Reflection and Druidry

(Nimue)

There aren’t many things I’m dogmatic about, but the importance of reflection and contemplation for anyone on the Druid path is definitely one of those things. There are a great many ways of approaching this,however, so it’s not very prescriptive in practice.

Reflection is key to understanding. If life is going to be more than a series of random things that happen to us, then we need to take the time to reflect on our experiences and how those experiences impact on us. Making considered and deliberate choices depends on this.

It’s all too easy to be a consumer – we can consume nature, landscape, spiritual experience, spiritual merch… To be a Druid you have to go deeper, invest more, feel more, think more – you can’t just skim the surface of life. Time spent contemplating things takes us further into them. We can approach our experiences in a contemplative way, slowing down to really invest in them, and we can contemplate after the event, internalising what we’ve learned.

For anyone on the bard path, reflection is essential. The process of taking what you know, and what you’ve experienced and developing that into something creative requires some time spent looking inwards. To put something out into the world you have to first go inside yourself to work out what to make and how to make it, and to turn the spark of inspiration into something coherent.

When we make quiet time to sit – in meditation, in reflection or in prayer, it creates space for magic. Time spent quietly inside yourself exploring your own thoughts does not cut you off from everything else, and can have the opposite effects. In the quiet, introspective moments we are most likely to get flashes of inspiration, and connection with that which goes beyond our everyday thinking. If you have a notion of ‘higher self’ or of the voice of spirit within you, this is when such parts of yourself are most likely to be visible to you. For those who seek communion with deity, or spirit, the process of turning inwards is the process that invites the divine. 

When you turn inwards to reflect on the world, and your experience of it, you become more able to fully engage with the world. We need both, and we need to explore these things as a shifting dance, and interchange. We bring the world into ourselves, and we bring ourselves into the world and at each stage, reflection gives us the means to do so. 

Asking what’s most important

(Nimue)

One of the small daily practices I’ve been exploring in the last month or so, is to ask what’s most important. I do this at the start of each day. Making the time for the question rather than just getting up and getting on with things is part of a larger shift. I used to be very much an up-and-at-it sort of person whenever my health allowed. These days I often stay in bed for a little while after I’ve woken up, and approach the day at a gentler pace.

What will be most important today? The odds are I already have some plans or intentions in place. I may revisit those, but my priority is to just be open to what seems most important intuitively. I watch out for the more unexpected responses. Whatever comes, I try to sit with it for a few minutes and just get a sense of how it works or how to follow through on it.

What’s most important right now? That can vary a lot. I give myself permission to think about what I might need from the day as well as what others might need from me. I check any plans I’ve already made and see how these look in light of any new thoughts.

It’s not something I invest a huge amount of time in, but I’m finding it beneficial. Sometimes unexpected priorities emerge, and I like where that’s taking me. I’m finding more room for what I need for myself rather than what’s needed from me. It’s informing how I pace things.

This is also a practice that allows inspiration to enter in. Sometimes what comes in response to that question is an idea, or an answer to something that needed dealing with. That might be inspiration for practical problems, for projects I’m working on or for things I’d not previously considered even needed attention. It opens up space for possibility.

It also creates space to explore any tensions between what’s supposed to be happening and what I actually want. Some days I just have to get up and do the things – whatever they are. I might not like them, or want to do them but some things just have to be tackled. Acknowledging how I feel tends to help me deal with the things I’m not keen on and to handle that more effectively. Recognising when I’m uncomfortable means I’ll do a better job of offsetting such challenges and keeping myself in a more functional state overall.

There are all kinds of things a person can make deliberate time for in a day, and I can certainly recommend this as something to explore if you’re looking at small, everyday activities either to enhance your everyday life or to open up space for intuition and/or inspiration.

Sitting with emotions

(Nimue)

This isn’t about mindfulness practice, because that isn’t something I do. My approach to emotions is not about observing them and letting them pass through, but one of engaging with them. I’m not interested in being unattached to my emotions. I see authentic living as coming from a place of feeling your feelings and being self aware and I embrace my feelings as part of who I am. I haven’t always had space to express or act on how I feel and I’ve sometimes had to crush my own feelings to a damaging degree, but they are who I am.

When life is busy we can just end up bouncing from one experience to the next with no time to process things. When life brings intense experiences, it takes a lot longer than normal to make sense of them. Taking time to sit with your feelings is really effective either way. It doesn’t need a lot of time normally. A few minutes at the start or the end of the day can do a lot to help you process what you’re feeling and to know what’s going on in your life.

It’s a simple enough thing – just taking some quiet time and noticing what you’re feeling and making space for other things to come up. The thing about emotions is that to understand them you do have to let yourself feel them. I don’t think it works to try and observe them as though you are somehow on the outside of them. It makes no sense in terms of what emotions are – these are physical events in your body occurring at a chemical level. You are your body, and you are your body chemistry, you aren’t separate from it or outside of it. The brain you might observe with is also part of the same physical and chemical systems.

When emotions are bigger and more complex it can take them a while to fully show up and longer to make sense. If you sit with them and allow them, then you can make sense of them more readily. There’s a lot to be said for letting your feelings happen in a considered way, making space for them where you can give them priority. It’s better by far than having them explode suddenly while you’re trying to do other things. 

It’s ok to feel the difficult emotions. There are a lot of faux-spiritual messages out there about not feeling some of our feelings, and a lot of cultural stuff around which emotions are unacceptable. If you’re set quietly by yourself, there is no reason to avoid any feeling. Let it come. Know it, name it, understand it. Allow the shame and the guilt, the anger, bitterness, resentment and anything else you’ve been told isn’t ok. Let it happen. In making room for it, it becomes easier not to be ruled by it. The things we try to suppress and ignore or pretend aren’t there can control us in ways we are not conscious of. It’s better to be conscious.

When you make room for everything, you also make more room for joy and delight, hope and enthusiasm. Undealt-with feelings can rob you of all of that. When you let yourself have your authentic feelings you will find out what doesn’t work for you and that leads the way to changing your life for the better. When you’re dealing with your feelings regularly – ideally daily – you also invite peace. An emotion you’ve come to terms with can be carried peacefully – even a large and difficult emotion. You can have it with you without it feeling heavy to carry – and that’s true of even grief and anger. 

Midwinter Meditations

(Nimue)

Midwinter is a good time to pause and take stock, if you can. It’s a good opportunity to look back at the year and think about what went well, and what you want to build on. It may be necessary to invest time in making sense of things, and making decisions about what is and isn’t serving you. Sitting in a meditative way can be really helpful, especially if you don’t get the chance to do this regularly.

A lot of meditation focuses on directing the mind in specific ways. However, it’s good to take time to gently unpack your thoughts and to make room for thinking about what’s going on in your life. Living an authentic and considered life depends on making time to reflect in this way. It’s important to know how you feel about things, and to know what you want.

Looking back, we can ask what can be learned from the year. What would you do again? What do you want more of? Less of? What can you change to enrich your life and take you in the directions you want to go in? Gazing into the past is the starting point for looking towards the future. Once we know where we are, it’s easier to think effectively about where we might be going.

Even when the options seem limited, considering them can open up room for choice. Sometimes we don’t get much say in what we have to do, but it’s always worth looking for what options there are, and to consider what it would take to do something well, or in the best way, or the least damaging way. It’s also important to remember that you can’t make good choices when you don’t have any good options, and to cut yourself slack around situations where you have little or no power.

All too often, New Year’s Resolutions are just a way to internalise different kinds of cultural oppression. You don’t need to be a whole new person, or to have some kind of personal revolution. You do not need to beat yourself up inline with other people’s expectations. Set down anything that feels like blame, or shame or misery and ask instead what would serve you. What good things can you bring into your life? What would make you more joyful?

It’s a good time of year to set intentions around things you want for yourself and want to be doing. Pick things that will nourish and uplift you. It’s good to reflect on what you want from life, and what you most need. Ask what would help you grow, or enable you to flourish. Ask what your heart longs for, or your soul hungers for. Give yourself permission to dream wildly and on your own terms.

The lives we live are shaped by everyday choices. The big, dramatic decisions we make can have surprisingly small impacts compared to what we do with our time day by day. If you want to make radical changes it’s more effective to think about the everyday changes you would need to make in order for that to happen.

Rest and Druidry

(Nimue)

I talk a lot about Druidry in terms of what we do, and that runs the risk of making it sound like being a good Druid calls for lots of effort and busyness. It doesn’t have to. Too much trying to do stuff can result in a lot of noise and motion, but no substance.

Resting is a good and meaningful thing to do as a deliberate part of your Druid practice. Mammals are supposed to rest, and other mammals invest time in that. Resting is a really good way of connecting with and honouring your animal self. Working with nature as it manifests in your own body is an important part of how we connect with the rest of the natural world. Flopped out, being a mammal being natural and making space for that experience is really good stuff to be doing.

Resting is not just sustainable, it’s also restorative. You aren’t consuming resources or using much energy when you’re resting and it may support you in using less at other times. Being well rested might give you more options on other low-carbon activities that do call for effort (walking, cycling etc). It’s also radical activism – self-care without consumption, not being economically active, and not being busy are all good ways of taking some respite from the relentlessness of capitalism. 

You can mix rest and meditation, but don’t be too workish about the meditation side! Rest is best combined with softer and more contemplative approaches. Gaze out of the window for a while, hold a nice rock and let your mind wander around it. Reflect on things in a non-structured way. Emotional processing takes time and we benefit from having the chance to digest what’s going on in our lives. Restful time lets us gently get to grips with our own experiences and that’s good on many levels. Let the monkey brain chatter away freely and be with that part of your animal self, too. 

Resting is the basis of being kind to yourself. If you can’t allow yourself the most basic and essential things, it’s hard to feel kind. Cultivating kindness and compassion is a good Druid thing to be doing, and it is entirely valid to practice this on yourself. The more you learn about what forms of kindness you need, the more you have to bring to other people who might well need your kindness. Slowing down and moving gently makes it a lot easier to be patient and compassionate. When we don’t feel threadbare and frantic ourselves, we’re much better placed to support the people around us.

Contemplative drawing

(Nimue)

I’m exploring the potential of drawing as a way of contemplating. I’m interested in the way in which trying to draw something leads to intense concentration on it for some length of time. This works especially well when applied to things that might otherwise be overlooked. I recently had a go at a half used bulb of garlic as well. Radishes aren’t the kinds of things I normally spend a lot of time looking at, so paying this kind of focused attention proved interesting.

There are many ways of drawing things, and all of them involve compromises. You get to think about shape, colour, light, shadow, and texture. When you’re working with a single pencil, you can’t catch everything, and I often find there’s a really interesting tension between trying to describe the shape of something and trying to describe its texture.

I spend a lot of time online looking at the work of other artists and seeing how they draw. In recent months I’ve been particularly looking at the work Jason Eckhardt does – his pencil sketches of trees and landscapes have made me want to get outside and have a go, although I’ve yet to do that. I’m also learning a lot from art by Martin Hayward-Harris, whose pencil studies of birds and other wildlife are stunning.

Whether I’m looking at things to try and draw them, or booking at drawings to try and understand the techniques involved, it all takes me into places of deep contemplation. What it brings up are thoughts about what makes something recognisibly itself. What is the essence of whatever I’m trying to capture? What makes a specific example of it individually itself? Each of the radishes I drew was distinctly different from all of the others. Spending time exploring that difference and getting to know the radishes was a peaceful process and a rewarding one.

The great thing about this is that it really doesn’t matter how good your drawing skills are. There’s no end goal here beyond the experience. It’s about taking the time, immersing in something and seeking to understand it. The focus of pencil on paper can be a real aid to contemplation, and whatever comes out of that is fine.

It’s also a good way of digging into the magic of the everyday. Taking small, familiar things and studying them can reveal their beauty and value. Making the ordinary into a subject worthy of your study and your drawing is rather lovely. And of course if you do a lot of drawing, you get better at it. Like anything else, time spent on creating gets more done than any innate talent you might have.

Daily Rituals

(Nimue)

David’s recent post prompted me to think about my own daily rituals. Having spent a lot of years on the Druid path, my daily rituals have changed a lot over time. Usually what happens is that I get interested in a particular practice and for a while I explore that intensely and decide what to do with it. There have been times when I’ve had daily prayer practices, daily meditation practices, regular altar-oriented practices and gratitude practices. All of those have evolved over the periods I’ve spent focused on them.

I’d like a living arrangement where I could easily slip outside in the morning and have somewhere quiet and private to stand, and just be present. That’s not feasible at the moment, and I make the best use of the windows that I can. 

Currently I’m exploring a reflective relationship with the everyday details of my life. This is more about responding to my experiences rather than setting up specific actions. I’m making a point of pausing to reflect on things as I’m doing them. It mixes ideas I’ve explored before – slowing down and gratitude, conscious living and reflection. I’m currently bringing those things together in a different way. Part of the reason for this is that life has thrown a lot of new and unfamiliar experiences my way in recent months, and this deliberate slowing down has been needful.

Otherwise I’m flitting around a lot. Sometimes I do very intense and deliberate meditations. Sometimes I do body-healing meditations. I’m doing a lot of unstructured contemplation and window gazing, because I’m not so fraught all the time. I note that being calm is a great enabler of meditation and that meditating to become calm is actually a lot of work. I note that it’s a lot easier to have a spiritual life when your life is better arranged to support your spirituality. If your spiritual practice is a set of coping mechanisms to deal with stress and try to keep moving, it’s not as effective as a spiritual practice.

Working with embodiment has brought me towards relishing as part of how I do my Druidry. It’s an ongoing process of celebrating lived, embodied experience. I pause to relish the flavours of the food. I linger over my tea. I gaze out of the window at the sunlight on the trees while relishing the cool breeze and the bird song. The sun on my skin and the wind in my hair are sensory experiences I make time for. Spending enough time in hugs and snuggly situations where I can take the time to really relish that is part of this, too.

When I go through deliberate phases with things, my aim is to embed something into my life. I don’t always know what I want to have stick. For me, an important aspect of setting out to do spiritual things is to change what I do in the ostensibly more mundane parts of my life. At the moment I’m drawing on a lot of previous explorations to find ways of being more reflective as part of what I do all the time rather than as something I set aside specific time for. It’s all threaded through with experiences of gratitude and joy.

Questioning Everything

I’m very much an advocate for doing deliberate check ins. For me, reflection and self awareness are important parts of what it means to be a Druid. Usually checking in can be a brief thing – taking the time to just pay some attention to how you’re feeling, how things are going, where you are with the Druid path, what’s good, what’s working, what isn’t. A little while in contemplation around all of this gets a lot done.

It’s worth taking this further every now and then. Sometimes life pressures will make it inevitable. There’s a lot to be said for being open to radical life re-thinks without having to be in crisis first. All too often we only take deep dives into our own lives and choices when we absolutely have to. Humans are creatures of habit, and it is all too easy to get into habits that don’t really serve us and to stay with them because change feels more threatening than whatever is familiar.

Being able to change is sometimes a question of privilege. You can’t make good choices if you don’t have good options. However, it’s always worth looking for the options you do have, because any small margin of improvement is worth having.

It’s worth taking the time every now and then to consider your life as a whole. What’s driving you? What are you passionate about? What do you need? What’s important right now? Are you doing what you intended to do? What’s limiting you? What’s helping you? Question everything. Dismantle your life in a contemplative way and see which bits of it matter to you and what you want to keep. Even if you can’t make radical changes right now, it’s worth knowing what you would change if you could – this means that when opportunities arise, you’ll be ready for them.

Who am I and what do I want? What do I need and where do I want to head with my life? What’s needed from me? What do I do that works? What’s good? I’ve been asking myself this a lot. These are not questions with quick and simple answers – which of itself is indicative. These are things I should know and that I need to take the time to establish. There’s a touch of the existential crisis to it, and it’s hardly the first time I’ve been around one of those. However, from experience, making time for small ones at regular intervals means keeping on top of things. It’s when we don’t look at these things that we can end up living lives that make no sense to us and do not answer our needs.

We’re not fixed things. Life changes, and changes us. We can’t expect to figure ourselves out once and then just live that understanding forever. Existing is a work in progress and needs treating like one. We all need room to grow, learn and change, to discard previous ways of being and to experiment with new possibilities. Change can be terrifying when it feels beyond your control, and is a lot easier when you actively engage with it. The changes we embrace will be adventurous, and may nourish us and help us flourish. Question everything, choose deliberately, live intentionally and craft a life.

Contemplating dandelions and joy

This week, the dandelions bloomed in earnest. There’s a buzz of insect life in the air, and where other plants are in flower there’s been a cheering amount of activity. With the year turning towards summer here in the UK, it’s finally been warm enough for some sitting out.

I very much like sitting out as a contemplative practice. Simply being in a space and paying attention to it is an effective way of connecting with the land. I don’t try and direct my thoughts while I’m doing this, I just try to stay present to what’s around me and let whatever emerges happen.

It struck me that the combination of warm sunlight and a cool breeze is profoundly lovely. It had been a while since I’d encountered such perfect conditions, and I took the time simply to relish it. Taking time to rest in the sun is something that really works for me – when the conditions allow that. Breathing slowly and relaxing into the gentleness of the day allowed me to contemplate my situation.

Dandelions are such incredibly joyful things. The plants themselves are tremendously resilient – something my writing partner David Bridger has been talking about a lot this week, which is why I was paying attention to them. At this point in the year, with the trees only just re-greening, the colour intensity of dandelion flowers is really something to behold. They are so easily dismissed as weeds, or overlooked. I took the time to appreciate them, to love their vibrant, sunny yellow and their role in feeding bees and other insects.

I’ve been thinking a lot about how and why I burn out, and what I need to change to avoid that. I’m fairly sure that I can pour from myself in a sustained way if it feels like I’m getting things done. Aside from the number of hours I can be active in a day, there aren’t many limits on my ability to give if the giving is meaningful. What’s worn me down over the years are too many situations where giving everything didn’t seem to change anything. I’ve been reviewing those experiences.

There is considerable joy for me in being able to make a difference. That joy is key to everything. Where I’ve got into trouble, it’s because I’ve waded in for people who were crying out for help, but who in practice simply wanted the attention and had no intention of being helped. I’m very much up for paying attention to people when that helps them, but people who want attention while they double down on their own misery are soul destroying for me. My own mental health suffers too much if nothing I do is meaningful or can make a difference.

I can be more resilient if I make time for joy. I have more to give if I spend time on things that nourish me. Sometimes that can be as simple as sitting in the sun, appreciating the cool breeze and delighting in the flowers. I need birdsong, and the flow of the stream. I can do a great deal with small and peaceful joys so long as I make a point of seeking them out. That means having time in the day, and not being so overwhelmed by everything else that I don’t feel able to make time for my own needs.

I’m thinking a lot at the moment about how to bring more joy into my life, and who might be likely co-conspirators for the kinds of shenanigans that delight me. I’m wondering how much good I can do simply by creating more space for happiness.

Meditation and emotional processing

If you’re the sort of person who is willing to rethink things in response to new information, then changing your mind can be a fairly rapid process. Sometimes it’s possible to shift emotional states quickly in response to new and different input, but it isn’t so reliable. Emotions are slow, often. The bigger and more impactful something is, the more time it can take to integrate it and make peace with it.

This is just as true of happy, welcome feelings as it is of gloomier ones. A big, positive change can take a lot of getting to grips with and can also be disorientating. We can be more neglectful when it comes to happy feelings because we tend to just accept them as good without any kind of scrutiny, where pain is more likely to have us paying attention to our own inner lives. Having intense good experiences, or a lot of them can also be something that needs processing.

This is something we can approach in a meditative way, taking the time to reflect on what’s happened and exploring how we feel about it. Deliberately reflecting on experiences and feelings helps us consolidate those experiences and make sense of them. It’s also a good way of being in more control with what’s happening. If our emotional experiences are things that just happen to us, we won’t have the means to seek more of what we like, or be able to deal with what we don’t like.

For me, the idea of the life lived deliberately has become a central tenet in my understanding of what it is to be a Druid. I’m not alone in this – the practice of reflection and being deliberate is there in the OBOD course.

Meditating on your experiences can work in any way that you want it to. I’m particularly focused on needing to understand things. My brain likes to sift information for patterns. I like to reflect on what, exactly made me happy and to revisit those things in a deliberate way. Around uncomfortable experiences, I need to understand exactly what I’m uncomfortable about. Sometimes the process of examining an experience will make me realise things about how I’ve been impacted by previous experiences. Your needs may well be different.

We won’t always consciously know what’s going on. We may not always have the room – emotionally or in our lives – to deal with our feelings. Things can get backed up, previous experiences can distort how we’re seeing the present. Sometimes a recent event can unlock feelings we didn’t make space for when they happened. That can be unsettling. Emotions can just bubble up sometimes, especially unprocessed ones, and that can feel a lot like being ambushed.

Making time for it is a good choice. Holding some quiet, safe, personal space where no one will judge you or make anything of it, is a good idea. Calm and gentle reflection on life – the happy bits and the difficult bits alike – means we at least have some idea what’s going on. Without reflection, we may not understand our own responses or needs. Taking the time to contemplate how we feel about things gives us a lot of information about who we are, what we need and what’s significant. It’s good insight to have, and spending time on yourself in this way has much to recommend it.