As I've shared in the last couple of dispatches, I've been going through a great deal of personal and spiritual growth and transformation. I'm working on understanding the lessons so that I can begin teaching the concepts, but I thought it might be useful to share the tools that I apply to begin understanding the lessons that present themselves on my path. It's my hope that, even if your path is significantly different than my own, that some of the tools that I employ may be useful to you when approaching your own spiritual growth.
Synchronicity
One of the concepts that I work with in my own path is that everything - living things, people, events, memories - is composed of spiritual energy and is therefore sacred. Every moment, every person, every experience is sacred and worthy of our honor and respect when seen from a perspective beyond that formed by our own personal prejudices and preconceived ideas. More than that, this sacred energy is an aspect or manifestation of the divine or, simply put, God. I personally believe that we are spiritual beings experiencing a physical existence, not the other way around.
For this reason, doors that open or close along my path, challenges or blessings that I face, and even little things that catch my eye are not only sacred, but are part of the spiritual energy and existence that I strive to manifest in my own life.
It's why I can hop in the car, blindly drive 800 miles to find the perfect spot on a distant mountain to bury a fossilized dog bone that had come into my possession. It's how I can be led by a wolf and a deer into a hidden patch of old growth forest where the fae still cross over into our world.
At its core, the concept is more than simply honoring the sacredness of each moment, but allowing ourselves to be led, not by our own desires, beliefs or limited perspectives, but by the divine. A door opens, I unquestionably go through it. A door closes, I understand that it's proper that the potential is now closed to me, even if I don't understand the reasons or its implications in the bigger picture.
What most of you don't see are the bumps and bruises that come along with living that path. I'm usually pretty agile until I allow myself to mentally entertain a concept that is contrary to the energy that I'm manifesting in my path. Suddenly I'll walk into a wall, drop what I'm holding, knock over glasses filled with liquid, or kill my car in the middle of an intersection. Keep in mind that I'm intentionally living my life by following spiritual patterns. One side of that coin is that doors open for me and opportunities and resources manifest when I need them. The flip side is that, when I begin approaching something that is outside of the energy inherent to my path, those same doors slam close, often right in my face.
Patterns of Energy
Living life by following the lead of the spirit realm makes it necessary to spend a good deal of time in meditation and introspection. It's not always clear whether a door is open or closed and, quite often, I'm not necessarily aware that I'm even approaching a door or crossroads in my path.
Even so, there are always choices to be made. At such points on my path, it becomes necessary to have a set of guidelines to rely upon. While I have a well-defined set of ethics that I adhere to, it's very useful to consider the concept of the types of energy I'm manifesting by my thoughts and actions.
Much like ritual work or the application of magick, the energy we manifest on our paths isn't a simple, self-contained process. It sets concepts in motion that will in turn manifest energy of their own. If you reflect back upon your life, you can see a series of events that led you from being single to being in a relationship, that led you from your first job to your current career, or led you from a place where you didn't give spirituality a second thought to where you are on your current spiritual path. If you reflect deeply upon that journey, you'll see that each path wasn't necessarily uniform, that there were starts and stops. However, at some point, the energy you were manifesting began to flow and led you to where you are today.
When approaching choices on my path, I'll use my understanding of ritual, specifically how energy manifests in spellwork and apply the same principles to the energy I'm manifesting in my life and in my spiritual path. After all, from my perspective, the energy behind magick and the energy behind my attitudes, actions, and intent is the same sacred energy, the same manifestation of Spirit. In my path, the same principles apply, regardless of whether I'm crafting a complex ritual or considering a seemingly mundane choice that awaits before me.
Faith
There are times when neither approach is effective. I won't receive any guidance from the spirit world regarding the choice I'm about to make and I won't have enough perspective or understanding to consider how the energy behind the different possibilities before me will potentially manifest in my world. At that point in time, all I can do is have faith.
There are numerous points in my life where I simply don't have a clue. My only option is to follow my heart, my instincts, and occasionally a dream or two that has slipped into my nocturnal world. After all, during the trip to bury the dog bone, I had no idea where I was going, I only knew that it was something that I needed to do. I felt a pull to begin sea kayaking for two years before a class finally fell into my lap.
I like to think of these moments in time as a test of our heart. When I have no other guidance than what I believe, what choice will I make? Will I begin to do what I can to move in that direction until specific guidance manifests in my world? Will I take a "safer" path and shy away from the risk of following my heart? Over the years, I've learned to follow my heart. There are moments when it is desperately uncomfortable to do so, when a thousand easier choices present themselves to me, but in my heart, I know the direction that I'm headed is the correct path for me to take.
The interesting thing is that such moments usually also indicate the potential for significant growth and personal transformation and are rarely a clear reflection of the event at hand. Driving blindly with the dog bone, moving ever closer to the border Oregon shares with California and Nevada, it would have been a very simple process to say, "Hey! This looks like a good spot," pulled the car off to the side of the road, buried the bone, and returned home by a reasonable time. Instead, there came a moment on the journey when I reflected on the amount of leave that I had available to me at my job, considered how much money I had in my savings account, and decided that I could stretch my journey to the eastern border of Kansas before I had to head for home. It was a complete and total leap of faith, a belief that somewhere, as I drove across the North American continent, I would find the place where I would be led to bury the bone and the dog's spirit could be properly released. Even though I was focused on the journey at hand, in the bigger picture, an entirely new level of my spiritual path was slowly opening for me to explore.
There are a number of additional techniques that I employ, but these are the core concepts that I return to again and again while exploring my path. In fact, I'm regularly calling upon them as I understand the next portion of my journey and distill those experiences into insight, knowledge, wisdom, and techniques that I can share with you here at Old Ways. As always, I'll openly share what I have to share with the hope that at least a small portion will be useful to you as you walk your own path.