Mind Body Spirit

Mind Body Spirit

Know thy Self

When I teach I begin always, always, always with MIND.

We live in a multitude of cultures that thrive on the ideas of not thinking. Certainly not looking inward to our own thoughts. Yet to me to be self aware about our thought and to be able and willing to rein them in is paramount.

It you can not control your own mind how can wield the power inside and around you and use it for spiritual and magickal means?

There are two unfortunate modern trends in the pagan community. 

One is rampant anti-intellectualism, ie
"Everything we think and feel is valid (and much more worrying) fact."

The second is diametrical opposite.
"If you can't measure it or find it in history it didn't happen."

I have issues about dichotomies.  TK thinks it is a Welsh thing. We don't say yes or no (at least not often), it is more complicated than that. 

"Would you like tea?" 

"I would not" (< said me never) 

This comes from Welsh people speaking English, but thinking and phrasing things with Welsh grammar. How you speak and how you think are deeply connected.

I have no idea if this is why I find dichotomies inherently uncomfortable. 

Yet I observe myself, my patterns and look at what I think, what I say and how I say it.

This makes meditation, a core in my teaching and practice, at odds with both ends of the spectrum. 

To observe yourself thinking, it helps to learn to observe yourself, not thinking. That is what meditation is, to observe the space within.

If your mind is a movie theatre, it is to turn off, or turn down slowly, what is playing to look around the room. What happens on the screen is a projection from somewhere else but plays in the screen called MIND. The OBSERVER is more than the MIND. This OBSERVER is called the higher self, the true self and many other things.

In the other room is the wild play happening. It is the theatre called BODY. It records things, makes music and painful shocking things. For me it is a space of great power. It you meditate long enough you can get up go and sit in the other room. The BODY is a space of feeling. Of the physical sensations and stimulus, or memory and bruises. Yet watching the dance is not the same as dancing it. The BODY is wise and knowing. 

I don't think you can fully heal a person without acknowledging both rooms. To understand both the feelings and the thoughts a person has. It is also hard to do magick if the BODY and MIND are at odds with one another.

Meditation allows the healing and the wholeness of both spaces without one being better than the other. It is not a passive place. It strengthens the OBSERVER and all parts of the self.

Once we understand the truth of the MIND and the BODY is not always truth, but that it can still teach us deeply something happens.

I only know one word for it.

Magick.

This why I ask difficult questions, ones that don't have easy answers. It is why I ask my students to keep journals, to write down their thoughts and feelings. It is why I repeat the same exercise again and again with tiny variations and ask them what was different, what did it teach them, how was it the same?

It is why I find teaching Craft endlessly rewarding. Their answers tend to be wildly different than my own and often just as "right".

Bright Blessings xxx

To learn more find my book The Key here.