CHAPTER FOUR: NAVIGATING AN UNSAFE REALITY

cw: mentions of sexual assault

“When we argue with reality, we lose the argument 100% of the time.”

Byron Katie

Safety: “protected from or not exposed to danger or risk”

I grew up in a decidedly unsafe country. Growing up in South Africa, I became acquainted with the threat of physical and environmental violence from a young age. By the time I was in the 3rd grade, two of my friends’ mothers had been murdered by their partners. I grew up glued to news stories of girls going missing, being raped and murdered in horrifically violent ways, and I always feared that would happen to me. I was 12 when we experienced our first armed robbery and my hands were cable tied behind my back with a taser being flashed in my face as my brother was led around the house with a hammer to his head. I remember on this day, my distinct and only thought was “please don’t rape me”.

I’ve contemplated over the years how painful it is to live in a world where my 12 year old self was so keenly aware of the threat of violence to her physical body. This, of course, is not unique to me. Many women, and many people, of all ages all around the world live with this same fear and threat. My response to this early childhood trauma, being keenly aware of the threat being in a body posed, was to lock myself away in my house or in my room with the windows shut and the house alarm on in case of intruders. I became the princess locking herself away in the tower, finding the tower to be more tolerable even in its isolation. My response to feeling unsafe was to lock myself inside and to build an impenetrable fortress around myself that no one could get into.

Whether we feel physically or emotionally unsafe, this is a very normal human response. For many years, I longed for perfectly safe circumstances where I would never fear the threat of harm. I travelled the world to find pockets of safety, thinking that they could only be found outside of my country of birth. I longed for safe people, safe friends, safe relationships, safe environments. It was only through magick that I began to accept that reality is not safe; that perfect safety is an illusion. It was through somatics that I learned that safety could be cultivated within my own body; a state that I consciously choose to create with myself and the ecology surrounding me.

The task is not to only seek to create a safer world. This is certainly the work of the activist. The task of the magickian is to learn to open ourselves, our hearts, our minds and our bodies in the moments where we would like to do anything but; it is to learn to unfurl instead of curl up into a ball in the face of that which feels unsafe for our bodies as Jesus did on the cross. Meeting the world as it is will often feel unsafe. Initiation is about teaching us how to stay open and loving in the face of an unsafe world.

There is a great alchemy in learning how to meet hardness with softness, to meet a hard world with a soft heart. Hardness often simply creates more hardness, and there is no alchemy in that. Trauma begets trauma, and violence begets violence, until we find a great enough alchemy to transform these sites of pain into the seeds of liberation. South Africans, and many people in the world, are carrying within them the imprints of colonisation, apartheid, and centuries of intergenerational trauma from before the English or the Dutch or the French even arrived on our soils. Being on earth is traumatic, there is no escaping this.

Trauma is not ‘bad’. It is the wisdom of our bodies responding to a world that is often too overwhelming to be processed in the present moment. Trauma helps us to respond to the unsafety of the world and survive it. The imprint of trauma is then stored within our cells, helping us to respond to dangerous and unsafe circumstances within the future.

Trauma is anything that happens too fast, too soon, or in a way that is “too much” for the body to handle. I think of trauma as something that initiates us. What do we do with the too much - too fast - too soon of this world? This world - or specific circumstances - are not bad for being too much, too fast, too soon. This too is nature. And all trauma is relational and subjective. What is too much, too fast and too soon for my body may not be too much, too fast or too soon for yours. What my body instinctively protects itself from, yours may easily unfurl into. What feels safe for you may not feel safe for me. In this way, nothing is inherently traumatic; trauma is the internal alchemy of the safe and soft body meeting the unsafe and hard world.

For this reason, we may bow to our trauma for what it has gifted us and how it has kept us psychologically intact instead of wishing it away. The presence of trauma means two things: that you survived and that you are a survivor. Without this inherent wisdom and mechanism of the body, you would not have survived.

Of course, there are moments where we see mass trauma being created in human bodies, where we can hold and empathise that for MANY bodies, what is happening is too much. When I look at what is happening in Gaza and the collective trauma that is being experienced, I think of this. Sometimes, in human history, there are events, movements, moments, that carry such a charge that they leave an imprint on the bodies of hundreds, thousands, or millions of people. The holocaust. Colonisation. The genocide in Gaza. South African Apartheid.

Sometimes, there are events and moments that do not initiate us only as individuals but as a collective. But what is initiation? It is the process of being taken from one state to another. Sometimes, people expect initiation to be “nice” and “pleasant”, to never feel traumatic and to give them the exact feeling of connection with the cosmos that they deem ‘good’. Initiation is always initiation into greater understanding of how the world is, and how we are, and to feel that we are connected to this vast cosmos in a way that we didn’t know before. At least, that is initiation in its conscious and magickal form. Here I will use initiation both to describe this conscious magick of surrendering to a greater knowing of our true Self, as well as the process of being brought from one state of consciousness to another (whatever that state may be).

Spiritual initiation brings us into a relationship with a world that is bigger than us and with a consciousness that is bigger than us. It illuminates the light within and brings us closer to our true and capital S Self. One of my teachers once said: “there is a very fine line between trauma and initiation.” In my view, that line is almost non-existent. In many ways, the difference between trauma and initiation is simply how our bodies respond and how our bodies receive the transmission and medicine and current of what is being shared with, or done to, us. Through initiation, we soften. Through trauma, we often harden. If we are going to learn to be initiated by this world, we will need to grow our capacity for softening even in the face of our own deaths.

Something becomes traumatic, or initiatory, because of how it lands in our bodies. It becomes traumatic, or initiatory, often by a seemingly inane decision made by the Gods. It will often become traumatic, or initiatory, based on how much capacity we have to meet that moment, and to meet the charge that is going through our bodies in a present and sane way (i.e if we are able to metabolise it). This is not a way to shame ourselves for what we are not able to metabolise. Many experiences will be too much to metabolise in a way that keeps us centred in a sane and loving presence.

But I look at leaders like Nelson Mandela and countless unnamed freedom fighters, Bisan in Gaza and the Dalai Lama as he is dispossessed of his ancestral lands and is continually oppressed by the Chinese government, and I admire their ability to continually stay soft and / or loving in the face of the hardness of oppression. Staying soft doesn’t mean we are complacent, or do not take action. Quite the contrary. It is our soft hearts that enable us to remember that even in the most painful of circumstances, there is love in the world and love in the heart of our oppressor and we can move with the remembrance of that love as Jesus did. Once again, this is the work of the magickian.

Trauma initiates us. Whether we “like” it or not, trauma is the Gods stroking us - showing us where we go into “don’t like”, “bad”, “disapprove of”. This happens unconsciously more than it happens consciously, all parts of our shadow that we have learned to habitually disassociate from will come up through those experiences that we experience as too much, too soon, too fast. Trauma is not the event that happens, but it is our reaction to the event. And trauma always reveals the shadow.

Trauma is our body’s way of navigating the charge of an experience UNTIL we have the capacity to face it. I do believe that the Will of trauma is to invite us to learn, to experience and to grow; to shape our lives and to feel the beautiful aesthetic landscape that opens up through our unfurling around, over, or on top of something that feels too painful to be touched.

Trauma is the memory of God living in us. A promise that there is more, more wild aliveness lying like a kernel in our being. Through trauma we are reminded of the spark of God - that which is unfathomable. God is too much, too fast, too soon - not able to be perceived fully and wholly in a single moment without a profound shift in consciousness to allow for that depth of complexity. Trauma is the lightning flash that pierces our soul. Trauma is a reminder of God’s presence should we seek it out. The rupture of trauma is also, often, the impetus for the search of God.

Our trauma reminds us/shows us/points us to that which is unintegrated within us. That which we have failed to look at and say “this too is God”. Sometimes, trauma is exactly what we need to pivot in life. It is what allows for our hero’s journey.

—

In consciously-invoked initiation, the sets of rituals, circumstances, symbols, fears and shadows that we may encounter become part of a beautiful dream that we are dreaming. That which we have experienced on our path of initiation becomes rich with meaning and profundity to us - which is often why you can hear people who have survived horrendous experiences (experiences that we most certainly might shudder away from and say “no thanks” to) speak about those experiences, what they revealed to them and how that changed the course of their life with deep love, acceptance and approval.

It is why we can hear people say they are glad that everything happened exactly as it needed to. When I hear people who have experienced great violence, fear and the dark underbelly of humanity speak about their experiences with love and admiration - I am in awe of their deep grace. One of the most famous initiatory cults of the Western world is the cult of Eleusis. The Eleusinian mysteries held initiations in Ancient Greece every year for the cult of Demeter and her daughter Persephone. The mysteries centered around the myth of Persephone’s abduction by her uncle and king of the underworld Hades, and her mother’s deep grief at the loss of her child. The mysteries had three phases: the descent, the search, and the ascent. Much like Jesus, this is a mystery of initiation through trauma.

The mystery culture spanned over two millennia. Yes, two thousand years. This was by no means a “niche” cult that few knew about. Instead, it was the greatest honour of many people’s lives to attend these mysteries. They might save up for their whole lives to be able to attend them, or their entire village might put money together so that one person amongst them may go (the mysteries aren’t cheap!). Many people who we have witnessed contribute to our culture in significant ways participated in these mysteries - including the likes of Plato and the emperor Marcus Aurelius. There was a vow of secrecy to be kept upon becoming an initiate - so much of what the mysteries contained is, well, a mystery (to us).

Why do I bring this up? Well, a thriving mystery culture that spanned two thousand years and initiated some of the greatest minds of the Western world was… not “safe”. In the traditional telling of the myth of Persephone and Hades, Persephone is kidnapped, dragged to the underworld where she is raped and made to be Hades wife. When her mother, Demeter, goddess of the earth pleads with the Gods to have her daughter returned (to no avail), she ceases to make the flowers bloom and the crops grow and eventually, in a panic, Zeus pleads with Hades to return Persephone to her mother. Hades, in all his trickery, agrees, but before leaving the underworld Persephone eats a single pomegranate seed. See, if you eat the fruit of the underworld, you will always be bound to it, and Hades knew this. From there onward, Persephone could only leave the underworld for 6 months of the year to be with her mother, and must spend 6 months of the year down in the underworld - wed to her evil captor.

To the uninitiated, this is a story of trauma. Like, wtf? This man, who is Persphone’s uncle, pounces on Persephone one day when she is innocently prancing through a field, drags her down to the underworld, rapes her, and then tricks her into eating a special magickal food that will bind her to him forever. Controlling much?

But to the initiated, and to the initiates of the cult of Eleusis, the story of Persephone and Hades is much deeper. The story of Persephone and Hades is a story about duality. Light and dark. Conscious and unconscious. The aim of initiation is to bring about harmony between that which seems “dual”, for it is only in touching the non-dual that we may know, touch and see God. Duality is how our human brain makes sense of an increasingly complex world. Bad and good. Left and right. Up and down. We humans love to find pairs, and their opposites, and yet the spiritual and magickal quest is to dissolve these and resolve all opposites into a whole. Through this reconciliation we may recognise that these parts were always two sides of the same coin. They were never as disconnected as we may have thought them to be.

This is the story of Persephone and Hades.

To the uninitiated, Persephone and Hades are separate. Hades is “doing” to Persephone, Persephone is having something “done” to her. Hades is the aggressor, Persephone is the victim of his violence and agitation. To the initiated, Persephone and Hades are two parts of a whole, and through Persephone’s descent into the underworld, she finds those parts of herself that she had forgotten. Hades, the underworld, is simply the realm of the unconscious - the realm of the shadow - the realm of that which we have habitually turned our attention away from, including those parts of us that we have abandoned. In this understanding of the Persephone and Hades mythology, we can see that it is the conscious mind - represented by Persephone - that is initiated by the unconscious mind - Hades. Persephone knows herself only to be a young, sweet innocent girl prancing around in a field with a mother that loves and cherishes her dearly. She is young. She is the picture of frolicking innocence. And while this is beautiful, it is not whole. And then the earth cracks open, as it often does when we experience trauma/initiation, and Persephone is “kidnapped” by Hades.

The genius in this is that, while Persephone is undergoing the kidnapping, she really believes she is being kindapped. She experiences all of the violence, the terror and the fear of her ordeal. She is not kidnapped thinking “la la la, this is all fine because it is simply my unconscious self!”. She experiences the sadness, the depression, the turmoil as she is in the underworld, feeling herself to be a prisoner, aching with longing for her mother who she has been violently torn away from.

And then one day, Persephone eats a single pomegranate seed - and she remembers. While, in her sorrow, she has refused to eat or drink - essentially, she has refused to consume the unconscious. She has refused to take the underworld into her psyche and into her body. When she commits the magickal act of eating the pomegranate seed, far from being an act of evil trickery from Hades, she is consuming her shadow - her own unconscious - taking it into her body and saying “yes, this too is what I am”.

The act of consumption is a deeply magickal one. Used in rituals since time immemorial, to consume something is to make it your flesh. What we consume becomes us and becomes our body. We take in the blood and body of Christ in communion. We symbolically allow ourselves to unify with the flesh of Christ, bringing us ever closer. To eat the fruits of the underworld, of the unconscious, of the shadow - is to marry, to join in loving union, with that which you have previously turned away from, ignored, or abandoned. Persephone is not trapped in the underworld for 6 months of the year. Now that she knows who she is, now that she has remembered, now that she has transcended the illusion of duality that would have her believe that she is only her conscious mind and ego - she must necessarily find balance between the light and the dark, between the night and the day, between being the queen of the underworld and the beloved child of her mother Demeter on earth.

We all contain multitudes. Though it is easy to forget that when we imagine ourselves to be separate, isolated, fragile egos; when we imagine that it is somehow possible for us to be truly harmed in a game that we are ultimately playing with ourselves and our OWN unconscious mind - the great reality creator. So, how do we transform trauma into initiation? How do we learn from the story of Persephone and Hades and meet the moments when we are dragged to the underworld with the ultimate knowledge that the captor - the kidnapper - the evildoer ‘outside’ of ourselves is bringing us closer to that which we have ignored and abandoned within ourselves.

This also isn’t to say traumatise yourself repeatedly for fun (or for spiritual illumination). If that floats your boat, sure, but we don’t need to go outside looking for trauma. Trauma/initiation will meet us when it is - and when we are - ready (or not!). But how do we cultivate a state of readiness for the trials of the world? How do we make communion and ritual of eating the fruits of the underworld so that we may not buy into the illusions of separateness? And how do we let all of this new knowledge rewrite our definition of safety?

What is safety? Is safety an illusion? Is safety something that we can and should strive for?

I think that there are two kinds of safety (which is ultimately just one) - internal safety and relational safety. Relational safety gives way to internal safety, and internal safety often gives way to relational safety. But we need a new working definition of safety. To me, the deepest sense of safety that I feel is when I feel my deep inviolability. When I can touch the deepest part of me, the part that remembers that I am both Persephone and Hades, the part of me that has eaten the fruit of the underworld and remembered, then I can truly feel safe. When I remember my inviolability, I feel safe.

And then, when I am surrounded by people who love me, who care for me, and who I am cultivating meaningful relationships with, I feel safe. But not always - I will have moments of feeling unsafe with my partner, I will have moments of feeling triggered by even the most well meaning friend, and I will have attachment ruptures with my family because that is part of life. In those moments, I can feel unsafe, and I can remember that while the people around me, the home that I have access to, the money that I have access to can all support me in feeling more comfortable in this world - and in the conventional sense of safety they can protect me from some degree of danger or risk - but they will not keep me completely safe.

In fact, it is often our most intimate partnerships and relationships where this feeling of being unsafe can be triggered most intensely - because often, our wounds around safety are relational and stem from our childhoods, the childhoods of our parents, grandparents and older ancestors.

In a world where people are increasingly feeling unsafe, there is a lot of external reality shifting work that we can do as activist-magickians in order to change the external reality to create less danger for other people. We can stop dropping nuclear bombs on one another. We can build better schools where children are loved and looked after. We can create inclusive healthcare systems that ensures that the vast majority of people will receive the care and attention they are needing. We can get rid of guns, or at least HEAVILY regulate them. We can change our relationship with the police and support the transition from a police state to communal systems of care and transformative justice (remember, humans were fine for millennia without the police to patrol and enforce ‘law and order’ - which often is simply senseless violence). There are many ways for us to make this world a safer and more loving place, and I hope that we will devote our hearts and minds and hands and bodies to that mission and desire.

There are many ways for us to make the world a more loving place. But I don’t think love and safety necessarily go hand in hand, or that safety is a prerequisite for love (if it was, we would have to accept that God doesn’t give a shit about us). I think we create a lot of suffering for ourselves by trying to make the world, or our partnerships, or our lives completely “safe”. In fact, many of the greatest atrocities in human history have been born from this desire to create perfect safety. White body supremacy is itself a trauma response to a lack of safety in old Europe, created through Roman colonisation, implanting the seed that Europeans could only be safe elsewhere - outside of Europe - and could only be safe through the domination of ‘less powerful’ bodies. Apartheid, whether in Israel or South Africa, is a fantasy of safety around whiteness at the expense of indigenous livelihoods, cultures and economies.

We will be exposed to risk if we want to live full and rich lives, and given the world we live in - unless we try to build our walls higher and our fences thicker, we will meet danger. In fact, the more that we use this approach - a la the nuclear family in the fantasy of the white picket fence - the more risk and danger that people face INSIDE of the house. Intimate partner violence and the abuse of children thrive in the isolated nuclear family unit where the patriarch is king and able to exert whatever power and control (or violence and abuse) over his kingdom that he sees fit. As bell hooks says: “We cannot claim to love if we are hurtful and abusive. Love and abuse cannot coexist. Abuse and neglect are, by definition, the opposites of nurturance and care.”

So what does it mean to create a loving world? And what is the role of safety in creating a loving world? I would like to live in a world in which far more people feel safe. I don’t believe that we need to endlessly traumatise ourselves or one another or be violent with ourselves or one another in order to grow and achieve amazing things as humanity. However, I also believe that the only true evil is seeking to eradicate “the final evil”. If we seek to make a perfectly safe world, I am afraid we would fall into the same dogmatic thinking of our forefathers. Additionally, if we only accept the world as it is without trying to change it, I believe we are not living up to our true potential as magickians.

How do we balance these two threads, then? How do we create more safety for ourselves and one another, without turning safety into a dogma and seeking to cancel those that make us feel unsafe? In many ways, I see cancel culture as a grappling with this question around safety - and the answer that cancel culture has arrived at is that we must excommunicate those that make us unsafe; those that cause us harm. This is the same carceral logic that underlies the prison industrial complex. When people “make us feel unsafe” we send them away, into the naughty corner to punished.

However, we also know that this strategy isn’t working. Prison recidivism rates - meaning the rate at which people go back to prison - is astonishingly high in most countries. Prisons are far from being places that create and foster rehabilitation and make our societies safer. Gangs and syndicate networks flourish inside and outside of prisons (and are often operated from INSIDE prisons). Prisons are not making our society any safer. What other models of rehabilitation do we have at our disposal?

I’m thinking about the documentary Fambul Tok which follows the tradition of bringing together victims and offenders for ceremonies of truth-telling and forgiveness in the context of Sierra Leone. The civil war, which took place from 1991 to 2002, is one of the most brutal civil wars in recent history. Thousands of civilians were killed en masse, and in horrifically violent ways - with humans being burned alive, or watching their families being hacked into pieces in front of them. Women too were raped en-masse in ways that make me shudder even to think about. What makes Fambul Tok so compelling, though not without its challenges, is the ways that communities come together to reconcile the absolute atrocities and violences that have been done to them. How do you meet your neighbour, when it was your neighbour who publicly and violently raped you? How do you forgive your uncle, when it was he that murdered the rest of your family? Fambul Tok shows us a community generated, and indigenous led, response to violence which includes the impulse not to exile and abandon but to forgive and integrate. Prisons are not indigenous - they are colonial. The process of exiling our fellow humans to the shadows is not as radical as we think it is. But there are always other paths to chart and ways for us to choose love even in the face of violence.

So many humans are tired of boring suggestions to simply forgive and forget - which often means disassociate and forget, especially when employed as a motif of dominator consciousness. When we make forgiveness a cultural value without showing people the paths that might lead them to forgiveness, we fail each other and we miss out on the true medicine of forgiveness.

This is not a book to explore alternate models of rehabilitation in depth. This is a book about love and love in action, and I cannot speak about love without speaking of processes of justice and accountability. We can create a safer world, without making safety (that is defined as the absence of any risk or threat) our priority. We can create a more loving world, while creating safer external conditions and also focusing on the ultimate safety that we all may experience when we remember who we are. When we define safety solely by the conditions outside of us, we become victims of our surroundings and environments and the conditions of our fate. When we define safety by and through our deep inviolability, and when we are able to share that safety with one another - through relationship - and through being in the blueprint of our inviolability together, we can gather - hand in hand - heart in heart - to build a different world.