Witch, Witch, you’re a Witch…

One of the biggest changes over the past few years has been my rediscovery of my spiritual path. I was raised in a very Christian household and when I was around 13 I decided I didn’t buy Christianity for me. I  had too many issues with it and absolutely no connection to it despite years of church every sunday, church camps, and two grandfathers who were priests. When I was 14 I made a new friend and her family was Wiccan. Her mother and her grandmother spent time talking to me about their faith and gave me my first set of runes. A few months later my mother found my bag of stuff and went ballistic. She got rid of it and I was not allowed to see my friend any longer. The amusing part of this anecdote is that my mother is now a Wiccan High Priestess with a coven of her own. She has dedicated the last 12 years of her life to the craft and to her path.

When Mother started studying I dabbled a bit again but I wasn’t ready. I also didn’t want to dive in when my Mother was doing it too because then she would lay claim to my faith as well as the many other things I fel she laid claim to. Then, a few years ago, I was struck by a quick succession of deep betrayals. I was spinning out of control. I needed an anchor. I needed something to help me process what was happening to me. I needed to find my sense of self again because it had been so shattered. I wandered into a little new age shop and stumbled across my first book and thus my practice began. I know have an extensive library of books on all sorts of Pagan Paths. My personal path is eclectic, once again disappointing my mother. I find Wicca too dogmatic for my tastes even though I can see how it is a good transitional path for those coming from Christianity to Paganism. Being pagan can be a very free wheeling experience. There are rules and yet at the same time there are none. Finding your way early on is so difficult and there is so much misinformation out there. Eventually you learn to listen to your deeper self and the guides that speak to you. You learn to trust yourself and your intuition which is something current society often teaches us to ignore.

When you reach the point of trusting yourself then everything changes. You being to not just trust in your practice it filters into your outside world. For a long time I was frightened to be “out of the broom closet”. People do treat you differently when they find out you practice the craft. They buy so hard into the Christian/Hollywood idea of witches that they cannot seperate it from reality. I lost friends but that was ok with me. Clearly they were not much of friends in the first place. I gained so much more with my path and my craft. I have made many more friends who have helped me on my journey to loving myself again. I have become a teacher and a mentor to some. I have been the student of others. Often times I am both teacher and student.

The past few months have been deeply stressful for me and I’ve lost my way a bit. My daily practice fell apart. I don’t remember the last ritual I performed and my last two casting were out of extreme necessity. I miss dancing beneath the full moon. I miss growing seeds of intention within myself. I miss the quiet meditations at midnight and the communing with my goddesses. I feel like the stress has shut down a part of me necessary to access these things and I want very much to get it back. So I am going back to some of those early books and starting from the beginning again to unblock myself. I want to be able to breathe that freedom again.