Embracing Your Darkness: Trusting Your Magic and Your Voice
The following is an article transcribed from a conversation between myself (Mimi Young) + June "Jumakae" Kaewsith of Your Story Medicine Podcast; the episode "Embracing Your Darkness: Trusting Your Magic and Your Voice". Main topics discussed included why embracing our darkness is just as important as embracing our light; freeing yourself from the anti-aging culture, and stepping into a pro-aging lifestyle; and how to use dreams to explore dormant parts of ourselves. (Note, since this originally was a verbal interview, some of the text may have been lost / mis-edited in the transcription. I provide a link to the podcast at the end of this article).
J: Hi Mimi. So first question I'd love to start off with is I like to call them roses if you can offer a rose of um what it is you're celebrating about yourself today.
M: First of all, thank you so much for having me, Jumakae. What am I celebrating about myself today? I am celebrating that I'm thinking only in the moment right now which is of course spending time with you with something I've been looking forward to and not thinking too far. And I feel that all our experiences are they just experienced, they, the experiences themselves wind up experiencing heightened sweetness when we can just be here truly now and nothing more.
J: Mm hmm. Yeah, because I mean who expected a pandemic? Who expected so much of the magic that has unfolded um like within the chaos And so I'm really excited to learn more about what chaos magic is and also how is it that we can we, we can turn whatever experiences or adversities we are having into our medicine, right? And um anyways, I know that this is so much of what you dive into with your, with your offerings, with your medicine, but if we can take away all of your titles for a moment, how is it that you would describe what it is?
M: You do? I love that. I love how you asked. Just yeah, that's just if we were to strip away all the titles, I would say that I am someone who is completely in love with The three dimensional reality and also completely in love with the invisible, non dimensional, multi dimensional, fluid dimensional reality too. Um and it's it's being able to have one ft in each of these realities that makes life really fun. And I would say that's really, it summarizes what it is that I do. So it summarizes what it is they do from a from a work or a career perspective, but also just my life, I mean that's how I cook. When I cook, I invite the ancestors to show up in the kitchen, that's how I parent um when you know we're every morning we talk about dreams and we talk about the ancestors and other spirits and maybe you know, even the household spirit let me show up on one of our laps when we're having a meal and when we're talking about a dream or talking about what happened to those missing socks and all these sorts of things. So yeah, I would say that's really how I would summarize what it is that I do and who it is that I am.
J: I'm like chuckling because I'm like, oh my God, that missing socks. So you're saying that it's not me, that I didn't misplace it, that a spirit could have probably like took it!
M: Yeah, I mean of course we, we do lose things as humans or misplace things, but yeah, things can be moved around in the home, things can go missing in the home, things can mysteriously uh you know, break or actually repair themselves oftentimes through uh yeah, like home based spirits, domestic spirits, they are real.
J: Is this something that you grew up with? So tell us more about your ancestral lineage, we, you mentioned that you are of Taiwanese descent, but you currently live in Canada and I'm curious how has this, how has your upbringing influenced your path today?
M: That's that's a big question. I know, yeah, so with my Taiwanese lineage, I come from homes, like referring to my parents, their homes uh that practice (Ch'an) Buddhism and within buddhism there's fairly uh at least in the Taiwanese experience. Um there's a fair amount of ancestral reverence that's tied into the buddhist practice as well as animistic based practices um and animistic based beliefs on top of that, uh there's Taoist principles that are woven, it shows up in buddhism, but it shows up in the everyday, particularly through food and through seasonal cycles.
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M: ...you completely lose touch with who you are, you completely lose touch with your roots, you completely, you just are not stable as a being anymore. Um and it really led to essentially someone who was, I felt like I was a bit of a shell, like, like I, I had a form on the outside and maybe um on paper it looked good or maybe on the outside and look good, but it was, it was really, it felt really vacant on the inside, I was deeply, deeply unhappy um and experienced a whole lot of depression and anxiety and I absolutely zero trust in my own voice. ... and it wasn't until I realized actually one of the best things to do is to actually believe in darkness and embrace darkness as a form of information because we all have it, we're all made up of it too, that we're not old as light here. Um and and by embracing that I was able to be honest again, and and that was really the big thing was like a living this lie, living this life of, of lies in denial and suppression and avoidance and uh yeah, so I got to the point where it was just such an obvious choice for me and so it was just like that daily choice of do I want to be honest with myself because it is through being honest and embracing and integrating all these aspects of light and shadow, so to speak, that I can actually tap into my own magic again and trust my voice and trust my who I am as a person.
J: Were you somebody who grew up in a family that wanted you to follow a different path of, what was the reaction from your family when you made a made a commitment to be essentially a full time witch?
M: So my dad never converted to Christianity, he remained um culturally a buddhist, but he never really practiced buddhism. Um he has always been interested in the esoteric and mainly actually was through his studies of martial arts and that's why he actually retained it. Um Yeah, but he's always been quite tapped into his intuition, but he's never spiritualized it, he's never made it this thing that becomes a full blown ritual where you have to go to a place every week and announced to everybody else that's exactly you know, like everyone's mimicking every everyone else, trying to look like a certain kind of spiritual person, he wasn't into that.So he really was just like you want to do this -- great -- and you don't want to do this -- great --like it's just like like he he really didn't care, it was my mother, it was my mother that I think it affected her quite deeply when I decided to walk away from church. I and to this day it's it's still actually a very uncomfortable conversation because um when we do engage in those conversations, I tend to feel that she's still coming from a place of evangelism, how everyone must, like you had said, believe in Jesus or you know, lest you be cast into hell and burn forever.
J: Mhm Yeah, and I know that you also have your own online business school that approaches entrepreneurship from a more de colonial perspective, one where we are in tune with the elements and one where we can build a team that goes beyond people that actually calls in our guides in the unseen realm. So I want to dig into how, like, where you created this, and also like you where does God fit in all of this? Because I know for myself it's like, ok, I've been slowly starting to use the word of God more, but of course there's still this this contraction in my body, like, oh people are going to think that when I say God, I only mean this God. So I would just love to hear your own take on that since you have also been one to have been exposed to both Buddhism and Christianity like me.
M: Yeah, so God, it what's interesting, at least in chaos magic is energies grow and expand when you feed them and when you, when you no longer feed them, the energies will follow through on a cycle. And and the cycle essentially is quite universal. You look at the cycle of seasons, the cycle of um your, you know, let's say menstrual cycle, seed cycle, it's all very similar, there's a generation and a degeneration, I'm oversimplifying obviously, but that's essentially what it is. God as an energy can be that so when you feed, feed, feed to God, it will generate and when you allow that energy to continue, it will eventually go through a degeneration, but a degeneration is not bad and nor is it's not really death, it actually just returns to that Yin state of potential. So that's something else can come through in the following generator cycle. So, how I talk about this in business is, I do like, I think it's important to talk about each of our composition. This is very Daoist when we're talking about, you know, which compositions will be made up of, So are we made up with metal or wood or water or earth or whatever. Essentially when we understand the functions and the personalities of each of these elements, then we understand what our gifts are and we know what our gifts are, then we can embrace them and we can also outsource perhaps the ones where there or they're not our natural gifts and that's really where the collaboration can occur. I mean it will be unique to everyone. And also sometimes we think we don't have a gift, but when we discover through our chart, our natal chart that like, wow, we actually do have a lot of this this particular element, but why is it that we don't actually consider that as part of who we are? Likewise, that we actually almost consider it foreign to us. And that's when a lot of people will understand that perhaps there has been some type of indoctrination in the past that has asked them to silence or squash or make that part of themselves small. We're talking about de colonizing a lot of it is de colonizing perspective, our own internal perspective of things of ourselves, our perspectives of how businesses or projects should be um should be formed. Um even just this idea and you know, we talked about this very briefly before recording is this idea of a solitary witch. Well no solitary, which even if the which is even if the which doesn't belong to a coven, um that solitary which is never working alone. Yeah, by definition, which means that you are working with energies are working with spirits. I'll go into my office and it looks and I'll tell people, I'll tell my family I'm going into a meeting and like it's me like physically in the room and no one else can, like no one can see anything in the room other me and maybe my desk, but I'm actually talking to the spirits that show up in the room and then we make business decisions together.
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For the full interview, head to Podcasts + Press and have a listen to Episode 53 of Your Story Medicine
Mimi
Founder, spirit communicator and Wu shamanic occultist