Enjoying the sugar-white sand of the Grayton Beach – Destin area at Thanksgiving, pre- Oil Spill. Photo copyrighted; all rights reserved.

Since I posted A Pagan Point of View of the BP Oil Spill in the Gulf of Mexico a few weeks ago, I’ve been inundated with requests for rituals, spells, and prayers–both pagan and Christian–for the oil spill.   For those of you who know my style of spiritual leadership, you know that I don’t believe in standardizing much of anything, including passing out canned prayers.  HOWEVER, I will give you some ideas to incorporate into your own spiritual work in regard to the oil spill.

I do not believe in publishing one or two rituals for everyone to use because I believe the most effective spiritual work is work you do yourself, work you put yourself and your thoughts into.  That doesn’t necessarily mean you have to go write an extensive ritual and perform it at a particular degree of the zodiac or phase of the moon, in my opinion.  I believe that it’s far more important for anyone doing spiritual work for the Gulf of Mexico right now to make a personal connection with Deity, however simple or complex, and then focus on your intentions in your spiritual work.   If I gave you a specific prayer, then it would be a prayer that resonates deeply for me but it would never have the power of a prayer YOU can offer up. 

Here are a few ideas:

Unfortunately, we have a lot to pray for.  Your prayers can go several different directions, depending on which facet of this catastrophe is most important to you or which you feel the need to focus on.  You may want to focus on all of them.

What’s done is done.  Tar balls are already washing up on my beautiful white beaches near Destin, Florida.  The air is thick with a stifling petro smell that triggers my asthma and sends me into coughing fits.  Oil-covered sea life is already being reported.   There is no need to create a ritual to stop this from happening because it’s too late–though perhaps you might want to pray that this will never happen again, especially since it’s so much a repeat of the 1979  oil spill in the Gulf, except exponentially worse.  Imagine our entire country being spurred to come up with real solutions to energy that will make us less or non oil dependent and demanding our politicians work together to help us clean up our world.

You may also want to focus on damage control and on stopping the leaking oil.  After all, the longer the oil is uncontrolled, the more damage to the coastline, wildlife, human health, and the local economies.  Spend some time in your prayers visualizing the best and brightest minds coming up with innovative, fast solutions.  (Granted, at this point, they probably won’t be wearing BP shirts, so really use your imagination.)  Think of the people, companies, think tanks,  and even other countries coming forth to offer solutions that really work.

You could concentrate on the clean-up effort, on creative and bold new ways to counteract any more damage before it can be done.  Give thanks for all the volunteers who are helping to protect the coastline and tend to the ailing wildlife.

Create your own ritual for the protection of the environment from further damage and the healing of all its creatures.  Consider working with Yemaja, the African Goddess of the Ocean, if that appeals to you.

Pray for prosperity to return to the already hard hit local economies that depend on fishing and tourism.  We already recognize the bad economy our country is trudging through right now, but restaurants, hotels, and beaches are empty along the Emerald Coast because tourists are quickly cancelling their vacations and heading to Atlantic beaches or inland instead.   Pray, too, for those families who depend on the fishing industry for their livelihood. Pray that perhaps  help will come for the local communities with as much enthusiasm as other Americans have had for helping the hapless victims of earthquakes in Haiti and natural disasters throughout the world and that the locals won’t have to wonder why they don’t deserve a little help, too.

Pray for those who deal with dark emotions in the wake of this catastrophic oil spill.  What was disbelief and then resignation to the inevitable has become bitterness, anger, and depression for the people who are seeing their shores and their communities tainted with oil.   Pray for those cynics who try to lighten their bitterness with jokes about which BP executives should act as personal filler for the leak, because I dont’ know of anyone apologizing for their feelings.

I suppose you could also pray for the companies responsible and for the men who run them, and that we’ll all find whatever it is that we need to forgive them.  Honestly, though, I can’t do that myself.  I haven’t really witnessed any remorse that felt authentic, and that’s usually what it takes for me to be in a forgiving mood.  It would be disingenuous of me to say otherwise.

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So you see, I could not possibly give you one standardized prayer, ritual, or spell that would cover so very many things this oil spill has visited upon us here on the beaches of Florida.  You’ll have to choose for yourself where to begin. 

All photos on this page taken between 1993 and 2009 of Lorna Tedder, Shannon Bailey, and Aislinn Bailey are copyrighted; all rights reserved.

 
I’m not a native to these Gulf of Mexico beaches, the blinding white “singing” sand of the Northwest Florida coastline.  I came from the sandy farmland and red clay of South Georgia where “The Beach” usually meant a summer weekend’s visit to amusements parks in Panama City.  Frankly, as a non-swimmer, I preferred vacationing in the mountains and was never big on water sports.  Even more frankly, none of that’s changed. 
 
When I moved to a little town about 5 miles north of the beaches of Destin, Florida, in 1985 and married a local Air Force brat,  I was a Southern Baptist who didn’t fully appreciate Mother Earth.  I was raised with the belief that man was given the Earth by God “to have dominion over it and all its beasts.”  In other words,  humans were given a planet full of resources to use and abuse however we liked.   Yet, my deep love of Nature was always there.  As a Christian, I found God not inside the bricks and stained glass windows of my hometown church but outdoors—in the flowers, in the woods, in the sway and rustle of the corn crops on my parents’ farm, in the scent of the pear blossoms on the tree that held up the clothesline, the gurgling of quiet streams that fed fish-filled lakes, the immense bowl of starry heaven  in the early twilight of autumn.    Being outside, barefoot in the grass…that was as close to Deity as I could get, and one of many reasons I felt I’d “come home” when I discovered Wicca.  It took Deity out of the churches and into the cathedral of Nature.  Unspoiled Nature, that is.  Nature devoid of choking oil spills, just as most churches I know are devoid of garbage and sludge in the aisles.   
 
As a Pagan who finds God in Nature, my cathedral has been tainted by an oil spill.
 
For someone so closely tied to land and the element of earth,  my initial visits to the beach were a little disconcerting yet pleasing at the same time.  I found I did not care for the crowded beaches overrun with tourists, trash, cigarette butts, half-empty suntan lotion bottles, and abandoned beer cans—but I loved the autumn months when the beaches were so empty of footprints that I felt I’d been walking on the moon instead of on pre-Hurricane Opal dunes.   I didn’t like the harshness of the Florida sun, preferring instead to get what I jokingly called a “moon tan” as the waves crashed ashore under a full moon.  I liked the beach most for what others did not—the soul-singing serenity, the vastness, the oneness with Nature, the highly spiritual texture of the sunsets.
 
The first time I visited Destin was with my then-fiancé in 1983.  The last thing we passed was the tallest building around—the round Holiday Inn—on the right as we headed east into nothing but high white sand dunes and a huge statue long known as “the Green Knight” on the left. 

It’s all now wall-to-wall condos and hotels, overlooking the turquoise and emerald waters and white sand, but there are occasional parks and public beaches that are as pristine as my first visits there.  And the sand still sings.  More aptly, it “barks.”  If you scuff you heels on it, it makes an odd barking noise unlike most other beaches.  My favorite of these is at Grayton Beach State Park and a little beach town known as Seaside, popularized by the movie, “The Truman Show.”    Yes, that’s exactly how it looks, too, if you see the movie.
 
My love affair with the beaches of South Walton County and those of Destin began with a tradition I started in 1989.  I was six months pregnant with my oldest daughter when we began yearly celebratory trips to the beach on Thanksgiving Day.  We would pack a picnic lunch, walk the almost solitary beaches, and take family photos for Christmas cards.  Our friends in Canada would mistake the sand  for snow, and it did indeed look like pure, untrampled, freshly fallen snow, and they were always awed by the fact that we were playing in the sand and surf on Thanksgiving Day when they were worried about stepping outdoors and flesh freezing. 
 
We have, to date, honored Thanksgiving Day on those pristine beaches every year except for 1992, when I had my Thanksgiving meal in the hospital with my newborn.  My dining room walls now show off photos from 20 years’ of Thanksgiving picnics, our special family tradition.  Some years were cold, some sunny, some cloudy, some warm and breezy.  When I divorced in 2004, I kept going at Thanksgiving, with both my daughters.  They now come home from college and re-arrange schedules so we can make our annual pilgrimage to the beach.  As my daughters fledge, eventually it will be just me going to those beaches, and I have no idea what the beaches will be like then or this coming Thanksgiving or if they’ll even remotely resemble that covenant with Nature from two decades gone by.  
 
When I converted from Christianity to Wicca in 1997, I began appreciating the Gulf of Mexico more than ever.  I began to understand more about the element of water and its importance in our ecosystem and in our lives.  Here on the Gulf Coast, it’s crucial to the economy—tourism, restaurants, fishing, hotels, real estate, even the Gulf Range that the Air Force uses in test missions.  To me, it’s been more personal, more spiritual as I feel a part of that vastness of Nature, feel connected to the Universe and everything around me.  It’s one of the places I feel most connected with Deity, and yes, the same Deity I knew as a Christian.    Many times, I have felt such gratitude on these sugar-white beaches  and beautiful waters for the spiritual gifts they offer that I have left little circles of rocks, shells, or feathers on the sand as a thank-you to my Higher Power.  I count my blessings and let the tide claim my offerings.
 
Now that the BP Oil Spill threatens the living, “breathing” Gulf, I find myself caught up in a sadness I cannot shed.  Most of the Pagans I know—and many of my Christian friends—are stealing visits to the beaches for what might be a final look.  As a Pagan, I know that Nature will re-assert itself.  All it takes is time.  I’ve seen this first with Hurricane Opal in 1995, which flattened my beloved dunes with its powerful storm surge, and more of the same with Hurricane Ivan in 2004.   The winds shift the sands over time, forming dunes once more,  though smaller than ones built up over 20 to 30 years’ time.  The grasses grow again on the dunes, especially with help from Nature lovers of all religions.  And eventually, the sand and sea recover from the natural cycles of weather patterns.  So it is with all Nature, even natural cycles that take decades or millennia to rise again.  
 
But this oil spill is not natural.  Regardless of the media spin BP would like to put on marketing this catastrophe away, it is not a natural disaster like a hurricane or an earthquake.  This is not Mother Nature balancing herself out through climate changes or deep internal rumblings.  This is a man-made disaster.  It is not an “act of god” –unless BP really wants to make that assertion of their own dubious divinity.
 
So, like others here on what we have until now called “The Emerald Coast,”  I make these little trips to her bedside, to the beaches.  The Gulf is like an old friend with a terminal illness, one caused by the hazards of someone careless who seems to take little or no responsibility or will, at the very least, brush it off as a “tiny spill”  or pass the costs of care on to others. 

We see her as often as we can now, not knowing how much longer we’ll recognize her or she’ll recognize us.   We enjoy these visits but mourn them already.  We know that one of these visits, it will be the last.  After that, the tar balls, the dying sea life, the sickened birds, the stained beaches, and eventually a dead sea where nothing grows or lives.  A void where there is nothing spiritual left but darkness.  

 And we’re both sad and angry.  We’re feeling victimized.  This was not an illness brought on by Nature itself.  It’s not death by natural causes but something more akin to manslaughter or perhaps murder.  Our emotions have a direction for venting, and it’s not at God. 

 In that battle of Man against Nature, chalk one up for Man.
 
But don’t worry. 

 Nature will re-assert itself in this never-ending cycle of life-death-rebirth that repeats in all of Nature, and whatever damage has been done to the Gulf by BP’s Oil Spill will be overcome, but it’s doubtful that it will happen in my lifetime.  

Or yours.

About a month ago, I confided in a spiritual coach of mine that I was afraid of a particular small group doing me harm.  One had already stalked me online.  She suggested that perhaps I might involve the Elephant Gods in a protection ritual to set my mind at ease.  I wasn’t aware of any Elephant God other than Ganesha, and this definitely wasn’t a Ganesha issue.  My friend Murv (M.R. Sellars) suggested the Elephant God known as Dumbo, but that definitely didn’t work.  So I did a little research and found out that in some places, elephants themselves were worshiped as gods.  They can sit on enemies’ chests or carry people to safety.

Hmmmm.  So I incorporated that image of protective elephants into my ritual work and felt much better.

Eventually, a few threats did arise.  That’s when I walked through a store and saw…an elephant.  Or two or three.   Jeweled, wooden, and metal.  Just little knickknacks.  I hadn’t seen them in years but there were a couple of them in different stores.

At first, I wondered if maybe this was a case of selective filtering.  I had elephants on my mind so I was looking for them?  No. Since 1999, I have associated elephants with a former coworker who made my life hell, so I’ve actually found them somewhat distasteful over the years.  When I see one, I remember that I’ve seen one–because I think of that one person.  And it’s been a long, long time since I’ve thought of her.  No, this was something different.  It was exactly 10 days after my adviser had made the suggestion to connect elephants and protection, and just a few days after my ritual.

I took it as a sign and bought a single sparkly elephant on four jeweled legs and put him on the Rock and Gemstone Altar in my living room.   Every time I saw him, I reminded myself that I was protected.

A few days later, I walked through another store and–voila!–an elephant here or there.  I just smiled to myself and reminded myself, again, that I was protected.  Later that day, one of the people I was concerned about bolstered support against me.  I didn’t worry.  Those Elephant Gods were taking care of me!

I returned from a trip out of town last Sunday and first store I walked into, I saw a little elephant statuette.  In the next one, a department store, there were two or three on one aisle.  I just smiled to myself.

Then I walked into a store tonight with my daughter to find her a nicer set of comfy clothes for one a huge wedding photo shoot this weekend and turned the corner to find not one elephant on a shelf but a whole aisle of almost nothing but elephants!

Yeah, I love it when that happens.

And if my stalkers are reading this, well, I wouldn’t advise you go to the circus any time soon.

For a woman called “Trauma,”  the acquisition of an Automated External Defibrillator has been an elusive dream.  But now, despite a hard-hitting economy,  it’s a dream come true because a small group of pagans came together for a good cause.

“I’ve been wanting an AED for five years,” Trauma says, cooling off in air-conditioned Cabin #4 at what’s commonly known as “Four-H Camp Ocala” but for this weekend is the Beltane 2010 edition of the Florida Pagan Gathering.  Trauma is one of those selfless people who does for others and doesn’t ask much.  She’s also one of the elusive, service-minded festival attendees known as the Guardians, who are charged with the safety and comfort of FPG’s attendees at the annual Beltane and Samhain celebrations.

Trauma wipes a few tears.  We all do.   The new AED can mean the difference between life and death at this gathering, which is at a remote spot that I had to have GPS coordinates to find at the end of a 400-mile drive.  I’ve noted that the festival is attended by a variety of people, close to 1000 in festivals past according what I’ve been told, and that variety includes a percentage of people who are older, heavier, and/or have medical issues.  In other words,  it’s a microcosm of the rest of Florida but miles away from any major medical facility.

Which makes an AED extra important.

Obviously a lot of festival attendees and non-attendee supporters feel the same way.

Trauma and her fellow fundraiser, John,  have just endured a soon-to-be-famous walk in unexpected 93-degree heat and in very unusual attire for either of them.   John donned hot pink lingerie and a boa.  Trauma, who isn’t exactly known for “girl clothes,” allowed herself to be tied into a white corset.  Flanked by nearly a dozen “Bustier Babes,” the group paraded through the festival, inviting attendees to “fill their cups” with cash for the AED.  They could barely walk 10 steps before being stopped while people took pictures or tucked money into John’s bra strap.    (You’ll notice that I’ve not included any  photos of the parade.  That’s so these two people who really put themselves out there for the pagan community won’t be ridiculed or misunderstood in their mundane lives.)

John, who has an uncanny knack for fundraising, began talking up the parade on Facebook and taking donations via Paypal weeks ago.  When I arrived onsite and noticed that the attendance was down from previous visits, I wondered if the parade would raise the remainder needed to purchase the AED for the Guardians.  After all, the tough economy meant the majority of my group stayed home this year and those of us attending were on a limited budget.  Still,   individuals appreciated John and Trauma’s efforts, dug deep, and gave to a good cause.

Approximately $2000 was raised for the purchase of the AED.  Trauma got her dream.

Today’s Book Spotlight is on Salt and Fire:  Cleansing and House Purification Rituals.  Lauren Hartford uses a “novel approach” to explaining how to perform a complicated (and possibly dangerous) ritual to cleanse your home.  All details are provided in the form of a short novella, covering the materials needed, the actual process, the dangers, safety precautions, helpful hints and tips, possible results, and various considerations that you won’t find in the usual “how-to” book.

As with all of Lauren’s books in her Priestess Diaries series, these novels, novellas, and short stories  are “teaching fiction.”  They stand alone or can be read as part of a whole if you like the characters Lauren presents.

Salt and Fire is one of the shorter books and can be read easily in one sitting.  Even slow readers can finish it within an hour.  It’s available only in pdf, so you can download it to your computer or mobile phone.   Retail price is $3 – good info, and for the price of a quickie vending machine snack!

Download pdf file now.

Other books by Lauren Hartford focus on protection rituals, hypnosis and guided meditations, the Law of Attraction, and real witch wars, with two upcoming books on listening to your intuition and building inter-dimensional portals.

Photo Copyright by alicepopkorn; creative commons license. Please check out the artist’s work–it’s beautifully spiritual.

Since when has Let Go and Let God become a synonym for Give Up?

Several years ago, I was facing an extremely shaky time when I was leaving a long-term marriage and starting a brand-new life. It was the first step in building a new me and all the confidence that comes with reclaiming your independence after really losing yourself for a while. I had compromised a lot of my true self over the years in order to meet the expectations of other people as well as my belief system that required me to be “selfless” to the point of giving away self. It was not an easy time. I’d lost my ability to trust and I desperately wanted to trust again, so I jumped out there and put my heart on the line and it got stomped on all over again. I fought to regain control of my life, and much of it seemed to be an uphill battle.

A member of the clergy told me I should handle a particular difficulty in my life by giving it a “spiritual surrender.” I had no idea what he meant. He wasn’t in and will never be in the particular situation I was going through, so his counsel didn’t quite ring authentic. Like many other people in my life who didn’t have answers for themselves, much less for me, he talked a lot about how I should “let go and let God.” I’m not sure if he simply didn’t know how to advise me on my particular situation or if he truly had insight into something greater that he kept fumbling to explain. I do know that his suggestions did not help me to find the happiness I have now. I do know that most of the people who spouted “Just let go and let God!” were among the most controlling in my life at that time and weren’t very good at the “let go and let God” process in their own lives. Most of them were telling me, some outright and others as kindly as possible, to give up on my dreams—and that grated against my soul. Some advisors tried to tell me not to worry about things, not to expect anything, just “go with the flow,” and mostly to just take whatever came along. They reminded me that I was at the mercy of …well, God…and helpless to do anything but accept what was coming to me. And what was coming was, of course, suffering…because that, to them, seemed to be our purpose until we can die of natural causes and go to Heaven where we can be happy at last or Hell where we can continue to suffer. Most of these people, I don’t fault for their frustration over my refusal to crawl into a cave and let life run over me.

I understand the whole concept of “let go and let God” a whole lot better now. If you expect life to be hard and bitter and they you die, then that’s probably what’s coming to you. If you expect life to be full of good things and joy beyond your wildest dreams, then you’ve let go of those thoughts and put them out to God and let go of them to be taken care of for you. If you expect everything to go wrong and that Murphy of Murphy’s Law fame was indeed a genius for looking for all that bad stuff that happens, then you will repeatedly see things go wrong in the most bizarre and simplest ways. I understand this process much better now because I’ve looked at it through several forms of spirituality. But the idea that to “let go and let God” means just taking whatever comes and thinking that whatever comes must surely be awful? No!

I could never reconcile myself to the concept of any Deity worthy of being worshipped wanting me to suffer, suffer, suffer and live my earthly life in misery, misery, misery. It seems terribly…inefficient…and maybe a little sadistic to think a Creator would want His most prized creation to be disgustingly worthless rather than cherished.

It really doesn’t matter what your religion or spirituality is for you to understand this “let go and let God” concept. To “let go and let God” does not mean give up, be a doormat, don’t care, don’t have desires, or forget your dreams. It’s really quite the opposite. It’s really about the handing it over to God—or Gods, or the Universe, or whatever you call your Higher Power—to make it happen for you. That’s not you in control in the way we usually think of control. It’s not God being your servant either. It’s more of a loving partnership with Deity.

In Christianity, to “let go and let God” is likely to be a prayer for what you desire to come to you and then a feeling so strong with belief that your desire is already yours that all you can feel is gratitude and instead of begging, pleading, prostrate prayers of rolling around on the floor in sackcloth and ashes, you aren’t praying to something to come to you but rather, you’re thanking God because it’s already yours. Yes, I heard those words unconvincingly a few times in my 35 years as a Christian but when you grow up in a particular belief system, you don’t question it and often don’t even understand some of the fundamental beliefs or where they came from. In fact, I was taught not to question anything–or else, as in “If you have any doubts, you’re going to hell.” There is truth in that, but not necessarily the way it was told to me. I now understand that if you doubt (don’t have the belief that is required in this spiritual formula), then your fears (usually something rather hellish or troubling) will certainly be delivered to you. However, if you put your belief out there that your desires will be fulfilled and just let God take care of that for you, you’re letting go and letting God make it happen on your behalf in a loving, fatherly, joyful sort of way. That’s not giving up!

In magical practices, to “let go and let God” (or Goddess) is really the same thing, though the terminology is a little different. For example, a Wiccan High Priestess will cast a circle which, among other things, creates her own little world of swirling, positive (usually) energy and thoughts. In that sacred space, she states her intention (comparable to a prayer for what she desires), raises that energy (the feeling of un-doubtable connection to her God, Goddess, or plural), completely believes that it is hers already, and sends the energy forth to happen, which is the letting go part of the process. She doesn’t, if well-practiced, ask for the same thing again and again and again and thereby hold the not-there-yet feeling in place but she lets go and allows her Higher Power(s) to bring it to her without any more worry on her part. Like Christianity, her intent, connection (feeling), and belief are key factors.

Universal Law extends beyond both traditional and alternative forms of spirituality, using different terminology but still, it’s really the same thing. Just different names—just as I am Lorna Tedder to some, Shmom (Shannon’s Mom) to her friends, or Milady to a lover. The concepts are the same. With the Universal Law of Attraction (the real deal, not the hype), the idea of “let go and let God” is the same as setting your intention, aligning yourself with the feeling/vibrations of what it’s like to be there already, and knowing/believing that your desires are manifesting for you so quickly and easily that they are already yours to feel grateful for.

See? I’ve looked at it personally from the viewpoints of Christianity, Wicca, and Universal Law and have found that it’s the same ideas in all three but a different language—intent, feeling, belief. And in that believing–and I mean really believing–you can relax and know that it’s coming to you and you can just let it come with little to no effort at all on your part. The spiritual practices are a different way of looking at Universal Law and that in no way detracts from spiritual practice. For me, understanding religion and spirituality from the view of Universal Law actually enhances my understanding of my own religion and helps me to appreciate and better understand other religions.

It’s too bad we’ve gotten so caught up in the nice alliteration of “let go and let God.” It’s a lovely catch-phrase. But maybe the easier way to understand that it is a loving partnership with God, Goddess, the Universe, your Higher Power, or however you call That Which Is Greater, is to reframe the phrase:

Let God, and Let It Come.

or even more simply…

Let.

Understand and amplify your magick and rituals by using the Law of Attraction, whether your intent is to manifest love, prosperity, healing, protection, or something else.

Making your rituals and spells work is easy if you understand Universal Law.

Ever since The Secret garnered popularity a few years ago, you’ve heard plenty of hype about manifesting the life you want–which is, of course, the change that magick brings. Most of what you’ve heard on TV or in the news really is nothing more than hype. It’s only part of the stary, and if you try to use the Law of Attraction without really understanding it, you’re likely to misuse it and bring the reverse of what you really want, like in Lauren Hartford’s Fire Burning in Water.

The real Law of Attraction is about intent, belief, and tuning your feelings to the frequency of what you want– which some regard as “to know, to will, and to dare.”

I am truly blessed.  I had the honor during this Solar Eclipse of January 2010 to facilitate the Third Degree Elevation of my youngest student, Lord Midlight, who began studying with me in August 2007.   During this time, I watched him really come into his own, and especially as a powerful manifestor.

I had to laugh afterwards as the group I was with went to dinner and out for some fun, and Midlight was still bouncing off the walls.  I give him 30 days for his feet to touch the ground!

Not that it was easy for him.  I don’t really know of anyone who goes through a multi-year series of spiritual lessons who breezes along.  The course itself is designed to challenge even the most grounded, and there are times when the lessons feel more like a curse than a spiritual path.    That said, I do think he had an easier time than many, strictly because he fully embraced the spiritual lessons and didn’t resist as hard as most of us do.  Or at least, that’s how it seemed from the outside.    He not only “got it,” but he wholeheartedly went after becoming a better version of himself.

When I was Initiated, I was under the impression that my Second Degree, not my First, would be the most difficult but I have seen differently in my own students.  For me, both were awfully hard, but largely because I couldn’t muster the courage to act on where Spirit was leading me during my First and so, even upon my Second Degree Elevation,  the lessons were piling up and the work became even harder and harsher.    The difficulties for me started within minutes of leaving my Circle behind right after my Initiation and didn’t stop until shortly after my Third.  Not that everything’s been all blue sky and ponies since then, but it was a rough ride.

I’ve noted in my students and in the students of others over the past few years that the First Degree seems the hardest for them.  Lots of trauma, drama, separations, heart-wrenching surprises, and points of nearly giving up.  For those who’ve embraced the lessons and moved forward, I’ve seen the amazement in their eyes at how much life has opened up for them.  For them, getting through that dreaded Second Degree was only a matter of fine tuning and really taking responsibility for their lives.

I sometimes wish I’d learned my own spiritual lessons earlier.  Or rather, that I’d acted on them earlier.  I learned them–I just didn’t do anything with what I’d learned until another year had passed and I’d had enough.  Sorta like being held down until I finally cried “Uncle!”  Or, in this case, “Morrigan!”

I’m very proud of Lord Midlight and have so enjoyed watching his growth as a person, a friend, and student.  I hope to continue to watch his growth now as a person, a friend, and equal.

Super sensitive. That’s what I am. I’m still trying to assimilate the weirdness (thus far) from yesterday’s eclipse, August 5, 2009. I had some strange physical effects, and it felt like the veil between the worlds was thinner than ever yesterday. In fact, I know it was, based on what happened late in the evening.

Physically, my senses were…MORE

Capricorn, an earth sign, is generally about practicality, business, and manifestation. It’s solidity. It’s bringing the…MORE

Note:  We’re moving portions of this site to a new website, http://www.spiritual-pagan-paranormal.com.  We’re not quite finished, so bear with us!

This Special Post on the Full Moon  is sponsored by

Check out 2 new sites we’re working on:  http://www.life-strategies-to-go.com and http://www.spiritual-pagan-paranormal.com.  And…don’t forget to follow us on Twitter for the latest updates.

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The April Full Moon, aka the Pink Moon, occurs in Libra on April 9, 2009 at 9:55 AM Central time here in the Florida Panhandle. This Full Moon, I feel, is all about…moving into new territory with relationships and how we want things to look.  More on that in a moment.

Libra, an air sign, is generally balanced, romantic, charming, idealistic. This particular full moon will be rather intense, considering that Venus (love, money, creativity) is retrograde and squaring an obliterating-then-rebuilding Pluto.  For a lot of people,  this Libra full moon balancing a fiery, move-it-forward Aries sun will bring about an urgent desire to make something happen in a relationship, bringing old drama to a head in a perhaps less than ideal way.  (But it will clear the deck for something better.) Last month was so filled with turbulence but this month?  There’s a sense of the Tarot here, a Lovers’ card.   A chance to find some grounding and make choices about relationships and partnerships and whether to be with a particular person, and at the same time, an opportunity to have many different relationships or partners but still say to one special person, “I choose you, regardless of how many people I may love, and choose one does not lessen the love for anyone else.”  There’s an intimacy to it of two people, but at the same time, an openness of loving groups of people who are not family but we choose to make them family, regardless of social templates.  This isn’t so much about lovers but multiple loves and not so much about a choice but choices, and the tension of Venus squaring Pluto will force some kind of decision in how we handle those relationships.

For those of you who routinely read my suggestions for meditations, you know how this works. I share this unraveling of images I have just before a New Moon, Full Moon, and/or Eclipse and you’re welcome to use what makes sense to you. For most of last year, I’ve been following this “story” of a river of emotions connected with Moon phases–everything from bridges over rivers to the structure that holds the river in its banks, to surfing the river, to becoming the river, to rising above the river in a parasail…all taking me “around the riverbend” to a beautiful new vista that is lush and green. For those of you who know me personally, you’ve watched in amazement and then horror at how some of these influences have played out in my life and how I’ve been healing from some heartbreaks and reached a place of happiness again.

For links to previous meditations, just search the Astrology or Ritual category on this site.

Thus far, the past year’s meditations have included Bridges, Riverbanks/Structures, Surfing/Sailing, Parasailing, Becoming the River, Rocks, Rebuilding the Riverbanks, Covered in Healing Mud, Washing off the Mud and Dancing Naked in the Sunlight, Beginning to Play in the River Again, Full-on Splashing in the River, Speeding around in Fun but Directionless Circles in my little boat, and Picking up a Passenger or two as we zip forward.

Which brings us to this Full Moon’s meditation: In this meditation, I am well past that point of standing beside the river, licking my wounds after the bashing from last Autumn. I have been dipping my toes in the river, dancing tentatively in the sunlight, and splashing watch all around. I have hopped into my little boat, the one without oars or a rudder. In spite of all the hurt of this past year, I’ve decided that it’s worth it to get back on the river and see where it takes me, even though I’m not steering. My motor has been running and I’ve been moving forward even though I don’t really know where I’m going, but along the way, I have picked up a passenger…a travelling companion for this journey.  I have leaned out the boat and linked arms to pull him into my craft with me, to this safer place I have to offer.

But here is the new part of this progressive meditation: as I move forward down the river, swirling this way and that in the current and not steering at all, I realize that I’ve picked up not just one passenger, but several.  These are lovers and dreams, wishes and desires.  These are those who support me on this journey and those whom I support.  The boat is so heavy with passengers that the rim is only inches above the water, that deep emotional current I’ve been in for the past year.  The boat lurches forward and swerves and…runs ashore.

This is not a bad thing.  One more passenger, and we might have been gurgling to the bottom of the riverbed.  Instead, we simply express mild surprise that we have found ground, something solid after so much emotional wateriness and uncertainty.   We climb out of this boat, onto solid ground, this time lush and not muddy.  I’m barefoot and feel the cool moss-like grass under my soles.  We can decide to get back in our boat, leaving someone behind so that we stay afloat, and continue along the course of the river…or we can explore this adventure that’s presented itself to us.   Ahead of us, opposite the riverbank, is a deep forest, and this is our other choice.  It is vast and beckoning with mysteries in the shadows and enchantment in the light.

Watch for choices to be made in the next month.  You may feel both restless and relentless in reaching a decision but ultimately, it’s about how you want your relationships to look—a very Libra kind of quality!

Photo by Marty (S); Creative Commons License

This Special Post on the Full Moon Eclipse is sponsored by The Long-Awaited Honest-to-God Secret to Being Happy, available at half-price to readers of The Spiritual Eclectic.  Click here to download.

The February Full Moon, aka the Full Snow Moon, occurs in Leo on February 9, 2009 at 8:49 Central time here in the Florida Panhandle.  The extra oomph for this full moon is that it’s a lunar eclipse, meaning the Earth eclipses the moon, at 20 Leo 52.  Lunar Eclipses are all about culmination, particularly of what started at the previous new moon eclipse two weeks ago.  The timing for this eclipse, if you like to incorporate eclipses into your rituals for a good “slingshot” effect, is 8:38 Central time, so you might want to take a look at what planets in your natal chart are near 21 Leo (see this previous post for more explanation).  I recommend creating a free natal chart at astro.com, (not affilitated with this blog) if you don’t have one already and looking specifically at the area of your life where this eclipse will affect you.

This Full Moon, I feel, is all about…transformation into who you really are.  It’s like that last extra push into becoming the fully realized person you know yourself to be, even if you keep it hidden from the rest of the world.  You know what’s really right for you, so step into it!  Live it!   And live authentically, happy in knowing who you are.

Leo, a fire sign, is generally a sign of boldness, authenticity, confidence, self-assurance, playfulness, really knowing who you are and what’s right for you.   Sometimes, it’s a bit arrogant because it’s so self-assured.  Several years ago, a Leo friend was telling me that his students were challenging him on some issues with astrology and how dare they because he was a Leo and he knew what he was talking about.  When he realized what he’d just said, we burst into laughter because it was so true to a Leo.

That sense of authencity and opening up to more playfulness and confidence has been a growing theme in the past month of my ritual/moon meditation suggestions.  I certainly didn’t plan it that way, but that’s the way it’s unfolding, and right now with quite a few planets in visionary Aquarius opposite Leo, it’s a good time to start your own personal revolution and change your world.

For those of you who routinely read my suggestions for meditations, you know how this works. I share this unraveling of images I have just before a New Moon, Full Moon, and/or Eclipse and you’re welcome to use what makes sense to you. For most of last year, I’ve been following this “story” of a river of emotions connected with Moon phases–everything from bridges over rivers to the structure that holds the river in its banks, to surfing the river, to becoming the river, to rising above the river in a parasail…all taking me “around the riverbend” to a beautiful new vista that is lush and green. For those of you who know me personally, you’ve watched in amazement and then horror at how some of these influences have played out in my life and how I’ve been healing from some heartbreaks.

For links to previous meditations, just search the Astrology or Ritual category on this site. Thus far, the past year’s meditations have included Bridges, Riverbanks/Structures,  Surfing/Sailing, Parasailing, Becoming the River, Rocks, Rebuilding the Riverbanks,  Covered in Healing Mud, Washing off the Mud and Dancing Naked in the Sunlight, Beginning to Play in the River Again, and Full-on Splashing in the River.

Which brings us to this Full Moon’s meditation:

In this meditation, I am no longer standing beside the river, licking my wounds after the bashing from last Autumn.  I have been dipping my toes in the river, dancing tentatively in the sunlight, and splashing watch all around.  I now find myself in a boat. It’s a small boat, but one without oars or a rudder (or whatever that thing is that gives you direction…you can tell I don’t boat, huh?)  Somehow, in spite of all the hurt of this past year, I’ve decided that it’s worth it to get back on the river and see where it takes me.  I’m not steering though.  And at the same time, I’m not simply letting the river flow with me further around this lush riverbend that’s been part of my life since last August.  My little boat has a motor, and it’s revved and pushing me forward.  I move in swirls and splashes, not in a straight line and not sure of where it’s taking me.  But…the sun is shining and I know I’ll be okay and I’m having fun.  The most important thing that comes to me is that while not everything I want is in the boat with me at the moment, I’m not waiting for it to hop in the boat with me.  Waiting, I’m told, never helps.  It does not matter if I sit and wait for my passenger to swim upstream to find me here with the boat or if I pick up that particular person/dream/desire downstream, it will appear when the time is right.  Meanwhile, waiting is wasted effort and I’m to enjoy this sunshine  and splashing until my next passenger swims out to meet me, breaks apart some boulders in the way, jumps from a bridge  to splash beside me, or washes ashore.  That particular desire will show up at the right point.  Meanwhile, I’m adding to what I have to offer by creating playful new life experiences for myself, and for sharing and building on later.

Photo by Aphrodite ; creative commons license

“How can I release old resentments and anger?” a friend asked.   She’s a very wise and together person, and very spiritual, so the question surprised me a little.  There’s always that expectation, you know, that spiritual people don’t get angry or carry resentments but some wounds are deep and take a long, long time to heal.

It’s only in looking back over the past four years that I realize how much old anger I’ve released.  It’s made a big difference in healing my life, and though I don’t quite have everything I want in my life just yet, I have a life I enjoy and one that’s vastly different from a few years ago. 

The first step for me to begin to release old resentments and angers was in realizing that it really was anger that I was carrying, from as far back as my early childhood.  I’d never considered myself an angry person…but inside I was furious.  I so seldom got “mad,” but I did get hurt a lot.  That was the key.  I grew up in a Southern Baptist home amidst a church upbringing that taught me that anger was a deadly sin and that I needed to be a good girl, good and forgiving and great at turning the other cheek.  The way anger manifested in me was not as rage but as “hurt.”  I couldn’t tell the difference, and to be honest, I sometimes still can’t.

The second step in releasing my anger was to honor it.  I had to stop thinking of anger as a “bad emotion” I wasn’t allowed to have.  Anger was my way of refusing a certain path of oppression and of demanding that I be respected and valued.  I learned to let it out in mostly constructive ways, to stop apologizing for it, and to use it as a reminder not to allow certain people to abuse either me or my compassion.  It’s saved me many times from letting an old wounding be repeated.

The hardest part of releasing anger is to meet it head on and investigate its root cause.  That means a lot of self-inquiry.  It means looking in shadowy places, shining the light on them, and dispersing them.  For me, it took the shape of a healing journal where I poured out millions of words that later became articles, books, e-courses, and workshops that help other people deal with similar issues.  The writing, for me, was cathartic, but I’ve also written poetry and songs, and if I were talented at dance or painting, I might have tried those methods as well.

Some old angers could be released only through ritual; in particular the Ho’ponopono ritual has been helpful to me.  It’s doubled as a funeral for my tyranical father and a divorce meditation for my ex. 

Another way for me to release old resentments has been to recognize the situation for what it really was and then rewrite it the way it “should” have been.  My article, The Day My Parents Killed the Pedophile,  is a good example and is recommended by many online communities dedicated to healing sexual abuse. 

It’s not that all of those old angers have been banished.  They’ve been released into the wild.  That means some have vanished, maybe for forever, but other still roam around and revisit from time to time to feed, or try to.  It helps to realize that in most cases, the people who wounded and angered me were doing the best they could with what they had and weren’t intentionally trying to hurt me.  It was just part of their personalities, but not something I have to bind myself to.  Some old resentments still float around me, unseen  and unnoticed until one lands close by or bops me on the head, and with those I can sometimes reach out from a different perspective and pop that bubble and it’s gone for good because it no longer has any power over me or chains on me.  There was nothing left but a thin sheen of oily color and no substance at all.

To keep new angers from forming, I’ve become more vocal, allowing my anger to show where I might not have before and with little regard for whether I particularly upset the other person or not.  Not every time, but exponentially more often than a few years ago.  Sometimes it becomes a major confrontation and sometimes it might ensure the partnership will not thrive (it won’t anyway if I hold in the anger) but holding it in only transforms the anger into a cancer (sometimes literally) that eats away and tastes like hurt. 

The big question for me to ask myself is, when my feelings have been deeply hurt, is it really hurt?  Or is it anger?  Or both?   It’s more often anger at injustice and disrepect than anything else.  And if I express myself as “I am so hurt that you….,” do I really mean “I am so angry that you…”?  If I express it as hurt and the relationship is truly a loving one, it can manifest for the other person as guilt rather than as a chance to clear the air.  Guilt only keeps it inside to fester.

photo by PakyuZ; Creative commons license

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Every time there’s a New Moon, Full Moon, or an Eclipse, I get thousands of search engine hits from readers looking for rituals/meditations and information on the upcoming event.  Some of this I can help you with, and some I can’t.

If you’re here for a step-by-step ritual, you won’t find it.  That’s because you need to do the work yourself.  Yes, you can find online rituals, free, word for word, but you’re missing the point.  (And yes, some are good for ideas.)  But the point is to do the spiritual work yourself, and that’s as unique for you as you are.  Spiritual work is not something you can copy from someone else’s homework and get the same result.  Their homework is specific to their spiritual needs, not yours.  It’s like attending an aerobics class to slim down–others may be doing the same or similar moves in different bodies, but if you don’t move yourself, you won’t gain the benefits.  You can observe others moving all you want, but if you don’t put your own energy into it, nothing’s going to happen for you.

So instead of giving you a step-by-step ritual so you can perhaps manifest what I want, I’ll walk you through my process so you can understand how to get the most out of a ritual or meditation to bring to you what you want.  Are you with me?  Join me, the Queen of Metaphors….

Event:  New Moon–and it’s a solar eclipse.

Why elipses are important:  Eclipses tend to bring big changes.  What, you think I just made this up? I’ve watched it in my own life and of my loved ones for years.  Look to history and how so often eclipses have been considered omens and the events that have been linked to eclipses, whether they happened as a result of a natural build-up of forces or people used the eclipse energy to force the event. 

Astrologically, they tend to have the regenerative effect of Pluto conjunct a House or Planet, sometimes decimating what was there before to remove it from your life and moving you forward to rebirth that area of your life.  I usually see the biggest blast from this laser-life focus of energy within 3 days of an eclipse, but sometimes, it hits exactly 30 days later.  [Side note:  after the last solar eclipse, I had a major but wonderful life-changing influence enter my life about 3 days later with a related intense and good turning point exactly 30 days later.] Sometimes I think of these eclipses as big erasers, slowly covering and erasing something from my past and making room to write something new.

The change is after the eclipse, not before, unlike with other conjunction patterns.  Think of a massive light focused through a lens and burning across an area of your life–it will either sear it or illuminate it.

Where:  This annular solar eclipse will be seen mainly in Indonesia and Southeast Asia.  Here in Florida, I do believe I’m out of luck…but that doesn’t mean I can’t use the power of this eclipse to aid me in my spiritual work. 

When:  1:55 AM, Central time here in the Florida Panhandle, January 26, 2009 (January 25 if you’re in an earlier time zone)–which means I’m happy to have Monday off because I can stay up latelatelate on Sunday night to acknowledge the moment–and the change I want to come into my life.

Signs:  This solar eclipse is the first half of a pair of Aquarius-Leo eclipses, with the lunar eclipse coming on February 9.  This eclipse is in Aquarius–specifically at 6 degrees 29 minutes Aquarius.  This is important to the type of energy or influences at play.  Also notable is that the Sun is in Aquarius and the Moon is also a New Moon in Aquarius and they’re conjunct Jupiter in Aquarius.  I think here in Northwest Florida, Scorpio will be rising at the time of the eclipse, so it should be extra intense here.  The Sun-Jupiter conjunction is a great sign for hope and wondrous new things coming into our lives.

Aquarius energy, to me, is all about visionary, revolutionary, unique ways of doing things–and ways of being.  That’s the energy I want to attune to for my meditation.

Houses:  My natal astrology chart gives me an idea of how this pair of eclipses will affect me.  If you don’t believe in astrology, no problem–just consider it as a language you don’t speak and not a science or math.  What patterns that have been in existence long before the English language this post is written in are in play right now?  Astrology is all about patterns, personified by celestial bodies.   For me, this pair of eclipses takes place in my Twelfth House (spirituality, secrets, the unknown, the subconscious) in Aquarius and in my Sixth House (work, daily life, health) in Leo.

So for me, the January 26 eclipse in Aquarius will be mostly felt in my spirituality-secrets-subconcious sector where I tend to find a lot of my own inner transformation.     With a stellium of planets in my Aquarian Twelfth House, I’ve had the tendancy to put up with a lot of crap and I’m putting that in the past and forging a more positive and tranquil place to be, where spirituality and love blend as one for me and where I can explore all the secrets of the subconscious and spirituality, preferably with someone.  These are areas where I want to concentrate when meditating on changes and improvements.  I could focus on other areas but if I can match the energies, then it’s like getting a tail wind to give me extra mileage.

If you don’t have a natal chart already, I recommend http://www.astro.com where you can find out quickly, at no $$$, but please don’t ask me to cast your chart for you.  This informative article is free but my time isn’t

Conjunctions:  As I mentioned above, eclipse energy is like a Pluto conjunction (use the search feature in the right-hand column to look for prior posts on eclipses and conjunctions).  I check my natal, or birth, chart to see if I have any planets, asteroids, etc, at 6 Aquarius 29 (or very close) where this eclipse will fall in my chart.  In this case, I have Saturn at the exact degree.  In the past (see prior articles), I’ve had the eclipse exact on a specific planet or my ascendant.  These are like nuclear explosions in my life!  I’ve seen several intepretations for an eclipse-Saturn conjunction and they range from blowing apart restrictions to beginning a new relationship to an end of certain fears.  The fact that it’s an Eclipse-conjunct-Jupiter (expansion, luck, broadened horizons) conjunct my natal Saturn (restrictions/structure) makes it feel very lucky and hopeful to me.  The last time an eclipse was in conjunction to anything Jupiter in my chart, it heralded a mind-blowing new relationship that opened amazing new vistas for me in both heart and mind, so I promise to report back on how this eclipse manifests for me.  Saturn seems like a scary planet to have at this position but the last “bad” eclipse I had was conjunct my Ascendant, which many interpret as good but it was extremely stressful and disenchanting, so I’ll wait to see what this eclipse brings to my Saturn and not automatically assume the worst.

If you’re noting which planets you have that are “lit up” by this eclipse, the energy of the eclipse will feel like whatever qualities that planet represents are getting intense attention, whether you want it or not.   For example, an Eclipse conjunct Natal Venus may mean a major shakeup in your love life or your creativity.

Length of Meditation/Ritual:  Personally?  I love to use the slingshot effect combined with eclipses (I do this when Mercury comes out of retrograde, too, if I need to increase or improve communications).  Eclipses lasts different periods of time.  I didn’t do my homework on one a while back and thought my meditation would last an hour…not four hours!  I like to begin my meditation (or ritual or prayer or whatever I choose) as the eclipse begins or as the moon in a lunar eclipse is completely blotted out.  I begin wrapping up my meditation when the eclipse is over or when the first glimmer of the moon shows as the lunar eclipse passes.  This varies from eclipse to eclipse, depending on the purpose of my meditation.  Sometimes I want to really focus on wiping out the old stuff in my life that no longer serves me, and sometimes I want to focus on the return of the light and what that means to me. 

Meditation Images:  In previous posts, I’ve shared my images for my own meditations and others have found them useful as well.  (search meditation or ritual for those posts). I have, for several months now, been seeing the moon’s emotional energy as a river.  In June 2008, I was drawn to the idea of BRIDGES over the river of energy, connected past to a new future.  WIth the July Full Moon, I was drawn to the idea of the riverbanks or walls and how they structured that emotional energy. The last series of eclipses in August 2008 brought a tremendous sense of joy, sailing, and parasailing, and simply rising above and having fun.  Later in the Autumn, I went through a period of despair and grief, before which my meditations saw me bashed against the river rocks and walking on the bottom of the river.  The meditations have progressed through a healing process over the Winter months, which bring us now to this new set of eclipses.

In my meditations for this New Moon eclipse, I have a sense of everything beginning to sparkle again and I step back into the river’s water, not so nervous around it since healing and not so disdainful of what it offers.  In my visions, I see myself no longer content just to dip a toe in this once-rocky-but-now-sparkly river but wholeheartedly splashing and happy.  It’s a sweet feeling that I’ll incorporate into my meditation as I find myself in that river, just having fun and feeling very serene in this place of spirituality and hidden secrets. 

This eclipse is all about hope–and the fulfillment that comes thereafter.

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Lorna Recommends:

Her last commercial novel about Joan of Arc’s legacy

Her favorite cookbook for those “unusual” feasts

Her favorite website gear

Her personal website

Photo by ehpien; creative commons license.

I’ve always had a hard time delegating, and that probably explains problems I’ve had with both Christian prayer, Wiccan magick, and the Law of Attraction.  

 

Among those who practice the Law of Attraction and those who practice Magick, whether they are WIccan or some other variety of paganism, I’ve been ridiculed for not being able to “just leave things alone.”  Among LOAers and Pagans, a big part of the mental-to-fruition process is intent and belief.  You believe and then you simply leave it alone to manifest.  You don’t have to do 500 different rituals for the same thing if you believe that Gods will deliver it.  You don’t have to keep fretting about the lack or something or when it will manifest for it to come to you.  And as a child, I often wondered if maybe God got tired of people pestering Him for the same thing every night if they believed God would supply their heartfelt wishes.

 

Just leaving things alone to happen, regardless of how much I believe they’ll come, has always been hard for me, and I think it’s probably because of my Southern Baptist upbringing that said you needed to show God how much you wanted something by praying loud and long and hard, and preferably on your belly in the dirt and begging.  That’s a hard mindset to get rid of!

 

I never really thought that much about delegation in relationship to prayer, magick, or even the Law of Attraction until recently.  I think it hit home first after reading extensively on the Law of Attraction, which is very much like prayer and is not mutually exclusive of prayer if you understand its tenets.  The idea of committing to certain actions that we can take to make our lives better but turning over those things we cannot control to the Universe (or God or a Higher Power) to let those things come to use in the right divine way and timing was very appealing to me. 

 

I also had the not-so-fun experience of dealing with an angry Spiritualist (her term for a magickal system that did not include the same system of belief and ethics I was familiar with among my Wiccan friends).  She’d called upon the spirit world to keep me from the object of her affections.  Very unpleasant.  What I dealt with was not her but a delegation of her wishes so that something dark took the action for her.  I really don’t like to spend my time on banishings and exorcisms, you know?

 

Definitely more upbeat and the first time I’d heard the term delegating used was advice from a Wiccan High Priestess who added runes to her prayers.  She told me that she chose a rune that represented what she was praying about, incorporated that rune into her prayer as a symbol, and then just let it go.  She didn’t have to worry any more.  She simply delegated the job to the rune and let it do the work for her.   THAT was an epiphany for me.

 

In my Christian upbringing, we might have asked our guardian angels for help–and felt a little guilty for being so much trouble–but we would never have “delegated” a job to God.  Maybe it’s semantics, but even if we believed that God would take care of it if we prayed for it, we would never have considered that to be “delegation.”  Maybe that has something to do with our vision of who’s in control or who’s responsible for certain actions?  If we’re responsible for how we conduct our lives and the actions we take, then how can we let go enough of those responsibilities to either instruct someone else to take care of it for us or to allow someone else to handle the task of making it happen?

 

For me, the idea of delegating the carrying out of my heartfelt desires is new, but it is working very well.  I’m not as obsessive over whether my prayer was heard and I’m not bothering Deity with repeated requests for the same thing, in effect holding it at bay because I don’t really believe it can come to me.  It’s just a small twist on looking at things in a different way, but a useful utensil in my box of spiritual tools.

Lorna Tedder, adding a little spice to life…or at least to a wonderful Winter Solstice feast.  Photo by Aislinn Bailey; all rights reserved.

Most people I know make New Year’s resolutions, manage to give up on them in defeat within two weeks, and feel like failures for the rest of the year because they couldn’t manifest a handful of changes in their lives in a few days’ time. I do something different, something that really works for me.  I call it the Burning Bowl Ritual, and it’s perfect for Winter Solstice, New Year’s Eve, or even special occasions throughout the year.   I’ve designed a ritual around it, one that can be adapted to almost any occasion or spiritual gathering.

Here’s how I adapted my usual ritual for a Winter Solstice “feast” that includes guests of all religions:

The timing of the Burning Bowl ritual is important to me.  I prefer to do it on the day of the Winter Solstice because of the symbolism.  Not only is this the longest night of the year, but it’s the day many cultures and religions celebrate the “Return of the Light,” as the days begin to lengthen after this night.  It’s also the first degree of Capricorn, an astrological symbol of manifestation–and the beginning of the new year of manifestation–whether you call those intentions or resolutions. 

For this year’s Burning Bowl ritual, once our feast was complete, I handed out sheets of paper to each guest and asked them to draw a big T on the paper. This was their personal list to take home, so they can put away their list and review it later in the year.   On the left column, they were to write down the things they want to honor and bid farewell to in the coming year.  Saying goodbye to these things will make room for better things to come.  I gave examples from my own list for the year:

Fretting over the lack of ——– in my life

Any insecurity or jealousy over ——–

Worry about ——-

Most of my dinner guests chose things like bad health habits, obsessions over certain people, money worries, unfulfilling jobs, and long-carried emotional pain. 

Once they were done with the things they wanted to say goodbye to, I had them turn their attention to the right column and write down things that they welcomed in for the next year.  Not things they resolved to do.  Not things they “invited” in, but may not come.  Rather, things they “welcomed” in because that implies that these things are definitely coming to them and they’ll be happy to have these things in their lives.  In my experience, the majority of things in this list arrive effortlessly throughout the course of the coming year.  I gave a few examples from my own very long list for 2009, beginning on Winter Solstice 2008:

Continue and expand my social circle and spiritual circle of friends and students, with wonderful lessons coming to me and from me

More loving relationships with family, friends, and daughters

An amazing, fun, intimate, creative, and intense sex life –and for my partner to be able to keep up with me

Learning new  things and meeting new people, including things like knife-throwing, archery, and motorcycles

Business opportunities that bring me many different streams of abundantly flowing income and allow me to be mobile in my workspace and hours

A deepening of my romantic love relationship with ————, to include much happiness, serenity, and a ————

My dinner guests welcomed in a huge variety of things that were very personal to each.  I thought that was funny that we tended to want to get rid of the same things that weighed us down but what we wish to come into our lives was quite diverse.  I loved some of the younger guests’ desires for good mentors, career guidance, confidence, and many of the things that my older guests didn’t consider until they heard these later.  I was amazed at the maturity of some of the youngest guests when it came to participating in this exercise.

When everyone finally had their list completed, I asked them to consider a verb for the next year and a simple phrase or mantra.  These are, in effect, my themes for the next year, and usually go hand in hand. I have to pick the exact words, and that sometimes means digging out the thesaurus to make sure each word has exactly the connotation I’m looking for.   My themes for the past few years and for the coming year? 

2006:  Manifest  and Risk Everything

2007:  Enjoy and Allow Miracles

2008:  Thrive and  Celebrate Everything

2009:  Enchant and Be Delighted

My guests began to think of their themes for the next year, some brainstorming with others to come up with the perfect word. Once they had their themes, they committed them to memory for later in the evening.  They chose words like Relax, Recalibrate, Have Fun, Be Adventurous, Succeed, Liberate Myself, Accept, Live Life to the Fullest.

For the next part of the evening, I brought out wine glass goblets that I’d bought for 50 cents each from a local pottery store.  I could have gone with plastic champagne glasses but I wanted something that my guests could take away with them.  I’d also tried to find those little rings–wine glass jewelry–that dangle from the stem, but couldn’t find them anywhere in town.  While walking through a discount store after a sushi lunch with my eldest child, I happened on an earring display and found not what I was looking for but something better.  I picked out about 10 pairs of deeply discounted gemstone and shell hoop earrings that closed the hoop with a clasp.  Each fit perfectly around the stem of a wine glass and made a nice souvenir to be imbued with the energies of the evening and taken away as a souvenir, to be worn later, attached to a car mirror or lamp pull, etc. 

Next, I handed out little inventory tags to my guests.  These were purchased at the local Office Max in the section where they sell tags and stickers for garage sales.  Each tag was about 2 inches long, with a string attached.  My guests wrote a symbol, picture, or word on the tags to represent what they wanted to say goodbye to and placed the tags in the goblet’s bowl.  These were placed inside the glass because their cups are already full of these things.

My guests then wrote symbols, pictures, and words on the tags to represent things they wanted to welcome for the coming year.  They tied these tags to the stem of the glass and let them dangle.

For the actual ritual, I’d hoped to gather in my backyard, but the below-freezing weather made it impractical, so we moved my grandmother’s aged cauldron into my open garage and started a very small fire in the cauldron, which served as our burning bowl instead of the usual barbecue fire pit in the backyard.

We formed a circle around the burning bowl, each of us holding a candle.  I lit mine and then then person’s next to me, she lit her neighbor’s on the left, and so forth until the circle was complete.  Because our guests were of varying spiritual backgrounds,  we asked the Archangels–something common to most belief systems present–to witness our intentions. 

After some brief explanations about the symbolism of the ritual, each guest tossed tags from inside their glasses into the fire, saying goodbye to the things that no longer serve them and that they wish to get rid of in the coming year.  Some called out these things proudly.  Most performed this part of the ritual silently, as was their perogative. 

Then, one by one, and in no particular order, the guests allowed me to cut the tags from the stems, leaving evidence of their desires in place around the stem, and offered the tags representing things to be welcomed in into the fire, with our intentions carried away by the smoke to come to fruition over the next year.  Some of the guests were exhuberant at this point and it was so much fun to see them enjoying this and feeling so much lighter and more hopeful.

When all the tags were gone, I then offered each guest a choice of grape juice or champagne and filled their glasses.  We each called out our themes for the new year and toasted to them, clinking our glasses.  Then we closed our evening with thanks to the Archangels for bearing witness.

The biggest difference, I think, in this Burning Bowl ritual filled with intentions toward what we welcome in and the usual resolving to do  a host of things that will get rid of bad habits to that so many of our intentions are not things we actually have to go do (and fail at) ourselves.  These are more like a wish list to God, the Universe, Goddess, or whatever belief system you follow so that we allow Deity to bring these to us and we simply welcome them when they get here.  Since I’ve been doing these Burning Bowl rituals, about 90% of my desires are fulfilled within the first 8 months of the year–and some are ones I just never thought would have happened, and certainly not on my own. 

As for this year, only 48 hours after the ritual, I’ve already had two unexpected things to welcome in that are stepping stones:  1.  I have reconnected with someone from my past whom I thought was lost to me and 2.  a colleague (who didn’t attend the party) dropped by my house to wish me a happy holiday and loaned me 3 sets of weighted knives so I can learn to throw them!

Photo by pinkcigarette; creative commons license

Maybe prayer wasn’t what I thought it was.  Prayer has always been a huge part of my life, whether I was devoutly Christian or devoutly Wiccan.  You’d think I wouldn’t be discovering new insights into such a simple concept as prayer when I began my attendance of religious services at the age of six weeks, and yet…one of the best things about a spiritual journey is the discovery of new things and looking at old things when our spiritual paths circle back through the same territory.  Just what is prayer, anyway?

A recent study conducted by a sociologist at Brandeis University found that prayers in the study fell into three categories.  Pardon my cynicism while I paraphrase:

1.      28% — Gimme

2.      22% — Hey, thanks

3.      28% — Gimme and by the way, thanks

Yes, I was a little…appalled.  I’d never really thought about prayer in this way before, breaking it down into the purposes or reasons people pray.  Does prayer really equal either “I want this” or “thanks for giving me this” and that’s it?  That seems so…unspiritual to me. 

My 18-year-old daughter is now majoring in psychology with minors in religion and Italian, so it’s fascinating to me to see her interpretation of many of the concepts that were bred into me.  I grew up in a household where the church doors never opened without us, and the Christian religion was a big part of our lives if not THE main part.  My daughter, the product of an atheist father and a devout-Christian-turned-Wiccan-High-Priestess-Mother, did not grow up being force-fed what she should believe.  Instead, I exposed her to different religions and belief systems so that she could understand and respect them all and make her own choices.  And one of those choices was to study religion once she went to college.

She approaches her religion classes with a freshness and with objectivity because she hasn’t been taught to believe only one way, and that leads to interesting insights for me.  There are many things that I still have trouble separating in my mind from what was programmed into me to believe by my Christian upbringing and what I discovered for myself.  My daughter does not have those particular constraints, and I enjoy her opinions on spirituality.

When I sent her a link to the study, she didn’t seem surprised by the results.  I complained that prayer then must be about talking to God, petitioning God, whereas meditation was more about listening to God and that maybe that’s why people have such a hard time learning to meditate.  She thought I was saying that it was bad to pray for requests or say thanks.

I realized through our emails that I have been seeing prayer not as a hotline for getting stuff but as “communication with God,” which made my daughter laugh. 

“Haha,” she wrote. “For you, it’s communication.  Most people just see God as a higher power with more abilities than they have.  Thus something to either ask something of or thank for having what they’ve got.”

Then she followed up.  “It’s like sending a Christmas list or thank you card, not like a face-to-face or phone conversation.”

And I guess that’s the epiphany of it for me.  I don’t think of prayer as a list of demands or a quick thanks-for-the-help, though I admit that I do those sometimes, too.  For me, prayer IS a conversation–with a little talking and a little listening on both our parts.

Around the riverbend, life is sometimes pretty amazing.

Photo by Chan Worley, Copyright all rights reserved. Used with permission.

Inexplicably, things suddenly seem shinier than they have in previous years.  Given the state of the world at the moment—and the state of my current social trend toward being, well, unsociable after several of my dearest ones had to move away—I had thought this would have been a darker time.  Instead, two weeks before the longest night of the year and the seasonal and spiritual celebrations of Winter Solstice, it feels as if the Light is returning already.  And yes, I’m really shocked, but pleasantly so!

My meditations have been noticeably different in the past few days. The Full Moon meditation (see link) startled me when I found sparkling sunshine all around me, especially after the previous two painful meditations and even more painful outcome.  In my private, regular meditations in my “Enchanted Forest,”  as of this week, it’s become a beautiful enchanted forest FORTRESS.  Last night, the venue was dark, a gentle and warmish night-time in the forest halls, with winter’s leaves on the ground and candles…oh, candles of all sorts!  Tall, short, pillar candles, tea lights.  All white. All burning brightly.  All lining either side of the forest halls and sparkling back with romance and charm.  It reminded me almost of my back patio with its sparkling Christmas lights outlining the edges.  Though my Enchanted Forest is always a beautiful and safe place, it had been decorated especially for me, like a surprise.  And it was a very joyful place to be, even when I’ve been there a couple of weeks ago and found it dark and cold, so that I quickly lit bonfires and found a hurting friend sitting, shivering in wait for me.  This was as opposite as it could have been—flickering, sweet lights—and the sacredness of the closeness I felt in that moment was tangible.

At the same time, my themes for the next year are beginning to gel.  Re-purposing is a huge part of the next year for me. I’ve looked at it in the past as re-formatting or re-packaging and gotten a good start on it but with new technologies and new markets, my guidance tells me it’s much more than that.  It is finding a new purpose for the things I already know and have, a higher manifestation of where I’ve been.  This isn’t just finding a new market for an old product or service but rather, a new incarnation that will be freer for me.

I think that I must have enough material in inventory that I would not have to create anything new for the next year and could still be as busy as I could ever desire to be.  Worst case,  I could produce about 10% of new material and fling out new creations to new audiences for reasons very different from in their previous lives.  I have one project alone that I created 12 years ago for a free workshop I did for a tiny professional audience.  The information is still valid, still timely…at least 80% of it anyway. Maybe more with a little re-writing.  That 80% equates to about 8, maybe 10, different projects in different formats for different audiences.  Online workshops, ebooks, DVD’s, audio files, and e-courses are all very real possibilities.  Out of ONE project that’s been on a shelf for most of the past decade.  The material is done—it’s just a matter of some tweaking and applying current technology to its distribution! And that’s just one example.

Another is the material I put together for my monthly gatherings.  I have a rather unique spin what I teach, and there’s no reason it can’t be re-purposed into projects for other audiences.  The work is done, regardless.  So why just put that work on a shelf and ignore that additional good things it can do?

But it’s not just the work itself that I’ve done and now need to give a good push and go reap the rewards.  No, it’s also the work I’ve done on MYSELF that I need to now recognize and go reap the rewards.

And that’s a very nice Yule present from me to…me.

Photo by Angus Thermopylae; creative commons license.

The December Full Moon, aka the Full Cold Moon, occurs in Gemini on December 12, 2008 at 10:38 AM Central time here in the Florida Panhandle.  This Full Moon, I feel, is all about having an “idea of who we really are.”

Gemini is a sign of  mental processes—communications, ideas, intellect, flexibility, adaptability, changeability.  The usual easygoing qualities of this particular moon are tempered, as mentioned last month, with some rather tense struggles astrologically. This year, people are much more serious, more tense, still licking their wounds from the economy, from job layoffs, and from a general sense of restriction and cutbacks even in their favorite relationships.

For those of you who routinely read my suggestions for meditations, you know how this works.  I share this unraveling of images I have just before a New Moon, Full Moon, and/or Eclipse and you’re welcome to use what makes sense to you.   For most of 2008, I’ve been following this “story” of a river of emotions connected with Moon phases–everything from bridges over rivers to the structure that holds the river in its banks, to surfing the river, to becoming the river, to rising above the river in a parasail…all taking me “around the riverbend” to a beautiful new vista that is lush and green.   For those of you who know me personally, you’ve watched in amazement and then horror at how some of these influences have played out in my life.  (But don’t worry—I have a feeling that it’s about to turn back to amazement again.)  Here are the links to previous meditations:

Bridges — http://thespiritualeclectic.wordpress.com/2008/06/15/ritualmeditation-what-this-june-moon-is-good-for/

Riverbanks/Structures — http://thespiritualeclectic.wordpress.com/2008/07/13/serious-moonlight-ideas-for-your-july-full-moon-meditations-and-rituals/

Surfing/Sailing — http://thespiritualeclectic.wordpress.com/2008/07/28/1-august-2008-solar-eclipse-rituals-and-meditations-for-the-new-moon-in-leo/

Parasailing — http://thespiritualeclectic.wordpress.com/2008/08/08/16-august-2008-lunar-eclipse-rituals-and-meditations-for-the-full-moon-in-aquarius/

Becoming the River — http://thespiritualeclectic.wordpress.com/2008/09/13/harvest-moon-in-pisces-september-2008s-full-moon-meditation/

Rocks — http://thespiritualeclectic.wordpress.com/2008/10/11/hunter-moon-in-aries-october-2008s-full-moon-meditation/

Rebuilding the Riverbanks — http://thespiritualeclectic.wordpress.com/2008/11/11/tension-vs-recovery-november-2008%e2%80%99s-full-moon-in-taurus-meditation/ 

Which brings us to this Full Moon’s meditation:

In this meditation, I find myself in the exact physical spot as at the end of the last meditation, though time has clearly passed.  I am still on the riverbank after being bashed against rocks in the current, but I am no longer visibly bruised and I’m no longer bleeding or shivering.  I have caught my breath, rested, begun molding new riverbanks out of the mud and rocks in my hands.  The course of the river has not yet changed, but I have been steadily rebuilding the structures of my emotional life and reclaiming the joy of sitting in sunshine.

I am not in the powerful emotional flow of the river but close enough to it to leap back into it or scramble up the slight incline behind me.   I note that I am completely without clothes in this meditation.  It’s something I never think of in these meditations, but it’s important in this one.  Not because I am vulnerable and have completely bared my heart and soul and then crawled wounded and half-dead onto the riverbank.  No, the lack of clothes is notable because I am covered in mud, from head to toe.  Black, rich, river mud.  While I have been rebuilding, I have allowed myself to be coated in this dark sheath of comforting—but sometimes tingling and sometimes scratchy—mud.  But it’s cooling and it feels good because it covers the soreness of the bruises that are no longer evident.  It hides my wounds.

That’s not the only difference in this meditation.  While the last few mediations have been full of storm and dark, the sun is out now, shining warmly on me under this Full Cold Moon.  I would not have thought it. 

I walk lightly just beyond the riverbank, onto the lush green grass of the beautiful plains that were waiting for me just around the river’s bend, the ones I saw just before I hit the boulders in the current.  I feel the grass under my muddy bare feet.  I feel the sunshine warming the mud caked to my skin.  The mud is no longer slick but dry now, and flaking off.  I raise my face to the sun, and feel the mud drying in my hair and on my face.

Then I do something very unexpected…even more unexpected than wearing nothing but mud or the fact that the sun in shining in my world again.  I walk back to the river, back to the emotional current that hurt me so only two moons ago.

I dip my bare and gray-muddy feet in the water and wash away the mud.   Some takes a little rubbing, some does not.  In place of the mud, my normally darker skin that occasionally shows my Native American roots is now a bright and new pink, unlike skin I’ve ever had in my life.  It is healed and the blood flow has given it a fresh and unusually bright glow.  The skin on my bare feet sparkles in the water. 

I don’t dive back into the river.  No, not ready for that yet.  But I do crouch and wash my hands in the river, loosening the caked mud until it flows away and my hands are bright and fresh, almost shiny in the water and sunlight.  My feet and hands are in the water, yet my feet are on solid ground now.  No flailing in the water or flying recklessly.  Just enjoying the feel of the current over my flesh but anchored this time.  More conservative in my adventures, at least for the moment, but not afraid of the water either, and certainly not swearing I’ll never wade into it again. 

I scoop up handfuls of clear water and wash my skin until all of the mud is gone and I stand in the sunlight, fresh and new and a little sparkly.  The mud from rebuilding and taking time for myself is gone now, healing left in its place.  There are still some sore spots under the shiny new skin but only I know they’re there.  Some bruises take longer to heal than others, and even when the skin no longer shows the painful color, the damage is bone deep and takes a little longer.  Yet,  there’s a freshness now, a newness.  I walk back into the grass and sunlight, this time wearing only my fresher skin, and lift my clean face to the sunshine. 

Although there is much intensity and struggle around me, this moment marks a change that is coming quickly.  For all the agony of the boulders I could not navigate, for all the recuperation time I have given myself,  for all those tiny steps I have taken to get my life–if not the river–back on course…there is sunshine and newness coming, and everything around me seems to sparkle. 

Pausing on the beach on Thanksgiving Day, Grayton Beach, Florida, (c2008, by Shannon Bailey) …

(see second photo below)

This is a Powerful Pause. I’ve been paying attention to my intuition for several years now, and sometimes I’m able to step aside and take a look at what I “know” is coming as opposed to what I wish would come.    Whether you call it the ebb and flow of life or a matter of pause and action, these are definitely patterns to pay attention to, and right now, for me, I am once again in a state that I call a “Powerful Pause.”

About a year ago, I had inklings…knowings…of some of the things that were to come.  It was like being in the middle of a huge sense of preparation in all areas of my life but quite a bit in the social/romantic sector.  There were moments when I had flashes of a man in my house, living with me in a wonderful and pleasurable relationship that I could hardly imagine, but they were humorous flashes of insight, too.  Like fussing over the towels for the shower.  Just mundane daily activities that were magically happy in each moment.   There were times  of walking  the path down by the marsh where the fireflies glow and the falling stars fill the night sky, and I felt a man’s arms wrapped around me, watching the twilight on the waters of the Bay.

But none of this was happening in my daily life back then. I was busy with work, family, friends, creative projects.  Tremendously busy.  And then I had an urgent sense of needing to prepare my nest which I calmed with summer repair projects and re-construction that desperately needed to be done.  It was a sense of “prep time!”  and pausing to get everything ready for a new stage of my life.  I feel as if I got a really good taste of that new phase of activity and intensity before it retrograded back into another phase of preparation.  Almost like the Gods said, “This is how good it can be.”

So now I am again in a state of a Powerful Pause.  I am refusing to see this time as bad, non-productive, or terrible. 

Thank you for reading!  The complete version of this article is now included in Give Your Life Direction.

Click on the pics in this post for larger views.

Back in college, one of my term projects was to find and point out erotic objects in advertising as part of my demonstration of how subliminal advertising works.  Yes, there were plenty of phallic symbols–some VERY plain–in the shadows and curves of liquor ads. 

I’ve heard the same about “orbs” that show up in photographs.  They’re pollen, they’re humidity, they’re dust, they’re smudges.  Tonight, something interesting showed up in my daughter’s photos with her new high-speed camera that she got for her birthday.

She was taking a picture of her hair to chronicle its length since she’s determined that her hair will be butt-length by the time she finishes high school.  That’s her in the photos with her back turned and her hair well past her shoulders.

What was surprising was the multitude of faces we saw in the mirrors behind her.  Many, we could explain away.  Sorta.  There weren’t reflections on the mirrors or anything on the opposite wall or smudges on the mirrors.  One in particular was very interesting to us.    Both my daughter and I saw a face of a young woman, straight hair, turned sideways a little, almost like her hand against the mirror.  That’s a windchime in the corner of the room, hanging in front of the face.

 And in case it didn’t stand out right away for you…..

Photo by ShotsAtRAdom; creative commons license

When I was a little girl in a Southern Baptist church, the preachers often talked about how we’d all recognize each other when we got to heaven.  Even as a child, I had a few problems with the way this scenario was presented to me.  Sometimes we were told that everyone would magically turn 33 again (the age of Jesus on the cross) and that’s the age we’d appear to be in heaven.  I had issues with this nice little fantasy!

First of all, I didn’t quite understand how we’d get to take our bodies with us.  Our physical bodies were sinful, after all.   Or look exactly the way we wanted to.  And if we looked exactly the way we wanted to, then how would anyone recognize us?  By the time I was a teenager, I already disliked any photograph that actually looked like me, so how would someone recognize me? I had a long way to go before I was 33 and who knew what I’d look like then?  How would I recognize my grandparents if they were walking around those streets of gold, carrying harps and being 33 when I’d never known them at 33? 

Of course, the preachers, Sunday School teachers, and parents all seemed mortified at my questions.  Questions really weren’t allowed in the church I grew up in.  Questions meant doubts and doubts equaled “going to hell.”    So most people kept their mouths shut and tormented themselves in private.

But now I understand exactly how we might “recognize” each other in the afterlife, or next life, or heaven, or whatever you choose to call it.  It works just as well in this life, too, right now, here on Earth.

After my grandfather died, he visited me in my dreams many times.  On one occasion, he appeared to me as a young man, in his 20’s, in a suit from the 1930’s.  It frightened me because I didn’t recognize him.  It was his energy, his essence, but not the way I’d known him.  In my dream, my anxiety saddened him and he became an old man again, and I was comfortable with that.

Since then, I’ve come to understand my empathic nature much more clearly. 

Unless my own emotions are very turbulent, I now will feel sadness, euphoria, or anxiety and know that something important is happening to a loved one.  I can often tell WHICH loved one. 

More recently, I’ve had experiences where I felt someone’s scathing hatred—and I’ve been able to tell who was suddenly focused on me and verify it with physical evidence.  That’s a longer story and a more private story than I can explain here, but having that “recognition” of another person’s essence or energy physically and scientifically validated was a shock for me.  I didn’t have to hear her angry voice, see her enraged face, or even receive an email or IM from her.  I simply recognized the feel of this person’s energy when she focused on me and when she reacted to her thoughts of me, which were expressed hundreds of miles away to someone else at the same instant in time…to the exact minute.  I found it both disturbing (her mental state) as well as somewhat euphoric (my amazement at recognizing the signature of her energy and thoughts).  I’d had this happen with people I’d connected with emotionally in a love relationship but never with someone I wasn’t a fan of and usually not validated in such a physical way as this was.

But I still didn’t think of it in terms of “recognizing” someone without recognizing their physical presence.  Two things happened that made it clear for me—1.  I learned a lot about grave dirt in spells/rituals and 2.   a “stranger” friended me on Facebook.

A practitioner of what some people would ignorantly refer to as “Black Magick” explained how grave dirt is used in her rituals (these were rituals for protection, not harm, by the way, so stop being panicky).  From her explanation of dirt from a grave being “charged” with the energy of that person, I began to understand better that our bodies house our essence or energy and become “charged” so that other people associate who we really are with the bodies that carry us.  When those bodies die, they are still charged with that energy and when buried, the ground around them becomes charged with that energy.  Hence, a person who was a stronger protector in life might leave behind grave dirt that is highly charged with that protector-influence.  It’s like picking up a shirt left behind by an old lover and still finding his scent on it and smiling at the memories its charged with.    For most people, the concept of grave dirt carrying the energy of the person buried there is way too morbid or bizarre to think about, let alone to consider the recognition of that energy as anything other than “bad.”  Me, I find it to be an interesting correlation.  We might sense a loved one at a cemetery but we might also sense them in their homes.

I finally put it all together when I received an email from a name I didn’t recognize.  In the past, I’ve  opened emails and felt that person’s energy attached to their words, sometimes knowing the emotional content before I read a single word of it.  Some people use their emails magickally, and once you open the email, it’s considered “accepted” so that you get the brunt of whatever emotions  or persuasive ideas those words were charged with. Sensing the sender’s own energy or essence when opening an email is an odd feeling, but quite real and very specific to the person.  It’s like walking into a room and smelling gardenia perfume and knowing your grandmother is nearby.  Even if other people in your life wear gardenia perfume, it always mixed with your grandmother’s skin in such a way that it’s a unique scent.  In this case, the email wasn’t directly from the person with the strange name but through a social network, so it wasn’t as strong.  Still, there was something about the essence around that name that caught my attention.   I researched the name, which didn’t even vaguely resemble any birth name or married name of anyone I’d ever known, and found a piece of artwork online.  When I looked at the art, I felt the energy of a girl I’d known 28 years ago who has since disappeared and changed her name to start a life elsewhere.   Had I seen a picture of her, I would not have recognized her.  But her energy?  Yes.

So no, we don’t need our bodies in heaven to recognize each other.  In fact, we don’t need them here to recognize each other either.

Photo by stitch; creative commons license.

If you’re looking for a sign, this is it.

How many of us are torn—or think we are—about a direction to take, and so we look for “signs” that will push us in one direction or the other?  We already know the answer but either don’t trust our intuition or want to ignore it because it’s not what we want to hear.  So we look for signs.

Signs can be anything. I’ve sent a email that I had serious doubts about sending, knew not to send it, but felt that logically I had to do it.   When the email bounced back to me—dot cum is not the appropriate suffix!—I took it as a sign that I wasn’t to send it and didn’t pursue the matter further.  A few days later, I found out that the intended recipient would have used the message against someone else in a devastating way.

I’ve taken long drives, just praying for some guidance about whether I should proceed with a divorce, and turned on the radio to hear Sheryl Crow singing “A change would do you good!”  I took it as a sign.  It wasn’t that a major life-changing decision hinged on whichever song happened to be on the radio at the time, but it was a sort of confirmation for what I already knew.  That was a ….

Thanks for reading!  The complete version of this article is now included in The Long-Awaited, Honest-to-God Secret to Being Happy.

Photo by Zoe; creative commons license

The November Full Moon, aka the Beaver Moon or the Frosty Moon, occurs in Taurus on November 13, 2008 at 12:17 AM Central time here in the Florida Panhandle.  

Taurus is a sign of solidity, sensuality, earthiness, pleasure, enjoyment.  Sounds great, huh?  Except that, astrologically, this moon has some difficult angles, plus the Sun is in Scorpio with all its intensity and truth-seeking.  There’s a tension between the two–can you relax and enjoy things or will your secrets be uncovered?–that can be felt in most situations and relationships right now.  I have friends who are ecstatic, hopeful, and cautious about the results of the Presidential election and I have family who are devastated and fraught with worry about our country’s future–and that’s just one of the ways that this Full Moon seems to pull us apart.  Edginess over the economy, politics, personal relationships, finances-it’s all there.  Several friends of mine noted that Halloween was full of angry emotions this year rather than the usual Halloween fun, and they encountered tension everywhere they went.  So remember that this November 2008’s Full Moon is going to be a time of intensity and extremes, of heightened worry mixed with heightened fantasy about the way things could be, of some explosiveness that, in the next month, will dissolve into a better understanding of the physical reality.

For those of you who routinely read my suggestions for meditations, you know how this works.  I share this unraveling of images I have just before a New Moon, Full Moon, and/or Eclipse and you’re welcome to use what makes sense to you.   For most of 2008, I’ve been following this “story” of a river of emotions connected with Moon phases–everything from bridges over rivers to the structure that holds the river in its banks, to surfing the river, to becoming the river, to rising above the river in a parasail…all taking me “around the riverbend” to a beautiful new vista that is lush and green.   Here are the links to previous meditations:

Bridges — http://thespiritualeclectic.wordpress.com/2008/06/15/ritualmeditation-what-this-june-moon-is-good-for/

Riverbanks/Structures — http://thespiritualeclectic.wordpress.com/2008/07/13/serious-moonlight-ideas-for-your-july-full-moon-meditations-and-rituals/

Surfing/Sailing — http://thespiritualeclectic.wordpress.com/2008/07/28/1-august-2008-solar-eclipse-rituals-and-meditations-for-the-new-moon-in-leo/

Parasailing — http://thespiritualeclectic.wordpress.com/2008/08/08/16-august-2008-lunar-eclipse-rituals-and-meditations-for-the-full-moon-in-aquarius/

Becoming the River — http://thespiritualeclectic.wordpress.com/2008/09/13/harvest-moon-in-pisces-september-2008s-full-moon-meditation/

Rocks — http://thespiritualeclectic.wordpress.com/2008/10/11/hunter-moon-in-aries-october-2008s-full-moon-meditation/

For those of you who know what happened in my personal life after last month’s rather precognitive meditation, the one where I felt we were being bashed against rocks, you may wonder why I would continue these meditations.  I don’t really have a choice…they come to me on their own, and usually give me an idea about the next weeks’ influences.  Besides, I have recovered and I’m well now-the worst part by far was having to navigate some of those boulders alone.

Which brings us to this Full Moon’s meditation:

In this meditation, I am no longer drowning in the emotional flow of the river or being pelted with boulders that are obstacles to my happiness.  I’ve pulled myself to the riverbank, and I am bruised, bleeding, and shivering.  I am tired but I am at last able to catch my breath rather than fight the current.  There are still boulders in the river and the current of the emotion in the river is still as strong as it ever was, but I’m at a place where I can relax for a moment.  I don’t, of course, relax fully.  Instead, I turn my attention to rebuilding.  I do not have the strength to lift huge boulders to line the riverbanks and change the course of the river, but what I can do is very small and very focused. 

In this meditation, the vista beyond the riverbend is still lush and beautiful, even if I am not moving right now.  I am not stuck either–just resting.  I see my hands full of river sand–wet, smooth, shiny with the tiniest particles of all those jagged rocks the current pushed me against, rocks I shoved off of, rocks that left me bleeding for days.  These are not the huge boulders still in my current of emotion but the ones that have been pulverized against my own body and heart, ground to dust to mix with river sand. 

I scoop these muddy handfuls of rock and sand and water and then layer them onto the side of the river.  I build, so slowly and with small movements, a more solid path for this river, gently raising a new riverbank, making small changes where I can.  I am not powerless.  I can continue to build my future, with small steps and appropriate rest.

The mud feels good in my hands.  Resting on the dirt and grass, my feet still in the water, feels good in my soul.  Taking these little actions feels good in my heart.  No matter how much intensity is in the air around me, I persevere, I plan, I make things happen…

And so can you.