Safety measures for intuitives

How intuitives can stay balanced and grounded as the world swirls—and why it matters

Hilma af Klint channelling the great consciousness

It’s everywhere these days, isn’t it? Mysticism, I mean. My inbox seems to be flooded every day with invitations to full-moon rituals and fireside myth circles and discount codes for crystals.

And I’m not being snide about these things. Truly. I have chosen to live in one of the most hippyish areas of the UK. I write about the imaginal realm as an otherworld, and my experiences of that realm. Just last week I announced my intention to publish a series of works on the female mystics who have lit me up: Hildegard of Bingen, Margery Kempe, Hilma af Klint, and more—women who began to channel the great mystery with ferocious energy around midlife. (More on that below.)

All the same, it worries me sometimes, all this zeal to transcend, both in the culture and in my own life. It worries me because as a recovering alcoholic, I’ve spent most of my life trying to escape the present moment. For a long time, I did this through substances, but even now, ten years into sobriety, if I’m not vigilant I’ll start using anything to hand to escape my own skin. Books. My phone. Resentment. Overwork. Fantasies of grandeur. Elaborate imaginary conversations. A frankly weird obsession with paint colours (don’t ask).

More than that, it worries me because I know I’m not the only one doing this. I see it everywhere: the urge to check out. The hunger for numbness.

What if all this cultural star-gazing and Ayahuasca-necking has been infected by the same impulse?

I believe deeply in the imaginal realm, in the otherworld. In what scholar of Sufism Henry Corbin called the Mundus Imaginalis and what Episcopal priest and mystic Cynthia Bourgeault calls World 24, or: “a vast tempering ground in which the overpowering and essentially impersonal force of [divine consciousness] can be absorbed and safely transmitted to the lower realms.”

And yet when human civilization is so activated, when everyone is dealing with some level of trauma, when passions and tensions are so high—there is a danger of spiritual bypass. Of ascending to alternate realms and making our homes there to avoid the mess of the moment. Perhaps even more insidiously, there is a danger that messages from World 24, from the imaginal realm, will come through distorted—that they’ll be warped by all the swirling energies in the culture and in our hearts.

So how do we avoid this? How do we seek guidance and nourishment from the higher consciousness that cradles us all without checking out of life on Earth or (wittingly or unwittingly) hijacking the channel for our own ends? Here are a few ideas:

• Remember that we are embodied for a reason. As Cynthia Bourgeault puts it, “coarseness”—meaning the fact of our having bodies and living in this fleshy, earthly realm—is a gift. And it’s our life’s purpose to use that gift; to attend deeply to what it’s like to have a body rather than simply trying to get out of it all the time. To revel in the incarnation we’ve been given.

• And trust me, I know very well that sometimes it’s hard to revel in being human and having a body. But the pain of being finite and having form isn’t incidental to the gift; it’s integral. Bourgeault writes: “Only when love encounters the constructal givens of this world and encounters the constrictions of choice, finality, separation, tragedy, betrayal, and heartbreak do its most tender and exquisite facets begin to emerge—qualities such as steadfastness, tenderness, commitment, forbearance, fidelity, and forgiveness.”

• To borrow from another scholar entirely, this means we have to stay with the trouble. That’s where the gold is.

• And to stay with the trouble, you’re going to need support. There’s so much trouble, and it’s so hard. I’m very lucky to be an alcoholic, because it means I have a program of recovery that holds me in community while keeping me focused on not checking out (much as I want to) and taking responsibility for the way I show up in this embodied life. But twelve-step programs aren’t the only way to stay present and rigorously honest about the way you’re fleshing. A wise spiritual community with an established tradition; an attuned network of friends or family; a therapist; a daily practice of reflecting on your own behaviour and apologizing for any wrongs; guidance from the writings of wise teachers who’ve gifted us their thoughts in the present and the past. All of these things can help.

• Which brings us to study. To the embrace of knowledge. To recognizing that humans have been reaching for these other realms for thousands of years already—since the beginning of our history as a species. Which means there are whole galaxies of insight and wisdom available to us, in books and art and architecture and more. There is so much we can learn about how people have navigated this boundary between realms, across thousands of years. About how they’ve brought nourishment from the otherworld into this world. About what kind of earthly conditions they were responding to, and how that affected their voyaging. About which techniques they used for clearing the channel of their consciousness.

This last factor—the importance of rigour, of intellectual curiosity, of study—is a driving force behind my upcoming work on female mystics through the ages. As my own connection to the imaginal has exploded around midlife, I have become keenly aware that if I’m going to stay grounded, I will need guidance. I will need to know how others have tried and struggled and succeeded in bringing back real fruit from the otherworld. I’m going to need to look to the women whose lives have been electrified and sometimes burned down by their gifts of intuition.

I believe that we are standing in a great moment of awakening, and that the insights of midlife and elder women in particular will be instrumental in that awakening. And I believe that navigating this awakening with wisdom will require us to stay grounded, to know ourselves, and to understand that we are part of a much longer story. I hope you’ll come along for the ride.

Love,

x Ellie