The Jade Mask
The Jade Mask
The Reclaiming of Ancient Wisdom
There is a particular kind of knowing that arrives before we can articulate its meaning and significance.
It moves in the body first like a weight behind the sternum, a sudden sharpening of attention, the sense of something vast pressing close in the ordinary dark. Sometimes it comes in the hours between midnight and dawn, dressed in the strange grammar of dreams, carrying symbolic objects you have never held but somehow recognized them at a cellular level.
I had one of those dreams last night.
I woke from it at the waning gibbous moon in Capricorn, and even before I reached for my journal, I knew this one was mine to keep. It was a transmission. Something is moving through my dream body on behalf of all of us who have, at some point, felt we are reaching for something real in a world that keeps handing us beautiful replicas. A truth we are diverted away from, as it is concealed from our consciousness.
This is the dream, and what it is asking of me. And possibly — of you.
What I Dreamed at the Waning Gibbous Moon
The building was enormous. The kind that announces itself through sheer mass, long corridors, fluorescent light, the faint institutional hum of systems operating smoothly, efficiently, indifferently. Yet where I parked my car, the landscape was lush and green, with many enormous, stunningly beautiful trees surrounding the lot. It reminded me of one of my favorite hiking spots where giant willows, evergreens, oak, and more seem to stand like sentinels. While the building presented itself as a place of community commerce, everything about it felt oppressive and patriarchal in a deeply unnamed sense of the word: gatekept, hierarchical, the knowledge inside it controlled by those who had decided they were its rightful custodians. Armored in the sense that questioning the motives of those within would mean certain doom.
I arrived there with my son. We had come to recover something. Although we did not know it at first. Our mission was not evident until we entered the building. The atmosphere upon entering was museum-like. It looked and felt like an old colonial building meant to teach, yet it served to uphold the structure and vision of the larger building.
Inside the building, held behind the architecture of its authority, were two masks. One was blue-green jade. It was cool and alive and seemed faintly damp, as if it had been kept somewhere dark and growing, somewhere beneath the reach of the institution's fluorescent indifference and rigid control. It had wide eyes and teeth. It was ancient in the way that certain things are ancient: not decayed, but deepened. The other was similar, but in red. Both had been broken into pieces and pinned to a board for display.
I managed to take them. It was unusual and graceful. I was covert and cunning. If you know me IRL, you know I'm clumsy. I don’t see this kind of burglary ever being in my wheelhouse. I snatched the whole display, the board, and all the broken mask pieces still pinned to the board, still holding their shape. And we ran. At some point, my son wrapped the green mask in his hoodie to conceal it.
As we tried to escape with the masks, every exit we found was sealed or blocked. Corridors looped back. Doors locked. We found ourselves in a seemingly endless maze. When we finally got out, and we finally stood in the open air, I discovered a few strange things. First, the red mask was gone, the parking lot was flooded with salt water, and all the trees were gone. It felt like we ran out of time. We were so caught up in the maze of block exits and evading our oppressors that we didn’t get out in time. The car was there, but inaccessible, floating in corrosive salt water. It corroded every surface, making escape impossible.
We were standing in the open on a concrete retaining wall, still holding the mask, still wrapped in the hoodie. No way forward in sight. Staring at the corrosion and feeling the devastation that was thrust upon us.
The Language the Dream Was Speaking
I work from a Jungian foundation, and in that framework, a large institutional building is rarely just a building. It is the collective structure, the psyche of civilization, the architecture of inherited systems. Its rooms are the categories we have been taught to think about. Its corridors are the patterns we navigate because we learned them before we were old enough to question them. And the exits that keep sealing themselves and being blocked by others are the escape routes we imagine using someday. The ones that somehow never quite open.
The moon was waning in Capricorn this night, and the dream wore that astrology like a second skin. Capricorn rules institutions, hierarchies, the structures we build to manage the wild and the sacred into something governable. The waning phase is an invitation to release not violently, but honestly. To let what is already established appear visibly finished.
And what the dream was named, when finished, was the old vehicle. The salt water did not come to destroy the car out of malice. It revealed what corrosion had already been happening beneath the surface. The quiet erosion of every system that was never built to carry what we are trying to carry.
Masks are the living thing at the center of it all.
In indigenous and shamanic traditions across many cultures, the mask is not a disguise. It is amplification. To wear the mask is to channel an ancestor, a force, an animal spirit, a divine current. The mask holds power that the individual body alone cannot contain. When the dream showed me jade, not bone, not wood, not museum plastic, it was saying: this is not dead. This is not history. Jade is a precious stone. It endures. Whatever has been taken from us, it is not finished. It is waiting. It still has power.
What Was Taken — and Who Is Taking It Back
I want to name this carefully, because there is something important here that goes beyond my personal dream.
Over centuries, the living wisdom traditions of women, of indigenous peoples, of folk practitioners and hedge witches and root workers and kitchen healers, have been systematically stripped out of common hands. Criminalized first: the burning times were not metaphor; they were policy. Then, pathologized, the midwife became superstition, the herbalist became quackery, the dream-reader became delusion. Then, in a final irony that would be funny if it were not so expensive, commodified. The wisdom was cleaned up, extracted from its roots, dressed up aesthetically, and sold back to us at a markup.
This is what the building in the dream was doing. Not evil, exactly. Just institutional. Just efficient at extracting value from what it doesn't understand and doesn't need to understand to profit from. Uniformity and compliance.
And here we are, reaching into the wellness aisle, spell-working, buying crystals, and feeling that almost-but-not-quite. Experiencing a spiritual hunger that nothing in the mainstream marketplace can satisfy, because what we are hungry for was never in the marketplace to begin with.
The jade mask is not in the museum. It was never meant to be in the museum. It was meant to be worn!
Power is within you. In the dreams your body still sends you. In the herbs your hands are drawn to touch. In the rituals that feel cellular rather than ceremonial. In the knowing that arrives before language catches up.
We take back our power when we come together. In my dream, it was my son and I who were against the institution. We were too few, and yet we still managed to recover one of the two masks. As a collective, we can all reclaim more of our inheritance. Our soul's deep belonging.
A Ritual for Reclamation: Sitting with the Jade Mask
You do not need an elaborate setup for this. The simplest practices often move the most energy.
Find a few minutes when you will not be interrupted. Sit somewhere you feel held, like in a chair, on the floor, or reclining on some pillows. Choose what works best for your body. Place your hands in your lap, palms facing up. This is the posture of receiving, not performing.
Close your eyes or soften your gaze toward the ground. Take three slow breaths, and with each exhale, let the construct of our current systems around you dissolve. Let the corridors go. Let go of the expectations, the restrictions, the narratives that hold you down – release them. Let none of what confines you weigh you down.
When you feel stillness, ask yourself:
What is the jade mask I have been trying to carry out of the institution?
Let the answer arise without editing it. It might come as a word, an image, a sensation, a sudden memory, a color, or a word, or vision. It might come as grief. Let it.
Then ask:
What would it mean to stop running toward the exit and sit here, in the open, with this mask in my lap?
Not to give up. Not to stop reclaiming. But to stop needing the old vehicle, the old exit, the old system's permission to carry what is already yours.
Sit with this as long as you need. When you are ready, write down what came. Especially, the fragments. Fragments are how the jade mask arrives before it is whole.
A Tea for Dreaming and Remembering
If you want to support this work on a physical level, I recommend brewing a cup of my Lucid Dream tea before your practice or before sleep. One of the key ingredients in this tea is Mugwort.
Mugwort — Artemisia vulgaris — is one of the oldest dream herbs in the Western folk tradition. It has been used for centuries to enhance dream recall, deepen dream vividness, and support the kind of liminal awareness that lets us move between the seen and unseen worlds with more fluency. In traditional European herbalism, it was the herb of the traveling woman, the threshold plant, the one carried at the border between places.
Mugwort is not recommended during pregnancy. It is also a bitter herb, so if you can’t drink this herb, you can place it under your pillow or in a bath. Work with it gently and pay attention to how your system responds.
Order some Lucid Dream in my shop, TheWitchwoodTeahouse.com
The Threshold Has Always Been Here
The salt water in the dream was not the enemy. It was the release.
The building was not the enemy. It was the mirror.
And the jade mask, cool and ancient, still holding the breath of wherever it has been kept, is not something we have to fight our way out of an institution to reclaim. It is something we must stop pretending we do not already have.
The threshold is not a door in a maze. It is the moment when you decide to stop navigating the maze entirely and sit down in the middle of the room with the sacred thing in your hands and leave those who are ready to see you and find you.
That moment is available to you right now. It does not require another person's permission. It requires only the willingness to hold what is yours without hiding it.
If you are ready for the deeper work of community, of initiation, of a structured container that holds the reclamation, the practice, and the becoming, I am offering several opportunities to reclaim what has been hidden from you. Check out my Signature Programs page to learn more about what’s happening.
The jade mask is waiting. I am here waiting at the threshold to invite you in.
Blessings,
Leandra
Witch • Wortcunner • Priestess • Herbal Mystic • Author
