Spark (eBook)

The Alchemy of The Spark

A spark is the product of elements interacting correctly at the right time, such as air and fire, but with zero water raining on its parade or damaging winds. I imagine this young flickering fire like the start of a relationship that will stick, when everything just falls into place at once, where the two lovers feel being together is totally natural.

Even when we’re not in a relationship, as single spiritual women we have a fire burning inside us. That fire was sparked in the late fifteenth century when our foremothers were hung (or burnt, in Scotland) for daring to be different, wild or unpopular, citing witchcraft as their justification. But they can’t deny us our innately magical intuition, our psychic truths, or our passionate knowledge of nature now. We are the proud, wild ones they never got to be, with all the eggs we’ll ever carry inside us, and all the eggs our daughters, their daughters and so on will ever carry. That means we also still carry our ancestors’ trauma, their hurt, their witch wound. Now that’s epigenetics in action.

There are plenty of questions you might have about what a spark is or can be. I will show you what it’s looked like for me, how it’s redefined itself, grown with me, in the following chapters. Our soul wants the spark, just not up on the surface level where the ego is concerned.

‘But,’ you might ask, ‘I’m in a steady long-term relationship and the spark has gone out. What does that mean?’ Well, I haven’t been there for a while, but I do know you deserve to live a spark-filled life, and the spark may well have gone out within you first. Actively healing the self will help you get it back in all areas of your life, similar to a domino effect. Everything comes back to you and the way you feel about yourself first, and the better you can communicate with yourself, the better it will get with your partner. Remember what spark means, and think what it means to you, because it will be different to everyone.

So as in all stories, let’s start from the beginning and see what kind of sparks flew with Supernova. And know that, like me, you deserve so much better.

Sign your self-love vow to yourself

Read this vow out loud, then sign your name at the end to commit to your new approach.

I, ……………, promise to put myself, my feelings and my boundaries first from this moment onwards. I vow to fiercely approve of myself, to validate myself, and trust myself. I promise to ask for help from my loved ones when I need it and stop wasting my fantastic self on people who do not appreciate me. I vow to meet my own unmet needs first and foremost and work to heal myself as only I can. I have all the love I need already inside me and I hereby welcome in my spiritual tag team and acknowledge that they are working overtime for my happiness. I know great romance is waiting for me.

And so it is.

Sign: …………………………………………

Date: …………………………………………


Part II

1

Root Chakra: Supernova

Affirmation: I am so worthy of love. I am worth more than how you make me feel. I am worth more than how you speak to me. I know and value myself more than you do. I am worth more than you say I am.

My story must start at the beginning. At its seed, at its root.

Our first chakra is the root chakra, called the muladhara. It sits invisibly behind our pelvic bone, at the bottom of our spine. It represents our home, our safe base, how secure we feel in it, and sets our foundation from which we grow. It also represents our physical desire. That all makes sense since its neighbour is the womb, our first home. Well, Supernova was the root from which my heart bloomed open like a flower. He was where I felt at home. His sandalwood-scented musk aftershave, his big smile and energy, all making me feel grounded and welcome in a world where I didn’t yet understand who I was as an adult.

Supernova was different. He wasn’t a normal fuckboy you can find all over dating apps. (The official term, in fact, is fuckperson, as regardless of gender and age, we are all capable of manipulation, and we are all energy beings, so the term deserves a neutral cover-all pronoun. But as I am heterosexual, I’ll refer mostly to fuckboys.) Fuckboys (FB) are normally good-looking blokes who can use their looks to their advantage. This is just the new name for them; you may know them as players, playboys, Casanovas and so on. They’ve taken full advantage of women’s sexual liberation for their own pleasure, and their idea of a romantic question is ‘does your place have parking?’ Their dating profile will probably be blank – they don’t even know what they have to offer – and include a ripped body or a pout pic. Their hot-and-cold approach is addictive to people who rate themselves directly by how much attention they’re fed. They’ll probably expect of you all the perks of a relationship while telling you they’re not looking for anything serious right now.

Supernova wasn’t even a Spiritual Fuckboy. Spiritual Fuckboys do all the same things fuckboys do in the emotionally unavailable way they do it, just using spirituality to woo. You know the type; the kind of person to write on their dating profile something like ‘I’m into the subjectivities of souls that will never be fully captured by unawakened brains’ and who show off their six-pack wearing an undone shirt in front of a Balinese sunset. Sanskrit is probably listed as one of the languages they speak. They’re a performative, woke mindfuck. And we spiritual single girls can be magpies.

In fact, Supernova would turn out to be the top rung of toxic, way more dangerous than just a Spiritual FB. He didn’t just reel me in for sex, it was for love. Ladies, meet my spiritual narcissist.

If you’re lucky enough not to know what a narcissist is, they’re typically defined as someone with ‘a persistent pattern of grandiosity, fantasies of unlimited power or importance, and the need for admiration or special treatment’, according to a study in the Journal of Behavioural Medicine. If you’re immediately wondering if this could be you, the same study tells us that up to three quarters of narcissists are men. If you even have the self-awareness to question if you’re a narcissist, you’re probably not.

Spiritual narcissists are not like a regular narc; they’re a cool narc. By comparison to the classic narcissist, their snobbery is manifested in their ‘guru’ ego, as if they’re a cult leader. They’ll have a reverence for their own voice and a vanity for their own look. Watch out for god-like excess, rather than authentic modesty. Take their long hair – they’re likely to think this defines them, so it’s a mask to hide behind. Take these things and the signs I’m about to show you, and you’ll be staring directly at a spiritual narcissist. Knowing them, they’ll probably sense your attention and be making sultry eyes right back at you. And they’ll probably always choose their love of the Universe over us.

Not all people who seem or look like this will be one. The crucial way to tell is how they make you feel about yourself in their company, which we’ll get into in this chapter.

Though I didn’t meet Supernova online, his profile might have said something similar. He would make long preachy speeches about his spiritual beliefs (I, the unknowing disciple, nodded and smiled in all the right places). He had dreadlocks he’d wrap up into a man bun, sleeves of spiritual clichéd tattoos, muscular shoulders he liked to show off, a devastatingly gorgeous face with dreamy hypnotising eyes and charismatic energy which crowned him a showman. Like any narc would be, he was completely addictive to me because I couldn’t exist without his validation. In turn, he was addicted to my attention.

Zero to hero

When we lack an internal validation system, we use the people around us for external validation. This is commonly where the ‘I’m not good enough’ issues arise. I had not one iota of self-esteem, but plenty of outer confidence that masked it.

The weekend before I met Supernova, I’d created – or perhaps reinforced – a humdinger of an inferiority complex for myself: that I was only desirable enough to men for a one-night stand. My best friend Lotti and I had been out clubbing in Edinburgh and we discovered the following days that both guys who’d pulled me were, in fact, married or in a relationship. I felt horrid for being lied to, not just once, but twice, in totally unrelated scenarios. I thought I’d really connected with both these guys. Jesus, who can be that naïve? I felt like a right loser. Where I should have sent out a ‘fuck you’ into the ether, hoping that energy reached them both remotely, sent not just their ears burning but their souls, instead I internalised it and that message came straight back to me like a karmic boomerang. Fuck me, I thought, for thinking I could be chosen for more than a snog or sex. I was 22, fresh out of my uni bubble, and it was a rude awakening into seeing how some adult relationships operated, undermining their own value by opening it up to strangers.

Ah, then here comes our ego, jumping to the safety of the conclusion that we’d end up like the guys’ poor betrayed partners if we allowed ourselves to fall in love. ‘You can’t get hurt if you’re never in a relationship!’ we assume, thinking we’ve hacked the...