Guest Blog Post: Softening Into the Binds by Fenn Priest

If there’s something a witch loves, it’s a liminal space: that magical place where edges blur, complexity deepens, and where the harshness of black & white thinking softens into endless variations of gray. A witch is vast, binaries cannot contain them.

These in-between places, fertile and rich with possibility, are where we can hold multiple truths at once, and where we can imagine futures that our eyes haven’t seen but where our wild souls know they belong. 

You know what an oppressed, traumatized nervous system hates? Complexity. Possibility. It avoids the unknown like the plague. What it wants–what it demands–is familiarity, predictability, and reliability. The kind of risk that our souls long and are built for is terrifying to the soft animal of our bodies, for whom there has never been such a thing as comfort and, therefore, no such thing as safety or rest.

And so, while the soft animal of our bodies are out here traumatized as fuck by systems of oppression and resisting any venture into the unknown, our wild witch soul languishes. It’s deeply painful for a witch to feel divided from within herself because she is made from the mud and bone of the earth and her soul was forged to be in relationship with everything.

How do we world-changing witches honor the competing needs of our wild souls AND our nervous systems at the same time? 

Here’s what we're not gonna do: we’re not gonna do what we’ve always done until now, which is to push, coerce, bully, extract from, and threaten the soft animal of our bodies. We renounce the tools of the empire. We’re gonna make some fucking magic instead.

We’re gonna get really good at edging—that is, we are going to practice working with the edges of our discomfort and learn to soften and surrender into them. We’re gonna lean into the liminal and expand our capacity for complexity by creating conditions in which the soft animal of our bodies can choose to experiment with the shenanigans and escapades the wild soul longs for.

I myself have lived in the erotic tension between desire and capacity for most of my life. My wild Sagittarius sun is a restless seeker that burns for change and expansion, and the Taurus-ass, burnt-out soft animal of my Autistic body wants to stay the fuck home under a blanket listening to the same Taylor Swift playlist & watching Girls again for the millionth time.

I couldn’t find any framework anywhere that could help me name and be in relationship with this bind, so I created my own, a system of nervous system magic for expanding our capacity for complexity called Somatic Spellwork.

My background is in adaptive and restorative yoga and yoga therapy, and while I no longer teach yoga or call myself a yoga teacher, my 15 years of study of yogic philosophy, subtle anatomy, and Ayurveda, as well as countless hours I spent in classrooms creating conditions in which the bodies of my students could soften and feel held, have formed the foundation that still informs my work today.

My favorite thing to teach was Yin yoga, a style of practice in which the body stays close to the ground—almost all poses are seated, reclined, or supine—and poses are held for several minutes in order to nourish the joints and move the subtle energy of the body.

With Yin yoga I learned to work with the edges of my discomfort safely by recruiting the support of the earth before coming into the shape, and waiting to get a yes from my body before attempting to go deeper. I learned to gauge when to lean into the edge of discomfort and when to back off in the same way that you know the difference between bathwater that is gonna scald your ass and bathwater that’s only a little bit too hot and will only sting for a moment before feeling sooooo good.

While Yin yoga taught me how to work with the edges of discomfort from a somatic and energetic lens, it is the archetype of The Hanged One that taught me how to soften and stay with the discomfort from an emotional and spiritual lens.

The lesson the Hanged One teaches is this: It is an inescapable fact that, at some time in our life, we’ll find ourselves feeling bound, stuck, and flipped upside down, either by outer circumstances, inner disturbances, or more likely a delicious cocktail of both. That what used to be the erotic tension between our capacity and our desire will reach an untenable fever pitch that’s going to send us desperate and scrambling for a solution.

The Hanged One teaches that there comes a point when working as hard as you can is no longer possible and when you will be forced to finally admit that there is no other option than to learn to soften so that you can, at long last, surrender. And that there is a way to do that without causing your nervous system to freak the entire fuck out.

It goes like this: first, you connect with that which holds you, which gravity is always doing, so we can start there. Then you find an appropriate edge, which you will know like bathwater that’s almost-but-not-quite too hot. There, you pause, and you ask, Is more ok? Can we explore deeper? If you hear a yes, then you begin to soften against and around the edge of discomfort. And then you stay for a while. Then you release and repeat over and over until your soft animal learns that it won’t ever feel a certain way forever and so it’s ok to agree to be scared for a little bit because it’s gonna be so fucking cool after and it’s worth the risk of letting themself love what they love.

A witch isn’t scared of edges. They don't fear discomfort–they thrive on it, because their business is magic, and magic means growth and change and transformation, all of which comes with its inevitable share of discomfort. They ARE magic, and as such, are spacious enough to hold all of their multitudes. A witch is made for the whole world.

Want to get good at edging? I’m teaching a workshop with Seagrape Apothecary called Softening Into The Binds on November 8th at 12pm-2pm PST. Until October 3rd, you can get early bird tickets for $49.87, after which tickets will go up to a sliding scale of $60.54 up to $81.88.