The Mirror & The War Within
This past week felt heavier to carry. The air thick with catastrophe, separation, grief, and the flood of unprocessed emotions seeking somewhere to land. I felt it in my own body and in the bodies of my clients. In the midst of it all, a mirror wobbled, almost falling, and in that moment something stirred. An old superstition rose: break the mirror, seven years of bad luck. Yet I wondered if this was never misfortune at all, but a fragment of an older truth. Perhaps we have been sold lies that veiled the deeper stories , stories left behind for us like keys, waiting to be remembered.
Everywhere we turn, we hear whispers of a ‘spiritual war’. From different groups, different traditions, different tongues, the same words: that light and dark are colliding, that humanity stands at a precipice. And yet as I sat with it, I felt the mirror whisper a different revelation. Perhaps this war is not out there at all. Perhaps it is within us. The war with our shadows, our projections, the reflections we see mirrored back through the world around us.
The ancients told us this through prophecy and myth.
Inanna descended through seven gates, stripped of crown, voice, heart, womb, and dignity until nothing was left but her nakedness before her shadow.
Isis pieced Osiris back together, reminding us that what has been shattered can be re-membered through love.
Jesus walked the seven days of his Passion, surrendering robe, crown, body, and life itself, before rising renewed.
Mary Magdalene remained through the darkness of the tomb, and because she did not turn away, she was the first to witness resurrection.
Mary the Mother carried seven sorrows, each one breaking her open to a love that could hold the unbearable.
Persephone descended to the underworld and returned again, her rhythm becoming the cycle of the seasons, death and rebirth woven into life itself.
Different lands. Different names. The same pattern. Every ascent requires descent. Every crown must be surrendered before it can be worn again. The superstition of seven years of bad luck may be no curse at all, but the echo of this deeper rhythm: seven gates, seven sorrows, seven days, seven years of shedding and initiation before renewal.
We live in a time when these initiations are returning, loud and unavoidable. They come as heartbreak, illness, loss, rebirth, and the heaviness of weeks like this one. They come as the sense that the world is collapsing, when perhaps what is collapsing are the illusions themselves.
Prophecy called it purification.
Cycles call it the turning of the age.
We call it a war. But the true battle is the one within, the choice between fear and love, truth and illusion, wholeness and fragmentation.
The way forward is not to fight harder, but to remember how to descend. To welcome the initiation instead of armouring against it. To practice discernment, knowing which embers need courage to flame and which need water to soothe. To return to embodiment, to anchor in body, in womb, in earth, so we can feel instead of flee.
This is the feminine rising, not polished, not untouchable, but deeply human. Willing to strip back the masks, to be witnessed by the earth, to remember that being raw, vulnerable, feeling, and flawed is not our curse but our crown.
So I ask you now, as I asked myself this week: what mirror in your life is asking to break? What armour is ready to be laid down? Which gate are you standing before?
The myths and prophecies were never meant to be forgotten. They were left as fragments, maps, and mirrors to remind us that descent is not the end but the doorway. Here lies the spiral, the endless becoming.
Alive in everything around us. To descend is to ascend.
Perhaps this war is not out there, but within each of us. And perhaps the victory, again and again, is love.