Back in November of 2016, I wrote an article called, “Adolescent Darkness – A Guide for Parents”. At the time I fully intended to write this accompanying article for those of you who feel that darkness is a part of your teen years. For what it was worth, I wanted to offer some small amount of hope and comfort, even in the face of a reality that it was going to take more than my words to change the totality of the darkness in your lives. A year and a half later I finally forced myself to sit and finish what I’d started. At the time it was one of the hardest articles I’d written. Until now.

The time between the first article for parents and the first draft of this one, had to do with two separate factors. The first was a set of major changes in my own life; sparked by the deepest exhaustion I’d ever know in my career, and the second, the more troubling, was a complete block when it came to actually being able to mentally wrap my mind around the task at hand. It seemed one thing to write a relatively clinical article about observations of teens’ lives meant for parents. Along with the observations, it felt necessary and quite comfortable to draw on my spiritual work and journey to help parents cope with what they might be observing in their adolescents’ worlds. That said, however, it was quite a different thing to sit in front of a computer screen and try to formulate words that could touch the hearts and minds of the ones that don’t need facts and figures about an existence that you live daily. Being a student of my own facts and figures, I also found it hard to find a way to translate the tools for coping not to observers, but to those who feel the darkness first hand. A year and a half later, I found myself ready to write.

That was 2018. It’s now closing in on the end of 2021 as I once again find myself daunted by this article and the prospect of updating it for a different generation than the one it was intended for. I don’t need to give a history lesson of all of the things that have happened since. We’ve all witnessed the political circus, the media frenzy, the hate, the isolation, and the despair. Even if we can’t understand why we are here, we all at least know where we are. We can’t change that past, the only thing we can do is try to heal and move forward. I hope that, in some small way, I maybe a couple of my words will touch even one person and make their lives a better place.

The inspiration for the original article for parents, came from an issue of Time magazine talking about adolescent depression and anxiety. Although I’d heard some of the statistics before and even seen, first hand, some of the effects on people that I care about, the article brought me to a profound conclusion; life is just f@#ked up! The block I had a year and a half ago was in trying to find some long and eloquent way of sugar coating a reality that is anything but sweet.

Not only is life just messed up, but as you go through the mists and confusion of it all, everyone seems to want to connect with you while you don’t even know how to connect with yourself. Your parents come to you and say things like they understand how you’re feeling because they were in school once too. It’s not the shared experience of “school” or listening to them talk about the good old days that cause you to lose attention. What everyone is missing is that you don’t need to hear more about other people’s lives; you get bombarded with that on a regular basis from family, friends, social media, the internet, and television. The biggest problem is that your depression isn’t going to get better listening to other people tell you how bad their lives were; in fact, it sometimes makes it worse. Your personal experiences of school, fears about personal security, social stresses, anxieties over the future, body and group image fears, and questions about things like sexuality and relationships that no one seems to understand that causes the darkness. Nobody understands because they honestly can’t! Unless they can walk your mile or cry your tears then they are, to some degree, unable to understand the world that you feel you are floating through. While you’re trying to connect with the now, the talking heads are trying to rationalize with you using experiences that are twenty years old or more. Maybe you’ve even been to a counselor or psychiatrist who also wants to “connect” with you. Of course, all too often their supposed shared experience comes from some out of date text book still gracing their bookshelf from their post graduate work thirty years ago. Not feeling the connections? Hmmm…I wonder why.

As a quick aside, and in all fairness to both parents and doctors, the need they have to connect is usually out of a true concern for you. They just don’t know how to touch that place deep within you because you don’t know how to reach that place. In fact, many times you don’t even know what that place should look like. They care deeply about your pain and suffering, but in all honesty, can’t understand your personal experience in life, nor understand how to truly help. Even funnier (in a dark sort of humor) is that in many cases they might not even know how to connect with themselves either. For someone who doesn’t know how to swim, trying to help a drowning person is leading nowhere good in a hurry.

All of that said, I’m also not going to try to “connect” with you or try to tell you that everything will just be ok. The reality is that there is only ONE person who you need to connect with…yep; you got it.

I firmly believe that 90% of all issues within the heart and mind are issues with grounding and balance in life. We can talk about psychological diagnoses and cognitive therapies all day long, but in the end if we are out of balance with our natural energies and not grounded within the life experience we have, we are going to experience depression, anxiety, and feelings of hopelessness. The problem becomes how to ground in a world of uncertainty when you don’t know if your parents will have a job tomorrow because of economic and political issues within our country, or if someone will bring a gun to school out of just shear hate and fear in their own lives. How do you find balance when you’re not allowed to connect with yourself; but, are constantly told how you should feel by teachers, parents, religious leaders, friends, the media, and the list goes on! How do you find middle ground when the world seems to be made of paradoxes? You’re supposed to love yourself for what you are, but you never see “yourself” on the cover of Vogue. Sex is bad, but there are people out there who are making millions of dollars who got noticed with things like sex tapes or reality television. Succeed in school, and maybe you’ll become a doctor or lawyer, but how many masters degrees are standing behind the counter at Starbucks? Women are empowered these days to be anything they want, and yet daily there’s another scandal that reveals the dirty secret that such success has all too often come because someone only gave them the opportunity to spread something other than their intellectual and creative wings. As a girl, you want to believe the speeches about empowerment, and yet what we hear more of in the media are the stories of victims and not the power of victory. Guys are also constantly bombarded with the heartbreaking perception that their very gender makes them bad. Our own president has admitted, on tape, to groping women and the fact that it was easy because he was in power. There are undeniably guys who have, and will, hurt women, but there are guys out there as well who are debilitated by a collective guilt that they can’t make sense out of. Throughout all of that, how do we find grounding and a foundational place for our hearts and minds?

In the midst of it all, fear, depression, and anxiety are very real. The issues that you deal with today are not the issue of your parents twenty years ago. The pain comes from a different place and it is a pain that is very real to you.

The hardest truth to deal with; however, is that the pain within you can only be healed by you. That might seem like a daunting task when you don’t feel like you have any control whatsoever. It might also seem unfair in that the pain may have come from outside sources that now leave you to struggle with putting the pieces back together. All of those voices out there that want to connect with you might be able to offer bits and pieces of comfort and wisdom to help find a path, but the only voice that has THE answer, is within you.

When I wrote this three years ago, I offered a couple pieces of wisdom of my own. Some of the original things I talked about then still hold true, but it’s become more important than ever to find a balance in this world. Finding that balance will take every bit of strength and courage you have. I know that, at times, you might think your strength and courage are all gone. But, I honestly believe, that the human mind and heart are two of the most incredible things in this world; with the ability to feel such incredible pain and suffering, along with the ability to heal and feel joys that transcend all and bring us closer to the heavens instead of the hells.

One of the reasons the Temple of the Sea Born was founded on the myths of ancient Greece and Rome, was because it offered a pantheon (spiritual group) of Goddesses and Gods that embodied the very basic strengths and sometimes weaknesses that we all understand. The ancient religions honored both the feminine and the masculine in the world as well as the physical and the intellectual. The old religions were far from perfect, but they offer a way for even modern generations to relate to a world that seems just as barbaric as it was then.

That said, here are just a couple of ways to start connecting with the energies of the Goddesses and Gods while starting to find that strength to heal. The first two are going to seem like they contradict one another, but the reality is that they compliment each other and balance each other. You must find a way to disconnect from the flood of images and messages we hear on a daily basis. Sometimes that means even disconnecting from friends and family for a while. They might think you are moody, but you are just taking time to touch base with the only one that can give you the ultimate strength.

When you disconnect from the hateful, negative and painful images and messages in this world, you take time to be alone with yourself. For many of us, this can be a very scary place to be. Sometimes all those voices that never stop in the world help drown out our own voices of self-doubt and fear that live within us. This is where things like meditation and even magick can come into play. Just being alone with your thoughts isn’t enough. You just exchange one set of voices in the outside world with another set of voices within you. If you just sit back and listen, then it’s entirely too easy to become overwhelmed. The key is to not just sit there! You can and should take action. When you do things like meditate, you can learn to choose which of those voices and negative thought patterns stay and which ones go. It is a passive way of filtering out the negative and focusing on the positive. It’s not always easy, but it can be done.

Practices like magick working, however, are very much proactive way of also dealing with the thoughts that are within you. When you work magick, you are actually taking those thoughts and energies either banishing the negative ones, or elevating the good ones in order to manifest them in your life. (If you are new to magick, then CLICK HERE to read my articles on magick 101). Magick is simply the changing of things in the world through will and energy. Some would say that the same things that witches practices is still being practiced today in things like advertising. The witch was accused of mind control, and yet it’s our advertising world and media who control our thoughts and desires for all kinds of things. If you don’t believe that magick works, look at the billions of dollars spent every year to keep controlling the minds of consumers. Your magick can grow powerful too, and although you might not be looking to control the minds of anyone, you can definitely harness those powers to at least bring change into your life that will help protect you and heal you.

Now comes the second part, and the one that seems opposite my first advice; you need to connect with people. So what does that mean? How do I disconnect, but then connect? We all need connection with other people. We all need the laugh of a friend or the hug of a loved one. It is in our very nature to desire to be accepted and respected. Sometimes we close others out because we are afraid of what they’ll see. Recently we’ve closed each other out because the government told us to. We were never meant to live alone, and so fostering connection with other, like-minded, people is so important. The difference in what I’m suggesting over what you might already be doing is that when you put the two together, when you disconnect first and find your inner peace, then when you come back to your family and friends, it’s from a place of inner strength and power. You are no longer just reacting to your world with other people you know, you are creating the world and owning it with the people you most trust to accept you unconditionally because you’ve accepted yourself.

There are no easy fixes, but there IS hope. If you feel like you are falling into the darkness, speak openly and honestly with your parents or other trusted people in your life. Be straight forward with them and tell them that you don’t need stories about their childhood, but you do need support on your own journey. There are resources out there. With the permission and support of your parents, the temple offers online guided meditations and even information on starting a magick practice. You might eventually need to see a counselor or even make the decision if medication is right for you, but here at the temple, we strongly believe that much can be accomplished through practices that are thousands of years old.

We wish you health and happiness in body, mind, and spirit. We also wish call upon the Goddesses and Gods to send strength, courage, and perfect love to you all.

ευλογια σε σενα (blessings to you)

©2016, 2021 Marcus Everett & Temple of the Sea Born