• Writing implement.
• Journal.
How-To
Choose the most important quality you have uncovered in these exercises, and create an empowerment mantra. Remember: simple wording is most effective, always state your mantras in the positive, and be sure that the wording and the desired outcome fit with your personal ecology.
“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? . . . We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us.”
—Marianne Williamson, excerpted from A Return to Love (this quote is
frequently attributed to Nelson Mandela)
For example, when working with boundaries, you might say, “I own my space.” When working to invoke a sexy attitude without compromising yourself, you might say, “I am safe in my sexual energy.”
Go to it, grrl!
Self-Definition, Self-Determination
Self. Here we are at a new frontier. And you know what? It’s all about you! I’m sure we’ve all heard the phrase “full of yourself” as a negative. An attack, a slur, a dis. But my question is this: If not full of our selves, what are we supposed to be full of? I encourage you to allow yourself to get full of the energy that is you. To get so full that you know exactly who you are, what you think, what you feel, and why you think or feel any given thing.
You are the center of the universe you call home. You are the creator, the actor, the magickian, the Witch. You define the reality that you live. Your thoughts and actions, conscious or not, create the stage that is your personal reality. The fuller of our own ideas, opinions, pleasures, fears, and desires that we become, the more we will know about where we want to get to next.
Self-definition is every person’s right and responsibility. It can be a lot of work at times to be self-defining; to think for ourselves, claim our voices, stand up for our beliefs, or challenge our own assumptions. But what better work is there? By becoming self-defining, we are creating new ways of being, and we stand as examples to those who are looking for ways to claim their own power. We stand as examples to our children, our friends of all ages, our lovers, our families, and our communities. By allowing ourselves the room to define our own true desires and needs, to speak about them, to own them and be strong in that owning, we allow others the right to do the same.
Spell Working: Letters from the Self
It can be powerful to find the voices we have used, and the voices we will someday command. This exercise is designed to bring cognizance to the stages of our lives, and to find connection with past and future selves.
Existentialism—
A Philosophy of Compelled Freedom: The main tenet of Existentialism is that the individual defines his or her own reality by assigning meaning to experience. For more info, check out this amazing site called The Existentialism Primer, http://www.tameri.com/csw/exist/index.html.
What You Will Need
• Your journal.
• Writing implements . . . pen, pencils, crayon. What did you write with as a child? What will you use as a crone?
• An artifact or belonging from your childhood.
How-To
In this exercise you will write two letters: one from your child self and one from your future self. Start each of the two letters with the salutation that feels right, and then: “I am ______ years old.” Just let the age come to you. And go from there.
Child-Self Letter
Use the artifact from your childhood to pull you back to the time period it came from. Perhaps it sat on your dresser, or maybe it was your favorite blanket or stuffed toy, and you took it everywhere. Perhaps it is a picture you drew. Whatever it is, sit with it for a minute, and let it bring you, present and aware, back into your past. Write from this space.
Crone-Self Letter
Sit in quiet contemplation, and allow your consciousness to travel forward in time. Follow one of the many streams of possibility or probability, and become present in the future. Feel your bones, your muscle, your flesh. Allow your eyes to focus, and begin writing.
Always Becoming
Being sure of ourselves is obviously not about disallowing future growth; it’s about claiming the awareness that we are always becoming more of who we are. Existentialism holds as one of its main tenets that existence precedes essence. We are, then we become. Working from this frame of thought, we are responsible for living the lives we want, and those lives become the reality we live. Act and outcome are inseparable. The means become the ends. The ends are defined by the means.
Self-definition is the “means” to self-determination. Self-determination, at the simplest reduction, means the ability to make your own choices, uninhibited by the ideas or ideals of others. It means the right to determine your own values, your own ethical structure, your own goals, dreams, and aspirations. It means being empowered to determine your own course in life, one based in your own desires and beliefs.
To live in this empowered space, it is necessary to realize that you determine the rules that define your reality. Ideally, these rules also allow you to interface with the realities of others. Your thoughts create your experience (or interpretation) of life, but there is also a space where the thoughts of others define the edges of your ability to define. The more aware you are of this process, and the more strongly you live within your own beliefs and act in accordance with your own rule structures, the more effective you will ultimately be in living the life you create.
Magickal Act: Making the Rules
When you become active in the process of making your own rules, it is no longer necessary to break the rules. You can be a rule maker instead of a rule breaker. Here are a few ideas to work with in creating rule structures that work in the long term:
• All rules are up for renegotiation if (when) they no longer serve you.
• Nothing is true; everything is permitted (chaos magick).
• Who and what you are now is exactly that—who and what you are now. You need not be defined by who or what you have been, or who or what you may become.
• Now is the only moment in which you have power of choice. However, the choice you have in the moment can be used to reinterpret past experiences and to project future intentions.
• Your thoughts, feelings, actions, and reactions are what define your experience, not the experience itself. Every experience can be interpreted any number of ways. It is your right, and your responsibility, to realize that you are defining your experiences constantly by way of your own personal interpretation.
• Your interpretations may be colored by your moods or your physical senses, but ultimately you may find that you control those systems (and your iterative responses to them) as well. Some of those systems are easier to learn to control than others, but it is possible that even the more difficult ones are sensitive to the power of thought.
How-To
This is an act of thought. From this moment on, you can work with the concept that you make the rules.
Spell Working: Breath of Life
In previous chapters, we touched upon how gratitude can help shape the life you live, and how becoming conscious of choice improves your chances of success. You have dreamed a new creation story as the nexus of your future growth and being. Here is where you will breathe life into the origin you have created. In this visualization you will return to your temple, and imbue your creation story with life.
What You Will Need
• Time. Ten minutes for visualization, and ten minutes for journaling or drawing.
• Journal.
• Writing or drawing implements.
You may want to read
aloud and record the instructions for the visualization before doing this exercise.
How-To
Sit in a comfortable position. Close your eyes and relax. Focus on breathing. Pull each breath into your lungs, allowing them to expand to their fullest capacity. Breathe out, and release any tension you feel in your muscles. As you breathe, let your lungs become even fuller, pulling your breath deep into your abdomen. Allow your belly to relax, your ribs to expand, your mind to quiet. When thoughts come to the surface, allow them to gently pass.
Once you feel relaxed and present, allow yourself to see, once again, your temple in the distance. Begin moving toward this magnificent place. Does it look the same as last time you were here, or has it changed? Notice, and keep moving forward. Notice the scents that ride on the air. Feel the temperature of your skin. Keep breathing deeply, and continue moving.
Do you smell incense burning in the censers? Do you feel moisture on the air? Keep breathing deeply. Soon you will pass the threshold, and enter again into your glorious inner sanctum. Enjoy this time out of time, in this sacred, sweet space that is all yours.
Now you enter into your center, the center of this sacred temple. Is it the same as last time you were here? Has it changed? Can you feel now, more than before, the stillness present here? Can you almost see your mentors and guides protecting this space for you? Can you feel the presence of herstory, your story, filling the fabric of timelessness?
Walk toward the altar. See your tools. Are they the same? Have they changed? Are there new ones? Have you let any go? Recognize what is, give thanks for stability and for change, and kneel before your altar.
On this altar you see the artifact of creation that you brought into being. You crafted this beginning with your own hands, your own mind, you own emotions, dreams, and desires. Reach out and pick up this artifact. Hold it in your hands, and feel it. Look at it, and recognize the passion that is held in this ultimate act. Everything starts from here.
Let your emotions—desire, gratitude, passion, love, strength, and whatever else comes up for you in seeing this artifact—build within you. You have so much power. Let it fill you. Let it fill you all the way. Let it fill you until you are so full of your own being that you are about to burst.
Now, hold your artifact in front of your lips, and blow. Bring the breath of life to this creation story, the creation story that is yours. Allow your life-energy to fill this creation. Let this creation be born of your passion, your desire, your dreams, your breath.
Now release the artifact in a way that feels safe. Let it grow. Let it fill the space that is your body. Let it fill the space that is your temple. Let it expand and fill the space that is the earth. And the universe. And all that exists.
Breathe in, and know you are breathing breath that is yours. You created this breath. You created this life. You created the self that you are. You created this world. This universe. This existence.
Allow yourself to listen gently in this space. Give thanks for returning. Hold this sacred space in the stillness of eternity. Know that you have birthed a new world. Walk into that world now.
Keep breathing deeply, and follow your breath back to consciousness.
When you are ready, slowly open your eyes, and journal or draw the story of this visit to your temple.
Onward and Inward!
Only one more chapter to go. This initiation cycle is nearly complete. Now, go to part 2 and get ready for your sixth ritual! Remember, you have created a whole new world. You can do anything!
[contents]
1. Harold Courlander, The Fourth World of the Hopis (New York: Crown Publishers, 1971).
chapter seven
The Seventh Initiation:
The Mirror and the Path
★ Daily Practice: The Goddess in the Mirror, page 124.
You have reached the seventh, and final, gate. This is the last chapter of Sexy Witch! Yes, you are getting to the end of the book, but this is the beginning (as is every day, and every moment therein) of the rest of your life. At the end of this chapter you will experience your seventh initiation. You will walk forward from that moment in this new world, this new matrix, that you have created.
This chapter will focus on your final Sexy Witch initiation into your own power, but as you may have guessed by now, your work (and play) doesn’t end here. This chapter offers you tools that will give the process you have worked in this book a more permanent home in your future life.
Song of Myself
by Walt Whitman
. . . I have said that the soul is not more than the body,
And I have said that the body is not more than the soul,
And nothing, not God, is greater to one than one’s self is . . .
I hear and behold God in every object, yet understand God not in the least,
Nor do I understand who there can be more wonderful than myself . . .
In the faces of men and women I see God, and in my own face in the glass . . .
• • •
A Magickal Thought: Self-devotion is a (r)evolutionary, magickal act.
Initiation is not an ending, it’s a threshold, a point of transition. To “initiate” means to begin. And thus, the mystery unfolds. Picture yourself before a large mirror, with a large mirror behind you as well. You look into the mirror in front, and see the mirror behind, and see that your back and front views replicate into eternity. You are in the moment that is present, with the past extending to all the “yous” you have been, and the future extending to all the “yous” you will be.
That is initiation: the moment between mirrors—doorways, thresholds—where you can see the future and past selves you will be and have been.
Initiation marks the ending of what’s been before, and the beginning of what will be. Since time immemorial, initiation has held an honored place in the process of becoming who we are, who we’re meant to be, who we’re growing into being. Initiation is a doorway that we walk through, and in so doing gain awareness of the mystery of transformation.
In Western culture, we don’t have many initiations that are recognized across the board. Some initiations we do recognize are graduations, birthdays (certain ones are seen as the Big Ones, but every birthday can be seen as a new year), getting a driver’s license, marriages, childbirth, and even, if covertly, menstruation and menopause. However, we have no consensual reality that tells us how to honor these transitions in ways that truly mark these experiences as transformational. For many of us, the transformational aspect of these celebrations has been downplayed, if recognized at all.
The initiation you are encountering now is one wrought by your own hand, your own will, your own intention, and your own work. This initiation is an opportunity to allow yourself to grow into the being you have created through the work you have done over the past weeks. This initiation is an opportunity to honor your growth, the commitments you have made to self-definition and future growth, and the work you have done to create a new world to live in, one that allows you to present yourself as exactly who you are. This is an opportunity to have the work you have done in the past weeks recognized and honored.
This chapter is about ceremony. It is about the ritualization of your desire to be in integrity with what you have learned, how you have changed, and who you have become. This is a turning point that will create a new way for you to be in the world.
In this final chapter you will create vows of initiation, and charge a talisman that you can wear either all the time or just when you need extra strength or a reminder of who you have become through the work. You will have an opportunity to recognize yourself, who you are now, and to make commitments to this new you.
For the coming ritual, if you are working this book on the solitary path, I ask that you choose one or more witnesses, close and devoted friends, who will stand for you. If you are working this book with
a group, your Sexy Witch sisters will be your witnesses, and you will be theirs. (You may decide as a group to invite other witnesses as well.) These witnesses will have the responsibility of reminding you of your vows. They will have the opportunity to see you honor the healing work you have done. For this reason, this person, or these people, must be people you love and trust.
Your witnesses may be male. If you have a partner, husband, or lover, I encourage you to think about whether you will invite your partner to witness your initiation. Even if you are working with a group, you may want to consider inviting witnesses who are not part of the group. Or maybe you want your mother, or sister, or brother, or best friend to be there. Bring this question to your group, and decide together.
Journaling Prompts: Witnessing
• Qualities that are important in my witnesses.
• My list of possible witnesses.
Self-Dedication, Self-Devotion
Past the concept of self-definition and self-determination lies the territory of your spiritual commitments to you. Self-dedication means being dedicated to your own relationship with you. It means recognizing the righteousness of your needs coming first in defining your dreams and boundaries. Self-devotion is the point at which you claim your relationship with yourself as a spiritual path. You can be dedicated to being a good mother, a conscious lover, a devoted follower of your teachers.
You can also claim your self-devotion as an ongoing spiritual path. Whom could it possibly be better to devote your study, worship, and faith to? You, unique and individual, deserve your faith and your worship. You raise yourself by your own worship. You become a beacon of self-ownership in the dark night of conformity. You build of yourself a temple that honors women everywhere.
Journaling Prompts: Devotion
• Self-devotion is . . .
• By devoting myself to me and my own growth, I . . .
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