The Mantra & the Yantra
Or, The Ghost in the Machine
My morning routine takes me down rabbit holes.
Every morning I do a varying combination of writing in my journal, reading, tarot cards, meditation, lighting candles. I use it to get my head on straight, to let ideas rise to the surface, in the hopes of becoming more centered and focused, less anxious, calmer. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. But overall, I have found that this time is fruitful and is where most of my decent thinking gets done.
I want to share an experience with you in the hope that it might be of use to you in your process, and on your creative journey.
The Word of the Year is a Machine
Every year, I choose a Word of the Year, something that I hope will help direct my learning and action for the year. But what inevitably happens is that I have NO IDEA what that word will end up doing in my life. It is like a machine that is sitting there with all its gears and buttons, and I have no idea how it works or what it does until I start pulling levers or cranking cranks.
For instance. Several years ago on January 1, I chose “force” as my word of the year. Force for good, May the Force Be With You, Find the Flow of the Life Force, etc. etc. Then, on January 16th, one late evening in Seattle, after a delightful dinner with friends, I was stopped at a turn lane with part of my car over the line—right in front of the police station—and ended up getting a DUI.
Little did I know that Force would be Police Force. The universe has quite a sense of humor.
But that DUI changed my life. I started making choices differently. I chose to quit drinking. I chose to change my relationship with money. I chose to save money, quit my full-time job, and go back to art school. I chose to become an artist. The only thing that changed was EVERYTHING.
Fast forward to last year. Before the pandemic, again on January 1, I chose PATIENCE as my Word of the Year. RILLY.
PATIENCE.
I’m sorry. I apologize. I didn’t even know what that machine did when I pushed the button.
My friend in recovery laughed heartily when I told her this. “Never pray for patience!” she said. “Because you WILL get it.”
So PATIENCE it was. And two months later, the pandemic hit, my art school went online, the leadership program I was running went online, art sales stopped, we all got quarantined, and my plans for the year were: Put. On. Hold.
I chose to let patience work in my life, hole up, make art, learn new things, make two new websites, create a coaching business. By the end of the year, I had to laugh, because one of my new clients started telling other artists in my presence - Shannon is so PATIENT!
HA! I chose the word because I feel like the MOST impatient person in the world - full of inner turmoil, resentments, impatience, high expectations and low output, judgments, anxieties, etc. etc. Etcetera. But when I pulled the lever and pushed the buttons on the Patience Machine, it started to work in ways I had no idea would happen. And I just went with it.
Enter 2021. What are we doing now?
So this year on January 1, I chose two Words of the Year—one for myself, and one for my business.
GENERATE—for myself. In the hopes that I would generate art, generate writing, generate some actual MONEY for a change (more about this soon).
Twilight Zone, The Fever, 1960
INTEGRATE—for my business. In the hopes that I would integrate all the things I had been learning—marketing skills, financial systems, mindset shifts, art skills, teaching skills—into my business in order to have a stronger, sustainable, focused business foundation on which to build.
Well, when I walked up to the Integrate Machine and pulled the lever—I started to see how this machine works. Like when you want to buy a blue car, suddenly you see blue cars everywhere, integrate started to show up everywhere.
I got an email from one of the many people out there I follow—Scott Jeffrey—about Integrating the Shadow Self. Really. So now, this is what we are doing? Apparently this year is supposed to be about me understanding and exploring my Shadow, understanding what that means, and integrating it into my whole self.
Carl Jung talks about the Shadow like this:
“Everyone carries a shadow,” Jung wrote, “and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is.”
So Jung says that in order to be a whole, complete, integrated human, one must address and acknowledge the Shadow in the self, explore it and bring it into the family, so to speak. The Prodigal Son. The Black Sheep. The Dark Lord. To see this side for what it is, appreciate its gifts, and welcome it into the fold.
This came up for me first in the realm of money - like, RIGHT away. I met with a financial advisor to help me figure out my taxes for my business - and she suggested a book that I consumed immediately—Prosperity Consciousness, by Fredric Lehrman.
Lehrman’s suggests several affirmations, or mantras to repeat—”like practicing your golf swing,” the first being:
“I deserve to be wealthy.”
He says many people resist this - based on childhood issues around how they were raised to think about money. Especially artists—money is “the root of all evil,” bad, dirty, sleazy, we just want to create, we don’t want to “sell” our work, etc.
The Shadow of the Money Story
So here we go - into the Shadow work around money. I hope some of these thoughts on “My Money Story” resonate with you:
My father grew up during the Depression, so we always scrimped and saved. He ground his own wheat flour and bought 10 pound bags of wheat, for god’s sake. We were Mormon, so we had a two-years’ supply of food in the basement pantry. This doesn’t seem so crazy now, and it felt like being prepared even then, but with 7 kids, there was always a feeling of not wanting to ask for anything extra. I was the youngest, so had hand-me-downs—toys, clothes—for years, and didn’t really resent it until I went out into the world and saw the wealth of my peers.
We literally lived on a hill, and we were halfway up/down it. My friend Christie lived a block down, and her family was POOR. My friend Lisa lived UP the hill, and her family was RICH. We were in the middle, but I still remember distinctly Lisa’s grandfather taking us all to 7-11 in his long Cadillac, and me RUNNING home as fast as I could to ask my Dad for a quarter so I could go with them to buy a Slurpee, and having a LOT of anxiety about it: I don’t want to ask, I’m not dressed nice enough to ride in a Cadillac, they think I’m poor, etc. etc.
I STILL pretty much ONLY shop at Goodwill. I pride myself on cooking a big pot of soup and living on it for a week. I buy only used cars, used books, etc. etc. I have always “felt poor” and felt like I couldn’t make REAL money, even though I have had grown-up full-time jobs all my life and have made my own money since I was 15. But this feeling of poverty drove me to get student loans—and hence, I STILL have student loans that I am paying back. Shame around money. I haven’t had a credit card for 20 years because I don’t trust myself. I pride myself on living on little. I’ve made bad choices with money and spent WAY too much on restaurants and wine just to forget my anxieties, have some fun, rebel and do whatever I wanted to, goddammit.
Want some whine with your crackers?
As much as I want to say—like the poet Ellen Bass writes in “How to Apologize,”:
“Unharness yourself from your weary stories”
—my job here is not to avoid or deny this, but to embrace and integrate the Shadow.
If anything resonates here with you, you may have some of the same issues around money that I have—a Scarcity Mindset, versus an Abundance Mindset. Putting this blog post out there is part of my process of Integrating the Shadow.
So, I now am repeating my new mantra—I DESERVE TO BE WEALTHY.
Lehrman breaks it down: what does “deserve” mean? From the Latin, “from, or of, or by, service.” From my service, I earn the right to have something. And, as other teachers have said, we deserve to be happy, or wealthy (we’ll get to thet next), just like the next guy, because we exist.
So what IS “wealthy?” Everyone has their own meaning. But Lehrman suggest putting a number on it. Do I need $100,000 in the bank to feel wealthy? And is wealth just money? No, obviously. For me, wealth is freedom. The freedom to use my time as I wish, to create and work without anxiety. And I did put a number on it—how much I’d like to save or make per year. It’s not over the top, but it still seems like a lot to me.
This all trickles down: what I charge for my art, what I charge for my services, what food I buy (“I can’t afford organic” becomes “I can’t afford to put chemicals into my body, because I want to treat it well and live a long time.”). What clothes I buy, etc. etc.
The Empress Emerges
Integrating this process into my work with Jung’s Archetypes, Campbell’s Hero’s Journey, and Christine Kane’s idea of the “Empire Mentality” for your business, I have also incorporated the idea of The Empress Tarot card. This card represents Nature, the Life Force, Abundance.
So I am on this path—and have been for several years—actively creating a mini-empire (and you can, too) where I am the Empress of my little realm of art, beauty, creativity, community. I am learning how I create my life. How to tap into the abundance of nature in order to be of service to myself and my community.
On this Hero’s Journey, the Hero must go through ordeals in order to return with the “gift” or the “elixir” that will help save the “famine-stricken land.”
The Empress, Wildwood Tarot by John Matthews, Mark Ryan, Illustrations by Will Worthington
Whoa.
Yes, my internal land (especially around money) has been “famine-stricken” for a long time.
The Scarcity Mindset has kept me from charging what I should, from engaging with the flow of wealth, and has helped me to keep my Shadow safe and unrecognized. The Shadow side wants SAFETY, feels superior when she looks at “rich people” who spend their money on what she sees as foolish things, an immoral wasting of resources. (There’s a lot to unpack here and I won’t go on and on.)
But let’s just suffice it to say I created a new mantra:
“The Empress must return with the elixir SAFELY (in order to create a sustainable, abundant life for herself and her community).”
You may think I’m crazy. That’s ok.
Artists - and everyone - live in their own little imaginary world of thoughts, ideas and feelings.
I made a new mantra. And then, I discovered YANTRA.
As I was writing in my journal, I was noticing that my description of the “elixir” (Acceptance, Surrender, Flow, Evolution) was starting to look like fodder for an acronym—and I LOVE acronyms. SAFE. I wanted to add LOVE in there. SAFEL - Y…what about Y? So I started down the rabbit hole of looking up words that start with Y. Yes, Yearn, Young.
And then I came across Yantra. Never heard of it!
Yantra:
““Yantra (यन्त्र) (Sanskrit) (literally “machine, contraption”) is a mystical diagram, mainly from the Tantric traditions of the Indian religions.””
Sri Yantra, WikiCommons
Cranking up the Yantra
A mantra is the song, prayer, soul, energy of the thing. A yantra is the piano it is played on, the form, the prayer book, the pipeline, the body of the thing.
This makes sense to a writer or artist. The WORD is a symbol or “contraption” that makes an idea come to life.
A poem is a small (or large) machine made of words.
Prose may carry a load of ill-defined matters like a ship.
But poetry is the machine which drives it, pruned to a perfect economy.
—WIlliam Carlos WIlliams
Like a poem, a painting is a “contraption” that helps us see in a new way—color, light, form, concepts.
So now, my Words of the Year—make sense. They are “contraptions” that you only understand once you start pulling the levers and pushing the buttons. Once you start WORKING them.
So my acronym became: SAFELY—Surrender, Accept, Flow, Evolve, Love, Yantra.
“The Empress must return with the elixir safely. ”
I, the creator of my own little empire, must go on the journey into myself. I must meet the mentors and endure the ordeals. I must work through this shadowland and integrate the unknown parts of myself and return with this wisdom, this gift, safely, so I can help restore myself and my community to abundance. I must Surrender to the process, Accept the world as it is, tap into the Flow of life force, Evolve and be open to change, I must grow to Love the process, and use the tools, the machines and contraptions—the Yantras—that have been so generously given to me.
I deserve to be wealthy.
And so do you.
In order to create a sustainable life, to contribute to community, to create more machines—more art made of words and of paint—of beauty and depth.
Of light. And of shadow.
K, that’s weird. I painted this WAAY before I delved into any of these ideas or knew what a Yantra was. That is how this stuff works, I guess. My Shadow is seeking ME.
Angles of Light, oil on canvas, 36x48, Shannon Borg
