qos | Entries tagged with practice

. . . can be a harrowing thing.

I have been led to connect with a very special man who is at a point of intense transformation in his life, one involving spirituality, BDSM, and his deepest authenticity. I have suddenly found myself combining the role of erotic priestess and spiritual director, and it is both dizzying in its intensity and incredibly grounding in the sense of feeling like I have been led to embrace an aspect of my Work which I have intuited since adolescence but never thought to actually fulfill.

What I am doing looks very little like any description of "sacred prostitute" I have ever seen, but that makes it no less authentic, only that much more unique. There are blessings I am uniquely qualified to mediate -- and there are others I am not. All I know is that last week, as my time with him wound to a close, I felt that I had achieved something very important for myself, that I could in some sense die now, having fulfilled an important part of my mission here. Of course, it is better to live and keep doing my Work. . . but there was still a sense of "It is accomplished."

The "harrowing" aspect comes from my awareness of the profound changes in his life that I did not cause -- they were underway before we connected -- but for which I have become a potent catalyst. I am aware of how very careful I need to be in what I say, for he has invested me with significant authority, and will be vulnerable to mistakes I make. I must be vigilant and attentive in my own devotions and practices to make sure I remain an open channel to the Divine, and not get caught up in my own ego, whether that manifests in reckless pride or fear.

This is where my training as a spiritual director is finally coming into focus, for although there was a limit to what I could learn at a Christian seminary, the principles of direction transcend path. I am even more grateful for having had that experience.

This is also the point where I have started to understand how a submissive woman can also be a priestess. I need to be careful about how much I put into print about someone else's journey, so I can't go into detail, but suffice to say that a puzzle I struggled with years ago has been resolved in a positive way. And I know that without my experience with LM and Michael I would not have been brought to the point where I would have the wisdom to be capable of negotiating this particular ambiguity.

LM and Michael initiated me into my queenship and into sacred sexuality. This man, unknowing, has been the vessel by which I have been initiated into being a hierodule, another aspect of my life which I had yearned for but believed to be impossible. And once again, it is an Emperor who is responsible for that initiation.

I've been instructed by my mortal mentors (my priestess teacher and my new polytheistic spiritual director) that I need to be concentrating on basic practices right now, especially centering/grounding/cleansing, and (from my priestess teacher) at least weekly meditation starting with four-fold breathing. I've always been lousy at this -- or, more accurately, highly resistant.

I've also been slipping back into compulsive computer gaming -- not complex, creative, strategic games, but mindless solitaire games with pretty lights. This is not good.

( The background from last night. )

This morning, when I sat down before my altar, the first thing I noticed was the drink offering to Tiwaz which had been sitting there for a couple of days. In the past, I'd let these sit from Tuesday to Tuesday, but I've recently read about letting it sit for 24 hours and then removing it, which made sense. As I moved the stale drink off the altar, I heard Tiwaz say that I should refresh it. That made sense, so I did.

As I went to the refrigerator, Odin said He wanted a drink offering as well, although He didn't specify what He wanted.

I still wasn't completely awake -- and, honestly, His tone didn't sound serious as much as poking. While I would hesitate to describe the All-Father as sounding "bratty" there was a kind of "Pay attention to me too!" tone in his voice that seemed strange. Please, just let me get this straight, and I'll talk to you about what You need, I begged.

I gave the fresh drink offering to Tiwaz and my attention was then directed to the dust on my altar. I sit there every day, but my housekeeping is not the best. Dust should not be allowed to gather on the altar! Odin chided. Okay, I'll clean it later today, I replied, and tried to settle into my usual devotions -- but He kept complaining about the dust, again in an almost whiny way.

I started thinking WTF? This is not how He usually behaves or sounds!
In the past, when He has wanted me to do something He tells me straight, like a boss or father. He doesn't sound petulant and nag.

It felt like I was being poked and shoved and harrassed. I was off-balance and doubting my inner hearing, but at the same time believing very strongly that I was indeed hearing Odin.

So I said, Give me just a minute, please -- and I collected myself and started doing four-fold breath.

As I centered and felt more calm, I could practically see Him nodding. This is what you're supposed to be doing, He said. This is what you need to do when emotions come up that you know you need to face, but are afraid to. This is what you need to do when you know you need to shut down your computer and tend to your Work. This is what will keep you centered and on course -- not just when you 'do your practices' but any time you feel yourself out of balance.

He had the grace to sound more approving than smug -- although there was certaainly a twinkle in his eye at the way I had so neatly fallen into His set up to learn the day's lesson.

From Odin this morning:

Before anything else: your gods, your husband, your daughter, your ancestors.

I need to connect and center on what's most important, what's foundational, for me before I reach out and start connecting with others through my internet communities -- which is the backward way I've been acting for the past several years.

Also: now that I'm in a place where I'm no longer starved for energy and emotional stability, it's time for me to start finding out what the gods would like from me in the way of devotional practices and offerings.

Connecting with my ancestors is a whole new area of my spiritual life, and it's progressing slowly -- but it is progressing. I've found a place for an ancestor altar, and I'm starting to trace back my family tree -- which is surprisingly easy, given a good genealogy program attached to one of the major genealogy websites. It turns out a lot of my extended family has done a lot of research and made it available to share. I'm starting to learn about where I came from.

My mom has just put a lot of effort into make a whole series of family scrapbooks, and I'm going to find out what I can about my ancestors through those -- and hopefully get some scans of the photos. I also have living extended family in the region who might be able to share photos and stories with me.

One of the things I've struggled with from the beginning in my hermetic magic training is a strong sense of internal resistance whenever I approach a practice or ritual.

It's hard to find the words to explain how I know, but it's been clear all along that this is not a personal resistance. It's something the reaches beyond my own instincts or intuition. I feel no fear, no sense of wrongness; my personal gut check comes back clear.

What comes up is a sense of hard push-back, a silent cry of don't-wanna! and sudden fatigue.

It was the same this morning as it's been just about every other morning that I've set out to do my daily practice. But this time, instead of trying to ignore and muscle through the resistance, I stopped and gently asked it Why are you afraid of this? What is the matter?

I didn't get a clear answer, but I stayed engaged with the resistance several minutes -- not pushing back, but quietly acknowledging, even honoring it. I also visualized a golden light radiating love and warmth into the place in my body where the resistance is centered, and asked my allies for help in working out whatever issues are caught up in the tangled knots I sense at its root.

The resistance didn't vaporize, but it did ease, and the practices that followed were smoother and more grounded than they usually are -- I assume because I wasn't exerting a lot of energy just to move through them.

I suspect that this is not the first time in the last several years that I've done this, but I have no clear memory if I have, and it's not something that's happened more than once or twice before at the most.

There's a lot of shifting going on right now. . . Since the weekend of LM's birthday and my soul retrieval, to my Beltane work, to some important new self awareness growing out of a book I'm reading (more on which later), I feel like I'm moving forward again in ways I can actually see.

A month (or more?) ago, I decided to create a very traditional kind of bead strand: one to help me keep track of my meditation. Part of my practice is to do four-fold breathing for five minutes to start and end my sessions -- but trying to keep track of the time isn't conducive to actual meditation. So I created a bead strand with twenty sets of three semi-precious stones and one hematite, with a medallion and a focus bead to mark the start and the halfway point.

My first attempt gave me fits because I kept cutting the wire to the wrong length and so was not able to actually secure the crimp beads. When I finally got the crimp beads secure, I found I'd left too much slack, so there was almost an inch of space between the beads. I put it away for what turned out to be a month, and when I picked it up again I did not like my original color scheme. What was supposed to have been brightly elemental looked like Mardi Gras beads.

So this evening I re-did the entire strand. The colors are tiger eye, subdued green-brown, and a dark purple, still with hematite. The brightly-colored halfway point stone has been replaced with a large black rose bead. The spiral medallion is the same. This one finally feels right.

Unfortunately, because of the dark colors, it doesn't photograph well, but people asked for a photo the last time I wrote about this.

I am beginning to more deeply understand the difference between "showing up for magical work" and "doing magical work with focused, sustained intention."

The first too often (for me) involves knowing what I'm doing and why, but then going through a series of gestures that don't have a vital connection to the energy of my intention.

The latter means that every gesture, every vibration, is connected to the energy of intention, which amps up the effectiveness considerably.

Over the last few days, my LBRP's and Rose Cross rituals have had considerably more force (especially the latter), and last night's ritual at my household altar actually was a ritual, including the evocation(?) of Tyr's energy into my home for guarding and clearing -- complete with the appearance of an actual guardian spirit.

This epiphany brought to you by the Slow Student Express. . .

I found out today that doing the four-fold breath my teacher recommends for meditation also works well to reduce stress and pain during grueling dental appointments.

And that's all I have to say about today.

This is another one of those "I can't believe it took me this long to figure this out" posts.

For the past several years I've been following the example of my teacher and using the term "The Work" to refer to my priestess studies and spiritual practices. (I realize that she didn't originate the term, but I didn't really use it until I became her student.) Once I realized that yes, I really was committed to the priestess path, I started using the term "vocation" to describe my approach to my work.

And yet. . . Too often my spiritual work has been one of the lowest items on my priority list, after the day job, taking care of my kid, and trying to simply keep up with life. Intellectually I've known that I could find nurture, rest, and renewal there, but -- as with physical exercise -- it has often felt like just too much effort to reap the rewards.

Tonight I'm realizing that I have not been treating my work like My Work, much less my Vocation. It's been more of a chore, a duty -- and I've had far too much of that these past few years. I have not felt the eager engagement, the joy, the deep yearning for where the path might take me.

And I need to bring those emotions to my practice. I need to go beyond my intellectual commitment to the Path and truly embrace it as my Work, my Vocation. I need to continue to honor my day job, but I need to start according my spiritual work even greater dignity and energy. I need to allow my inner fire to kindle, not just my mental focus.

I could go *headdesk about this, but I'm not going to. I came to this path in the midst of some of the greatest darkness I have ever known. For more than a year I honestly would have preferred to die. This path was born in my grief; I was initiated by the death of my beloved. Find joy in my path? I've barely had the capacity for simple happiness for more than three years.

Over the past few months I've been looking for new sources of pleasure and happiness. Until very recently I hadn't thought to look here. It's time I took my spiritual practices, my priestess path, out from under the veil of mourning as well and allow it to be the enriching experience, the fun, the exciting, intriguing pursuit it was meant to be.

I recently added a new element to my practices: lighting the candle on my household altar first thing in the morning and spending a few minutes there. The centering and grounding it gives me is far out of proportion to the effort and time expended.

This morning I felt like there wasn't much point to doing it. I slept badly last night and this morning I feel like I'm hung over. My head is fuzzy and I can barely keep my eyes open. I didn't feel like I could bring any coherence to the observance -- but I did it anyway.

To my surprise, just sitting there made me feel better, more solid, more calm.

Sometimes -- okay, a lot of the time -- I forget that I don't have to do all the work myself. They do some of it as well, even when I don't ask.

For at least a year now, I've been operating under a habit of doing at least a Qabalistic Cross and Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram ("QC" and "LBRP"). I haven't been as consistent with my Middle Pillar and meditation -- but that's starting to shift.

I did several days in a row of full practices this past week, and its started to sink in. Last night I went to bed late, so I only did the QC and LBRP -- plus the Rose Cross ritual, a new nightly must-do, and then went to bed. I did my backward review of the day and went to sleep.

But there's a lingering sense of "offness" -- and it tracks back to not doing the Middle Pillar and the meditation. Especially the meditation. There's a sense of *needing* to go deeper into the symbolism of the Tree of Life, to continue the work of ascent that happens in that practice (but not only in that practice).

I've encountered a number of invocations to the rising sun, but this one struck me with particular meaning today.

I like it becuase it's specific about connecting the sun to various qualities I would like to have in myself as I embrace life. I'm not sure that it does this any better than many others, but it came to me today, when I needed it:

Invocation to the Sun
by Omraam Mikhael Aivanhow

As the sun rises above the world, so may the Sun of Truth, Freedom, Immortality, and Eternity rise in my spirit!

As the sun rises above the world, so may the Sun of Love and Immensity arise in my soul!

As the sun rises above the world, so may the Sun of Intelligence, Light and Wisdom rise in my intellect!

As the sun rises above the world, so may the Sun of gentleness, kindness, joy, happiness and purity rise in my heart!

As the luminous, radiant living sun rises over the world, so may the Sun of health, vitality, and vigor rise in my body!

[I have no idea why the qualities in the first part of the poem are capitalized but the ones in the second part are not!]

Recently a friend sent me this question: At several points in your journal, you mention some elements of your work and calling. While you you have discussed healing the world, wearing the role of hieros gamos, and of priestess, those strike me as concepts and roles, rather than duties. If I may ask, have you found there to be specific tasks involved in your path of devotion?

That's an excellent question, and the answer is "very few at this time."

At this point I'm still developing my basic skills as a priestess, and most of my tasks are around keeping up my daily practices, which are the calisthetics of my path. I do a dark moon ritual with/for Ereshkigal every month. The form of it changes in response to what She wants.

There is a twice-daily ritual I perform with LM which is part of my "path of devotion" -- which does have benefits for my priestess path even though it's not a devotion to a deity.

I also see keeping this blog as a task of my path. "Keeping silence" is one of the qualities of the mage, and there are some things I don't speak of -- but I do feel strongly that part of what I'm here to do is write about my path so others can benefit from my insights and my mistakes, or feel less alone.

The Ereshkigal devotional, despite the slow pace of its progress, is also a specific task for Herself, and something I have to finish before I move on to other things.

But I don't have specific set of rituals that I do, and I don't have specific work that I do as a priestess. I suspect that as my skills deepen I'll be given more specific things to do.

Does that make sense?

Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves. . .

This quote from Rilke has been a central tenet of my post-Void spirituality. It's part of the basis for "feral holiness" -- living outside the boxes of traditional spirituality, without the comfortable assurances of certainty that are so often part of organized religion. I have come to believe that many people stay within traditional religion because the they are afraid of not having answers for the scary existential questions about who we are, where we come from, what happens after death, and etc.

I've gotten kind of cocky about my own level of comfort with ambiguity -- or my perception of my own comfort. Because I've come smack up against two rather startling and humbling realizations.

The first is that I've developed some fairly strong beliefs over the past few years. Which shouldn't be surprising, given that I'm a priestess -- but it's at odds with my story of myself as someone who doesn't have the answers and is comfortable with that. In point of fact, I do have answers to those questions, answers I feel rather strongly about. I don't think they're the only right answers, but they work for me.

The second realization, and the one which was the prompt for this entry, is that I have some serious discomfort around certain ambiguities of my path, and they give me fits.

( Not the traditional questions. . . )

I want the answers, and I want the gods to give them to me. And I want to have a super-charged godphone so I can hear the answers clearly and without my ego or my fears or anything else in the way.

And then I realize that it doesn't work that way. That I have to live with the ambiguity, with the not-knowing, and just keep pushing along the path and having faith that I will get what I need when I need it -- and when I'm ready for it.

I have to remember the rest of Rilke's advice to the young poet. . .

try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.

I'm trying very hard to live my way into the answers.

I just printed out my first practice checklist in almost a year.

I've been consistent in doing the most basic of practices -- but "the most basic" is not enough. Not for who I am. Not for who and want I want to be.

I'm using the same format I did before: a table divided by the days of the week with the daily work listed each day next to check boxes, but I've added a larger last square for weekly goals and notes. This week's goals are simple: to ground myself again in a regular routine of full practices, and to complete a full series of meditations with at least one of the Qabalistic symbols as I work on them in order.

This kind of discipline has always been my biggest challenge in every field I've ever worked in: consistent, repetitive, focus on the basics so that I have a firm foundation on which to continue to grow and develop.

I'm damn tired of my own inconsistency, and there's only one solution: renewed determination and commitment to buckle down and Do The Work.

May the gods help me keep to the path, maintain my focus and discipline, that I become a more useful and effective servant.

Tonight is the first dark moon since I felt called to dedicate that night to Ereshkigal. With everything else going on (new job, new relationship) I hadn't been paying close attention to the calendar. Thank goodness other friends do, and they make references to it in their own journals!

Because I haven't dedicated any time to preparing, tonight is going to be focused on devotional attention, communing with Herself. I'll also ask Her what She wants going forward. But most of it is going to be focused on Her. I haven't been very attentive in the past few weeks, and want to correct that.

I'm wearing my chain necklace today, the one I was wearing during my first encounter with Her and which immediately became dedicated to Her. It's helping me keep thinking about Her, and remember what I'm going to be doing tonight. It's helping me remember that even when I'm less than focused in my service, I still belong to Her.

Every so often I've fretted that I don't do enough in the way of regular, "official" observances in my spiritual life. That is: I don't have a sacred calendar that I follow. Most of the celebrations of the Wheel of the Year really don't resonate with me, and despite lots of thinking about it I've never actually put together an official sacred calendar. Every time I read posts by friends who *do* have such structure in their paths I sigh in a mixture of wistfulness and admiration and continue on my own unstructured way. (I don't put my daily practices in the same category as observances.)

I have two rites which I do on a regular basis: a Tuesday night ritual with Tiwaz at my household altar, and a twice-a-day cup ritual with LM.

Over the weekend, Ereshkigal let me know that She wants me to start doing 'something' for her at each dark moon. She's not being specific about the details right now (although I did get an image of one possible activity involving Lucius as a fellow participant), and I get the sense that the specifics of the observances are going to be fluid, in response to what's going on in my life -- or simply what She is in the mood for or wants me to experience.

This feels far better to me than creating an observance "because I should." I hate "make work" -- which is essentially what such an observance would have been if it had not been in response to the call of a deity, or to a feeling of need or devotion rising from within myself.

The first two nights of the more advanced Qabalistic meditation have gone very well, and have provided extra motivation for doing my basic practices, which is great.

I had a good conversation with my patrons the other night about the direction of my path and the focus of my efforts right now. No time to go into detail at the moment, but it was a welcome exchange. Part of it was the realization that I'm still not far along in my basic skills to do some things I've been thinking about. No harm or shame in that, just a need for continued dedication.

I'm on break at work right now, wishing I could be home and focusing on spiritual pursuits -- but grateful for even the income of a temp job.

*Finally* finished three cycles through the sephira meditating on the general attributes of each.

Now it's time to start the journey of each sephiroth and path, meditating on each of the symbols listed in Paths of Wisdom (John Michael Greer, highly recommended).

This is a huge undertaking, and will take approximately three years to get through the entire Tree, assuming I am faithful in doing the work. If I'm not consistent, this could take five years or more.

This gives a whole new meaning to the phrase "Onward and upward!"

I remembered the other thought I was going to post about this morning, something else which came up during my time with LM during our meditation together on Christmas Day.

One becomes an adept not by having natural talent, but by doing the work, day in and day out, week by week, month by month, year by year. Natural talent can be bonus -- but it can also be a drawback. If the first stages come too easily, one can begin to feel entitled to that ease of achievement and begrudge the hard, detailed, boring work that must also be part of the mastery of any path.

There is also the wisdom which is captured by a friend's userpic: The obstacles are the path.

None of this is new. Others have wrestled with this challenge and had to come to this realization for millennia. Being a magical adept has much in common with being a master musician, warrior, athlete or writer. To become more than a talented amateur you have to spend uncounted hours in repetitive drills, spending more time on "the basics" than most beginners ever will. One must balance the humility of being willing to perform the basics over and over with the confident assurance that yes it will make a difference.

I've fought this for so long.

But I'm becoming reconciled to it.
In fact, on reflection, I may even have stopped hating it.
I'm starting to see the flecks of shine where I've been polishing.
There's still a lot of work to do, but I'm starting to see where and how and why the work pays off.

I posted yesterday that that Christmas felt like New Year's day to me. My cards for the coming year are the Knight of Wands and the 8 of Pentacles.

The Knight of Wands comes from a Tarot.com reading which included these wonderful words: The Knight of Wands in this position advises that you modify your self-image in order to get a sense of yourself as a person of action. No matter what your past patterns have been, it is fully possible to place yourself solidly on your road toward the future. As someone who has spent far too much of life waiting for the tides of whatever to sweep me into whatever place I was supposed to go, this is a radically reassuring and affirming message.

The 8 of Pentacles. . . well, that's the card of Doing the Work: spending the time to make sure the basic skills are so thoroughly a part of one's practice that the foundation is sturdy and reliable.

( I've made another collage. . . )

Since I started on this path, the main challenge has been to keep up my daily practice. In order to achieve this, I have let myself concentrate on doing "just enough to count" and feeling free to be imperfect. And that has served its purpose. Doing my practices has started to become a genuine habit. I'm not sure that it ever would have reached that point if I had insisted to myself (or my teacher had demanded) that I do everything each day and do it perfectly. Showing up and doing the best I could in that moment has been sufficient. I've felt vague pangs of guilt during this time for not doing better, but I pushed them down, telling myself that it was enough to just "do it as best I can."

Recently things have started shifting internally. As I mentioned here a week or two ago, I've started to realize that I really need to get better at focus and concentration. I've known that all along, of course, but it's starting to feel important that I do something about it.

Yesterday I also started realizing that I need to set aside more time, earlier in the day, to allow for better clarity and more time to do more work. This too is something I've 'known' all along, in that same half-guilty way. The difference is that now that desire has the impetus of being an authentic inner prompting, not just a nagging sense of duty.

I have four priorities in my life right now: my job, my kid, my spiritual work, and my household responsibilities. In a pinch, the fourth of those gets to slide. My kid is a growing-up, independent creature who still needs a lot of my attention but is perfectly fine doing her own thing. I need to talk with her about this need, and discuss when it will work for *both* of us for me to retreat and take care of my inner work. I can't do it if I feel like I'm short-changing her on the time she needs from me. In theory, the best time for me to do my inner work is when she does her homework. I just need to feel like I'm not abandoning her when she needs me.

I'm aware as I write this that on some level I've been using her as an excuse to not do the work. She's certainly old enough to understand what I do and the importance of it, and she can certainly spare my presence for 30-45 minutes.

I want to do more than I'm doing. I want to progress in ways I have not yet been able to. I want to experience things which still lie beyond my reach. I want to be a more effective priestess.

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Queen of Swords

From the sublime to the ridiculous

Entries tagged with practice

Being a Priestess. . .

The All-Father Makes A Point

Morning Practice

On Engaging Resistance

Finally Finished My Four-Fold Breath Strand

Intention

Side Benefits

"Work" and "Vocation" Realization

Morning Altar Time

My Practices are Gaining on Me

Invocation to the Sun

Priestess Tasks?

Facing My Own Discomfort with Ambiguity

Back to Basics

Dark Moon Observance

Dark Moon Observances

Practice

Tree of Life Meditations

On Becoming an Adept

Deepening My Practice, From the Inside Out