Techniques
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An Exciting Announcement!
I am pleased to report that Llewellyn Worldwide has contracted to publish my next book, ROUND WE DANCE: Joyous Living Around the Year and Throughout Life. This is an Atheopagan book about incorporating rituals into your life, and will go into specific seasonal themes, rites of passage and personal rituals, with ritual outlines and techniques and associated craft projects and recipes. I’m excited! I am busily working on this volume while looking for my next full-time job. I “go to work” at my desk every morning, take a break for lunch and return to writing until 5:00 in the afternoon. I haven’t ever been this disciplined about writing before, but…
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Reintegration
Coming down from the mountainI have seen the lofty gloryI will go again some dayBut for now, I’m coming down. –Meat Puppets There is an ache in my heart right now, a longing for the people and experiences of Suntree Retreat. It isn’t that I’m not glad to be home. I like my life, by and large. But I have had a peak experience and there is a feeling of sorrow, of yearning now that it is over. At the Retreat, I came to feel a deep caring for every attendee and for what we were doing together: the rituals, the vulnerability, the courage, the socializing, the celebration. Such an…
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Towards a Daily Spiritual Practice
One of the things which characterizes our Atheopagan path–and which we share with many other Pagan denominations–is observation of the eight holidays of the Wheel of the Year: the solar solstices, equinoxes and the midpoints between them. So every 7 weeks or so, we have a seasonal festival to celebrate, if we so choose. How we define those holidays can vary widely, as we are aware of our local climates and ecological processes and seek to match our celebrations to them. And we don’t have to celebrate all of them if we choose not to. In addition, we may hold occasional rites of passage for our friends and loved ones,…
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On Spiritual Burnout and Bypassing
Sometimes, the ways and events of the world can weigh you down. Over the past 18 months or so, we have seen a LOT of that, what with the pandemic and the various awfulness happening in the news. I know things are starting to get to me when I am less drawn to my Focus (altar), less motivated to do my spiritual practices. It’s ironic, because spirituality is the cultivation of a feeling of meaning, awe, connectedness and joy, and you’d think we’d go running for that when times are hard. Some do. I’m just not one of them. Instead, my tendency is to lean into what’s the damned point,…
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GUEST POST: Playing with the Senses During Ritual
by Eloise Martel Something I find useful to immerse into the ritual experience (especially when you start and you don’t really know what to begin with) is playing with the 5 senses: Sight, Hearing, Touch, Smell, and Taste. Playing with the senses can trigger specific memories and help you achieve your goal during the ritual. You can find correspondences (herbs, days, colours, stones etc.) in almost all the 101 witchy books, but don’t forget to ask yourself what associations make sense to you personally. If the goal during the ritual is to make yourself feel certain things, what you are going to use has to speak to you. Sight: Many…
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Riffs on a Meme: Enchanting the Mundane
Today, in the weekly Atheopagan Zoom mixer gathering, I was exposed to an Internet meme that really resonated. It is this: This is so completely an Atheopagan approach to life! Turning pedestrian tasks into romantic and thrilling adventures is a way to add happiness and joy, and to retool our mental approach to them to enhance our motivation and focus. Nothing supernatural required: just a reframing and a playful approach. Currently, I am stuck on trying to get a new job. I’m still so burned by what happened at the last one that I haven’t been able to bring myself even to update my resume yet. But I have to…
