Accepting my role as Visionary
The Definitions of Visionary:
Visionary: a person thinking about or planning the future with imagination or wisdom.
Visionary: able to see a mental image of what will or could be in the future through dreams, trance, or supernatural visitation.
Visionary: a person with original ideas about what the future will or could be like.
Similar to Creative, Inspired, Inventive, Innovative, Intuitive, Discerning, Talented, Resourceful
(Definitions derived from Oxford Languages. Check out Wikipedia’s page on The Visionary)
The Luminary is an Archetype similar to The Visionary. I am working with fusing the two.
My experience with Visionary Archetype from childhood to now
I can’t remember when I first came across the term “Visionary” but its an energy I have always admired, and beneath that, desired. I imagine a part of me held it in high regard because it recognized myself in it and wanted more. It was a gentle whisper in the form of bodily sensations indicating a potential path for me. Usually ancestral callings, North Node destinies, makes themselves known to us very early on but in incredibly subtle-body ways.
This is why it is so important to become embodied in order to reconnect to these whispers that guide us home and to our people so we may take up our role in the web of life for all.
Childhood
On that deep unconscious level, a part of me recognized quite young that the way my mind worked, and ultimately my essence, was different than those around me. I would later come to know this as my Autistic Soul or what some call my Neurodivergent Brain.
As a child, I rarely saw my different way of thinking and my strong ability to visualize as a bad thing, especially because I received a lot of praise and encouragement from my parents around my creative playful endeavors like all the home-made movies and music videos, and backyard plays, local talent show competitions and directorial pursuits throughout my life. In particular No Mirror Movement and The Greenbriar Theatre Company. My first two performance companies.
Since I could walk, I lived in a world of imagination and then embodiment of that liminal space in my play - with my self and my friends. Many times, this impulse to create from imagination was my littles ones way of surviving. To dream has always been my main tool to manage the discomfort and reality of living in a body on earth in various systems - including a nuclear family.
Young Adulthood
As a teenager, my ability to see into futures that were more ecologically just and create them now was met with both praise and massive resistance - the first time in my life where I started to question my visions, my fervor for them and often felt at odds with people. Not able to understand why they didn’t care or didn’t see the change that was necessary as even possible, let alone worthwhile.
Despite the challenges, my ability to catalyze a group of people into feeling and ideally action remained steadfast through my college years, and was channeled into my volunteer work with a nationwide student led organization called Feel Good. It focused on social entrepreneurship and grassroots community led development. It taught me the importance of having a collective common vision and inspired me to intern and research with our partner organization: The Hunger Project leading me on a three month study abroad program in Kampala, Uganda where for the first time in my life I was really faced with race, class, privilege and savorism.
There are shadow sides to the Visionary, like all archetypes and energies.
My early twenties were dominated by my work in student organizing and leadership training at a variety of nonprofits in San Francisco, as well as chasing love in all the wrong places including the dance spaces I was devoted to at the time. Spaces that wouldn’t allow me to do what I had always done with my visions: choreograph.
The Artist’s Way Workbook as a Way Back to the Visionary
Being blocked from this channel was really difficult in retrospect and catalyzed a lot of interpersonal rupture and strife that lives in my body to this day. However, this pain became alchemized, a key source of reclamation as I went through The Artist’s Way workbook in Spring 2023 while recovering from Top Surgery. That book was one source of coming back to the Visionary archetype.
It was an important Channel of Change for Freeing my Expression and Aligning it with my Dreams. Expression and Dreams that were damaged from toxic teacher/mentor environments. Prior to those environments, I was always most celebrated for my Visionary abilities utilized in creating my art - particularly my choreography, as well as my group containers for transformation by way of music, dance, and storytellers exchange.
The No Mirror Movement Years
And even though the toxicity of that space made me leave, it also forced me into deeper relationship with my self and my path and led to the creation of my nonprofit dance collective No Mirror Movement. A group of dancers committed to getting out of the mirror and back into their bodies. An all levels, all styles, all bodies dance collective that centered collaboration, inclusivity, social justice, and authentic relationships. It was my training ground in facilitation and laboratory for therapeutic processes of change.
Everything I was learning at the California Institute of Integral Studies’s Somatic Psychology program was informing those five years. NMM was my family, my safe haven, my muse.
But when the 2020 pandemic hit and my dance company: No Mirror Movement went to virtual rehearsals, had to cancel our show indefinitely, and eventually ended in the graveyard of small start up nonprofits, I had just as much (if not more) visionary energy coursing through my MindBody. The problem was I no longer had somewhere to channel it. Three years later and I have only choreographed one very short piece whereas I used to create 4-8 pieces a year.
The Visionary Today
So where did all that Visionary energy go?
Here.
To Full & Plenty Joy: a School of Life, Death and Rebirth. The sum of everything I have experienced and learned the past 15+ years, since graduating high school in 2008 from Horace Greeley in Chappaqua, New York.
It is not lost on me the meaning of finding myself right back where I started, living on the lands of the Lenape and Wappinger, writing this blog from my childhood bedroom.
Returning home, while challenging, also gave me the time and space to come back to this part of me, this role in the Social Change Ecosystem: The Visionary. Though I had been doing Visionary work for most of my life, I also had a propensity to run away: from people, from discomfort, from myself, from whatever didn’t feel perfectly aligned. So choosing to return home, to a source of a kind, was an essential part of the path back to Visionary. An essential step to come back to myself and start to create again in a seemingly “solo” context rather than group. This was also important as someone who never really developed all the necessary bricks and supports on the individual level and put all their energy instead into relationships and community, which led to burnout and resentments.
Journal entry during The Moon Studios Clear Channels Workshop September 2023
Big Recent Shifts
The FPJ Life Spiral, The Magic Room, The Cosmic Creator Altar and help from some Witches
Since the Eclipse Season started at the beginning of Fall and the violence and mass death in Palestine, Israel and many parts of the world ramped up to unimaginable levels, I have been coping by going full on Autistic Visionary, as evidenced by the walls of my office, the drawings of prototypes for the Full & Plenty Joy Life Spiral and its programs, and the screened in porch of my house that has been turned into what we call “The Magic Room” - a sanctuary for grief, reflection and restoration.
While sitting in the Magic Room one night, I realized that this little co-regulation sensory happy - home sanctuary outside of space and time looks shockingly similar to the visions I downloaded during Sarah Faith Gottesdiener’s Clear Channels Workshop.
Download during Clear Channels describing what now looks like The Magic Room at night
The Magic Room on All Hallows Eve 2023 with guest appearance by Tinkie Winkie
Her workshop was about defining your “channel” in particular in the form of a newsletter. While I didn’t learn much of anything new regarding the logistics or potential business power of newsletters, I did receive a bunch of downloads during her guided visualizations that put me into direct contact with the Visionary Archetype. They were the downloads I needed to reinspire myself and reaffirm this role for myself.
This is the Cosmic Creator Altar I created in my office while I was processing the energy of the workshop and devoting a space in my house to a Visionary - a Luminary, archetypal energy.
The power of the Nonbinary-ness is at the core of the Cosmic Creator
Artworks by me made during Top Surgery recovery plus photos of Inner Child Guide
Here are some pictures from my journals during that workshop:
The vision of my unique channel (more on the back of the paper). Now a part of my altar.
Notes getting clear on my role and how it manifests through my work
Part of a channeled message from well ancestors supporting the journey saying that the specific offerings always shapeshift but the real work, the real gift is being authentically yourself.
Channeled guiding words for my role and the work.
Another key break through in owning my Visionary Archetype was my first ever spirit session with the Opulent Witch. Essentially part tarot reading, part spiritual ancestral guidance and part energy clearing work facilitated by Kiki Robinson, one of the creators of The Living Altar, my favorite oracle card deck.
I had booked the session because I could feel I needed deeper tending. Especially to the layers I couldn’t access on my own energetically. The Magician Reversed Card guided me towards this self-tending truth because of how Lindsay Mack of Wild Soul Tarot describes the card, “tending to all that’s been going on under the surface.”
There has been a consistent theme in returning to the Visionary that it’s actually not a super heady energy, but deep deep down in the caverns of the darkest parts of the ocean - the unconscious, the sanctuary of ancestral memory.
In the session, she affirmed that I was indeed “beginning my Visionary era”.
A very young part of me and a college aged part of me were so relieved and affirmed to receive these words. Especially in the form of that external validation from someone I deeply respect. I am only human.
Kiki also channeled the desires of my ancestors who wanted me to create an altar for them that was separate from the altar I was using for work.
Ancestral altar in The Magic Room. I also call it the Cailleach’s Cabin. The Gaelic Winter Witch.
The large pictures of of my Grannie Maine (paternal grandmother) Anne Elizabeth McIntyre who was a kitchen witch (decorating the home, making meals, gardening, flower arrangements). And on the right is her brother, my Great Uncle Harry, Harry Horner McIntyre, who became a socialist and union organizer after returning from the WWII airforce and rejected his inheritance and WASP social status.
The Opulent Witch offered the perfect container for this kind of divine clear and unsaid wisdom that cleanses you into your new skin, that you find still peeling off your body in random bits from time to time.
A kind of spiritual transformation, like the Snake, that the Gender Doula teaches so much about. Who has taught me so much about seasons of transition and waiting and shedding and turning blue. He helped me on my path to visionary by helping me in my gender identity and expression, as well as reflecting on and rerooting into my values.
I look forward to turning this into a graphic and enjoy the complexity and interconnectedness of the various values. It can be synthesized down into four main ones, but I like seeing the whole web.
These various spiritual supports gave me the permission and inspiration I needed to allow my visons to come through full force. Exhibit A: My office as it stands today:
North Node in Aquarius: the point of destiny
My North Node, an astrological point in the sky indicating the flavor of our insatiable hunger for learning and growth and development into our destiny, is in the sign of Aquarius - the Humanitarian and Innovator ruled by the Planet of Time: Saturn.
Aquarius is also where my mercury - how I communicate and my moon - my internal experience: emotions and body and sensations and self care, are located. This is part of why I have been leaning much more into this archetypal energy. The point is to move towards your north node - having innovative visions for change that are about the collective. And because of my moon, visionary, just like how when I was a kid, is a big way in which I cope during intensity.
I was already in this energy before the October 7th attacks, but the mass death and destruction of the Palestinian people since that date has thrust me even further into this work. In psychology we call it a locus of control: what you can and cannot control. Part of what I can control, is fully embodying and committing to my role in the Social Change Ecosystem as Visionary Healer.
This clarity has resulted in the creation of a much clearer and robust direction for Full & Plenty Joy. Here are just some of the prototypes I’ll be turning into full on graphic. I hope they inspire you to get a giant writing pad that you can go to and allow your visions to spill out onto.
A portion of the FPJ Life Spiral - the Key Channel of Change: Becoming Embodied
What we’re up to in 2024 learning and growth wise!
Physically outlining complex systems, like a content strategy are very helpful for me
A portion of a Season of Focus (term coined by Multi Passionate Mastery) in 2024’s curriculum.
I freaking love the containment of a frame, if that wasn’t already obviouos.
It could be a conceptual intellectual academic frame: like Somatic Psychology or Attachment Theory
It could be a literal frame like how one dresses an altar and a wall of visual magic.
It could be an embodied frame like how I choose to respond to the sensations in my body.
Regardless, I love concepts that guide - like personality tests! I don’t know a single neurodivergent who doesn’t love a personality quiz of really any kind - buzzfeed or love language style. They’ve taken in.
I’ve come to accept that as a Visionary, I am also a humanitarian at my core. My special interest is humans and this has been apparent since my studies in college and now work as a licensed psychotherapist. This is because the vision I have for a thriving world is so dependent upon humans healing. Upon us getting our shit together and making radical changes internally and externally. This is why I focus on healing as a solution, though I know it is not the only one. There is never any one solution and I don’t believe in a “fixing” mentality either. I believe in restoring the natural cycles of life, death and rebirth that humanity has lost much of it’s connection to due to massive out of balance violent hegemonic systems of oppression.
I will close, though I could talk about this for ages, with a picture of a journal entry from Clear Channels and my Archetypal inspo words for 2024.
