top 7 barriers to sovereignty, part 2
Today I'm fleshing out 4 more of the top 7 barriers to sovereignty that I've noticed in us humans over the years.
The more you notice these barriers in yourself and decisively let go of them, the more you'll be able to embody the bold arcana of the Emperor who guards his territory, which is so, so crucial in this Capricorn-dense 2020 year.
(the Divine Masculine card, a more diplomatically-named version of the Emperor, in the She Wolfe Tarot
- and yes that is the great David Bowie.)
4. Unconscious attachment to feeling wronged
Pretty much no one wakes up in the morning and thinks "Wow, I want to feel wronged today!" and yet... that's still what many of us do.
"Feeling wronged" has a great virtue to it - unlike other pleasures in life, which may be hard to come by, the delectable rush of "feeling wronged" is always available, no matter who you are, no matter where you are.
Why? Obviously because the world is so full of wrong wronging wrongers that's why!
You can easily take offense at something someone close to you has done, and if by some strange twist of fate all your loved ones all behave like angels, you can just click onto the News site of your choice for your daily hit of outrage.
The only draw back to perpetually feeling wronged is that overtime, it instills in you a feeling of powerlessness ... and not the lovely kind of 12-step "spiritually surrendered" powerlessness -- but rather a kind of gloomy, cynical powerlessness like the kind best lyrically embodied by mid-80s, synth-heavy Leonard Cohen.
... and this kind of cynical powerlessness is the very opposite of the resilient sovereign energy we all need in order to stake our claim in the world and thrive.
Now I would never advocate flatly giving up a pleasure.
I'm far too hedonistic for that; the very idea is abhorrent to me.
But I would suggest that you become consciously aware of when you're indulging in the pleasure of feeling wronged - and that you allow yourself to fully, shamelessly revel in that pleasure...
... knowing that it's ultimately a big funny ruse because the embarrassing truth is you're actually omnipotent divine consciousness in brief disguise as a hapless, wronged human.
This way, you still get to feel magnificently wronged, and you chip away at the Veil of Forgetting that stands between you and total remembrance of your actual immortal, omnipotent identity.
5. False belief in "having no choice"
Here's a statement that's never actually true: "I had to do it, I had no choice."
Oh yeah?
Even if someone is holding a gun to your head and telling you to give them your wallet or they'll shoot -- you have a choice.
You could just die. Or you could give them your wallet. That's a choice.
Naturally, you'd rather give the attacker your wallet, since you can replace money and ID cards but your brain - not so much.
Still - it's a choice. You always have one, and verbally denying that fact just strengthens the "cynical powerlessness" grooves in your being, which you utterly don't need, unless you're trying to fit in at a Vice party.
People say "I had no choice" when they're trying to hyperbolically emphasize how terrible the alternatives seemed to them.
"I had no choice" is fun to say because fiction always brings an element of fun. But troublingly, words have power, and you can hypnotize yourself into believing this.
When you do this hypnotic disavowal of choice, you lose a vital connection with the depth of your own agency, and you enter into what existentialist philosopher Jean Paul Sartre called mauvaise foi, or "bad faith," a form of self-deception in which we fail to take honest responsibility for our decisions in the world, and thereby lose access to our real depth.
We fall into mauvaise foi to spare ourselves the pain of being aware of our full agency.
And indeed - embracing our total agency and responsibility feels painful, as both Sartre and his existentialist predecessor Søren Kierkegaard acknowledged, because it involves the uncomfortable art of learning how to hold paradox, i.e., to understand that two apparently opposite truths can be equally true, simultaneously.
This practice of holding paradox is the Great Work that the ancient Hermeticists (alchemists) called reconciling opposites.
Interestingly, both the alchemists and Carl Jung, a pioneer of depth psychology, emphasized that the reconciliation of apparent opposites within ourselves (pleasure and pain, good and evil, masculine and feminine, mortal and divine) is key to coming into union with our Higher Self and becoming a fully liberated, fully realized being.
(This is individuation in the Jungian sense, initiation in the occult / Hermetic sense).
And you'll never learn to do it if you go around saying "I have no choice."
So try: "I have absolute choice always, and sometimes I choose to do hurtful or wrong things, because I'm simultaneously utterly good and also completely evil."
You might get quizzical looks, but you'll be finally honest. And this vocal honesty can lead you to astounding revelations.
6. Persistent sense of guilt / unworthiness
This is my personal favorite. I've met very few people who totally lack a free-floating sense of guilt and insecurity.
Who knows exactly where the feeling of guilt / unworthiness comes from?
Electra / Oedipal complexes? Five lifetimes ago when you burnt down an orphanage as a raiding Viking?
I have my theories, but as this essay is already getting a little long I'll cut it brief and just say: this guilt stuff can be a barrier to sovereignty because as long as you carry it around with you, you'll let people guilt you into doing stuff you don't really want to do.
There's many short-term antidotes to guilt - anything that can lower your inhibitions will temporarily lighten the load.
The only long-term antidote to guilt that I've found, however, is total acceptance of factually being an extremely guilty wronging wronger, combined with celebration of the complete interdependence of all reality (the major teaching of the Buddha).
So, for example, yes, maybe I did burn down that orphanage in 1086 A.D., and yes, maybe I do have several Freudian complexes, and yes, maybe I am failing to biohack myself into ultimate health....
... and ... all of this bad, bad wrongness of mine is currently interdependently supporting all the goodness and beauty in my own life and in the entirety of reality, because the universe is always in perfect balance, and there is no lotus without mud, no rose without shit, as the Buddha and as the Tarot arcana of Justice / Adjustment teaches us.
So. There.
Ahhhhhhh - guilt lifted.
7. Blocks to receiving wealth
Something you've probably noticed about sovereigns - they have money, a lot of it.
There's many sorts of blocks to receiving wealth - but one of the most persistent ones, I find, is the notion:
"In order to make a lot of money, I have to work hard and suffer."
I have this notion myself, and I find that at root it's connected to a fear that if I receive a huge amount of money, suddenly I won't be able to work hard and suffer any more.
I mean, this is the common aspirational advertisement - get rich so you can live in luxury and not ever have to work hard or suffer!
(Of course, plenty of rich people suffer a lot with various ailments, and some work hard, for the hell of it.)
But we humans live in paradox, and ironically - we resist change that we think will tear us away from what we know, including our familiar suffering.
So I find I'm much more receptive to receiving large amounts of money when I tell myself,
"Don't worry, Carolyn, you can get paid this giant sum, and you can still work hard and suffer."
It puts at ease the part of me that's always defensively vigilant lest my comfortable suffering be taken away by some swift boon from the gods.
it sounds weird, but it works - give it a shot ;)
cheers to your growing sovereignty!
love and villainy,
Carolyn Elliott
author of Existential Kink: unmask your shadow and embrace your power
invoking Venus on a Friday, like you do
P.S. Let's connect! Search for me on Instagram: @carolynelliott_ and hit "follow" for more provocative insights into the alchemy of the psyche.