Whole Being: Life Alchemy
Being, Belonging, Becoming
Being Real
“It's discouraging to think how many people are shocked by honesty and how few by deceit.” ~ Noël Coward
I want to be unorthodox. I want to be weird, different, and sometimes shocking. I want to be wild, free, and open. Experimental. I want to be a "broad" in the best sense of the word... brassy, brazen, unapologetic. I want to speak my mind.
Because here's the thing: "nice" can be a mask. The sugar-coated, always-agreeable persona? That's the most dangerous disguise. When you don't know your own shadow, your capacity for anger, for violence, for cruelty, you end up blind to the ways it slips out sideways. A smile on the surface, venom underneath. Suppressed darkness always leaks.
I've seen it in the clergy, so buttoned up they squeak when they walk. They think never cussing makes them holy. They end up looking like they've got a stick jammed so far up their bum it's practically a halo. And it comes out twisted: false humility, false smiles, false everything.
The Irish Goddess known as The Morrigan doesn't do nice. She does necessary. When she appears on the battlefield, black wings cutting through dawn mist, she doesn't come with sugar and sympathy. She comes with truth that tastes like iron and earth. She shows you what you're really made of when everything polite gets stripped away.
This is the work of real chaplains, real ministers, real humans: to become psychopomps for the living. To guide souls not toward some sanitized heaven, but toward the underworld of their own becoming. Like Persephone descending, we must eat the pomegranate seeds of our own darkness before we can speak with authority about light.
The difference between my darkness and your darkness is that I can look at my own badness in the face and accept its existence while you are busy covering your mirror with a white linen sheet. The difference between my sins and your sins is that when I sin I know I'm sinning while you have actually fallen prey to your own fabricated illusions. ~ C. JoyBell C.
Not me. I cuss. I wear earrings the size of small chandeliers and lipstick red enough to scare the Baptists. I say what I mean, even when it makes people shift in their seats. Because being real, bloody-knuckled, shadow-faced, unvarnished real, is the only way the soul can breathe.
Kali knows this. She dances on Shiva's chest not from cruelty, but from fierce love. Her necklace of heads? Those are the false selves we've worn like masks. Her sword? It cuts through spiritual bypassing like butter. She is the dark goddess who says: You cannot love what you refuse to see.
Being real means dropping the mask. It means looking at the parts of yourself you'd rather hide, the jealous streak, the rage, the selfish impulse, and naming them. Not polishing them into piety. Not pretending they don't exist.
This is shadow work in its rawest form. This is what Jung meant when he said we must retrieve the gold from the dragon's cave. The dragon isn't evil, it's guardian. It protects the treasure of wholeness that can only be claimed by those brave enough to face their own monstrosity.
Being real means you don't just talk about love, you admit the days you don't feel it. The mornings when compassion dries up, when you'd rather slam the door than open it. That's the shadow. And if you don't know it, if you don't wrestle it, it wrestles you.
Being real means clergy who can cuss without shame, who can walk into a hospital room with the smell of sweat still on their collar and say, "This is hard, and I'm here." No theatrics, no gauze of sanctimony. Just presence.
Like shamans who've journeyed to the bone house and returned with stories that make people uncomfortable. Like wise women who've sat with the dying and learned that grief and gratitude can occupy the same breath. Like tricksters who know that sometimes the sacred path leads through the profane.
Being real means red lipstick and big earrings, because God is not afraid of color. Being real means laughing too loud at the wrong time, crying in the middle of a board meeting, and not apologizing for being human.
The earth herself teaches this. Watch how she births mountains through violence. How she feeds new life with the decay of the old. How she makes no apologies for winter's cruelty or spring's wild excess. Nature is not nice. Nature is honest.
Being real means refusing to become a cardboard cut-out of "nice." Nice isn't kind. Nice isn't honest. Nice is the fake flower in the vase, plastic petals, no scent, no roots, never wilting but never alive.
I'd rather be alive. Wild, untamed, a little dangerous. I'd rather have dirt under my nails from digging into the marrow of life than walk around antiseptic and hollow.
The vision? A world where spiritual leaders show up whole. Where shadow and light dance together instead of shadow getting shoved into the basement to grow mold and resentment. Where we create communities that can hold the full spectrum of human experience without flinching.
Imagine churches where you could say "I'm struggling with hatred today" and receive not judgment but recognition. Where the minister might respond, "Yeah, me too. Let's sit with that and see what it wants to teach us." Where communion includes the bitter herbs alongside the wine.
Imagine spiritual communities that honor the dark goddesses alongside the maiden and mother. That understand destruction as sacred as creation. That see anger as potentially holy fire instead of sin to be extinguished.
I am a siren, a mermaid; I know that I am beautiful while basking on the ocean's waves and I know that I can eat flesh and bones at the bottom of the sea. You are a white witch, a wizard; your spells are manipulations and your cauldron from hell yet you wrap yourself in white and wear a silver wig. ~ C. JoyBell C.
This is the work of re-ensouling our spiritual landscapes. Of refusing the plastic paradise of perpetual positivity. Of choosing the messy, difficult, blood-and-beauty path of becoming fully human.
Because if the soul has a purpose, it isn't to look tidy. It's to burn brightly, even if that means sometimes burning down the pretty lies we've built around ourselves.
The fire is the point. The authenticity is the prayer. The shadow is the doorway to the light that doesn't blind, but illuminates everything we actually are.
