Crowning the Goddess #3

Carolyn Chlebowski on Death Currents and Time Magic

If you’re on our TOTEM newsletter list, you should have seen a recent email titled, “The Goddess Gets Her Crown Back”. In this email, we outlined the key paradox around abundance. In our culture, success is synonymous with hard work: grit, suffering, effort, pushing through, accumulation, dominance, and aggression. But abundance is yin- not yang- requiring that we reframe our approach and mindset if we want to receive the things we’ve been working so hard to achieve.

The bottom line? Our addiction to doing is gumming up the works and fighting us in our push towards abundance. So, if we want to shift this dysfunctional dynamic, what do we do?

In short: we give the Goddess her crown back.

It’s an energetic metaphor for giving place of privilege to our divine yin energy and honoring the goddess- within and without.

In this series, I sit down with a variety of TOTEM collaborators, clients and thought leaders to get their take on how we can all “Re-crown the Goddess” and bring our lives back into balance. We continue this series with Carolyn Chlebowski of TheWildPsyche to dig into the deep magic of illness, death and transmutation.

About Carolyn Chlebowski

Carolyn is an earth steward, stargazer, void walker, dream weaver, creature consort, beauty seer, mesa carrier, tarot reader, energy healer, ancestor, creator, and storm-hearted lover. She has worked as an eclectic witch, as a tarot reader, as a Reiki channel, and as a mesa carrier in the Pachakuti Mesa Tradition of Cross-Cultural Shamanism. The confluence of all these practices and propensities points to flow as a common undercurrent of good medicine and working magic. She provides tarot readings via her practice, The Wild Psyche, and creates incredible content on Instagram @wi_psi. In 2022, Carolyn will be providing in-person Tarot and Reiki services through Astral Auras Metaphysical Store in Lowell, IN. Check out the following links for more info on Carolyn:

In person readings: www.astralauras.com and look for Astral Auras on Facebook

Email: thewildpsyche@gmail.com to schedule a tarot reading

Link: Find her on Instagram as @wi_psi

The power of surrender

Carolyn has lived with a chronic illness for more than 20 years. Living with the intense unpredictability of a chronically sick body, she sought paths to healing, wellness, and transcendence through the mystical arts from an early age. The mystical arts were a sanctuary for Carolyn, for whom the best of modern medicine couldn't come close to curing her illness and alternative medicine left her healing incomplete. She stepped onto each path- both traditional and alternative healing modalities- seeking a cure for and control of her “obstinate” body. She now looks back on this time, reflecting on the phenomenon as “confusing [her] body for her life.”

Carolyn jokes that she is a recovering control freak, having found a relative peace surrendering to flow about all things, including her health journey.

Embracing flow

Feeling powerless to control her health situation, Carolyn’s spiritual practices centered on navigating the vast landscapes of matters of life and death. In her words, “What else was I going to do while suspended so ruthlessly between them? And aren't we all, really?”

This awareness of the precarious nature of our existence brought Carolyn to the crossroads of life intersecting with death. She became spiritually-apprenticed to Death (note the capital “D”). This work quickly focused on a key message: everything in life (our motivations and machinations and maladies) are born from forces we perceive as oppositional, when in fact they are manifestations of the same force. Carolyn learned that so much of living a joyful and abundant life comes when we allow our natural current to take us where we are supposed to go.

“So much of a full and rich life is in surrendering control.”- Carolyn Chlebowski

Carolyn and the Goddess

Carolyn feels that the Goddess has always been there for her, wearing various faces, initiating and demonstrating this wisdom of surrender. She believes that if we are going to understand flow and abundance, we must first learn to let go:

“Let go of the shallow idea that Goddess and the fruitful feminine are forever fertile, unfailingly fecund, perpetually pregnant young women basking in the sunny glow of permanently ripe and blooming fields or perched atop literal piles of shiny collectible coins. Goddess and abundance can absolutely appear in these ways, yet the second we attach ourselves to their looking like one thing, we sever ourselves from their full potential.”

Another concept Carolyn thinks we need to release is the idea that feminine means woman and masculine means man. To her, these are problematic false equivalencies perpetuating a heteronormative perspective that is truly serving no one.

The Goddess aspects that have taught Carolyn the virtues of abundance have been those of death, void, chaos, war, surgery, disease, sovereignty and sex, protection and weaving. At first blush, one may not think of these things as being particularly abundant, but much of the shamanic wisdom that comes to us is through learning by contrast.

Persephone, who Carolyn refers to as the Tender of the Dead, guides her through the underworld and helps her make friends. Sekhmet, Patron of Surgeons, is her great strength, teaching her healing through disease and clarity through chaos. Lilith is the Snake whose body is both the embodiment of perfect flow and a weapon of constriction, the kundalini coiled or climbing through her DNA. Marzanna, Polish Goddess of Winter and Desolation, sees Carolyn through shifts of season, or as Carolyn puts it: “Singing over my bones when they fall fallow, holding me in the blessed land of my ancestors before grieving me back into action.”

There is Athena who sees and weaves. Her mind sharp and discerning, she teaches that justice and change exist grounded in the present moment, like sword in stone, inextricable until we know that wars are only won when there ceases to be sides. And her Medusa, fierce protector, who shows us something about how trauma exists in our lives. Petrifying. There are ever the Morrigan's crows, harbingers of death, who nevertheless show us how to navigating the ever-streaming flow of time from timelessness.

Ever-present for Carolyn is the Kali Ma, the slayer and her most influential guide. Lady of Blades, Eater of Demons, voice of the Void, master of chaos, death and destruction, and patron mother of Carolyn’s magics. She presides as guardian over the left field of my mesa, my shamanic altar ground.

The Mesa of abundance

For Carolyn, the Mesa tradition of shamanism is, among many things, a map of wholeness in flow and abundance. It is a ritual space worked and maintained in favor of restoring and supporting flow anywhere things have become stuck or stagnant. The flow of energy through the artes- or medicine pieces- on Carolyn’s altar are in a spiral.

She also works with three fields of power in the Pachakuti Mesa Tradition, expressed in the left, center, and right fields of her altar. These represent, respectively, death, life and rebirth. The past, present and future. Magic, medicine and mysticism. She regards the energy that flows across each of the three fields as creativity creating creation. This means the field of power associated with death, that which has passed and is passing, is also the domain of magic and pure creativity. In this model, death is not opposite to life, but rather is an integral part of life's flow.

This is where we get to pause and take the space to integrate our active lives. It is where that which we've created returns to be dissolved into pure undefined potential. This potential energy is potent with possibility for creation of new structures and visions we are capable of creating only through the integration and release of the present and passing moment. Death indiscriminately accepts all things, converting them to the primordial power out of which we sculpt and weave our dreams. That doesn’t sound so bad, does it?

Through the context of Carolyn’s mesa, Kali Ma has taught her how we as a species tend to resist death and, in doing so, effectively resist life. Because of this, we find ourselves stuck, stagnant, and ill at ease. Kali Ma- the Destroyer who Creates- shows us how time passes. This is flow: the mechanism by which we experience ourselves as alive. When we grasp at it, we experience the sense of lack. When we let it flow through us, we hold and contain it all.

Harnessing the Goddess

Carolyn recommends taking a critical first step to connect and commune with the Goddess: stop doing things and get still. I know, I know- it seems too simple, but it’s really powerful- to the point of making us itchy and uncomfortable when we try it.

Carolyn sinks into the stillness of a space outside of time, the cradling void into which Kali calls her. From this vantage point, she can view the stream and ask:

“How and where is it flowing? Where is it trying to carry me, how might I be resisting, and how can I restore or support flow? Where am I at in the creative process that is living? Am I conceptualizing or creating something? Am I basking in the joy of recent creations? Am I feeling a restless stirring that says I have more to give and explore than what my current structures-- mental, or physical-- allow for, and letting those fall away to become the inspiration and renewed creativity I need to carry forward? Or am I feeling restless and discontent, yet loathe to let my structures change or fade, whether for distaste about my choices or fear of void space? Have I stopped the flow?”

Then, wait quietly for the answers to start flowing in.

Crow medicine

All of this is well and good in theory, but takes on tremendous meaning when applied to real life.

For Carolyn, her best real-life example of this practice rests in the last two years, which she spent in a repeating nightmare of would-be fatal health scares. Up to this point, it had been six years since she had required pharmaceutical intervention, surgery, or hospitalization, a blessing gained through holistic lifestyle choices and the ability to pursue them.

But her healing had plateaued at some point. She held on to her lifestyle choices and spiritual practices as the static, singular “Answer”, becoming rigid in them as the way to achieve some degree of control over her experience and, frankly, to mitigate pain. As Carolyn began to sicken, she clung harder to these outdated solutions. Her creative nature was writhing, frustrated, inside the static structure she had made of her practices and, as she saw it, her health regiment. She grasped for more control, becoming increasingly strict in her own health discipline, rejecting more traditional, western medicine solutions even as she descended into a harrowing daily experience.

During this time, Carolyn dreamed of Crow constantly, understanding that this is her emissary from the Goddess. One night as she slept, she found herself in a vision, sunning in the lawn while Crow, wearing a plague doctor's mask, eyed her from a nearby tree. Carolyn grew nervous with the realization that she was being regarded as a “dead thing”. As Crow swooped down to her, she screamed and rolled away, fearing it would pluck out her eyes. Then, as she gazed upon its dark feathered form at rest in the impression where she was just lying, she remembered how she loves crows and wished she had let it have her.

“This was my message, loud and clear, to let go of the sunny spot I'd found, turn my face to the shitstorm I was actually in, and let the doctors have a pass at me. I listened. It not only saved my life, but restored it, forcing me to confront the medical PTSD which had been controlling my mind and constricting my life.” - Carolyn Chlebowski

Live crows swooped down reassuringly as Carolyn entered various clinics and emergency rooms. They perched upon the windowsills of the hospital rooms she effectively lived in for those years. As she was presented with unpleasant (or straight up sucky) truths about her situation and choices regarding her medical care, she started to use the filter of “which option will allow the situation to flow?” When her choices became literal death or disembowelment (each of which would be major deaths in their own ways), she chose the surgery. This surgery came with a sweeping ego death that completely decimated ` the previous structure she thought her spirituality and approach to wellness were built upon.

“My literal evisceration, the thing I most feared, the choice of great loss I refused to make for so long, turned out to be in favor of flow and carried me into a freedom and opportunity exponentially greater than I ever had access to before.” - Carolyn Chlebowski

And this is the message of Carolyn’s Crow medicine: abundance doesn't look like one thing. It doesn't mean life is always easy or nice. And flow doesn't mean we don't choose our own adventure. Abundance is simply the willingness and choice to let life flow unimpeded through us.

Asking Goddess to get involved

Carolyn suggests that, if we are inclined to enter the service of Goddess in assistance to our flow, we can ask that Goddess to help us out. You can write the request on paper, burn it, and maybe release the ashes into a body of flowing water or a breeze. This indicates the intent to court the most unbridled aspects of creative nature and invites the guide most qualified to assist us. Pay attention. According to Carolyn, the Goddess will show up at the right time. And the Goddess doesn’t always look like a woman: “she” can take the form of an animal, plant, or any number of sentient nonbinary beings. The Goddess may challenge us. Learn everything possible about this goddess, and if there are traditional offerings or rituals associated with them, you can try them or design a version of your own. As Carolyn’s teacher don Oscar always says, ritual begets relationship. What do the talents and specialties of this goddess inspire in you? And how can you bring that creative inspiration to community? Flow does not end with us!

Things come full circle

Thank you, Carolyn, for sharing your incredible story with the TOTEM community! And thank you for this simple, incredible lesson to keep in mind as we work to re-crown the Goddess in our lives:

“Abundance is, simply, unending flow of life through us in the form of spiral time. And we have it all when we embrace the ride: ‘May the circle be open and ever unbroken. May the love of the Goddess live forever in your heart’.”