The Lilith Academy
Shadow Work For The Western Woman
Meet Chriselda Pacheco
Origin Story
A child-free on purpose, never married Gen X'er who was raised by her WWII grandparents on the west side of San Antonio, Texas, Chriselda is the first in her immediate family to get a high school diploma or college degree. After many years of political organizing in her hometown and college campus, Chriselda graduated with a degree in English & Communications then landed a prestigious internship at Mother Jones Magazine in San Francisco, California. This is where a fork in the road of her destiny showed up.
Little did she know the adventurous life that awaited her.
In The Wild:
20 Years of Sex Work
Defying all intersections of cultural convention, I saw that the path toward journalism was not for me. I entered that work force right at the time of the invention of the ipod while living in San Fransisco. There is where I discovered that the real story of who we are was playing out in the dingy dark spaces of strip clubs. The true, unfiltered story of TRUTH wasn't in journalism. It was amongst the misfits, whores, harlots and those discarded by culture.
It was better to LIVE the story than to report on it.
When I decided to take the B-sides path, I told myself it would be okay as long as I made something of it later in my life.
Turning my whole life into my own field work, all that I am creating now is my Magum Opus: the distillation, synthesis and transmutation of all these raw materials of my acutely observed direct experience as a naked warrior on the front lines of culture wars for 20 years.
Consecration
In the summer of 2014, I was consecrated as a Gnostic Priestess at the Ancient Spanish Monastery in Miami, Florida. To be honest, I never knew there was such a thing as a Priestess or "initiation". I did not know what the occult was because I was too busy LIVING it to observe it.
This initiation found me, I did not seek it out.
To me, this is the most important ceremony I've ever had the honor to be a part of. Because unlike a college degree, this was an acknolwedgment of my soul's journey and how far it had come through many trials and tribulations.
On To the Great Work
There is always more than meets the eye.
Quantum science has even quantified that for us.
The Great Work is to the alchemist, the soul's journey towards what Carl Jung calls individuation. In other words, it is the ONLY and MOST important work of life --- to rediscover the true Self that has been relegated to the hinterlands of shadows. The True Self gets in the way of the gods of the machine. Their goal: to use us as energy sources. To keep us going for just long enough for them to continue to seize more and more power.
To wake up from this amnesia is the goal of the Great Work and this is what is at the root of all of my work, courses and upcoming books.
I am NOT a liberator. No.
I am a facilitator of liberation for those who are ready to do the gritty work of unpacking what lays dormant in their unconsciousness so that they can learn to liberate themselves.
Sex work prepared me for this and I am eternally grateful
