La Chiva is a magical being who is experiencing their place in this world in the moment.
It’s Time To Meet La Chiva
Neo-pseudo Shaman, Anarchist Queer, Expressionist Spiritual Artisan, Witch and Diviner (They/Them/It)
I, La Chiva was born in the middle of the so-called united states-of-somebody-else’s america; and I grew up white and middle class, and queer. As a young queer kid I was told that I was possessed by a daemon. My queerness or so-called ‘same sex desire,’ my feminine identifications (all of it goes together, really); was the sign of daemonic possession.
Now, well…
La Chiva Is the Daemon in Me and I am La Chiva.
I moved to New York City, where I made experimental performance pieces, taught preschool, attended some universities (BA Art History/Early Childhood studies, MSW Social Work); took a lot of dance and yoga classes; engaged in psychotherapy; provided psychotherapy to others; lived in an ashram and took a lot of drugs and alcohol; not necessarily in that order, but sometimes all of it at once, sometimes even all on the same day!
I have trained in psychotherapy/psychoanalysis, social work and art, and I am a self-taught mystical spiritual artisan. I have worked for the past 20+ years in some of the poorest and most diverse communities in both NYC and London (Divided Kingdom); in jails, family centres, psychiatric hospitals and the court system.
When I turned 30 and moved to England, I attended some more universities (MA performance art, MA psychosocial studies), did more drugs and drinking; engaged in 10+ years of Jungian psychoanalysis; went to a lot of recovery meetings; did more work helping the government control its poor and marginalised people; made more performance art pieces, and adopted a child. Again, not necessarily in that order, but sometimes all at once and/or all on the same day!
After I became a parent to a dependent human child through bureaucratic legal processes of adoption; and once I reached middle age, I became disillusioned with both addiction and the State; and I came to the conclusion that contemporary capitalist culture and the neo-liberal institutions that support it are all a bunch of bullshit. And that goes as well for many or most of the charitable and clinical institutions that are meant to support people, but usually just end up categorizing, blaming and basically pushing them around, if not plainly abusing them outright.
So I started reading Tarot cards professionally and getting up to my old performance art theatrics; this time infused with a deeper spiritual commitment to the actual magic of ecstatic ritual performance as a tool for healing. Because, after all – along with the love of my Sasquatch-Rhinoceros-Child – it was the incorporation of faith in ancestral and household magic, and the soul wisdom gleaned via the magical hermeneutics of Divination, that ultimately saved me from addiction and suicide.
Magic is healing and healing is magic; caring for each other is craft, like making something with your hands. Making something with your hands is healing; taking care of yourself and the collective, through making things with your hands, your heart, your mind and the materials of your life story; is magic.
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