Third Eye Vision: Why I Won't Inject My Forehead

The energetic cost of the anti-ageing trance to the feminine, and our power to truly see

Forgotten Elders by Autumn Skye

Last week a man I am very close to asked in conversation if I was ever tempted to quietly go and get an anti-ageing injection in my forehead. I considered my internal response (not for the first time, because: look where we have got to as a culture) and arrived at the same clear place I always do: No.

Around this inner No, which is really a Yes to so much of myself, I build an altar daily and I tend to it with ferocious devotion. And the more I feed it, the more beautiful and delicious my life as a woman becomes.

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A note: in this piece I do not condemn the sisters in our family, circle and community who take this path. It is close to all of us in one way or another; feeling beautiful happens in many ways and contexts. This is based on my own perception of and response to the normalising of aesthetic pharmaceuticals and the energetic cost of this, and the keys to deeper insight they can offer us around the power of the feminine in relation to maturing and softening deeper into self with unwavering acceptance.

…how can i leave before the party’s started

rehearsals begin at forty

i ripen with age

i do not come with an expiration date

and now

for the main event

curtains up at fifty

let’s begin the show

~ Rupi Kaur

When we buy into an anti-ageing culture, we live our life as women from the premise that its natural arc of maturation is ugly, flawed and shameful. We come to believe not only that the power and hard-earned wisdom of Crone is something we should delay arriving at but - crucially, beyond this - that if we can stay at Maiden forever, we will be happier, safer and live a life with less pain and suffering. Mother: a glitch to bounce back from. Crone, we can do without. We are in the dangerous habit of erasing wisdom.

That we have almost completely lost initiation culture in the West alongside this, with no universal ceremony or structure in which to honour the potent thresholds woman crosses as her womb journey develops along this arc (Girlhood-Menarche-Motherhood-Menopause) and the selves she lays to rest as she does so, only worsens this repression and displacement of feminine power.

I watch my three children growing up each day, learning more about who they are and the tapestry of life that they are part of, and not for one moment do I wish for them to grow back down. I may occasionally wish this for me: to briefly return to baby snuggles - but this is my own affectionate longing and not one reality can (or should) meet. I perceive that in a certain sense, male power run riot has done this for the feminine: keeping us young and nubile for its own enjoyment, and contorting reality to keep that surface level desire met over and over.

The fetishisation of youth, and the fear it profits off, are symptoms of a culture sick not only with a distorted masculine but also with its resultant gaping Mother wound: a wound that is only growing, tearing our Earth apart, and that will ironically cost us collectively the very existence we strive to secure by looking younger - if we do not work hard in this lifetime to heal it.

When we are in full attunement and surrender to Gaia’s organic rhythms - the non-negotiable sequences of life that create, sustain and end us - we are repairing this wound and we are walking with our destiny. Ouroboros is healthily eating its own tail. Indigenous cultures know this, and they work to preserve that attunement. When we start to think that we are better than her rhythms, that we can live above them and manipulate and outsmart them, we are perpetuating the wound and fragmenting the self - at great emotional, physical and spiritual cost. We cannot know belonging or wholeness: so we seek more external safety. Cut off from primal Mother energy, our root chakra weakens and we search outside ourselves for security. We panic, we edit, we reject, we contort; today we collectively freeze our faces.

The path of shamanism, which I’ve long been called to and am now fully committed to as I stride into my forties, offers a very clear understanding - and lived energetic experience - of the map of the chakras that populate and inform our luminous body, or our energetic field. Human energy maps from ancient cultures the world over converge on these seven spinning wheels from root to crown, from early Buddhist and Hindu references to the Hopi, Inka, Maya and other aboriginal cultures. In my training and practice I have come to understand and perceive in ever greater detail the information and qualities that each one holds - marrying the endocrine, neural and developmental maps of the human body beneath. Relevant here, and to our collective awakening at this time on earth, is the sixth chakra in front of the pituitary gland - the third eye: universally recognised as the energy centre through which we wake up to our transcendent nature, exist beyond the limitations of this finite body and restore connection to God / Goddess / Source / Spirit. It is concerned with intuition, inner vision and greater perception beyond the physical senses. This is a great resource: in a world so virtual and disorienting as ours, it is a vital centre of remembering. As women, reclaiming our intuition and clear-vision in a culture that has so effectively shut these powers down is both radical and rife with challenges. Third eye invites us to awaken further: industry floods it with a neurotoxic protein. The catch is, we must quickly come back for more. Ouroboros’s tail is chasing its mouth.

Like many other women I sit with, I often sense that the work of healthy and clear boundaries is great medicine for the feminine at this time. Part of this is getting clear on what is and isn’t welcome in our energetic field as well as our physical one. And while I am no stranger to surgery, pharmaceuticals and the lifelong urge to morph and shapeshift, I honour my maturing energetic field and the information life offers it. I bow down at the altar of my lined forehead, and those around me, to the maps of care and concern and sensitivity and concentration and victorious engagement-with-reality that mark them. When I meet an elder rooted in her power, I see the true radiance of her face and cannot help but linger in her field. Magic and knowledge live there. And I find that beyond my shamanic work, I close my eyes more and more each day - to see with the luminous one wide open between them, as the realm beyond this skin and bone reveals itself with ever greater beauty and love.

…Halleluiah, I’m sixty now, and even a little more,
and some days I feel I have wings.

~ Mary Oliver