Pagan Every Day(?)

Teo Bishop writes compellingly here about the importance of a daily devotional practice. It's an argument I agree with, and yet find very hard to maintain.

My sense of nearness to the kindreds waxes and wanes and, perhaps unwisely, feels the farthest away when I am under stress. And I have been under stress the past few weeks, mostly due to a project at work, that has only this week mostly lifted.

I want a daily practice, or at least a weekly one. I still need to get seriously to work on developing mental discipline to fulfill the Dedicant Path requirement, but even more than that, I want to create real relationships with the kindreds. I feel that I am actually on the edge of that in a couple of cases, but my regularity is lacking.

And still, it's hard to do. It's hard to carve out a dependable time, to work around distractions, even though a simple devotional takes only 10 or 15 minutes. I do it sporadically, sometimes a couple of times in a week, sometimes only once every couple of weeks.

I frequently hear that paganism is a religion of practice more than belief, and yet, my practice falters. How does one break out of the rut?

Meditations

I have been dragging my feet on moving ahead with the DP for a while now. I've been writing my essays on the high days and our celebrations of them at Cedarlight Grove, and I've done two of the three required book reports, but I have not been diligent on anything else about it.

There are number of reasons for this, and its easy enough (and true enough) to claim busyness, but that's only part of it. The main reason is that I'm afraid of the mental discipline requirement.

I'm sure I'm not the only person who has tackled this program that has found five months of regular meditation practice to be intimidating. If I were a betting man, I would bet that it's the number one reason people start the DP and don't finish it. At the same time, I can't argue that it shouldn't be there because I understand why it matters.

So I am taking a new run at it, starting today. I'm planning to try at first for just five minutes of complete breathing (inhale for a count of 4, hold for 4, exhale for 4, hold for 4) and general quieting of mind. When I can do that, I'll starting working on the Two Powers using my recording of Ian Corrigan's narration, and assuming I become comfortable with that, I'll seek more techniques.

Meanwhile, I will work on the essays that aren't tied to events – attending a rite or reading a book – and try to have them complete over that five months as well. My hope is that after five months of regular mental discipline I will have gained enough experience to find it valuable and continue, which is obviously part of the point of the requirement.

Shut Up, Brain

ADF's focus on regular mental discipline through meditation and trance is, I can see right now, going to be the most challenging part of the Dedicant path.

This morning I tried a simple mental stillness meditation. I began with counted breaths -- 4 beats in, 4 beats hold, 4 beats out, 4 beats hold, repeat -- and focused my attention on relaxation, from feet to head. Then I tried to simply count and exclude all other thoughts.

I was struck by how noisy my brain is. The thoughts fought back hard, and for every one I managed to quell by forcing my mind to attend to counting, two more it seemed would well up to take its place.

Finally, after what seemed like a long time, I managed a few breath cycles with no other thoughts intruding. Immediately upon noticing that, of course, I started thinking about how I had briefly managed to stop the thoughts.

Eventually I ended the practice. The total time was about 10 minutes.