Wicca for Beginners (9 page)

write the chatter out of your system.
Get a notebook and write down all of the gibberish going through your head. Write and write and write until it’s purged. You can also imagine and visualize that you’re writing it rather than actually writing.

wash it away.
Visualize yourself in a river current, with the water washing away all the extraneous stuff that is running through your head.

a variation on square breathing.
Instead of slowly inhaling, holding, exhaling, and holding, do one full circuit slowly followed by a quick one, then alternate between the two.

third eye breathing.
Breathe slowly and deeply, imagining that you’re breathing from your third eye, the energy center in your forehead between your brows.

If you absolutely can’t get the chatter to stop, it might mean that this isn’t a good time for trance work because you have something important that you need to deal with. In this case, it may be best to deal with the outside issue first.

Trance with a Travel Guidebook:
Meditation and Pathworking

Meditation and pathworking are extensions of the visualization and trance work you have already done. There are many types of meditation, but for our purposes, meditation is concentrating on an image or desired outcome while in a trance state. Pathworking is taking a mental journey while in a trance state.

Meditation

A meditation is somewhat like a prolonged visualization done under special circumstances. It’s useful in magic and self-improvement because, as I explained earlier, when you concentrate on an image while in trance, it’s easier to impress the image on your mind. Wiccans meditate on images for many reasons, including but not limited to the following:

to exercise the mind.
Because it requires holding an image in the mind for a period of time, meditation can strengthen the ability to focus and sharpen awareness.

to do magic or heal.
Both of these require concentration and visualization, which are both in turn aided by meditation and trance. Often, a Wiccan will meditate on the visualization of a goal—such as getting a new job—as part of a magical ritual to achieve that end. In addition to treating a sprained ankle medically, Wiccans may meditate on a mental image of the swelling going down. It’s common for Wiccans to light a candle and meditate to help heal a loved one who is in the hospital.

to “set” a dream.
This is sort of like a “call and response.” You use a meditation to ask your subconscious a question right before bed. Then, when you go to sleep, the subconscious answers you in a dream.

to get psychic information.
This is similar to setting a dream, except the answer comes from other sources, such as a flash of inspiration or the psychic senses.

An Example of Using Meditation to Achieve a Goal

The following is an example of one process a Wiccan might use to achieve a goal with meditation. This is a framework that you can alter to use in a variety of circumstances.

Let’s say you wanted to use meditation to improve your scores on the SAT or some other big test. You might follow these steps:

1. First, study for the test! Meditation is a powerful tool, but you must also work toward your goal on the mundane plane.

2. Choose a safe, quiet place to meditate. Turn off the phone. Put a “Do not disturb” sign on the door. Relax.

3. Create an image in your mind of you getting a great score on the test. This might be a mental picture of someone shaking your hand and saying congratulations or a visual of the test-score number itself. The image that has the most meaning for you will be the one that works best.

4. Use one of the techniques from chapter 3 to ground. The taproot visualization is a great pre-meditation grounding technique.

5. Use one of the trance techniques from this chapter to enter a slightly altered state. The candle flame or bowl of water techniques might be particularly useful for this example.

6. Shift your consciousness from whatever technique you were using to enter the trance to the test-score image you chose. For example, if you’re staring at a candle flame, “see” your image in the flame, visualize the flame becoming your image, or slowly allow your eyes to close and visualize your image in your mind’s eye. Focus on the image. See the image become clearer. Make it real in your mind.

7. After a time, release the image and ground.

8. Repeat this once a day for several days to strengthen the image in your mind.

9. You can modify this process to work on any of the goals listed previously, and more.

Pathworking

Now that you have a bit of experience with concentrating on a single image, you can expand that experience into a pathworking. Just as in meditation, a pathworking begins by grounding, relaxing, and entering a trance state. However, once you’ve achieved trance, instead of focusing on a single image, you allow your mind to take you on a guided journey along a path or to a destination that you chose before you began. In chapter 1, I mentioned Mircea Eliade’s work on shamanism and how the shaman uses altered states to travel on the world tree to the underworld or otherworld to get psychic or divine information. This is a form of pathworking. Wiccans use pathworking in the following ways, among others:

to talk to the gods.
The gods exist on earth, but it’s easier to reach them on their own turf—the otherworld, the spirit realm. In meditation, you can travel to the worlds of the gods and learn about them in context. They may show or teach you things in a pathworking that would be difficult to experience on the mundane plane.

to build an astral temple.
An “astral temple,” at least for the purposes of this book, is a place you create in your mind where you go to do magic or communicate with the gods, among other things. Pathworking to an astral temple usually involves taking multiple trips to this place, making it more concrete and clear each time you visit, until you can go there at will.

to get psychic information.
You can use a pathworking to meet helpful guides whom you can ask for information. For example, you might design a trip where you meet your inner self (a personification of the subconscious), and ask it to locate the source of pain in your body. Or you might visit the animal or human spirits of a sacred site to learn about the significance of the area. Likewise, you can use pathworking to meet, talk, and get information from the dead.

One of the most important things to remember when doing pathworking is that you must have a single starting place for your journeying, and that you must leave your pathworking the same way you came in. For example, some people visualize beginning their journey by going through a door or gate, and they pass back through the door or gate on their return to the “real,” or mundane, world. Others imagine beginning at the mouth of a tunnel, and returning back through the tunnel at the end.

Retracing your steps is important because it signals your mind that you intend to come back to the mundane world. You want to make this clear to yourself so that you come back completely, and not with one foot in the otherworld and one foot on earth. When you are on a pathworking journey, your psychic or spirit self, not your physical self, is the one that makes the trip. You want to make sure that the psychic self reunites with the physical at the end of the pathworking. If they don’t reconnect, you can feel disoriented, dizzy, queasy, muddled, or incomplete, for lack of a better word. Eliade posits that shamans are considered a little bit crazy because they are simultaneously in both worlds and therefore never completely in either. Do not panic, though —if you do pathworking and wander off track, you’re not going to become a crazy shaman. If you have not managed to come completely back from a pathworking journey, you can fix the situation by returning into your pathworking through your gate or whatever visual you used, visualizing yourself reintegrating whatever part of you was left behind, and clearly and deliberately returning back the way you came, followed by a thorough grounding once you’re back.

If you are truly worried about not being able to return, try the Theseus trick I discussed earlier in this chapter. When you enter the pathworking, tie a golden rope or thread to your gate or doorway and the other end to your wrist. If you get lost or disoriented in the pathworking, you can follow the thread home. (I’ve found the thread to be more reliable than a
Hansel and Gretel
trail of breadcrumbs.) Another option is to have someone stay in the room with you while you are pathworking. He or she can “talk you back” by verbally leading you to your entrance point if you get lost.

It’s also important to use the same entry and exit point because you will ensure that your mind knows the place well and you can get there easily, especially if you didn’t bring your golden thread. This makes it much simpler to get into your pathworking and find your way back. It also means that you can spend less time and energy with your “induction” (the beginning part of your trip that you repeat each time you journey) and more on the actual journey.

Setting Up a Pathworking

To set up a pathworking, first you must decide some of the particulars of your trip, such as the reason you are journeying, your path or destination, and whom or what, if anything, you’d like to encounter. Bear in mind that you may encounter all sorts of things you didn’t plan for while journeying. You should also decide what image you’d like to use for your induction, or transition between the material world and your journey. You can use the door, gate, or tunnel ideas, or create your own.

When you’ve chosen these factors for your trip, you have the framework of a story. (There is a sample framework after this section.) The framework has three parts: the induction, which is the part where you enter the trance and pathworking; the “body,” where you do whatever it is that you need to do in the pathworking; and the “closure,” where you exit the pathworking. In many pathworkings, including the following sample, the induction and closure are closely scripted, but the body is not. This is because you can’t plan for everything that happens in a pathworking. If you could, there would be no point in going.

Write down your framework. Once you have done this, you may want to read it into a tape recorder so you can use the sound of your own voice to guide you into your pathworking. Be sure to read very slowly and clearly, and pause for a bit after the induction and before the actual journey starts. If you don’t want to tape yourself, you can ask a friend to record your induction instead, or when you get to the actual journey, you can have him or her read the induction to you, or you can simply imagine the starting point for yourself.

The steps for a pathworking are very similar to those of a meditation:

1. Choose a safe, quiet place to do your work. Turn off the phone. Put a “Do not disturb” sign on the door. Relax.

2. Use one of the grounding techniques from chapter 3 to ground, preferably one that requires no props.

3. Close your eyes, if they’re not closed already. Turn on your tape recorder, tell your friend to start reading, or begin to visualize the entry point into your journey. Listening to or imagining the induction of your story should serve as a trance-inducer in most cases. However, if you find you are having trouble shifting consciousness, try square breathing while you are listening.

4. Listen to the induction. See yourself at your door or gate or tunnel. Take a moment to fix that place in your mind. See yourself reaching out to touch the door, gate, or tunnel. Feel how real it is.

5. Once the image of your starting point is solid in your mind and you have achieved a light trance state, begin your journey.

6. As you experience your pathworking, pay careful attention to the details that you see, touch, smell, hear, and taste, and tell yourself that you will remember them even after you have finished the pathworking and are no longer in a trance state. Sometimes the information we receive in pathworkings is subtle and contained in the small things we encounter rather than in the large ones.

7. If you encounter anyone in your pathworking—humans, gods, fairies, elves, animal spirits, ghosts, folklore characters, or any other being—be polite! Don’t touch or pet anything that doesn’t want to be touched or petted, and if someone or something tells you to leave something alone, do so. The beings you find in a pathworking operate on a different plane, and the etiquette is different there. If you are respectful and take the time to examine a situation for clues as to how you should behave, the beings you encounter are more likely to help you and be receptive to your returning. Think of it as attending a formal dinner in a foreign country where you don’t know the language or customs, and approach it accordingly. And never, never, take anything unless it is obvious that it has been given to you. If you were at that formal dinner, after all, you wouldn’t steal the forks. Items pilfered from spiritual realms, and/or the owners of those items, tend to come back to haunt the thief later, so it’s a matter of common sense as well as etiquette.

8. When your journey is complete, return to your starting point. Shift your consciousness to the “real” world, and ground. As with meditation and trance, if you think you may have trouble coming back, ask a friend to rouse you gently from your trance at the end, or set an alarm clock to go off at a certain time. Neither of these techniques takes the place of grounding, though. Always ground after pathworking.