Are You Harnessing the Power of the Portal?
A friend shared a TicTok video with me today discussing the three “portal days” in December. According to the video, the portal days in the month of December 2022 are the 2nd, 12th, and 22nd. Upon further investigation, I discovered that the Mayan astrological calendar lists the portal days of the same month as the 1st, 17th, 14th, 15th, 22nd, and 26th (Both list the 22nd so that’s probably a doozie). There are portal days for each month.
According to experts on such things, portal days are when the barrier between the seen and the unseen worlds is thinner than usual. It is a day when galactic portals are opening up in the universe. The energy produced by these galactic shifts can cause you to feel emotional or sensitive. It can bring old hurts to the surface.
To be in alignment with these days, think about cleansing and renewal. Focus on your inner world by meditating and/or praying. It is a time for listening to your inner knowing. It is also perhaps the perfect day for writing about energetic portals.
Before embarking on a journey of exploration and discovery that began in earnest in August 2022, I wouldn’t have paid much attention to something as slippery-sounding as a portal day. My seemingly rational, western mind, firmly grounded in “reality,” would have dismissed such a term or idea; that a day that’s numerically interesting on the calendar would be more special than any other day of the year.
But that was the old me.
I have experienced people and events recently that have changed some of my core beliefs about the nature of reality. Granted, my beliefs were about as solid as an origami crane to begin with. Even as a teenager, I’ve always known in my bones that the universe is a big and mysterious place, and most knowledge is unknowable and even unreachable to most people.
And to tell you the truth, the older I get, the less I trust the body of knowledge that came out of my own, western culture. My instincts have always whispered warnings about believing too firmly in anything, especially knowledge derived from a culture so obviously dominated by a power structure that suppresses and delegitimizes half the population for being women and the rest of the world for being different. I don’t think western knowledge and beliefs are wrong, per se. I think they are woefully incomplete and unbalanced.
The patriarchy taints everything, even science.
The past few months have given me the time and opportunity to give more thought and attention to these matters. What brings me to the truth about a thing and how do I know who or what to believe? After much reading, meditating, soul-searching, journaling, and frankly, plant medicine, I have come to realize that, although science is a useful tool, it cannot replace inner knowing. It cannot accurately explain instinct.
There are invisible, powerful forces at work not yet understood. Although western science is beginning to investigate and sometimes grasp what ancient civilizations have known for thousands of years.
There are two truths regarding the basic nature of reality that I now fully embrace. One-everything is made of energy, and two-this energy works in ways most humans don’t understand. There’s a lot of room for what I like to call magic in those two truths. And by magic, I don’t mean the stuff one learns at Hogwarts. What I mean and want to convey is how truly magical everything actually is.
Even when it comes to the magical energy of doorways. Maybe especially doorways.
The oldest civilizations in the world have a name for this energy, this universal life force. In India, it is called prana (and they also insist that this energy is feminine, but that’s another day and another post), and in China, it’s called chi. Western, modern thinking and science span about 500 years (The general consensus is that the modern scientific age began during the Renaissance). The cultures of India and China are ten times older-about 5,000 years. Who would you trust more to give you information about the nature of reality-a five-year-old or a 50-year-old?
According to both of these ancient cultures and the belief systems stemming from them, understanding how to harness and utilize this energy can lead to a happy and healthy life.
If a portal is a place through which energy moves, perhaps it would behoove us to pay more attention to them, to keep our eye on the door, so to speak. There exist both physical and energetic doorways, the latter being invisible, but certainly not less important. I have heard said that the invisible things are the most important things. It is also obviously true that most reality is not visible to the naked eye, a truth any quantum physicist can affirm. This means that we cannot see nor are we aware of the most and the most important reality in the universe.
This seems like a crucial and oft-forgotten detail.
According to Merriam-Webster, the first definition of a portal is a “Door, Entrance, especially a grand or imposing one.” More interesting is the fourth definition on the list, which reads, “a communicating part or area of an organism, specifically: the point at which something (such as a pathogen) enters the body.” The definition suggests that portals are openings in organisms (bodies of energy) for both the negative and the positive.
Most of us are very aware of the energy coming into our “home portal,” commonly referred to as the front door. We decorate these portals for the holidays and seasons. We only allow people we know and trust to walk through them. We take our shoes off before we pass through or immediately after (a few of us take our bras off first). Some of us save the front portal for special occasions, opting instead for the side entrance for everyday comings and goings.
The magic of a doorway is such that we often, very often, forget what we were just thinking or where we were headed after we walk through one. We’ve all done that. There is a reason why you head into another room with a clear idea in your mind of why you’re going there, only to completely forget once you walk from one room to the next.
Walking through a portal is an energetic experience that has a profound effect on us. The simple act of passing through a doorway can wipe the slate clean, sometimes to our chagrin.
So when I hear there are portal days based on the numbers on a calendar or on the position of the planets, I sit up and listen. Portals are important, after all. I investigate. I don’t think about it. Instead, I observe how it sits in my body, a much wiser entity than my mind. I ask my Self with the big “S,” that part of me that knows things beyond time and space.
Are portal days real? Do they exist?
My inner knowing tells me it’s within the realm of possibility and probably likely, but my mind doesn’t know for absolute certainty.
I think you know which part of me I trust more.
I took all the doorway photos while strolling to the coffee shop where I wrote this piece, becoming increasingly inspired as I took them, in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. San Miguel is known for having a copious amount of exquisite front entrances. Magical portals are everywhere here!
