Dearest Quester,
We’re going to deviate from the Mary Oliver series for a moment. This missive is personal (and I promise there will be more of that in the future). I feel the need to answer the pressing questions that have come up in several private messages.
This questions essentially boil down to these:
Why aren’t you still an astrologer?
Why are you no longer teaching classes about the occult, magic, or spirit work?
Why don’t you give readings or spiritual counseling sessions any longer?
Why are you changing your focus to this? It seems so mundane.
Fair questions. You’ve been along with me for quite a ride, some of you since 2019.
As many of you know, this isn’t my first foray into spiritual creative recovery.
My first iteration was EmpressCraft (created in early 2022), where I offered spiritual counseling for people wanting to dig deeper into their creativity. The sessions looked at the astrological chart as a whole—fixed stars, houses, planetary positions—to suss out creative hangups and help someone begin embracing their unique creative habits and flow. It was then I first asserted that creativity is spirituality; this was a major milestone in my own understanding.
Out of my entire career as a spiritual counselor, that was the most rewarding period. My favorite podcast appearances were on this topic, during this time (which is saying something, because truth be told I hate being on camera or being interviewed). It’s where I began to hone the thoughts that would eventually become the Manifesto I shared a few weeks ago.
I truly loved those counseling sessions. However, this is where I started to feel… hedged in. Limited. I wasn’t satisfied with only looking at this through the lens of astrology. In fact, I often found it cumbersome and unnecessary.
On top of that, I was dealing with deeply rooted imposter syndrome around creativity. I struggled with feeling I wasn't "recovered enough" from my own deep blockages to be a good guide. I felt I needed to be 100% creatively healed, otherwise I was a hypocrite. I look back now and see how harsh and uncompassionate I was with myself. Creative recovery is a path we walk our whole lives, for reasons I am sharing in my work today.
In any case, I wandered from EmpressCraft to Moon Haven, from Moon Haven to just using my own name; from focusing on animistic astrology to more broadly on spiritual guidance (and for a time, more particularly folk witchcraft).
In truth, I was trying on hats because nothing seemed to fit. I wish I still had the messages I sent to my peers at the time. In a panic one night, I asked my professional friends in the community, “If I stopped being an astrologer, would we still be friends? Would we still talk?” Later, I again repeated this for magic, the occult, witchcraft.
Because I knew in my gut, none of these things were right for me. I still wasn’t spiritually home, which meant I couldn’t sustain them personally or professionally.
My spiritual path was evolving quickly, and I needed the space to be authentic in how I helped others. And let me confess: I felt utterly trapped, completely unable to make that kind of authentic change.
Beyond my personal search, my experience making a peer group from occult practitioners and spiritual teachers has been mostly challenging. Let me be clear: I also found this in organized religion, so this isn’t some damning critique of alternative spirituality.
In general, I think when spirituality becomes a profit-driven social club, it creates the conditions from which power struggles inevitably arise.
Mixing personal beliefs, social status, and money is a potent cocktail. I’m not blameless in this. I have tried my best to be an ethical person but have often fallen short. So I don’t want to level black-and-white blame at any group, as if I were simply a victim. I’ve done my own share of harm, even when unintended.
That being said, behind the scenes my family has suffered from my public involvement in the alternative spirituality and occult spaces, mostly at the hands of people I considered peers or friends. It’s deeply disappointing that a space supposedly centered on spiritual growth has such an aversion to healthy conflict-resolution. As I tried to develop those skills for myself, I found I was rarely met in kind. And that’s where I finally couldn’t continue in those spaces.
It reached a point where staying in this professional space was no longer healthy for me or my family. It was not a match for my own path (which I always teach from), and it was incompatible with my ethics and values around caring for my community.
While coming to these realizations, I kept researching, looking deeper into what I can only call the origins of spirituality. Where did it come from? Why am I so compelled to engage in it? What is the purpose?
The answer took me right back to the ideas I began to formulate during my time with EmpressCraft. And ultimately, it’s what culminated in the Manifesto (Part 1, and Part 2).
At our earliest beginnings, we cannot separate creativity from spirituality. We cannot separate ritual from art. We cannot separate creative problem-solving from our relationships with the other-than-human.
If we remove the trappings of glamour, averting our focus from the seductive image of spirituality to its actual substance, creativity and spirituality are one and the same. Dancing, making music, singing, praying, creating ritual implements, sacred spaces, special clothing, special foods… All of it is creativity.
Creativity is the imperative of all life, which includes but also goes beyond the human experience. I love how Lucy Pearce expresses this in her book Creatrix:
“Most people confuse ‘creative’ with ‘artistic’ and associate creativity with its end product – an accomplished painting or beautifully iced cake. But creative does not (necessarily) equal artistic. Creativity is the basic quality inherent in nature that is responsible for making energy come into form. Creativity is all around us, all the time. Plants produce flowers and fruits. Birds and insects lay eggs. Spiders weave webs. Creativity’s basic biological purpose is to reproduce and sustain life. But it seems to do so in the most dynamic, beautiful, bizarre, extravagant and elegant of ways. Think of the exquisite markings on animal fur, the iridescent plumage of birds, the elegant design of a seashell, the lustrous sheen on a ripe berry, the intricate pattern of a braided river, the vivid colours of leaves in autumn, the seams of precious stones in caves… None of these beautiful forms are strictly necessary. And yet, this is how creative energy expresses itself as it reproduces and transforms the constituent parts of the natural world from one state to another.”
There’s a reason that almost any creative act—from spinning thread to baking bread to metalsmithing—has a spiritual background. I can’t think of a single human act of creativity that does not have some kind of spiritual or magical quality assigned to it.
It’s why we look at the neolithic cave paintings and have a chicken-and-egg reaction: did creativity come first, or ritualized spirituality?
We struggle with that question because we see it from a modern lens where spirituality is separate from “mundane” life. Modern spirituality is heavily focused on transcendence rather than immanence.
Transcendence proposes that the point of spiritual cultivation is to separate yourself from the world, to be above it. Heaven, nirvana, enlightenment—some untouchable, unchanging perfection—is outside of this world.
But immanence is the original spirituality of our shared ancestors. It proposes that life itself is spiritual. That spiritual cultivation comes from the consequence of how we live. That the mundane is inherently sacred. That the mountain, the pebble, the storm, and the bear have an indwelling spirit and agency as much as you do. That heaven is here. It always was. The divine is in the messy chaos of life.
Organized spirituality often begins as a way for a group to survive a world of other-than-human intelligences. Maybe if we learn to respect Sedna, she will be more giving. Maybe if we are taught by Trickster, we can take our part in creating the world. Maybe if we draw their image or imitate them, we can find a way to live in good relationship.
But over time, organized religion often forms to benefit a specific class. And my, is it ever creative! Cathedrals, icons, rituals, incense, complicated prayers. But this is also a collection of creative spiritual agency for the benefit of a few at the top. They take folk crafts rich with connection to the immanent earth and attach them to transcendent philosophies of stilted, spiritual hierarchy. In doing so, they create systems of control and clubs of exclusivity. Only certain acts are “spiritual,” you can only join the club if you perform those certain acts satisfactorily to the right authority, and heaven is somewhere else so we can ransack the earth with impunity. We get further from our own creative spiritual agency and begin imitating others, hoping to arrive at the connection and meaning we desperately crave.
I’d argue that today, alternative spirituality is taking on a similar shape.
And I simply do not want to be a part of that.
This isn’t to say that magic doesn’t work or that spirits aren’t real. I fiercely believe both are true. But I believe creativity is the original spirituality, the origins of all magic. It is the place where our humanity and the enspirited other-than-human world meet.
Living a creative life is, in itself, an act of spiritual cultivation. It is an enchanted way of being in relationship with ourselves, each other, and the other-than-human.
The cave paintings were an act of magic—a ritual to honor, propitiate, and perhaps become the Great Bear, to borrow a little of its wisdom and power.
Our obsession with finding meaning and making magic is natural; it’s part of our shared ancestry.
Creativity has always been the vehicle.
From personal experience, client work, and deep research, I have come to believe that intentionally cultivating a creative life is the most powerful path to spiritual sovereignty. It will help you cultivate self compassion, as well as the curiosity and openness necessary to have healthy relationships with others (including the non-human beings and spirits of this world). It gives you more experiences of aliveness, flow, and connection than anything else. It hones the co-creative skills necessary for life-altering magic while making every single day magical. It helps you stand in your agency, become deeply intuitive, and steer by your own compass.
What is missing right now in modern spirituality is this intentional focus on our creative-spiritual roots.
This is the work I want to do, because it is the work I am doing for myself. I can only guide from my own, authentic experience.
My work moving forward is to focus on these roots—on helping all of us, myself included, get past the creative anxiety of our age that keeps us from our most meaningful, enchanted existence. This is the foundation that helps the magical tree blossom and makes spirit relationships sustainable. This is what I call Coeurage.
If what you need right now are immediate magical solutions to seemingly insurmountable problems, I’m not going to leave you hanging.
Soon, I will introduce you to my personal in-house magician, someone I trust with my life.
But as for my work, I am here to tend the roots.
I hope this lays your questions to rest. More importantly, I hope you’ll join me on this new leg of the journey. Thank you, as always, for being my companion on the path.
From my fire-feathered heart to yours,
Amaya
Coeurage is a labor-of-love free publication that is supported by those who purchase my immersive and in-depth workshops.
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I’ve been so honored to work with you in a 1:1 capacity and I’ve told you this: I’m always excited to see you grow into this new version of yourself. Grateful for our friendship and I know this has been a long time coming.
I've taken two of your classes and they have brought such depth to my life! I look forward to following your work wherever the path leads