a spell for breaking out of your comfort zone and into your Genius Zone with Gray Garland

a sneak peek into a guest grimoire

We’ve been loud and proud sigil spell creators (Digital Altars, anyone?) for many years at Holisticism HQ.

A sigil is, most simply, a visual spell.

Here’s how it works: While creating a sigil (this can be as lo-fi as symbol you draw, or as detailed as a piece of pottery or collage), you hold an intention for a desired outcome. This directed attention “charges” the visual spell, and the magic begins to do its work. Every time you catch sight of the sigil, the magic is reinforced.

Depending on your practice, you might prefer to use sigils and visual spells as a way to communicate with your unconscious mind. The abstraction of your intention allows the conscious mind to take a backseat, which ultimately means we can let something more intuitive takeover.

We publish a weekly visual spell in our Tuesday Portal, but we thought we’d query some of our favorite intuitive folks to come on the ‘stack and cast a visual spell for us.

MEET GRAY GARLAND

Gray (she/they) is an artist and alchemist teaching people to harness their own chaos and ride the lightning to a more creative, ecstatically alive future. Find them at over the Graynbow.

GRAY’S INTENTION

A spell to help you break out of your comfort zone and connect with your Genius by embodying your inner mad scientist.

GRAY’S INSPIRATION

Lately, I’ve been careening totally off the rails in my art practice; challenging myself to get messier, weirder, and more unhinged with the things I express and how I express them. I’ve been giving into nonsense and chaos and disorder. I’ve been tuning into the wild and wacky electric frequency of frequency itself — vibrating between the literal and the metaphorical.

You could say I’ve been leaning into my inner mad scientist (this message brought to you by my Gemini stellium) and I think you should do it, too.

Not only because this archetype — this undiscovered aspect of your Self — can be a gateway to making art that leaps off the page and poisons the mind of all the boring folks around you but because it can help you alchemize emotions and parts of you that resist being known directly. Your inner mad scientist is the key to making the mundane magickal and the magickal mundane. Your mad scientist knows how to take your raw materials and make a rollicking good time out of them.

For today’s spell, I want you to consider that your Genius may actually come from the most misunderstood and possibly unsexy parts of you. The parts that express in a way that makes your ego cringe.

“There are deeper strata of truth…and there is such a thing as poetic, ecstatic truth. It is mysterious and elusive, and can be reached only through fabrication and imagination and stylization.” — Werner Herzog

A RITUAL FOR CONNECTING WITH YOUR GENIUS BY EMBODYING YOUR INNER MAD SCIENTIST