the spell of a disempowered man

a case study of love as a divine mirror

All of Me Wants All of You by Sufjan Stevens

You know those tender moments of your life where you have been stripped truly naked in front of another and you must part ways?

“Shall we beat this or celebrate it / You’re not the one to talk things through / You checked your text while I masturbated / Manelich, I feel so used, ooh-ooh”

Sufjan speaks of a lover who he wishes he could truly unite with. He craves the never ending depth of oceanic love. The one that refines and revolutionizes and strips bare. “All of me wants all of you” is sung like a lullaby to alleviate his torture of loving someone who cannot see him.

Early on in my spiritual journey, I realized that music was a way for me to connect with the divine. When I sing and perform, I feel the warmth of home and the profundity of aliveness. It is what the Disney movie Soul depicts as flow state. When I listen to music it feels like I am unlocking worlds within me. I do all my ritual with music and I do my deepest internal work alongside a soundtrack. Sound heals me more than anything else. It is my greatest tool.

When you say goodbye to one of your best friends and one of your most impactful loves, you have to use all the tools you have to alchemize the ache. It is the type of departure that illuminates the path home to the self. Each song that speaks to this ache helped me move through the acute emotions of loss and shame in the early stages of healing. Now, two months later I feel this deep sense of gratitude for the journey. It has been the portal to something profound within me. It activated the most beautiful spiritual awakening I have ever experienced.

In my approach to studying theology, I have moments where I fixate on the teachings of certain belief systems. I was opened to the spiritual world through the Self Realization Fellowship of Los Angeles as a young girl, but I was initiated into my own awakening while studying Christian Women Mystics at Georgetown. Then, in the rapid movement of my healing, I found solace in Tibetan Buddhism. But one system of thought that never left my mind was The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. The order no longer exists, but its occult teachings have influenced every part of Western Esoteric Traditions today. I truly believe that in the path of spiritual pursuit or magical pursuit, the systems that illuminate themselves to be teachers have to be aligned with the subconscious desires of the initiate. This is a fancy way of saying you gotta feel it in your gut what you should study. Respecting cultural prerogatives, of course.

Through some base rituals and definitions of magic from the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, I have been able to witness a profound transformation of how I experience reality over the past few months. The technical aspect of this magic will be in another article, but I must share with you the wonder that has arisen within me. This ache reminded me that I am whole and a part of the divine order of the universe.

This spiritual awakening has been beautiful because I knew that with the departure of someone I loved, I was headed back into my undercurrents for beautiful transformation. The story I told you in The Alchemist illuminated the divine tether within me that is the birthright of all. Because of that experience, I have anticipatory excitement for any stage of the evolution of self. I am collecting a record of my theological findings and realizations so that I may one day share it with the world.

Let me tell you this story of how I fell in love and what it has unveiled to me about subconscious archetypes.

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No Machine by Adrianne Lenker

“To the ocean of your love I am a river / I don’t know what I’d do, I don’t know what I’d do without you”

I met this guy through close friends of mine and the connection was incredibly deep. It evolved over the course of almost two years as we tried to turn a romantic endeavor into a stable friendship. Obstacle after obstacle, it just could not work. I do not recommend being friends with people that tell you they have feelings for you because the slope is too slippery. It’s too risky.

The crazy thing about this love was that we felt each other in a way that I have never experienced. I felt him. It is as simple and as complex as that. I felt his confusion, I felt his secrecy, I felt his love, and most of all, I felt his pain. I felt his pain so much it threw me into panic.

This is someone who I trusted with my internal world and they trusted me with theirs. We experienced each other’s beauty and each other’s ugly. It felt like I could talk to him about anything and everything and he would find some way to meet me in my reality. We did ritual together. I could spend 30 hours with him in a car and not get tired of him. Some things are undeniable. Even when you want to be ignorant to them. Emotionally we felt like partners and we had the overflow of tears to prove it.

I knew we were in deep karmic shit.

I will not get into the specifics but the depth of this relationship impacted both of us so much that it threw too many people into confusion. Absolutely unfair confusion. Too much love was being spilt without the capacity to hold it. There were too many feelings, too much unresolved trauma, and too many players for it to be fair to anyone.

Basically, in my best way to contextualize the shit show that was my love life in a way that takes me OUT of the ego, it was the perfect threshold to the next initiation of my spiritual journey.

It triggered every part of myself that I was uncomfortable with. Everything. The sex, the commitment, the other party, the body, the pain of my past, my childhood wounds! He touched everything because I let him. I ripped myself open through letting myself love someone who did not have the capacity to love himself. This was the sacred crossing point: learning to break the spell of the disempowered man.

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Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You by Big Thief

“It's a little bit magic / Like a river of morning geese / In the new warm mountain / Where the stone face forms and speaks / I believe in you / Even when you need to recoil"

People come into our lives so we can experience ourselves through them. The grand range of that beauty. I have spent the last five years creating a home within myself where I can experience my own depth without fear. Sometimes, that comes in an unhealthy form. This is when I do the internal “work” to solve the mystery of the wound. To be so enmeshed with someone while the relationship itself is turbulent is extremely taxing on the spirit. Loving someone can only account for so much until self respect needs to step in and the divine must reestablish order.

I am going to call myself out. I fall in love with disempowered people. The ones who grip at my heart so intricately to bring about the divine mirror. I am under the spell of disempowerment with these people because they are mirroring the spell I have kept myself under unknowingly. The syrupy-ness of a disempowered relationship dynamic feels like an addiction. When two people are mirroring the deepest shadows of each—and having to face it over and over… you can only go so far.

Breaking the spell has been the catalyst for this journey. What did I do to break it? Honestly, I cried and got frustrated and I sat with my bruised ego and told myself that I did not deserve what happened. I poured into myself the ways I knew how—through music and magic. I made a series of playlists chronicling the early stages of healing. I did ritual with my loved ones. I invoked angels and threw myself into my passions. Roads began opening up to me that could not have opened if he had stayed in my life. I meditated so much that I met my higher self in the mirror. I induced a shroom trip-style vision through meditation itself. I let myself feel. Not only him, but everything that came with the feeling of him.

The most profound thing happened. I realized that he was just the gatekeeper between me and the next level of understanding myself.

What does it feel like? It feels like this:

May 10, 2025

“This is a sacred ache. One I treasure, for it is the path home. I am so grateful. The spell of a disempowered man. What does that cost me? The obscurity of my heart for the idea of sanctity in theirs. What a gift to witness the undoing of illusion. What a precious gift. To move through it all having loved the most sincere way I know how, in all of its severity. A heart ablaze is the true source of the love we seek. I am sure of it. For my heart is ablaze in the presence of the vastness within me. And in there I am led by my blazing light, the true source of the divine.

On fire is my heart, on fire is my heart.”

At the root of all human experience is this: we ache to return home. It is the common theme in all of the love I have shared. We ache to return home to love itself—to the very thing that creates us. Each experience we have is a reminder to prioritize that love above all else.

I opened enough to meet the love of the divine within me. It has been a transformational opening that has stripped my ego as bare as my nervous system could handle. What awaited me was the type of reality bending that only the mystics I read about experience.

This is the greatest milestone. I am living the theology I study.

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Marrakesh Night Market by Loreena McKennitt

“Would you like my mask? / Would you like my mirror? / Cries the man in the shadowing hood / You can look at yourself / You can look at each other / You can look at the face of your God”

Loreena has spoken to the inner workings of my personal gnosis for years. In these lyrics she dissects the choice we all have—do we accept the mask of humanity or do we choose to look in the mirror and remember? The avenue is clear, whether we look at ourselves, or each other, we are always seeing the face of our God.

He was my great mirror. Now I see myself more clearly than I ever have before, in all of its complexity. And most of all, I love myself more than ever before because I know, in the very core of my being, that love itself is the medicine. Radical love, radical honesty, radical authenticity…

The disempowered man is an archetype. It is what I saw in the mirror when I came to the conclusion that someone in pain had hurt me. To accept disempowered love means that somewhere within me, I believed that I must be disempowered myself to experience love. What a sad realization to come to. What led me here? Who taught me this? What spells have I kept myself under to satiate the people around me at the expense of my own magic?

When I was with him, I felt trapped. I did not want to admit it to him but his sadness and his pain were too much for me. He was learning the lessons of self love that I had learned through the alchemy of violence. I felt like I was guiding someone through their own darkness, and for what? To be betrayed by someone who consistently betrayed themselves? It was so clear and so intoxicating. That is exactly what karmic loops feel like—intense, disorienting, and addicting.

So much of my love was siphoned by someone unconsciously because in some innocent way, I thought that if I could see the sanctity of their own heart they would be inspired to see it too. He could not. He did not have the capacity to witness himself as a vessel of divine love, and in turn, he became my divine mirror.

Every kiss, every moment of contact, every “I love you” was a portal to the deeper avenues of divine light within me. Through him, I set my heart ablaze. That fire is the very thing mystics throughout time have named as God itself, as Love itself.

This was never about him. This was about my return home to divine love within me. Everything I felt was because of my own capacity. If he had stayed in my love, I would not have experienced this profound unity with the source from which we come.

Every time we love we open the portal back to remembrance. What is remembrance? It is is the remembering that we are of the most powerful force—creation itself. Mystics throughout many traditions have different names for this. We can call it God, the Universe, Sufis call it Love with a capital “L.” But what I have realized is that the portal through remembrance opens when we are given a mirror. When we must experience ourselves through the reality of our broken-ness, and summon all the courage we have to face it and feel love.

I loved him so deeply I could have lost myself. But what I gained was me. I gained the extension of myself that goes beyond physical form. I gained the certainty of my expansion beyond the material world. I gained my status as a Lover. Not in the romantic sense, but in the way Sufis described themselves as Lovers of the divine. The ultimate Lover, the one whose heart is on fire with the essence of creation itself.

I set my heart ablaze through remembering that the love I had for him is the love I am capable of feeling for existence itself. I became the Lover.