Mabon Challenge Day 6: Welcoming the Dark

In this new season of shadow and decay, try embracing the wholeness of your inner wildness.

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Autumn is here.

Breathe in. Can you feel it? A little bit more smoke on the air? A kind of magic tapping on the window?

I find more poetry in this season than any other time of year. It’s a time for longing, and gathering, and invoking, and magic-making. It’s a time for drawing your coven closer. For focusing in on your internal magic and internal world. For drawing deep from your own ever-abundant, ever-shimmering well of fire and music that connects you to the life force that bonds all beings and breathes us all into existence.

Breathe in. You are the universe experiencing itself. Breathe out.

Life is intense. It is an onslaught of emotion, change, loss, and wonder. I am always blown away by the sheer amount of beauty and horror and emotion and power that blisters through every day of this life.

And as anyone who is reading this knows, not all of it is beautiful.

There are periods of darkness. Shit happens. The shadow insists on being known. For whatever reason, we suffer.

But we do not have to resist this suffering. We can accept it with equanimity. That is so much easier said than done, but it is what the mystics and magicians have always been saying. This moment is the kingdom. With all of its pain and brokenness. We are enough as we are, with our wildness and our disappointments and our cyclicality.

There is nowhere to go. This is what there is.

Life becomes so much easier when we learn to embrace and invite our shadows in. When we have tea with our demons. I heard a beautiful quote recently: One day the wolves that howl in your head will become dogs carrying slippers to your feet. But this can only happen if we do not run from the wolves. If we let them see us. If we see them. They might devour us. But we might become something entirely new after that.

Personally, had I not confronted so much of my inner pain during my Vipassana retreat followed immediately by a COVID-19 quarantine, I would never have attended a life-changing mental health retreat after that. Only by stopping and fully looking at my inner world (for 100+ hours of silence!) did I finally realize I needed help. And now I feel not only much healthier. I also feel like I have so much more to give to the world. That new energy has taken the form of this offering, and so much more.

This is the lesson of the darker seasons, and shadowier energies, and wild, ferocious goddesses of various pantheons. Cerridwen, Lilith, and Hekate. Inanna and Persephone in her pomegranate-stained Queen of the Night form. These goddesses teach us that these initiations, these winters, and these Dark Nights of the Soul are necessary for life.

For so long I wished I was only a springtime or summertime person — not angry and not wild and not so quiet and so introspective, but rather calm and peaceful and friendly, with an always-clear mind that I could shut off at will.

I did not know that true peace involved embracing the tumult and chaos, and learning to accept it. Only through this reframing could I become free.

What if Persephone was happy in Hades? What if she loved to dance with the dead?

What if ghosts were not terrifying, but rather only wanted love?

What if Satan was not evil, but rather just a rebellious son?

What shadows can you love this season?

There is a tremendous difference between loving your shadows and entertaining them to the point that they become able to drive the car of your life. The challenge is to allow the shadows but also to release them when it is time for them to go.

See the shadows. See the wilderness. Invoke them. See them for what they are, which is not you, but rather just temporary energies. Set them free in this way.

As a sidenote: I am throwing around a lot of different names and concepts and mythologies here, each with their own rich and complex histories and deep implications for many people. Their portrayals here may not resonate with your understanding of them. These descriptions of emotions may not resonate with where you are in your life now.

And that is good and true as well. Because the truth is — and quantum physics has proven this beyond a shadow of doubt — two opposing realities can exist at once. Matter can be both a wave and a particle.

The way we see things changes everything.

So here I will humbly propose a deeper truth for this season of contrast and shadow: There is no difference between darkness and light. There is no duality.

True reality is beyond binaries. Beyond division. Beyond separateness. True reality embraces all of it.

When I say embrace the shadow, I do not mean embrace the shadow at the expense of the light.

I mean embrace all of it.

How can you embrace your whole self, this season and always?

What darker energies or witchier goddesses are calling to you?

What wildnesses have you been tampering down? Where is the fire burning inside you? Do you see distant light glinting from deep within the woods? Do you hear distant drums? What’s stopping you from going after them?

What’s stopping you from dancing to them?

Is there a long-buried dream or project you want to resurrect?

A place you want to go?

Something you want to believe in or manifest but are scared to?

Don’t let your desire to remain small or to stay in the sun keep you from going deeper towards your truest, fieriest midnight songs. Today, lean into the shadows. Today, accept yourself in your wholeness. Your feral abandon. Your limitless connection to the universe’s unquenchable energy. Your truth.

In that spirit, here are some creative prompts and shadow work ritual ideas for today and tomorrow: