C is for Corporeal, D is for Dance – Pagan Experience 2015

On the off chance that you haven’t guessed by the time, I ‘m writing about embodiment for the Pagan Experience Challenge today. I’ve been a singer (14 years of lessons plus, admittedly, 14 further years of, like, singing in the shower or otherwise letting myself get rusty) since I was 7 years old. Which basically means that I was actively being taught how to Be In My Body well before puberty hit and all the social pressures to do exactly the opposite of that started cropping up.
I think that’s relevant.
I mean, yes, staying in my body in sexual situations where I’m not the one “doing the doing” is not the easiest thing in the world, and I don’t think that’s a separate issue, but I do think that learning embodiment, learning to pay attention really closely to what your muscles and feet and lungs and all the rest of you are doing at any given time has made it easier for me to be, well, naked, for a start, but there’s more to it than that.
A lot of my energy-work – whether that’s stuff like Grounding[1] or stuff like Sex-Magic/Laying-On-of-Hands or stuff like charging up a honey-pot – is centred around the bodily stuff I learned, ages ago, for How To Sing Really Well. As it happens, it’s also really centred around lighting up those big, straight-line, chakra points on your body – but I didn’t realize that until someone who could See that stuff told me as much when I showed her what prepping to sing looked like.
 
It’s… Art is magical. It’s an act of both creation and transformation, just because of what it is. But art as magical action can be used to do that whole “creating change at will” business as well. I was at a workshop on ritual, last October, and I said “I’m a writer and a witch, and when I write things down I make them happen”. Which isn’t true most of the time, but it’s proven on multiple occasions to push those odds towards What I (think I) Want, so I’m going with it. Likewise, when I sing, all those energetic chanels open up and I can Do Stuff – stuff kind of along the lines of reiki, I think? – that I can’t do, or can’t do as easily, when I’m quiet. Dancing, too, opens me up. I can be a fountain on the dancefloor. My wife says that I glow when I do that, and I’m inclined to take her literally as she’s one of those folks who can See that stuff, so.
 
Embodiment, for me at least, is the gateway to making energetic changes in the world. So there you go. 🙂
 
 
TTFN,
Meliad the Birch Maiden.
 
 
[1] For a given value of “grounding” – I’ve got my feet in the river pretty much all the time. I’m what sometimes gets called a “cement head”. I can bring people back to earth, and/or their bodies, when they get lost. It’s part of what I’m for. How cool is that? 🙂

E is for Energy-Centres and Energy-Manipulation – Pagan Blog Project 2014

This post follows pretty hard on the heels of “last week’s” (ten minute’s ago’s) post on Ecstasy, and it’s somewhat related. I’ve been playing with energy points, trying to turn my chakra points (meaning the seven really big ones) into something closer to tentacles (or maybe roots?), energetic limbs that can reach out and reach in to act as points of connection between me and another source.
 
I’m kind of a funny one, maybe, since it’s my root chakra, my red chakra, that lights up in sexual situations. I’m not sure what that means beyond (a) I associate sex with the colour red, and (b) Maslov’s Hierarchy of Needs puts sex on the same survival level as food, shelter, and other “stability” markers. My sacral/belly chakra, my orange chakra, is one that I don’t pay a tonne of attention to beyond its relationship with my own (and, potentially, someone else’s, not that I’m planning on getting pregnant mind you) umbilical cord and how I can use that as a tether to the energy of the Earth (which I’m just as likely, if not moreso, to do through the soles of my feet)[1].
I’m more likely to engage my third eye chakra (allegedly all about psychica abilities and Traveling and such-like) when I’m trying to boost stuff that’s more typically associated with my throat chakra (music, public speaking, self-expression, etc).
 
…I’m not sure if this is particularly normal or not (it definitely doesn’t line up with the correspondences that I’ve found online).
 
Anyway. What I’m getting at here is that I’m trying to teach myself to actively engage those energy centres in appropriate situations, but I’m also trying to gage whether or not its having any effect (on me or on anyone else). I… think I’m managing to do something? :-\
 
We shall see. I figure, if I keep working at it, I’ll get the hang of things eventually.
 
 
TTFN,
Meliad the Birch Maiden.
 
 
[1] It occurs to me that, given its associations with creativity (fire in the belly, as much as in the head, y’know?) it might do me some good to feed that fire a little in my own life. Just a thought. I wonder if I can come up with some kind of hook-up between my belly chakra and my throat chakra where they feed into each other and amp each other up… (Thoughts? Suggestions?)

Full Moon – Ice Moon Crests … OR … D is for Doctor – Pagan Blog Project 2014

You’re getting another combination-post today because, frankly, I’m freakin’ tired and also have candles to make, which means bashing up some beeswax before I can get to that part.
Right.
So it’s Ice Moon. The local Winterlude festival (and the concurrent Snowblower festival) is in full swing, coming up on its final weekend, and we have ice and snow apleanty, without it being too cold.
This is really great for anyone who relies on tourist dollars to make their living, so hurrah. Also, much as slogging through drifts kinda sucks? I’ll take that over -38 pretty much any day of the week, even when my grocery bag straps decided to snap, one after another, on the way home from the grocery store.
(Guess what happened to me today?)
 
But the real “big deal” for me today is that (on Valentines’ Day, of all days) I went to the Heart Institute to talk about the results of a test I had done last month. I was quite worried about what I was going to find out because, while there wasn’t much chance of something being particularly wrong, the wrong would have been with my heart, which is kind of a very massive deal, y’know?
Anywqay. Given the veb-tense I was just using, I suspect it’s become clear to most of you that my heart is, in fact, just fine.
Halle-freaking-luia, and thank you Maia! ❤
Colour me relieved!
 
So that's my news for the cresting of Ice Moon. But what, you may be asking yourself, does this have to do with Paganism? Why “D is for Doctor”?
 
Well. Let me just tell you. 🙂
 
While at the Heart institute, the doctor gave me a bit of a check-up – stuff about my pulse and my breathing, for the most part. Very professional and business-like. But it felt… more intimate than it was, if you will.
Now, my wife, as you know bob, is quite a bit more perceptive about these things than I am. So when she commented to me that “That doctor was really doing her job,” but wouldn’t elaborate until we were out of the hospital, I figured I was in for something witchy.
 
What she said was “She was listening with more than her ears”.
Now, I know that doctors learn how to see people’s insides without cutting them open – that’s kind of the point of the training, in a lot of ways, and it’s likely that this was just a skilled craftsperson doing her work well (like how my wife would listen to a piece of wookd to learn what it wanted to be made into). At the same time, though… When I say that her examination “felt more intimate than it was”… I mean it.
I said “I think I felt that. It felt like she was touching me under my skin”. Not very far under, I grant you. But…
Look. Maybe this isn’t a “reality check” so much as the two of us confirming our spidy senses like “yes men” or something. But… it’s still nice to have my itty bitty tingles of personal gnosis (or whatever you want to call it) backed up by someone else’s experience.
 
 
TTFN,
Meliad the Birch Maiden.

E is for Experience – Pagan Blog Project 2013

So I was expecting to write a post about Education and my continuing studies in trance work and sacred sexuality. But something happened that I decided to write about, instead.
My wife and I were coming home from a social event downtown and we stopped in at a tatoo shop because my young lady is looking at getting some ink done. My wife picked up on Whatever It Was almost immediately.
I totally didn’t, because I’m like that.
But apparently the air was thick and slightly weird. The gal who worked at the shop had just burried something in salt that had been screwing around with the place.

This is. This is maybe going to sound a little weird.

The gal at the store asked me to see the difference between the temperature of her back and the temperature of her arm and, when I touched her arm (which, yeah, was quite a bit warmer than her back) I felt something like static.
It was icky. It was just there and tingly/weird-feeling. My reaction was kind of different, I guess? I was all “Huh… That’s interesting!”

Anyway. Fast forward ten minutes and my young lady suggests that I could help the shop-keeper to ground out a little bit, and she’s okay with that plan, so I do my Thing (which may or may not even justify the capital letter). Basically, I have (in theory) a Natural Ground. I don’t even really know how it works – although finding out about it (mostly from other people telling me as much over and over and over agian) did explain why all those Grounding Exercises in things like The Spiral Dance never did a damn thing. But it does work. So I gaver her a big hug and visuallized pulling her deep under water into a really peaceful, blue-black space. And also concentrated on playing sponge/vacuum in order to suck up the excess energy that was sizzling around the place and freaking her out.

And boy did I feel it. O.O
I felt like a TV in an electrical storm. Which, possibly, the younger readers of this blog won’t get at all. But yeah. Static crawling all over everything.
Here’s the thing. I had no idea what it was. I didn’t want to touch anything in the store in case it was Something (or Someone) who was nasty and unpleasant (or just pissed off) who needed to be taken outside, but I seriously wanted to get ahold of something metal to ground the stuff out of me, in turn[1]. I also didn’t want to risk bringing Something (or Someone) into my own house once we were home.

Anyway. My wife, who is much clearer about this stuff than I am, let me know (once we were outside) that it was just excess energy that was so buzzy and weird, and there’s wasn’t, like, a creepy monkey or something on my back. Which was a releif. Didn’t do anything to make my back stop hurting (which has been on-going for over two months at this point), but I was glad to know that I wasn’t carrying any extra passengers.

Anyway. That’s my most recent experience with actively and consciously being an energy sink. 🙂

This concludes our PBP13 Blog Post for the week. 🙂

TTFN,
Meliad the Birch Maiden. 🙂

[1] I wound up using the post of a stop-sign once we got outside.

V is for Vampire – Pagan Blog Project 2012

This is another post for, er, last year’s Pagan Blog Project.
 
Other than the gothity-goth-goth beginnings of my pagan experience, you may be wondering why on earth I’m bringing vampires into this.
 
Or, y’know, not.
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I’ve recently (ish – like, in the last six months) been having a slow back-and-forth conversation with someone about energy-awareness, energy manipulation, and the hunger/craving for both blood and energy that gets described as “vampirism”.
It’s a great conversation, and I hope it continues.
One of the things that came up was how “energy vampire” is frequently used as a synonym for “person with bad emotinoal boundaries who likes to stir up trouble”.
While it’s true that there are people who “feed on negative energy” – sadists who thrive on the energy that comes from “bad pain” (pain that the masochist suffers through and endures as an offering, rather than ecstasy-inducing pain), or people like Thista Minai over at Gods and Mirrors (link goes to her post about why she hates the term “vampire”, fyi – it’s a good read) – but equating “feeds on negative energy” with “deliberately (or indeliberately) stirs up chaos, discent, and other messes” and/or “stirs up negative energy in people who haven’t conscented to that” is… misinformed at best and, well, slander (or possibly libel) at worst. Either way, it’s damaging.
Hell, for that matter, equating “energy vampire” with “feeds (only) on negative energy” is also not quite right. Case in point, Lee Harrington (because I’m such a fangirl) has a couple of posts about being a psy-vampire, about feeding on ambient or actively-offered energy – that isn’t necessarily pain or fear or what-have-you[1], and about not eating and how that screws with your system just as much as not eating fruits & veggies & protein screws with your system. They’re good reads, too, albeit for different reasons.
 
I’ve heard energy-drinkers (whether “ambient” or “direct” or both, whether or not they also drink blood) talk about how they try to stay away from people who like to stir up emotional trouble or who do the energetic equivalent of force-teaming because they literally make them feel physically ill; how they can get high from a cohesively energized or enthusiastically focused group or crowd but/or that crowded restaurants or other situations where the energy is intense but unfocussed can leave them feeling jittery or dizzy; how sex is like having their batteries recharged; how they can hook into, and get fed from, particular rhythms or types of music; how they get touch-hungry in ways that seem excessive to what their peers need or crave… And I have to say that all of this sounds very much like my own experiences.
 
I’m not great (ahaha… understatement) at moving energy around. I can do it, but it’s clumsy and sporadic, and – other than specifically with singing – the results are, at best, unreliable. That’s part of why I’m studying trance- and ritual- techniques this year, actually. Because I think learning to navigate Energetic Realms and how to guide the energy of a ritual/ceremony/scene may help me navigate (and manipulate) energy in other ways as well.
 
As far as other resources go, there are some hard-copy books available on the subject of vampirism (energetic or otherwise). Having read none of these, and basing them largely on the reviews, I’m pointing you towards Raven Kaldera’s The Ethical Psychic Vampire, and Michelle Belanger’s Vampires in Their Own Words: An Anthology of Vampire Voices and The Psychic Vampire Codex: A Manual of Magick and Energy Work as a place to start outside the blogosphere.
 
 
And that’s what I have to say about vampirism.
 
 
TTFN,
Meliad the Birch Maiden
 
 
[1] I pick up extra food at dance parties, for example, because there’s so much of it floating around. It’s great! 😀

T is for Trance – Pagan Blog Project 2012

One thing I want to try doing – or doing more frequently – as I (try to) deepen my practice and connect more with ecstasy and [sacred sexuality] is to go into trance more often.
I admit, I’m not entirely sure why I want to do this.
Partly, I know, it’s that It Sounds Cool. As in: all the cool (experiential hedge-witch/spirit-worker) people are Doing It, so…
Yeah.
The other reason is because, in those situations where I’ve gone into trance, or gone into Energy-Aware Headspace (perhaps a more accurate term?), I’ve been able to pick up on the presence of People; the energetic/physical needs of the person(s) I’ve been with[1]; have been a better, more powerful singer; and been generally more aware of and able to interact with and alter/shift the flow of energy in the space, in the person’s body, or whatever.
And that, I think, is a good reason to want to get the hang of this, to be able to slip into that headspace – what I call trance but what might be better described as “energy-aware headspace”… or something – easily and quickly and reliably, rather than on a wing and a prayer and a whole lot of maybe, after an hour of trying to get myself there.
 
I recently picked up a book – Trance-Portation: Learning to Navigate the Inner World – which, going by the reviews it got and also by the table of contents, appears to be a good step-by-step introductory guide for the kind of stuff I’m looking to study and try. I’m hoping will have some Excercises that I can Do At Home (ideally safely, ideally without walking too far outside my own body… or going too deeply into my own oceans, as the case may be[2]) in order to start working on this in an active, practicing, and reasonably[4] regular way.
 
Anyway. That’s my plan for trance work and making an attempt to do it and get comfortable, maybe even good (decent? competant?) at it.
 
Wish me luck! 🙂
 
 
TTFN,
Meliad the Birch Maiden.
 
 
[1] In a scene, during sex, when supporting/calming someone who’s in distress, while doing massage.
 
[2] I think my Inner World – at least a particular, slightly scary but (I suspect) very powerful, part of it – is down past the blue and into the black of ocean space. My monster lives there, if I go deep enough. I think my power lives there, too. Worth exploring, but I can’t help looking at it with a LOT of trepidation[3].
 
[3] What’s that thing from Joseph Campbell? “The place you’re scared to go, that’s where you need to go if you’re going to clame your power”? (Not actually a direct quote. Possibly an interpretation of something he said, though).
 
[4] At this point I don’t know what “reasonable” means, and I’m thinking it might be a cop-out word. At the same time, I don’t think it’s likely I’ll be doing trance work every day… Unless I should be? I don’t know. The plan is to read the book, do what excercises there are (or find/create some if there aren’t any in the book – suggestions welcome, folks), and see where that gets me. I can do it. I can do it. I can.