn your regular bathing routine into a ritual with your intention.

• Keep salt scrubs in your showers and do a cleansing salt scrub every time you wash.
• Take a moment, literally just a moment, to connect with the water. Let yourself feel the water pouring over you. Feel grateful for the presence of water in your life.
• After washing, step fully into the stream of water and let it cleanse your spirit. Notice if there is anything stuck in your energy field that needs to be released and let the water shift it, letting it flow down the drain.

Food
Making and eating food is a daily practice we all need to survive and it is the perfect time to implement rituals. Cook with intention, even if that is just putting a frozen dinner into the microwave. Singing words of gratitude over your plate before eating it will charge it with your gratitude and bring more blessings your way. Gratitude begets things to be grateful for. Make cooking and eating a ritual. This doesn't mean you have to be serious and eat in silence. There is a lot of joy and silliness that can be part of ritual, too.

• Add ingredients with intention, understand what the magickal correspondences of herbs and spices are. Include things that are in alignment with the goals you want to achieve.
• Say prayers over your food as you prepare it and before you eat it.
• Take a moment to honor the food. Whatever you eat had to give of itself for you to eat it, honor that sacrifice with your gratitude. Be grateful for the hands that picked that food, the truck drivers that drove it to your store, the people that work at the shop that help you, and the hands that cooked it.
• Add herbs or essences into the water that you drink throughout the day. Make each cup of water you drink a ritual and a prayer. Chant words of empowering or blessings over your cup before you take your first sip.

Cleaning
We all have to clean up. We wash dishes, do laundry, clean the cat box, and even scrub toilets. Engaging your magickal self when doing these mundane activities helps you to bring ritual into the everyday. This is even more important when doing chores you don't like. For example: I really dislike washing the dishes. When I do the dishes, I use this as a time of meditation. I focus on my breath, I go within, and let myself be with myself. Washing the dishes has become a meditative practice in my daily life. It is a way to bring ritual into the mundane.

Magickal Moments
Try setting aside small moments in your life to work as triggers for magickal moments as you move through the day. Ritual doesn't have to take hours; it can literally be thirty seconds of awareness and focus. If you have a busy or highly scheduled life, you may need to insert these moments into your daily calendar. There are lots of apps both for spiritual work and for scheduling that can help you with this process. Technology can totally aid in your daily spiritual work.

Touchstones A touchstone is like a secret hint you put out into the world to help you remember important things. For example, whenever I put a key into a lock, I take a deep breath. The key and lock is a touchstone for me to intentionally breathe.

Touchstones can look like anything and they serve as reminders for whatever you need. You might pause and say a prayer every time you see the color pink. Perhaps you speak the name of a beloved ancestor any time you find a penny on the ground. Maybe you stop and feel deep gratitude whenever you hear a phone ring. Let your imagination run wild.

These touchstone moments are small rituals that pepper your day with magick. You never know when you will come across one of your touchstones. It creates an opportunity for you to pay attention to the magick that is happening in your world all the time.

Adventuring
A big part of connecting into daily magick and ritual comes from connecting into your part of the world. Get out into your neighborhood. Go into wild spaces near you. Take walks around your block and let yourself feel the buzz and thrum of your hometown. Learn where the spirits of the land dwell and connect with them. What are the cycles and seasons of your living place like?

• Track the Cycles: Keep a ledger or journal of the cycles and seasons where you live. Watch what plants grow and when. Notice the changes in weather. See how the moon phases change how things feel or look where you live.
• Sit Spot: Pick a time to connect with the land around you every day. Maybe it's the early morning or late night. It could be after work or mid-day. The time doesn't matter, it's the commitment that does. Go outside, or look outside your window, every day at the same time. Just notice what is going on out there is in the world.

Ritual and magick are a part of our everyday lives, we just have to be willing to see how they are intwined with everything we do. Yes, we have mundane things to do, clean toilets, pay bills, put gas in our cars. These things may not feel like rituals or magick, but they truly are, if we allow them to be.

We can easily bring more magick into our daily lives through the ritual of living. The big rituals are profound and moving, but it is truly the art of finding ritual and magick in our day to day that brings us into connection with all of the mystery that life holds.

Article originally published in The Llewellyn Journal. Copyright Llewellyn Worldwide, 2021. All rights reserved.

I recently dated someone I liked a great deal but had to break up with him due to the high level of anxiety I got from the relationship. (He kept blowing me off by not calling me back and things like that.) We weren't together long. Most of the time I am fine with my decision, but there are moments when I am suddenly hit hard with a feeling of utter sadness and regret. I have to stop and consciously work through those overpowering emotions. My brother mentioned to me that it's possible I'm being affected by his thoughts and feelings. Since the breakup, I have been consciously sending love and forgiveness back to him. I often think that maybe on some other plane somewhere, we are happy together, which makes me feel better. I'm wondering if maybe these sudden waves of emotion are not really mine, but are feelings of his that I am picking up on. If so, what do I do to move on?

S.

Susyn:

A relationship can remain unbalanced for only so long before the person doing all the giving has to move on. When we give too much, we send the other person our energy and power. While they thrive on this, if we do not receive the same in return, we begin to feel anxious, fearful, lost and drained.

I applaud your decision to remove yourself from a relationship that was obviously unhealthy for you. As it is never easy to let go of someone we once hoped would prove to be a long-term partner, your feelings are understandable. Keep in mind that you are not grieving the loss of this person in particular, but the loss of a dream. While he may have had many qualities you want in a mate, it's also possible that you projected attributes onto him that were not really there.

You mention that you have been sending him thoughts of love and forgiveness. This may be one of the things that keeps you tied to him emotionally and energetically. Whether these sudden thoughts and feelings are originating from him or not, the best thing you can do is to put closure to the relationship and prepare to move forward.

His energy could be holding you back from finding a better relationship. The mind is very powerful; his could be surrounding you with something like a force field that keeps new admirers away. Again, it does not matter if the thoughts are originating from him or from you; the important thing is that they are inhibiting your ability to move on.

It is not easy to control or altogether stop thoughts of a past love. One method I recommend is called corralling, in which you start to construct specific boundaries around your thoughts and emotions. This is like a mental diet, for it involves creating discipline and structure in order to change your habits of thought.

Throughout the day, each time a thought or feeling about your ex arises, stop and tell yourself, I will not think about this now. I will think about it at 9 p.m. Do this throughout the day. At 9 p.m., give yourself 15 minutes to think about him exclusively. When the time is up, return your focus to the moment. If you miss your time, you must wait until the next day at 9 p.m. to think about him. Do this for a few days and you'll see that you are thinking about him less and less.

If the obsessive thoughts continue, you may also want to use my Freezing Ritual to counteract this endless loop of feelings. This will not harm your ex but it will enable you to free yourself from this pattern. The complete ritual is available at my Kajama profile.

*****

Oceania:

I don't think you are picking up on your ex-boyfriend's emotions; I think he triggered unresolved feelings from your childhood! You now have an opportunity to work through them - that's the gift of this brief relationship.

As your brother sounds supportive, you might discuss your parents and early family life with him. Together, you can share memories and determine who this ex-boyfriend reminds you of! From your description, he was inconsistent, unreliable, and left you feeling insecure. Does that remind you of anyone?

You mentioned some overpowering emotions. We usually don't experience that level of intensity in an adult relationship unless it reopens past wounds. As children, we are trapped in our families - there's no leaving. If we can't express feelings or be heard, emotions get pushed down inside us and held there under pressure. Remember when you pushed a Jack-in-the-box back down and slammed the lid shut? When we meet someone in adulthood who reminds us of childhood, it's as if they turned the crank on the Jack-in-the-box; the lid springs open and intense feelings pop out!

We THINK the person who pushed our buttons is responsible for our flood of emotion, but those feelings were packed down inside us long ago. We leave childhood carrying an overflowing suitcase - one we had to sit on top of in order to zip shut.

This baggage is powerful. Until we unpack and sort through it, we tend to avoid any situation that reminds us of what's inside OR repeatedly choose situations that remind us of what's inside in an attempt to work through old business indirectly. Either way, the suitcase is controlling us.

One of our jobs in adulthood is to open the suitcase and honor what we find. We need to view the contents realistically and objectively. Once that lid is open, we stop over-reacting. Unless our safety is at risk, adult emotions tend to be relatively mild because we always have the choice to exit a situation.

After separating your ex from whichever parent he most reminds you of, take a fresh look at what happened in this relationship. Did you stay and suffer too long, leave at just the right time, or give up too soon? Only in the last case would it be worth reaching out to him.

You say you liked him a great deal and when you envisioned being with him on another plane, you felt happy. If you can separate your past from your present, you will be better prepared to enjoy relationship success with him or with someone better suited to you.

Astrea:

Many times in life we hear, "You will always have what you NEED, but not necessarily what you WANT." Your spirit must have needed to experience the feeling of leaving your human body, and the suggestion in the next chapter of Sylvia Brown's book was all it took to get you there.

Even though you hadn't read it yet, your SOUL recognized the title of that chapter as something it had been seeking, and your soul, knowing that you had that reference to read after your experience, got with it and out you went!

While I don't usually recommend her books, Sylvia Brown has a wide reaching and powerful effect on lots of people. A Gemini like you would be able to relate easily to her writing and put it to good use. Synchronicity - you gotta love it!

I like your description of "getting caught." That's exactly what it feels like, isn't it? One minute you're free and hovering above the room, and the next minute, ZAP! back down into your corporeal form you go!

As a little kid, I loved that "feeling of return." With practice, most of the time we can control that event, but sometimes, when our physical ears hear a distracting noise or something else occurs to knock us back into reality, back we go. With practice you will be able to control your return better.

I find it interesting that you were visiting your mother-in-law and not someone in your own genetic family. Evidently, you and your husband got married for reasons that are even deeper than love. His family's interest in "psychic stuff" will nurture your children in such matters and help them to grow into their own abilities.

You'll never have to be concerned that when your daughter visits them, she'll be discouraged from exploring her own psychic life and power. My parents encouraged me to develop my psychic senses in a time when it wasn't nice to even discuss such things in public. Heck, it's STILL not considered a great topic at the dinner table in some families!

Your kids will get to talk about it ALL and ask questions and read and study. This is going to give them such an edge in life! Talk with your husband about how you want to present this to your kiddos, so that you are united in your approach and ready to tell them their experiences are all natural and okay.

A word or two of warning: Geminis often have difficulty staying grounded in REAL LIFE. Don't get so strung out on your ASTRAL life that you neglect what you're doing here on Earth.

You are at the beginning of a long journey to learn where your power really lies. Try to be patient with this process and take your time.