Welcome to Permission Slip: 8 weeks of rewriting the rules.

When you were young, you were handed a rulebook (or a series of rulebooks), an instruction manual on how to successfully navigate the world. You were promised either directly or indirectly, that if you can just be good enough in your performance of these rules and expectations, that you will get where you need to go.

Everyone’s rules are a little different, but at their core they sound like statements of fact about who you are and what your value is in the world, about what you deserve or are capable of, about what the world will allow, about how other people are, about where money comes from and how it works, about who has power and who doesn’t. Some of these beliefs may have been genuinely supportive to you, but some have held you back in major ways.

When you desire or crave things that live outside of the boundaries of those inherited beliefs, you feel wrong. You feel misaligned and confused, maybe guilty or in denial of your desire, or stuck in patterns of self sabotage and unsure why your intentions never seem to take you where you want to go. The issue in either scenario is not you, it’s your split mind. One part of you is committed to the truth of the old belief, and one part is reaching for the hope of the new one, and you’re getting stretched thin between them.

You look around you, and you notice all of these people who seem to be getting what you want with ease, and without following the rules that you learned and you wonder what is so much better about them than you? You wonder what secret they’re in on. The secret is: they’re not any better or more worthy than you.

They have just granted themselves permission.

Permission to want what they want without judgment or restraint. Permission to pursue it… to try… to fail. Permission to believe in their own power and ability. Permission to assert themselves in the world.

So many of us have been taught to outsource power to people and structures outside of ourselves. We’ve let others define who we are and what we are allowed to do or be in the world. I have to be ugly because mom said I was. I have to be ashamed of myself because my youth group leader said I should be. I can be a writer because my MFA program said I can. I can’t run a business because someone on Tumblr in 2013 told me that charging money makes me a greedy capitalist.

There are two core beliefs that prop the whole system up:

1. Someone else knows better than me what is true or right for me.

2. I have power (or am rewarded) when I do what is right.

   These beliefs together equal the whopper:

3. I have power when I do what someone else says is right.

   And so, you can only want, pursue, and have what other people or institutions permit you. You abdicate your power, you ignore your own values, you make yourself small and compliant and you do what you’re told, but it doesn’t give you what you want. It doesn’t bring satisfaction. If it brings success, the success feels empty. And you watch people be or get everything you secretly hope for without doing what is “right,” and you think: what the fuck?

   Your power does not come from your adherence to the rules. In fact, the power of the rules comes from your adherence to them. A little riddle there for, ya. Your power comes from your focused intention and passion sustained over time and practiced through action. You have immense, arguably magical power to create any experience you wish to in this world, but only if you get all parts of you on board. You have to decide that you actually do have power and you have to decide to trust yourself to listen to and harness it. You have to stop looking for someone outside of you to give it to you or validate it.

   No one can grant you freedom and sovereignty, only you can. To me, that is what it means to be a witch, but you can call it whatever you like. In this course, we will move through layers of questioning what we were taught to believe vs what we actually want and what beliefs truly support it. Our goal is to resolve the split consciousness, to actually make up our minds. We will use magical ritual as a tool for shifting and embodying belief week by week. In past courses, I gave suggested rituals and assignments each week. This time, I will teach you how to construct rituals for yourself so that you can continue the practice long after class. I will teach you how to recognize and read the signs all around you in life that reflect internal programming so that you see the external world as a mirror you have an empowered relationship to, not an experience that you are victim to.

   We will use this class to rewrite the rulebook, the manual you were given for how to live, which will send powerful waves of change through your reality. But more importantly, this class will teach you the skill of rewriting your manual, so you can do it again going forward, anytime you need.