Archive for Paganism

Sunday Meditation: Reflection on an idea

October 7, 2007 / / One comment

Often these meditations are guided imagery. I take you on a visual journey. Sometimes, I give you affirmation-type meditation, where you reinforce a goal or concept in a meditative state. Sometimes, a meditation creates a feeling-state, a transformation of consciousness.

Another kind of meditation is meditating on a thought, with the goal of attaining insight or understanding. I cannot call this “insight meditation” because that is a very specific thing, but the idea is to create meditative insight rather than just “thinking it over.”

A homework assignment I often give my students involves meditating on an element. But to do this in meditation is not the same as “thinking it over.” You’re not wracking your brain on “What is Air?” and searching for the right answer. Instead, you allow the concept and question to move through your meditative state. Like this:

Ground and center.

Imagine Air. Air is around you. Notice what it is like. Just observe it, and notice qualities as they appear to you. Notice any thoughts you have about Air. Follow these thoughts down whatever windy path they take, bringing yourself back only when you’ve left the topic of Air behind.

That’s really it. Observation, reflection, following stray trains of thought while using a focused state to bring that train back when it takes a sider too far. Often, I start such a meditation by stating my question aloud (like “What is Air?”). There’s no “thinking about” in the sense of working your brain, it’s just bringing the possibility of insight into your consciousness.

I like to use this technique when doing ritual chores, like when cleaning up after ritual or polishing my pentagram. It keeps the mundane chores sacred and often opens my mind to new observations.

You can use this kind of reflection on any problem. Remember: Don’t worry over the problem, simply observe it and see what you learn.

Fall Equinox

September 22, 2007 / / One comment

The equinoxes hold a sort of nebulous place in Wicca. The Fall Equinox is the middle of three harvest festivals. The first harvest, Lammas, has strong associations with bread, wheat, sacrifice, John Barleycorn, and Lugh. The third harvest, Samhain, is the Celtic New Year, the Day of the Dead, and Halloween. Both of these have a wealth of imagery, ritual, and custom. The second harvest, not so much.

Fall Equinox is sometimes called Mabon or Harvest Home. Both of these are modern names, and more traditional Wiccans simply call it Fall Equinox. (See? It’s kinda boring.) Rich folklore is kind of lacking.

The two most interesting ritual contexts for this holiday are as a Thanksgiving festival and as a commemoration of the Rites of Eleusis. Thanksgiving makes sense because of the harvest, because of the changing of seasons, and because equinoxes are a time of astrological stasis, and therefore a good time to stop, reflect, and give thanks. A Thanksgiving approach is more in keeping with traditonal Wicca, because it is agriculturally-based and oriented around issues of abundance, fertility, and seasonal cycles.

The Rites of Eleusis were held annually at this time for two thousand years. They have a profound place in Pagan history, both because of their longevity and because of their profound influence on Pagan Greek philosophers, artists, and poets. By the late Classical period, when Greek myths were told in a way meant to mock the Gods (hence Zeus’s exaggerated infidelities and Hera’s outraged jealousies), the mysteries of Demeter, Persephone, and Hades were treated with utter reverence. Modern Pagan groups such as Reclaiming have created powerful ceremonies based on modern recreations of these rites.

Some folks kind of combine the two, shifting the Descent into Hades into a more explicitly agricultural context (which is always a part of the Greek rite) and sometimes using British or Celtic deity names.

Sunday Meditation: Rosary

September 16, 2007 / / 6 comments

Having been raised Jewish, I had no familiarity with a rosary until I began to study Hinduism, where it is called a mala or a japa mala. In Buddhism, they are known as juzu or nenju. A mala generally has 108 beads, an auspicious number in Hinduism and Buddhism. The use of a mala or rosary is quite effective for meditation.

For each bead, you say a mantra, prayer, or a thought upon which to meditate. The rosary allows you to rid yourself of notions of time. You are not meditating to a clock-time, or to a count, you allow the rosary to set the time for you. When you reach the head bead or fringe, you are finished.

Holding your rosary in your dominant hand, grasp the first bead between your thumb and middle finger. Take a deep breath, let it out, and say your mantra. Use your forefinger to move to the next bead, and repeat the process.

I have lately been experimenting with using specifically Wiccan phrases instead of Sanskrit mantras. Certainly you can use Om or Om Shanti Shanti Shanti. But try one of these (from The Charge):

My Law is Love Unto All Beings.

All acts of Love and Pleasure are My Rituals.

I have been with you from the beginning, and I am that which is attained at the end of desire.

Sunday Meditation: Garden of Light

September 2, 2007 / / One comment

Ground and center.

You are going to take a walk through the woods. If you like, you can begin from one of the paths that you found behind your Meditation Cottage a few weeks ago.

As you walk on this lovely green path through the woods, you notice a delightful array of sounds. A breeze moves the leaves in a whisper. Birds sing. Cicadas hum. You can feel the sun through the trees, touching your skin and dappling the path. You walk a long way.

The further you walk, the more that sunlight penetrates through the trees. The path becomes a bit brighter. You notice that you no longer hear sounds. You seem to have come to a place where there are no birds or insects to accompany you. You continue through the bright, silent woods.

You come to a field, and it is full of sunlight. You walk into the field and are dazzled by the brightness and the warmth. The sun is strong on your skin; pleasant but intense. As you walk through the field the sun becomes brighter and brighter, almost blinding. At last you see only a white light, but you continue to walk.

You walk through light. After a while your vision begins to clear. You are in a formal garden, still brightly lit, but utterly different from the natural field you left behind. The garden is beautiful; fragrant with cultivated flowers and herbs, and you see lovely benches here and there. There seems to be music coming from all around you. In the distance is a large gate, but you have no interest in it and do not approach it.

There is someone waiting to meet you in the garden. Who is it? Spend the rest of your meditation in the garden with this person. Stay as long as you like.

When you are ready, leave the garden and enter the field of light. Cross through the blinding sunlight until you again see a field, and then a path into the woods. Walk through the woods, which become greener and then populated with birds and insects, until you reach your entry point. When you are ready, open your eyes.

After this meditation, drink cold water and eat some bread to help you ground.

No Candles Allowed

August 29, 2007 / / 10 comments

I got an interesting letter last night, and I asked for permission to publish it.

Hello. I have your “Elements of Ritual” book and I love it. The thing is, you talk about candles and incense as being key essentials to ritual. I’ve been trying to learn as much as I possibly can before I do a whole ritual by myself. My problem is that I’m a college student who lives on campus, where candles and any sort of smoke or fire-related anything is strictly prohibited. I was just wondering if you have any substitution ideas or know where I can find any. I can’t always get the exact tools and things I need for my altar or rituals, which is another reason I haven’t attempted a solitary ritual yet. If you can help, that would be great. Thank you so much and I really love your work.

Blessed be

Good question! I default frequently to candles because they are inexpensive (see, students? I have your needs at heart!) and easy to get a hold of. But dorm rules are something I didn’t consider; especially when I wrote my first book. Here’s what I wrote back (edited a little):

Candles and incense are very helpful, but if you have to substitute, you can. For incense, try using an essential oil or a natural herb. For example, a sprig of fresh rosemary or lavender can be used create scent, or open an essential oil and inhale when Air is needed.

For Fire, substitute a Fire symbol; an unlit candle, a piece of ambera painting of the alchemical symbol for Fire, or perhaps a minature lion; be creative.

When candles are being used for things other than Fire, it depends upon their use. For example, if you used a candle to represent the God, instead, use another God symbol. If you used candles
to mark quarters, use a different sort of boundary marker.

Blessed be,

So, those are my thoughts. I’d be interested if you have any additional ideas.

Starwood Diaries: Part Four

August 26, 2007 / / Comments Off on Starwood Diaries: Part Four

Wow, I never finished the diary, and almost a month has passed. Well, when last we left, it was …

Thursday night. There was a big dance party, “The Rumble in the Jungle.” I went down but I wasn’t feeling it, so I wandered over to the Roundhouse and as I approached, the drumming slowed, which hardly ever happens, and just as I reached the gate, it stopped completely, which really hardly ever happens. So I sort of took it as a sign and visited at Dalton camp for a bit and went to bed early. I kind of had an epiphany: Hey, Deb, you’re not a night owl. It’s rough not being a night owl at Starwood, because there’s so much night life, but there you are.

Friday: I’ve got my rhythm, now, and can make a big pot o’ coffee, brush my teeth, and get myself ready for the day with some facility, but the thing I like least about camping is mornings. Wander across half the campsite in a state of dishevelment in order to get to the shower, or pretty up just to take it all off and redo it? Or shower in the afternoon and hope no one is displeased by the aroma? But anyway, I make coffee without fail, although by the last couple of days, I’m thinking I could just bag this French press racket and run down to the cafe and buy coffee.

At 11:30 I taught Part Three of Spellcraft. This is my workshop class, in which I ask people to bring spell ideas and we brainstorm them. It’s always incredibly rewarding, because people share pretty deeply about what concerns them, and we can be intuitive in finding their needs, goals, and spells that will work for them. One gentleman in particular stuck out. He was a documentary filmmaker and was feeling stuck and overwhelmed by the way in which you didn’t really know, with a documentary, what film you were making until after you filmed it, because you didn’t know what would happen, and then you had this enormous amount of material you had to edit into a movie. But it was all empty space, filming without knowing exactly why, and he was just stuck. This was fascinating because I’m such a film buff, and I’ve wondered exactly those things, but I never had the chance to look at it magically. (Plus the guy was charming, with deep, evocative eyes.)

So I talked about creating a Water spell, and talked about To Dare, and we worked on using Water to empower “going with the flow” and letting the creativity just happen.

There was also a woman whose bird had flown away. Should she do a spell to bring it home, or a spell to have it be safe where it was? We talked for a bit, and I asked what kind of bird it was. A cockatoo, she answered. Well, that changed everything! Cockatoos can’t live safely in the wild in Massachusetts, where she’s from! So obviously the spell has to be to bring it home. And it was a great lesson for everyone in making sure you have enough information and ask enough questions. So we talked about constructing these and other, more complex, spells, and it was a very productive class.

After lunch, I attended a “Pagan Speed Dating” session, which didn’t hook me up with the love of my life, but I had fun meeting new people.

In the evening I attended Don Kraig‘s talk on Sex Magic. It was a good class, Don’s a consummate speaker, using the right amount of information, humor, and interaction. I was a little disappointed because I had somehow gotten the impression that this was a new lecture, not his usual sex magic lecture. Now, I have no objection to speakers re-using lectures, we’d all collapse if we didn’t, but I simply hadn’t expected it.

At nine o’clock was the healing ritual for Frank Barney that I’d been asked to High Priestess. (Yes, High Priestess is a verb. Deal with it.) There was a lot of chaos in putting together ritual materials and an altar, a lot of rapid meaningless motion the last hour, a lot of holy shit we forgot to have water on the altar sort of thing, but we pulled it off. Just as the procession into the ritual was assembling, Dave had to go to the bathroom! So we kept them there, chanting and drumming, at the gate, and when he came back, we let them in. About 50 people, which was quite a lot for something that wasn’t on the schedule.

We explained what we were going to do, and cast a circle. I kept quarter callers who were well known to me at their quarters so I had a sense of being held by magical adepts. I got people saying yes by asking “Who here has loved this land?” “Who here has built a fire on this land?” And so on, until I finally asked “Who here will heal Frank Barney?” “I will!” they all shouted.

Now I had ’em.

We brought Cate Dalton into the center of the circle, and she invoked the energy of Frank Barney. We made sure she was good and connected to Frank, so that giving power to her was giving it to Frank. The key to addressing his Parkinson’s was connection, we’d decided; neural connections, connection to life and love and the will to live. Love and connection. We raised this power and sent it into her.

Then we brought Elspeth in to speak about the Barney family, and their commitment to the land, and to one another. We talked about the healing needed for all of them, to sustain them as a family and keep them loving one another and caring for one another during this difficult illness. By the end of this second power raising everyone was in a giant puppy pile, a huge group hug, in the middle of the circle, holding Elspeth and one another and sending love, love, love.

Next we just talked about healing. I asked people for stories. Orien talked about Orien Rose and the healing we’d been doing and what it meant to be a part of the healing circle that sustains his family as his daughter miraculously recovers from a devastating accident. Oberon talked about the enormous healing given to Morning Glory, such that healing networks were springing up on the web, because it was too big for just one person. Frank Dalton’s stroke. Hell, my knee! (And how connected was that, because Oberon and Frank Dalton were two of the three people who picked me up, got me out of the circle, and put me on a stretcher when my knee snapped at Starwood, and here we all were, at Starwood, healing together.) It became a circle of sharing the miracles of healing we could achieve, and I closed by saying, “Look around you. If you want to know who the healers are, you’re standing with them. And if you need healing, know that. And if you didn’t count yourself among them, know now that you can.”

Then we closed the circle. It was beautiful.

In the Bedroom. Or not.

August 25, 2007 / / One comment

Continuing my observations of my own mind.

I was channel-surfing and I came across Anna and the King. It was near the end, and Jodie Foster as Anna, very upset, picked up and threw a tea tray. Which struck me as implausible behavior for a Victorian lady. And I recalled a review I’d read, of In the Bedroom, in which the reviewer said that Sissy Spacek’s one false note in an otherwise stellar performance was when she broke a plate. Why, the reviewer asked, do people in movies think that emotional moments require broken crockery? In real life, we can experience very intense emotions while leaving all our plates and cups intact.

This one moment brought back the memory of that review, and indeed, I could see Spacek breaking the plate (I saw the movie in the theater, and that moment was also in the trailers).

But the rest of the movie? IMDb tells me it’s over two hours long, and I saw it only six years ago. I can remember maybe fifteen minutes of it, total.

Where did it go? I sat there, saw it, had an experience, wrote about it (I always write at least a paragraph on every movie I see). I remember the review. With perfect clarity, I remember a bit of text that I thought showed a bit of insight. But an entire movie is gone.

(Not gone. Since I started thinking about this, more images have come, but not a lot.)

This isn’t just CRS ha ha look how I don’t remember. Because I do remember. I remember the review, I remember sounds, images, colors. But whole other chunks just walk off the page. That bothers me, but not so much. Mostly it interests me. What am I doing in there?

Shattering glass

August 22, 2007 / / 2 comments

The other day I dropped the coffee pot. It didn’t break.

But as it hit the floor (with an anti-climactic thud) I heard the glass shatter and felt the shards flying.

With all the work I do with meditation and imagery, it is fascinating to me that, when startled, the mind can do it all by itself without help. That what I’m working to create with various mind exercises is something I actually do naturally when I’m not trying.

Starwood Diaries: Part Three

August 14, 2007 / / 5 comments

So I totally forgot to tell you how we moved the entire campsite eighteen inches.

We arrive Sunday, and Barb & Charlie are already there, with their pop-up, awning/kitchen, and Sylvia’s tent, and they’ve marked tent spots on the ground for the rest of us. Craig puts his tent kind of much closer in towards the kitchen than need be, but as I said, we’re all racing the sunset, so whatever.

Then the next day, we’re looking at how the campsite is set up, and we know that Christine is arriving Tuesday with a tent and a screen tent, and we’d like to use the screen tent to create a continous area with the kitchen, and maybe there’s not enough room.

And I say to Craig “You could move your tent back about a foot” and he says something really snotty, like “Yeah, right” with a very sarcastic tone. Later he said he had no idea I was actually serious. Well, my theme for Starwood was communication and miscommunication, so of-fucking-COURSE he didn’t think I was serious.

Then Tuesday, Christine arrives, and we start helping her set up. Craig’s not around, but me, Charlie, Barb, and (I think) Arthur are more than enough helping hands. We lay out the screen tent, and there is just not quite enough room. At which point, I am totally willing to pick Craig’s tent up and move it myself, but there’s now someone camped about six inches behind him.

(We were on high ground. There was a shitload of room just a few yards away, but after Squishwood, smart campers avoid that area. We were jammed together on our little spot.)

So, with Craig’s tent as an immovable northern boundary, we had to go south. But in order to move the kitchen, we had to move all the furniture and cookware and coolers. And the awning that was attached to the popup. And the first time we moved it a foot and then we had to go back and squeeze out another six inches.

It was totally worth it. It gave us a kitchen/living room effect for the rest of the week that was comfy and cozy. But we moved a campsite eighteen inches.

Sunday Meditation: Lovingkindness

August 12, 2007 / / Comments Off on Sunday Meditation: Lovingkindness

Lovingkindness is a specific form of Buddhist meditation. I am not a Buddhist, nor an expert on Buddhism. My understanding of this form of meditation may be flawed. However, whether accurate or inaccurate to true Buddhist lovingkindness meditation, I find this a valuable and profound exercise, and I practice it, if not regularly, with frequent irregularity.

This is an advanced exercise. If you are not good at grounding and centering yet, you should not be doing things like breathing in negativity.

Ground and center.

Visualize your center as a gently glowing orb filled with love. Your center is love and love suffuses you. Note the color of this loving glow. Note its temperature and texture.

Visualize your glowing, loving center expanding. It fills your body and reaches beyond you. Each time you exhale, your loving center moves outward, larger and yet just as strong, just as loving, just as kind.

Exhale and send love outward, filling the space around you.

Inhale deeply, and exhale until your loving glow fills your home, touching all who live there (human, animal, and plant) with love. As you inhale, you take in the negativity that prevents your household from feeling love. Take that negativity and allow it to dissipate as it comes near your glowing center. It cannot touch you, you are protected by your loving glow.

Inhale and bring the negativity into you, where it fades to nothing. Exhale and send love. Inhale, and heal the negativity in your household, exhale, and replace it with love.

As you breathe, in and out, in and out, the loving glow expands and expands. Now it encompasses your neighborhood. Inhale the negativity and allow it to dissipate without touching you. Exhale love and fill your neighborhood with love. Inhale the petty arguments, the gossip, the coldness and fear, allow them to dissipate; they are gone. Exhale love. Shower your neighborhood with love and compassion.

Continue to breathe in and out, in and out, and see how your glow can expand. Can you reach beyond your neighborhood, to your community? Can you exhale love to your state? Your nation? The world?

You may find with practice that your glow expands more easily. Because this is a meditation about expansion and giving, it is important to always encompass at least your home and neighborhood, but the first time you try, you may or may not be able to reach beyond that. Soon, though, you’ll find that you can, and indeed, the more loving you send out, the easier it is.

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