Poetry gets in sideways

One of the things that makes poetry especially powerful is that it engages our brains in a somewhat different way. That can make it possible to express things that otherwise aren’t easily conveyed, or that are otherwise difficult to hear. Poetry can thus have some really powerful healing properties, especially around emotional and spiritual issues.

In terms of emotional and spiritual wellness, one of the big problems is simply that of shutting down. If you aren’t feeling, connecting and being present in your own life you’re going to suffer and miss out on a lot of what you need. However, being overwhelmed, distressed beyond anything you can bear, exhausted or ground down from anxiety drives people into protective states of shutting down. It’s an entirely reasonable response. We aren’t supposed to suffer in the way that modern life hurts us, and the shutdown was supposed to be temporary relief, not a way to live.

Poetry can get in when other things do not. It has the potential to slip softly through our shields. It can come at you sideways in ways you were not ready to block. The way poetry can surprise you can be restorative. Shutting down can only ever be a temporary solution. What we all need in response to pain and difficulty, is things that can act as balm for our hearts, souls and minds.

If you’re on the bard path, this is an invitation to think about what you can write that another person might find restorative. While this can be undertaken in a personal and specific sort of way, we can also think about it more broadly. Mary Oliver is a good example of a poet whose understanding of the world is restorative and she’s someone many people turn to for comfort. I can also recommend the work of Adam Horozitz, who also has the magical ability to capture aspects of the natural world in his writing and presents those details in powerful ways.

I have some poetry collections in my ko-fi store. I can’t promise that they will help everyone, but there’s always a chance something in there will resonate, and they are free as ebooks. I hope, that if you are hurting, you are able to find something that comforts you and gives you a way forward. https://ko-fi.com/O4O3AI4T/shop

Unexpected visions and being eaten by owls

Many people seek visions and spiritual, otherworldly experiences in deliberate ways. Obviously if you can find someone to guide you and teach you in person, that’s ideal. There are lots of other resources out there, and with patience and sense, a person can learn a lot from books, guided meditations and so forth.

Of course it doesn’t always work like that. Sometimes things just happen. It’s most likely that unexpected spiritual experiences will come in times of crisis, brought on by fever, sleep deprivation, extreme stress and the like. It’s when life breaks us open that we’re most likely to have these unsought experiences, and to be obliged to question our own sanity. 

When you’ve gone on a deliberate process of visualisation, there’s nothing unsettling about having visions. When your brain feels like it is falling apart because you’ve not slept in days, and you don’t think the wolf you can see is real even though it looks real… that’s a whole other kind of experience. It’s widely said that the difference between spiritual practices and madness is that the spiritual stuff you do deliberately and can come back from on your own terms. I’ve also read a few people exploring what happens to you when what occurs is more like madness. I’ve found Jez Hughes especially helpful on this score, and Gabor Mate has powerful things to say about it too.

There’s a power in being ambushed by the unexpected. When you’re doing things in an organised and controlled way it can all feel like a pleasant psychological process. That can be fine – there’s a lot of benefit to be had from visualising and contemplating in deliberate ways. But at the same time, if you want experiences of wildness, of the numinous, or the divine, that’s never going to feel entirely safe or within your control. Spiritual experiences are often at their most real and affecting when you haven’t actively sought them or tried to shape them.

It helps a lot if you have some support for all of this. If your culture frames visions as insanity, then you have limited options for how to deal with your experiences. It’s good to connect with likeminded people and find what support you can. It’s good to have people you can trust to help you make sense of things in a spiritual context when it feels like you might be going mad. People who can be there for you during the days when you have to get on with your ordinary life even though you have been eaten by owls. People who can help you be in pieces when a spiritual experience has torn you apart in a needful way. People who can hear you when something on the edge of dream stitched you into the landscape.

There are things we cannot be taught and cannot be prepared for. Some things can only be known through experience. I’ve been walking a druidic path for twenty years at this point, and was actively Pagan for years before that. I’ve studied meditation, I’ve taken guided journeys and I’ve read a lot of books. In recent weeks I’ve had to re-learn a lesson about being open to extremity. I cannot both protect myself carefully, and be torn apart by owls. I’ve had quite a few years of living cautiously and being very shut down, and I know that’s changing. 

I’m not here to teach anyone how to do what I’m doing, but I feel strongly called to share the stories of what is happening. I have no definite sense of what my current journey is about, or for, but I do have a strong feeling that I should write about it and share whatever comes to me. I won’t necessarily explain what comes from where, I think I just need to put these visions into the world and trust to that process.

Druidry and community

When I first came to Druidry some twenty years ago, part of the attraction for me was the social aspect of it. Groves and Orders, open rituals, music and those first online spaces. I was in an area where a fair bit of in-person stuff was happening, and able to travel further afield sometimes to connect with other Druids.

The social side of religion is an important aspect of it for a lot of humans. Many of us long for a place to fit and a community to be part of, and many of us find those vital social connections through our spiritual lives. It’s normal to crave approval and validation, and religions generally give people opportunities to prove their devotion.

Community has the capacity to amplify things for us. When people bond together around good causes and the need for positive change, this can truly bring out everyone’s best qualities. It’s easier to be your best self when you get social approval for your generosity and kindness. Getting involved with a fundraising activity where a lot of people come together to do something good is affirming, and encourages you to do more of that thing.

It’s worth giving some thought to the things your Druid community focuses on to make sure that aligns with the qualities you want to develop in yourself. Some groups are very much focused on ritual and spiritual connection while for others coming together in the same place will be primarily about performing and sharing creativity. Online spaces are often more focused on learning and thinking, which works well for the more philosophically minded. Moots are good for people seeking to meet their social needs and can be particularly valuable for folk who are otherwise solitary.

The key really is to find a space that answers your needs. Sometimes it works to go into a space and ask for there to be room for more of the stuff that speaks to you. And so it is that moots sometimes develop open ritual groups, and ritual groups spawn study groups and moots end up with a lot of bardic content, or a whole table full of philosophers. All of these things are valuable.

The social side of Druidry allows us opportunities to be inspired and uplifted by each other. It may motivate us if we have people we want to impress, or delight. I know there are a lot of arguments out there against the idea of anything that looks like ‘ego’ but I’ve read enough mythology to feel that there’s plenty of room for bombast and good kinds of showing off, and that these things are only at odds with being spiritual if you’re part of something that teaches you it is good to be humble. Feeling socially recognised and valued isn’t a non-spiritual state and feeling validated by our communities can do a lot to help us work on things we find challenging.

Seeking transformation

New experiences always offer the scope for change. What are we looking for in our spiritual lives, if not the opportunity to grow and develop? Any project or adventure we undertake holds the potential to change us, shift our thinking, open our hearts, educate us and teach us things about who we are.

I recall reading something a while ago about how most people look back at their previous selves and easily see how much they have changed over time. Those same people tend to believe they have stopped changing now, and won’t change much in the future. They are probably wrong about this, but it’s an interesting reflection on how we approach the idea of change, especially as we age. For some people, getting older seems to involve getting more fixed, but it doesn’t have to. The scope for adventure and discovery is always there.

There are questions to ask around how much novelty is a good idea. New things have more power to surprise and stimulate us, which is good. The eager mind is often hungry for new experiences. However, it’s all too easy to go chasing after novelty and thrill, without ever internalising those experiences. Novelty alone doesn’t change us because we also need time to absorb and reflect. Not everything has most to give at the first try and many things have more to give us if we stick with them for a while and invest deliberately.

Change isn’t reliably a good thing. Change can mean loss, and it can mean learning terrible coping strategies to try and get through impossible situations. Change can make you smaller, it can take things from you. When setting intentions, it’s not enough to seek transformation because that can mess you up. I don’t recommend just trusting the universe to take you where you need to go because in my experience it doesn’t work like that. Life will hurt you, and the less privilege you have to insulate you, the more hurt you are likely to suffer. Sometimes change means moving towards things that will allow you to feel safer and more comfortable. It doesn’t all have to be raw and exposed.

It is certainly true that we do our best growing on the edges of our comfort zones. However, for the person who has been living outside of their comfort zone, the greatest scope for growth comes through embracing more comfort and certainty.

Not being political is also a political choice

What does it mean to be able to choose not to be political? It’s something I’ve seen discussed many times in Druid and Pagan groups – that politics and spirituality are at odds, or that a person doesn’t need to engage, or that not engaging may be the moral high ground.

The first possibility is that you assume ‘politics’ just means supporting a party or turning up to vote. Protesting is political. What you share, or don’t share on social media is political. Everything you spend your money on has political implications. How you treat other people is political. A person can be politically active while never getting directly involved with politics. Tax avoidance is political. Climate chaos is political.

You may not have noticed that politics is being done to you without your involvement or consent. You may have bought into the idea that you are powerless and irrelevant, or you may have been persuaded that all politicians are basically the same so there’s no point voting for them. This isn’t true – granted, many politicians, regardless of political affiliation, are not great people, but less bad is still an improvement. Voting for people who are not actively trying to strip other people of their human rights and who are not personally profiting from the destruction of the planet is a good idea.

It’s easy not to be political when the system is set up in your favour. There are implications to being white, male, cis and straight, and having money and good health. The more boxes from that list you tick, the more likely you are to be served by current politics than threatened by it. Not needing to be political is a state of privilege. Not feeling responsible for the suffering of others is also a choice to consider carefully. If you are alright and don’t really need to do politics, consider the people whose lives are at stake in all of this. Not just people in your own country. If a political expression isn’t likely to get you killed or imprisoned, maybe you could think about the people who are forced out of being politically active for fear of death, imprisonment, and torture.

Doing nothing is not a neutral choice. It is the choice that supports the status quo. It is a vote against change. We live on just the one planet, we are all affected by each other’s choices. The choice to do nothing in face of that has huge implications. If you don’t speak up to protect what you love, then who will?

Druidry and Pain

There’s nothing in modern Druidry to tell us that pain and suffering are in some way good for us spiritually. If a painful experience comes along, there’s always scope to learn from it in some way, but no feeling of obligation. There’s no Druidic story that we’re here to learn specific lessons, or worse yet, that we agreed to those lessons before being born.

Ancient Druidry may well have included an element of belief in re-incarnation – the Romans certainly thought so, and compared Celtic belief to the philosophy of Pythagoras, because that was what it reminded them of. A Celt might agree to repay a debt in a future life. What’s interesting in this, is that what carries over does so by agreement. There isn’t some great weighing and measuring system that sets you up to deal with past mistakes or learn lessons, by the looks of it.

What the mythology tells us about Gods, punishment, suffering and learning is that it’s all very personal. It is the deals you personally made that you will be held to. It’s breaking your personal taboos that will land you in trouble. There’s no bigger system. Pain is personal too, and it may well be the price tag for a glorious, memorable life.

It isn’t noble to suffer. It doesn’t reliably make us better people. A bit of suffering can be good for improving empathy and compassion for others who suffer, but there are no guarantees. Pain can be a teacher, but only if you choose to accept it as a teacher and only if you have enough resources to be able to work with it on those terms. Pain is not spiritual punishment – unless you did something that brought it on yourself, as Celtic heroes seem to do, and then it’s part of your story.

In life-affirming religions, the physical world is a good place. Yes, it can hurt you and it will kill you, but in the meantime there are feasts to go to, there’s mead to drink and wine, and beautiful other people to try and shag, there’s adventure to be had, and passion and glory. Pain can be a consequence, but it’s part of being alive. In religions that value pain and suffering as spiritual experiences, this tends to go with a denial of the physical. If you’re trying to transcend the body, then making it suffer can seem like a tool for spiritual advancement.

But honestly, having done a lot of physical pain and emotional suffering along the way – it isn’t a great teacher. I’ve learned more from more nuanced opportunities. I can learn more and grow more when I’m not mostly shut down by pain. Often, all pain can teach you is how not to want to be in your body, how not to take joy in it, how to find this life miserable and restrictive and how to have happy feelings about death. There is pain in my life, but mostly I try and use my Druidry to help me overcome it, rather than trying to use the pain to fuel the Druidry – in which capacity it has very little to offer me.

Having a physical daily practice

The general wisdom with any spiritual path is that you should have a daily practice. It’s how you make your path part of your life. Most things improve if you keep doing them, and what we do a bit of every day is what defines us – far more than any occasional, dramatic things will.

One of the things that has happened for me with the Druidry is that I’ve embedded it in my life to a degree where I can’t always see it. I live my path. I live it in the everyday green choices I make, in my relationship with my landscape, in how I deploy language, in my relationships with people… It colours everything I do, but at the same time there’s not much I can easily point at and say ‘this is my Druidry’. I’ve had patches of wondering where my Druidry had got to and whether I had slipped out of it. It’s an odd state to be in.

One of the most direct benefits of having a regular spiritual practice is that you get to feel like a spiritual person with a regular practice. The more you embed your beliefs in your life, the less visible they become and in some ways that’s a good thing, but it can also take something away. If your work really is your prayer, if you take a meditative mindset into everything, if there is no hard line any more between what is sacred and what isn’t… you may lose that sense of your own spirituality. 100% Pagan may make it impossible to see the wood for the trees.

In the last few months, I’ve taken up Tai Chi – in no small part because I wanted to add something to my life that I can do every day. Being a specific physical practice, I can’t embed it in my life by any other means. I have to do Tai Chi to do Tai Chi. I spend time moving and standing most days, and I like how this has changed things for me. It’s a good physical discipline and I’m benefiting from that – which is also a way of honouring nature in my body, so, more stealth Druidry! I’ve a long standing interest in Taoism and the Tao Te Ching so this is a body meditation that connects with it. Tai Chi also functions as a martial art, but I’m not especially exploring that side at the moment. I’m studying balance and how I load my joints, slowing myself and seeking a soft, flowing motion.

The more successfully you do the work, the less visible it becomes to you – this is the way of it for most aspects of a spiritual path. Most of us find affirmation in the more self-announcing parts of what we do, and this is one of the great benefits of community ritual. One of the good things about doing something physical in this way is that it remains self announcing. You have to practice it and in doing it every day you get to remind yourself that you are indeed the sort of person who does such things.

I’m aware that such an ‘ego-led’ approach to what we do and why might sound wholly unspiritual. But at the same time, I think being in denial about why we may be motivated to take up spiritual things in the first place just leads to a different kind of self importance. A secretive and dishonest kind of self importance that does no good to anyone. Best to be honest about these things. We take up spiritual work because we want to be spiritual people and we want to feel that way about ourselves. When we do it well, what we do becomes less visible to us, and we may well need things that help us feel the same excitement of a novice.

What is compassion?

Compassion, as a spiritual virtue, is something I’ve only ever aspired to, and not with much hope of being able to achieve it. As a spiritual concept, it comes up in many religions – Hindu, Jain and Buddhist thinking explores compassion as something to practice, while Judaism, Christianity and Islam tend to see it as the territory of God. Either way, it’s not easy work.

Compassion comes from the person feeling it. There are no transactions here, no earning the right to be treated compassionately. To be truly compassionate is not to judge. I tend to judge. It means what I do is better framed as kindness, or sympathy because it is partial and I know I cannot extend it to everyone. How you manifest your compassion may well depend on judgement, but the initial recognition of a fellow suffering human does not.

I would like to be able to see everyone as containing a sacred spark, as equally worthy, as all deserving love and compassion. I’ve thought about what kinds of qualities I would need to develop to move towards this state of being. It calls for a vast capacity to love and accept and to recognise our shared condition even in people who do the worst things. I feel very strongly that as soon as we’re talking about the limits of compassion, we aren’t actually talking about compassion any more.

As someone who isn’t compassionate, I am able and inclined to get angry about how I see this term used in some quarters. It is a popular word with people who wish to be seen as spiritual. Too easily, it becomes a demand for other people to appease them. Why are you not treating me with more compassion? It’s an easy knockback if, for example, you’ve just been called out for something. It tends to be people with privilege in the first place who feel entitled to demand compassion from others. It also tends to be people with privilege who practice compassion towards themselves – especially when someone has asked them to do something difficult, uncomfortable or otherwise unappealing to them. I can’t help you right now, I am practicing compassion towards myself.

Compassion towards self is such an attractive mask to slide over the face of total selfishness. It’s the mask that proclaims virtue while hiding the least attractive and least spiritual motives. These are people I usually fail to find compassion for.

I think compassion is something to aspire to. In the meantime, empathy is a good thing to try and develop. Sympathy can run too close to pity, but when we empathise we start to see how we could have ended up in the same place. How easy it is to fall through the gaps, or be led astray, or let the least helpful part of yourself grab the steering wheel. When we can see that we all have the scope to do both wonderful and terrible things, it is easier, I suspect, to cultivate compassion. Those times when we can’t do it will be able to teach us a lot about who and how we are, and what we fear in ourselves. It’s not people who have evolved beyond their worst impulses who may be best able to practice compassion. It may well be the people who have faced their own darkness so that they do not have to fear it in others. I’m not at all sure, but I think it’s worth pondering.

Daydreaming

So many self-help, spiritual and magical practices tell us to focus on our intentions to get what we want. Will your desires into the world. Positive think your way into manifesting what you want. But how do you know what you want? Willpower with no real direction can’t give you much. At the same time, those sources will also encourage you to be mindful and live in the moment, not worrying about the future or regretting the past.

For me, daydreaming has been a deliberate process for most of my life. I imagine things, and I play with them, trying out the variables, looking from different angles, considering possible trajectories. Most of my fiction emerges from this deliberate daydreaming.

By revisiting the past and examining regrets, and thinking about how things might have been different, I develop a better understanding of myself. I learn lessons that I can apply in the future. I daydream a lot about the future, and this allows me to figure out what my priorities are. It helps me see how to move towards the things I want, and how to avoid old patterns I want to change. It can help me identify faulty thinking in the present. Daydreaming about how things could be helps me identify things right now that don’t suit me and need to change.

My daydreaming is unstructured. I don’t approach it with discipline or with allotted time frames. I drift there when I need to. It doesn’t separate me from where I am, either. I can daydream while walking and still see a great deal of wildlife and feel very engaged. I think this is in part because I know when I’m doing it. I don’t wander off in some kind of trance, I trance very deliberately from where and when I am.

Our fantasies and desires are a big part of us, and often have the steering wheel as we navigate life’s journey. If we hide them away so they only happen unconsciously, we don’t always know what’s driving us. If we make room for them, we learn. Some of those desires aren’t the most noble, some may be toxic to us. They may hold us to ridiculous standards or damagingly unrealistic expectations. They may undermine our joy in what we have now, if we let them.

A healthy relationship with our desires, where those desires are allowed space and can be explored, stops them from being unconscious motivators. That makes space for better choices. It is better to know and acknowledge our most unappealing inclinations. It pays to look at where those urges would take us and whether we want to go there. It can be cathartic, too, mentally playing out the jealousy, anger, resentment – it can help let it go, without letting it interfere in life in other ways. If I let myself see me wanting to be horrible, I can deal with it. Sometimes it’s best to treat your unconscious a bit like a toddler – just because it’s quiet doesn’t mean everything is fine. Leave it unsupervised and it may try to glue the cat to the inside of the washing machine…

 

Presence and process

Spiritual activities call for presence. They ask us to be fully there, in the moment, mind quiet, heart open, totally engaged. In practice, this can be difficult to achieve. My experience of running rituals, vigils, and meditation groups, as well as my own firsthand experience suggests that presence is a challenge sometimes.

When you turn up to the thing – be that public ritual or private practice, your mind may be full of stuff. Issues from the day, worries for the next day, deeper ongoing problems, things you need to remember, things you regret… the conventional wisdom is that to do the spiritual stuff, you need to switch this off. The older I get, the less convinced I am of this.

The noise in your head probably isn’t trivial. It likely pertains to the real things going on in your life. Turning the noise off changes nothing, solves nothing. It’s a neat skill to be able to do it, and it can be handy in the short term, but doesn’t help in the longer term.

Our lives can be very fast, information dense, over stimulating, problem laden and stressful. We need to deal with that. It is easy enough to do – it just requires some time when you aren’t massively stimulated or required to interact, and you can unpack your brain. Let those thoughts run. Investigate them. Find solutions where you can. Write down things that need doing. Work out what you can safely let go of.

I do my best processing either walking or sitting. I do my least helpful processing if I have to do it in bed at night. If the issues are too large and emotional to tackle directly, I process them by drawing, or dancing, or singing. I have learned that hefty positive experiences need as much processing time as apparent problems. If I don’t make deliberate space for processing, my head is a mess and I get stressed and don’t sleep well. If I make deliberate time to process things, my mind clears naturally, and it much easier to find the mental space for engagement with other things. Not just spiritual things, either. Life is easier when you clear your brain out regularly.

It doesn’t feel very spiritual to have a head full of the stuff that was on twitter, what the cat did, why the colleague said that and what to cook for tea. But this is life, and life is not separate from spirituality and not the enemy of it. The problem is not that we’re stuck in the mundane stuff, the problem is that we’re not giving ourselves enough time to deal with the mundane stuff properly. It merits having time spent on it. Lessons can be learned, plans made, answers and strategies figured out.

If you find calming your mind to meditate difficult, consider that you may need more processing time, and try doing that instead. It will confer the benefits of a calmer body and a clearer head. Developing a clearer view of our lived experiences brings all kinds of gifts, and will in time help a person slow down, cope with stress and make better choices.