Healing and sacredness

My sense of the sacred is something that has shifted a lot over time. It’s not a hard pattern to trace. In my teens and early twenties, I was infused with feelings of possibility, open to a sense of wonder and able to imagine divinity and magic as part of the world. 

Things happened in my twenties that closed me down. It’s a long and unhappy story – which is perhaps all anyone really needs to know about it. I became uncertain, depressed, anxious, and I lost much of my sense of wonder and possibility. 

I’ve been thinking a lot about the ways in which hope and confidence are necessary for feelings of faith and wonder. At the times when I’ve been least able to believe in myself, I’ve also been less able to believe in much else. With the current political state of the world and the looming realities of the climate crisis, it is not easy to stay open to beauty, to find joy, to be hopeful. Without that openness, the scope for experiencing anything numinous is much reduced.

This autumn has taken me on a transformative journey that is steadfastly changing my life. At this point I’m confident in naming it as a healing process, but I can see it will be more than that. I’ve faced up to many of the things that have locked me down. I’ve made my peace with many things, I’ve gained insights and I’ve changed. I feel more like the person I am supposed to be and considerably less like a ball of scar tissue. Alongside this I’ve seen my creative output increase dramatically and take new shapes I’m excited about.

I’ve been writing a lot of poetry. There are themes through it about connecting with divinity. It’s become a process of re-enchantment, for me, and rediscovering what it means to feel wonder, awe and inspiration. Being able to feel those things is changing how I feel about myself. 

I’m taking this winter to look inwards (a surprisingly conventional response to the wheel of the year, but there we go!). I have a lot of inner work to do, alongside keeping doing the things that are supporting this whole process. I am investing time in following the calls of inspiration, and seeing where these emerging feelings of wonder and hope might take me. At the moment, I need to hold carefully the process itself – at some point I might be able to talk usefully about how all of this has happened, but not while I’m in the middle of it.

What I can say is that all of this growth and change is fundamentally rooted in experiences of peace and safety. I know the theory is that we do our best growing on the edge of the comfort zone. I’ve lived for a long time outside my comfort zone, sometimes not even being sure where the comfort zone would be anymore. Folding into peacefulness, into security and gentleness has been transformative. Sometimes the healing part has been brutal, but it is the feeling of safety that makes it possible to go through that.

At the River

A birthday trip to The Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust meant that I got to spend a little time beside the River Severn. It was low tide, with a great curve of sand exposed – no doubt many wading birds were feeding, but only a few were visible. Thanks to the efforts of my fabulous offspring, I was able to see curlews, and I heard them, which was wonderful. It’s been years since that last happened.

There were wild cranes with chicks, kingfishers, avocets and oystercatchers. I think I’ve added shellduck and oystercachers to the small list of birds I can identify by all alone. There were a lot of fluffy baby geese, and a great many orchids.

I grew up on the Cotswold edge, above the Severn plain. The river was always part of my landscape and always part of my sense of sacredness.  

Sacred Space

A rowan tree spirit, on rowan wood, created by Keith Healing. Now part of the family altar space.

What makes some art sacred?

Fellow Moon Books author Imelda Almqvist has suggested using #SacredArt over on Twitter to talk about just that thing. So, what makes art sacred? In the bard tradition, it’s not just visual art that has spiritual significance. For bards the word, spoken or sung is primarily where its at. Modern bards tend to embrace all forms of creativity as potential bardic expressions, but that doesn’t mean all creativity is necessarily bardic.

Here are some thoughts about what separates sacred bardic creativity from regular creativity.

• Where you get your inspiration from. If the work is inspired by spiritual experience then it’s fair to think of it as a spiritual activity.
• If you are doing the work as an invitation for something to work through you, to receive messages and insights or otherwise open yourself to magic and inspiration, then there is a sacredness to it.
• Who you create for – now, there may have to be a commercial aspect to this because everyone has to eat, but if your primary concern is with offering your creativity back to whatever you hold sacred, then there’s clearly a sacred art aspect to your work too. On the bard path, we also identify a spiritual aspect in using your creativity for the good of your land and tribe, so art for activism, inclusion and culture shift can also be seen as having a spiritual dimension.
• If you create to bring spiritual ideas and feelings to people regardless of how spiritually inclined they are – there’s a sacred art aspect to your work.

Any piece of work could be driven by one of these factors, or combinations of factors. It may be the essence of the whole piece or project, or just a part of it.

In terms of that fourth point, it’s often work that isn’t overtly spiritual that has the most chance of connecting with people who are not currently feeling inspired or magical. Work that gets in under the radar can have powerful, transformative effects. It can impact on people who would actively turn away if they thought you were going to offer them something with a religious aspect. Sometimes, it’s by having that sacred aspect be one thread amongst many that you have the best chance of engaging people whose hearts might otherwise be closed to you.

To be recognised as a bard means persuading other humans that what you do is bardic. However, when it comes to the question of whether your art is sacred or not, no one else has any right to try and define that for you. If it feels sacred to you, then it is sacred.

Sacred Art: A Hollow Bone for Spirit

 

Sacred Art, a Hollow Bone for Spirit is a new book from Imelda Almqvist. As the title suggests, this is a book about sacred art. However, it’s published by Moon Books (this is where I first ran into Imelda) and Moon Books is not set up to do lavish, image-heavy publications. As a consequence, this is a book about sacred art that doesn’t have any images in it. This limitation has, I think, paid off rather well and led to a book that invites its readers to think and imagine rather than showing them what sacred art is.

The art in this book exists primarily in your head. By this means, you might start to see the forms sacred art could take for you, rather than being focused on what other people have done. There is nothing to be intimidated by, or directed by about how the art *should* look. How you imagine the art as you read the book may well take you towards your own process of sacred art-making in a way that being shown other people’s work might not.

In many ways, this is a philosophical book. There is a steady stream of small activities to explore, but the bulk of the book is an investigation of the nature of sacred art. As someone who trained as a fine artist and has worked with art in various capacities for many years, Imelda knows a great deal about art. She’s also been working with shamanism for a long time, and is well qualified to speak about the role of art in a spiritual and shamanic context.

While shamanism is the focus of the book, you don’t need to be on that path to benefit from reading it. I think this is an ideal text for people exploring the bard path as well. There’s so much to chew on about how and why and what we create, that anyone interested in exploring any form of creativity linked to any Pagan path will likely find something they can use.

In the absence of art, and being light on the how-to instructions, what this book leaves you with is the clarity that sacred art is something you do. It’s not something other people tell you how to do. It’s not something other people can give you marks out of ten for. You do not pass or fail on human terms here. If you can take onboard the philosophy and open yourself to working in this way, what follows is your personal journey, for which no maps are available.

For anyone serious about this journey, the book is rich with suggested reading and other resources to check out. You could take this on as a workbook and treat it as the core content of a spiritual art course, read all the extra materials, do all the exercises, and see where it takes you. Equally, you can read it from a place of curiosity and see what sticks. Imelda is clear that everyone needs creativity and everyone has the scope to be creative. For some, that will mean a devotion to sacred art, but the rest of us will benefit from whatever we are able to do.

Find out more about the book here – http://www.shaman-healer-painter.co.uk/info2.cfm?info_id=225883 

What is sacredness?

While I was planning my talk for the recent market and conference in Wolverhampton, I had a bit of a light bulb moment. I was talking about sacred places, so of course the question of ‘what makes something sacred?’ was very much on my mind. Why are we more able to see the sacred some places than others? Why is Stonehenge sacred, while the Stonehenge car park isn’t? Why do we identify some days as more sacred than others?

The barrow I frequent is a sacred place for me. Other people go there to fly remote controlled aeroplanes, and to ride down the sides on mountain bikes. It is not a sacred place for them. The sacredness I experience is not self-announcing.

It struck me that it might be entirely off the mark to think of sacredness as being inherent in an object, place or time. What if sacredness is the kind of relationship we have? It follows that ancient sites and places of beauty are more likely to inspire us to a feeling of sacred relationship than a supermarket car park. At the same time, it means that someone who was looking for sacredness in a supermarket car park could do just that.

I have, as it happens. Supermarket car parks attract foxes – I assume they come for the rodents who come for the scraps. I’ve had a number of beautiful fox encounters on car parks, and that has given me a sense of sacredness in places that otherwise in no way seem to invite it.

In theory then, anything can be sacred. In practice, our little monkey brains can only do so much. Relationship is a conscious thing, it requires engagement, deliberateness, participation. Trying to be in sacred relationship with everything all the time would be exhausting. Perhaps when we are very old, and very wise, with decades of sacred relationships behind us, it will simply be a state we have entered, but that’s a ways off for me. Most of the time, it is enough to make the sacred relationships we can. Be that with a place, or a time, a creature or a tree, an idea or an experience. Sacredness can be the terms on which we choose to engage.

All Acts of Love and Pleasure

“All acts of love and pleasure are my rituals’ is a line from Doreen Valiente’s Charge of the Goddess (read the whole piece here – http://www.doreenvaliente.com/Doreen-Valiente-Doreen_Valiente_Poetry-11.php) It’s an interesting phrase to ponder.

Up until fairly recently, if I thought about the line at all, I interpreted it in sexual terms. However, over the last few months I’ve been on a journey and have been changing my relationship with my body. A wider idea about acts of love and pleasure has taken root, and has brought me back to this phrase with much greater interest in the idea of sacredness in the physical.

All acts of love of course has to mean more than shagging. I’m not always good with touch, I can still be panicked by unexpected contact, but on the whole I’ve learned to trust, to soften, to be more open to affection from friends. I’m starting to see my own love for the physical world in this line, too. Putting my body into water, or into soft grasses, or out in the sun or under a wide sky is also an act of love, and of sacred connection.

The scope for pleasure is vast. Our physical bodies have the capacity to relish many sensations. Our senses are rich with opportunity. Yet I’ve spent most of my life with a utilitarian approach to my body, seeing it in terms of what it can usefully get done, and as a means of getting my brain places. There’s been a puritan streak in my thinking since childhood – I have no idea where it came from, but it created the feeling that to enjoy anything too much with my body was unseemly, inappropriate, greedy… that the pleasures of a body were not to be trusted or invested in.

To take pleasure in food, and rest, in skin contact, a hot shower, a cool drink… every day offers so many opportunities to delight in small, bodily experiences. And if all acts of pleasure can be sacred, that really turns the tables on the life-denying puritan who took up residence in my head very early on in life. I think much of it for me comes from a feeling that I am not entitled to enjoy or to feel good, that I do not deserve to relax into things, or delight in them – I am meant to work, to strive, and to suffer. Well, sod that! It’s a miserable way to be that has kept me in some lousy places and contributed to poor mental and physical health, so I’m learning to head the other way and to enjoy what I have and make the most of it.

So many spiritual practices treat the experience of the body as something to control, and be ashamed of. I’ve lived with a lot of body shame, one way and another. Working to change that has made a huge difference already, and I feel I have quite some way to go along this path.

Pot-lickers of the world, unite!

Like most people (I suspect) I was brought up knowing that there were rules about eating food. One of the rules was not to run your finger round the plate afterwards. Nor should a person sneak out to the kitchen and carefully run their fingers around bowls, saucepans etc.

I grant you that it doesn’t look charming, and ups the risk of getting food on clothes. But at the same time, it’s a manners system that tells us it is preferable to waste food by washing it down the sink, rather than run a finger round the pot and eat what’s there.

Every morsel of food out there exists as a direct consequence of the death of a living being, except perhaps for milk and eggs, where the death of living beings is indirect, but still part of the equation. Anything that had seeds in tends to be the death of future plant life before it’s had chance to get started. For me, this makes it difficult to cheerfully wash that life away. If life is sacred, then surely, the careful running of a finger over a plate to make sure none of that life is thrown away disrespectfully, is a sacred act?

Anything we wash away has to later be cleaned out of the water. Down the sink is not ‘away’ really, it’s just a problem for someone else to deal with.

My guess is that the underlying reason for the manners of not licking the pot, is not wanting to seem that desperate. Getting every last scrap off the plate might look like poverty and desperation, and humans will go to remarkable lengths to convince themselves, and each other, that they aren’t that desperate, even when they are. However, there are many ways of achieving a feeling of abundance, it’s not like food residue is our only option.

So, I am putting my hand up to say that nothing goes into the washing up with edible food on it when I’m around. I don’t care what it looks like and I don’t care if anyone feels moved to judge me. I feel very strongly that we need to change our collective attitude to food waste – because what we collectively throw out is obscene and we’re killing a lot of things just to chuck them in a bin or wash them away. We need to show our food more respect.

Stepping into ritual space

How do we enter ritual space, let go of the cares of daily life and become open to magic, divinity and that which is sacred to us? When I wrote about Glamour in Paganism a few days ago, one person in the comments picked up on the issue that kit and setting are important in how people transition into ritual space. It’s a valid point, and one that stands looking at. How do we enter ritual space?

Dedicated clothes and objects can help create a sense of specialness, of time out of time. Many people find this really helps them, and I don’t want to invalidate that experience, but I think there’s an alternative that is worth exploring. The trouble with depending on ritual kit is that you can only respond in a Pagan way when you’ve set out to do so, and it makes it that bit harder to express your spirituality in the heat of the moment. Without robes, cloak, wand, crystal, or whatever else you normally need, how are you going to handle it if you get an unexpected experience, or have a sudden personal crisis where a bit of Druidry in self defence would not go amiss?

For me the key thing is spirits of place. Other traditions call them land wights, genius loci, faeries, elementals, and a host of other things. However you understand the idea of that which is spirit and present in the land, is what you need to work with here. Atheist pagans can just take this literally and work with whatever is present – trees, rocks, grass, soil, it’s all good.

For me, the transition into ritual is a transition into awareness of the spirits of place. I do this primarily by taking the time to go in and be with the place. Sitting, strolling, standing as the weather and ground conditions dictate. I look and listen. I feel the air on my skin and I taste it. I think about who and what came here before me, and I open myself to the place. I listen to the songs of its birds, or if it’s what I’ve got, to the hum of the traffic. I look at the sky, because no matter where you are there is sky. If you insist on doing ritual in a cave or a cellar, there’s still sky outside before you enter that space. Sun or moon, rain or shine, the sky brings nature to the most urban of spaces. It can permeate into our indoor rituals, even.

I breathe slowly. I notice what it’s like to be in my body, in this place. I feel out my body reactions to the space. I look for beauty and inspiration, for hope, but I do not ignore anything that is tough for me – the cutting down of trees, the dead things, the absences and the silences. Often at this point I become aware of the absence of great hooves, and recognise that I will not see aurochs.

This kind of transition can be developed by working with a single object, holding it, meditating on it and connecting with it. Improvised altars made from found objects, including human detritus, can be part of the engagement process. Making mandalas, or sculptures out of found items, or just gathering twigs for the fire all help us to be present and part of the place. In recognising the sacredness of the smallest things, the magic of the living, breathing world, we transition. We step out of the ordinary mindset that sees nature as something to use and place as backdrop, and we step into the world of life and detail, and from there, ritual is a lot easier and flows more readily.

Sacred submission

Deity orientated religions often talk about submission to the divine, or the will of the divine as being the goal of spiritual practice. Religious activities are designed to attune the believer, and enable them to submit to the will of their deity. Paganism isn’t always so submission orientated, many prefer to stand before their gods, but we have these threads too.

Sacred submission isn’t an event. It’s not something you do once and then are all sorted. Submission to deity, to a belief system, to a way of living, is a day to day, moment to moment sort of process involving every choice and action in a person’s life. It is the ongoing nature of it that makes it so powerful; the constant, conscious submission of personal desires to a higher goal. I don’t follow that path, but I can entirely respect it.

Submission is a gift. It is a gift we may offer to deity, or to a partner, or to a cause. The problems start when the flow is in the other direction. Submission should be an act of gifting from one who submits, not forced on them by someone with more power. If you are making someone act in accordance with your religious rules, or making them perform acts that you want, in no way are they submitting. They may be coerced into going along, but this is a whole other thing, and it tends to be very toxic, and very abusive not only of its victims, but of the ideas that have been subverted.

For a spiritual path to be meaningful, it has to be chosen. Anything we do in fear, under duress and threat of violence, is not being given freely. If there is no gifting, there is no spiritual power. There is no spiritual depth and value in what is done, you just go through the motions to stay alive. From the outside, it isn’t always easy to tell who is giving freely, and who is forced to conform – the veiling of women provides a wealth of examples of both. Veiling by choice is a powerful act of dedication. Veiling out of necessity is an affront.

You can’t force gifts out of someone. They cease to be gifts and become the fruits of conquest. An act of submission, is an act of gifting, and needs valuing as such. It should flow from love and be an expression of love. To demand submission is to be a tyrant, and there is no love if the submission is not gifted.