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Category: Paganism

Discernment

This past weekend, Glasreo and I attended an informal pagan discussion hosted by the Fellowship Beyond the Star, on the topic of discernment.  It was a very fruitful discussion, starting with general definitions and then branching off into individual stories of encounters and omens and general spirit work and work with deities.  It was fun to hear other people’s stories, and helpful for all of us to have others’ insight into our experiences.  In general, the discussion of discernment hinged on a couple of key points:

  1. Ruling out mundane causes.  This is a big one.  Sometimes a flock of crows is just a flock of crows, sometimes candles fall over, sometimes your air vents cause incense smoke to move a certain way.  Chances are, if it’s something pretty normal or totally plausible, it’s not a sign of something more.  It’s a good idea to learn as much about the science of whatever you’re working with as possible, and to get to know your environment.  Seeing a heron isn’t unusual if you’re near a body of water – but you might think it is unusual if you don’t know that there’s water nearby!  However, it’s important to know that you can’t ever rule out mundane causes 100%.  What you should aim to do is figure out whether what you’ve witnessed is unusual or common.  Unusual things may just be an omen!  This also applies to trancework: if you’re doing journeywork or astral travelling or something like that, and you aren’t sure whether what you’re experiencing is something you made up or insight you’re receiving, ask yourself whether the patterns are unusual  or common.  If you were going to daydream about the topic, is this what you would probably come up with?  Does everything seem expected, do you feel like it’s all something you’ve already known?  Then you’re likely to still be inside your imagination.  If something unexpected occurs or doesn’t go the way you’re trying to create it, that’s probably coming from somewhere outside yourself.
  2. Trusting one’s intuition.  At some point after you’ve examined the possibility of mundane causes, you need to think about how you feel, in general.  Sometimes a very common thing can be an omen anyway because it’s what you needed, or because the timing was exactly perfect.  If you feel strongly that it’s an omen, or that you’re receiving insight from outside yourself, and it’s not just wishful thinking, you probably are.  Learning to tell wishful thinking from truth requires a lot of practice evaluating your own thoughts and that can be hard, but the self-awareness that comes with that struggle is very much worth the end result.  You’ll learn to trust your intuition and in doing so, trust yourself and your experiences.  It can really deepen your practice to not be second-guessing yourself constantly.
  3. Using lore as a guideline.  Lore is really useful if you’re getting messages from deities or other lore-known spirits.  You can look up their animal associations, get a sense of their looks or personality, or other things and check those details against the information you’re getting.  Lining up 100% isn’t required for you to be correct, but nothing should be huge and glaringly contradictory.  Blonde vs brunette is probably fine; mountain associations instead of lake associations might be a bit too far.
  4. Using divination to double check the message. If you can, it’s always a good idea to do divination or to ask someone else to do divination for you and ask “Am I seeing things clearly?” or “Is the message coming from X deity?” or, “Am I really supposed to do Y thing?” to double check that you’re getting the message from who you think you are, and that it’s trying to tell you what you think it is.  Divination can also be helpful if the message is clear but vague: you can ask how or when, and get more information.  Be careful if you’re divining for yourself, though, that you’re not falling victim to wishful thinking (yep, there’s that little gremlin again).
  5. Asking for further signs or repetition.  One of the best ways to figure out if you’re really getting messages from spirits when they’re jumbled and unclear is to ask for some kind of unusual, specific sign.  Don’t make it something impossible, but make sure that it really is something unusual, that you’ll notice and pick up on.  You can ask for a certain number of something like birds, or ask to see a specific animal on your drive to work, or something like that.  It might be a good idea to give it a deadline, too, so that you’re not waiting forever and wondering if the answer is just “no”.  Repetition, whether you asked for it or not, can also be an indication that something is really a message.  Maybe there’s a cardinal nesting near your house, so seeing that one isn’t unusual, but throughout the day you see another 5 or 6 cardinals all over the city and there are pictures of cardinals indoors as well – if you feel like you’re being stalked by something, it may very well be a sign!
  6. Journaling.  One of the best things you can do when you receive a message or something you think might be a message or just witness something really unusual is to write it down!  Maybe it was a message, but it will only make sense after the fact.  Maybe the message is in the repetition, but until you write it down you don’t realize that you only really ever see crows on Wednesdays.  Even if you are sure it’s a message and you know who it’s from and what it means, it’s still a good idea to record it, since a lot of the messages will make even more sense with time.  That was you can also keep track of how different spirits and deities usually approach you with new messages, too, and it can help you figure out if things are messages or not much more quickly!

Hopefully this all makes sense to you, and maybe it’ll even help some of you – it certainly helped me to discuss it and write it all out!

As we slide into Winter…

A few months ago, I posted a blog titled “A Message for the Equinox”.  In it, I described a journey I took to see the Morrigna, the three Daughters of Ernmas, and their message for me about the coming fall and winter.  As they predicted, the fall has been tumultuous, even beyond what I had expected.  Fierce storms raged, the veil was so thin that people who aren’t normally in tune could feel that something was amiss, wild unseen things were wandering, and the US election seems to have caught quite a few of us by surprise.  Illusions are being shows for what they are, assumptions are being overturned, and we are all confronting the fact that we have painful shadow work to do in order to move forward.  The unnecessary, the luxurious, and the gilded things are being stripped away.  It has been a painful season of growth, but I hope you all are rising to the challenge.

As we move forward, however, remember to take time for yourself.  Remember to rest, recharge and heal. Check in with people around you; give help where you can, and accept help when you need it yourself.  The winter is likely to be even worse than the fall, and spring is very far away.  We have much to do before then, and burn out is likely if you can’t maintain yourself.

The Morrigna have been calling me, personally, to help heal those of their warriors who are in my own circle.  That, it seems, is my role in the struggles ahead.  I am a healer, not a warrior, and my most important efforts include holding space for others.  I will do my best to provide respite and sanctuary to all those I can, whether through reiki or spellwork or simply listening.  If you need someone to help you find hope, please do not hesitate to reach out.

I’m attempting to schedule some reiki classes for January or February, so if you are interested in taking Reiki I, II, or III, do let me know.  Classes are tentatively priced at $50 plus the cost of a manual (which is $15-20), and I’ll need at least three students per level to be able to schedule a class.  Weekends are probably best, as each class is several hours long and I’d prefer not to go too late into the evening.

A Message for the Equinox

This is going to be a different sort of post – I’ll be sharing a piece of personal UPG, a message I received from the Morrigna (that is plural – the three Daughters of Ernmas, of the Tuatha De Dannan).  I don’t usually do much of that here, but it’s a more general message, not a personal one, and the few other messages like this I’ve gotten I shared with close friends, people I worship and practice with, and many of them found it useful.  I thought it might be time to share with a wider audience.

For background, last winter I started getting weird vibes about the coming spring and a sense that things were Not Quite Right.  That culminated in a journey to see the Morrigna where they showed me an image of the world outside my door blanketed in snow, and a faery host culling plants and animals, bringing death to make room for new life.  That’s an important part of every winter, but I was made to know that it would be somewhat more severe, and warned to make preparations.  I did as I was advised and I returned on several additional journeys where I was given additional messages.  Some forecast bad weather (in both the physical sense and in the sense of psychic “bad weather” due to spirits runnng amok)and I was eventually told that things would settle down, and everything basically did settle down a little before Beltane. The turning of the seasons last year did not go as smoothly as it usually does and it seems this time isn’t going to be much better, unfortunately. When it comes to influences between the worlds, “as above so below” so to speak, and with things being a bit off kilter up here, things are off kilter Over There as well.  Sensitive people have been noticing that things have been bleeding through a bit already, and a lot of people have noticed a sort of weird imbalance between the hot weather and an uptick in spirit activity that usually comes with cooler weather.  Hoping for answers, I went to go talk to the Morrigna about it again, and below is what they showed me.  I am sharing this here in case anyone else finds this useful, though with the usual UPG disclaimers.*

I asked the Morrigna about the “baton pass” between the local faery courts that usually signals the changing of seasons, and in their cauldron of water I was shown an image of the inside of a great hall, where the Seelie court was gathered and meeting with emissaries from the Unseelie court.  However, instead of all of them being courtiers, many were the more feral or more bestial members, those more associated with the Wild Hunt than with the Unseelie court proper. As the Seelie King stretched out the sceptre in his hand, the Unseelie King reached out to take it – and as soon as his fingers grasped it, himself and all the Unseelie courtiers also became like the feral and bestial creatures that had accompanied them.  (Whether they had been in disguise or whether they are merely showing a different aspect of their nature this year I am not sure – but in my experience, the local Court is usually at least nominally in charge of the local Wild Hunt, providing them with some oversight.)

The Wild Hunt left the hall like a host of bats, or perhaps of locusts, because as they reached the outside world they began stripping everything back to the roots, back to the stones, devouring and destroying nearly everything on sight. Despite the intensity of the imagery, however, I did not get the sense that this was a bad thing. The changes, though harsh and sudden, were paving way for newer, healthier growth. It was a cleansing chaos, almost fire-like it its wrath, but made instead of death and ice.

As they moved about, they created prisms of ice around the homes of the Seelie fae, isolating them and putting them into stasis, but also protecting them from the storms to come. I had a glimpse of powerfully destructive winter storms following in the wake of the tearing claws and teeth of the Hunt, but those are still far enough in the future that I will need to return again later to ask for more details. I also was given a glimpse of the light at the end of the tunnel, so to speak, and was shown the returning sun turning the ice prisms into greenhouses, sanctuaries where small plants might sprout, rousing the Seelie fae who will then shatter the ice and begin the spring. After that, I thanked the Morrigna, and returned.

Today is the equinox, so it all starts today.  I recommend grounding and centering even more than usual this autumn and coming winter. And check your wards. It’s probably going to be a bit rough for sensitive people, so if that’s you, work on your personal shielding, too. Most of it will probably pass us by like it did last year, since the fae are more concerned with the natural world than they are with human society (and we have fabulous indoor heating and food flown in from all over the globe, etc), but I do somewhat wonder if the chaos will have an effect on the election.  Besides that, expect heavy snows and ice storms and very probably a late spring. I’ll keep checking in with the Morrigna now and again and posting here if people are interested.

 

*That is, if your UPG is different from or conflicts with mine, that’s fine!  But don’t try to convince me that mine is wrong.  It could be we’re looking at the same truth from different angles – and I’m not going to try to convince you, either. But I will keep posting mine here, because this is my space, and this is my truth. (UPG = Unverified Personal Gnosis)

Reiki Adventures

Glasreo and I have been doing a bit more reiki recently, both for clients and bartering with friends.  I’ve noticed that I’m getting better at paying attention to the client’s gods and guides, now, even when they don’t have a specific message, which is good.  Previously I mostly noticed them when they were trying to get my attention!  I’ve been practicing shifting focuses in and out a bit and it does help with my awareness and visualization.  I’ve also been improving my work on physical ailments – helped in no small part by a new anatomy book we picked up, which is refreshing my memory of high school Anatomy/Physiology!

On Glasreo’s part, he’s finding it a bit easier to work with client’s energy centers, and that is helping him find less obvious blockages.  He’s solidified a few new relationships with spirit helpers, including a lava elemental that has been very helpfully eating things we pull out of people.  The crystal spirits are taking a more active role, as well – Glasreo is now making crystal grids intuitively based on each client’s needs, instead of more general grids to help with reiki flow and broad healing.

We’ve been pretty in tune as we work together on clients as well, seeing a lot of the same issues and problems, but being guided to work on different aspects so that our work complements each other.  So far we’re still using the chair-in-the-living-room method, but as our sessions have been 45 minutes or shorter that’s working out fine.  Hopefully before too long we’ll be able to save up for a traveling massage table.

[[If you feel like helping that cause, please contact us to set up an appointment, or visit our etsy shop!]]

Seasonal Depression: Working with an Evergreen Spirit

I (Réaltán) suffer from seasonal depression (AKA Seasonal Affective Disorder).  It makes keeping my energy up, both physically and magically, much harder in the late fall and winter, as my natural inclination is something like hibernation between Samhain and Imbolc, approximately.  Part of this is probably due to my spring fae nature (about which I will no doubt have to make a post eventually), but that doesn’t mean that I can’t do anything about it.  I just am not sure how to.

Or, rather – was not sure.  But then I had what seems to be an absolutely genius idea (though I’m no doubt reinventing the wheel): talk to an Evergreen spirit!

I have something of an affinity for plants, and I frequently use plants and herbs in my general craft, but I have not spoken to the spirits of plants much to do anything more than what they are prescribed for in herbalism, or associated with in magical symbolism.  This is my first major relationship with a plant spirit, and so far I’ve done a handful of hedgecrossings (aka journeys, tranceworkings, astral travels) to go meet and talk with who I have identified as Black Spruce.  In my talks with him, he has given me the following tidbits of advice, which I will share here in case anyone else can benefit from his wisdom as they deal with their own challenges, this dark half of the year.

  1. Slow your blood.  Slow down, but not as far as deciduous trees – don’t completely fold inside yourself and hibernate.  At the same time, however, don’t try to be as quick as you were in the spring. Now is not the time for rapid growth.  Don’t force yourself to get everything done by trying to move at breakneck speeds – you will fail.  So slow down a little. Decide what’s really important and focus on that.  Don’t worry about things undone, just do whatever you have the energy and strength to do without overtaxing yourself.  It will be enough.
  2. Wax your leaves.  Insulate your energies from the cold of winter, and make sure to stay warm physically as well.  Adjust your shields – keep out the wind of other people’s negative energy and the ice of their judgment.  Other trees lose their leaves because they are thin, fragile, and easily damaged by frost.  Not spruce needles!  They are hard and waxy, durable and insulated, but they still let sunlight through, which is important!
  3. Take in as much light as you can.  Light is important, whether it’s sunlight (bask in it each afternoon for a few moments), the light of your truth (remember to make time for self-care and things you enjoy), or the light of love (spend plenty of time with loved ones). Don’t let your shielding keep the warmth out.
  4. Take care of your roots.  Make sure to ground, ground, ground – and center.  Physically, keep your feet warm, your whole self warm and as comfortable as possible.  Make sure to keep your legs and feet strong and in good health – wear shoes with good support, and make sure they’re waterproof!  Personally, I need to work on my flexibility some, as my tight hamstrings contribute to my chronic shoulder pain, transferring tension up my spine.
  5. Stand tall.  Winter might make you want to curl into a little ball, but it’s important to maintain good posture.  Stay balanced.  Also, stick up for yourself.  It can be harder to live your truth and ignore naysayers when you’re already feeling a little down, but it’s a very important time to make sure you stay upright.  If you begin to bend under the weight of pressure now, by springtime you will find it hard to grow straight again.  Better to keep your balance now.
  6. Spruce is good medicine.  Spruce tips are a good remedy for many winter ailments.  The new growth tips are an excellent source of vitamin C, and a hot tea made from these tips can also ease many symptoms of upper respiratory infections like the common cold, including congestion, runny nose, and coughs.  Winter is an important time to use whatever healing modalities you know, whether that means herbalism, reiki, or zero-blancing.  Be your own remedy.

Hopefully these ideas will reach those who need to hear them.  And I highly recommend seeking an Evergreen spirit to guide you if this sort of work sounds like a path you need to go down.  I am very much enjoying my work with Black Spruce, and after I mentioned this to a friend of mine, she met a Balsam Fir and is now doing some very important work with him.  His messages have been similar to Black Spruce’s – he also stressed the importance of slowing down, which is probably the most important message out of all of the above.

~Réaltán~

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