changing paradigms « Seeking: first Pagan steps and tools

Why don’t teachers move?

By jenett, on April 15th, 2011

One question I’ve seen increasingly often recently from people who aren’t near a teacher (or a teacher of a particular tradition) has run “Why can’t the teacher move? Why do I have to be the one to travel and make sacrifices for this training?”

Now, one part of the answer to this is that while many Craft teachers are dedicated to teaching, they themselves have already sacrificed for their own training and learning. Asking them to sacrifice for *teaching* (something which they generally do without pay or other benefit than the joy of teaching something they love) seems a little much to ask.

But the other part is a bit more practical, and that’s what I want to explore here.

Why doesn’t the teacher move, or at least travel?

Because those teachers have lives, and families, and jobs, that they’re not just going to pick up and move away from.

Because those teachers already have students and initiates and group members to whom they have commitments and connections. Moving’s not impossible if the circumstances call for it, but it’s neither simple nor ideal.

Because moving – by yourself – and practicing trad is complicated and exhausting.

Because ‘more members’ is not the value that’s primary. Caring for existing connections, and for the well-being of the overall trad is often the first value.

And finally, because a lot of students say they’re interested, but for a wide variety of reasons, don’t continue past the first few meetings or first few months. (Which is a whole other essay.) A teacher making major life changes for any one given student is therefore not a stastically wise move.

Let’s look at an example:

This is one I’ve thought about a lot, because my life has recently involved a move 1500 miles across country, because, when it came down to it, taking a job in my field won out over staying in the place I’d been living and had lots of Pagan community ties. (The new job is awesome, and has a lot of other things going to it – I’m within driving distance of family and friends I’ve had to work hard to see for a decade.)

Now, I am a 3rd degree priestess in the tradition. I am fully able to move by myself, create a group around me, and find and train people. (Lots of people aren’t. I happened to be, and it’s partly because I consider my career to be part of my religious vocation that I was willing to do it.)

But I’m also not stupid. I’m fully aware of exactly how much work the process is going to take. And more than that, how much *time* it’s going to take, before I can have the kind of group experience I really really want to have again, and the kind of group experience that allows for full learning and understanding of the trad.

Let me lay that out, in practical terms:

I had potential students. When I decided to move, I have to let down two very lovely women who expressed interest in being my students in Minnesota. So it’s not “no students here, maybe students there.”

I need to get to know the new area on a mundane level, and also on a witchy level. Once I’ve sorted out “Where do I buy my groceries” and “Where’s the nearest decent supplier of herbs, or do I order online from the stores I know and love in Minnesota?”, I get to move onto “What’s the local Pagan community like?” and “What’s the land here like?” and “Where are the places of power and resonance in this landscape?” and “How do my assumptions about seasonal cycles fit into this geography?”

I expect all of that to take at least a year. Maybe more. (The good news is that by the time I’ve done all of that, I’ll be settled into the job, and have a bit more time and energy to throw at an active Craft life again.) And that’s with moving somewhere – Maine – that is in many ways (in terms of climate, seasonal patterns, flora and fauna) similar to Minnesota. If I’ve gotten the job I applied for in Tucson, it would have been a much larger adjustement.

Even though Minneapolis and where I am in Maine are at almost the same latitude, I’m still noticing lots of differences, though. And it’s also a shift to living somewhere rural, after living all my life somewhere urban or suburban.

Somewhere in there, I need to start establishing myself as person of potential cluefulness in the local community. That means going to more public rituals or other events than I might otherwise (In Minneapolis, I could easily give potential students other people in the community to ask about me. New place, I don’t have that yet.)

It means thinking of some things that a) I feel I can offer to the community b) fit with whatever the new job is (in terms of time/scheduling/how public the event is) and c) are not treading on the toes of people already offering stuff in the area. Both so I can get let people check me out – and so I can get to know them.

I may need to spend some time offering things that help give people the experience to decide if my tradition is a potential fit for them. Depending on what’s in the community, it may mean offering a bunch of intro-level options (if there’s nothing like that in the area). In Minneapolis, I didn’t have to do that: there are multiple sets of intro classes going most of the year, and a range of open ritual options.

In Maine, the distances involved mean that general public work is a little more complicated, and there’s a lot less of the short-class-series going on. (Though there are public or general invite rituals at various places around the state on a regular basis.)

Given that, I do feel an obligation to consider offering more public stuff than I’d otherwise choose to do, even of the “Here’s how to develop your personal practice, and understand what you’re doing better” variety.

There’s also some practical issues: I rented my current apartment sight-unseen, and it has a clause about guests. (I can only have 2 at a time: this is a college town, so I was not hugely surprised by that. It’s great in that there aren’t loud parties when I’m trying to sleep, but not so good for even small group noise-considerate work.) Plus, I need to buy more actual furniture still.

So before I can do much in the way of teaching, I need to move to a better space for it, or find a suitable space to rent.

Figure we’re at 18 months or 2 years post-move here.

And then we get to start the whole personal process.
Once I’ve gotten to the point I can consider students for a small group, I’ve still got the whole “Are we a good fit for each other” process (a couple of months), then their Dedicancy (a year or more, depending on when they approach me, because there are times of the year we don’t start that process.)

Because there’s only one of me, I can only take so many students at once.
If I am working in a professionally demanding job, and running even occasional public workshops, that’s one person a year, maybe two. (And that’s assuming my health stays okay, though I do know lots of ways to make pieces of this work fairly efficiently in terms of my time and effort.)

Dedicancy takes a year, so we’re now at 3-4 years post-move here.

And *then* we have the problem of initiation.
My trad still does cross-gender initiation (though it’s a topic we need to revisit.) That means that to do an initiation, I need to import a priest to help me, if the initiate is a woman. (And really, should anyway, because the thought of doing the full initiation ritual without any support for the first time makes me go “ergh” a whole lot. It’s a ritual with a lot of different things to keep track of.)

Now, the HP who trained me is potentially willing to do that – but he’s a busy guy, there are scheduling complications, I’d feel I needed to pay his way, and it means that my theoretical initiates would be walking into a complex and sensitive ritual with someone they don’t know. There are obviously ways that email and phone conversations can help, but that’s not a simple problem.

(My preference would be to invite my HP and his husband out for a lovely weekend at the height of a pleasant travel season to get to know the current students, but that would mean making sure I had a guest room, etc.)

And then, to build a group
We’ve got to repeat the student part another year or two or three, even to end up with a small group. Because some of them will move, and some of them will have stuff happen.

But if I’m really on the ball magically, and also a bit lucky, I might be able to gather the four roles needed to do our actual trad work in… oh, another 1-2 years, and in another year or two have a lovely small group that complements each other and has synergy, and all those other great things. Because there are things about the trad you can’t learn until there’s enough people for the roles.

At which point, we can finally – 4-6 years post move – get back to the actual work I *wanted* to do when I first hived.

In other words:
The whole thing is a whole lot more complicated than “Sure, let me move and start doing what I’m doing here without missing a beat.” Just writing the thing out is pretty exhausting and overwhelming. (The fact I can is that I’ve been thinking about this particular issue for about 3 years now, because I knew I was in a profession where moving to find a professional job in my field might well come up.)

And there’s also the part where I’d be separated from the care and support of my tradmates. Where I’d have to figure out a way to do useful conversations about stuff that comes up as it does. (The HP who trained me is much better about email conversations than my HPS. I love – and respect, and honor them – both, but one of those is a lot more annoying long-distance than the other.) And it means that I – as the other 3rd degree in the trad – would not be handy to help out if *they* needed me. Which we’d all cope with if we had to, but is not ideal.

(I can obviously come visit, but that also takes a whole bunch of coordination and planning. And not a little cash.)

Was the move worth doing? Absolutely. My life took me away from trad-mates and friends, but I have an awesome job, I love where I’m living, and there are a lot of good things in Maine, too. But would I volunteer to do it just for the potential benefit of *potential* students? Really probably not.

But there’s also the part about ego. I adore my tradition. I think it has many wonderful things. But I *don’t* think it’s the right thing for everyone, and I don’t think that it’s the only possible road to self-transformation, or to the Gods, or to any other goal anyone might care to name.

Now, can I teach stuff other than my trad? Yep – and as you see above, I expect to do that, at least as part of what I was doing, for a year or two. I’m reasonably good at it, I enjoy it, and I’ve got a bunch of useful ideas wandering around my brain. But it doesn’t teach people the trad, and it doesn’t maintain *my* commitments to my trad, so it’s not a long-term sustainable stopping place, either.

So, what are the options?

A person, these days, really can develop a wonderful personal practice, deep connections to the Gods, a working practice of magic and correspondences, and a whole lot more with the published material, online resources, and some conversations online or in person to help over humps or smooth out rough edges. I’ve met some lovely people like that (including, actually, both my prospective students in Minnesota.) It takes work, sure, but there’s a lot out there to help these days.

(I have lots of suggestions here.)

What someone *can’t* learn from that is all the stuff that’s about a specific trad, and all the stuff that’s about leading a group.

The first, because you can’t connect yourself to the energies and practices of an existing community without experience in the existing community (and initiation, for those trads where that’s the key to the energetic linkages.) But in my eyes, someone is not ‘lesser’ because they don’t have that. Just on a different path, with a different set of commitments. They may be *more* able to do some very wonderful things in the world as a result.

If someone feels deeply called to a particular trad, they can figure out ways to explore that (or not, as they choose), but it doesn’t make them a better witch or priestess, or anything else whether they do or not. It matters to me a lot more what they do with what they *do* have.

The latter – well, you can’t learn to sing in harmony in a choir without a choir to sing with. And it takes practice with the choir, not just dreaming about the ideal of the choir. I do think that someone, going very carefully, and listening hard to advice, and maybe figuring out a way to find a mentoring connection in group leadership skills (on both practical and magical levels) could learn this without previous group experience fast enough to not get a group in trouble.

But it’s the place I’m most cautious about – other than a very few specific practices, like possessory work – because if someone gets it wrong, there are serious risks to them and to the people they’re working with.

And so, I really do encourage people looking at this one to find *some* way to at least get some experience, and to get some serious ongoing conversation going with people with a lot more. That might mean going to festivals or conventions occasionally. It might mean travelling for training for a period of time, being clear with everyone that you’d go back to your community when you were done. It might mean finding someone who’s able to drive, but who’s more flexible than a whole group, who could mentor you. There are options there that might be more accessible to a given person than full-blown training with a trad leading to initiation.

(Would I be willing to mentor on this for someone outside my trad? Yes, assuming that the person and I had mutually compatible discussion styles, and I had enough time and energies outside my own commitments – because I do think it’s important to have people do it well if they’re going to do it.)

But again, it’s not the ideal. And because part of what makes a trad – passing stuff along to another generation of practitioners – is so tied up in doing that group leadership stuff, that in-the-circle management stuff well, so that people can understand it and continue it, I really think it’s a second or third choice to working with a group for a substantial period.

Yeah, that leaves people out. Professional music leaves me out, too, because I don’t have the time or energy to put that much practice time in. We all have to make choices, and recognise what those choices lead us away from: staying in a particular location limits us to the choices in that place. Travelling limits our choices for deeper connections in the place we were. One isn’t automatically better than the other – but they’re both limits.

[last updated October 28, 2011]

Removing old energetic ties

By jenett, on April 10th, 2011

One question that comes up from time is how to remove old energetic ties and energetic entanglements that no longer serve us. My own approach to it is pretty pragmatic: clean all the things, see what’s left, and figure out how to untangle that. Cutting is a last resort, because it has some ongoing consequences.

The methods I describe below are designed to clear out anything that isn’t serving you anymore, rather than focusing on cutting ties with a specific person (I generally think it’s more useful: sometimes we’re being limited by energetic ties we don’t know are there.)

However, you should be aware that doing this kind of work can change relationships in ways you didn’t anticipate. You may find that some relationships in your life become closer, others become unexpectedly distant. Because this method is relatively gentle (except for the one place where I note otherwise), if you don’t want that outcome with that person, you can generally fix it with some attention and time.

The practices below mostly assume that you have some solid skills: If you don’t have these yet, you should learn them first and get some practice.

centering (what’s you?)
grounding (connecting to the vast world around you to rebalance energy)
sensing energy in some form (so that you can use the skills below)
directing energy (so that it goes where you intend)

Theory:

My basic theory on energetic connections goes like this:

1) We are all connected, in a very loose way, because we are all part of the larger world and environment.

2) However, some of us are more tightly connected than others, because of choices we’ve made. Some choices create closer ties than others.

Going to the same high school as someone creates some ties, but for most people most of them are relatively weak. Being married to someone is a much tighter tie. Having sex (or fooling around) with someone is somewhere in the middle. Working with someone for six months is a fairly light tie, but working together for five years is a much stronger tie.

Magical and esoteric groups, or any setting where there are strong emotions, major life-changing experiences, very new situations, or anything similar can create a very deep relationship tie very quickly. (Think summer camp, too.)

3) As we grow and change, some of those ties fall away easily. Others don’t. That doesn’t mean that those ties are bad or wrong – just that if they’re no longer serving us, we might not want to continue adding energy to maintaining them.

4) Very occasionally, someone will get a tie into us that’s really hard to shift. A family member who knows just how to push all our buttons. A boss whose actions take a sharp swipe at our confidence and self-assurance. Anyone who shifts our view of ourselves, or ability to stand tall in our own identity. In these cases, we may want and need to detatch in order to do the stuff we care about – but we may need a bit more effort to do it than getting rid of outgrown ties.

When you might consider this kind of work?

You’ve had a major change in a relationship that means someone who meant a lot to you has either left your life, or the relationship is so different they might as well have.
You are tidying up loose ends as you transition into a new stage of your life (as part of a physical move, a new dedication to a particular path or a next step on a path).
You feel that there are specific old entanglements that are keeping you in patterns that don’t serve you, and you want to release them so you can move on.

I generally review my life at major transitions (physical moves, new jobs, other noticeable changes in my life), but also do a quick review at least every year (usually around my birthday) or six months (if I’m going through a range of smaller changes.)

What do you need?

Useful tools vary depending on your preferences, but I’m fond of:

a handful or two of sea salt (table salt will do)
a soap you consider particularly refreshing and ‘new’.
incense you consider purifying and cleansing (sage is classic, but there are lots of other choices. If incense is a problem for you, you don’t need this.)
music that reflects the kind of changes the new openness might bring me.
comfortable clothing that helps you enter into a ritual mindset. (For the approaches below, flowing sleeves and long skirts are less practical, but see the notes below.)

You should also include at least one tool that helps you reflect on yourself and what you want. For some people, this is a journal. For others, it’s a divination tool (Tarot, runes, something else). For some people it’s a pad of art paper and markers/paints/whatever.

You also want whatever other things you’d normally use for ritual or magical work. For some people that’s altar clothes, candles, incense, statues, and more. For some people that’s their favorite tree outside. (You will want a bit of privacy for this.)

Starting clean:

A good place to start is from as energetically clean a place as you can. Generally, I suggest:

Center and ground.
Focus on balancing your energy: letting out anything that is no longer serving you, taking in things that allow you to grow and heal.

Wash your various selves.
Have a bath or a shower, focusing on washing away any energy or energetic ties that no longer serve you. Take it seriously – scrub yourself the way you would if you’d been camping for a weekend, or out playing in the mud. Get between your toes, behind your ears, and everywhere else you can think of.

As you scrub, focus on the unwanted energy washing away from you and (when you open the drain, if you’re in the bath) flowing out through the drain, flowing far far away and dissipating. If you’re in the shower, this is even easier.

I generally prefer to throw a handful or two of sea salt in the bathtub (it’s a great psychic cleanser) along with a couple of drops (3-5) of an essential oil that helps with cleansing and purifying (both lavender and rosemary are cheap and have lots of uses. Right now, I’m using a blend of juniper, fennel, and grapefruit a lot. There’s a folk tradition of putting a bottle of beer in the bath, and I’ve found that pretty effective, too. Shower users can use a salt scrub, or hang a small muslin or felt bag of dried cleansing herbs (hyssop, lavender, rosemary are good choices) under the shower spray.

Get dressed in a way that helps you be your best possible self.

Best possible self in the sense of what you want to continue to become. If you’re making a transition from ‘stay at home mom’ to ‘back to the workforce’, dress in clothing that at least somewhat reinforces that. If you’re leaving behind a relationship that’s no longer working, consider wearing something that ex really didn’t like – but that you love on you. That kind of thing.

Spend time reflecting:

What stuff in your life do you want to let go of? Do you feel any resistence to doing that? Why? Why not? What would help you feel like you could move on?

For example: if we’re moving on from a romantic relationship that had – like most of them – some really good stuff, and some really hard stuff, we might want to hang onto the good memories, but recognise that we need to move on, and let go of what might have been. We might spend time looking at photos or listening to songs that remind us of the good times, or writing a list of the things we’ll miss. But then we might go and continue, and write a list of why we’re done now with that relationship, what we’re *not* going to miss, and what we’re looking forward to as we move on.

The exact questions you’re going to need to ask yourself depend a whole lot on your situation. In some cases, like the example above, it’s pretty straightforward: there’s a clear ending to work with. In other cases, it’s going to be a lot fuzzier: you may know you need to do *something*, but not really what you’re trying to change.

Journalling can help here, using prompts like “I wish I could….” or “I miss…..” or “I remember when …. made me happy.” Start with things like that, and free write for 10-15 minutes. Look at what you come up with, and see if there are any patterns, or things that keep coming up.

Divination, if you have a divination method you feel at least somewhat competent with, can also help. (Or get help from a friend with more experience. Some online forums also do a reading exchange.)

Look at what keeps coming up. Any time I plan to do a major clearing out of old ties, I pay extra attention to what things I keep circling around in my life. Often (because I’m a big reader), I start seeing a similar theme in a range of books, the things I’m drawn to reading. Some people find that their playlist is out to get them: certain songs show up all the time. If you do regular divination, you might find the same cards showing up a lot. You may hear the same word or phrase coming up in unexpected places. Things like that.

These shouldn’t be the only thing you use to make decisions, but they’re often worth exploring in more detail. What is that thing, what does it mean to you? Why?

Taking inventory:

Here we get to the meat of the practice.

First, take inventory. Working your way slowly over your body in your mind, examine your aura and energy by whatever sense works best for you (or more than one sense.)

Take your time and slowly identify any spots that seem dirty, sound fuzzy or off-key, feel mucky or sticky, or that feel tense, tied up, or tangled. Don’t feel like you need to do anything about them the first pass: just identify where they are.

You may find that a specific sensation, emotion, or even person comes up as you look at a particular spot – if it does, make a note of it, and go back to your scan. Good notes can help you decide what to do later.

Make sure to cover your whole body: it’s usually easiest to start at one end (the top of your head), work your way down your back, under your feet, and back up the front (making sure to get the sides of your legs, the underside of your arms, etc.)

Spots of particular interest include:

Chakra points (you may want to do more research, if so.)
Spots on your shoulder blades or on your back.
Areas of old injuries or pains that are strongly associated with someone specific in your past for some reason.
Anywhere that just doesn’t feel right.

I’ll note: it’s possible that this scan will turn up spots that aren’t quite right, but that aren’t related to energetic ties. (It could be a physical injury, illness, or something else to pay attention to.) If you’re a heavy computer user, your neck and shoulders aching could be feeling the burden of lots of connections – but chances are, it’s probably that you’re spending a lot of time looking at a screen. Physical stretches, varied exercise, etc. might be all you need.

You may want to take a break here. As you build a baseline over months and years, it’ll be a lot easier to figure out what’s normal for you, and what’s something to pay extra attention to. When you’re starting out, taking a break between doing this inventory and making any changes can help you get clarity about which things are actually a problem, and which things are parts of other things in your life.

You may come to feel (with some time for reflection) that specific spots feel directly connected to specific people or events, while others don’t.

Cutting away:

This is the other core part of the practice. I generally suggest a light but firm intention here, of removing those things that no longer serve you, while leaving those things that do. Don’t get too specific: you may not know yet which things those are.

Go slowly, and if something starts feeling like it’s the wrong choice, back off. You can always come back to that spot later. It’s much easier to do multiple passes (doing a little bit, taking a break, seeing how you feel, coming back a day or two later) than to rebuild connections once you’ve broken the energetic tie directly.

The one-person method is a bit harder to do, but can work if you have sufficient focus and direction of energy. Basically, go back over your body, bit by bit, and as you hit a tangle, muddy spot, or fuzzy spot, you slowly focus on the energy clearing and becoming clear, light, and freely moving. In some cases it may feel like releasing a kink in a hose, so that water can run easily again. In other cases, you may find that releasing that thing is like cutting a piece of string connecting you to something outside of you.

Before you release something like that, take a moment to take a deep breath or two, and let your mind roam a little. Does this feel connected to someone in specific? Is releasing that energy what you really want to do (releasing the tie entirely can change your relationship with that person quite a bit). Or do you want to take the information, and use it to sit down with that person and work out any problems in your interactions face to face?

You may well find that some spots are a lot easier than others. I generally find it’s harder to reach places I can’t reach physically (middle of my back, for example). You may need to repeat the whole process a couple of times over the course of a week or two.

You may also find spots that make you feel happy – that are connections to people you love, value, and want to keep in your life. You can renew these areas by directing a little energy to help make them sparkle and flow easily – buffing off a piece of metal with a soft cloth, rather than scrubbing.

The two person method requires someone else who’s good at directing energy. It’s traditionally done with an athame in a number of trads, but you can also do it with your hand. Either way, the person doing it runs their hand or blade at a 90 degree angle to your body. (So, if they’re working on your back, the flat of the blade or flat of their hand is parallel to the floor, and perpendicular to your body as you’re standing up.)

While they’re working, they’re focusing on scraping off or flicking away (depending on whether they’re using a blade or their hand) any bits of aura and energy that are stuck, grungy, or too tangled to be of use. (So you need to trust them quite a bit – both to recognise the good stuff from the bad stuff, and to act in your own best interest.)

This method is often a good bit quicker in my experience than doing it all myself, and there are spots other people find much more accurately. Starhawk and Hilary Valentine describe a general version of this in their book Twelve Wild Swans.

If you’re focusing on a specific person (for example, removing ties with an ex, or someone else you’re removing from your life for good reason), you can focus on that person, and you may feel a very strong physical sensation in a particular spot on your body. (You may not, too, and that’s okay.)

Focus on removing the connection to that person without malice or hatred – you’re pruning a rosebush or weeding your garden. It’s not personal, it’s not emotional, you’re just clearing the way for something new. (Strong emotion will help feed the connection, anyway, which is not what you want right now.)

When you remove a strong connection like this, it can be easy for the connection to try and re-attach. To help prevent this, once you’ve removed it, smooth over the spot where it was until there’s no rough energy for it to reattach to.

Rest. Reflect. Repeat as needed.

Connection with the world, with other people, is complicated. Chances are, you’ll want and need to repeat this regularly. If you haven’t ever done it, you might want to check back in with yourself in a week, a month, three months, and see how you feel. As you get more experience, you’ll get a better sense of when you might want to do it again.

You might also be interested in two posts on my blog (this will take you away from the Seeking area of my website):

Both use some of the techniques described above as part of a larger ritual work.

Sharing with others (the broom closet isssue)

By jenett, on January 2nd, 2011

One question that comes up for a lot of people is the question of coming out of the broom closet – when do you tell people about your change in religious interest, views, or practice?

Before I go any further, a recommendation: Dana Eilers’ book The Practical Pagan is an excellent resource on this topic, and she has a lot of great advice about how handle issues of sharing details about your religion both with family and in workplace settings. Highly recommended.

Continue reading Sharing with others (the broom closet isssue)

Why a year and a day?

By jenett, on January 1st, 2011

People have gotten the idea that in order to be a witch (or a religious witch, or a Pagan, or whatever), you simply need to study for a year and a day. And that that time frame is really fixed – you can’t take longer.

The reality is a bit more complicated.

In fact, the year and a day comes from a common group practice of asking students to work with the group for a year and a day before they commit to the group, the tradition, and the Gods (via initiation). Lots of people decide (often for very good reasons) that one or more of those things isn’t for them, at least right now. It’s much better to figure that out before long-term oaths and commitments are made.

Continue reading Why a year and a day?

Feeling silly

By jenett, on January 1st, 2011

When you read books about Wicca or witchcraft, you see lots of them talk about doing some specific motions, or saying some words. Often, those things seem pretty silly.

And yet, lots of books talk about them. And so do lots of teachers, and lots of groups that have been doing this for a while. So there must be something in the robes and the tools and the standing there saying poetry, and chanting. What’s up with that?

My theory is that it has to do with four things:

Getting your brain out of everyday thoughts and actions.
Using multiple senses.
Engaging your subconscious and other parts of your mind.
And sometimes, the specific actions work for specific reasons.

Continue reading Feeling silly

Classic Pagan books

By jenett, on November 14th, 2010

Many people start out their reading about Paganism by reading classic Pagan titles and authors. This is, however, not something I personally suggest, and I want to explain why.

It’s based on three core principles:

Our community learns and grows and changes over time.
Practical aspects change too – health, safety, adaptations.
Books are basically static.

Note: it’s not that these books aren’t worth reading. Just that I think they aren’t the best choice anymore for the first books someone reads. I usually suggest people start reading them after reading some core basics (like the six topics suggested on my good starting books page) and otherwise getting familiar with current community practices and approaches through ongoing discussion (magazines, blogs, forums), local community events, or some combination.

Continue reading Classic Pagan books

The question of bodies

By jenett, on November 4th, 2010

Our society is deeply confused about bodies and what they should look like. While many of our ideas of ‘what is attractive’ are rooted in health, many of those ideals have gotten seriously skewed – not just in the recent past, but over centuries, even millenia. What’s changed, though, is that we’re constantly exposed to people who appear to fit those ideals, and so we can get caught in a loop of thinking we’re imperfect and horrible.

Even the medical research is iffy: it’s clear that some kinds of food choices put us at risk. So does not exercising. But the research says that’s true for everyone. It doesn’t change because you’ve magically passed some point on the scale. Research also increasingly shows that we can’t change someone’s weight – either direction – just by trying. Not for long, anyway. (Links to further info below.)

Continue reading The question of bodies

Some first steps

By jenett, on October 28th, 2010

Here’s a guide to how some of your initial learning and exploration might go, along with a few other tips. Basically, it’s all about taking your time, being gentle with yourself (and those around you), learning how you learn, and seeking out multiple sources.

Continue reading Some first steps