What If Once Upon a Time is Now?
Finding your own mythic ground
Are you ready to find your own mythic ground?
Dear Readers,
In recent essays, I’ve been sharing how fairy tales work as a spiritual technology. Two weeks ago I featured a detailed essay on the Grimm’s fairy tale Iron John, showing how the story functions as an initiation ceremony through the properties of light.
For the past few years, I’ve been absorbed in integrating Mū Hawaiian magic, as transmitted to me through Brother Ke’oni Hanalei, into my own life, absorbing the concepts and codes, and finding innovative ways to apply it as a modern spiritual practice.
I was astounded, when I realized the principles of the oscillation of Mū magic were also in old European fairy tales.
Although I live in Hawai’i, my roots are European. The fact that my lineage and my chosen place revealed the same teaching to me affirmed the integrity of my path, and made me even more excited about the next expression of my body of work, The Coracle, an offering I’ve been grounding in for the past year.
I am honored and thrilled to announce that I now feel grounded enough in this body of work to offer it to others!
I generally offer an essay a week here, but the current one in progress needs some time in the cauldron. Instead of offering it up half-cooked, I thought I’d dive into sharing how The Coracle: The Journey of Safety and Belonging, works on a practical level, for those with a more linear brain than me. I realize I extremely right-brained and may fail in my translation into linear time and plot points sometimes!
The Journey of Safety and Belonging, Part One of The Coracle, begins Sunday, May 18th, on Zoom.
I hope this little essay gives you a clear idea of what I’m offering, while still maintaining the magnetism of mystery. If you do have questions, please reach out by replying to this email.
Words Offered in Honor of the Linear
I realized today that what I offer is not easy to describe to those with a more left-brain orientation. I feel like whenever I describe in a linear way how what I offer works, it sounds way more complicated than it actually is!
However, in an effort to satiate the linear, I’m going to break down what I’m offering as simply as I can, with the intent not to strip it of its magic and mystery, for those who orient toward this way of entry.
Here we go!
The Journey of Safety and Belonging, is a 4-week (5 session) online odyssey to establish an unshakeable sense of inner safety arising from your own core, not what the outer world tells you you need to feel safe.
Belonging blossoms, like an oak tree from an acorn, like a pebble from a boulder, out of this kind of safety.
True safety is not the same as security. We’ll be looking for those hidden, or not so hidden places, within you that are keeping you from experiencing safety, and offering those tender places remedies to help them resolve, in a safe container, so that you can know the kind of safety I’m talking about.
Without getting too meta, this is far more than personal work. Lack of true safety on an individual level is at the core of all the political turmoil we are now experiencing on our planet. The more of us that come into true safety and belonging, the quicker our collective will shift toward peace. I don’t just believe the personal is political. I know it is. In my own life, I’ve watched the world around me shift as I’ve reclaimed my own belonging through this process. If enough of us do this kind of work, a mass shift in consciousness and the structures we create with it, will inevitable transform every aspect of life on our planet for the better.
Back to the linear:
The Coracle is a three-part odyssey: The Journey of Safety and Belonging, The Journey of Open-Hearted Action, and The Journey of Purpose and Flow. Each of these journeys is carried on three core currents:
The indigenous wisdom of fairy tales and myths (mostly from the Indo-European tradition.)
Mū Hawaiian magic
Ceremony
It is not necessary to commit to all three phases of the journey, though it will be necessary to participate in Part One, in order to move onto Parts Two and Three. Part Two, The Journey of Open-Hearted Action will be offered in October 2025. Part Three, The Journey of Purpose and Flow, in early 2026.
These three currents are all part of my personal practice, developed over 30 years of being a wayfaring stranger on Earth. I’d love to tell you all the stories behind that one sentence, but I did commit to talking straight, so I’ll just say I can testify that they work, because I am no longer a stranger. I experience belonging, wherever I go and whoever I’m with, with every fiber of my being.
If you do want to learn more about my journey that’s led to this body of work, you can read about it on my website by clicking on this link, or in my mythopoetic memoir, Piko: A Return to the Dreaming.
Acclaimed mythteller Martin Shaw had this to say about the book:
“Jennifer Lighty is the real thing and has done us a great service with Piko. A modern woman working intuitively to contact mythic ground.”
This is exactly what we’ll be doing in each journey of The Coracle—contacting our own mythic ground intuitively.
We will have some helpers along the way. Those princes and princesses, wicked stepmothers, dragons, gnomes, swan maidens, scullery maids and kitchen boys, you know from fairy tales, will become our allies in a journey that will take you into your depths to find your core wound around safety, and they will provide you with just the right remedy to heal and move on to becoming the authentic, original, unique human being you are meant to be.
In my next letter, I’ll go into more depth on how the three core currents of myth, Mū Hawaiian magic, and ceremony function as allies to assist our intuitive journey.
WE ARE MAGNETIC.
Let’s come together and help each other grow and change into the ones we are waiting for.
I was listening to my Myth Medicine playlist driving home tonight from a craniosacral workshop tonight. Dylan’s “Masters of War” started playing.
Why did you pick that song? you might be saying.
Are you saying war is a myth? Look at the world around us. This sounds like another spiritual bypass. We need to get real.
I agree. War is real. But the source is mythic. It begins in the world beneath the world we move through in these bodies. It lives inside us, even when we live in a secure place free of guns and bombs.
In The Journey of Safety and Belonging we are going to the source.
Are you ready?
We begin Sunday, June 18, at 9AM HST. (Don’t forget to adjust to your time zone.) Live storytelling will take place on Zoom, but the ceremony will be on-going throughout the four-week container. There will be replays if you can’t make it live.
We will have a Substack chat to interact with each other in-between sessions, and I will be available for private guidance throughout the entire journey through email.
THE DOOR IS OPEN!
If you’re ready to join today, or would like more information, head to my website.
If you have questions, hit reply to this email, and ask away.
And please share this email with any friends you think would be interested in this journey!
Bob Dylan, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Kō aloha lā ea
Concentrate on love by way of the light