So long and thanks for all the fish.....

With the changes going on in  my life, I am retiring the title of Coffee Priestess.  I have started a new blog called Life of An Armchair Mystic.   I am inspired by a peer to codify my practice and at least publish it in blog form.  I am not sure how it will evolve just yet. 

What can you expect from the  new blog?

A commitment to weekly posts published on Wednesdays (day of Mercury and communication) that will be a combination of my own ritual process and the background information I use.  A sort of electronic file cabinet of correspondence and memory.

I will still be largely focused on the Wiccan Wheel of the Year but will include bits and pieces of my shamanic training (Ode to Jane Smallman) and Buddhist influences as well. 

And because I can, I will be also including my manifesto on Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs and how it and motivational psychology are intrinsic to spiritual practice.  (When I was a chemical dependency counselor I taught a recovery class every 3rd Tuesday on The Hierarchy of Needs and through school and Wicca classes I seem to write a paper every 5 years or so on it.)

As much as I want to comment on the various social challenges we are experiencing I am going to limit my comments and instead focus on how to transform the pain and frustration into something more useful.  While my life is not perfect, I see progress each day and as we say in AA progress, not perfection.

With that gentle readers, I welcome you into the world of the arm chair mystic. Grab your beverage of choice and enjoy the ride!

Transforming Pain On The Path

Happy November to everyone!

I was planning on writing more about ancestral practices but have a slight change of plans.  Yesterday, a man decided to deal with his pain and frustration by driving a rented truck onto a pedestrian walk way in Manhattan and killed 38 people in the name of his religion.  When I was watching Morning Joe today one of their guests said that we can either transform our pain or transmit our pain and it struck a cord in me.

We live in a broken world. We are oppressed, disenfranchised, marginalized, and then ignored. Our media and social media outlets capitalize on that pain and sometime with well meaning and thought provoking questions but more often than not it magnifies the issues and not really resolve them.  How do we deal with the constant influx of distressing information and how do we transform it into something positive?

I like the idea of transforming pain. The Wiccan Rede states An It Harm None Do As Thou Will but we fall short.  We hurt others in our selfishness and we hurt ourselves.  The first step in the process of transformation is the same first step that is used in the AA Twelve step program.  We admitted that we were powerless over ________ and that our lives had become unmanageable.  In my own walk I am powerless over my sense of rejection.  It can overrun my life if I allow it too.  The second step become more important of coming to believe that a power greater than myself can restore me to sanity….Awareness

Because of my pagan leanings I choose to see that power as the Goddess and her Consort but it is also my community and elders and their wisdom from traveling the path before me.  Surrendering my ego and sense of righteousness in order to understand someone else’s side of the story is a vitlal necessity  and then that leads into the third step of surrender…. Giving my will and my life over to the care of God as I understand him.  It is not easy to recognize when we need to walk in active forgiveness and surrender. Both are necessary as a part of transformation.

As a nation, as a world, we need to stop seeing our pain as isolated incidents. That we are the only ones going through our confusion and frustration, our sense of loss and our sense of what needs to be done in compensation.  We do not always know the best way but we are willing to yield the pain of our ego to the wisdom of compassion we may  heal more than just ourselves in the process.

May the month ahead bring you encouragement, empowerment, and peace.

Blessed Be!!

Samhain/Halloween 2017

When I first started this blog, I wanted to write about my research and experience within the wiccan community and my understanding of wiccan cosmology such as it is.  I admit I have been fairly hit and miss about posting on a consistent basis but I hope to correct that this next cycle.  It will still be about my experience as a solitary wiccan practitioner and mostly about my own growth process during these historic times. With that being said...\

Samhain is upon us. For the secular, American world it is known as Halloween.  In the life cycle of the Goddess it is the celebration of the death of the God.  In Celtic countries communities would gather at the end of the harvest and celebrate the ancestral dead of their community.  The christian church celebrates All Soul’s Day on November the 1st.

My pith instruction from my teachers and books is that this is the Wiccan New Year. We celebrate our dead, do divination for the coming year, and reaffirm our dedication to the old ways.  

In modern American culture we continue to do this but it is more the focus on confronting our fears around death. We still feed our dead with candy. We tell stories of ghost and monsters of all forms.  I don’t believe there is any right or wrong way to celebrate this season.  

My own expression of wicca has become much more focused on ancestor reverence throughout the year along with the Goddess and her consort.  My family has always held a high interest in genealogy and I remember several summers with my Great Grandpa Herman and my mother going through old cemeteries in small midwest towns making rubbings from headstones for dates and names. I also remember in later years being taught by Grandpa Lew how to read area history by looking at grouping of tomb stones. In our family cemetery at Coleridge, NE I was shown groupings of young children who died from tuberculosis and spanish flu.

Our history is important. Remembering the history of our family is important not just on a personal level but on a more global social level as well. It is one thing to remember the people we hold a lot of esteem for. My great grandmother who harvest 5 o'clock seeds and sold them to Gurneys or that my Grandpa Don helped fight for factory worker rights in the 60’s and 70’s.  What do we do with the not so pleasant ones? The same grandfather that championed social justice was a drunk and beat my grandmother nightly who I also inherited my depression from? In our genealogy research discovering the unpleasant fact that some of our southern relatives probably did own slaves even though they were poor farmers themselves?  

We have a social movement that is very much focused on destroying any reminders of oppression and the negative side of our history as a feeble attempt at making reparation of the past sins of our ancestors as well as our society.  I really don’t like revisionist history or being responsible for anyone's sins but my own.

For better or worse we are made up of unique combinations of our ancestors genetic material and their experiences.  During this time of year, I offer up elevation prayers and rituals for my ancestors that had mental health issues, we addicts, we abusive, and oppressed other human beings.  I also very much look at how my own biases and behaviors reflect my religious ideals.  I freely admit I fall short but I keep striving to be a better person and more inclusive of everyone. In order to truly grown as individuals and a society we need to look at the negative as well as the good. It is not enough to just be idealistic and rewrite history to read the way you want it to.  That doesn’t do anyone any good.  My challenge to myself and to you gentle reader is use this season to celebrate the past good and learn from it to create a better future.

Celebrating The Fool's Journey

It's been a while gentle reader. Many attempts to start up again with some sort of regularity. The last few years being its own struggle to recover and figure out how to move forward.  

My own tarot reading for the spring equinox this year focused heavily on The Fool card from the tarot and that it was time to delve back into tarot as a spiritual practice and not just mundane soothing of our questions. Will he come back to me? Will I get that job? Ad nauseam.

The Fool's Journey in its strictest sense is a way to internalize the meanings of the 22 major arcana cards. It does describe the potential enlightenment process for most western practitioners. However, don't be deceived into thinking it is a straight line.

We in the west are particularly enthralled with the ideal that everything happens in a straight line. A direct methodology. Luckily for us the universe is cyclical in nature. And like most cycles the journey can stall, it can go in spurts, you can arrive at any number of random points in the journey without any real idea of how one got there.

The Fool card astounds me in its simplicity of describing the process of our daily lives and its profound implications once we start peeling away the layers of its meaning. With its numeric value of zero there is a riddle of no beginning and no ending.  It is complete within itself and perhaps that is the real meaning of our spiritual journey.  We are complete in ourselves, nothing lacking and no beginning and no ending.  As I study the eastern tradition of Buddhism it reminds me very much of the Heart Sutra that form is emptiness and emptiness is form.  Not in the dark, _blank sense  but the golden field of active potential.  What do I mean by that?

What I mean is that the universe is always ready to create itself through us.  There is this warm energy that is amorphous until we start choosing to assign it meaning.  

As I continue forward with this project I am assigning myself the task of looking at how I create my universe and assign it meaning.  I challenge you, gentle reader, to do the same.  If we are the ones assigning meaning to our universe does that mean we get to change how we are experiencing it?  Yes beloved, very much yes.  

My goal with this project is to continue to explore what I have learned and am still learning about the tarot as an esoteric system and share that knowledge with other seekers on the path.

Blessed Be.

Invocations for Self Blessing

Starhawk once said that all ritual is a chance for transformation as long as we allow it to be. One of the tools like I like using in my own transformation process of rebuilding my self esteem is a litany of previous successes.

If you want to be really spiritual about it you can cast circles and invoke whatever diety of choice you work with and burn your favorite incense.

The trick is being willing to deliberately invoke positive past experiences even when you aren’t feeling positive about your present. There are always times when you nailed a recipe, had someone befriend you or even fall in love with you, successfully cooked your favorite meal, achieved a fitness goal etc.  

There are times I do go through the process of writing each success out and then when the ore challenging days of Not enough happen I pull out the paper or computer copy and remember what had been positive and remind myself that it will be positive again.

One of my other process that I like to use in addition to the positive litany is a mirror. I have always struggled with a positive self image.  In Jambalaya Luisha TIesh offers a self esteem/blessing where you anoint each body part is anointed with your favorite scented oil and you say Thank you, my ________.

Much like learning to stay mindful when you first start meditating the biggest challenge is to recognize when you start to self hex yourself by going into the negative self image and pause long enough to do something different.

Pause and Reset

So what do you do when you realize that your self esteem has taken a hit and it is time to make a change?

In our previous articles I have laid out a sort of theory foundation for starting the recovery process.  I included a basic structure for maintaining and/pr restructuring of dynamic balance in our lives. I am continuing a basic discussion of foundational ritual practices before you actually do anything else. Like using a good primer to make paint last longer, these practices help tools like positive affirmation or even wiccan specific practices of underworld journeys be more effective.

In most metaphysical traditions there are the twin practices of grounding and centering before any type of real meditation can begin.  Grounding is the process of connecting to the earth energy around us and centering can be best described as pulling the energy around us to our point of balance so that we can use it throughout our day. Developing the self discipline to ground and center multiple times throughout the day does increase your own ability to combat negative self talk when it arises and assists in better decision making skills that are not purely reactionary.

Grounding basics:

Stop what your doing.

Stand or sit with your back straight. (Good posture does help the muscles relax.)

Take three deep breaths to exhale the stale, stressy energy.

Close your eyes and imagine that you are a tree and that your feet are roots going deep into the earth.

When you feel/sense that you are completely connected to the earth begin drawing that core earth energy into your being through your roots.

When you are ready it is time to move on to the second phase called grounding….

When you feel the energy flowing from your feet to your head imagine that energy condensing into a centralized place in your body or your natural center of gravity. (For some people this is the solar plexus or gut area. For myself it is the base of my spine or my root chakra.)

Stay here for a few more moments and when you are ready to can move back on to the rest of your day or ritual.

When confronting negative thought patterns and being willing to change them this is a major practice.  In her Udemy course Freedom to Choose Something Different Pema Chodron describes this as a 3 step process. When you start getting hooked into your cycle either a cycle of behavior patterns or emotional responses the first step is to notice that you are getting hooked. The second step is taking that pause. The pause can be a few seconds to several minutes but it is noticing that you are at the crossroads. The third step is choosing to do something different.

It is through the consistent observation of our destructive mental processes and being able to stop it do we obtain the release and the relief of choosing to go down a different path.  More on that to come.

Blessed Be.

The Role of Ritual and Healing

“Do as thou wilt shall be the whole of the law. Love under law, love under will.”

• Aleister Crowley

Our theme is recovery and effectively handling chronic illnesses.  I am a 3rd degree witch/priestess of an eclectic wiccan tradition and I am a former chemical dependency counselor. I currently struggle with my own chronic illnesses of depression, type 2 diabetes and autonomic neuropathy as well as retinal neuropathy.  In this article I want to start discussing the use of magic and ritual in recovery and healing self esteem including becoming self actualized.

Magic was once defined by Mr Crowley as the science and art of causing change to occur in conformity to will.   Ritual is often added at this point as the process by which we harness our will to create that change.  

Rebuilding self esteem is the cornerstone of successfully managing the stresses of chronic illness and recovery. There are several approaches to how this is done.  I want to propose that while there can appear to be a clear cut difference between a mundane and spiritual approach to the matter creating that change hinges on intent or recognizing that something needs to change and having a singular focus to fix the issue.   

The other day I was revisiting my teacher’s edition book of shadows that our tradition uses. I was reminded of how we have taught the process of maintaining the cycles of balance. As this information is widely available in other printed forms I do not feel out of place publishing it here. Maintaining cycles of balance in any area of life there are five basic principles:

Intention

Preparation

Invocation

Purification

Consecration.

I bring this up because these really are the steps to effectively rebuilding our self esteem. Our intention is recognizing that we need to alter how we are evaluating our worth. The process to fix that ends up being the other points whether we are invoking the use of a therapist or magical tools we still end up needing to detox the negative judgment and the recognize that we are something pretty amazing.  In a different vein we can ask some questions of ourselves as a part of identifying what we need to rebuild by asking if we have become stuck because we are overly focused or worried about our problems? Have we forgotten who we are? Do we understand the power that resides in us?  Once we can honestly answer those questions we can take a look at practical and magical ways to create the changes that we need.

Now that I have satisfied my own need to share my foundational knowledge there will be future articles on different processes both mundane and spiritual to consider for your bag of tricks.