Witch School: Meditation, Grounding and centering

This week's lesson included a brief guided meditation. This helped focus the group and prepare su to talk about meditation in general.

There are two basic types of meditation.

Introspection: this is focused within. It helps you calm yourself and clear your thoughts. It lets you sort things out. This is a very helpful sort to practice daily.

Journeying: This takes you outside of yourself. It allows you to speak to spirits or deities, and take direction. It's best to do this guided, especially for the novice, and the very sensitive. Occasionally an outside entity will horse on a journeying meditation.  This is where they piggyback along and possess the journeying meditator. It's most often to deliver a message through the journeying meditator.

Grounding came next. Grounding is letting the energy within you flow out into the ground and then drawing up new energy from the ground. This is easy in Memphis where we sit on the conjunction of two Ley Lines. It is often easiest to do this while breathing. Breathe out and visualize the tired, used energy leaving your body and flowing into the ground. Breath in and visualize the new energy from the ground flowing up to fill you.

Once you are full of the energy, it's time to center. Take your will and wrap it around that energy, claim it for yourself, wrap it up and make it yours. My visualization is a wire-wrap around a glowing green core, but use what works for you. Centering establishes your place in the universe and your will as a driving force.

This is all in preparation to create or enter a sacred space. A Sacred space is a time and place set apart for the divine. Grounding and centering is the mental work before casting the circle which delineates the physical area of the ritual.  Casting the circle cuts a bit of space and time out to sanctify it.

When the circle is cast, that particular patch of grass or bit of living room is no longer ordinary, but a church, a place to contemplate the divine.


We talked about several solitary meditations that we do.

Holes: Visualize walking into the ocean or a lake. When you are in the water, holes open all over your body, and the water flows through you, washing away all stress and negativity, leaving you clean and empty.

The Couch: Create a couch, a large, comfortable one in your mind. Don't sit on it yet, just picture it in every detail. When you sit, three people will join you. You may know them, you may not. Sit with them, talk to them, listen to them.

A Labyrinth. Many of us have walked a candlelit labyrinth at Festival of Souls. It's a meditation on its own. And if you don't have a labyrinth, remembering the walk can be form of meditation.

The Fish and Flower: You are in the ocean and you are swallowed by a fish. It isn't painful or frightening. Inside the fish is warm and dark. Stay there as long as you like, warm and dark and safe. Then push your way upward. You are a flower. Bloom, spread wide in the sunshine, let the warmth soothe you and enjoy the light after the darkness.


Their assignment, and yours if you like, is to meditate three times for at least five minutes a time.

Next week and for the month of October, we will be talking divination.