Yesterday’s post, 29 June 2026: Crossroads Devotion, ended with a prayer.
Not because I was trying to sound holy. Not because I wanted anyone to think I’d somehow transcended ordinary human frailty overnight. I wrote it because, in that moment, it genuinely reflected where my heart was.
Then I read it again this morning.
Oh, good grief…
If I didn’t know myself better, I’d think I’d achieved enlightenment sometime between my first coffee and hitting the Publish button.
It was all love, grace, and compassion on the Middle Path. Beautiful sentiments, all of them. Sincere sentiments too.
The only problem was that I’d accidentally presented one facet of myself as though it were the whole person.
Fast forward twenty-four hours and I’m sitting here rolling my eyes at my own sanctimony, quietly remembering that I’m also capable of being impatient, sarcastic, judgmental and occasionally spectacularly full of myself.
That’s not a contradiction.
That’s just being human.
Wholehearted, Not Holy
The older I get, the more suspicious I become of my own attempts to sound spiritually evolved.
I think that’s one of the reasons the Christo-Hekatean path has felt so liberating. It isn’t because I’ve stopped caring about ethics. Quite the opposite. It’s because I’m increasingly allergic to hypocrisy, especially my own.
For years, spirituality often felt like a performance review. Was I loving enough? Forgiving enough? Detached enough? Had I responded with sufficient grace? Was my ego showing?
No wonder shame was never very far away.
These days, I’m much more interested in wholeness than holiness. I don’t want to spend the second half of my life editing myself into someone who sounds enlightened. I’d rather become more honest about who I already am.
That means making room for contradictions.
I can genuinely want peace and still lose my temper.
I can believe in compassion and still think someone is being an absolute prick.
Neither cancels the other out.
A Rabbit Hole Worth Falling Into
This morning, I stumbled across a video about Dr John DeMartini’s method. I’d never come across his work before, but within a few minutes, I had the same feeling I remember having when I first discovered Byron Katie over twenty years ago.
It wasn’t that either of them handed me answers.
They handed me better questions.
As I listened, I found myself becoming increasingly aware of the stories quietly running in the background of my own mind. We all have them. They help us make sense of the world, until one day we stop recognising them as stories and start treating them as objective reality.
That made me wonder what narratives I’ve been carrying around for years without ever examining them properly.
Relationship narratives immediately sprang to mind.
Not any one relationship in particular. Just the collection of stories I’ve accumulated over a lifetime about love, romance, marriage, commitment, intimacy and what all those things are supposed to mean.
I’ve no doubt some of those stories are complete bollocks.
An Unexpected Answer
One question refused to leave me alone: What do I actually want from love?
It sounds ridiculously simple, but I realised I’d never asked it without all the background noise of expectation. I wasn’t interested in the answer offered by religion, romantic films or society’s collective script. I wanted to know what remained once all those voices had quietened down.
The answer surprised me by arriving so quickly: freedom. Not freedom from love, but freedom within love. Freedom to remain curious, to keep growing, and to pursue truth without feeling as though I have to squeeze myself into a role that no longer fits.
That thought was still rattling around my head when I reached for my astrology dice.
Saturn in Capricorn in the Seventh House.
(Sometimes symbolism has all the subtlety of a 2×4 upside the head.)
There it was: duty, convention, inherited expectations and obligations.
Then I picked a card from Stephen Fry’s Mythos Oracle.
Artemis. I smiled.
I’ve always thought of myself as a hopeless romantic.
Perhaps I’ve been wrong.
Perhaps what I’ve really been hunting all these years is truth. All my writing is about romancing the Truth. Yes, capital T.
Turning the Cards Around
The biggest gift I took away from DeMartini’s work was the possibility of a more honest divination practice.
For years, I’ve encouraged Tarot clients to ask thoughtful questions when they come for readings. Sometimes I forget that advice applies to me as well.
It’s remarkably easy to use Tarot and other divination tools as mirrors that reflect whatever narrative we’re already invested in believing. I’ve done it many times. I’m fairly sure everyone who engages in divinatory practices has done it.
From now on, I’d like to focus more on questions like these:
- What story am I telling myself that this card quietly refuses to support?
- Which assumption have I promoted to the status of fact without ever really questioning it?
- What part of the picture am I conveniently leaving out?
- If the opposite were also true, what might I be failing to see?
- What expectation is shaping the way I’m interpreting this card?
- Am I asking this oracle to reveal the truth, or simply to confirm what I already believe?
- If I let go of my preferred narrative for a moment, what else becomes possible?
- What would change if I stopped trying to be right and became genuinely curious instead?
I’m under no illusion that this will stop me projecting onto the cards at times when I read for myself. That’s probably impossible.
What it might do is help me notice when I’m doing it.
And that feels like a worthwhile practice.
After all, the cards have never lied to me.
More often than not, I’ve simply been a little too attached to my own BS.
