Unhappy Hour, or How I Find Myself Waving a Sword in My Living Room on a Monday Night

Sometimes I want to step back and take a snapshot of my life so that I can look back later and have a good laugh.  Just a few minutes ago I was holding this aloft, wondering what my neighbors must think.

I'll skip telling you why I have the sword (it's an art model thing) and get straight to what I was doing before that.  See, I'm reading this great book by my favorite astrologer, the esteemed Rob Brezsny of Free Will Astrology, called "Pronoia is the Antidote for Paranoia - How the Whole World is Conspiring to Shower You with Blessings".  It's sort of an irreverent, spiritual, comedic self-help workbook with a lot of fun exercises designed to shake you out of whatever state you're in, and open up or let go.  

So far, there's one exercise I really like:  Unhappy Hour!  Surprise!  60 Minutes of dwelling and reveling and going to the depths of whatever is making us unhappy, really getting down into the muck.  There's a place for mourning and moaning and groaning, or complaining or being unhappy and frustrated, or what the fuck ever.  To be healthy and happy individuals, we need to acknowledge and feel our feelings, rather than trying to pretend they don't exist.  Life is not a constant ticker tape parade riding on top of a tiger.  At some point the parade is going to come to a halt, and the tiger will in fact eat you.  Sometimes life sucks.  Enter Unhappy Hour.

Now I'm not trying to complain about my hard knock life.  I've got it really good, I feel very blessed. But I am human, and there were a couple things eating at me tonight.  My instinct was to try to find someone (anyone) to hang out with, so I knew I needed to do exactly the opposite.  Shun people!  Hang out with myself and feel that shit!  

Making up my own version of Unhappy Hour on the fly, I turned on my altar lights and lit some sage.  As I lit it I chanted a silly mantra to myself, and fanned the smoke over myself with my ceremonial broom (because urban witchezzz, DUH), continuing to chant and rotated slowly.  Then I smudged my apartment, dramatically bewailing anything, no matter how slight, that I could think of that wasn't going my way in that moment.  

I laughed the whole time I did this, and I had to reach for my creative woes as I ran out of real ones.  I had done this once before, a couple weeks ago, and got a little more oomph from it.  That time I laid on the floor listening to Liszt and managed to squeeze out a few tears.  Both times, once I gave myself over to feeling my emotions without requiring that they be okay, I became calm almost immediately.

In this instance, once I finished smudging the house I thought I should practice with my sword a bit.  I keep it next to the altar, on the opposite side from the broom (because warrior priestess.  Duh).  Eventually I'll start posing with the sword for some costume gigs, but first I need to build up the muscle groups.  It was super fun though, I held some very short poses, and felt like Jaime Lannister.  And I wouldn't even have noticed the sword there if I hadn't been giving myself over to Unhappy Hour.  And if anyone can see in, hopefully they're entertained by the woman with the sword and the broom.

I encourage you to give Unhappy Hour a try.  If something is bothering, allow yourself to feel it, really.  Dedicate some time, even just a few minutes, to wallow in your sadness, or what have you.  The first time I only made it for twenty minutes, and this time only like five.  And now I'm done wallowing until the next Unhappy Hour, whenever I decide that is.  Now I can just do something productive.

Like write a blogpost.