The Copper Ka’kari

~ my journey from pain to pleasure ~

The Prophecy of Pain

In 2019 I read a story that felt like a prophecy.

Back then, I was beginning what unfolded into 7 years of being edged by my own wild, untapped power. But this was no edge of pleasure to surf and sink into.

This was frustration born of sensing, feeling, knowing that I had power, capacity, and strength nestled deep inside of me, somewhere, trapped, hidden, locked away…

Blocked, veiled, constricted.

During my psychedelic descents, I began seeing a noxious-feeling, pulsing malignantly black mass that across journeys, swelled and spread within my body.

As the years stretched on and bled together, this black mass broke down into a muddy-brown sludge that gelled into molasses during everyday life, but would thin towards water after ingesting psychedelics and sweep through my body, filling me with a soul-deep ache for expulsion, for purgation, that I couldn’t achieve.

The frustration of not understanding where this mass-turned-sludge came from is tattooed into my marrow—as is the desperation that would bubble up when the sludge liquefied and flowed through my body, and my oozing hopelessness.

In the story that felt like a prophecy, there are seven ka’kari: metallic orbs that melt down to cover the body of the bearer, giving them power over a specific element.

Silver owns metals. Red is the boss of fire. White allows the bearer to create glamours. Brown rules the earth. Green leads plant life. Blue governs water.

Together, these ka’kari are known as “the six angels of light.”

The seventh, their superior, is the black, “standing guard in the darkness,” offering immortality, among other special abilities and capacities that dwarf the others.

Bonding with a ka’kari requires being born with the biological capacity for channeling this world’s magic, as well as the particular psychological blueprint that these sentient orbs quietly feel and find their way through the world towards.

Bonding with a ka’kari is one thing… using a ka’kari well is another challenge.

When the black bonded with Kylar, the main character, he struggled for a loooong time to access and wield the power he’d been privileged to receive. That’s when the story began reading like a personal prophecy: power trapped within, unable to flow.

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The Burning Blade

For 7 years I carried the ever-growing ache, weight, and pressure of blocked energy.

For 7 years stuck, stagnant energy festered and rotted, seeping into my marrow.

For 7 years, my body, mind, and life contorted around the energetic blockages—leaking out sideways in obsessive focus with a kink for collapse, dismissive-avoidant attachments, and an immense amount of physical pain.

At the peak of my pain’s strength, I couldn’t walk to the end of my street and back without freeing the white-hot burning blade to knife through me for hours.

Any movement that wasn’t carefully calculated and slowly executed slid the burning blade deeper. Sitting for a moment too long brought a swift descent into torture.

Sex, a brief emotional balm, was more pain than pleasure.

My energy was depressed, depressed, depressed.

My mood was black, black, black.

In the beginning, I perceived the pain as a physical problem, perhaps the result of a lifetime of athletics—hockey, soccer, bodybuilding, boxing—catching up to me.

I saw doctors, physiotherapists, and acupuncturists. I took x-rays, had blood work done, and received intramuscular stimulation. I tried yoga and pilates. I leaned on my knowledge of the body from my years as a personal trainer and nutrition coach...

Aaand nothing.

Zip. Zilch. Nada.

The doctors had no answers.

The physios told me to keep doing their silly exercises.

Acupuncture offered exhales of relief, but never resolution.

Even the gentlest of yoga and pilates flows tipped me into spikes of pain.

I lost trust in my body.

I lost hope for a life that didn’t hurt.

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Witnessing Death

Eventually, my psychedelic explorations led to books like Françoise Bourzat’s Consciousness Medicine and Bessel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score.

And so bloomed the realization that perhaps the pain’s origin wasn’t physical…

Perhaps my mind was making me sick.

But alas, even armed with this new perspective and the beginnings of what’s since evolved into highly attuned psycho-somatic awareness, nothing changed, for years.

I had new insight and perspective, but I didn’t know how to proceed. Nor did I have the capacity or strength to enact change—and a lifetime of self-caretaking made asking for help almost as painful as kissing the white-hot blade itself.

So I continued to soak in my own suffering.

I carried on repressing my deepest desires.

I suffocated my truths in pleasing lies.

When I looked in the mirror, I saw black, black, black.

I saw myself dying.

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The Homeward Path

In time, I began to see and understand the sources of the pain that had knotted themselves deeply and tightly throughout my body, constricting my energy flow:

The complete burning of my family’s home. A heartbreak I didn’t know how to let go of. A business that generated income but drained joy and fulfillment. A relationship that seemed a great fit on the surface, but was misaligned from the beginning…

Plus all the other little misalignments that I ignored, truths buried in service of keeping the peace, and lies I spoon-fed myself about who I was and what I wanted.

No wonder I saw a tumour-esque mass deep within.

No wonder the mass collapsed under its own weight.

No wonder I was in so much fucking pain—emotional manifesting as physical.

Finally beginning to understand my pain was a double-edged blade.

I was relieved to be making sense of what I was experiencing…

Which meant I was staring down the barrel of processing deep trauma, reconciling a long-calcified heartbreak, finding a new way of earning a living from fulfilling sources, addressing the incoherent relationship I was in, and integrating my buried desires.

So I kept waving my dismissive-avoidant flag furiously… but beneath the surface, quietly, almost imperceptibly, I began softening. Positive momentum began appearing in flecks, glimmers, and shards.

Then, after two years of avoiding the gym from fear of pain, I began the tedious, meandering, deeply uncomfortable process of learning to move again—and rebuilding all the muscle, strength, and capacity I’d lost while wallowing on my belly.

The psycho-somatic, psychedelic, and indigenous knowledge I’d continued building in the background began influencing my beliefs, decisions, and actions. Not only in how I tended these traumas, wounds, and misalignments, but my daily life approach.

I began being able to walk a little bit further, receiving a little less pain in return.

I let my business die a natural death, and didn’t rush to build something new.

I allowed my relationship to collapse, and the space created to consume me.

In the stillness born from releasing everything I once clung to…

The path home began materializing through the fog.

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Return to Pleasure

My energy, my power, didn’t begin flowing all at once.

Instead, easing into motion like a frozen river thawing in spring.

I kept my life as empty as I could. I removed every demand on my time and energy that wasn’t essential. I chose not only to earn by far the least I’d ever earned in my adult life indefinitely, but also to not do anything about the contraction.

I knew keeping my life empty for as long as necessary was more important than my bank balance—an intuitive knowing that demanded the purest trust I’ve ever known.

This wasn’t a decision born of retreat, but in preparation for rebirth.

In the stillness, I tended my body on my yoga mat, in the gym, in the trees.

I soothed my mind with journaling, psychedelics, and narrative therapy.

I released frozen wounds, adopted values, old beliefs, and worn identities.

I unboxed my desires, and made space for them to bloom into my life.

I chose and integrated my ideal baseline emotional state—mischievousness.

I consciously cultivated a new energy field and way of showing up in + meeting the world: an embodied, deliberate execution of “your vibe attracts your tribe.”

I wove myself a new life philosophy from truth, play, and pleasure. From embodiment, rhythm, and desire. From devotion, intuition, and coherence.

The more I released, the more space I made, the more I built myself new.

Slowly but surely, I found myself enjoying life again.

The pain I once believed I was saddled with forever faded into memory. The desires I’d once shoved into a box began blooming through my everyday life of their own accord. New, deeper, and more aligned connections began emerging into my life.

The mirror that once reflected death now shines with flame.

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The Copper Ka’kari

In the end, the ka’kari that found me was not black, but copper, tucked away in a rock and gem shop I’d driven past hundreds of times over twenty years of living nearby but never went in—only entering now when looking for a gift for my sister.

I’ve long had a love affair with copper tones, their subtle, understated gorgeous sparkly sheen weaving through my life: my waterbottle, lighter, keys, and piercings.

But what I didn’t know when I picked up this 560 gram orb was how dense copper is, or how incredibly fucking pleasurable and soothing holding this orb would be.

Nor did I expect to immediately think, “Oh…. this is how I make people feel.”

All my life people have reflected how I’m grounding, soothing, and calming to be around. In Grade 7 we had assigned desks, and my teacher always sat me amongst the hyperactive and attention-disordered kids because she noticed they acted out less. I’ve been drawn into leadership roles without seeking them many times.

So I’d understood my nervous system’s effect conceptually, but never embodied it…

Not until the copper ka’kari found me, at the end of a year of collapse and rebirth.

The time is only now, when energy flows around and through me without the slightest obstruction or snag, that I could feel the copper ka’kari’s silent summons.

With love from the fog,

~ Alexander, Flamebearer of Emberbrook

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