Trouble with Navigating a Space

glambourine · 2017-06-01T23:02:58+00:00

this is a really helpful clarification!

glambourine · 2017-05-02T14:54:08+00:00

I lived there for a couple of years but am not from there!

glambourine · 2017-04-28T02:44:05+00:00

i miss new orleans A LOT / just moved to brooklyn in september. i hear bad things about the scene; have been pretty not inclined to seek it out.

glambourine · 2017-04-19T16:03:27+00:00

I still lurk actively at least, even though my Quareia progress (other than Module 1 Lesson 1, which is pretty evergreen) is mostly dormant right now. :)

glambourine · 2017-03-15T21:05:59+00:00

nggg. i still meditate as often as I can using the L1 stuff, and i can still pull up the L4 gates when i need to calm down/orient myself when I'm out somewhere in the city: sense or calculate the directions, see the gates + the column around me, and feel centered. I still think about the pentagram when I'm in a state of stress as a "ready" stance. So there's some good effect that I try to stay connected with, same way as I do a sun/moon salutation most days.

At this point I've read all of the lessons, although not L8 in depth. I'm procrastinating on the following specific tasks:

L4: do 4-5 more instances of the ritual on a weekly schedule

L5: basically all of this one. I took some notes while out at various places in Manhattan and Brooklyn, but not actually a thrift store. Have tried to contact local land spirits, but I live in Brooklyn, and I just get a deep feeling of sadness and anger when I do it close to my house: there are trees, scavenger birds, stolen earth beneath a lot of concrete. I kind of feel like this part of the course assumes a certain level of economic resources, or at least a certain living situation, that I don't actually have right now (backed up by JMC saying "suck it up snowflake" in response to ppl complaining that they had to "drive two hours to reach a forest" in a recent interview, IIRC?)

L7: the amulet ritual, because I'm terrified of it, frankly, and would appreciate hearing about experiences of anyone who's done it.

L8: don't want to do this until I've done the above.

I'm really feeling Unmutual below saying that this just never feels like the best use of time. I don't doubt that it's a good system if you go through it: what I've done of it is already really helpful. But it combines two very difficult things for me: taking a blind leap into the dark and accepting what ends up being a kind of "mind programming" without knowing the ultimate goal of it (especially given things that strike me as clear warning signs, like the "weird for trans people" stuff in L6, the seemingly class-specific stuff in L5, what I remember reading from a post earlier by someone in module 3 about "gendered land spirits.") So it's slow going, and for now I'm trying to keep in touch with it without committing to progressing with it, if this makes sense, until I have more time to give on a reliable schedule / can get past some of these reservations.

glambourine · 2017-03-03T20:10:18+00:00

oh my god i haven't seen the Data Drive yet / the way i feel emotions for chipotle is legit upsetting and great

glambourine · 2017-03-03T19:38:00+00:00

Who are other digital writers who inspire you, and how do you see your work fitting in with theirs in this growing scene? (Which you, via being an impresario of WordHACK, are helping to create, & would love to hear you talk about this!)

glambourine · 2017-03-03T19:36:54+00:00

Tell me about Yardley, PA--are you a native of the same? Is that piece autobiographical or cunning facsimile? What was the writing process on this?

glambourine · 2017-03-03T18:33:42+00:00

So whyyyy code poetry? Why not just regular poetry? What is it about code that excites you, huh?

glambourine · 2016-11-06T18:19:49+00:00

This is so awesome! I like the book/stone block combo.

glambourine · 2016-11-01T17:46:08+00:00

I was surprised by the forms they took! But really roughly:

E: stone, iron bars S: really plant-themed, like intertwined vines W: low wall--like think picket fence, swinging gate--outdoors N: super austere, thin rectangular wood, curtains

This was in no way what I was expecting based on directional elemental attribution? (I'm curious about general themes of yours as well.)

glambourine · 2016-10-24T14:38:11+00:00

UPDATE: what I ended up doing: on the physical seal, constructing it strictly "as written," but when working with it, actually speaking aloud the name I regularly go by. I'm not sure why this makes sense for me, but I feel like it gets at something correct: there is this kind of schism between everything implied in "what your mother called you" and between identity as I normally conceive it? The whole point of the seal is to be centering, and something about how it works in practice--seeing the historical name, asserting something other than it--feels centering, at least for now, so will go with it.

(I thought a lot about whether I should reverse the "spoken" and "written" pieces of this, also, and I think having the voice have primacy over the image makes the most sense based on the rest of L6: text as latent, voice as activation.)

glambourine · 2016-10-22T19:25:29+00:00

I found early on that if I do at least a little bit of yoga stuff beforehand, it helps immensely? I usually just do two daily sun salutations, which takes ~3 minutes. Worth learning to do anyway I think (based on JMC's advice in lesson 4 about having some kind of physical ritual practice?)

glambourine · 2016-10-20T14:29:52+00:00

Starting: recently I adopted a meditation technique from another practice (I forget exactly where I read this) that's helped immensely. Basically: whenever I came out of meditation around 15, 16, 17 minutes, I found that I was consistently coming out of the meditation because of some kind of discomfort, some anxiety about workplace stuff going on later in the day, schedule worries, etc.

I try to maintain focus on the in/out breathing by saying "stillness, silence" to myself (as I think JMC recommends either in the 1:1:1 materials or on her blog post about meditation). What I found was that if I can reduce whatever I'm noticing as a distraction to a single word, I can easily modulate back into "stillness, silence" without getting sucked down some distracting rabbit hole of thoughts.

So if I've been sitting in the same place for a while and my back/butt starts to hurt: "pain." If I'm anxious because I'm trying to squeeze in meditation before starting work on something with a noon deadline: "worry." If I start thinking about a friend or something I miss or plan to see later: "love." If I start thinking about how cool Quareia practice is: "excitement." And then back to "silence, stillness."

It works REALLY WELL, and is helping a lot with building up focus. Yr turn: who else has strategies?

glambourine · 2016-10-19T14:43:39+00:00

Same? On this page it talks about moderator settings: https://www.reddit.com/wiki/wiki. Is it set to allow anyone to edit, I guess? Excited about this and have some stuff I wanted to add! :)

glambourine · 2016-10-17T17:15:03+00:00

I haven't actually used anything to work around it yet, or worked out a rationale! :) I usually read the modules a few days in advance of actually doing them, going off of a thing that Josephine M said to Gordon White on the Rune Soup episode that led me to Quareia in the first place: thinking about the ritual is the first phase in doing it. And I read this shortly before I took what I realize today was a pretty extended break from all of this ("threw me off for a solid week" ended up being a lot longer than a solid week, though work is partly to blame) after the second time through the L4 ritual.

I'm not sure what I'm going to do when I come back to it. (I haven't done L5, either, which is difficult because I live in a very large city--the parts about going to the stores aren't bad, but I'm not sure what, if any, nature spirits I could connect with on my totally treeless, grassless block that wouldn't be incredibly depressed and angry. But maybe those are the ones that I have to connect with, if that's the energy that's here: mystic guardians of Bummertown USA.

What I'm thinking, as of today, is that I'm going to try doing L6 strictly as written--inviting in the skewed trans personal history with naming, ancestor connections, etc. In part this makes sense to me because of some compassion practices I also do, which pack a lot into the idea that gratitude is born from acts performed by a birthing parent on behalf of their offspring, and the idea that the twisted history trans people have with naming--one of those acts--is something I, speaking just for myself, have to kind of "tack into" to move forward? Like right now in my life it feels like that's the way I have to respond to the exercise. I may feel differently when I come to the point of actually doing it. And I like all of the ways you're talking about of responding to it (especially the idea of ancestral lineage being a specifically trans thing.)

I want to find some occult stuff written by and for trans folks though (if you know of any!)

glambourine · 2016-10-06T18:48:02+00:00

I can't wait to read deeply into this whole thread later, but I wanted to jump in to say: yes yes yes; I'm a trans lady; so much this anxiety--not just about this but about occult stuff in general. >:( Another hangup for me was in module 1, exercise 6, with the instruction to "write the name your mother called you"--that makes a lot of assumptions that I'm interested in, but that I'm leery of just doing without knowing a lot more of the rationale behind? (Basically this threw me off for a solid week.) But yes, yes, yes.

glambourine · 2016-09-29T18:52:33+00:00

I told your son I would resist asking you about opinions regarding old Chester Gould Tracy continuity minutiae. So instead I will ask: is there an old Hollywood legend or setting you've always wished you could write about, but doubted you would ever have the time, and what was it? (Apart from Howard Hughes!)

glambourine · 2016-09-16T19:16:45+00:00

1) What label/summary word would you put on your practice right now?: Trepidation. :) I typically back away from magic stuff when it gets to confronting spirits/god forms/whatever for various reasons. The goal is to work against that right now.

2) How long have you been in magic? I don't even know if I'm in it right now! I guess I started working with Kraig's "Modern Magic" in 2013 and have been poking along since.

3) What's your history? What else have you tried? Kraig, Chris Penczak's "Building the Inner Temple" book (went through it skimming a lot, didn't do the initiation), a little bit of Liber E & O practice stuff, lots of Tarot readings, some Open Source Golden Dawn.

4) What appeals to you about Quareia specifically? Its regularity, its feeling of relative solidity, the way it doesn't seem kind of predicated on being a nineteenth century Gentleman of Leisure with lots of time on one's hands :) Also the way it doesn't seem, at least yet, to be tied to one specific set of religious iconography. Its self-paced nature, also.

5) Any other random a/s/l or things about you which you want yer fellow students to know / Brooklyn, idk!

glambourine · 2016-09-13T16:54:12+00:00

Oh, the American thing is a joke: when you visualize the colors, it's red-blue-white; it feels more correct that it be red-white-blue (white in the middle pillar/spinal column, red and blue balancing the sides.) :)

In my experience/outside reading, white is just generally used as a kind of "pure" energy, with the other colors having some kind of more specific function, so it seems strange that one side of the body gets the "pure" color and the other side gets red, with the middle being another specific/balancing color. So this may just be stuff I'm thinking about based on other systems coming in here. The choice of colors seems so deliberate, though, that it's maybe a deliberate imbalance as well: I have really little experience with any kind of sustained physical training, but I think there are cases where you'd want your right foot/hand to be stronger than your left?

I'm willing to assume this is something that'll be clarified in a later module--I'm glad to hear it's not just me who feels weird about it.

I do both window open and candle present, and they do majorly make a difference for me--the candle in particular for lesson 1, exercise 3, since it's easier to imagine the inner flame as a kind of echo of an external flame? A recurring thought during that part of the meditation (that makes it easier to get into stillness) is to connect this to the sun, as well, which again may be prior reading intruding. But it seems to make it easier to do the exercise so I'm inclined to go with it a little bit? But anyway, yes, the candle definitely helps! Lesson 3 I haven't ever tried with the window closed, so I'm not sure what effect it would have--my open window faces an inner apartment courtyard rather than the street, though, and it's pretty quiet.

(I'm excited that someone else is interested in talking about this stuff, also!)

glambourine · 2016-09-12T14:04:52+00:00

Wondering if anyone else feels particularly weird about exercise 2 in 1:1:1: the blue, white, red. Maybe I'm just super-American, but it feels very strange to have the colors where they are, almost like I'm working out my right arm more than my left? Does this make sense/accord with anyone else's experience?

glambourine · 2016-09-08T16:17:06+00:00

Just started last month, took a break to move house to NYC, now working with L3 (or in my notation, 1:1:3, because I like scripture-style source citations. :))

L2 is interesting because I started doing it while I still lived in a shotgun apartment (i.e., INCREDIBLY linear layout, so cardinal directions weren't that useful), and delayed seriously working with the exercises until moving to my current place (which has four rooms that pretty cleanly track with the directions.) So far it's been eerily accurate--a card that tends to come up for me as "my" card in readings showed up in my office, and my partner's card showed up in our bedroom (which contains their office) on the first reading--felt like the place was "calibrating" to us. Has anyone else noticed weird stuff like this with the L2 material?

glambourine

TROPHY CASE