The following is an excerpt from Sage, Huntress, Lover, Queen: Access Your Power and Creativity through Sacred Female Archetypes by Mara Branscombe. Engage with the Archetypes with Mara (The Lover, The Huntress, The Sage, The Queen) on Wanderlust TV with a free 14-day trial!
The Mystic engages in soulful practices to build her steady, yet always evolving inner spirit house. Weaving ways to initiate contemplative, internal practices, and rituals through her day is her craft. To discover and listen to the current inner impulses is the loom. This becomes the Mystic’s daily superpower. The practice of discerning an authentic impulse versus a fear-based pattern is ongoing work. To understand how the narrative of the past limits, clouds, and feeds an illusioned life is essential. To be curious and non-attached to the outcome of an idea or vision is one of the greatest tools with which the Mystic builds her inner sanctuary. Through such devotion and dedication to self-inquiry, a deeper field of consciousness and high vibrational frequency grows. This magnetic energy inspires others to do the same. To show up as the best version of self is to consistently return to the Mystic’s code of presence and truth, which naturally enlivens the essence of wonder in every step on the journey.
The Mystic Builds Her Spirit House
To ignite the inner Mystic is to take a vow to care for your highest self. It is to live with the awareness that each day is the living ceremony that guides the essential self. It is to live in faith that the present moment is the only moment. Yes, the past informs the present, and we hold our prayers and intentions to create our future.
Essential to the Mystic’s wholeness is to seek balance in how we listen to the inner self, and how we attune to the external ecosystems in both the mundane and sacred realms. On the one hand track your thought patterns, use of words and language both internally and externally, and how you anchor into daily life. On the other hand, pay attention to how you connect with the otherworldly energies— dreams, visions, intuitive downloads. These two worlds must not be separated in order for wholeness inside the Mystic’s vision to be received.
Are you the same person on the yoga mat or the meditation cushion as when you need to stand in your truth and affirm personal boundaries? Can you hold the Mystic’s perspective while in a heated argument with a family member or while you are cooking dinner for your hungry children?
This is often a challenge in the moment; we tend to turn away from the uneasy feelings. Yet the discipline is to turn towards them. Bring a beginner’s mind to the situation and be present to both your bodily sensations and to the desire to check out. This process takes patience and the willingness to let go and be vulnerable. However, the more you do it, the easier it becomes. The next breath is always waiting to bring you back home to your body.
Staying Current with Your Evolving Self
Slowing down, developing a daily meditation practice, bookending your day with a morning and evening ritual, basking in nature’s rhythms, and creating times of silence will support the inner Mystic’s alchemy. With a steady, rhythmic devotion to the work—and fewer media distractions—the intuitive voice will come forward. Your daily commitment is to track and trust the inner voice as it comes.
Initiate the slower, mindful practices without aiming for individual gain or enlightenment; rather engage in them in order to experience union with self and the external ecosphere. This generates an awakening of love over disconnection, of truth over fear.
Immersing yourself in nature builds your sixth sense and attunes your awareness to the greater powers. The rhythms and pure energy of the natural world teach you to trust your own way of perceiving, receiving, and understanding your inner Mystic.
Ether is the most mysterious, unexplainable of elements, and yet it is the energy that holds earth, air, fire, and water together. Its tenuous and invisible quality is associated with the celestial realms and the upper world of space. When you attune your awareness to both the seen and the unseen worlds, you begin to observe energy as it moves and shifts in each moment. Refining our ability to receive and perceive what dwells in our natural environment, we naturally begin to sense the vibrational frequency known as the ethereal plane. We pick up clues through our subtle body. We expand our vision to include wonder and magic.
Silence is a gateway to the creative impulses. The frequency of flow, grace, and conscious communication becomes a living, breathing creative process. Creativity is an inner process and journey.
Over time, the grand “Who am I?” question emerges. In this precise moment, your inner Mystic has arrived to ignite a deeper inquiry into your personal and collective life experience. Be curious about how you can show up daily to work with life’s obstacles and remove the stressors as they arise; this is where the magic lives.
Sage, Huntress, Lover, Queen: Access Your Power and Creativity through Sacred Female Archetypes by Mara Branscombe © 2023 Findhorn Press. Printed with permission from the publisher Inner Traditions International.
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Mara Branscombe is a mother, writer, yogi, artist, teacher, mindfulness leader, ceremonialist and spiritual coach. She is passionate about weaving the art of mindfulness, self-care, creativity, mind–body practices, and earth-based rituals into her life and work, and she has been leading community ceremony since 2000.
An adventurous spirit, Mara has sailed across the Atlantic Ocean, trekked across the Himalayas, studied yoga in India, planted trees in Canada’s north, lived off the grid in a remote cabin in the woods, worked as a Waldorf (Steiner School) teacher, and then found her passion for dance and choreography. All the while yoga, meditation, mysticism, and ritual have been at the heart of Mara’s journey. Her trainings in the Incan Shaman lineage and the Pagan tradition have greatly inspired her life’s work of earth-based, ceremonial, intentional, and heart-centered living and loving.