These are probably some of the hardest disciplines for people new to the Craft to get started on. I believe that a lot of that is because many of us have very inaccurate beliefs about what meditation and journeying are, how to do it and how it can help us in our magickal practices.
Meditation, as most pagans practice it, is not the complete stillness of the body, mind or spirit that one sees in many of the Eastern religious traditions. For pagans, meditation can, and usually is, something totally different. It can be simply staring at a sunrise or sunset and marveling at the universe and your role in it. It could be working in a garden and becoming part of the earth and truly grasping the cycle of life, death and re-birth. It could be ecstatic dancing where your feet feel like they have a mind of their own and you dance to the music playing in your head.
The idea of a daily meditation practice is to move your mind from the mundane world to magickal world; To be able to think magickal thoughts and bring them back into your mundane world and implement the magick in to the mundane. Meditation requires you to slow your mind down so that you can process and analyze any given situation and determine your next steps.
There is a huge difference between the meditation and journeying although you will see those terms used interchangeably by the uninformed. Let's see if this analogy works out to describe the difference. Let's say that I am feeling compelled of late to learn more about rocks, crystals, etc. It's a feeling you have in the back of your mind that "hey this would be cool to learn more about that" During a daily meditation, I would run through my mind all the thoughts that wanted to run through it and only keep the ones that were pertinent to the subject I was considering, working with crystals. (The thought that tells me I have laundry to do or the one that wants to create a grocery list, all go through my mind. Kind of like going in one ear and out the other.) I may envision the reasons I want to do it, I may think about the challenges I would face in doing it, I would consider all kinds of things related to just this issue. The meditation is designed to give one clarity regarding a situation and hopefully after you have run through the questions and given yourself the answers, you will come to a decision about what you want or need to do.
Journeys are very different. When one takes journeys, they have a specific goal in mind. For example, if one wants to meet a particular deity or meet a totem or power animal. Let's say, like in the above example, you have decided to take up the study of crystals. In order to understand a particular crystal, it's energy and how it works, you would take a journey with that specific crystal and interact with it. As we learned in the energy working segment of this blog, we know that everything has a specific energy signature and being able to work with an object successfully is totally dependent upon how we understand the energy of that object to function. To learn that, we journey with it. We interact with the object/deity in a deeply personal way and get to know it so much better. In short, journeys are a more complex form of meditation that give you deeper insight into a specific thing as opposed to an overall situation.
Both have a purpose in the life of a Witch. Daily meditations can help us slow things down, sort things out and determine a path of action. Journeying can give us deeper meaning and insight to a specific thing or issue. If you say that you can't meditate or journey, then you are doing something that is blocking your from being successful. I find the below tips help immensely:
1. Make it a habit. Doesn't matter when you do it...just do it and do it regularly.
2. Start with your breath. Focusing on your breathing will slow down your heart rate and allow your body time to relax fully.
3. Understand that meditation is an active thing, not passive. Determine ahead of time what you want to think about and let all other thoughts fall away. Acknowledge them and shoo them away for another time. Don't dwell on the fact that your mind is throwing these random thoughts at you...embrace them and tuck them away for later.
4. Try using guided meditations to start with. Being forced to focus on someone speaking will help your mind develop the ability to focus on a specific purpose.
5. Don't let yourself be disturbed. Even in today's busy lives we need down time to decompress and get away. Ensure that everyone in the house knows you are not to be disturbed and that phones and other electronic devices are turned off. If you still have a noisy house, invest in a good pair of earbuds to shut out the excess noise.
People only get good at meditation and journeying if they do them on a regular basis. This isn't a one shot and done thing...its the development of a key lifetime practice for you and your walk in this path.
No comments:
Post a Comment