Peaches Christ: Vampire Actors and Goth DJs
Beware! Spooky season is upon us. In the spirit of Halloween, drag icon Peaches Christ joins Michelle Tea for a conversation about worshiping horror films, unpacking religious trauma, and designing a haunted house. Then, Edgar Fabian Frias shares a spell for working with your fears.
Peaches Christ: Horror filmmakers and horror fans tend to be deeply empathetic, sensitive people. And so their attraction to these films is that they need an outlet, they need a fantasy because the horrors of the real world are so deeply hurtful to them that this is a safe place for them to play. It’s like, “Let’s play out these things that haunt us for real,” in this sort of safe space.
[Music]
Michelle Tea: Welcome to Your Magic. I’m Michelle Tea, and today I’m in conversation with a true icon — Peaches Christ, the Bay Area-based drag queen who is all about all things horror, culty, campy and spooky. With fellow filmmaker Michael Varrati she hosts the Midnight Mass podcast, which deep dives into underground cinema classics, and every fall she creates the spectacular Horror Vault, an immersive haunted house located inside San Francisco’s historic - and creepy old mint building. We’re going to talk about religious damage, the 1906 earthquake, Satanism, and more. Then we’ll spend a moment with friend of the pod Edgar Fabián Frías, who will help you invoke the spirit realm to work with your fears.
Stay with us.
[Music]
Michelle Tea: You know, I slept in a haunted house once. It belonged to my friend Heather’s grandparents, who had both recently died, in that way old people who really love each other pass — one, and shortly thereafter, the other.
The house was in Michigan, and Heather had arranged to join her mother there and help her get the place ready to be put up for sale. She was also going to pick up her grandparent’s car, which she was inheriting.
This was summer, 1996. When I learned Heather was going to drive all the way from the midwest back to San Francisco, our home base, I invited myself along. Our mutual friend Cary also hopped on board. We were so psyched for this road trip, which would take us through Memphis, New Orleans, Santa Fe, all these iconic American cities.
Cary and I met up with Heather after debauching for a week at an outdoor music festival. This is important bit — I’m a sober alcoholic, but I wasn’t then. A terrible camper, I brought, like, a sleeping bag and a gallon of whiskey. I came to party. I crashed in different tents for seven days, hooking up, barely eating, sleeping poorly on rocks and brambles. Once, after a thunderstorm, I awoke in a leaky tent with my head in a puddle. When we got to Heather’s grandparents’ house, I was so in need of stable comfort. Even though I was sleeping on the floor, in the basement, at least it had a carpet and a roof. Heather’s mom cooked us a warm meal before I conked out. I’d really abused my body, and I could feel my immune system starting to sag. But, what I hadn’t realized, hadn’t known about yet, despite my interest in the occult, is that you have a psychic immune system, too. It helps keep out the spirit realms, the swirling unknown, so you can focus on life on earth without getting spooked and distracted. That night, falling asleep in an underground room empty but for a chiming grandfather clock, my psychic immune system was frayed.
You know that feeling, when you’re falling asleep and you get this sensation like you’re falling? And your whole body jerks and you sort of wake up from the dream state you were tumbling into? Well, that night, as I began to slide into slumber, that happened to me - but I couldn’t move. My body was stuck in what’s known as sleep paralysis. It’s a terrifying experience, being alert, mostly, and having what really felt like a physical sensation, this sense of falling, and falling and falling and falling, and you can’t pull yourself out of it. It went on for hours. It went on all night long.
At some point, the sensation of falling began to morph into something else. I began to feel, or fear, that something, some entity, was trying to pull me out of my body. The struggle to jolt myself awake turned into a new effort, an effort to stay within myself. I have no idea what was trying to get me — I have no idea what this experience was AT ALL — but it felt scary, and unsafe. I tried to open my mind to it - maybe I was going to astral project? Maybe this was a mystical experience, but my fear was ruining it? But no, it didn’t feel safe. At all. It felt really frightening.
The one thing that gave me comfort through the long, dark night was hearing the pitter-patter of Heather and her mother walking around upstairs. See, I would tell myself. You’re safe. People are nearby.
Cary was very nearby, in an adjacent room, and when, at daybreak, I finally managed to shake off my sleep paralysis, I stumbled in and woke him up. Can I sleep with you, I’ve had a really scary night, I can’t even explain it. Cary made room for me in the twin bed he slept in, and I passed out hard, only to wake up a little later on the floor, with no idea how I got there. A dream had woken me up. In the dream, I saw the face of a middle-aged man, African-American and wearing a hat sort of like a police cap. As if on a movie screen, his face filled up the whole of the vision. He was facing away, and then he turned and looked directly at me, and spoke, though I heard nothing, as if the sound was off. There was absolutely nothing scary about this man or this dream, and yet I was overcome with terror that I was seeing something I was not supposed to see, not at all. It was wrong, it was forbidden. I woke up, wondered how the hell I got on the floor, and fell back asleep. The next time I woke up, maybe an hour later, it was because my body had become wracked with a full-blown orgasm. Yes, you heard me. I wasn’t touching myself, I hadn’t had a sexy dream, nothing like that. Just my body going haywire.
I got out of bed, finally off the floor, and found Heather upstairs. She had also slept terribly, she said. She and her mother were scared all night long, they kept hearing the sound of someone walking through the house, but no one was there. They’d stayed huddled in bed all night, awake and alarmed. That wasn’t you, walking around? I asked, my body rolling with goosebumps. Nope, it was not.
When I told Heather about my experience, she scolded me for being such a seeker, a dabbler in the occult, yet doing nothing to ground myself, keep myself safe from malevolent energies. She shared with me that her grandparents had been occultists themselves, and had taught her to surround herself with white light. Wait, your grandparents were occultists? I asked, stunned. Heather took me back downstairs where I’d been sleeping and opened a closet. It was filled with antique esoteric occult literature. Holy crap.
So on the drive back to San Francisco, our idyllic road trip fell apart. Heather had a huge crush on Cary and when it wasn’t reciprocated, her Scorpio moon lashed out, and then lashed out, and then lashed out... It proved too much for Cary, and when we pulled into New Orleans, he decided to bail. I felt bad that my friend had been driven off this adventure. I worried about them having to Greyhound back to California alone, so in solidarity I left the trip also and I bought a bus ticket back to the Bay.
Heather drove us to the bus station in the morning. Cary and I waited in the long line of people boarding the bus as the driver checked tickets. Finally it was my turn. Looking away from me to say hi to a colleague, he then turned to face me. The bus driver. There he was. The man from my dream. African-American, middle-aged, that cap on his head, it was a greyhound driver’s cap. Hello, he said pleasantly, May I have your ticket?
I don’t know what the hell that was all about. Was the house haunted, did Heather’s grandparents open a portal with their occult hanky-panky? Was it their spirits saying, Oh yeah little girl you want a supernatural experience? We got something for you. Why the sleep paralysis? Why the prophetic dream? Why the orgasm? I have no idea. But it is easily the most frightening and unexplained thing that ever happened to me.
Here’s Peaches Christ.
[Music]
Michelle Tea: Peaches Christ, I'm so happy to have you on Your Magic and our whole team is. We’re such huge fans and I've been such a huge fan since back when I lived in San Francisco and would go to your Midnight Mass live events that were so much fun and I don’t even know where to start with you except to ask you, where did you come from? What's the Peaches Christ origin story?
Peaches Christ: The first thing I want to say is thank you for having me on. And the fandom is mutual. To me, you're a very iconic member of the San Francisco community that I, I am so nostalgic for because I moved to San Francisco in the mid 90s.
Michelle Tea: We were lucky to be there, that was a special time.
Peaches Christ: I really agree. Like I worry about sounding like one of those, like older, bitter people, you know, waxing nostalgic, but then I'm like, no, it really was a magical, special, amazing time, you know? But, yeah, I came from Maryland, actually, I grew up in Maryland. And I really am, I feel, like the product of a discovery at a young age of John Waters and The Rocky Horror Picture Show, because I feel like those two things I discovered at a very formative age growing up in Maryland, and then the fact that John and Divine and Mink and Edith Massey and all those weirdos were just up the street, you know, in a city where my relatives all lived, it really was a mind blowing thing. And so, so, my drag persona, my creative career, my, my writing and directing, it tends to center around, you know, a love of drag and horror and cult movies and midnight movies and and yeah, that's kind of where it all got started.
Michelle Tea: I love that and I really relate to it because I was a goth teenager who also was just like staying up late in my friend's basement, watching, like, Desperate Living and sneaking out to The Rocky Horror Picture Show. It must have been incredibly exciting to realize that they were sort of close to you, like it must have made that world that John Waters created with, with the help of all his actors. It must have made it feel so accessible and that a creative life maybe was accessible.
Peaches Christ: Absolutely. I think that that because I grew up in Maryland and in the bubble of of of of going to Catholic school and being a kid who was obsessed with horror and obsessed with theater and drama and being flamboyant and outrageous and had a real love for haunted houses and haunted attractions, I was an oddball. I was like the black sheep. And so I thought, Hollywood, you know, I subscribed to Fangoria magazine and all of that stuff seems like a million miles away, you know, like Hollywood seems so far away to me and so far removed so that when they were shooting Hairspray and, you know, I was a kid in junior high and had heard about this movie being filmed in Baltimore because that was really a crossover experience for John. Like that movie really made the mainstream news, especially the local news. I clued into the fact that not only was the film about racial integration, but the fat girl's mom in the movie was played by a man. And I had to kind of pretend I wasn't interested because as a young, queer kid, you know, not to give all your tells just so you can survive. But of course, I was like, what do you mean? That's a man. I just, it blew my mind. So it was the fact that they were making the movie up the street. They were so close to where I was and that the film featured this person called Divine. That was really what unlocked the door. And then, of course, that was just that was the gateway drug to, to discovering pink flamingos and other things at a very young age.
Michelle Tea: That is so excellent. I love that you went to Catholic school, and then you went on to deem yourself Peaches Christ, what was the oopmh behind taking the name, the moniker of the world's lot, one of the world's largest religious leaders that you were perhaps tormented by their followers?
Peaches Christ: [laughs] That’s actually exactly it. So I was lucky that I did go to Catholic school, I was raised Catholic, but I didn't have nutbag parents. So when I said in eighth grade like that, I did not want to be confirmed and I started asking those questions. My parents actually backed me up. And so even though the nuns at school and some of the priests kind of ostracized me or, you know, were kind of bullying a little bit when I look back on it, because they could not believe that my parents were supporting this decision not to be confirmed, I felt like a rebel, but I had the support of my parents. And I started asking those questions then and I think my anger with the church, you know, continued to develop with my sort of queer realization, you know, in high school. So my rage towards the church and my interest in drag as a punk rock kind of act, you know, again, my, my, my drag idols were Elvira, Divine and Frank N. Furter. So, you know, I liked drag to be a little dark and transgressive. It felt like taking the name Peaches was going to piss off all the right people, which it did.
Michelle Tea: Yes, so so good. Listen, do you have a spiritual practice?
Peaches Christ: I do actually. I don't talk about it that often because I think, you know, like a lot of people, I understand the entanglement of spirituality with religious damage. And so I like to make it very clear that I am a spiritual person. But I'm also very, very anti-religious in a lot of ways. And it's an interesting thing because it's confusing even to me, you know, in my head, because I've had to sort of detangle an old and outdated concept of God. But I'm sober and part of my sobriety has been to create a higher power of my understanding that, that is very different than the one I was force-fed as a young person. So I definitely am spiritual. I meditate every morning. I definitely have a concept of God. It's very maybe if it's if it's aligned with any sort of practice, I guess you'd say it's probably pagan because it's so based in nature. And, you know, and then as far as any sort of religious statement I make, I feel like I do that through Peaches Christ. And then, of course, a card carrying member of the Satanic Temple. I, I like to to tell people that that's more for me of a political movement that I'm a part of rather than a religious or spiritual one. It's performative.
Michelle Tea: Totally, it seems like that's their whole jam is just doing like these incredible performance art, political pranks that sort of expose religious hypocrisy.
Peaches Christ: For me, it was a few years ago, maybe 10 years ago when they were first coming around and they started to actually do real litigation as far as challenging anti-choice laws and really the separation of church and state in different, different places. And that's when I was like, “Oh, yeah, this is the Satanic Church I want to be part of.” And Anton LaVey of course, is a huge inspiration just because of the drag of it all. You know, I mean, talk about a performance, you know, I mean, we are the cape and the horns and do ceremonies with Jayne Mansfield. And, you know, it's like that's such fabulous drag. And it pissed all the right people off and it scared people. And I love it.
Michelle Tea: So you love horror obviously. Does horror play into your experience of like the divine or spirituality in any way? Is there any sort of like influence or relationship there?
Peaches Christ: You know, I actually think it does and I didn't realize that until much later in life. And, you know, I was, am still a huge horror fan, but especially as a kid, you know, I was just so into it. And later as an adult, and especially because I made a horror movie and got to think of it from the point of view of, like, why, you know what what am I trying to say? It, especially in relationship to showing, you know, violence and really dark and hideous things. I tapped into this sort of idea, actually reading an interview with Wes Craven, who said, you know, horror filmmakers and horror fans tend to be deeply empathetic, sensitive people. And so their attraction to these films is that they need an outlet, they need a fantasy world where they can kind of exercise some of this psychology because the horrors of the real world are so deeply hurtful to them that this is a safe place for them to sort of play out these fears and worst case scenarios and things. And because it's fantasy, it makes a big difference and I really resonated with that because I remember around the time I read that interview, not being able to make it through the movie The Hurt Locker, like I was so traumatized by it in the theaters. I think because it was, it was about something I knew was happening, I couldn't handle it. Whereas send me to a Freddy Krueger movie, and I'm just giddy because I know it's all makeup and fantasy and fake. And, and so I think when you get into this sort of the Grand Guignol of it, and you are theatrical, it's like, let's play out these things that haunt us for real and this sort of safe space.
Michelle Tea: I really want to talk about the haunted house that you have coming up in San Francisco this Halloween season. But you had talked about being younger and being involved in some haunted houses. Have you been doing this for a long time, longer than I knew?
Peaches Christ: Yes, but much, much longer. It's funny. The people who knew me as a kid, you know, sometimes, especially if I go home to Maryland like I have been and people are like, “Wow, like you really haven't changed,” you know? Because I was obsessed with haunted houses. I grew up going spending summers at a place called Ocean City, Maryland, which is a very quintessential East Coast Boardwalk Resort town. And at the end of the boardwalk, they had a Bill Chasey dark ride that you rode through called The Haunted House. And they also had a walk through haunted house. That was this giant version of the psycho house that was called Morbid Manor and all the goth kids, all the heavy metal rock kids of the 80s, the teenagers, they all worked there. And as a kid, I was like 10 years old. This is the 80s. So your parents let you do whatever you want and my parents would just let me ride my bike two miles down the boardwalk to the Morbid Manor where I would then sit and watch people going in and out of that haunted house for hours at a time. I knew all the teenagers that worked there. Sometimes they would let me come in and scare, you know, if they didn't think I would get caught by their boss or whatever. My obsession started then and then about the time I was in junior high high school, I started creating these sort of experiences in the neighborhood I grew up in Annapolis and that grew. It was really my first experience producing. I would write a script, I would audition all the neighborhood kids. I would spend a year with my buddies, building sets, building coffins, creating, you know, running electricity. My father helped me get permission from the landowner where we were doing this haunted trail so that it was all legal and on the up and up. And like my dad would take the chain off the chain saw and he would be the finale monster. And I put him in a costume. My mom would wear the costume I had created for her and she would sell the tickets. And we were like written up in the newspaper and, you know, that was really my first taste. I mean, I was making movies and doing theater and writing plays, you know, as a kid for for school and stuff. But I think the first thing that I actually ever monetized or got press around was The Haunted Trails, it was called. So, so that actually is maybe the first where I really got my start.
Michelle Tea: So tell me about the, the haunted house that I think it’s a few levels up from the Haunted Trail that you have going on. You've got it. It's, it's in San Francisco. It's at the Mint, the Old Mint building? How in the world did you secure that building? Talk about a haunted — it always seemed like a weird, little haunted monument.
Peaches Christ: Very much so, if ever there's going to be a haunted building in San Francisco, it's that one. Because, you know, after the 1906 earthquake, you know, that building was the only building left standing in that whole neighborhood. And it's a horror show, really, because they were able to shut all the steel shutters to protect the gold inside. At that time, there was a third of the country's gold located in that building. So it was their duty to protect the building, which meant as people were burning alive in the streets begging to be let in, the employees of the Mint, the federal employees actually barricaded themselves in the building and kept it wet. They kept it wet with a central well, and that's actually what kept the fire away.
Now, I know all this history because I work it into our shows. Luckily, my, my couple decades of work as Peaches in San Francisco are what got the doors to the Mint open. And then once they were opened in 2018, I was able to go, “OK, what do I want to do?” And it's really my love of haunted houses mashed up with my, my, my newer love of immersive theater experiences. So it is a full show with a beginning, a middle, and end. The actors have a story to tell. It's a 60-minute immersive horror show.
This year I wrote a whole new story. The concept for the last couple of years was centered around the idea that after the earthquake, the Mint was secretly used as a prison before Alcatraz opened, which, which we did such an effective job that there was actually a few press that would come and actually write about the story as if it had happened.
This year, the concept is that in the 60s and 70s, when there's actually a lot of questions about what the Mint was used for, there's a lot of mystery because it was dark for so long. The concept is that this family, the Blackwell family, who have the world's largest collection of occult artifacts, have been storing them in the vaults of the Mint. And so for the first time ever, you, as the guests, are invited to do a tour of these artifacts in a gallery at the Mint. And you go into the vaults. And of course, one of these artifacts contains a power that opens a portal to another dimension. And you, as the guests, have to follow this character as they unleash the immortal reckoning. So it's a you know, it's a lot more fantasy and supernatural than Terror Vault was a few years ago.
And I think part of that might be the pandemic where I went more fantasy than than hardcore, brutal horror. I like to say that we're maybe one of the most unapologetically feminist haunts because we typically feature women victimizing men in our show. We have very few scenes of women being brutalized because I feel like we've seen that. We've done that. And in general, my, my power comes from a femme place and so the women — I have no problem portraying wicked women, which I guess you could argue is problematic, but I think it's way more fun and way more delicious. So it's a lot of a lot of men being murdered in our show. But this show, because it's more fantasy, there's less of that kind of classic horror violence that we've had in the past, and it's more... I mean, I think it's really beautiful and it's I mean, I mean, I'll tell you, Michelle, speaking of our heyday, I wrote a whole sequence in the show just so that I could hear what I wanted to hear. So there's an entire section of the show that's dedicated to this 80s goth nightclub run by vampires in San Francisco called Fang Bang, which I made up. But it's just so that I can play. You know, the whole thing is Siouxsie and The Cure and every night and so we're doing a pop up bar in the Mint that you can come to open to the public with vampire actors and we have Goth DJs and, you know, so, so I'm selfishly kind of just building the show that I would want if I were a guest.
Michelle Tea: Oh my gosh. I'm, I'm getting chills. I'm so excited.
[Music]
Michelle Tea: Well listen, can I read tarot cards for you?
Peaches Christ: Sure. I think because of the pandemic and everyone's life kind of being turned upside down, I guess my biggest question is like creatively, I've shifted gears both out of necessity, but also out of wanting to. And I'm just wondering, like, is it going to work out? You know creatively, I’ve really like invested a lot more time like kind of moving away from the constant cycle of of producing shows and live theater and touring because I can't to, to in addition to doing the Terror Vault shows and also hopefully theater in the future, but really kind of investing a lot more time in writing and developing projects for TV and movies and stuff that I guess intimidates me.
Michelle Tea: So I'm going to shuffle and just see like what's the path look like right now for you? Let's just see what this next sort of like, I don't know, what do you wanna say? Six months?
Peaches Christ: OK.
Michelle Tea: Let's see what this... you know.... what, where's the ease? What are the challenges? See what the - what story we get from the tarot. Wait, what is your astrological sign?
Peaches Christ: Capricorn.
Michelle Tea: Oh, your centerpiece card and this three-card reading is Sun in Capricorn, Power.
Peaches Christ: Oh wow.
Michelle Tea: Which is great. That is so good for you. I love this so much. This... I want to say, this is like you got really good cards and you also got a like, how can you find some peace in your mind card. OK, your centerpiece card is this Four of Disks and it's like, you know, as you're talking about, like what you're moving away from and what you're moving into. To me that was like, well, that just sounds so organic and natural. Like, like it's a natural evolution of who you are and your energies and I feel like this really confirms that. It's like, yes, this is stable, you know how to do this work. This is so Sun in Capricorn, so Four of Disks.
The card that's before that is the Star making your dreams come true, reaching, reaching out, really like going for it. Like what's your wildest dream like, I love what you were saying about how this is very how this year's haunted house has a lot of fantasy in it. I feel like the Star very much supports that. It's like very imaginative, it's very inspired and it's just knowing, like, can I make my wildest concepts take root on the physical plane and like, bring them into fruition? And and it's like, yes, with this Power card after it. Yes, you can.
But what are you going to do about your tormented brain Peaches? We have this Nine of Swords here at the end? OK. It just looks like, you know, the good thing, the good and the bad thing about the swords, a swords card, especially this one, is that this is happening in your mind, right? So this isn't like external, you know, failure or anything like that. This is sort of like — in the Rider Waite deck, this is the card of the person waking up from a nightmare holding their head. And so it's really about anxiety. It's Mars in Gemini. And, and I really like thinking about the astrological attributes to these cards and really trying to puzzle out, like, why, why is Mars in Gemini seen is like an intellectual cruelty? And I just think that Gemini energy pulls in so much. It pulls in all of the vibes, it pulls in the joyful vibes and the cruel vibes. And with Mars, Mars is just like a little engine churning it all up, I love that you were saying you have a meditation practice. I think that as you sort of push your own creative and career limits and move further out of your comfort zone and into new areas where maybe you have less control initially, I think it's really important to, to know that, like, that might be really destabilizing mentally for you, right? It might just invite anxiety in, how could it not, right?
It's going to be really good for you to rely on any sort of meditative discipline, self care, discipline, mindfulness disciplines, all those kind of things that really help calm the mind and regulate anxiety. Does that make sense?
Peaches Christ: Oh, my God, yes. Because that is the constant struggle and only in the last few years have I realized that that might be a lifelong struggle and that I can, I can definitely quiet my mind. I can definitely — the whole move to meditation was just being desperate, and what I realize is that if I'm going to continue down the path of producing events and being an artist who puts my in my heart out into the world and sometimes my life savings, whatever, that that there's a certain amount of trauma, you know, that is brought up with this stuff and that I need to sort of constantly do my best to manage it.
Michelle Tea: That's so — everything that you're saying is totally reflected here. It's like you get in this life to access the Star card where you have a wild imagination and you're able to, like, bring it down to earth, actualize it and it brings you personally a lot of power, a lot of stability. It's like it brings you respect. It brings you all those things that Capricorn wants. Like Capricorn wants to always be ascending the mountain and it's like this is your, this is your path up the mountain. And it triggers anxiety at the same time, even though you want it, you can do it. You're great at it. It gives you so many gifts and it gives the world so many gifts. That's the thing with the Star, too. It's like that joy of being able to actualize your inspiration. That's a joy that spreads to others. The Star, we all get to see the star. We all get to be in the starlight with you. So it's like it's very giving and very generous, even as it does support your own personal goals for your own life. Yeah, man, it's rough with the anxious mind. Yeah.
Peaches Christ: I mean, I have to say, like, even though I know that I still struggle with stress and anxiety. I also know that now I understand it. Like I'm not afraid of it, I can confront it and I have a different relationship with it.
Michelle Tea: That’s awesome. Oh my God. Peaches Christ, thank you so much for being on Your Magic. I hope you have a great Halloween holiday season.
Peaches Christ: You too. Thank you for having me.
[Music]
Edgar Fabián Frías: Hi, my name is Edgar Fabián Frías and I’m gonna be doing the “Ignite that Fire Within” courage spell today. I wanted to create a spell that can help invoke sacred will from within, that fire from within in, in order to help one be able to approach something that maybe is fearful in a way that can be filled with courage, be filled with that fire, knowing that it can be really hard to let go of fear.
The ingredients for this spell are: a red or white candle, a writing utensil, two pieces of paper.
One or more of the following crystals and/or fruit: Quartz, Carnelian, Moldavite, Citrine, Labradorite, Orange Calcite or you could also get an orange, an orange or red bell pepper, a persimmon, a sweet potato, or any fruit your have in your home.
First, you can find a quiet place to do ceremony and open up a sacred space in any way that feels right for you. Personally, I like to cleanse the space with visualizations and offer some plant offerings, get grounded, maybe say a few prayers, invite in protection & guidance, and take a few deep breaths.
And then you prepare a sacred altar in the space and of course this could be on your desk, in your kitchen. It could be outside and whenever you’re ready, you light your red or white candle. This lets the Spirits know you are available and open and at this time you can grab your crystal or fruit and hold it in your dominant hand.
Take a moment. Practice some deep breathing. Visualize yourself breathing in courage and exhaling out fear. Allow the powerful fruit and/or crystal to charge up your body with energy.
Taking some time to focus the energy center in your stomach and then down, going down to your groin area. And starting to envision a fire start to build there and start to travel up from the core of the earth, really connecting to that fiery center of the planet. Letting the core of the earth send up energy to activate those energy centers in your body.
And then taking a second and asking for clarity, asking for precision and spending a moment writing down 10 things that you fear on the two sheets of paper:
One one sheet of paper write down 5 things that you fear that you hope will never happen. For example, you can think of losing your job, getting sick, having your relationship ends.
On the second sheet of paper write down 5 things that you fear but that you actually hope will happen. And some things that I thought about myself was getting cast in a big movie role, getting offered a really big promotion that’s outside of your comfort zone, signing up to run a marathon, etc.
When you’re ready, say the following affirmations and, of course, please adapt them to whatever feels authentic and true for you:
“I invoke the fire within. I Ignite. I Grow. I Increase. As my fire grows so grows my courage
I banish all fears that hold me back from my sovereignty.”
And feel free to repeat this three times and after you say that, take a moment and either burn, or rip, or throw away that page with 5 fears of things you do not want to happen. Just get rid of that.
Then, grab your list of 5 things you fear but that you want to have happen in your non-dominant hand and hold that crystal or that fruit in your dominant hand and read these 5 fears out loud.
Then repeat this phrase three times:
“Fear is a guide. Fear Is A Portal. Fear Will Set You Free.”
And then after you do this, feel free to fold the paper, place it on your altar space with under the candle, crystal, or fruit. And then strike a power pose. Let yourself get filled with the rush of meeting your fears with courage. Dance a little if it makes sense, or maybe just let out some sounds!
And then close the sacred space as it makes sense for you. I like to give thanks and offer up energetic offerings to the guides and to the ancestors for their support. And I also like to spend some time writing and/or drawing about the experience that I just had.
[Music]
Michelle Tea: Thank you so much Edgar Fabian Frias. As we move deeper into spooky season, a time when many believe the veil between this life and the next grows thin, when the dying of vegetation in the northern hemisphere prompts us to think about things like death and mortality, it’s good to have a ritual to help us work with fear. It’s a powerful, and motivating, and universal human emotion. We hope you learn from what scares you, we hope that you face your fears bravely. And if you happen to be a freak like me, that you enjoy your fears this haunted house season and get chased by a zombie or two at your local Halloween attraction. Tricks and treats.
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Michelle Tea: Thanks for tuning into Your Magic. Make sure you follow us on Twitter and Instagram @thisisyourmagic. You can also subscribe to us right here on Spotify — we just don’t want you to miss an episode, okay? Sign up for our newsletter at thisisyourmagic.com and get more musings from our team of spiritual seekers. And you can email us at hello@thisisyourmagic.com, we would love to hear from you.
This episode was produced and edited by Molly Elizalde, Tony Gannon, and Vera Blossom. We got production support from Raven Yamamoto and our executive producers are Ben Cooley, myself, and Molly Elizalde. Our original theme music is by John Kimbrough.
Tune in next week for a conversation with Tinashe. Thanks for listening!