Mirrors are a tip top Goddess Accessory. Rhiannon has one, as does, Aphroditie, Nyx, Oshun, Amaterasu and just about every mermaid ever. As ever, with deities there is a deeper meaning to My journey with the goddess has really been centred around mirror work the last few months.
Mirrors and Mermaids were of course taken by the Christian Church to be a symbol of vanity and how terrible being vain is. Very occasionally you get mermaids with mirrors in old medieval churches to act as a warning – be vain, and you will become a soulless mermaid and go to hell! But that is completely missing the point of the Goddess’ sacred mirror and why mermaids are really always checking themselves out.
The Sacred Mirror
Mirrors are not just about loving acceptance of what you look like. It’s about loving acceptance of who you are as a person on the inside too, and about being brave enough to see what is really there – clearly seeing your actions, thoughts and beliefs good and bad, no matter how shit scary that might be.
Mirrors show us our dark side, the secrets we are hiding, the things that we don’t want to see but, in a mirror, we cannot hide from. I think this links in nicely with the practice of scrying in a black mirror – looking into the reflected darkness to see visions of the light.
There are lots of layers to mirror work, so I’ll lay out a couple biggies for you.
1. Seeing your physical self in a physical mirror
The reason why a lot of us women dislike mirrors is because they force us to face up to our own self hatred. How many of you avoid looking in mirrors because you don’t like your body or the way you look? This is our own self-hatred being shown to us by the Goddesses of the Mirror – it is reflecting back at us what we truly think about ourselves, in the hope that we can change it and transform it.
This is like Obvious Mirror Step One, but it’s still an incredibly difficult experience for many women to simply look in a mirror without feeling like shit and hating what they see – ie hating themselves. The mirror is showing you the need to think kindly of yourself, where you are wounded in your relationship with your body, and where you need to heal.
I want you to know that contrary to pop culture you are not supposed to look in a mirror and automatically hate what you see, and seeing good stuff looking back at you in the mirror does not mean that you are arrogant or narcissistic. At. All. Ever. No.
2. Seeing yourself in the mirror of those around you
This is when you see a mirror of yourself in other people. This can either be in a wonderful way – if someone does something kind and wonderful that really moves you, it’s because you also have the capacity to be that kind and wonderful. You are seeing a mirror of a part of yourself in them. That’s not saying that if you dig Mother Teresa then you must be Mother Teresa mk 2: it means there are Mother Teresa-ish aspects to you and your personality. Or to put it a hippy way, there are parts of you that vibrate the same way or align with Mother Teresa’s Badassity. It’s kind of lovely really, because if the awesome stuff you recognise in others is really the potential and saplings of that same awesome stuff in yourself, how limitless and awesome must you be?
On the flip side of course, if you see something negative in others or in a situation that really affects you or triggers you, then that is often a fear or a part of yourself that is being mirrored back to you. Say when you were a kid you were always late for everything and you were made to feel awful about it, and nowadays you are a timekeeping nut and flip off the handle when other people are a minute or two late to meet you. You are seeing that part of yourself, the part that has the potential to be always late and that you are so scared of becoming again, in those other people.
This happened in an extreme version to me recently. Someone close to me shared private deets about my training in Glastonbury to become a Priestess of Avalon to people I did not wish to know about it in a very public place, and also kind of bashed the community I was involved in a little too.
Now I went BEZERK. Seriously, seriously shaking and crying with rage all day, in a way I have only ever done once or twice before during my parents’ messy and ungraceful divorce. I literally went all out-seeing-red-shouting-slamming-doors-crazy, in a way that I seriously do not normally do ever.
You know what one of my biggest fears is, and the reason I am not more open about my spirituality to general everyday peeps? Because I am terrified that they will make fun of me and discount me as a stupid, flakey hippy person and won’t take anything I do seriously because of it.
So, literally, that is what I saw in that sharing of my secret life. I saw things that were not there to the extent I seriously thought they were when I read it. I totally, spectacularly over-reacted to the situation, because it was mirroring my deepest fears back to me.
It’s kinda embarrassing thinking about it.
I’m not saying it’s OK to go around publically sharing private stuff about your friends and then bashing it, because hells no that is patently and obviously not OK. The situation deffo deserved a reaction, but definitely not the all out crazy I responded with.
(And I did see it and I apologised for it. When we are walking this Priestessfull, imminent-Goddess path, it is so, so important to see clearly and be prepared to take responsibility for your actions, good and bad, like a grown up.)
Now, you don’t need to feel like crap about this. It’s just a part of life and how we learn. Now we know about it, we can see it as a very human learning experience deserving of compassion rather than an act of shittiness. And on the other side you come out stronger. I know now that if people think I am a douchy flakey hippy for being a Priestess, that’s their deal and not mine, because I know who I am and I am cool with it, and what they think is never, ever going to stop me. Boom.
3. Other people using you as their mirror
Just as you see your shit in other people, other people see their shit in you.
This is brilliant, as most of the time if people have a strong reaction to you, then it usually means that that reaction has absolutely nothing to do with you. And. That. Is. Awesome.
You get this a lot in times of great stress when people fly off the handle at you. I was involved in an utterly abysmally mismanaged theatre show this year, cast members being bullied, dates changing last minute, lies about all sorts, people not getting paid etc. and when the director/manager asked me to change a whole group choreo with less than 24 hrs notice last minute and I said no because I was travelling all day, she flipped out on me and called me all manner of horrible stuff and accused me of all kinds of things that were incredibly hurtful to read.
Now, I was a huge mess after this and couldn’t believe what this person “thought of me” and threatened me with. I was completely upset and stressed out, crying all over the shop and terrified that I was this horrible person she said I was. I couldn’t look at it objectively till a couple of days later, when I went through the list of stuff she had charged at me and truly asked myself, is this true? And the answer to 99% of it was, no, it’s not true. But it is completely true of her. Literally every charge she laid at me was an aspect of herself she was refusing to look at. It was so obvious, it was just incredible. And as soon as I saw that, I realised that all this drama wasn’t about me, I was just her mirror.
It’s happened a couple more times since then were I have really clearly seen that the stuff others were charging me with was their mirror rather than a real issue of my own.
This means you can really truly be free from what other people think of you, as most of the time, what other people think of you is really what they think of themselves. This is incredible. How would you feel if suddenly you didn’t have to worry about what other people thought of you ever again?
Of course, don’t be a dick about it. If you boss says “It makes me MAD when you get your work into me late, do you even want this job?” or “You were really rude when you told my girlfriend she had a face like a squashed pug last night”, then for gods sake start getting your work in on time and stop acting like such an asshole. Not everything will be a mirror and you have to be alert to that.
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The practice is to look at what’s being mirrored and what you are mirroring and be prepared to honestly answer the question, where is the truth in that? It means you have a responsibility to be compassionate in a world full of people seeing their crap reflected back at them everywhere (including you) and it also means knowing that saying “You know that all this stuff you just shouted at me is just a mirror of your own projections of fear, right?” is totally never going to work. It means taking responsibility for your reactions to your own mirroring like a grown ass human being, being able to say “I’m sorry, I reacted so strongly to x because of my fear of y” and it also means honouring yourself enough not to discount every reaction as a mirror from your imagination: sometimes stuff will be just mirrored shit you saw and that’s it, and often stuff will be mirrored shit with an accompanying real world change to be done and communicated when you calm down a bit.