Available: freelance Pagan priestess

Women are more likely than men to be religious. When women belong to a particular culture, tradition, or faith, they're more likely to be conservative about that culture, tradition, or faith (or so I think I've read; I remember it surprised me). Women--usually mothers--often play the role of cultural conservator: I think of mothers lighting shabbas candles; mothers cooking big holiday meals, sending cards, buying gifts, remembering birthdays; grandmothers attending Mass every day. Women don't often hold positions of power in religious hierarchy (though that started to change with the second wave of feminism), but they most often do the day-to-day religious work in a culture.

In Wicca, of course, especially those strains of Wicca influenced by feminism, women hold spiritual authority. (This is something of a truism, but my own experience suggests a pretty firm divide between feminist-inflected Wicca and other, more traditionally male-centered Wicca; I don't think the public face of Wicca is as feminist or female-friendly as one might expect from a Goddess-centered spirituality.) Also, since Paganisms are relatively new, historically, and often improvisational and ad hoc, and since they seem to attract seekers with anarchist or countercultural sympathies, many Pagans don't set much store by tradition. (Obviously there are exceptions, but even traditionalist Pagans don't have that many years of tradition to uphold; and Reconstructionists are, you know, reconstructing, which involves much faithfully making things up.)

I think a lot about what it means, as a woman and now a mother, to serve the Goddess, and what it means to be called to a kind of clergy-like service in a faith that has no clergy (and that some would argue should have no clergy; please forgive a new mother for not looking up all the links; I think Kerr Cuhulain made an argument to that effect recently). I think about how I want to practice my faith now that I have a child. Can I still slack off on some of the sabbats? (Pagan true confession: I never manage much for Beltane.) How will I get my child a spiritual education? (Join the UU church? Develop a curriculum for Pagan SunDay School, as one non-Pagan friend suggested I do?) Is spiritual community even more important now, and is a specifically Wiccan/Pagan/earthwise community important? How do I rustle up one of those?

In short, what does it mean to be a religious conservator and innovator within my family?

What does it mean to be a freelance priestess in my wider community? For we Pagani a sense of place--of the very earth under our feet--is important, but there aren't a whole lot of Pagans in my place. I image playing a role something like a public monastic; I imagine tending a temple and playing a visible role in a wider community. I'm a solid celebrant, though I usually have to create my own occasions and invite people to celebrate with me. But I imagine that my public role might be more counselor and healer. I'm also an excellent teacher--really, it's one of the things I do best, though I've been several years without a classroom or students.

In short, I have vision, skills, training, and interest, but I don't know how or what to manifest.

I remain open to Her call. The changes in my life in the past year alone have been tremendous. I'm incredibly blessed. I just wonder if I need to be taking more assertive action. I don't want to miss out. Yet the message I get so often is, be patient and wait.

So I turn these ideas over in my mind, I listen, and I wait.

Thoughts on healing: caring and bearing witness

It could be a tenet of Wicca (but it's not, since Wicca tends toward tenetlessness) that Witches Heal. Though we often speak as though healing is something we do for another person, as in a doctor healing her patient, in fact we can only heal ourselves. I can care for another person and provide some conditions for healing, but only he heals himself. Similarly, and of concern to many Pagans, we cannot heal the earth; but we can care for the earth and provide conditions under which it will thrive and heal itself.

One of the most important things we can do as healers is to bear witness: to hold a non-judgmental but discerning space for the person or being who is healing. We need to be able to discern what would help them (an action, a holding, a medicine, a clean needle, a kind word, a pointed observation, a touch), but we cannot sit in judgment, for judgment limits and constrains where healing needs room for natural expansion and contraction. Bearing witness means being able to see things as they are, not as we wish they would be, and to "hold space" compassionately for whatever arises. Much of the work of a healer lies in being present to another, not buffeted by or frightened by their emotions, not sucked in, not closed down, not colluding, not withholding. Being with. And in that being, seeing what else might be needed.

Witches heal

I found the following on this week's page in We'Moon '09. I've been thinking about this a lot over the last couple years; I think she's exactly right.

I began thinking about ancestral memory and what if? What if the wounds I carry are not solely from my lifetime, but also from my mother's, my father's, and grandparents' passed genetically and psychically? What if the multiple abuses I have processed in therapy are from ancestral wounds as well as current, and what if the connections extend beyond even ancestral lineage to some kind of interspecies link?

I feel lighter when I entertain these thoughts and constantly renew my commitment to my path of healing, not only for my family and myself but also for all beings. I am beginning to see that the web of life weaves connections between all of time, space and place. And how each small healing benefits the whole cosmos.

(Janice Young)

Desire's end, part II

A couple of months ago, a grumpy old guy named Billy visited this blog and apropos of nothing except the blog's name left this comment:

Hey, there is no end to desire. We have been at that for billions of years.

The whole cosmos is nothing other than sexual energies, it's just in our human forms that it gets all messed up.

So maybe he didn't get the reference to the Charge of the Goddess, or maybe he didn't care, but the thing is, I agree with him. Desire seems to be a fundamental operating principle of the universe. As such, it seems perverse to wish for or anticipate its end.

Feri tradition tells a creation myth in which the Goddess gazes into a mirror and, falling in love with herself, gives birth to the universe. It seems to me at least a lovely metaphor, and I think more than that, to say that longing is what draws us into this world (the parents' desire for each other and for a child, the soul's desire to incarnate). Longing lures us through life, however messy and complicated, and it beckons to us from beyond the veil. How unfortunate it would be, then, to deny the power of this longing, to try to make ourselves, as if we could, beings without desire.

Yet we do just that. We deny ourselves all kinds of pleasure, including the pleasure of simply feeling our desires. Think about the fundamental things humans long for: food, water, shelter, touch, sex, companionship, beauty, comfort, meaning, creativity, expression, and connection to the world around us. Which of these isn't affected by practices of self-denial and wishing things were otherwise? How often do we fear that our wanting something will be too painful, that our desires will languish unfulfilled, and so we cut ourselves off from the wanting? What would it mean if instead we allowed ourselves fully to inhabit our desires, to know them intimately, to know ourselves intimately? Is it too much of a risk? What are we risking? And what do we lose if we don't taste the depths of those things we want?

I know my own litany of fear runs like this. I won't get what I want. I want too much, and that means there's something wrong with me. I don't deserve to want or receive things. I'll be judged. I'll be rejected. My needs can never be met. I'll have to give too much of myself away. It will be too painful. I don't want to be needy. I don't want to risk being disappointed. If I "give in" to my desires, they'll overwhelm me, or someone else. I'm powerless in the face of them. I'll hurt someone. I'll be consumed by them. I'll lose control. I'll feel empty, isolated, alone.

In a puritanical culture, whence come many of these fears, desire is something to be kept under tight control if not altogether annihilated. It's an unseemly artifact of our animal natures. We identify desire with women, in whom it's deemed uncontrollable. Like the feminine, it needs to be mastered. Desire leaves us vulnerable and exposed. We feel its tremors, and we turn away.

What would it be like if instead of trying to master, ignore, or squelch desire, we rode its currents instead? What if we became intimate with not just the contents or objects of our desires, but with the very shape, texture, and taste of desire itself? What if we allowed ourselves to dive deep into the wanting? What if we sat with desire and allowed it to unfold within us, to reveal its layers and secrets, to discover what's underneath the ripples of surface longing?

What if we were honest with each other about our desires? What if, instead of furtively confessing, we boldly stated, explored, investigated, and celebrated them? What if we stopped being coy and embarrassed? What would it mean to take responsibility for desire in the full context of that desire? To work skillfully with it? What if we acknowledged and accepted that we're desirous beings and got to know ourselves as such?

Healing, one definition

I found this in the April edition of O Magazine:

"When we honestly ask which persons in our lives mean the most to us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a gentle and tender hand. The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not-knowing, not-curing, not-healing and face with us the reality of our powerlessness ...makes it clear that whatever happens in the external world, being present to each other is what really matters."

--Henri J. M. Nouwen

Working with "negative" emotions, living in this body - a beginning

Two bloggers have recently made reference to my post, Heal this, in quite different and interesting contexts. (Why doesn't Blogger have Trackback, anyway? I mean, it's a lovely surprise to find a reference to one of my posts while I'm reading someone else's blog, but it would also be nice if the conversations were tracked for readers.)

Medusa asks with regard to the "Heal this": "Are frustration and anger part of a spiritual path? If so, what are their purposes?" I like that those are the questions that came to her while she was reading what I wrote, because I hadn't formulated them myself, but they're good questions. I mean, the answer has to be "yes," right, because those emotions are inevitably part of this being human. Yet I so often find myself trying to disavow such feelings, trying to cut them off or deny them, and wishing I didn't feel them. I know that healing and change come from acceptance and allowing those feelings to be, but how does one accept the "negative" emotions? What is the practice? And does Wicca have anything at all to say to these questions? Or do we have to turn to Buddhism?

Sia writes about taking care of oneself on the spiritual path in If you're such a Goddess, then why do you treat yourself like s%*t? She talks about the daily struggle to make healthy choices, a struggle I share. As I asked my therapist last week, why am I enchanted by choices that may feel good in the very short term but don't in the longer term? And why do I resist simple things that feel really good, like daily yoga practice?

Most of the cultural discourse around "health" is profoundly alienating to me, grounded as it is in a Protestant work ethic and Judeo-Christian ideas about sin and virtue. As I was saying to a friend recently, I long for new narratives. What would an earth-centered ethics of health and the body look like? There are already some answers out there. I see lots of Pagan bloggers thinking and writing about these things, working out their own ways to live ethically and healthfully. I welcome the discussion, encourage more, and want myself to experiment more with passionate, respectful, earthy, joyous, non-linear, earthwise ways of living in this body, on this land.

New moon in Pisces

I assure you this won't turn into an astrology blog, but there have been some big astrological events lately--or at least they've been having a big impact on me. And there is just one more that I want to write about right now.

(One thing I love about Wicca and Paganism, at least as I think about them, is that they encourage reading the events of our lives like a literary text. Did you have the experience in high school where your English teacher would explain the symbolism in the book you were reading, or you would study various critical reviews of, I don't know, The Scarlet Letter, and someone--maybe even you--would complain, "yeah, right, how do you see all that in this book? We're just making this stuff up." Many people--maybe even me, at times--feel the same way about a magical worldview, about religion, about tarot, astrology and other kinds of divination. Did the bird that flew into the glass of my bedroom window [the only time it's ever happened in my seven years living in a window-filled, second-story apartment] on New Year's Day last year while Adonis and I were discussing getting pregnant really presage the miscarriage I had six weeks later? Was that event a symbol invested with meaning? Is it "okay" to read our lives that way? Sometimes I feel that if my life were a novel, the symbolism would be pretty heavy handed.)

I often think of astrology (and tarot) as a set of texts for interpreting human existence. Recently, I've talked about Pluto entering Capricorn and the lunar eclipse in Virgo. Today is the new moon, completing the lunar cycle and beginning another anew. The moon is in Pisces, as is the sun. I found the article by Simone Butler on Mooncircles to be particularly apt.

All addictions stem from the same root: feeling separate from Source. The Alcoholics Anonymous 12-step program succeeds because it teaches participants to give their problems over to a higher power. Making the connection to Source through prayer, meditation, or spending time in nature reminds us that we are one with all that is.

During most of March, with the sun in Pisces, a sign that rules both addiction and spiritual surrender, we're asked to awaken from our illusion of separation and jettison crippling habits that hold us back. February's solar eclipse on the 7th opened our wounds for healing, and the lunar eclipse on the 21st shone a bright light on the need to fix what's broken.

(Deborah Oak had a particularly harrowing wake-up call.)

Now, on March 7, Uranus the Awakener conjoins the New Moon in Pisces--a wake-up call for sure. In Pisces, the last sign of the zodiac, we merge with Source on our journey back home....

Trust is a key word for Pisces.... The Hopi say we're in a rushing river, that we should stop clinging to the shore and allow the current to bring us to the river's calm center.... Pisces demands surrender to "what is," rather than railing against what isn't. Surrender leads to the calm center within. Otherwise, you end up lost in your fears--and the endless cycle of addiction.

If you're feeling unusually vulnerable or empty these days, remember that the aching void is also your access point to Source.

As in the beloved Leonard Cohen song,

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in.

Even at the dark of the moon, blessings.

The cosmic bulldozer

You know how sometimes everything that happens to you points in the same direction? Like you couldn't ignore the signs if you tried? This is one of those times. Witness the power of one pledge. The message? To tend to the roots.

(1) Partly, it's the astrological weather. Pluto has moved into Capricorn, though it will move forward and retrograde throughout this year, before settling in for the ride till 2023. We tend to be afraid of Pluto. He's the king of the underworld, after all. He rules death and transformation. Like death, he's impersonal. He doesn't care if a little destruction is going to mess up your plans. Whatever has outlived its usefulness has to go. Structures that no longer serve us are upended, no matter how attached to them we might feel. Practical Capricorn is firmly rooted in the material world: wealth, home, property, business, building, construction, management of resources. Earthly institutions: marriage, church, government, economy. Got one that isn't working? Pluto is gonna bust it up and break it down. For example, the last time Pluto was in Capricorn (November 1762-December 1778), there was this little event we call the American Revolution.

(2) My own challenges these last few months have been those relating to first chakra issues: home, survival, and money. Here is what Anodea Judith has to say about the first, or root chakra, called Muladhara, located at the base of the spine:

It relates to the element earth, and all solid, earthly things, such as our bodies, our health, our survival, our material and monetary existence, and our ability to focus and manifest our needs. It is the manifestation of consciousness in its final form--solid and tangible. It is our need to stay alive and be healthy, and the acceptance of limitation and discipline so crucial to manifestation. (Wheels of Life, p. 60)

My sister's illness, the trouble with buying a house, some issues with my finances; these all have to do with the first chakra, and with Capricorn.

(3) In my last post I mentioned something called the schizoid defense. That defense has to do with root chakra issues: physical survival, manifestation, living on the earth. Do I have a right to be here? Do I have a right to the things I need to survive (food, sleep, shelter, a job, medicine, health care, love)?

--

Patterns. In the past I've had trouble grasping how my own schizoid defense works. It's been the one to elude my understanding. But now I'm beginning to see it in the parts of my life I try to fragment and hide from, the places where I practice denial because to broach them seems terrifying. One of the biggest areas, for me, is money. And the message I've been getting loud and clear these last several weeks is that my old way of (not) dealing is really not going to work anymore. Fragmentation and denial are becoming impossible. This is Pluto at work in Capricorn.

Because I'm a pretty grounded person in many ways, and I don't suffer a lot of anxiety, I've had trouble discerning challenges around my root chakra. The cosmic 2x4 has had to swing this way several times. The biggest hit was what got me to begin studying healing in the first place: surgery at the bottom of my lumbar spine. Yes, surgery on my first chakra. Three years later, I'm starting to understand the connections. Survival, support, money, home, earth, belonging, manifestation, deserving.

The structures have been threatening collapse for some time; a few years ago, they started to fall. I picture Pluto as this big bulldozer or backhoe. I imagine Arthur Dent waking one morning to find the bulldozers reflected in his shaving mirror, poised to destroy his house. He doesn't realize that bulldozers are the least of his worries, since his planet is also scheduled for demolition that morning. That's Pluto, blandly informing us that the plans have been on display at the central office for some time for those who cared to consult them.

But the other thing about Pluto? He guards all the earth's hidden riches. To discover them, to spy them glinting in the sunlight, you need only turn over some earth.

So what happened next?

I wrote the previous post a week ago. The next morning, I woke up feeling out of sorts and decided to stay home from work in order to fend off whatever malaise was encroaching. By late afternoon, I was in a state of high anxiety--and I'm not prone to anxiety. I called my therapist and made an appointment for the next day, and I called two friends to come be with me. By the time my friends arrived, the migraine had begun. The migraine that lasted five days.

I know the moon was full in Virgo, shadow to my beloved Pisces. (I have two planets, sun and Venus, and the north node in Pisces, above the horizon in the 11th house. I have fateful Pluto and the south node in Virgo, below the horizon in the 5th house.) I know there was a lunar eclipse. And I was just about to start bleeding. A Witch knows what these things mean.

I began getting migraines in my early 30s. For a while they were quite disabling, coming hard and often, but then I met an acupuncturist who all but cured them. I stay on a regimen of Chinese herbs, and I get few migraines. The ones I have aren't severe.

But this one: the aura of high anxiety at its cusp, the pain on the left side of my head, tight muscles throughout my body, sensitivity to light and smell, heat rising through my body, time distortion, upset stomach, vomiting, no appetite, extreme fatigue. I pretty much spent three days asleep with an ice pack on my head. I did get to see my therapist, who talked me down from the ledge o' anxiety, as I lay on her couch with an ice pack on my head. Oh, and my acupuncturist? She's in India.

Emotionally, I was just miserable. (What am I doing with my life? What's the point anyway? Why don't I take better care of myself? That sort of thing.)

I started to feel better on Sunday and was able to take a walk in the sunshine. By Monday afternoon, back at work, I could feel that the energy had shifted, and I started to feel more like myself, a bit more optimistic. I took a dance class last night and got to stretch all my muscles, which is such a relief after the thick, turgid tightness of a migraine.

One of my friends who came over to help me during the eclipse, herself a healer, said something that helped me:

"To be a healer just means to be willing to be in healing, with yourself and with other people. To be a healer means to be willing to be in healing."

My therapist said something else that helped:

"Hope is out there, even if you don't feel it right now. Just because you feel hopeless doesn't mean there is no hope."

Heal this

I'm sure it's a lovely cosmic joke that as soon as I pledge to make my own healing a priority for the year, I run right up against the unwillingness, my own and others', to take steps toward healing.

I've been walking around for days churning with frustration at what I take to be the intractability, on the part of people around me, to changing their lives. All the while I know, at least in an intellectual way, that the anger I'm feeling is a projection of anger toward myself and my own intractability. That is, I turn my self-judgment into judgment toward others. Yeah, I do that, and I'm psyched, really, that at least I've learned to recognize that much. But what am I so angry about?

Tonight after hours spent hiding from myself, web surfing, mostly, and avoiding dinner in favor of junk food snacks, I went to the sink to do dishes (trying to get mad at Adonis that there were dishes to do, but I can't even take myself seriously, it's so clear I'm trying--and failing--to get mad at him when I simply want an object for my anger other than myself). Throwing the dishes around the kitchen, I touched the feeling of anger that had been masquerading as lassitude all evening, and then it came to me: I'm angry because I can't control these big, potentially life-changing events happening around me. I can't do a damn thing about my sister's cancer. I can't do a damn thing about our not getting what seemed like the perfect house; we did everything "right," and it still didn't happen, and no matter whose fault it is or isn't, there's not a damn thing I can do about it. I feel powerless about these big first-chakra issues--you know, survival, home, the little things--and then that feeling goes global: "clearly," my monkey mind chatters, "there's nothing you can do about anything. Not about your own health or comfort or well being, not about your work, not about your friends' struggles, not about the dying oceans. I mean, fuck you."

The obsessive narrative of my thought continues in its nastiest voice: "Clearly you can't heal yourself. What makes you think you can do anyone else one whit of good, let alone heal them? Look at you. You're a mess. You might as well give up. Here, have a doughnut and feel sorry for yourself." And so on, ad nauseam.

The point is not really about anyone's unwillingness to change. That's the voice of (self-)judgment speaking. My point here, if I have one, is to notice that (a) I made a pledge not three weeks ago to continue down the healing path and to focus on what it means to heal myself as I serve my healing apprenticeship, and (b) the first challenge given to me is to notice and experience what happens when life feels out of control. I couldn't be much further from feeling like a all-knowing, wise, powerful, beneficent, white light, earth mother, warm and fuzzy, peaches and cream healer. No, I feel like shit.

So now what?

Update: Oh yeah, and Pluto is square my natal Chiron and Mars. Ha!

Imbolc pledges, self-healing

I need a course in Dreamwork 101. I'm a freakin' Pagan and a Pisces, for Nyx's sake, but I can't remember my dreams to save my life. So don't ask me if I really did dream of my pledges for this Imbolc, this year and a day, because I have no idea.

I spent the evening of the new moon working with my "healee," the 2nd-year student from the mystery school who drew my name to work with her this year. Our work provides support for her through the grueling 2nd year, and a healing apprenticeship for me in this, my 4th year. And it is wonderful work. I love it. I have this sensation of being "plugged in" when I do the work - both grounded in the earth via my root chakra and electrically charged. When I'm in that place, the path before me is illuminated, even if I don't know how all the practical details are going to shake down. It's very different from my old modus operandi, which was to try to make things happen through sheer force of intellect, planning, and ego-driven will.

Since my path right now is that of the healer, I asked what I could do to pledge myself to that. The answer I received is to devote myself to my own healing. Like a lot of people, I can spend myself, becoming ungrounded and depleted, on a mission to help others. Indeed, I can cast "helping others" as a noble mission, but use my focus on others as a way to avoid taking care of and taking responsibility for myself. This spring I have my healing work, my full-time job, volunteer work with the dogs at the SPCA, mutual support of my partner, and a house-hunt to occupy me. But my pledge is to devote myself to my own healing. I can't lose sight of that, or I lose sight of everything.

What are the practical details of this pledge? First not to turn it into a to-do list, the modern woman's guide to beating herself up. Nor does self-denial heal a damn thing. My preferred forms of self-punishment are to deny myself sleep, time with friends, cooking at home, and movement. So the first step is to allow myself those things. Go to bed early. Make a meal at home; involve a green vegetable somehow. Have a friend over for conversation and a tarot reading. Go to my dance class. Spend 20 minutes practicing yoga.

Also, I'm devoted to herbal infusions, thanks to the incomparable Susun Weed (this week I've been alternating oatstraw and a red clover/red raspberry mix, because that's what I have in my cupboards), and flower essences, thanks to Molly at Green Hope Farm.

My favorite metaphors for healing are those of flexibility and nourishment. The best medicine is pleasure.

Backward, forwards

("As Dreams Take Flight" by Beth Budesheim)

Last year was extraordinary. In my healing work, I had two important initiations, graduated from the mystery school, and spent three weeks in Turkey as part of an accelerated course. In the fall, I began working with two "healees" - that is, I began my work as an apprentice healer. In my own body, last January and February, I was pregnant and had an early miscarriage; in the initiations and in Turkey, my body began to change at a cellular level; after Lugh died, my menstrual cycles became irregular. Lugh, my sweet beloved dog, died unexpectedly in October, and thus began my journey of grief. In less than two years with me he brought me enormous gifts, and he continues to do so. In December, barely five years after her first diagnosis, my younger sister learned that breast cancer has returned to her body. She is following both conventional and complementary therapies, and I added a third "healee" to my healing work.

I'm a little tired.

But I've been dancing, and having lots of sex, doing some simple work with herbs, recommitting to my yoga practice, sitting in front of the fire, walking dogs at the shelter, spending more time with friends, cooking, reading, and keeping a healing journal. I'm still working full time in the book biz. Adonis and I are beginning to look at houses, hoping to buy one before the summer. I want a garden, and a proper compost pile, and a nice fenced-in yard for at least two dogs. In June, at the summer solstice, I receive my ordination, and I begin to look ahead to the next steps on my healing journey.

Blessings for this new year.

Late Lughnasadh

Late Lughnasadh greetings, dear readers. (As if it’s possible to be late among the Pagani.) It’s been an intense couple of weeks – not even two weeks – since touching down in New York. In addition to jewelry, tapestries, goddess statues, and coffee, I brought home a sea urchin spine from Turkey. Embedded in my right foot. I didn’t know it until I fell ill the Friday after my return and discovered that my foot was red, hot, and swollen, the infection trailing its way up my ankle. A doctor excised the spine and prescribed antibiotics. I hobbled around for a week, keeping my foot elevated as much as possible, soaking it every few hours in hot water and Epsom salts. Now I’m much better, nearly mended.

I’ve also witnessed much heartache in the past couple of weeks, from a friend who spent several days in cardiac intensive care, to several friends whose marriages are in crisis, to a guarded, hurting lover at home. I wonder if everyone’s heart is hurting. I wonder, too, at the ways I’ve guarded my own heart, and how much that guarding hurts and isolates me. It’s a normal response to contract in fear, yet that response so rarely serves us. I’m learning how guarding my heart blocks my generosity, both toward myself and toward others. I came home from Turkey with a heart more open and full, and the energy in my body has been tremendous. I can be more generous with myself and others, but it’s not about making anything happen; it’s about allowing the life force to flow and take its course. It’s an Oprahesque cliché to say that we can’t give to others without filling ourselves first. But I think I’m beginning to understand what it means to attend to my own needs and how, when I do so, I don’t have to make anything else happen. The rest just flows.

Lughnasadh is one of my favorite holidays, second perhaps only to Samhain. My sweet puppy was born around the sabbat (we adopted him in November two years ago), and so we named him for the solar god, Lugh. (He likes to hear me sing, and a favorite is "You Are My Sunshine," the appropriateness of which just struck me.) The abundance this time of year is staggering: the lush green, the still-long days, the gorgeous colors of the farmers' market. Indeed, going to market is one of my favorite ways to celebrate, along with eating as many tomatoes, peaches, and blueberries as I possibly can. I feel the blessings of the earth and the hint of fall in the air.

Perhaps the best things I've ever read about Lughnasadh can be found here.

Abundant blessings at the turning of the year.

Ritual, health, and changing self-stories

(Image: "Self-no Self" by Sandra Sunnyo Lee)

Fiacharrey at the Cypress Nemeton noted my recent post on the uses of life-narrative in changing the self, and my comment that ritual could be a powerful tool for retelling our life stories and reworking our sense of self. Fiacharrey discusses the idea of using ritual in these ways; s/he focuses on the role that externalizing a difficult problem can play in psychological health. According to the original NYT article, those who score highly on assessments of well-being describe their problems as something outside themselves, "villains to be defeated," rather than as persistent character traits. So, for example, someone who describes a period of depression as coming out of nowhere and external to the herself (e.g., referring to it as "the black dog"), scores higher on a well-being assessment that someone who describes herself as a "depressive." The study discussed in the article seems to suggest that it's healthier to externalize one's problems in this way. The way to externalize the problem is to tell a story about it, and presumably an individual has some measure of control over the kind of story she tells. So perhaps we can retell our way to a measure of psychological health.

Fiacharrey gives some practical tips on designing rituals that can help us retell our stories:

1. “Externalize” the problem you are dealing with. Make it real and separate. Represent it with some tangible object that you can work with.
2. Word spells in terms of overcoming obstacles. Word them with the problem first, then the resolution. Negative, then positive ending.
3. Use third person instead of first person as much as possible.

And while Fiacharrey says s/he is "leery of reducing magic to simply a mind-trick we play on ourselves," I don't think that's what rituals of this sort actually do. If we accept Dion Fortune's oft-quoted definition of magic as "the art of bringing about change in consciousness in conformity with will," then taking intentional action to change the contents of our awareness and our underlying beliefs is magic.

But as Witches and other practitioners of magic (ought to) know, we can't think of the will in a common way. The idea of "willpower" - that I can make something happen by trying hard enough - is misleading. The will isn't about wishing something were so, or trying really, really hard; and it's not about forcing something to change. Indeed, it's an open question whether the will is terribly responsive to conscious, rational argument at all.

I'm not convinced that change happens best when we try to make it happen. While there can be a conscious decision to start telling one's life stories differently, after that decision is made, one may need to employ other means in the retelling. And that's where ritual can come in. Ritual is a form of communication with the unconscious, with the child-self, with Younger Self. The Feri tradition teaches that the only way to reach the Higher Self is by going through the Younger Self; that's why Wiccan rituals are often designed with Younger Self in mind - the pretty colors, the yummy smells, candles, nighttime, poetry, drumming, chant! We alter our everyday consciousness in order to reach something deeper. Ritual isn't about convincing the rational, everyday mind - the Talking Self - that something is so. Rather, ritual courts the child in us, and thereby connects us to the Divine.

To take it back to storytelling and psychological health: it's not enough to tell yourself a different story. You have to convince yourself of the new story. You have to learn to embody the new story. You take it into your cells, your bones. The new myth becomes alive for you. It's not a dramatic epiphany - at least, not usually. It's piecemeal. It's process. And it has to happen throughout your being, at every level, not just in the conscious mind. As is said: the mind is a wonderful servant, but a terrible master.

Healing: paying attention

Last week I wrote about my worry that a focus on wholeness in healing tacitly presumes that we’re broken. And brokenness – the idea that we fall short of some ideal, that we’re imperfect, that we’re separate from the godhead – is intrinsic to a Christian worldview. If we focus on wholeness in healing, are we challenging the idea that we’re broken, or are we reinstating the duality of brokenness and wholeness? Should healing and wholeness be part of an ethics of Wicca?

Other religions treat the body as sinful, dirty, animal (and hence farther from god), or an impediment to enlightenment. As feminists have taught us, degradation of the body goes hand in hand with degradation of women. Wiccans honor what has traditionally been associated with women and hence degraded: nature, the earth, goddesses, children, our bodies, animals, dirt, blood, birth, change, death. These things are sacred to us. They aren’t a sign of illness or failure or sin. They aren’t to be fixed. Rather, we tend, honor, watch, and participate. What we could strive for as Wiccans, I think, is to see things for what they are and to promote greater flourishing. Not to fix, but to tend. I like that word, tending, as if the earth is a great garden from which we’ve never been expelled. It also makes me think of paying attention. I’ve learned from my few years in the mystery school that great healing occurs when people are given loving attention without judgment. Perhaps a Wiccan ethics of healing could be based on tending, attending, and paying attention.

How different would the world be if we paid attention to the needs of people who are sick or have disabilities, rather than trying to fix them or blame them? If we attended to death rather than ignoring or hiding it. If we tended a pregnant woman or a woman in labor rather than asserted our own agenda for her. If we paid attention to our elders. If we attended to the messages of animals and trees. If we regarded our own bodies with loving attention. If we each tended our sweet corner of the earth.

On healing and being broken

I'm thinking about the symbolism of Christian baptism in the context of healing. Christians, of course, believe that we are born sinful beings and that we have to be cleansed of sin. Baptism - pouring water from a sacred font onto a child's head, speaking words of blessing, and marking the child's forehead with the sign of the cross - is the cleansing. One interpretation is that we are born of woman, of blood and sex, children of the earth, and we have to be cleansed of those sins in order to join the heavenly kingdom of God. Our suffering in life is a measure of our sin and our distance from God.

Needless to say, Pagans don't believe that shit.

However, many Wiccans, at least, emphasize healing ourselves and the earth. One one level this is uncontroversial. We've done great harm to the planet and thus to ourselves, and we need to repair that harm. Also, illness is a regular event in human life, and healing is a way of bringing the body back into alignment. We want to heal, to be healthy. That's normal. And Witches don't take a mechanistic view of the human body. Healing, for us, involves much more than ameliorating symptoms or ridding the body of disease. We also speak of healing psyche and spirit and energy, and we use various methods, many unconventional, to heal ourselves and others.

Witches are also often influenced by New Age ideas about healing. Thus we may work with chakras or energy healing, visualization and affirmation. This syncretism and blend of old and new ideas and techniques provide fertile ground for exploring healing in the broadest sense. But I worry that the idea that we all always need healing, that healing is an on-going process, that we are all healing old wounds, whether from childhood or ancestors or past lives - I worry that this way of thinking about healing implies the assumption that we're all sick or broken. And that doesn't sound so different from the idea that we're born in sin and need to be redeemed. Do we unwittingly model some of our ideas about healing on a Christian model that we mean to reject?

Protestant culture teaches an ideal of perfectibility along with belief in progress. We understand that not so much on a cultural level - how can we improve our communities and nations? - as on an individual level: how can I best lose weight, stop smoking, save money, meet the right person, fashion my lifestyle, etc., ad nauseam? We live with a belief in the future, that things will be better and that we can make them better. The idea of infinite perfectibility presupposes that we always fall short, that we can always be better, that we're always imperfect and need to be working to improve.

Can we go about our healing work without also believing that we're always sick or imperfect and that we need to be fixed? How might we develop a model of healing borne out of acceptance of the way things are? How do we reconcile the idea of seeking wholeness with the truth that we are already whole? (Or are we not already whole?) Next week I will explore these questions further.

Healing: the problem with food

"Witches heal."

"All women are healers."

I've written before about healing. It's one of my abiding interests, and I intend to write about it more regularly. I'm in my third year of a program at a school for healing arts (what I often call the "mystery school" when I write about it here); I should know a little something about healing by now. I'll be writing about broader philosophical questions - what is healing? - and more practical matters - energy medicine, acupuncture, herbs, diet, and the like.

Right now I'm all in a tizzy about food. All my adult life, I've been interested in and driven by food trends. I was a vegetarian for 11 years, in the late 80s and 90s, and I attempted various periods of veganism during those years. Diet for a Small Planet was my bible. (I still think Frances Moore Lappe is a saint, and there's a great granola recipe in that book, but leave out the soy grits - they'll make you fart.) I ate a lot of soy, including processed soy products like soy "meats" and "cheeses" (ugh). I did the Jane Brody thing. (Remember her?) I did Andrew Weil's "8 weeks to ultimate health" (an eminently sensible plan, in my opinion, although I took it to extremes). I still go through my Susun Weed herbal infusions phases. I started eating meat again on the advice of a nutritionist about five years ago. Philosophically, I stand for local, humanely raised animals/meat, and I shop and cook that way. But I also go on benders and eat bacon-cheeseburgers at Friendly's, and lunch buffet at Pizza Hut, and goddess-knows-what at Taco Bell. Despite my junk-food tendencies, I'm something of a gourmand, and I love simple, high-quality food, deliciously prepared. I've gone through periods of binging and periods of starving. My weight will be stable for years at a time, but I've gone through times of extreme loss and gain, my adult weight varying over 80 pounds.

My current phase is "nourishing traditions," which I find too limiting (so I stray), but also interesting and delicious. I prefer Nina Planck's approach to Sally Fallon's. Nina's a gourmand, like me. Sally is a dominatrix (and not in a good way). I find her tone in her writing to be angry, punitive, self-righteous, and a bit cultish. But there are good information and recipes in her book.

I'm currently seeing a nutritionist who likes the nourishing traditions approach and also believes in using a lot of Standard Process supplements. I like my nutritionist a lot, though she's something of an evangelist. But I can't find any information critical of Standard Process or nourishing traditions, and that worries me. I want to be well-informed. I don't just want to take what I'm given, even by my very concerned, well-intentioned, expensive-for-me nutritionist. Still, I'm taking my copious supplements for my liver, adrenals, thyroid, etc., and I'm trying to eat less sugar (ha!) and more fruits and veggies.

Yesterday I went to see my acupuncturist, whom I hadn't seen in quite some time, and she was concerned and critical about the many-supplement approach. The upshot of all of this is that I have no idea what to think, who to believe, how to make decisions. I consider myself intelligent and well-informed, but I feel at sea. That makes it difficult to eat at all.

Thus a big question for me right now is, how do I heal myself - emotionally, spiritually, and physically - around food? How do I nourish myself? How do I clear out the noise, get quiet, and know for myself what to do? If you have a healing story around food, I'd love to hear it.

The red tent

Yesterday and today I struggled through my work day with headache, cramps, spaciness, and a general mild malaise. The moon is dark, and I'm bleeding. I came home from work and went to bed, dreaming of my own red tent - a place where women could go during their moontime. I imagine it as a room in the Goddess temple I'm planning in my mind and journal, a dream for the future, perhaps. In the temple there would be a moon room.

Enter the temple. It is quiet, and the air smells lightly of incense. Go to the kitchen and find a cupboard with jars of herbs for tea. Put on the kettle; mix red raspberry leaf, oatstraw, lavender, and red clover. While the herbs steep, get out the clay mug, the raw milk and raw honey. Prepare a hot water bottle for yourself. If your bleeding has caught you by surprise, go to the linen closet and take out a new clean cloth to bleed on. Take your tea and hot water bottle, and enter the moon room. The floor is covered in soft rugs. Choose a day bed covered in a grandmother's quilt. Or take a bolster to practice restorative yoga. Light candles. If you like, you can choose an essential oil - geranium, perhaps - to place in the diffuser. The room is quiet, and the light is low. There are windows you can open or close, blinds you can draw or not. There is an altar in honor of women's wise blood.

Lie on the daybed and dream. Let your mind wander. Breathe. Sip tea. Sleep under the quilt on fresh flannel sheets. There are cut flowers and green plants around you. Perhaps a fountain plays. Or a cat curls at your feet. On a small table next to your bed, find a deck of cards for divination. A journal and pen if you want to write your dreams. A piece of chocolate. Someone can come to rub your hands, shoulders, feet, or to give you Reiki. You can be by yourself or with other quiet, dreamy, bleeding women. Turn inward. Let go. You were able to leave work when you needed to, and there is nowhere you have to be.

What would you have in your moon room, your own red tent?

Back to school

I'm lying on the couch with puppy Lugh, who sleeps and sleeps. We're supposed to go for a walk, but he's a lazy pup, and I'm a lazy mama. I'm exhausted, in a happy way, after my first fall weekend at mystery school. The transformations take my breath away. This year is my third year; in June, I'll graduate. Next year prepares my class for ordination. In the fifth year, we'll begin training as teachers. I have two healing relationships with classmates this year - I'm someone's healer, and someone else is my healer. My healer and I are going for an astrology session together on Thursday afternoon to learn more about how we are in relationship. She bought the Idiot's Guide to Wicca when she learned she would be my healer. I thought that was such a sweet gesture.

My grandma is still on this side of the veil, having informed my mother in the middle of the "it's ok to let go" talk that Jesus knows she's not ready to go yet. She's 96! She bought a new car late last year. What can I say? I have tenacity in my genes.

Mabon approaches, and Adonis and I are planning to drive to Rochester for Pagan Pride on Saturday. I'm engaged in a leisurely, self-led tarot investigation/meditation, living with a card on my altar, watching for its energies in my life, then writing a brainstorm in my tarot journal. I know when it's time to move on to the next card. So far, I'm up to the High Priestess. I'm using three decks, the Rider-Waite (with Rachel Pollack's 78 Degrees as a reference), the Druid Tarot for variation on the Rider-Waite, and Joanna's Gaian Tarot, which inspires me to no end.

Adonis is leading a workshop on issues in sexuality for a group of student peer counselors at the university tonight. When he gets home, I hope we can go for burgers.

Healing as spiritual work

Healing = to make whole

What is wholeness? It is the opposite of alienation and disconnection. Wholeness is the integrity of the organism, where integrity is understood as growing, dying, and being reborn within community - human, animal, nature. Wholeness also includes the idea of yoga - literally, the yoking of body, mind, soul, spirit, shadow, Goddess.

Healing comprises the life cycle within the larger cycles of nature. It includes illness and death as part of flourishing. Healing takes place across generations; my teacher's teacher says that the healing work we do in this lifetime heals our ancestors, too, back seven generations. We affect not only the future, but also the past. We bring our gifts to the whole community, and that includes the ancestors. Black currant flower essence supports that work.
I am a student of the Wise Woman tradition of healing. This tradition emphasizes easily accessible, cheap (or free!) simple remedies; sharing information freely; compassionate listening to self and others; renaming weakness as strength; and knowing one's own body as the earth's body and the earth's body as one's own. The focus is on empowerment, responsibility, and self-knowledge. Women's bodies are conceived of as normal - not defective, "different from," or more messy and problematic. (I stopped being a vegetarian when I became convinced that its "moral ideal" was most easily met by a rich, white, young man. The book that makes this argument is Animal, Vegetable, or Woman? A Critique of Ethical Vegetarianism by Kathryn Paxton George.)

Healing is a spiritual project. It's not about curing the sick. (The "New Age," with its emphasis on certain forms of healing work, has been criticized for conceptualizing all humans as sick. For how is that different from believing we are all sinful? But I think this criticism is misguided, relying as it does on a narrow idea of healing.) Healing is about bringing the earth, including ourselves, into balance (which includes a good measure of chaos!). It's a quest, a mythic journey, a kind of midwifery, and a practice of loving attention. Illness of the body, mind, spirit is one means of entry onto the healing path. Environmental activism is another. I believe that Wicca - witchcraft - and other earth-based spiritual practices are also points of entry. And there are many more gates opening onto the road.

(The illustration is "Birth of the Crone" by Durga Bernhard.)