Dancing Your Talk

I’m probably not the only person to get more than a little tired of old clichés in the spiritual community, but let’s take a look at one, just for fun:  “Are you walking your talk?”

I’m not going to say that I think it’s a bad saying, because it’s not.  It has given many people something to think about, reflect on, and do some honest self-examination with.  It’s succinct and easy to remember, and the mental imagery works to get the point across.  But it’s not enough, really.

Mainstream religion holds no appeal for me because I find most of it to be boring, rigid, or far too dictatorial for my tastes.  Original thought and questioning authority are discouraged in far too many churches for me to ever be comfortable with a spiritual path of that nature.  There are too many variations of “thou shalt not” in our world for me.  I’m not interested in slaughtering innocents or buggering bunny rabbits or anything, I’m talking about really stupid things like community associations that ban you from planting anything off of an approved list in your front yard or painting your house a different color.  Societal norms that are unwritten are just as bad, like clothing expectations limited to gender which keep men from wearing perfectly good kilts to the office.

Most of the pagans I know are far from boring, and are more likely to skip, hop, or jitterbug their way down their spiritual path instead of just sedately walking.  Many pagans are proudly flouting rules as often as possible, when doing so doesn’t endanger anyone’s well-being.  We are a more colorful, creative, boisterous lot of people than mainstream culture is generally comfortable with.

In keeping with the theme of balance that every Equinox brings, I do think we could use a little self-examination and bring our Intellect back into balance with our Ecstasy.

We have bodies for a reason, and while I don’t profess to know exactly what that reason is (because there could be many, different for each of us) I do think that we pagans (I doubt I’m alone in this) think more than we move.  There is a path to Ecstasy through dance and movement, time-tested and highly valued in other cultures.

Gabrielle Roth, in her book “Maps to Ecstasy”, has mapped out five basic, sacred rhythms “that are the essence of the body in motion, the body alive:  Flowing, Staccato, Chaos, Lyric, Stillness”.  I highly recommend the book, and several of the videos on YouTube could be helpful in unleashing your inner dance to further move you forward on your ecstatic spiritual path, and open up part of yourself towards healing that you may find more exhilarating than yet another game of Candy Crush on Facebook  J

Check this video out, and notice that there is no choreography.  Each person is finding their own body’s need to move to the music.  This isn’t about sweating for weight loss, it’s about moving for Spirit – your Spirit.  Go ahead, dance a little way down your path and see if it feels right for you.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uyhs2mNLgyA

Peace out, witches.

Harmony and Blessings,

Alan

Sacred Music

I was listening to National Public Radio on the way home from work the other day, when I heard this beautiful, haunting singing. After the bus passed me, I realized it was in Latin and I paid more attention to the story about the nuns of Ann Arbor, Mich. recording choral music.

I enjoy sacred music, especially some of the work done by nuns and monks I’ve heard over the years. It got me thinking though, about how I define “holy” when it comes to music.

For me, the holy and sacred music my spirit yearns for instills a sense of peace, and communion with the Divine. Probably in part because I’m an introvert and quiet time is what I need to recharge my batteries.

I’ve listened to my share of ecstatic music, and thoroughly enjoy that too but while it pumps up my adrenaline levels it doesn’t fill me with peace. It does make great music to listen to right before doing any heavy lifting, though, because it strengthens my spirit and makes the work easier on my body.

I began running through all of the pagan music I could think of on the drive home, looking in my mental catalog for something that was overtly pagan and still filled me with that sense of peace and harmony. I found lots of songs that make me happy in my mental pagan collection, but nothing that touched me with the same peaceful vibe I was getting from the Catholic singers. Lots of chants from various Reclaiming CDs are associated with happy memories of our community Chant Jam sessions, and some are useful for focusing energy and intent during ritual, but nothing left me with serenity.

Is it something we’re missing in our community collective repertoire? Are we missing out on peace within our own community music? Many of us are free-wheeling independent thinkers, captains of our own destiny, etc. etc. but does that exclude us from peace and serenity? Can’t that also be part of our path, and our music?

I'm quoting one of the sisters from the article here in closing, and I've shared the link to the story for your reading/listening pleasure as well.

"We bring people back where the culture, sad to say, is selling them short," Sister Joseph Andrew says. "The culture is not saying you need silence; you need to calm down; you need to meet God in however you might choose to worship him. And I think when you turn this music on, something interiorly starts to calm down. And there starts to be a freedom to be able to really listen to God within."

From http://www.npr.org/2013/08/13/211639502/life-as-prayer-the-singing-nuns-of-ann-arbor

Peace and Harmony to you all,

Alan

Magic as Science – or at least Pseudo-Science

There's a lot of talk among magical practitioners about how magic is just like quantum physics.

Or that crystals, because of their piezoelectric properties are great magical amplifiers, since our nervous systems run on bioelectrical impulses.

But isn't that really just a bunch of hooey? A crystal's piezoelectrical properties don't really kick in unless it's under mechanical stress. I don't think squeezing a crystal tightly in our fleshy soft sensitive hands is putting it under enough stress to make it build up a charge of electricity.

We explain magic away as all sorts of semi-scientific things in order to make it sound more real. Personally, I think that means we're neutering our own magic by not believing in it enough to let it just be mystical instead of having to justify it to the Doubting Thomases of the world.

Even on Wikipedia, one of the least scholarly sources of data around, they say “Modern Western magicians generally state magic's primary purpose to be personal spiritual growth” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_(paranormal) ), which I find ludicrous. Magic can be practiced without any spiritual growth whatsoever, there are tons of people out there messing about with magic who are living proof of the petty vindictive things people are capable of. But still, even Wikipedia is saying that we modern Westerners are neutering our magic.

We need to embrace the mystery, the mystical, and let ourselves feel and practice magic without explaining it away into nothingness. Good magic is like a good golf swing – you have to let go and express a little wild abandon for it to be useful and make something significant happen.

Let the Moon be silver, eldritch, and full of power to share and focus. Let the night wind whisper mysteries of wisdom into your soul. Let the summer sun fill you with strength and power. Feel the Earth beneath you, humming with Life.

If your spells work, then you're doing good. But keep the magic and the mystery alive, don't lose your sense of wonder.

Peace out, witches.

Failed Expectations – When Icons Fall

Remember how disappointed you were when you were a kid and Santa didn't bring you what you wanted or asked for? Your feelings were hurt, like it was a personal affront. But as an adult, you look back on it and sort of laugh. The thing is, we never really grow out of that feeling.

My French teacher in high school said a swear word in front of me, and I was shocked because teachers just aren't supposed to swear. I even said something about it, and her response was “Oh, grow up”. She let me down, she failed to live up to my expectation of how a teacher behaves. My feelings were hurt not by her, but somehow by the world for not being the way I thought it should be.

I remember when my best friend from high school Luci died of leukemia at the tender age of 24 just how angry I was about it. It felt personal, because MY friend died in horrible pain. When I got home from her funeral and learned that my friend Eric had died of AIDS the day before, it just shattered me. That was my first experience with friends dying, and truthfully it royally sucked. It's not supposed to happen when you're that young. You don't... (wait for it)... expect it.

In each of those examples, I felt let down, hurt, and angry. But as upsetting as those events were at the time, I got over them. Broadening the scope outside of my personal experience though, think about any time your favorite political figure, music star, or actor did something that upset you. Tom Cruise comes to mind, so let's use him as an example. As a star, people idolized him, fantasized about him, and at one point in time girls (and some guys) got giddy over possibly seeing him in person. He's famous, which made him more attractive, and people poured a lot of their personal energy into this idealized mental image of what he was like.

The public created a thoughtform for Tom Cruise. Oh, the media and publicists help shape it like they always do, but the public feeds the energy into it. He had a good thing going, until the rumors about him being gay cropped up. Then between marrying Nicole Kidman, publicly announcing his affiliation with the Church of Scientology, saying some nasty things about Brooke Shields and the couch-jumping about his marriage to Katie Holmes, Cruise became a laughingstock.

He failed to continue living up to the expectations of his fans, and now he's spoken of with either ridicule or disdain. The energy shifted in tone and instead of positive, people pour negative energy at him when they bother to at all.

But really, that happens with any celebrity. I'll stop picking on Tom now. Your favorite blogger today may be someone you ridicule tomorrow if you don't like what they have to say.

So let's look at what happens on the etheric level. You like some person or sports team, you decide that they're worthy of your admiration, and you feed them energy. By aligning yourself with them that way, it feels as though you're sharing in the energy of the whole fan base, and it feels good. Their success feeds your ego and makes you happy because you're connected to them on an energy level. Their failures, however, make you upset because then it feels like you fail. You get angry at them for “failing you”, and the positive you fed them becomes negative. We all know that generating negative energy long enough over time becomes toxic, so if you keep it up you wind up poisoning your own aura. At best, you might disassociate yourself from them and break the connection.

But what does that do to them? In the weeks since the Paula Deen scandal started, it looks like she's lost weight and has lines on her face that weren't there before. How much of that is her body reacting to the stress of negative energy blasting at her from the public and/or being starved of the positive energy she's used to receiving? Pick any President, and look at the before and after pictures surrounding their term in office, and you'll see what 4 years in the Oval Office can do to a person. Toxic energy causes harm to us, and to the objects of our focus.  I think it also creates stress in the person we're focused on, which has physically harmful side-effects.

In discussing this subject with friends before writing this post, the following possible solutions to the dilemma were put forth:

1. Don't form energetic attachments to public figures.
2. Don't form attachments to anyone in order to avoid disappointment.
3. Love everyone indiscriminately.

None of those are terribly practical, are they? I think we humans are always going to form attachments to public figures, but we should control how much importance we give them. Let people be human. We can't go through life avoiding all attachments, or we never allow ourselves to love. But we can't love indiscriminately without “bleeding out” on an energy level. I think the best we can do is to be rational about our own feelings of attachment and let other people be human.

If you put someone on a pedestal, it's going to hurt a lot of folks when it comes crashing down.

Worship - It doesn't mean what you think it means

It seems that some people feel that “worship” means bowing and scraping ones forehead on the ground in some slavish humiliation to the gods.

It does not.

From the Merriam-Webster dictionary:

1 chiefly British : a person of importance —used as a title for various officials (as magistrates and some mayors)

2 reverence offered a divine being or supernatural power; also: an act of expressing such reverence

3 a form of religious practice with its creed and ritual

4 extravagant respect or admiration for or devotion to an object of esteem

And reverence, from the same source:

1 honor or respect felt or shown : deference; especially : profound adoring awed respect

2 a gesture of respect (as a bow)

3 the state of being revered

4 one held in reverence —used as a title for a clergyman

See? There's nothing in there about bowing and scraping, chanting “We're not Worthy”, humiliating yourself, or slitting a goat's throat.

I think some folks in the pagan world see the word “worship” and flash back to something in their Christian past that made them feel less than great, and the word gets a bad rap. Personally, I treat my gods like friends and family (the ones you like) and dedicate acts of kindness and charity to them.

Some hard-core reconstructionists probably won't agree with me, but that's OK. I'm not telling anyone they have to do things my way, or live in accordance with my will. I'm just sharing what works for me, because it works so very well for me.

Worship is a word. A perfectly reasonable word. If you have negative associations with the word, go do some Shadow work, write some spells to help you get over it in your journal, and move on. Just think, when you're done getting over this issue, you have one less thing that pisses you off. Won't that be nice?

Peace out, Witches.

Gods, Heroes, and Violins...

The recent pagan blogosphere explosion over comic book heroes being likened to gods as expressions of the same archetypal ideas is.....

Welll...

Tiresome.

Honestly, it's an old and trite conversation that anyone who's been around the pagan community more than 10 years has heard before, although perhaps not with this much vitriol.  Generally we have these sorts of conversations while trying out someones latest batch of home-brewed mead or something.  It's right up there with the same tired old "what is a pagan, really these days?" conversation that I'm not going to get into.

So here's my thinking on the subject, do with it what you will.

For "cerebral pagans" who intellectualize everything and analyze everything, it's a perfectly fine conversation to have, speculating on parallels.  Anyone can see that in many ways Superman is the Heracles mythos revamped for a more modern era.  Still, it's a fun intellectual exercise, but not really the basis for a serious philosophical approach to the pagan mysteries.

For a hard polytheist, it's a borderline insulting conversation.  Frankly, I can't imagine how ticked off I'd be if I was a hard polytheist who worshiped Thor, seeing the comic books, cartoons, and movies basically making a mockery of my personal deity.  If Christians started seeing Jesus action hero figurines, and Jesus comic books where he's less than perfect, portrayed as having faults, and showed his bare bottom, they'd probably be incensed.  Making a mockery of someone else's sacred and holy god/tradition/thing is just enormously assholic.

If the conversation were a little different, where Superman and the other comic book heroes were likened to heroic archetypes instead of gods, maybe the whole thing wouldn't have gotten quite so explosive.  But I think it's too late to interject a note of reason into the larger conversation stream, unfortunately.  I almost wasn't going to comment on it at all, really.

But on the way home from work tonight, I was listening to National Public Radio as usual, and the most interesting story was running.  It totally made my inner music geek sit up and squee with delight.  Story link is here:  Playing Mozart

In the story, people were talking with excited reverence about seeing, touching, and actually playing Mozart's instruments.  The real deal from the 18th century.  It made me realize that these people, while not worshiping Mozart as a god, were treating his instruments as almost holy relics.  This was literally the high point of some peoples lives, and I don't blame them for their feelings at all.  I mean geez, Mozart touched those!

In the story, there was a comment made that struck a huge nerve with me:  "They're quieter than modern instruments and produce less brilliantly colored tones. They force the audience to lean in to appreciate them."

Maybe we, as a pagan community need to remember that sometimes the louder and more flashy things aren't as precious as something that requires our energy to pay attention to.  Open all of your senses and revel in the glory of a sunrise, the next time you're up that early.  Give your first sip of tea or coffee in the morning all the attention of a devout monk in a cathedral listening to the Pope for the first time, and really enjoy the experience in all of its minute details.  Maybe by living a more reverential life, we can more easily treat each other with reverence.

But what do I know?  I'm just a guy whose first word was "Batman", after all.

Peace out, Witches.

To Dare: Throwing off the shackles of other peoples limits

The title for this blog post is a bit misleading. It doesn't really take courage to reject other peoples limits or expectations, you just have to do it and accept that there may be consequences you can't foresee. You don't have to prove to anyone that you're "pagan enough", because you set your own limits for who and what you should be.  Back in the days of PI (Pre-Internet), when Llewellyn only had a few books out and everyone was trying to struggle through Drawing Down the Moon, if you were lucky enough to find a teacher of Wicca one of the earliest things you learned was the Witch's Pyramid – To Know, To Dare, To Will, To Be Silent. With a heavy emphasis on being silent about what you were learning, who you were learning it with, and what you were doing.

These days, lots of people have broken their old oaths and broadcast everything on the Internet. Well, almost everything... some of us old-timers still have plenty of secrets we don't make public. Unfortunately, the down side to everything being so public and so accessible is that people are learning everything on their own (not always bad), from potentially questionable sources (bad), without any structure or proper monitoring of their energies while learning new psychic and magical skills (potentially awful). Think of it like a weight lifter without a spotter – if your form is wrong or you're lifting too much weight at once, you can seriously injure yourself.  If you were learning to juggle, a smart person would start with tennis balls.  Some people are trying to learn to juggle with swords, and hurt themselves because they don't have the skills yet.

The really big problem I see with this learning model is the complete and utter lack of self-confidence. A lot of self-taught pagans these days haven't done the deeper Shadow work to throw off the mores and expectations of their previous religion. That, my dear readers, is the part that takes courage. Self-examination, objective analysis of your own motivation and patterns, and finding a way to live free of those old patterns. If you're looking to others for your validation, you're looking in all the wrong places. While it's true that in an initiatory Mystery tradition you have to be initiated by someone to really be a part of it, that's not the only valid path in the meandering forest of paganism. Without having someone around to validate what you're learning by teaching you, it takes more work to validate it internally - but it's totally doable with enough internal objectivity.  However if you haven't thrown off the need for validation or example from someone else, you're doing yourself a disservice, and the gods a fair amount of disrespect.

And here's why. Your connection to Deity is YOURS, not someone else's. Oh, a good teacher can help you find the way to build your own connections to the Elementals and the Gods, but in reality you don't always need us for that. If you ignore your birthright to connect to the Mysteries of the Universe, you're basically throwing the gift in the trash. Everyone has that access themselves, if you look deep inside enough and learn to listen without your ego getting in the way. That's what a good teacher is for – to help you find your own power. My happiest moments of teaching in the past have been when my students have realized that their connection and their way of touching the Divine was different from mine, but correct for them.

You're going to have a more difficult time finding and keeping your connection to the Life around you if you haven't let go of old patterns, though. There are many choices other people make with their spiritual practices that I simply don't agree with, and don't or can't understand. But you know what? My opinion doesn't matter, because that's their path. I just hope they're doing what's truly right for them and fulfilling for them in every way, without being damaging.

So become your own role model. Establish your own parameters for what a “good” pagan is, and then figure out how to live up to it. Routinely (at least once a year) re-examine what you're doing and how happy it's making you, to see if you need to tweak something to be happier and more fulfilling. Don't be shy about asking for opinion, but don't take anything someone else says as gospel. See how you feel about it, internalize what works for you and get rid of the rest. Don't be a sheep, be a nice independent goat.

And don't put other pagans up on a pedestal. They're human, just like you are. Celebrate their wisdom as part of the tribe, but don't pretend they're some Catholic saint, because they're not. Expecting them to be is really unfair. I adore Selena Fox, I celebrate the marvelous hard work she's poured into public paganism and the amazing strides she's made for all of us over the decades. That lady totally found her passion and dared to make it a reality. But she's human. She laughs, she gets sad, and I'm sure once in a while she even has moments where she loses her temper, or farts or something. I would love to meet her, and some of the pagan authors I admire, but only because I think we'd have a great time hanging out, not because I think they're going to poof me into some neo-angelic being with their presence.

Am I making any sense, or have I rambled too much? Feel free to comment or leave questions, I'll do my best to answer. Just remember, I'm not perfect and I don't know everything. Just like you.

Peace out, Witches.

My Psychic Day

So last night, I didn't do so great at the sleeping part. I just kept waking up, thinking it was time to get up. This is the primary reason I hate getting up before the sun – when you know you shouldn't be awake before sunrise, you never have to check the clock.

So anyway, I got up and did the usual morning routine, spiritual cleansing and got dressed for work and out the door on time.

I should have realized my shielding wasn't up to par when every single person on the freeway around me was like hearing a bee buzz at the edge of my hearing.

Got to the office, shielded the car from thieves as usual and walked into the office. Someone sprayed something “fragrant” in the downstairs lobby and I got upstairs as quickly as I could. I kept hearing yelling. Not angry, just yelling. But it was only in my head and I couldn't tell who I was hearing.

Then I got to my cubicle and the muscle tension started. I was getting bleedover from everyone. Here's what that means. A bad taste in my mouth and feeling like my jaw was clenched – the guy in the next cubicle is having problems with his wisdom teeth and is in pain.

Someone somewhere in the building was upset and it had me feeling a little nauseated.

Someone else was laughing about something sarcastically, and it felt like I'd just had a bite of really tart cherry pie.

I saw that somebody had scattered my circle of quartz crystals over the weekend, so I did a psychic cleansing on my space as well as the crystals and reformed them into a circuit to boost my shielding. Things died down to a dull roar and the inner noises went into the background for a while.

I went downstairs to take my manager a book, and his office door was closed. I went to knock, and I smelled poo and heard a toilet flush so I waited. Yep, there he was a minute or two later coming down the hall. I hate psychically smelling poo. It's just so … well... icky.

And then as we were chatting, I could feel how tired he was. Fortunately, I had a meeting at 9am to go to and didn't spend a lot of time in there with him.

One of the people I was meeting with was saying she was tired, but she felt alert and “bright” to me, so meeting with her was a nice respite from everything else so far that day.

That was just the first hour I was at the office. I'm home now, my nerves are frazzled from trying to shut everything out today especially at the grocery store after work.

I have felt arthritis, headaches, toothache, irritation, worry, and grief today (not sure who was feeling that at work) and I'm frankly exhausted. On the up side, no mental images of anyone having sex hit my radar. Thank goodness!

Hoping a night of sleep puts everything right again, I've already done the sage and frankincense thing in the bedroom. And if it doesn't, I'm putting on the hematite bracelet and putting the onyx in my pants pocket before I leave tomorrow. I may do that anyway, just in case.

Being Pagan

I was going to edit this and give it more order than stream of consciousness, but I think instead I'll just let you see how it came out of my head and through the keyboard, no editing at all.

----

I've seen a lot of people lately in various forums trying to define paganism with the apparent intent of using that definition to tell people what is and is not allowed under the pagan umbrella.

This is not one of those attempts.

Instead, I have chosen to examine my own feelings and thoughts on the matter and express them here, in my online sacred space. I am mindful that what I write may be offensive to some if they internalize it and apply it to themselves, but that is not my intent. I am sharing my worldview purely for the purpose of sharing. I do accept that other people see things differently and no one is required to live up to my personal definition of pagan, witch, wiccan, magician etc.

When I close my eyes and look at the world around me through my mind's eye, I don't see a riot of colors that can't be seen with my physical eyes. Magic doesn't work that way for me. I don't hear unearthly noises like the singing of pixies or anything. I do, however, feel things that can't be touched, seen, or heard. I feel a warm, vibrant sense of life all around me. It's like the sun on your back, or a stream rushing over your hand, but less tangible. It's actually closer to that feeling you got from the old-style televisions when you put your arm near the screen and the hairs would rise up. That feeling is what I get when I'm experiencing the flow of life.

In my perception and experience, ghosts, gods, elementals and nature spirits are just as real as you and I. Energy that is cohesive and directed by intelligence with emotional expression, but without physicality.

I perceive a spiritual plane of existence overlaid with our own that I think of as “the causal plane” where magical focus creates the change and it ripples into manifestation in our reality. In all likelihood, that idea is part experience and partly what I've read somewhere in the last 30 years. I've honestly forgotten what I've read in that period of time so I can't pin it down to a specific influence, but the concept works well for me. When I whistle up the wind, I'm focusing on the causal plane's wind moving and the physical wind moves after it (when it works). When I'm drawing down the moon into myself, it's liquid silver electricity that shifts my consciousness more into the causal than the physical reality. When I draw down the sun, it's golden healing fire that doesn't shift me quite as far, but strengthens the scope and breadth of my perceptions in the physical world to better connect to the causal and create change. I'm not sure if that's even close to explaining correctly, but when I'm needing physical strength I'll draw on the sun and charge up my chi that way. And yes, I draw both energies into myself at the same time without going insane, or exploding or causing any other damage. Because they're compatible, though different.

Being pagan, or a witch, is accepting that reality. That we live with spirits and other energy beings all around us and that magic is a real force that we can tune into and create change with.

My personal need for balance has me accepting the Goddess and our horned, virile image of God at the same time. I am both masculine and feminine, and I honor experience the creative force of the universe as both genders working in harmony. If I ignore Him in favor of Her, then I do Her a disservice by depriving her of her partner. I'm totally cool with other people sticking with one or the other, that's their path to walk. For my path, I have to honor both and I can't do it differently to accommodate someone else.

I am uncomfortable with fictional terms (like “muggle”, “guardian”, or “planeweaver”) being applied in real life. I feel like it's a line that shouldn't be blurred, even in jest. Well, ok, maybe in jest once in a while, but I've learned that if you use the same joke too often it can become an ingrained pattern. Too often, I've watched folks read or watch something fictional and immediately start equating it to real life and adopting the terms used by the author. That road leads to delusion, and away from the reality of magic I'm afraid.

I cringe when people say “Initiation doesn't mean anything”, because I've had some deeply profound spiritual experiences through initiatory life events. The titles that we humans create to go along with some of those initiatory experiences don't mean much, except inside our own carefully constructed social groups. The experience should always be honored, even if it doesn't conform to my personal idea of an initiation.

(Wow, that's really random and requires a lot of editing.)

Bottom line, being pagan to me means acknowledging the flow of Life all around us, and connecting with others of like mind in this plane and the spiritual planes.

Each of us has our song to sing, and whether it's a ballad, country & western song, heavy metal, or classical violin piece they're all valid. What doesn't work for me works for others, and it's not my place to tell someone they can't do it. I can, however, put in earplugs. I can accept it and not like it, without beating someone else up over it. And isn't that just the courteous way to interact?   

Magic and Music, part 3 - Chant Jam

The magical energy that can be raised through group work is pretty phenomenal sometimes.  My Wiccan teacher had a formula for it that unfortunately I didn’t write down, but essentially the whole is always greater than the sum of the parts when you do it right.  Music is one of the most fun ways to raise energy that I’ve experienced.  When you have a group upwards of 20, it’s just something you have to experience because it’s too hard to explain.

I was chatting with a friend in the 80s about magic and chanting, and we discovered there were chants that she knew and I didn’t, and vice versa.  Then in further conversation she brought up other local people who knew yet more chants that neither of us did, so I proposed getting us together and sharing/teaching so we’d all have access to more chants for use in ritual.

The first meeting was in my very small apartment and I think there may have been a dozen of us cramped in there, and we had no idea how to start.  Someone suggested an atonal Ohm chant to warm us up, and it turned into something different.  I had envisioned something like the Mystics from the movie "Dark Crystal", when they were singing a chord, but that wasn’t what happened.  We wound up singing the same tone as a group, then gradually raising the pitch (and volume as we warmed up) and eventually hit a crescendo and let it go.  It was like a burst of warm light washing through all of us, and kind of exhilarating.  At that point, we started going through note paper with chants written down and sharing, singing together.  It wasn’t long before we noticed the energy levels in the room building and our own energy levels escalating further.  We also agreed that we needed to write the chants down, and have copies for everyone to have access to in order to capture all the different versions of lyrics.

A couple of us took that task on, and lots of phone numbers were traded for follow-up calls.  We were joking about it being our pagan hymnal, so naturally we named it the Hermnal (to honor the Goddess) in the spirit of silliness we were enjoying with the whole project.

The next meeting was the following month and I think we had around 30 people present at someone else’s house (they had a huge living room with great acoustics), and we passed out copies of the Hermnal and started with the Ohm (which became traditional).  People brought drums and rattles, fresh fruit and veggies, and it was a party.  I forget what we were chanting, we were sort of on a roll going through different chants with the same (or compatible) melodies, and we all sort of went “Wow” because it sounded so good and was so full of energy.  I can’t remember who said it first, but once someone came up with the idea that we were “like jamming, only with chants” then Chant Jam was officially named. 

Here’s some feedback from a few people who were there:

K’s recollection:

“We would meet fairly often - once a month? - and warm up with an OM chant, holding hands, moving the energy around the circle.  It would intensify and move through us faster and faster, then crescendo and release.  So simple, yet so fulfilling, so satisfying, so balancing.

We would sing the old familiar songs and chants, and as I looked around at the faces of my loving friends I would be filled with joy and smile with my whole being...and they smiled the same smile back at me and each other.

I liked the chant that included movement: air my breath and fire my spirit, earth my body, water my blood.  And don't forget the Pagan Pokey!  I also really liked the chant that integrated several different chants as a sort of round: we would be together in the same rhythm and flow, choosing different words as inspiration struck:

Goddess/God Chant
Old People/New People
Diana of the Hunt
We All Come From the Goddess (sped up a little!)
Kore Chant - chorus
We are a Circle - chorus

It sounds kind of crazy and chaotic, each person choosing what to sing/chant, changing it up as desired; but actually it worked very well every time.  It was sort of like a vocal drumming circle: everyone doing their own thing, but following the same beat made our efforts merge and blend into a unified verbal dance.  Wonderful!

The energy was clean and delicious and all around us.  I would be suffused with it and washed clean of any icky, sticky energy and filled with spirit and light and pure happiness.

I don't know why it worked so well; the company, the time of our life, the time of the world, who can say?  It was truly magical.”

J’s recollection:

“I was asked by Alan to write something about chant jam and what it meant to me. I did not know how to explain, the way the act of group singing has influenced my path in life. I was a student of Alan’s when chant jam started. In my opinion, it was a way of getting people together to run energy without running into the politics that can get in the way when people of various beliefs come together. It was fun, and for me, very enlightening. I began to realize that the vibrations that were created affected people in ways that could not be simply explained. I wanted to understand how singing could make me feel so good. Not just uplifted but physically better. Sleep better, more focused and general aches lessened. So this question lead me to, in my first year of my masters program in acupuncture, write a research paper on the subject. What I found was that there are many correlations between the rhythms and sound patterns that are used in chants and the functions of our brains. That vital body functions are aided and maintained by rhythm and vibration. There are some great books out on the subject if you wish to research this further.

I don’t think when I was singing and laughing and having a great time all those years ago I understood where it would lead me. I am almost sure Alan still does not cognize the impact those gatherings had on everyone. Thank you friend.”

Thank you both for your contributions!  Chant Jam was really magical for my community, both for social networking (pre-Internet) and sharing energy.  It was a place and time for people from various pagan traditions to meet, relax, and have fun singing.  People who couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket were happy clapping, stomping, drumming, and shaking rattles and we loved that contribution because it just added to the joyous energy we were all sharing.  Like K said, you walked away from Chant Jam cleansed and uplifted.  And I agree with J’s assessment that after Chant Jam I was sleeping better and my body was happier.  At one point, we had people bringing their kids, or driving 2 hours from the San Francisco area up to Sacramento to join us.

I would love to bring it back to life because it was so positive and uplifting for everyone.  It’s a great place to share new stuff we write, too.  When you have a big group of people singing with open hearts together, it becomes “safe space” to try new things.  I knew folks who were too shy to sing in small groups who were completely comfortable singing loudly at Chant Jam.  So, I’ve included a link to the PDF of our Hermnal for your use as an example to either use as a template for creating your own, or use for your own Chant Jam sessions.  A couple of words of advice if you want to start your own:

1. Make sure you’ve got folks bringing fluids because you’re going to get parched quickly.  Stay away from sugary drinks, they’ll promote mucus production and make singing harder.  Something as simple as a big pitcher of ice water with lemon/orange/lime slices in it, or fresh sprigs of mint work very well.
2. Fresh fruits and veggies are great to have on hand, but stay away from dairy-based dips because they promote mucus production and make singing more challenging for lots of folks.
3. Start small – get a group of 10 or so together to start the thing off, and figure out where you’ll be having it as it grows (because it probably will).  Neighbors and noise are issues to take into account.  Most people don’t feel comfortable in a public setting like a park, it sort of kills the mood and doesn’t generally work well acoustically.
4. Keep the politics out!  Seriously, if everyone agrees to Chant Jam as being ego-free space, it will work better and last longer.  Ours died because someone tried to “own” it, and you can’t do that with things that are truly a Community event.  Establishing some rules for it is good, but too many rules will be restrictive and turn folks off.  If you have more than 3 rules for Chant Jam then you’ve probably got too many.
5. Scheduling – bring calendars and don’t overdo.  If it’s going well, there will be people who want to do it all the time.  That creates burnout and interferes with regular things going on for other people.  Don’t schedule it on full/dark moons because you’ll automatically be excluding folks, come up with a regular schedule (first Friday after dark moon, for example) and stick to it as much as humanly possible.  And definitely make sure you have an announced start AND end time for the event. Enthusiasm is great but the folks hosting will want to eventually have their space emptied and go to sleep.  :)
6. Phone/email tree – it’s important for the core group hosting/organizing your Chant Jam to communicate with folks who want to attend.  These days with so many people online a single Facebook group makes that easy, if everyone is on Facebook.  But phone trees still work best in case something comes up at the last minute and the person hosting it has an emergency.
7. Hermnal – where authors were known, they were written in.  A lot of this was typed from lyrics that came with cassettes and CDs and many of the tunes can be found on YouTube if you don’t know them.  For all of the ones where the author includes “Alan Heartsong” – that’s me.  I’ll work on a follow-up post to this one that has links to sound files of me singing the ones I’m responsible for.  If you don’t know a tune and can’t find it online, then send me an email and I’ll do what I can to help you with it.

Chant Jam is not ritual, it is not one person’s way, it is a gift and blessing from and to your Community.  If you have a magical community that works well together, and can agree on goals, then you may find the opportunity to use the energy you raise as a group for a purpose.  You just have to have consensus first.  Imagine what changes you can create with 20-50+ people singing, chanting, drumming, dancing, etc. to raise energy towards a common goal!

Magic and Music, part 2

Our last blog post on this subject was pretty general, and covered the overall topic rather well so this time we’re going into a specific example.

In a group I used to work with not long ago, in the beginning stage of our forming a group mind I awoke with the following lyrics pulsing in my brain:

I open myself to you, in Perfect Trust and Love

I open myself to you, so that We are One.

The recording of this I made is here:   https://dl.dropbox.com/u/97115725/OpenToYouShort.wma 

The MP3 version is:  https://dl.dropbox.com/u/97115725/OpenToYouShort.mp3

There was more, but it was specific to the group so I’m leaving that part out because it wouldn’t be appropriate to share.  However, as you can see from the words the context is Wiccan (because I am) and the intent is to open our energy up to the people we are sharing circle with to better facilitate the meshing that the ritual group mind requires.  The first time we met after the melody and words came to me, we stood in a circle holding hands, and I started off singing those two lines while looking into the eyes of the person on my left.  At the end of my round, I kept singing while she joined in and we both looked to the person on their left, and so on around the circle.  When the person on my right was singing it to me, and the whole group was singing it together, I have to say the energy was just amazing.  One of the gals in the circle said that she was almost sure she felt her hair blow back when it got to her as the focus.  I can say that it was a LOT of energy raised before we’d even started to get ready to begin the ritual, and the subsequent full moon was pretty intense for all of us.

It sounds rather dry, putting it in writing like this, unfortunately.  Later as I was thinking about how one would use the same idea and melody in solo work, I came up with this variation:

I open myself to Earth, to Fire, Wind and Rain.

I open my heart and mind, to join with you again.

I open myself to you, in Perfect Trust and Love.

I open myself to you, so that We are One.

And I’ve recorded it here, although the melody is pretty much the same.   

https://dl.dropbox.com/u/97115725/OpeningSongFull.wma

And here is the MP3 version:  https://dl.dropbox.com/u/97115725/OpeningSongFull.mp3

It works for me, pretty well as both a grounding/centering and an uplifting quick charge.  Please keep in mind, this is me singing it a cappella, and trying not to wake up the roommate.  Sorry if it’s a bit quiet, this is my first foray into singing into the computer microphone.

This is one small example of what I mean when I talk about making music magic have a purpose.  It’s why I’m taking my personal spiritual practice in this direction, it doesn’t just speak to my heart, it sings to it.  I’m envisioning songs of grounding, songs of healing, teaching songs, etc…. something longer than the simple chants we use, but that are simple enough for the non-singers to work with as well.

I’d love to hear your experiences with music and magic, and look forward to your responses and ideas.

I wish you harmony and blessings as always,

Alan