Wise Ones Podcast

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Create a Space for your Emotions When challenging emotions float helter-skelter through our bodies, they make it difficult for us to center, ground, and process. To create a container for your emotions, begin writing your feelings until you simply can't write anymore. Get it out. Free up some energy for thought and action. Who knows--you may even learn something about yourself in the process. Create a Space for Your Thoughts When I need to have a good think, I go for a nice long walk. I let my mind wander. I let it focus on what it wants to focus on. I consider the situation and reframe. Nine times out of ten, I feel a hell of a lot better about whatever's happening. Gather Insight Pull some tarot cards. Get advice from your guides on the astral. Reach out to a spiritual mentor or wise friend to get an outside perspective. Learn more about why you're thinking how you're thinking and feeling what you're feeling. Cast a Spell Once you've done some cogitating and processing, it's time to create a soul-resonant intention and cast a highly effective spell. Don't know what a soul-resonant intention is? Find out in Spell Bound. Do Something Completely resigning yourself to powerlessness is the LAST thing you want to do, Beauty. Take action in big ways. Take action in small ways. Take action in useful ways. Take action in creative ways. Anything you can do to stay connected to your agency will help you get through! Much Love and Stay Safe, Jessi

Given the stress, anxiety, and concern over the spread of coronavirus, the Wise Ones Coven have agreed to share this exclusive guided meditation in service of the community. If you're feeling frightened and uneasy, listen to this meditation to return to center. So much love to each and every one of you. Let's take care of ourselves so we can take care of each other!

If you choose items that resonate, you can't go wrong! Enroll in SPELL BOUND: https://jessihuntenburg.wpcomstaging.com/13856-2/

In this chat, Emerald and I riff on the archetype of the Trickster--how it appears in pop culture, functions as an agent of chaos, and how a marriage with the Warrior archetype makes it a force to be reckoned with. The Diamond Net: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCvW2U2-szAK2lBzUYOw0DwA Work with Me: https://jessihuntenburg.wpcomstaging.com/

In this episode, Carrie shares the process of creating The Spacious Tarot, from conception to creation to Kickstarter launch and beyond. She also speaks to what she's learned and how she's evolved as a result of creating the deck.

It's a new decade, and I am HERE for it! In this episode, I encourage you to write imperfection into your intentions, share the words I've chosen to anchor and inspire me in 2020, and chat about the #monthofmagick challenge we're doing over in the Wise Ones Coven--join us! https://www.patreon.com/jessihuntenburg

In this episode, I briefly explain the reasons for the podcast name change, chat about the history of Yule and Saturnalia, and explore ways of subverting the shadow and consumerism of the season so you can recapture its magic! Join the WISE ONES Coven| https://jessihuntenburg.wpcomstaging.com/wise-ones-archive/

In honor of Samhain, I share listener's ghost stories as well as a few of my own! My friend Will joins us as the very first guest of the podcast, and he speaks to his ability to see and feel spirits while sharing some of his most memorable experiences with folks beyond the veil. Follow Will over on Instagram @jhbo_o_o Learn more about me and my services at www.jessihuntenburg.com

In this episode, I share the "holy" experience of finding a carving pumpkin, the awkwardness I felt when I led my first ritual, and the role ritual plays in connecting us with our power as divine creators.   From a young age, my life was rife with ritual in a way I’m just beginning to understand.  Each autumn, for instance, we’d make our annual pilgrimage to Northbrook Orchards to pick our carving pumpkins. The first or second Saturday of October we’d all pile into my Dad’s apple-red F150, crushing each other to create spaces for our bodies as the radio blared the scratchy tunes from the blown-out speaker. Locked and loaded, we’d bump and jostle down the sinuous road, tittering away about what sort of pumpkin we’d choose and whether we’d carve a goofy face or a scary face or try our hand at a Halloween scene this year. Each time my father would downshift, he’d crunch the knee of whomever had been unlucky enough to sit next to him and that poor soul would silently wince in pain—one less-than-grateful peep could turn the truck right back around and stop the trip before it even started.   Once we’d pulled up to the orchard store and my Dad had chosen a parking spot with nearly as much scrutiny as he’d soon choose his pumpkin, we’d burst out of the truck and feast our eyes on the apples, the corn stalks, the canned vegetables and the plastic bottles of single-serve cider sweating on a pile of ice in a barrel by the cash register. The smell of sugar-cinnamon donuts would soon creep into our nostrils and intoxicate us with the same potency as the incense of Sunday mass—there was something holy in that smell as we knew a taste of its source would transport us to the autumn before and before and before, as long back as we could remember. It was only after we’d chosen our pumpkins that we’d grab a half-dozen donuts and perform the amazing feat of making them disappear in a minute or less. The buzz of that anticipation would fuel the vigor with which we made our pumpkin choices.   Next the long trek through the pumpkin patch, the rolling over of each gourd to see how flat its back-side and whether or not it had grown atop a vine. We dashed about like leprechauns, desperate to discover the best pumpkin before anyone else could. The only one who strode about like a human was my mother--she trusted she’d find a pumpkin perfect for her purposes regardless, a trust I both envy and do my best to achieve now that I’m grown with a child of my own.   After fully surveying the patch we’d stand beside the pumpkin of our choice and wait for my Dad to pull his Swiss-Army Knife from a well-worn jean pocket and hack at the stems until he’d severed each from their respective vines. Depending on the size, we’d lift our pumpkins and levy a guess at the weights, hoping to guess within five pounds for the coveted chance to take home our pumpkin for free. For the kids, it was less about the money and all about the prestige.    Pumpkins selected, collected, and paid for, we’d head back to the truck and place them in a tight row in the back of the bed, careful to keep them from rolling themselves bruises and broken stems.   The following Tuesday or Thursday, we’d scrawl our chosen designs on the smooth or bumpy surface of our gourds, the five of us taking turns with the two pumpkin carvers we’d managed to save from the year before. The ritual culminated in the lighting ceremony—we’d stack our pumpkins in a line on the kitchen table and my mother would place a tea light in each and flick off the kitchen light to the sound of “oos” and “ahhs”. Huddled proud in the dark, we’d collectively have what I can only refer to as a religious experience. In this case, we were the divine creators, the beings who’d painstakingly brought something beautiful and terrifying to life.   One needn’t look far for evidence that ritual is central to our experience—the standard feed of the late-twenties set is punctuated by engagements, marriages, births, holiday outings and of course, the ultimate self-care ritual--vacations. It’s our rituals that keep us bonded, grounded, and connected, that provide us with structure and purpose. It’s our rituals that keep us from flying off the deep end when things go pear-shaped. As the Titanic sank, the band played on--we may not be able to control what’s happening around us, but we can always connect with the practices that give our lives meaning.   My first attempts at conscious ritual were clunky and awkward, strange and weirdly performative. I’d done my best to avoid every christening and public union I’d been invited to, so it was weird to find myself carving the air in a circle around me, chanting words and phrases that had no discernable context and didn’t quite resonate. I longed for transpersonal experience, longed to feel the rush of the world around me disappearing and the world of my wildest emotions and dreams taking its place. From what I’d researched, ritual was a surefire way to find this, but I had my doubts--the closest I’d come to having your traditional “holy experience” was wandering St. Peter’s Basilica in an intoxicated state, overwhelmed by the beauty, the horror, and the history of the belief system that gave birth to the Vatican and caused so much change and upset in the world. There was no priest, no intermediary, no translator—instead, there was the hum of a hundred voices, each speaking its own truth, language, and experience. Amidst the cacophony, I found my voice. Ritual absent, I found god.   Despite this, I persisted in my ritual attempts. I was in a place in my life where I had very little left to lose, so I was more than willing to make a fool of myself if it meant I might heal some wounds and step into my power. About three tries in, I discovered that I was the captain of my ship and master of my fate inside my sacred space—if I didn’t like something, I could leave it, and if something piqued my interest, I could explore it further. Using my own leanings as a guide, I crafted a ritual practice with tarot, astral travel, and deity communication at its core, and I’ve been pretty damn happy and content ever since.   So what is it about the repetition of action and recitation that’s so damn powerful? Every practitioner is likely to have a slightly different take, but I think most can agree that repetition trains the mind to have the experience it desires to have. For instance, the first time you light a yellow candle and ask the cosmos for joy, you create the association between yellow and joy, and candles and petitions. Likewise, you create a space where deep concentration and focus is present, and where these are present, memory has a better chance of taking hold. Do the same thing often enough, and you won’t even have to try to make conscious associations—your body and mind take over and immerse you in this world almost instantaneously. And in this space of awareness, importance, and reverence, a portal for transpersonal experience opens up and sucks you in.   Some folks require an intense level of rote repetition to open this portal—think of the chanting of the “om” mantra and its ability to banish ego and through losing conscious meaning gain greater meaning on a cellular level. Some, like myself, prefer to follow the tenor of the moment where the soul wants it to go, more or less freestyling on a ritual concept given what jives in the moment. I’ve always found the freedom to alter and experiment liberating, and alternative spiritual practice seems to allow this more readily than other religious traditions. Even as I dig doing my own thing, I also see the value in referencing rituals that have come before, rituals that dozens upon dozens of folks have performed at various places and times in history with varying degrees of success. I believe that consciousness records these experiences, and the more they’re performed with a similar intention, the more powerful they become. This is a place where my logic breaks down and I let the woo in—this is a place where the transpersonal becomes possible for my particular psyche.   Even though I support a laissez-faire approach to magick and ritual, I conceive, write, and demonstrate a new ritual every month for the online coven I organize. I do this knowing that each and every one of the members approach spiritual practice from a nuanced, unique space. I do this knowing that it’s impossible for the ritual I offer to meet the distinct, personal needs of each member, and I do this in the hopes that each feels inspired to do what she needs to do to make it her own. Why don’t I just encourage each to create their own monthly ritual and support them in this process? Because I understand how easy it is to pass over ourselves, to put off this generative activity and address something more pressing and concerning. I also know how daunting it can be to stare at a blank page with blank thoughts, clueless of what I’m looking to achieve and clueless of how to get there. Sometimes we need starting point, a primary structure to rearrange and play with. This is why Catholicism never really jived with me—there was no room to make the ritual my own. There was no space for me to find my voice and to give it a channel to speak through.   So often our daily rituals are forced, stilted, unpleasant: drive to work though rush-hour traffic. Wash the dishes, clean the litter box. Take out the trash. Listen to a friend or significant other complain about a job they refuse to leave. Incessantly tend to our children’s needs with little thanks or appreciation in return. Make yet another uninspired dinner and mindlessly zone out to the television in the wake of our over-exertion and exhaustion. Wake up the next day and do it all again, oblivious to the reality it’s creating within us. What we endlessly repeat is important, folks, and if it doesn’t speak to who we are or what we want from this life, it can reinforce a narrative that’s both depressing and disempowering.   With intention and awareness, however, we can create rituals that feed and comfort us. We can reframe our daily routine by crafting a contextual narrative that gives meaning to the monotonous repetition of our lives. With a great deal of thought and effort, we can grow closer to ourselves, our souls, and our experience through bringing mindfulness to our actions. And if we’re truly dedicated and committed to this pursuit, we can create a paradigm where it’s possible to find the goddess on a walk to the corner store.   One of the first intentional rituals I adopted was the walking ritual. Shortly after I moved to the city to attend college, I devoted one afternoon a week to wandering a new neighborhood, eager to map out the landscape of my new home. As I walked I allowed my mind to go where it would, to interact with the what it perceived and to respond through thought and emotion. After a few months of these treks, it became obvious to me that each neighborhood aroused something a little bit different, a specific feeling or memory trigger that took me to a specific psycho-spiritual place. When I felt the need for pop-culture connection, I went to South Philly. When I wanted to feel literary and plugged in, I’d hop to Midtown. When I wanted to feel downright ritzy and decadent, I went to Rittenhouse. When I wanted weirdness and detachment, I went West.   I still live in the same city and I still take these neighborhood walks. I travel to the place that’s sure to evoke the experience I’m looking for, and each time I revisit, I discover something new. Walking through neighborhoods is a glorious act of co-creation—they show me what they are and I give meaning to those images, and over time, something greater than myself or the neighborhood takes shape.   So it is with ritual—through practice, we create something simultaneously familiar and novel. We form a portal to a place where who and what we are transcends itself.

In the inaugural episode of "Spontaneous Phantasm," I share the story of how I first became curious about consciousness and our relationship with it. I chat about the ways my consciousness has trapped me and the ways it has liberated me, and explain why I chose the name "Spontaneous Phantasm" and what topics I intend to discuss on the podcast. Sign up for the newsletter | https://mailchi.mp/jessihuntenburg/radicalresonanceseries   Podcast Transcript   I suppose it began with a catechism lesson and the words that lesson burned into my brain. “After you die, you will live with God forever.” The priest said them to comfort us and strengthen our faith, but I left his sermon uneasy. There was something about the idea of forever that gnawed at me, and the gnawing persisted through dinner and followed me to bed. As I lay in the darkness, I decided to try and perceive forever with god, to create a picture in my mind of what that might look like. I conjured a vast, billowing cloud spanning the diameter of the earth and floating above that orb itself. Behind lay the vast blackness of the universe. I concentrated on this image for as long as I could, returning to it when my mind decided to wander. The more I focused on it, the more my unease became a disturbance. Finally, I was filled with such a deep, empty, encompassing fear that decided right then and there that I had no interest spending eternity with God in heaven. I didn’t want my consciousness to exist for an indeterminate amount of time and I wondered if my opinion would matter to the almighty. I suppose you could say that that was the day I met death. I was seven years old.   From the time I was twelve to the time I was eighteen (with a brief sojourn my ninth-grade year), I lived under the proverbial bell jar. If my family believed in treating invisible illnesses, I’d likely have been diagnosed with dysthymia—a persistent, low-grade depression. I bemoaned the awful state of the world. I sulked and suffered. I look back at my younger self and I feel deeply for her—she was in such pain and could find no way to relieve it. She accepted her perspective and couldn’t believe that anything would change it, and there was nothing anyone could do to convince her otherwise.   It wasn’t until her senior year that she emerged, and she did so because she largely stopped caring about things that had never been important. She dared get a “C” in a class. She skipped nine days of school to make day trips with friends, to experience the world as it was meant to be experienced. She lost her best friend. She got her first boyfriend and had sex for the first time. Her perspective shifted from impossibility to possibility, and because she thought things possible, she began to get them. She also started living for herself for the very first time in her life, and as the bell jar lifted, everything became illuminated.   Nothing changed, and yet everything changed. The conditions of her life remained the same, but for the first time, she could see a way out.   It’s amazing the power that an idea has to shift our very way of being in this world. I’m inclined to believe that our perception of our experience is far more important than the experience itself, that our perception is the true reality.   During that ninth-grade year I deliciously lost myself in astral travel. As I write this, it occurs to me that my astral practice may very well have been one of the main reasons why I experienced a sojourn in my depressive symptoms. I was also walking to and from school with good friends rather than taking the bus with strangers. The school’s facilities were old and comfy (no stark white paint) and I felt free to be myself.   Before I went to sleep, I would conjure worlds. I would take the trips I longed to take in my mind. I would speak to the folks I’d long to speak to. I’d have hours long adventures that took me to spaces of my consciousness that I didn’t even know existed. I called it “mind-tripping” and I went to bed earlier and earlier each night so I could revel in it and drink it in.   I’d always been one to live in the recessed of my mind, but those recesses hadn’t always been comforting places. Through astral tripping, I took control. I declared my agency. I made a conscious decision to drive out the demon thoughts that had hijacked my consciousness to make space for what I desired to be there. I didn’t keep them away forever, but I created a mind-space I could refer back to when things got rough. “It was wonderful once,” I told myself. “That means it can be wonderful again.”   This is a podcast about thoughts. Visions. Perceptions. Metaphysics. Consciousness. No matter what I do on the objective plane, I always return to the vast, ever-changing landscape of the mind because the mind is where everything begins. The mind is where we may exercise our greatest level of control. The mind can make us miserable, and it can set us free. The mind is powerfully elusive—scientists have been studying it for years, and they’ll be the first to admit they know very little about it. It fascinates me, this mind that is mine and that, at times, feels so much bigger than me. It shrinks and expands sometimes at whim, and sometimes according to my personal design. There are times that its thoughts creep up upon me unawares, and I have to set aside time to process, to analyze, to understand. Other times it becomes swept up in the moment and my mind is part of everything that exists (swimming in the ocean consistently gives me this feeling).   This podcast is also about the uncommon ways our mind works—about the exceptions, not the rules. I’ve been a practicing witch for the past six years, and working with personified deity, crafting spells, and demystifying my shadow has been instrumental in helping me gain a better understanding of my particular mind. I’m also a professional tarot reader and spiritual advisor, and I use the tools of tarot and craft to help others explore the caverns of their unconscious so they can process, heal, and step into their power. Before that, I studied critical theory, a discipline that Max Horkheimer described the purpose of as the liberation of human beings from the circumstances that enslave them. My focus was on the mind as captor and the mind as liberator. I guess you could say I’ve been thinking about consciousness for quite some time.   No matter what tangents I’ve taken in my spiritual practice and no matter which interests have caught my fancy over the years, the beautiful and terrifying workings of the mind are a mainstay. I’ve crafted this podcast so I can share the thoughts I’ve gathered over a lifetime of pondering as well as bear witness to the thoughts and meanderings of others. I’m deeply interested in discussing phenomena of consciousness with folks who consider these sorts of things. I’m deeply interested in inviting folks onto the podcast to chat about things they often don’t in other forums; I want them to speak to their own fringe and give them a platform to explore and discuss that which “doesn’t fit,” so to speak. Mostly, I want to have deeply interesting conversations about the nature of consciousness and how it relates to the human condition. I want to feel the goosebumps rise on my skin when we stumble across a thought or idea that’s both new and spot on. I want to play with others in the realm of the mind—to kick around ideas and bounce things off of one another and to learn what it’s like to see the world from another perspective.   I know that there are plenty of podcasts out there that explore the occult, consciousness, and unexplainable phenomena. So why Spontaneous Phantasm? Because I feel that I lie at the crossroad of skepticism and belief in such a way that I can make the wild approachable and the commonplace deeply interesting. I feel like I can coax perspectives out of folks that they themselves may not even have known they held. Do I believe I’m the only person who inhabits this space and has these abilities? Absolutely not. In fact, there are probably many of you listening to this who are deeply similar in many ways. However, if I’ve learned anything in the past six years, it’s this: just because someone else could do a thing doesn’t mean that they will, and the only thing stopping me from doing a thing is my damn self.   I suppose I should spend some time chatting about why I decided to name the podcast Spontaneous Phantasm. I began with the concept of a mirage, of something that appears magickally and disappears just as magickally. That’s the best language I have to describe transpersonal experience—in a moment of gorgeous bliss, we feel connected to something much larger than ourselves, something expansive and sublime, something mysterious and familiar all at once. And then, either by our will or the intrusion of our thoughts, that moment passes and with it the emotion of oneness. In this way, a spontaneous phantasm is the unexpected appearance of something fantastic, something not quite “real” in the traditional sense but deeply moving nonetheless.   The word phantasm is also defined as a creation of the imagination or fancy, and conjuring a phantasm is much like engaging with what Jung would call active imagination and what some woo folk, myself included, call astral tripping. This is what I was doing those early nights in my ninth-grade year, and the potential these sessions hold for self-discovery, healing, and wild, cosmic connection are endlessly interesting and something I’ll likely discuss in many ways and forms here. Finally, phantasm is defined as an illusory likeness of something, as a trick played on the eyes and the mind. So many of our limiting beliefs are phantasms—we often see a wall where there’s a door, and we often conjure doors in walls to justify whatever path we’re hell-bent on taking. It’s all a trick, you see—all an illusion that we can fashion according to our own design. This is where I would normally insert a Matrix reference, but I’m slowly beginning to realize that it’s been twenty years since that movie came out and even though it’s a formative one for me there are likely folks listening to this that haven’t seen it. Public service announcement: if you haven’t seen the Matrix, go see it. Just make sure it’s the first one.   I decided upon the word “spontaneous” because all acts of consciousness and magick are a bit miraculous. With the power of our mind, we create something where there was nothing. Our subconscious drafts the vast landscapes of our dreams without our express influence or permission, and suddenly we’re wandering a spontaneous phantasm while we sleep. Our body responds to our dreams the same way that it does to waking life, begging the following questions: are our dreams any less real than our supposed reality? How heavy are the weight of our thoughts, and how might we use our awareness to lighten and shift them? Are our imaginings the blueprints of potential scenarios, potential lives? What power really lies in these spontaneous phantasms, and how might we use them to liberate us from the circumstances that enslave us? These questions are the soul, the lifeblood of this podcast, and I endeavor to do my best to explore them quizzically, excitedly, wildly, and open-mindedly.   I would love it if you’d join me on this journey, my beauty. There will be many more episodes to come, and although I don’t promise perfection, I can certainly promise thoughts and ideas that set your soul on fire. If you want to hop aboard, feel free to subscribe to this podcast. You can also subscribe to my newsletter to be notified when the latest episode is posted and you can receive a free three-video series to boot—check for the link in the episode notes. If you’re an avid fan and you’d like to give the podcast a nudge in the right direction, feel free to share the podcast link, rate the episodes, and comment. Anything and everything you do to support the work and get the word out is deeply appreciated.   Keep traveling the open caverns of your minds, Beauties. Much love, and I’ll speak with you soon.