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[Llewellyn] 3 Quick Practices to Calm Anxiety
Earthdragon replied to UK Pagan's topic in Around the Web
I guess a mechanistic approach would be that the body ie. brain, is in fact the mind. To me mind and body are intermeshed. I think it's been shown that deep muscle relaxation is incompatible with stress. -
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[Llewellyn] 3 Quick Practices to Calm Anxiety
Veggie dancer replied to UK Pagan's topic in Around the Web
That was interesting. Our emotions effect our bodies, our posture, places of tension can be an expression of our feelings and cause physical pain. Also a physical injury can cause an emotional response, I've heard and experienced how back pain can make you feel depressed. As a flip side to this I have felt how dancing; physical exercise and working on balance and flow and releasing tension and moving with a different kind of intent can uplift emotions. Also how positive emotions like laughter can be so healing physically. This article is about some techniques that use physical contact to help deal with anxiety. i really think mind and body are not so separate as we often think. Anyone else got thoughts on that? -
Shownotes for DruidCast Episode 143 King of the Faeries – Mythago – https://mythagomorris.wordpress.com Talky Bit 1 – Tea with a Druid – Adrian Rooke – http://rooketherapy.co.uk Amazing – Glenn Conroy and all at SHOBODA 2019 – https://www.groveofthesummerstars.nz Talky Bit 2 – Gail Nyoka talking about the Voices of the Ancestors project facilitated by Healthy Villages Inc – https://healthyvillages.weebly.com The Sailor and the Magician – Paul Francis aka Dr Space Toad – http://paulfrancistroubadourspacetoad.com/aboutpaul.html Ceridwen’s Cauldron – Mythago – https://mythagomorris.wordpress.com DruidCast theme – Hills they are Hollow – Damh the Bard – https://www.paganmusic.co.uk For further information on the Druid tradition – https://www.druidry.org View the full article
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[Witches' Voice] Paganism and Witchcraft in the Media [Alexia Moon]
UK Pagan posted a topic in Around the Web
Paganism and Witchcraft, as a set of beliefs and craft, respectively, are subject to being referred to and spoken in the media. Today I plan to tackle a bit at how, Paganism and Witchcraft are viewed and portrayed by the media nowadays, mostly television, literature, media and cinema. I will use the term and quot;witch and quot; in the feminine but this applies to both women and men. Lets start with Literature. Since forever that fairy tales with witches and gnomes and dragons are a part of people's min View the full article -
... all as Moonsmith has said!
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^^^^^^ Late to this topic - everything that John Mac has said!
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Interesting Veggie: not only is it the Chinese new lunar year but two of the folk in the grove on Monday have been quite ill and have missed out January. For them too, Imbolc was the start of a new year.
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I didn't make a New Years resolution for start it January this year so I'm making one for Inolc instead and that is to relax and chill out. Been far too stressy lately. And stressing out is not useful in any way it just stops you from being able to think or function so I'm giving it up best I can from now on.
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We celebrated Imbolc today. We stood among snowdrops beside a holly tree with just a single berry left and in sight of a hawthorn whose buds are not yet moving. Three of our four fire festivals all lined up. I went to a moot in Shrewsbury for the first time last week where we were led through a simple candle ritual for Imbolc. We were reminded that Imbolc is not necessarily a time for action but for preparing for action. For our own celebration in the grove we took this idea - not yet sowing seeds but a time for looking through a sort of spiritual gardening catalogue. All that potential and it is within our power to realise at least some of it. It is also a new year of the pig - If astrology is significant I am a fire pig! Sounds like crackling to me but the pig years have been wonderful. No daffodills yet. All as it should be this year.
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There are snowdrops out in somebody gardens near me and the shoots of other bulbs pushing up. The odd tree or 2 in blossom already. I'm really looking forward to spring getting underway but at the same time hope we get a bit more snow before winter departs.
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Sky Clad Or Not? - Does it make a difference
JohnMacintyre replied to a topic in Starters Orders (basics)
Dear Folks, It's a normal part of initiatory Wiccan practice and has been since the tradition emerged in the years following the Second World War. Whether it "works" for individuals is always going to be a very subjective matter but if it wasn't effective and valued by most of us then I doubt it would have survived as a ritual practice for so long. There's no single reason for it, nor should there be. Remember that it's mainly the practice of small, very private, very closely bonded, groups where everyone knows everyone else very well and there is a very high level of mutual trust. For many reasons, both practical and symbolic, it's effective in the contexts it's used for. Feeling cold isn't really an issue. Central heating plus a few generations of Mediteranean holidays may have given many people strange ideas about what a comfortable temperature is, but for most of the year you're not going to die of exposure that quickly in Northern Europe. BB, John Macintyre -
Sky Clad Or Not? - Does it make a difference
JohnMacintyre replied to a topic in Starters Orders (basics)
Dear Folks, It's a normal part of (initiatory) Wiccan practice a -
[The Bardic Blog] Thinking About – Walking to the Beat of a Different Drum
UK Pagan posted a topic in Around the Web
When was that first moment when you realised your view of the world was somehow different to the perceived norm? Have you had that experience? I’ve been asking myself this question and, of course, I find many instances in early life that express that, somehow, the Path of my life was going to lead into very non-conventional places. So I keep stepping back in time and I think I’ve found the moment it all clicked for me. It wasn’t the first moment, but it was the precise second it all fell into place. I was very young, maybe 8 or 9. I was over staying the weekend at a friends house in Burgess Hill – our parents were friends so we had been drawn together, and I was very fond of him. We had great times playing with our torches on the ceiling of his bedroom when we should (at least according to our parents) have been sound asleep. So the next day I met some of his other friends. We lived in Haywards Heath which, although very close to Burgess Hill, made Burgess Hill feel like another world to me back then, so I had never met these other friends before, and I never met them again. We walked off as a group into the countryside that surrounded Burgess Hill. Don’t think you can find these places now, they are all covered in housing estates and bypass roads, but back then Burgess Hill was a relatively small town (although it was obvious that money was beginning to be spent to make it the sprawling town in is today). We walked across the fields and found an old orchard. It was late Autumn and a lot of the apples had fallen. Now to an adult those fallen apples might have meant cider, or apple sauce, or some other culinary delicacy. But to a group of very young boys they meant one thing – ammunition. So a game of war was proclaimed. Sides were chosen and each of us found our base camp. When I say this was an old orchard please don’t think of pristine lines of well kept trees upon a glorious green field. No, I think these trees must have been planted on waste land after the war, and all around the trees were still bomb craters that hadn’t been filled in since WW2. This was only 28 years after the end of the war, so think back to about 1992 and that’s how fresh the end of the war really was during my childhood. So choosing a base camp inside one of those bomb craters was, of course, brilliant. Now then, I’d been used to playing war with my fiends with toy guns. Yes I know that is definitely not PC these days, but back then it was just a part of growing up. Boys played with toy guns. Plastic cheap things that made a noise when you pressed the trigger for about a minute, then it all seized up, and so we ran around shouting “da-na-da-na-da-na!!!”. If you got ‘shot’ you had to fall to the ground for 10 seconds, then you could get up again and carry on. Nobody ever got hurt (again, not a time to go into the ethics of plastic guns here – that isn’t the point of my tale) and we were outside in the fresh air having a ball. But… Apples, thrown at full strength, hitting you in the side of the head… Well, they really hurt. But we were very young children, so most didn’t worry about that. “You could lose and eye!” I hear parents thinking, even those parents reading this, and it’s true. But it would never happen to us because, well, we were invisible, and had a war to win! So we ducked down, hid out of sight, until someone broke cover, then all hell broke loose as apples flew through the sky, pelting the poor kid running and slipping on the wet, clay soil. Then the moment happened. A boy I barely knew really did slip, and we felt victory within our grasp so we went ‘over the top’ and ran towards the enemy’s trench. Apples flew towards us, a boy went down next to me. And as my army (of about 5 other boys) ran towards enemy camp, I just stopped. I remember time slowing down, and I just stood there, watching the apples fly in slow motion, bursting upon the head of one of the kids in the enemy’s trench. I sat down. It all felt really bad, really wrong. Some of the other kids saw this and they stopped too, and in the end they all ended up just looking at me. My first thought was “they are all going to pelt me now”, but they didn’t. They all slowly walked over to me and one of the boys, I would say the leader of this group, said, “Are you ok?” “I don’t think I am,” I remember replying. “What wrong?” “This is wrong. I think this is wrong,” I just replied. “I don’t want to hurt my friends.” And I remember the conversation of 8 and 9 year olds begin to debate the ethics of playing war, how it felt to hurt their friends, and pretty much everyone agreed. It was all ok. They walked off, glancing back at me, but the lead boy stayed behind. “You’re really different aren’t you,” he said. “Yes,” I replied. “Yes, I think I am.” And with those words, of speaking them out loud, and with the acceptance of what they meant to me, life continued. The war carried on of course, but I found myself watching, and thinking, on the sidelines, and hearing the beat of a different drum. View the full article -
Anxiety is often simply the messenger for emotions that need to be expressed in the body. That said, it can be an incredibly difficult thing with which to deal. Amy B. Scher, author of How to Heal Yourself from Anxiety When No One Else Can, provides three quick techniques that you can use to calm anxiety. View the full article
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Sky Clad Or Not? - Does it make a difference
Moonsmith replied to a topic in Starters Orders (basics)
YES! This ^^^^^^^^^^ big time. I go bare foot everywhere at home. I have told the story before of a visitor who came to the door and said that '"there were human footprints in the snow on the drive". I was able to reassure her that this was only because humans lived here. -
Sky Clad Or Not? - Does it make a difference
Stonehugger replied to a topic in Starters Orders (basics)
Yes, definitely keep your kit on in December 😀 -
I do not know why we persist with these cod-Irish spellings. Yes: Samhain is pronounced [by me] as Sowen. As in female pig followed by a slightly apostrophised female foul. Tomorrow we celebrate Imbolc pronounced Immolc
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And I can hear her accent in my mind as she says it! Proudly Cymraeg Hwncomwnco Ffred
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And is Samhain pronounced Sow-Wayne?
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Sky Clad Or Not? - Does it make a difference
Veggie dancer replied to a topic in Starters Orders (basics)
I like the idea of it but it's not something I do. I'd be too self conscious as part of a group to get anything from it. i do think there may be something in it if you can strip away (pun intended) your inhibitions and do it properly. when you have a baby they tell you about how important skin on skin contact is with the baby. The skin is an organ and there are a whole list of benefits of touching naked skin on skin with your baby, and also the baby feeling its own naked skin with its own skin is supposed to be beneficial. I read somewhere else that skin contact with your partner is also good for your health. So maybe opening our skin to contact with the air, water, the earth, trees or whatever might have a lot of potential. I'm sure it doesn't have to be TOTAL nakedness for you to get something from skin contact but maybe the more the better? Until more becomes too much for you to feel comfortable with and then I expect that outweighs the benefits. i suppose many of us might not go completely naked but find some bare skin useful in ritual. I do like to be bare foot and feel contact with the ground, and feel things against bare hands or even bare arms and legs. -
As my daughter in law would say: "Cymraeg Deheuol. Ych a fi!
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Sky Clad Or Not? - Does it make a difference
Moonsmith replied to a topic in Starters Orders (basics)
I regularly visit Castlerigg but nearly always in early December. While I almost invariably have it to myself I would not unzip my puffer jacket never mind getting anywhere near my base layer. ( I play a very competitive game of strip poker!!!!) Being naked for spiritual reasons simply does not work for me. . -
The thought is, indeed, interesting. You might have hit on a rational basis for the practice.
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Sky Clad Or Not? - Does it make a difference
Stonehugger replied to a topic in Starters Orders (basics)
I wonder if practising skyclad is all about "wearing" the wider surroundings. I've only tried twice. Once was with a group (we called ourselves a circle in those days, which sounds a bit pretentious now) and it turned out we couldn't take it seriously, so great fun but not a spiritual experience!! The other the was on my own at Castlerigg and, come to think of it, I think I was perhaps maybe possibly trying to "wear" the stone circle. If that's true, I imagine I'd have been wearing the entire monument, not the individual stones and their immediate neighbours. Now there's an interesting thought. Would being skyclad help me feel the monument more holistically? I won't try to find out in this weather. -
Though not a Welsh speaker, I've lived here all my life and am familiar with the pronunciation of place names etc. As far as I know, a Welsh C always sounds like an English K. Interestingly, an archaic form of the Greek Sigma (Σ, σ & ς) is written as a C, so I wonder if that is the source of the ambivalent English pronunciation.
