Wednesday, March 18, 2015

Soul Retrieval

You probably recognize that your spirit (some call it soul) is separate from your physical body. When you leave your physical body and go out into the astral planes, the physical part is left idling while the soul travels. I use the word soul because our friends in the First Nations tend to use it instead of spirit; spirit is usually reserved for the Great Spirit (otherwise Manitou). It is a strong belief among many groups that the soul can be split into many parts and that, whether you realize it or not, you may leave such parts at distant places or with people you love. You are still connected to such parts with what has come to be called an aka thread. "Or ever the silver cord be loosed or the golden bowl be broken ..." and so on in old poetry. So did you ever think that your soul could be split into several pieces--that you could give away, as it were, fragments of yourself and still limp along? Often human beings may leave behind or give away parts of their soul, perhaps to a former lover or to a deceased relative. Soul retrieval is one name for the experience in which you may get back that fragment and become whole again. The underlying idea here is that your soul is divisible, and that when you fall deeply in love with someone you give away part of your soul to that person--and you probably receive part of their soul in return. Many of you have had such an exchange. So what happens if the relationship ends? "Oh, when s)he left, I felt as if part of myself went with them!" It's the stuff, all too familiar, of unnumbered love stories and torch songs, non? --that feeling of loss associated with any major separation, whether it be by death, divorce, military events, or even when a child goes to college. You feel as though there's a hole in your life. Such a hole is the missing part of your soul that has remained with the Other. When you meditate on the over-all situation and on the idea of becoming whole again, you can get over that feeling of loss in a more rapid, more wholesome way. Our friends of the First Nations say a thread remains, that joins you to any part of your soul that you have left somewhere, and that in meditation you can follow the thread and find the piece of your soul that is missing--and can bring the fragment back with you to become whole again. This is a straightforward approach to what a psychologist or counselor works toward with you in grief counseling ... though it does not happen in a single sitting, goodness knows. In meditation you can grief-counsel yourself (thinking of your loss in terms of a piece of your soul that is temporarily lost or absent). We have had experiences with work such as this. One which was truly amazing was with a young woman who had been comatose for six weeks. With the aid of a shaman we communicated with her astrally as she lay in her comatose state and told her to follow the spirit thread leading to the place where she had left her soul. It turned out that she had been driving late at night with a carload of her young friends, that she had missed a curve and had run head-on into a tree. A very good friend had been killed. She blamed herself for the accident, so deeply indeed that her soul had remained at the scene though her body had been carried to hospital. In less than 15 minutes the shaman had helped her release her self-blame and had talked her out of her comatose state, by leading her soul to rejoin its body. She became whole again. When you lose someone, you need to think in terms of becoming whole again. Dwelling on what you have lost and weeping over old mementoes and such things doesn't hack it. You have to take a pro-active approach and determine that you will get all pieces of your soul back and go on with a full life. Indeed, the most wholesome step to take is to purge your dwelling of any and all traces of the departed one: all photos, artifacts, old garments and possessions ... when you can bear to do so, get rid of it all. I, Yvonne, promise you this: Your tears are the first sign that your healing has begun. Blessed be.

Thursday, March 5, 2015

Where did all the Joy go?

We have just watched "The Wicker Man", that old, old film. The joyful deeds and dances those actors performed prompted these thoughts. Of course to sell the film back in those days, the story had to have at its climax (ahem) a human sacrifice. The christians were the leading proponents of human sacrifice, having burnt alive maybe as many as 10 million heretics (their own backsliders) and a hundred thousand or so pagans who wouldn't toe the line. People were much to valuable to be burnt; and pagans did not have burning in their catalog of punishments, despite what the christians tried to imply. In the dim dark past when we started Wicca, the Craft was a happy, joyful spiritual path. We simply had a lot of fun. But gradually over the years the attacks by sociopathic members of the Abrahamic religions forced us to become more serious and in some ways almost to resemble them! Most of the attacks centered on such things as nudity and sexual freedom. " I don't believe in it, or I can't do it, so you can't do or have it!" Today many Wiccans feel bound to live within boundaries that were never imposed by Wicca but are the self-imposed result of trying to avoid censure from the uptight hangers-on of joyless religions. To say the least, it's ironic when we realize that originally christianity itself was originally a joyful religion, sexually free, whose adherents were simply having a good time. When christianity was approved as a permitted religion, one of many, by Constantine, Connie's co-Consul Lineus said, "Yes, that's okay, but men and women can't meet in the same building because the religion is too licentious." So we can see that from the early days of christianity it guarded itself against this accusation and became uptight, not to be bested in the inflicted-uptightness sweepstakes until Islam came along. When christian leaders had families, they had a tendency to leave the church property to their relatives, so the church decreed that its leaders could not marry. Now misery loves company; thus the requirement of celibacy meant that those who were forced to be celibate didn't approve of sexual activity for the rest of society. "If I'm not gonna get any, you aren't either--at least not without a lot of furtive guilt." Members of the Craft are doing the same thing to ourselves that the christians did to themselves. A sexual initiation (gasp) is no longer approved. In an attitude that we Frosts can hardly bring ourselves to believe, it is labeled "old-fashioned". People of the Craft, self-styled Witches: We are here to tell you that if you continue down this path, puckering ever more tightly, all the joy will be gone forever. Others may live such a tight-ass, constricted life, but that's not enough. They live to inflict their way on others. If you want to be celibate: be celibate. But don't do it because someone with an ax to grind says you must or you'll go to hell. Can you repeat after me, "If it harm none, do what you will" ? We are not hustling movies; we just want to get the joy back. Don't be so bleeping serious, boys and girls: It's all research, after all. Come dance and drink and ... with us. Blessed be Gavin and Yvonne

Tuesday, March 3, 2015

Using Msditation

When you have spent some time (maybe a lunar month) meditating, many things that people label "odd" may start to happen. The first: You will sense the presence of an entity: a discarnate being, let's say, who may be someone who has recently graduated ("deceased"). Such awarenesses are often called spirit guides. You may have heard people joke uneasily about their "fairy godmother" or their "guardian angel". Try to welcome your discarnate visitor(s) mentally and, when you get to know them, give them a name. If you live in a city large enough to support a Spiritualist church, seek out that church and attend some meetings: Sunday morning maybe, but do try to investigate the things they do on weeknights. You'll be surprised. Once a link is firmly established between you and your guide, you can stop using the protective salt circle and maybe the affirmation. Many of us, though, never stop affirming our intent and our gratitude with each sitting. Now is the time to decide what you want to use your meditation for. Just to update any incoming bulletin from the other Side? That's fine. Basically meditation relaxes everything and improves your health; but it can also serve for what is called astral travel: You leave your body idling while your spirit goes to a different level of awareness. For lack of a better comparison, it's as if you had double-parked outside the store and popped in to run a quick errand. The car is idling, ready for you to jump back in and drive away. Before you sit down to meditate, you need to think of something that we call an urgent necessity: something you need to know which is not easily looked up on the internet or easily determined by using your latest electronic gadget. When we taught a class on all this at a seminar; one attendee decided that her urgent necessity was to ascertain whether her cat was all right with the cat-sitter. She was actually able to travel on the astral plane and to see the cat and to be assured that it was doing well. It's fashionable right now to investigate your genealogy. Many people doing it have found that they can overcome gaps in their family line where they got stuck and were unable to progress through normal procedures. This often happens because records had been destroyed, and was especially prevalent in the post-Civil War period; example: when courthouses and all the records they held were burned. Southern records of emancipated slaves often do not include any specifics of past owner/slave histories. Slaves were regarded as property, not people; and they were described simply as "field hand" or "house slave" or the like. Such gaps can be filled in through astral travel: going back and "seeing" your ancestors. Astral travelers quite often notice that travel into the past eventually gives them pictures in sepia tones, and then fades out as they go further back in time. Further, the travelers can make no changes in the scene(s). This is reversed in travel into the future: There the colors of the scene brighten and the travelers' every thought makes changes in what they see. Here the Buddhist quiet mind is most important--vital, in fact. It's natural enough to feel confident that you can keep your mind quiet; but when you go into the future, if you think about a white bear standing in the corner, it will suddenly appear. This may be dangerous: When you get to that point in your future "real"--temporal--life, you may verily be faced with a white bear that you have unwittingly placed there. ... All of this may sound extremely weird--but when you try it, you'll find that instead of being weird, it's fact. And never forget about the Law of Attraction: When your intent is benevolent, good experiences will come to you. When it is negative ... need we get explicit?