James Storrar

Mapping the Spiral — A Living Guide How to Use This Guide This is not coursework. It is ceremony. • 💭 Return to Lesson One when relapse feels shameful. • 📜 Revisit Lesson Two when you need to translate habit into symbol. • 🌫 Sit with Lesson Three when emotion feels elusive or frozen. • 🧱 Walk through Lesson Four when defense overtakes presence. • 🌊 Breathe with Lesson Five when silence is the only truth. Let this guide shift with you. It is not static. Each image, each line, is a threshold waiting to be crossed again. This course does not teach recovery. It companions it. Under each lesson there is a link that takes you to an image for helping with contemplation and reflection. Use the images and supporting text as follows: • Click the bold red station link beneath each lesson to open the image. • Spend 1–2 minutes gazing at the visual—let its shapes and tones soak in. • Read the accompanying text line by line, pausing on any phrase that resonates. • Notice how image and words converse; journal whatever arises. • Return once more to the image and text after your exercises to observe what’s shifted © EiE training 2025 Mapping the Spiral — A Living Guide Lesson One: Contemplation — The Fog Between Knowing and Doing You opened with rupture. Recovery was reframed not as ascent but as ritual return— honouring relapse not as failure but as invitation. The spiral became sacred geometry: movement that does not erase repetition. • Morning Fog Meditation Sit quietly as dawn light fills the room. Notice thoughts drifting like mist, neither tracing nor dismissing them. Let ambivalence breathe. • Journaling Contradictions Write two columns: what you know and what you doubt. Ask, “How can these coexist?” Record the questions that arise. • Breath as Threshold Use a simple inhale–pause–exhale cycle to navigate inner tension. Each pause is a door into depth. Jump to Mythos Station: Portal It begins in shadow—a tunnel of worn stone, damp with the breath of centuries. On the other side, light spills into a grazing field, indifferent yet welcoming. Sheep blur the border between memory and motion. Above, sky stretches like a forgotten song. This is not a destination. It is a question. The tunnel does not conceal. It cradles. It frames the silence before choice, the inhale before agency. Portal is a threshold not of architecture, but of initiation. It does not ask you to walk—it asks whether you are ready to feel. The edges hold—tone against tone, darkness pressed into light—and inside the image, presence settles without urgency. You are not entering. You are unfolding. © EiE training 2025 Mapping the Spiral — A Living Guide Lesson Two: Preparation — The Map Is Not the Journey, But It Begins Addiction spoke through symbols—loop, hunger, fog. You reframed it not as moral lapse or diagnosis but as mythic initiation. The practitioner became witness, apprentice, translator of ritual language. • Drawing Your Spiral Map On paper or in clay, sketch a winding path. Mark touchpoints where desire flares and where calm returns. Label edges with images that resonate. • Choosing Your Object Select a stone, feather, or coin to hold your intention. Each time you touch it, recall the promise you made. • Translating Habit into Symbol Name one repeated urge and assign it a color or shape. Keep that symbol visible as a reminder of what calls you. Mythos Station: River It does not rush—it remembers. The surface churns with quiet insistence, slipping beneath the geometry of wire and bridge. The water moves, but the rhythm is ancient. It’s the pulse of transition, not urgency. A current that knows every collapse and every convergence. In River, the landscape doesn’t guide—it absorbs. Sky glows above, blurred with distance, while the dark edges trace where motion meets tension. You feel the strain in every frame, as though the photograph itself has exhaled mid-stream. This is not travel. It is © EiE training 2025 Mapping the Spiral — A Living Guide transformation. The image holds a moment between agency and surrender, where movement carries without asking, and the only resistance is in the texture of memory. The river speaks in tones, soft but unrelenting. It invites reflection, not navigation. In this station of the mythos, change isn’t decided—it is endured. © EiE training 2025