By Land, Sky & Sea (4 page)

2

Feel the pulse of the earth beneath you. Sit on the ground. Touch it. Run your fingers through the soil. Build a relationship with the living earth.

—Christopher Penczak,
The Temple of Shamanic Witchcraft

Before beginning a ritual in Neopaganism, it is considered essential to ground and centre, or at least to still the mind. Over the years, the famous tree of life alignment meditation (and there are a variety!) has proven the most effective in achieving the desired state of consciousness over the years. This chapter will explore the how-to (the technique itself) and the why of the tree of life alignment meditation. It is hoped that the efficacy of this method will prove evident and that you, the reader, will more deeply understand the reason for this practice today.

Before I provide you with the meditation word for word, I would like to add that I have found grounding and centring to be a useful practice in almost any situation. When travelling in Europe recently, I would ground and centre whenever we reached “new” land to formally acquaint myself with it. For example, after we disembarked the ferry from Wales to Ireland, we drove a short way to Our Lady’s Island in the very southeast of Ireland, and I aligned myself there with the tree of life, also called the world tree. My roots delved far into the belly of the Mother, and my branches stroked the canopy of the star-strung heavens. Previously, I had felt a little lacklustre, but immediately after grounding and centring, I felt rooted in place and felt my purpose burn brightly anew. I also find this practice helpful in situations of conflict or when I feel a little sick, deflated, or disorientated in general. Starhawk teaches the method to activists who put themselves on the front line and finds that these methods aid in calming a person and bringing them into harmony with their surroundings. An individual “realises” and therefore proves powerful and in control in circumstances that usually break down morale.

The tree of life
Alignment Meditation

Below, you will find what I have called the tree of life alignment meditation, which is really a fancy way of defining a method for grounding and centring. This method is particular to the WildWood Tradition of Witchcraft, of which I am an initiated priest and co-founder. Feel free to try it as it is or adapt it to your own tastes.

Part One—
Begin by closing your eyes and opening yourself to the sounds and rhythms all around you. As you breathe deeply in, you realise that these sounds form patterns and are, in truth, in harmony with one another. Delve deeper into the pattern to find the rhythm that inspires it. Let this rhythm be that of your breath as you inhale and exhale, breathing in the white light of the universe and releasing, as you exhale, all the stresses and anxieties of the day. You are here, in the now.

Part Two—
Now focus on your feet (or the base of your spine—whatever body part is touching the ground), and feel and see strong roots pushing through the layers of soil and earth, through the veins of minerals and chthonic water, until they reach the heart of the Mother herself. The molten heart-fire from this sacred place rushes up your roots and into your body, where it settles there as the dark earth light of the Mother, grounding and nurturing.

Part Three—
Now focus on your crown. In your mind’s eye, your body is, in fact, the trunk of an ancient tree, and your consciousness now follows the path of your woven branches into the sky realms. Here, the bright white light of the heavens enters your branches like lightning, like quicksilver, and pours into your body, mixing with the dark earth energy. They meet and marry and are one within you, as they always have been. You are their child—a mighty pillar between heaven and earth. Blessed be.

I will now deconstruct each of the three parts of the meditation and explain why they are as they are.

Part One is the initiation of the flow of energy. By closing one’s eyes and attuning to the rhythms in nature, you will find a solace and equilibrium that cleanses your being and reaffirms it as part of the intricate (and simple) pattern of life. The breathwork here is obvious and draws upon colour visualisation—white, to instill peace and clarity—and of course the yogic breath, which is useful in hollowing out the mind, ridding it of thought, and establishing a pure rhythm that the conscious mind may follow at leisure. On every exhalation, one may purposefully and powerfully banish the mundane drivel of the day and breathe in peace and at-one-ment with the universe. Part One ends with a succinct affirmation of being in the present and relaxing, without fear, into it.

Part Two brings the focus to the Earth that is our foundation—the land itself! In projecting one’s consciousness (through energetic roots) into the womb of the Goddess, we find ourselves experiencing the raw physicality of our Mother—a manifestation of divinity. Knowing the land you live on can help you have a more in-depth experience with grounding, in that you can more vividly picture in your mind what it is exactly your roots are travelling through. Judy Harrow paints this picture beautifully when she says in her book
Devoted To You
, “Lately, some Pagans have been creating geologically accurate grounding meditations. Instead of talking generically about soil, water table, and bedrock, these meditations describe the actual rock strata in your area, and also a bit about how those particular rocks were formed.” After penetrating the dark mysteries of the earth, we come to Gaia’s own heart. Our roots receive the earth-fire and absorb it into the trunk of the tree—your body. This not only energises the body and prepares it for the intensity of magickal work ahead, it also firmly grounds you in the physical plane, our source for all bodily nourishment.

Part Three centres on receiving and drawing down the light of the sky realms, and it ends with the sealing of both heaven and earth coming together as one within your body (your being) as the pillar that unites the two. Your consciousness flows through your branches as you mentally extend them into limitless space, and there, stroking infinity, they receive the divine charge of the sky realms, what we perceive to be transcendent. Our experiences in this plane of reality tend to be of a revelatory nature simply because we are unused to the extremely high vibration of the energy that exists there. Once our own vibration synchronises with the energy of the sky, we become a part of the revelation that is the All—the great mystery of life. When the white light of the heavens and the dark light of the earth meet, they marry, drawn together enigmatically, as magnetic opposites attract and come together by their very natures. The grounding and centring has thus actualised itself within your being, and you are focussed and prepared for whatever work lies ahead of you.

As mentioned above, grounding and centring has become a prerequisite ritual practice for most Pagans today, especially those who blend the newer variants of Pagan spirituality with the older traditions. We do not know if, historically speaking, the Old Ones prepared themselves similarly, as not much of our Pagan European culture was recorded so forthrightly; we need to be able to read the subtle signs they have left for us in the landscape and in myth. However, in my experience, Paganism and its rites are nature-derived, and this means nature as it encompasses all things, including our humanity. Humans often take deep breaths naturally before committing themselves to a physical act or even when making a significant decision in life. I believe that we do this to clear our minds and focus our energies—in other words, to ground and centre.

In my book
Spirited: Taking Paganism Beyond the Circle,
I talk about giving and receiving in equal measure in my chapter on ritual. I refer to the need to always keep in mind what one is sending out versus what one is receiving. Basically, we need to give to get, and vice versa. If not, our energy sources become depleted, and we could end up in mental disarray, etheric unease, or physical illness. Also, if one is raising power towards a specific goal and all they have called upon is their own personal power, the effects will not materialise as strongly as it would had that person drawn upon nature’s abundant life force.

Grounding and centring helps to align oneself with the powers of nature as expressed specifically through a “joiner” of heaven and earth. The tree of life, or the world tree, is both a symbol and a reality (the former reflecting the latter). With our roots firmly in the ground and our branches painting the skies, we are whole in all realms, for the world-encircling “stream” (the great sea/ocean) is what nourishes our roots and inspires our dreaming.

Practice

In sacred space, at your altar or wherever, practice the tree of life alignment, and make sure you engage your entire being with the task at hand. Transcend physical limitations and allow yourself truly to be the world tree. When you visualise, you are giving form to an energy that is ever-present, and if fed with conviction and intent, these forms will direct and shape this energy, moulding them to our wills.

To flesh out the technique, research the geology of your area more completely, and integrate your findings into your visualisations when grounding and centring.

3

The body is the temple.

—Unknown

The body is of matter, and the word
matter
comes from the Latin
mater
, meaning “mother.” The Mother and the Feminine have always been considered, at least in the Western mystery traditions, to be of the physical, of matter. Perhaps this is because the woman is considered to be more closely connected with the physical world, as she is the one who births the spirit into this world of form, and she is also the one whose body flows with the cycles of nature, specifically those of the moon. In saying this, it must be remembered that all things in this world (that thing we call nature) are expressions of spirit, and spirit is an expression of nature; the child mirrors the parent as the parent reflects the child. Therefore, we cannot simply cast woman as the physical entity without considering woman as a spiritual, mental, and emotional being also. I speak from a man’s point of view, albeit one who shamelessly and with great mirth honours the Great Mother.

Before I speak of the body and its significance both to the land (as that is what the land is) and to Paganism, I wish to speak of the Mother, or what most Neopagans call the Goddess. For many years I have struggled with this concept purely because I came from a Wiccan background
[1]
and could only see her through that lens. Most eclectic forms of Wicca describe the Goddess as being an overarching supernal Mother figure who encompasses within herself all goddesses. The God is described similarly. However, as a queer male, and one who experiences sexuality and gender as fluid, this philosophy has never sat well with me, purely because I do not agree that because a goddess is seen to be “female,” they all must be of the Great Female Deity. This is ludicrous! The gods defy gender. We say
god
and
goddess
to describe various deities because we are human and wish to make the Divine more comprehensible to the human psychology, which has been conditioned by duality.

It was after I visited Glastonbury Tor that I became enlightened to the Goddess as the land, as the world, as all of humanity knows her—Mother Nature. Mother Nature has been identified with many deities throughout history; however, she is as she is, and I honour her for that. I have called her Gaia, but nowadays I prefer to simply think of her as one of the Old Ones, unnamed and deep. She is the sacred landscape, the body of the Divine.

The body is sacred! It is one of the many truths I experience daily. My strong belief in this truth is the reason I am vegan, the reason I rarely use pharmaceutical drugs, and the reason I do not smoke or partake of synthesised drugs. I do drink alcohol, but only wine.

This is part of a geis
[2]
that I placed on myself several years ago. When I was in high school and somewhat of a rebel (in that stereotypically teenage sense), I made a dumping ground of my body at every party I attended. I smoked and drank myself sick, and my body made a point of always rejecting these toxins rather theatrically. It was almost two years before I took the hint. I then committed myself to a huge detox that is now an integral part of my life. The body is sacred, yes! Write down these words or something like them and place them in constant view so that you can truly absorb their meaning. Live these words and say them as a sacred prayer to the Goddess who is.

The Pagan traditions do not reject the material; we embrace the Mother, for she is Spirit incarnate. I was once discussing this principle of Paganism with a teacher who was a Pagan and a friend of mine at high school, and she said to me that nature is the perfect expression of the Divine. In contrast to Abrahamic faiths, which traditionally see the physical as something to bind and repress, Paganism celebrates what is inherently sacred. We are truly pantheists and animists. We value the spirit that animates the world and all within it. This is highly important and must be deeply understood before one can truly call oneself Pagan. We do not strive to move beyond this plane into an ethereal fantasy realm. We are here as children of the Great Mother, and we love the Goddess we call Earth. The body is sacred; it is divine.

The following sections will detail the finer points of integrating body wisdom into your life.

To Dance

The Goddess is dancing!

—Pagan bumper sticker

I find that dancing lends itself to the passion of raising the Kundalini, of freeing the soul to journey into the sphere of the Divine.

—Yasmine Galenorn,
Crafting the Body Divine

I was a dancer long before I began to consciously engage with my spirituality. Some of the earliest pictures of me that my parents have are of me dancing, dressed in traditional Balinese dance costumes. I have always intuitively understood rhythm and music to be highly sacred and important to who I am and what I do, and indeed I believe them to be cornerstones of the Pagan traditions. When I dance, I am free.

In high school, I was a dancer in a contemporary youth dance theatre called Fringe. My teacher and friend, one of the most amazing people I have had the pleasure to know, saw dance as an expression of the soul and shared with us the meaning and methods of such a philosophy (see interview with Kirsty, page 21). I learnt much from her about what it is to be a creative practitioner, and much of what I picked up I have integrated into my living path.

In the ancient past, Paganism was not merely a group of people who came together regularly and officially to honour the seasons or practise other rites to attune with nature; the old Paganisms were cultures unto themselves. A Pagan was a Pagan because they were of a people, of a place, of a way of life that had developed organically over thousands of years, from Palaeolithic times into the Classical era and beyond. It was part of growing up to know the sacred arts of dance, drama, prayer, and ritual; these things were common heritage, and we have all but lost it. However, these old ways can and must be recovered and reclaimed. When I dance, it is part of my reclaiming.

In modern Witchcraft communities today, there are several traditional methods of dance we employ to help raise power in our rituals. The most popular is the legendary spiral dance. The basic technique is this:

All are holding hands in a circle, and the person who will be leading the spiral dance breaks with the person on their left or right, depending on which direction the spiral will be moving—deosil or widdershins. Generally it is thought best to always dance deosil (with the sun), as this encourages growth and life. In the Northern Hemisphere, this would be clockwise. In the Southern Hemisphere, deosil is anti-clockwise; therefore, the leader in the Southern Hemisphere would break off from the person on their right. The leader then begins to move deosil, and all are following in tow. The spiral winds tighter and tighter, forming concentric circles from “row” to “row,” until the leader reaches the centre. From here, the leader will turn back on him- or herself and then take the spiral in the opposite direction—widdershins. This can be repeated several times over. At the right moment, the power is released by dropping hands and throwing arms into the air. An emotive vocalisation always helps to encourage the power on its way.

Other forms of modern Pagan dance are simple enough. Go to any drumming circle or big Pagan event, and sure enough you will find fire (either in bonfire or fire-toy form) and drummers spurring on a group of entranced Pagans releasing inhibition and expressing the gift of rhythm. Low, grounded movements are popular and embody the close connection between us and the earth. African dance is a fine proponent of these kinds of movements. Acrobatic styles are also touched on and express the wild Fey nature possessed by many a Pagan. Unfortunately, in the Neopagan community at least, many of the older cultural dances have been ignored or lost, and not much work has been done on revitalising or restoring these old dances. However, it is important that this work is done and that the old ways are reclaimed, for there is much to be learnt from the ways of our ancestors.

Shamanism has been described as a “technique of ecstasy.”
[3]
A major component of any shamanic tradition is dance, and it is used primarily as a method to transcend the ego—to
ek stasis
, stand outside (of oneself). In attaining this altered state of consciousness, we are freed from the mundane constrictions that keep us submissive and static, and thus we embrace change—the Universal Law. Once outside the discrete self one knows as “identity,” everything becomes self. This teaching is central to the Vedic Upanishads. Through dance, one can be absorbed into the All of nature and the cosmos; one becomes the dance of life itself. One becomes entranced in the dance; it can lead to self-hypnosis. In Bali, many dancers are put into trances by priests before ceremonial dances take place. Having witnessed these dances myself, I can personally attest to the beauty and grace exhibited by the young, entranced dancers; it is almost as if little gods have decided to manifest before the village and express their divinity. In many cultures, dance is used to tell stories and to physically embody myth and legend. In this way, raw matter is used to convey the sacred that infuses all things. As highly visual and tactile beings, we can respond dramatically to such performances, and thus we are more likely to receive the messages and teachings they seek to impart.

In the Neopagan community, dance is mainly used either to raise power in ritual or to celebrate the body and its inherent sexuality. I have described the popular spiral-dance method of raising power above; however, free-form dance to appropriate music is just as effective. I often dance to music by Enigma, Loreena McKennitt, Santana, Wendy Rule, and tribal drumming tracks. These aural aids enhance my experience and often lead me into realms and states of being that are hard to put into words, though as a writer I attempt to! I highly recommend looking through your own music. You might discover something just right!

When dancing to celebrate the body in its divine glory (which can be done while raising power), perhaps you could end/ground with orgasm. Just like the act of sex itself, dance releases endorphins; thus, dance can be a form of foreplay! It makes absolute sense when you think about it. Some of the most rewarding, ecstatic sexual experiences I have ever had have followed long nights of clubbing. Yasmine Galenorn, a prolific Pagan author, says that dance, in her experience, releases the Kundalini energy. Kundalini, a Sanskrit term, refers to the serpentine energy that is coiled at the base of one’s spine. It can rise, and when it does, it is said to bring enlightenment and freedom from mortal/mundane constraints. Actualising one’s immediate divinity and entering the realm of the gods reminds us that we, ourselves, are their children, and therefore the divine “blood” flows through us. It is hard not to feel beautiful and good when this knowledge becomes ours. Just like the old temple priestesses of Inanna and Aphrodite, through dance we become the Goddess who is dancing and simultaneously give her the worship she so desires.

If you are interested in studying the art of dance, look into the contemporary dance movement and research the various styles that have evolved over the decades. Contemporary dance is dance at its most expressive. It exists at either side of the technique spectrum—highly articulated or deeply intuitive, and most times both. Look into choreographers like Isadora Duncan (who resurrected the grace and poise of the art of dance), Martha Graham (the myth-inspired choreographer whose heart was pulled by the ancient Greek tragedies), and Twyla Tharp (the mistress of flair, ferocity, and finesse), and pay close attention to the way these dancers describe what they do (or did) and why they do it.

If there are any multicultural festivals or events occurring in your area, make sure you pay a visit. You may stumble across a performance that triggers something primal within you. Many dances performed today exist in the same (or similar) form they have for centuries. In Bali, the art of dance is considered to be delicately spiritual, and many dances are performed as offerings to the gods and spirits. To encounter these special moments of cultural heritage and passion is something to delight in! I feel blessed to have been born into it.