Are you being initiated? 🖤

By Lian Brook-Tyler

People are often called to work with me and Jonathan as they're called to or are journeying through life initiations such as a plant medicine ceremony, a dark night of the soul, or a huge change or rupture, such as relationship breakdown, childbirth, job change or loss, ill health or bereavement pulling them in down into its alchemical crucible.

Our role isn’t to make it all nice and better but to guide you as you’re stretched tight by the tension between life as it was (or you fantasised about) and life as it is (or as your soul is calling you towards).

It’s often a hard, thankless, shame-stirring, heart-rending kind of work.

And honestly, it’s not the work I fantasised about doing either.

If you cut me open, you’ll see Aphrodite written all the way down, British seaside rock style… I have long been fascinated by the Love and Beauty that she’s known for (Magic and Truth too which came later, the initials of the four words also magically ‘just happen’ to be my initials).

I am all about rose petals, poetic romance, iridescent bubbles, double rainbows, soul mates, vintage pink champagne in antique crystal flutes, crimson kisses, shooting stars, emerald velvet, and midnight sapphires.

Not the yucky, messy, disgusting, dark stuff.

And yet…

“She [Aphrodite] spoke and loosened from her bosom the embroidered girdle of many colors into which all her allurements were fashioned. In it was love and in it desire and in it blandishing persuasion which steals the mind even of the wise.”

Homer

And so, without realising what it meant until it was already too late… Aphrodite stole my mind… It dawned on me that more than anything, I am devoted to Union.

(Though any astrologer could have taken one look at my 5 planet stellium, including Venus AKA Aphrodite, in Libra in the 7th House of Partnership aka Union, and foreseen that long ago.)

At first, Union was first an alluring fantasy that I fell in love with… Ooooh, Divine Union, yes please.

But the more I understood what Union really means, the more it demanded I look at everything I’d pushed away, was disgusted by, and didn’t want anything to do with. It was time to see the most unwelcome things hidden in murkiest corners of my very own mile-long shadow bag…

Helplessness

Desperation

Pessimism

Entitlement

Grandiosity

Weakness

Arrogance

And of course, most of all, given my obsession with Love, Magic, Beauty, and Truth…

Hate and intolerance

Mundanity and dreariness

Ugliness and ungraciousness

Delusion and ignorance

That’s when the other, lesser known, side of Aphrodite was waiting to show me the way. The Goddess of Love and Beauty is also known as the Alchemical Goddess.

“Whomever or whatever Aphrodite imbues with beauty is irresistible. A magnetic attraction results, “chemistry” happens between the two, and they desire union above all else.”

Jean Shinoda Bolen, Goddesses in Everywoman

She taught me how to abide in the almost unbearable tension between two things… The old and the new, the known and the unknown, the desired and the reviled, the call back to comfort and the call to adventure… Until union occurs and something true, meaning of the soul, is created.

If you choose to enter the initiation that life is calling you into, you will be called to look for, own, and learn to love what you’ve been repulsed by, disapproved of, and scared of - in yourself and in others.

It’s one of the worst things most of us can imagine.

And yet, it’s what allows us to live the right-shaped life for us, the one our soul came here for.

This is why we all need help… Including the otherworldly help of myth and archetypes… If we are to allow ourselves to be dissolved in the crucible of initiation, returning made anew to live our own unique soul’s myth, in a modern world which encourages anything but.

The upcoming ways you can join us are in Mythical, our new community coming very soon, and in Medicine ‘24 coming in March - the details to book a call to explore that with me or Jonathan are below.

If you’re ready for it, we are here for it, we are here for you.

All my love,

Lian

♥️

P.S. The irony is, that I’ve had many life ruptures, perhaps more than most, many of which invited me into the initiatory depths of my own dark material, but I could have been in Hell and still wouldn’t have been able to see beyond the rose-tinted-glasses-as-armour perched on the end of my nose.

I wasn’t ready for it until I finally was.

So if you plan to live a lifetime without going to these places, I really get it, and we’ll still be here when you’re ready.

Want to become more intimate with us? If YES, click any or all of the buttons below.