by Starhawk
This state, when your attention is focused and dropped deep into your center, is “home base,” and if you get distracted during this exercise, simply retrace these steps and return to “home base” on a few easy breaths. We call this state dropped attention.
Now allow a sensation somewhere in your body to draw your attention. Open your attention toward this sensation, and explore it with your inner senses. Note the texture, temperature, pressure, motion of the sensation. Does it feel like a huge frozen sponge? An explosion of orange prickling? Do images and associations arise? Does it feel like you’re underwater? Do you hear words or sounds? Do you smell Christmas cookies? Notice each sensation, image, and emotion as it arises, and tell yourself that you will be able to remember them. It’s amazing how quickly they can vanish when you open your eyes, just like the details of a dream. So far, we’re just noticing sensation, not trying to change anything.
Next allow yourself to make a slight, subtle adjustment in your physical body, to make yourself a little more comfortable. Maybe you can open your hand just a little bit more; maybe your neck, which is usually tilted subtly to one side, might like to be a bit straighter. Maybe you can uncross your ankles or yawn.
Sometimes it helps to direct a deep breath toward a tense or painful area. Sometimes it helps to work with an image, such as that of wrapping a sore, tired knee in warm red flannel, or dipping a hot face in a cool tide pool. Sometimes it helps to send a strong mental image of a color that feels soothing or energizing to a trouble spot in the inner landscape. Try making a humming sound or long vowel tone (aaaah, or ooooh) and sending it into the area you are working with. Try allowing a sound to come out of that area.
The purpose of this exercise is to find whatever helps comfort, soothe, and energize your body, no matter how silly it might sound. After all, you don’t have to tell anyone if you don’t want to. Take note of what was helpful, and tell yourself that you will be able to remember.
Now pull your attention back into the center of your body, and return to “home base.” Let yourself rest in your center for a few breaths, and then slowly begin to allow your attention to rise on each breath until it is gathered again in a glowing sphere behind your eyes. Open your eyes, stretch thoroughly, and then grab your Book of Shadows and make some notes, before the detail and intensity of the experience fade. In circle, you may wish to discuss what you experienced. With practice you can get to know your own inner landscape well and gain tools and skills that allow you to care for and comfort yourself.
If you have been lucky enough or patient enough to get specific suggestions from Younger Self, by all means take them literally and use them. If the color blue helped, sleep in blue sheets, wear your lapis earrings and a blue T-shirt, burn blue candles, eat blueberries. Just like anyone else, Younger Self is more likely to speak up if you show that you are listening carefully and willing to help. If you keep practicing and paying attention, you will also know when it’s time to stop or change. You don’t have to eat blueberries forever!
Wandering Within Exercise: A Mirror
The ancient texts say that above the entrance to the Delphic oracle were written the words Know Yourself (in Greek, of course). Place a mirror on your altar or on your circle’s altar, behind the roses, to “reflect” your commitment to self-knowledge. Now when you work at your altar you can see yourselves and the roses reflected together. Now your altar, which holds the mysterious images or objects that brought you to the inner path, together with the roses and the mirror, is beginning to reflect your commitment to your own process of self-discovery, self-healing, and self-love.
Wandering Within Exercise: The Mystery
Now that you have begun to be an adept in the art and craft of self-love, what happens if you use one of these exercises to go to a place of powerful self-love, and from that perspective look at the disturbing or mysterious images, dreams, or sensations that opened the door of the Inner Path for you. What if you bring your dream symbol, your cards, your posture or gesture into the mirror of self-love with you? Can you find the same deep acceptance of your difficulties, your challenges, and your mystery that you have learned to have for yourself? If so, you have found the little stream that will lead you to the powerful sea of love, the love that turns the stars, the love that says, “For I am the mother of all things, and my love is poured out upon the earth.”
Seeking Guidance
As Rose rests by the stream, lost in the wood, the Old Woman appears. Rose shares what she has with the Old Woman. Although she has little, her heart is generous. In turn, the Old Woman gives her exactly the information that is most needed. The Old Woman knows how to find Rose’s brothers. Like Rose, we must learn to ask for guidance. In the Elements Path, we learned to ask for guidance from nature and from our wisdom voice, deep within. We learned to keep an altar and rely on our relationship with deity. In the Inner Path, we are going to ask for guidance from real people and in trance.
With any magical practice, it’s good to check your efforts from time to time with other people. This is especially important if you are doing most of your magical work alone. We all need attention and insight from others as well as from ourselves, or we can lose our perspective. Everyone, even the most experienced priestess, has blind spots, and they are often about ourselves. As we pursue a self-healing process, we need guidance and advice from outside ourselves. This may be the advice of friends, of our circle sisters, or of casual acquaintances, or it may be the guidance we seek from finding a formal relationship with a spiritual teacher, bodyworker, or counselor.
Guidance from a Circle or Coven
In Reclaiming tradition, we often form intimate, committed circles and covens, which meet regularly to celebrate the full and new moons, to do magic together, and to support and challenge each other as we each move toward our personal fulfillment and our life’s purpose. These bonds are often as strong as or even stronger than family ties. How many people really know that you felt like leaving your husband every fall for the last six years, but you loved him again by Christmas? How many people remember a really important dream you had last year and can remind you of it? How many people know that you always get a stomachache when you start a new project? When circle sisters know each other well, they can be the “Old Woman” for each other, using their wisdom and humor to help one another.
Guidance from Teachers
We can also find the Old Woman disguised as teachers offering public classes in the Goddess traditions. These teachers aren’t all old, and they aren’t all women, but I have gained tremendous personal growth and healing for myself when I have sought out teachers in my tradition. None of them have been the perfect mentor; all of them have been human, with their own personal stories and growth unfolding along with mine. One moment they might offer the perfect encouragement or challenge; the next moment they might say something really dumb and thoughtless. But if they had been perfect, or tried to be, I wouldn’t have felt at home in the classes. I wouldn’t have felt I belonged, because I know perfectly well that I’m far from perfect. So why would I want a perfect teacher? She wouldn’t be able to help with my real dilemma, with my humanness. Almost every metropolitan area now has teachers offering classes in the Goddess traditions. Consider the possibility of taking a class to support your work or your circle’s work on the story of the Twelve Wild Swans. Here are two stories to encourage you, about how a teacher can be the “Old Woman” for one magic moment.
Guidance: A Story
I met Cybele as the teacher in a Reclaiming class during the years I was first studying Witchcraft. A small, lithe woman with the movements of a dancer, Cybele had a face that was both mysterious and oddly open. I felt I had known her for years.
The circle was cast, and Cybele began the invocation of the Goddess as She Who Listens, Shhhhhh. I felt the familiar prickling sensation as the tiny hairs on my arms stood up, and shivers ran down my spine—the physical sensation of present power. I somehow knew that Cybele was calling in a deity as familiar as the
back of her own hand.
As I came to know Cybele over the years, this first impression deepened. Cybele has dedicated her life to therapeutic bodywork and healing with women and men who have survived childhood trauma and abuse. She has literally heard it all. When Cybele listens, a quiet, reflective acceptance spreads out from her center like the stillest alpine lake, reflecting, accepting the tiniest detail of the trees and sky. Calm, still, reflecting, accepting—absolutely. Then suddenly her crooked grin breaks through, half the worldly cynicism of someone who has heard the worst of human nature, half the wicked resilience of the survivor.
One day, one of Cybele’s students had come to a particularly difficult moment in trance. She was releasing her memories of a frightening childhood experience, and suddenly she felt that she couldn’t breathe. From her experience as a bodyworker, Cybele knew what to do. “Don’t try to breathe in,” Cybele said quietly. “Just breathe out.” As the woman breathed all the way out, her body’s wisdom took over and the next in-breath came quite naturally.
Guidance: Another Story
Another wonderful Reclaiming teacher story involved Egret. A big, strong woman with a lush Texan accent, Egret is a slow talker and a deep listener. She’s not a bandwagon kind of gal; her independent thinking and personal courage to speak unpopular truths have enriched every circle she’s been part of. The slow silences and deep devotion of her practice lit up her classes when I was a student.
The circle was cast that night at class, and we tranced deep and far into the Otherworld. When we returned, my friend Bessie had a strange tale to tell. She had been joined over yonder by a spirit like a little flame, and it had wanted to come back with her. All the women in the class, including myself, started giving our different bits of advice and warnings about birth control and getting rid of unwanted spirit visitors. Meanwhile, Bessie was getting quieter and quieter. Finally the chatter and well-meaning advice slowed down. As the silence drew out and Bessie still didn’t say anything, Egret finally spoke up: “Maybe this is a good thing.”
This “good thing” is in second grade now, with hair like flames and little feet that fly like sparks in the Irish jig competitions.
In these stories, Cybele’s student and Bessie were able to hear the perfect, helpful advice from the “Old Woman” of the moment. These special moments, highly valued by both teacher and student, are powerful magic when they occur. But the same quality that makes a teacher the perfect “Old Woman” in one situation may make her irritatingly human a moment later. We all are ultimately teachers and guides for one another, students in one situation and teachers in another.
Guidance Exercise: Recognizing the Teacher in the Beggar Woman
We can also receive guidance in completely unexpected ways, from strangers or casual acquaintances or from our everyday companions. Here is another exercise that reminds us to pay attention, so that we can recognize guidance when it comes our way. It can help us practice generosity and recognize the wisdom of the Goddess in unexpected places. Set aside a day for it, or weave it into your life as an ongoing practice.
In Aldous Huxley’s Utopian novel Island, mynah birds were trained to fly around the village crying out, “Attention! Attention!” as a constant reminder to people to put their attention on the here and now. The teachers at the Wilderness Awareness School, who train students in nature awareness and the development of the relaxed alertness we need for literally wandering in the wild, suggest that we choose our own version of the mynah bird, something that occurs periodically in our lives as a constant reminder to notice the life and detail around us.
For this meditation, choose your own wake-up bell—perhaps the ringing of the phone, or the cry of a blue jay, or seeing a blue car on the road. Whenever your “wake-up bell” appears, imagine it is telling you that the very next person you meet may be the Old Woman who will set you on your path.
Make an offering to the next person you meet. This might mean literally giving spare change to a street person, or giving your child a spontaneous hug, or offering to make a cup of tea for a tired friend. Then listen to whatever that person says as if it were a piece of true wisdom or a clue for your journey. You may ask a question if it is appropriate to your interaction. Act on the advice you receive (within the bounds of your own ethics and common sense).
Guidance: Giving Back
Can you think of someone, or maybe a few people, in whom you could trust and confide, from whom you could seek counsel? Are you willing to commit yourself to doing so? If so, try this simple exercise. By making a food offering at our altars, we will ask to he sent the guidance that we need.
Take a moment to think about the loaf of bread in the story. For the Northern European people who told this tale, the loaf of bread would be the staple food, eaten daily, and carried on journeys—the staff of life. But this may not be the staple food you rely on for life, or the staff of life of your ancestors. If yams, or rice, or bean cakes, or salt fish, or some other food works for you and your ancestors instead of the bread in the story, by all means use that instead.
Exercise: A Food Offering
You, or you and your circle, will need some food, prepared so that it is especially delicious. Create sacred space at your altar, and light your candles. Bless the food. Place part of the food on your altar as an offering. Make prayers for yourselves with words, drawings, silence, gestures, songs—whatever works for you and your circle sisters. Ask for the willingness and the courage and the luck to meet the guides who are just right for you at this moment in your lives. Ask for what you know you want and need. Ask to be surprised, too, by wonderful assistance that you cannot anticipate. Commit yourselves to paying attention to what happens between you and other people over the next few days or weeks. Eat the rest of the food. It is done. Thank the powers and open the circle.
Trance for Guidance: Asking the Old Woman
Let’s take this opportunity to get the advice and guidance of the “Old Woman.” Return for a moment to the disturbing sensation, or dream, or image that provided you with your door into the Inner Path. Let’s take this to the “Old Woman” and ask for her help.
Create sacred space alone or with your circle, and use your favorite induction to enter trance and go to your place of power. Greet the directions in your place of power; find your path and begin to walk it.
There is a glow of light in front of you on the path. As you approach and can see more clearly, you find the Old Wise One. Offer to share with her whatever you have. Show her the mysterious dream or divination image, or the mysterious sensation or posture, that opened the door of the Inner Path for you. She can counsel you and answer your questions. She will point you in the right direction. Notice where she points and the features of the path: the landscape and the weather that she is directing you toward. She may have something unexpected to add. When you are finished, thank her and say farewell. Know that you will be able to remember what has taken place and that you can return here whenever you wish.
Return to your place of power on your path. Does your path seem different now?
Thank the four directions, and return, using the exact opposite of your induction. Stretch, say your name three times, and discuss what happened with your circle sisters. Make some notes in your Book of Shadows, eat a little something, and, only when you are ready, open the circle.
We have followed Rose into the wild. We have lingered by the little stream and begun to practice the art of wandering deep into the wilds of self-knowledge and self-love. We have shared our food and accepted guidance. Now we must follow the little stream to the seashore, where we will face the next challenge of our journey.
The Outer Path
Nobody knows how to remake the world. There are no sets of instructions for rebuilding a healthy society, no manual for healing our social wounds. Like Rose, we know that we are called to set the world to rights, but we often don’t know how to do it.
This section of the story teaches that the great creative powers we ne
ed can be awakened only when we give ourselves over to the unknown. Not knowing what to do is no excuse for doing nothing. The wildwoods are calling us to explore their depths and find unexpected allies and guidance. When we allow ourselves time to wander, we discover new trails and hear the songs of unfamiliar birds. Our experience is enriched, and that broadening of understanding will inform all our actions and creations.
Wandering requires courage and confidence. We live in a society that expects us to have clear goals and efficient plans for reaching them, to follow set timetables and know where we’re going and what we’re doing. But creativity is not efficient. Efficiency belongs to the realm of Talking Self, but art, poetry, music, dance, and visionary organizing arise from Younger Self, who loves to skip through the woods freely without being constrained to follow a trail.
When we allow Younger Self freedom, when we let the form emerge from the block of marble, the characters tell the story of a novel, the song sings itself, and we open the way for Deep Self to speak through our art and our work.
When we take on roles of leadership in a group, we must be comfortable not only with our own unknowing but with allowing the group its chance to wander. If we’re planning a ritual, a political action, or a creative project as a group, we need to allow time for open discussion of all the possibilities. Our conventional image of a leader is of someone who knows what to do, who sets the direction of a group and moves it toward her or his personal vision. But empowering leadership is very different. Instead of pushing the group ahead, our role might be to say, “Slow down.” Instead of offering a clear solution to a problem, our role may be to make time for a broad discussion of all the issues and let the solution emerge from the group.
For me, this is a lesson I learn over and over again. My natural tendency is to leap ahead, see a vision far down the road, and then attempt to drag the group there along the path I see as most direct. I want to move faster, faster, faster! and have been known to literally writhe on the ground with frustration when someone slows the group down.
