So it turns out I'm a Mage - Part 1

(and a Demon Hunter and a Grid Weaver, but more on that another time).

It wasn’t always the case. Sure, I played a lot of White Mages in the roleplaying games like Final Fantasy that I obsessed over when I was 19-20. But in real life, I had to get embodied first, as I wasn’t used to being in my body due to decades of trauma. I did that by doing a lot of yoga, starting around age 35, in Toronto yoga studios. I felt so strong and agile and I could stick my leg in the air and balance on one foot for a long time. For someone who wasn’t known as athletic, my ego felt massaged. It was also good for the fortress of grief I had been feeling after my dad passed away suddenly in 2015 of a pulmonary embolism.

Yoga practice went very well. I even decided to become a yoga teacher—I dedicated my learning and path to my dad, who definitely had untreated physical and mental health issues that culminated in his death—and to my ex, who had committed suicide due to mental health issues. Had there been more healthy wellness systems and resources available to them, they could still be here today.

I started teaching yoga to the special needs students I had been supporting. Though yoga was great for a lot of things, it wasn’t helping me to break out of the linearity of my movements. So I got into some creative, conscious, expressive movement, at home with solo kitchen dance parties and also at ecstatic dance events and whenever I went dancing with my friends. Through yoga and dancing, getting grounded into my body was the first step in my path to becoming a White Mage.

I still had to face my demons. And I literally did face one big bad guy, through the help of energy healing practitioners. I had a spirit releasement of a dark force entity that had been inhabiting my body since I was 13. (Back then, I didn’t know that I would be doing this important work for others one day. That my intuitive abilities would activate and strengthen. I’m a Demon Hunter now—will write more about that later.)

Besides breathing slowly and moving consciously with flow and expression, I knew more could be done. My body was like a high-functioning, well-oiled machine. But my mind was still blank, my emotions limited. I was having trouble smiling and laughing. I couldn’t bear to do high fives and text emojis. And years of marijuana abuse had me struggling to follow movie plots and unable to string sentences together. So besides taking a shit ton of medicinal mushrooms like Reishi and Lions Mane to rebuild my brain, I also started taking Improv classes.

It was like magic. My humour, spontaneity, and levity returned. I could banter and riff once more. Turn a negative scene into a positive one. Use left and right brain more fully. These skills were very helpful for teaching hostile students with multiple exceptionalities.

But I knew something was still missing. My emotions were not sufficiently felt with the depth I knew I had. And I still had an edge. That wasn’t fun—for me or anyone else. So I decided to take acting classes, group and private.

I read a lot of Tennessee Williams, did character studies, and explored archetypal and symbolic movement, and it turned out that I quite enjoyed expressing from my heart space. I wanted to be like a Carebear, shooting a heart-shaped beam onto everyone and everything. It felt good and right. No more edgy me. I felt cool and powerful to be bitchy sometimes, but it wasn’t fun when the remorse would kick in. And I was tired of being alone, isolated from the rest of the world due to my traumas. I wanted to take my spiky armour off for good.

All of the yoga, meditation, breathwork, dancing, improv, acting, journaling, and writing that I did, alongside lots of intuitive readings and energy healing I received from skilled practitioners, had me longing to pursue a bigger dream than merely providing academic and executive functioning support to students with specialized learning needs. I decided to pursue graduate studies in expressive arts therapy and clinical mental health counselling. How could I not since I had seen first-hand the powerful effects of bringing the expressive arts to my students and my own life? I wasn’t really interested in the counselling aspect at the time—to me, somatics and expressive arts were superior in helping people to move forward. I know now that counselling is just as powerful as body work and expressive arts therapy.

Meanwhile, I also deepened my studies of yoga teaching, obtaining my advanced yoga teacher training in the first half of 2022. I knew that somatic work was important, and I wanted to help people to get grounded into their bodies so that they could move forward with more ease with their other wellness goals.

In summer 2022, after a two-week trip to British Columbia, where I reconnected with the beauty and abundance of nature, I landed in Toronto and picked up a fluffy baby Labrador Retriever—my first dog—my heart was cracked open even more. It was hard not to perceive people as safe and kind when Bodhi melted grumpy stone eyes into pools of gooey love everywhere he went in my neighbourhood.

With much of my armour taken off, I was ready to advance in my path towards becoming a White Mage. Two weeks later, I was on the elliptical at the gym in my apartment, when I looked up at the clouds and saw a bald, seated man, coloured in with orange and pink. It was notable because the rest of the sky was grey. When I focused intently on the man in the clouds, I suddenly felt electrical shots pulsating through my body. I didn’t count the number of times, but it felt like more than nine. The Buddha cloud was pulsing as the shocks hit me. All the while I was trying to look calm and cool and collected on the elliptical, trying not to bring attention to my wild internal experience, pumping my feet smoothly and gracefully. It was a sign in the sky that marked a new chapter for me—one that symbolized not my edge, but my newfound inner peace and ease and joy.

Expressing with my heart, mind, and body aligned continued to open the doors to the universe and nature’s incredible magic. In summer 2023, on the last day of work at a school for students with multiple exceptionalities, where I had devoted 3 years of my life, trying my best to support these brilliant souls (by the way, I don’t use the word brilliant unless I mean it or I’ve got my White Mage hat on, describing diamond healing frequencies), I saved an email my boss had written, thanking me for my work—and I heard a woodwind instrument play a soft and pretty high note, for around 8 seconds. I looked around, unsure of where it came from. It played again. Another sustained note. I looked at my flute in front of me, sitting on my humble IKEA oak bookshelf. I connected the dots. My flute had just played on its own—twice! Could it be that the universe was thanking me for pouring my mind, heart and soul into helping these kids?

During my summer residency at Lesley University in July 2023, I experienced many messages from the universe yet again. I saw a whale cloud in the sky as the plane took off from Pearson airport to Boston. I explored meaning with sketching and watercolours (a whale emerged again that I didn’t notice until I stopped painting) and music-making and improv and theatre and collaborative sketching and walking in nature. There were so many shivers of recognition and healing in these solo and group activities.

More of nature’s magic abounded that summer. On a cottage trip with my partner’s family in August, I was at a beach with the Allegheny Mountains in the distance.

I embraced my partner and looked up and saw a heart-shaped cloud.

At a Lake Erie beach, I collected heart-shaped stones—three in a row in 5 minutes.

Back at Findley Lake:

I saw arms made of clouds flanking the golden sun;

a group of lilypads waved hello—twice;

and a massive wave greeted me at my partner’s cottage on a placid lake.

These were wonderful initiations into a reality where everything was meaningful and everyone mattered, where choosing to love yourself and to love humanity resulted in unlocking the keys to sacred mysteries, to messages in the music, the water, the plants, and the sky.

Here's Part 2...