A Cure for Laziness - Difficult Despite its Simplicity

We've all been there, whether its exercise

 Meditating

 Or even spiritual

We get really into something - it excites us, we feel good when we do it, we might even brag about it - but then something happens, "I was going to jog then it started raining and I just don't feel like getting soaked" or "God I'm so sick...there's no way I can do a full moon ritual tonight." "Well...I started my breathing to meditate and then Katelyn woke up and after I had to get her fed and changed it was time to start dinner."

For some people 1 day's interruption isn't enough to throw them off track, but for others with busier schedules from work, kids, and other obligations that one day can turn into a week - two weeks.

Personally, this happens to me a lot. I have two children who are both at very mischievous ages; you take you're eyes off them and something is drawn on, they've suddenly snuck 5 cans of soda out of the fridge and have them all simultaneously opened and hidden under a bed where they sneak drinks, the bathroom floor is soaked - you get it - they've got a little Loki in'em and because this my practices of all of the above often look like this:
Exercise 3-4 days a week
Yoga 5-6 days a week
Mediation 3-5 days a week
Morning Devotional: 6-7 days a week
and I'll stay really steady on this schedule for a month or so...
Then something happens - the dishes from the night before didn't get done and the sink is over flowing "Well...I'll exercise after I get the dishes done." So I do the dishes...then I wipe of the counters....then I polish the cupboard doors...then I dust the blinds and window sills...wash windows...scrub baseboards...sweep and mop...and I am suddenly exhausted! No exercise today!
The next day I hadn't planned to exercise so had something else planned instead and the day after that there's something else and something else and finally I start guiltily finding excuses not to.

One thing in your life tends to leak into another - much like how people bring work home with them whether they mean to or not even if its just with their attitude. I start finding myself waking up and telling myself I'll do my morning devotional after I wake up a little more or that I'll meditate after the kids go to bed and get wrapped up in back to back episodes of The Big Bang Theory instead.

After a while I start getting restless - my muscles not getting the workout they're used to and my heart aching for that purposeful connection with deity, my stress level aching for the beautiful peace I find in my meditations - and I find myself fighting it for a while. I have no idea why other than maybe my mind starts thinking of these things as more obligations instead of the 'something for me, my health, and my growth' that they really are. Each time I have to come to that realization again and then I toss myself back into all those practices again but its...sooo....HARD!

In some cases I think its hard because we have to face others that know we gave up for while (intentionally or not) -  friends at the gym or even the members of your coven; but most of the time I think its admitting it to yourself. When we stop doing things that are important to us at some point it becomes important to go back and evaluate why it keeps happening and sometimes those answers are rough.

The hardest part for me is I cant draw lines between things - everything is connected - as I showed before - if I stop doing one thing everything else will trickle off into temporary obsoletion as well. So, when a relative of mine lost his job and moved in with my family and I, a relative I might add who has meant a lot to me throughout my life and is in full disagreeance with my spiritual beliefs, I ran into the broom closet and slammed the door.

I couldn't stand the idea of being ridiculed for my beliefs in my own home and as often as I've sworn to myself that I'm not going to care and do what I want - I'm an adult I can make my own decisions and he is staying in my home - there's still that little coward in me that says, "He wont be here forever right? You can just pick back up in full and be the witchiest witch you wanna be - you can prance around in robes and roll around in tarot cards and yell your questions to your Ouija board if you want! But for now you can avoid the fight."

I'm a non-confrontational person with a hot head - yes it sounds like an oxymoron. I do my best to to talk things out before aggravation turns into anger and that's why in the nearly four years my partner and I have been together we've argued all of one time. Once confrontation begins I can't censor myself - I don't say hurtful thinks like 'I hate you' just to be hurtful - but I will tell you what I think and not everyone appreciates that quality especially when its loud and usually by that point I have no volume control. It doesn't happen often and I avoid it the best I can.

I could chalk up hiding in the closet to that - but in the end it comes down to a painful truth for me - I'm not as grown up as I think I am. I had to grow up young - circumstances made me - and I pride myself on the hardships I've overcome, the fact that my closest friends tell me that I won't sugar coat things for them and the fact that I follow my own advice when so many people don't and that they trust, love, and respect me all the more for it. So I can't help but feel ashamed when I realize that there's a part of me that still cares what some people think so much so that I'll push aside what means so much to me.

I'm not ashamed of being pagan, I don't have to worry about losing a job, a spouse, or anything like that over it - so why should I hide? My challenge - to let MY flag fly. I don't want to hide for anyone and its time that I don't.

Everything in life is a decision - even not actively making a decision is still a decision in the sense that life still happens - you really cant hit the 'pause' button on life. You have to make the decision to evaluate your priorities and what's important to you, you have to make the decision to start back up you have to make the decision to follow through. Its all up to you - the trick is remembering that. There's no shame in having the mundane parts of your life (work, cleaning, etc.) take over for a time - at times its very very necessary - its just remembering that you have the choice of when other things become the focus point again and the choice to work towards finding a balance.

So make a choice today - you'll be happy you did! ;)

Willow

Because my computer died

Please bear with me during this time! Horrible timing that it is my computer decided to die on me. I will do my best to try and get more posts up here in the very near future I have not abandon my blog I've just not been able to use it lol
So in the meantime if you have any questions or any suggestions for blog post feel free to post them message me or email me. I still have access to my blog via my phone however it might be a pain to try to make much of a post through my phone but if I don't get a computer here soon or get my computer fixed I will be attempting it nonetheless.
In the meantime
Brightest blessings,
Willow

The Road to “Butt Out!” is Paved with Good Intentions: Their Hell is a Scary Place (even if you don’t believe in it )

Pretty much every Pagan I know has grown up in a Christian family, ranging from Pentecostal to Mormon, Baptist to Lutheran, (and though not Christian but still Judaic) even Jewish. Their parents ranged from Church at every opportunity to church never but pretty much all of these parents hold the same belief: if you don’t worship God, their God and no other, you go to Hell.

                                                                          HELL WITH A CAPITAL ‘H’ for emphasis!

For most of the Pagans I know, Hell was the hardest fear to let go of. For those of us raised in the Christian faith, Hell is that place that we heard about in church, were warned about by our parents; it was the ultimate punishment of our wrong doings. Now, it’s become an expression ranging from the classic, “What the hell?” to the dramatized comparison during unwanted situations, “This is hell!” Though this transition from fear to blasé didn’t happen overnight for any of them.

I often hear a term used, to describe this first stage of leaving Christianity, known as ‘Christian Guilt’. Now, the ‘guilt’ may be true in the sense that you might feel bad about how your family will react but beyond that I’m not so sure that it quite fits. If you went through this you may be able to look back and think about the emotions you felt there in the beginning. I know, for me personally and the friends I’ve spoken with, it was fear.

Fear is difficult; it doesn’t have to be rational or have any real basis and often times the most irrational of fears are the hardest to let go of. Getting over fears is kind of like reprogramming yourself, you face your fear, often by repeated exposure, and eventually it stops having the same effect. But when it comes to Hell? That’s a fear that really cant be faced in the same way unless you can manage to die repeatedly. Its strictly based on faith and when the faith in your beliefs becomes strong enough (and if one of those beliefs is that there is no hell) eventually the fear fades into nothing but a memory.

But for our family, friends, etc. whose beliefs are in the Christian faith, hell is a very real, very scary place.

I realized my faith back in 2005, I had already been estranged from the Pentecostal beliefs I’d been raised with for years – I’d let those beliefs go around the same time as I did Santa. I moved from that to just believing there was something bigger without really giving much thought as to what, faith just wasn’t that important to me; that changed in the summer of ’05.

There was an incident one day that summer that sparked a change in me. It was a normal day that changed when my grandmother and I seen 2 women walking hand in hand down the road and made the comment, “That’s just disgusting! I don’t know why those people aren’t just rounded up, put on an island, and then we can have the place blown up.” And I was so hurt and so angry by it that I ended up coming out as bisexual right then and there. 

It caused a massive blow up resulting in my mother bawling, my grandmother screaming and calling me a ‘Lesbian Anti-Christ’ (its ok – laugh – I know I do now) and quoting scripture at me, their contemplating taking me to the hospital to have me psychologically evaluated, and finally resulting in locking me in my room where all the anti-depressants were from the year before when I had lost my 2 best friends in a car accident and my mom didn’t feel like I was coping well so had me try multiple kinds before abandoning the idea. I ODed that night, obviously survived, and though it only made my mom voice her opinions more quietly and didn’t change my grandma an ounce on the subject – it sparked a major change in me.

I’d hit bottom at that point – and I was ready to find faith again but I didn’t want to turn to a faith that caused my own family to treat me like that. I first started looking into Buddhism and though parts of it resonated with me it wasn’t enough to really commit. 

One night when I was feeling especially down I snuck out and went to the park near my house – it was windy and it was going to rain soon but I didn’t care. I found my favorite place to go in the woods and that’s when it started raining – just a total downpour. Something about the rain was so soothing – and the trees were swaying and it was like the wind between the trees created a melody – the rain slapping the leaves and the ground around me percussion – and I danced with the trees. I don’t know how long I was there but that night saved my life - in large part because the beautiful, amazing, terrifying, yet loving woman who appeared to me in my dream that night and all she said was, "Wake up my Willow, it is your time to come back to me."
I didn't know who she was but I felt her strength, her love, her knowledge, the fear that she could cause when necessary - I felt it and I knew that she was what I'd been searching for - whoever she was, and I never looked back.

I knew that there were nature religions but I knew nothing about them so I started researching. Boy was I surprised when I found out that Wicca was a nature religion, I’d always heard it referred to as Satanism. I remember being afraid to even read about it at first, I didn’t believe in Satan but, again, fear doesn’t need to be rational – I was conditioned to fear him. 

But study I did and I fell more deeply in love with nature. I didn’t stick with Wicca and ended up on the path of Drudiry where I believe I've truly found my place.

I didn’t come out about my faith to my family until 2009 – my mom cried again and still claims to get nauseas every time it comes up, my grandmother was in the starting phases of Alzheimer’s when she found out from my mom and didn’t express much of an opinion, and another family member lectured me for over an hour about how it’s ‘the Devil’ – half way through the lecture I was having Water Boy flash backs and suppressing my laughter.

I had dealt with the worst of my ‘coming outs’ so was better equipped to help my friend….

I have a friend that, for the sake of his privacy, I’m gonna call Jake. Jake is an extremely intelligent and hard working man, he has a good heart, a gorgeous son, and a very involved family. Jake has also been practicing Wicca for at least 9-10 years now. 

Jake stayed in, what is jokingly known as, The Broom Closet for a very long time – and then he got sick of it. His son, whom he has full custody of, was old enough to finally start getting a grasp on religion, to start figuring out his own beliefs, to think for himself, and because of that Jakes family decided they wanted to start getting him involved in their Mormon faith. 

Jakes wasn’t too happy about this, he wanted the right to teach his son what he believed just as his parents did with him and realized that in order to do this he would have to come out – so he did. Many parents get upset, cry, get angry – but his parents just seemed semi-aggravated and didn’t take him seriously – and although he is a full grown adult and has been for many years – treated it as if it was a stage of teenage rebellion.

This attitude, and the fact that they continued to (and redoubled their efforts to) teach Jake Jr. their Mormon faith, caused many a heated argument between them. These arguments only increased when Jake came out of the closet in another way, he’s gay. The real irony of this situation is the fact they didn’t take his faith seriously until then, he had to come out as Gay to be accepted as Wiccan.

At this point they started pushing him to get involved at their church, to get him to go out with their groups and proselytize about the Mormon faith, to get him to go their churches Single’s Night and meet a woman (you can laugh, we did), and even bought his son his first Mormon Bible. 

Jake and I talked endlessly about this, it was a great source of stress for him. He was tired of working 90 hour weeks and coming home to find them helping his son memorize scripture, tired of his family ushering him off to events that he had no interest in going to – but he loves his family – pushing them too hard to butt out, as he so badly wanted them to, could have repercussions he wasn’t sure he could handle but tensions were so high between them all that they were nearing a breaking point anyways.

THE HARD PART:
Well that’s pretty obvious – it’s a combination of dealing with the fights between friends and family – sometimes even losing those friends/family from our lives. The ones that stick around – some are accepting and that’s the easy part – the hard parts are when the ones we care about so much are pushing their ideas on us to the point that we just want them to shut up! Often times it makes us feel like they think we’re too stupid to form our own thoughts, opinions, and beliefs. 

THE REMINDER:
His story, even more than my own, is what inspired me to write this post; in large part because he and I spoke of it so often there for a while.
Sometimes, one of the hardest things for us to do is put ourselves in someone else’s shoes especially when that other person is hurting us or infringing on our personal rights or privacy in some way. Believe me, in this case I know how annoying it is to have to deal with your family/friends butting in and telling you that you’re wrong, trying to get you to go to church or read the Bible, using Bible verses as reference to why your beliefs are wrong. It gets old and it gets old fast. But this is exactly what I did to keep from losing my mind, put myself in their shoes – especially my moms. 

My mom has never been an overly religious woman but she does believe in the Christian God – she did grow up going to church, etc. and though she fell out of the practice as she got older she didn’t stop believing. I had to look past my anger at her interference in parts of my life I didn’t feel she had any business in, and just remember – she loves me. Its that simple, she loves me. 

I really don’t believe in hell – at all – never entirely had. So I had to liken it to having a friend getting addicted to a horrible drug like heroine and the fear of her dying horribly. That’s as close as I can get with it – because to them its so much worse. An eternity in hell? An eternity is such a long time we cant possibly wrap our minds around it as much as we might try – eternity is a concept that we have no actual point of reference to.

My mom, just like Jakes parents, just like many friends and family of mine, yours, his – believe in this eternity – whether it be in Heaven or Hell – they just want the best for us. 

Now, don’t get me wrong! In this caring I am in absolutely no way saying that their caring means that you have to let them drag you to church, and listen to their lectures, and let them degrade you and your faith. What it does mean is letting comments like, “Your false religion” slide from your shoulders a little so it doesn’t turn into a fight right off the bat and trying something like, “I respect your right to have your beliefs so please respect mine.” Don’t rise to the bait whether intentional or not. Being the bigger person is hard but when you make a choice that your family doesn’t agree with sometimes its required of you if you want to keep them in your life and still live yours the way you see fit.

So now to you, have you dealt with these issues? What advice would you give to someone considering coming out of the Broom Closet or who is dealing with this now?

(By the way, Pagan Says What? now has a Facebook page! Like us at: Pagan Says What?

Willow

Pagan Says What?

Hello, and if you're reading this - THANK YOU and WELCOME!
At this point, I suppose I should get the introductions out of the way!
My name is Willow, I'm a mother of 2 (1 boy, 1 girl), am happily spoken for, and have been practicing paganism since 2005.
My hopes in starting this blog is to connect with other like minded people, to teach, to learn, and to share. I intend to touch upon a wide range of topics whether it be my random babblings about my personal journey, the latest news of the pagan community,  DIY and crafts of different sorts, important news of the more mundane sort, divination, etc. etc.
I've really felt the desire pressed upon me lately to start a blog such as this - so here and I am, and please bear with me as I, for lack of a better term, come into my own as a blogger. I really look forward to this experience, to meeting and talking with new people, and the sharing and exchanging of ideas!
Some of the posts you can expect to see in the future are:
-How Do You Handle These Situation? (Strangers and your faith)

-There's a Difference Between Your 'Right Way' and Misinformation

-The Road to "Butt Out!" is Paved with Good Intentions: Their Hell is a Scary Place (even if you don't believe in it)

Again, I look forward to meeting all of you! If you have any questions or suggestions for topics please feel free to contact me at pagansayswhat@gmail.com 

Brightest Blessings,
Willow