about applied arcana
or: where exactly are we, and how did we get here?
So, it seems to me that the world we live in isn’t working for any of us.
Even before I joined the “real” world (such as it is), I had a nagging sense that society at large was somehow centered around a series of very believable and well-intentioned lies. These lies made it easy to buy in to what someone else thought we should be doing and very difficult to sense into our own original truth.
Lies like: “You should do that because it looks good on your resume.”
Or: “You need to cite your sources.”
Or: “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all.”
Something you should know about me from the start is that I am very good at following rules. (Even if I hate being told what to do.) And the more I felt something was wrong—with me, with other people, with all of it—the more I collected and implemented rules, trying to see if anyone else had said something that could help me make sense of it.
I tried it all. Coaching. Conferences. New jobs, old jobs. Mentors. Diets. Saying yes to all of it. Then saying no. Everywhere I went, for years, I was looking for the answer: What rule do I need to follow that will make me feel okay?
There were many plausible answers, many useful perspectives, and many mitigations that made things better, for a while. But no matter how things looked on the outside, there was this little wobble, right in the center of my chest, that told me that, still, everything wasn’t quite right.
I tried a lot, and I went all in. And when effort alone wasn’t enough, I got vulnerable and asked others for help. But the deeper I went, the more it seemed that the problems that plagued me plagued everyone. It seemed like we weren’t seeing something—something important.
But I wanted it to work. So I tried harder.
Something else you should know about me is that I am a stubborn little freak when it comes to chasing something down.
So when I finally realized, after about five years of searching, that nothing had really helped (and best I could tell, it wasn’t helping anyone else either) I was at least able to feel confident enough to conclude that the problem wasn’t me.
It seemed like it should be me—it would be easier if it were me—but it wasn’t.
It was all of us, and none of us. It was something bigger and less substantial. I had a sense of it, but still couldn’t make sense of it, so I decided to seek the source.
✶
Stepping off the rails of our collective cultural expectations into the void of the wayless open was the most difficult moment of my life.
I felt like I was fumbling towards madness, with one hand in the shadows and the other hand trying to hold onto the strings that I’d tied back into the light. I had the sense that losing myself to my own depths would change me in a way I couldn’t quite conceive, but I just couldn’t stop.
I desperately wanted to feel okay. I wanted it more than anything. But goodness. After a life spent learning how to flawlessly execute other people’s expectations, the fear of relinquishing those skills to keen forward into a cave of my own creation for uncertain consequences felt crazy-making.
I didn’t even know what I was looking for. A vocation? A solution? Myself? What I did know was that I felt very alone, like I was the first and only human who had ever braved the darkness below.
I had a sense I would know what I was seeking when I found it, but even as I deepened my intuitive practices, dabbled in ritual arts, and reached down into the wisdom of tarot, it was hard not to feel like I was leaving solid ground behind.
But then, one night in the autumn of 2015, all of that changed.
Deep in the October darkness, I had a strange, vivid dream filled with floating motes of light. In the middle of an ancient cobblestone alleyway strung with silver lights, a creature that was half stag, half man was seated, crosslegged, waiting for me.
I can still conjure the details of his face, the golden lights that danced between his antlers, the soft creases of his hands. I’d never had a dream like this, never had a feeling like this, even throughout all the years of my earnest Roman Catholic upbringing.
But unlike most dreams, this one lingered long into day. Something about the sight of the stag-man calmed me, and the quality of the connection left no question in the deepest parts of myself that I had found something that finally felt right.
Two years later, deep into a Wikipedia spider web, the face of my dream stag greeted me from my screen. On an ancient plate of hammered silver, a crosslegged stag had been pounded into the soft metal by skilled human hands, found two millennia later deep in a bog in Denmark.
creator unknown. image source (cropped for emphasis)
Somewhere, somehow, someone else had shared my dream. In the wake of that transpersonal connection, corroborated through art made centuries ago, transmitted from the cauldron itself to my computer screen to my retinas through the contemporary digital media, I realized I had been looking for my soul.
And it seemed I had found it.
But unlike most of the stories of some sort of spiritual awakening I’d read before or since, that wasn’t the end of the story.
In many ways, awakening to the concrete reality of my intuition and my apparent ability to access information across time and space created more questions than it answered. While it soothed that wobble I’d felt within, I found it harder and harder to rectify the realizations I was coming to with the road anyone else was walking.
I knew that I could live in a world that contained both spreadsheets and my burgeoning spirituality.
The problem was not accepting it. It was figuring out how.
✶
It took me ten years to figure out how to hold my intuition and my intellect in both hands.
As someone who has always been proud of her own capacity, it’s still hard for me to acknowledge how ill equipped I was to set out on this journey. After all, I had learned how to follow other people’s directions so well. And it wasn’t that I didn’t understand, conceptually, at least, what I was looking for.
But how to implement it? How to actually live it once I found it? That was another story indeed.
I approached the depthwork that would become Applied Arcana in 2013 with a single noble desire: To understand myself and the world in a way that facilitated the pursuit of a more profound expression of the precious nature of my particular human life.
However good that sounded, most of it was profoundly messy.
What it actually meant was integrating who I thought I was with who I actually was. It meant figuring out, mostly by feel, how my mind, my heart, and my soul fit together, and how to facilitate, interpret, and then embody that communication from deep within me.
It meant processing decades of repressed pain.
It meant going deep into my own experience and getting straight with myself and everything that had happened to me. It meant learning to listen to my own body, and it meant believing myself—even when (especially when) people I perceived to have authority over me didn’t agree.
As I mentioned, I’d looked for solutions in all the conventional places: talk therapy, allopathic medicine, grad school, perfectionism. And those things helped. Sometimes.
But they also reinforced a narrative of isolation, self-recrimination, self-blame, and brokenness that I found challenging to rectify with my burgeoning understanding of who I was.
And what I found even more challenging was the fact that very few of those conventional resources cultivated any space for spirituality or the unseen energetic component of our experience. It wasn’t just overlooked, either. From what I could gather, the entire realm of experiential spirituality outside of dogma, traditional cultural beliefs, or established religion was treated as a benign quirk at best and a clinically diagnosable delusion at worst.
But ultimately it was actually the underworld resources, the unconventional treatments and intuitive insights that I’d been taught were foolish or futile—that I’d been taught to fear—that truly helped: Time in nature. Tarot. Prayer. Psychedelics. Poetry. Alternative therapies. Acupuncture. Ancient ritual. Plant magic. Community. Somatic therapy. Internal Parts Work. Screaming. Mythology. Art.
Some of it worked, and some of it didn’t. Or it didn’t work right away. Some of it worked so well, I had to manage the fallout from the treatment more than the fault I was trying to address. Most of it was strange and unbecoming and loud. None of it followed the rules I’d taught myself to obey.
But slowly and surely, the deeper I went, the better things got, until one day I sensed my descent had abated.
Whether it was the result of one particular moment or the culmination of everything that transpired, I still cannot say. But without particularly noticing, somewhere along the depths of my journey I had touched down into my own roots, and from there all the strings I created to find my way home kept me centered in my own self instead of strapped against everyone else.
✶
What I found in the darkness is not just for me. It’s for all of us. For you.
I have always believed in the collective power of personal medicine.
After all, something doesn’t have to work for everyone, or be built for everyone, or even believed by everyone in order to impact them—or to be true. But especially in our current cultural context, where we try to cast as wide a net as possible in order to keep anyone from being left out, it can become easy to believe that anything sourced from any one person can’t possibly contain something for all.
Don’t get me wrong: I’m committed to the common good.
But just as the tarot is composed of sometimes-conflicting perspectives that all, still, somehow, belong together, I’ve found that navigating my own interiority is complex enough that the solutions that work for the multitudes within me can often work at scale. Even if they’re not for everybody.
In the tarot, this paradox is literally held by the Queen of Cups.
In the Smith-Waite (or Smith-Rider-Waite, or, less accurately but more conventionally, Rider-Waite) tarot, Pamela Coleman Smith’s illustration of the Queen of Cups presents a composed woman staring solemnly past a jeweled chalice while seated on throne that has been erected upon a pebbled shore.
But where this card deviates from the others of its suit is that the Queen of Cup’s cup is quite different to every other cup illustrated in the deck.
It is winged and decorated and strange and she holds it very carefully, in a way that is both supportive and appraising. Most importantly, unlike the other cups carried in the cards, this one is closed—it boasts a decorated lid and a small golden cross perched on the top, pressing up from berries, or bubbles, or golden pearls.
In my interpretation of this card, in the story this card reveals to me, this cup contains waters that the queen has collected from the very depths of her being. The cup is the unique container for these singular waters, which are connected to the waters that surround her, but are hers alone for as long as she holds them.
And through the process of collecting those waters, not only did she have to figure out how to navigate all the way down to the deepest part of her emotional life, but she also had to build the vessel that would allow her to carry what she found there back to shore.
The cup she holds is a synthesis of all of it, just as water is a solution that can hold many other substances—whatever has been added or dissolved or eroded away swirls together in the cocktail within the cup, irrevocably linked to every other drop of water on the planet through form and function, but yet unique in its current placement and its particular composition.
It is both magic and medicine, both science and spirit, both shared and singular.
What this queen knows, but many of us, including myself, have struggled with, is that this kind of devoted focus and attention directed towards the deepest parts of herself is not selfish. It’s not retreating, or weak, or delusional, or exclusionary. Instead, it is the source of her power, the arena of her dominion, and the wellspring for whatever wisdom she might choose to share with others.
Applied Arcana is my strange cup.
It is both the fruit of my journey and the purpose of it. It simultaneously protects and presents what it contains, binding it together in context and circumstance for as long as I care to support it.
It required skillful mastery of tangible processes and the development of new tactics to create, everything we expect from art and innovation. It required reaching back into history, both personal and collective, and exploring places previously unknown. It required identifying myself as an individual, yet working to accept, include, and integrate all the different perspectives I held within me.
And while it is sourced from within me, and defined by me, and decorated by me, like all cups, it is a vessel that asks to be shared.
✶
The world we live in doesn’t need more rules. For true wellness, we need more responsiveness to our own right action.
I understand now why I wanted so badly for the rules I had internalized to lead me someplace safe.
After all, there’s nothing quite like a global pandemic to make every person on the planet confront the cracks in our collective experience. On some level, and to varying degrees, we all have some insight into how uncomfortable it can be when everything familiar to us kind of…falls away.
In moments like that, it’s easier to see how much the world we live in is an irrevocably human creation—which means, like everything else we’ve made, it’s also something we have the power to change.
But just as we saw when everything shut down, the difficulty doesn’t often come with stepping away. The challenge is figuring out what to do about it. How to handle it. Where to grow from there.
As such, it’s never been enough to point out that we’re struggling. It’s never been enough to enumerate what’s wrong. We have to follow the pain to find the place of potential, but after that, the “holistic how” of change is more important than encoding how we got there.
In order to build a world that works for all of us, it’s critical that we learn how to lean into those deep waters. There’s no other way to access our own particular solution to that collective puzzle. The medicine that exists within you can only be scooped up and shared from the waters deep within.
And across all the realms I can access, the best way I have learned to do that by far is by leaning into the power, pleasure, and potential of our human heart—the literally beating center of the liquid of our lives.
After all, the heart is where the intersection of your material substance and your electrical energy is most intense.
Of all the parts of you, it is you the most. And whether or not you can relate to my somatic spiritual experiences, I hope you can buy into your own heart.
I hope you can believe that it’s important to follow it. I hope you can see it as a source of energetic illumination and love.
I hope you can believe that who you are and what makes you “you” is important to understand, encourage, and embody.
And I hope you can learn to trust—even if you don’t already—that the true desires of your heart matter, and that making them material serves more than just you.
Ultimately, I want you to believe that living from your heart in aligned expression with your essential self is both possible and profoundly important. And then, I want to provide you with some of the tools and insight you might need to figure out how that works. For you.
Just like the potion in the queen’s cup is more than the sum of its parts, the journey we each take to become ourselves is more than how-to lists, best practices, and other people’s solutions.
The act of becoming ourselves requires becoming ourselves, and the only way to find out what you need is to be there, with yourself, as you build up from the bedrock of your own inner depths.
This business was built to support you on that journey, wherever you’re starting from. It exists at the intersection of the sacred and the scientific, the magical and the mundane, and the tangible and the transcendental.
Like all objects of potent alchemy, it resists definition in conventional ways.
It is, broadly, my effort to encode what I have learned of myth and metaphor and magic into a form and function that is external, approachable, and self-sustaining. It is a service-oriented synthesis of everything I think will help you as you go, with a focus on creating solutions that are beautiful and tangible and can stand out amid the noise and clamor of our busy lives.
Ultimately, Applied Arcana is my earnest endeavor to fuse ancient and contemporary storytelling and sensemaking strategies into an accessible, modern-day approach to intuition and transcendentalism—the belief that we each have the individual capacity to access and encode the absolute, the sacred, and the divine—that will help us all live bravely from our center.
Because I believe, after everything I’ve experienced, that the world needs all of our wisdom in order to work. And wellness. And whimsy and wonder.
And in the decade I spent on my own underworld journey, it was the patterns that emerged from engaging with the tools and teachings I share here that most reliably delivered those things to me. The nights I spent in circle with others, whether or not those circles lasted. The evenings I spent in repose, igniting plant matter and watching smoke swirl up to the gods.
These experiences are the soulful cement of the human experience.
They hold us together and bind us to ourselves. The ancients and our ancestors knew that the objects we surround ourselves with encode our cultural awarenesses and create the fabric of our lives.
They matter. You matter. This all matters.
And more than anything, most simply, I want you to have these things because making them makes me better. Using them will make you better. And when things get better for you and better for me—that’s how things actually get generatively better for us all.
