Link: On Shaman Sickness

Moonvoice has written an amazing piece on Shaman Sickness titled Shamanic Pathways 07 - A wounded shaman(ist)?.

I have some of my own thoughts to add to this, but I haven't been able to get the essay written, so I'll just provide the link that inspired such for now and write more on it later.

Religion in the Workplace

This is a revised and expanded version of an essay I wrote back in July 2008.

This is, in part, a response to Daven's essay Religion in the Workplace, and in part derived from my experiences here and in other places.

In the essay, Daven poses the question "How much religion should be taken to the workplace?" This is an interesting and important question, but unfortunately he seems to get caught up in the trappings of religion instead of the actual practice of religion. His examples talk about unburned scented candles, images of the goddess, shrines, signature lines, and the like.

I hold Daven in the highest regard (being a former student of his high magic class). But this article, to me, is asking the wrong question and looking at the wrong things. The trappings of religion are not as important as our faith and our devotional practices to the gods.

If you want an article about the trappings of religion in the workplace, he makes some excellent points.

While some may disagree with me on this, I do not see the point of building a shrine at work, unless maybe it is to a local landwight in which case you can probably get away with a few flowers on your desk or with putting something unobtrusive outside. Posting the Charge of the Goddess might be acceptable practice (or the Christian down the hall might be doing it with the Lord's Prayer), but that does not mean that it is appropriate to do so. As Daven points out:

Understand that while you talking about Paganism in the lunch room or over the water cooler may be tolerated, the business is about making money.

...and that's just it. Posting a copy of the Nine Noble Virtue as a reminder to myself might be a worthwhile exercise, but the truth of the matter is that if I want to post them at work I should be evaluating my motives very carefully. They should be part of who I am, and why would I need to post them publicly when I could just as easily stick them on a piece of paper in my desk?

I'll go out on a limb here and say that posting them publicly is an exercise in broadcasting one's beliefs to others and not reflective--one way or the other--on the internal state of the person in question.

I wear a pentacle ring that is specifically charged. In situations where I am concerned about the reaction I flip it around so that the pentacle is on the inside. If I thought it would be a problem for a long period of time, I would consider moving the ring to my necklace (which lives inside of my shirt) and/or wearing another ring charged with similar properties.

I am not closeted--even slightly--I am quite open with my beliefs. I am also sensitive to the fact that my faith is--first and foremost--between me and the gods. If I am more effective in a workplace by not walking around with a large pentacle on my t-shirt, then I will dress accordingly. My goals are workplace effectiveness and honor of the spirits, not showing off. If the gods demanded that I walk around with a t-shirt with a large pentacle on it, I would try to negotiate and, barring that, find a job where I can get away with it with a minimum of hassle (though I generally find if a Christian could wear a big cross on their t-shirt the company won't mind the pentacle for standard equal opportunity reasons, YMMV).

I am far more concerned about behaviors than I am with these trappings. The first question here is "what are your needs." I pray several times a day and try to go through my prayer beads on a semi-regular basis. This, to me, needs to be acceptable behavior, but there is no reason they even should see it under most circumstances. Some flexibility around my holy days (e.g., I've made it a point that I must be in town at the end of October) and such is another major sticking point for me, but most places I've worked have been accommodating (though I do get to use PTO for it). These requirements are no different than that I need to be able to take holidays off since that's my only time with my out-of-state family--its just one of the priorities we need to think about when choosing a job and a workplace environment--I could not work in retail without very carefully negotiating what days I did and did not get off, simply because those are the times of the year I get to spend time with my family traditionally. For a classical shaman of the northern tradition there would be more stringent requirements, for an agnostic there would be fewer, but in the end these requirements are no different from any others.

It is important to me that I pray. It is not especially important to me that I keep incense at my desk all day.

So what about the Christian with a copy of the Lord's Prayer up who tries to save you? The evangelical Christian is required to proselytize as part of her faith, the faith of the coven that trained me years ago specifically forbade it. I am semi-tolerant of such behavior in moderation (they shouldn't push the point when I say no, but being asked along is fine), but its important to note that this isn't about what "they" can do: its about our relationship with the deities.

Recently I was asked along with some of the people I work with when they went to pray to a Buddhist equivalent to a land-wight. It was a beautiful experience that was quite obviously a matter of behavior. If I had said no, they would have gone on their way without me. I do not feel compelled to join, they don't treat me differently for not joining, and it takes place out of sight on an already established shrine. Praying in this manner is elegant and respectful, and it doesn't intrude on anyone who doesn't want to see.

It also doesn't require keeping a shrine on my desk.

Boundaries

This is a revised and expanded version of an essay from December 2008.

One of the things that we as a society seem to have is a poor grasp of emotional boundaries.

Through the course of our lives all of us build within ourselves an intricate set of boundaries and definitions. "This is who I am" and "this is who you are." For some people these boundaries are extremely well defined, for others they barely exist.

Read more over on Weaving Wyrd.

The Word Should

One of the constant struggles that we face in our lives as humans--let alone spirit workers--is the challenging hurdle of the word should.

There are a thousand things in any given moment that one should be doing. I should be cleaning, I should be doing laundry, I should be exercising more, I should be researching the stock market, I should be practicing hapkido, playing a game of Go, or studying for an exam, or reading the sagas, or reading at all, or founding an LLP, or writing software, practicing energy work, or working harder at my job.

It is true, I should be doing all of these things, and a thousand other things besides. I should be doing a lot of things, and at any given moment those shoulds can come around to bite me, with two predictable consequences:

• I cannot focus on an activity that I am working on, for knowledge of what I should be doing


• Given multiple possibilities in a given moment, I can become paralyzed and fall into loops.
  

This advice has shown up in a variety of formats through the years, and it basically comes down to this: live in the moment. If you are going to goof off today, goof off. If you are going to work, then get things done. If you have set your mind to do something, then do it and don't keep putting it off.

Should is not a very useful word. It implies a judgement of myself that I have no reason to make, it implies outside expectations of me which are not necessarily there, and it implies goals in my life that I do not necessarily have.

Rather than saying I should do something, it is much more useful to say what I will do as distinct from what I am doing. Anything that I will do later can wait until what I am doing is finished. There is no sense worrying about it. By the same token, if I need to do something, then there is no sense postponing it.

Going Back to the Basics

In all martial arts--and indeed just about every skill--there is a continual emphasis "going back to the basics." My Hapkido instructor--an 8 dan in Tae Kwon Do and an 8 dan in Hapkido--says that there are still things in his first Forms that he is still working on. In rapier fighting, Hapkido, and tantojutsu we drill footwork to death, because everything else comes from it and "sloppy stances make sloppy technique."

In Lessons of the Fundamentals of Go Kageyama repeatedly emphasizes the importance of going back to the basics in all things: from Go to Baseball to Cooking, saying of Go that:

When a beginner learns the game, the first things he should learn are the fundamental skills. When he advances to the point where he begins to think of himself as a strong player, the thing he needs to do to become even stronger is to go back and study the fundamentals once more.

No matter how good you are or how good you think you are, it is important to go back and revisit the basics. Yet it is tempting to say "I know that" or to gloss over the basics of a craft that we think we are good at, yet this is a grave mistake, as we like to say in Hapkido: "To consider yourself as knowledgeable is to commit an error." Once I get to the point where I believe myself as knowledgeable, I know something has gone horribly wrong, since I should be realizing how much more there is to learn--not praising myself for how much I think I know.

Occultism has a lot of the characteristics of a martial art. It has a nearly infinite progression, and many of the techniques simply cannot be mastered without repetition and practice. Some of the techniques can cause real harm to the practitioner, the client, or someone else and some are extremely difficult to learn. It is important to build those basic foundations before continuing, to quote Diana Paxson in Trance-Portation:

Even, or especially, if you already have a given skill, you must practice it regularly--several times a week--for about a month, or until you feel ready to go on. Those with more experience may actually find some of the early lessons harder, as they may have old habits to unlearn. However, you will find that these skills, once mastered, are useful in themselves and may provide a foundation that can support the practice of more esoteric skills like oracular and possessory work.

Yet many times people like to treat occultism as if it had no learning curve. As if one can simply spend a few minutes, read a book or two, and suddenly be an expert. Many others--some of whom actually are quite talented--have let their success go to their heads in whatever role they fill. As a result, they gloss over the basics in their own practice, having lost sight of their importance. As a result, they stop advancing and stop improving.

Breaking it Down

Having established that basics are important, what are the basics? Many of these vary by tradition, I think for most occultist practices the following makes a good starting point:

• Mindfulness practice
  
• Meditation, prayer, and/or devotional work.
  
• Grounding, Centering, Shielding
  

We can probably expand from there, but I throw those three categories of practice into "things you can't go wrong with," that anyone can learn and most people could benefit from knowing.

Mindfulness, as discussed previously helps us with the art of living consciously, of making each day count. The exact mechanism we use for the practice (I like mindfulness through breathing, but each individual may have different things that work better for them) can vary, but the essence of it remains the same: practice paying attention to something, practice seeing the world without preconceptions.

Meditation and prayer have a host of benefits for self-reflection and training the mind, along with getting us closer to the gods.

Just about every introductory book on some form of Occultism starts with Grounding, Centering, and Shielding in some form or another. Pathwalker's Guide starts out with a few basics in this area, Trance-Portation does as well. My Celtic Trad teachers repeatedly drilled into me "practice grounding, practice centering, practice shielding. If you do nothing else, practice those three." Everything else derives from them in some way, and they are the techniques that are most useful in our day-to-day lives.

Walking into a stressful meeting? Ground, Center, Shield.
Feeling overwhelmed at work? Ground, Center, Shield.
Roommate's depression rubbing off on you? Ground, Center, Shield.
Feeling anxious about tomorrow? Ground, Center, Shield.

etc.

It isn't a panacea by any means, but it is a good first step and it can't hurt. It is also fundamental to future practice, from thaumaturgy to theurgic magic, from journeying to blood walking, from Kabbalah to Shamanism, they all include some variation of grounding, centering, and shielding.

In terms of good examples of how training the basics can work, Trance-Portation does a great job of breaking down journeying into it's fundamental basics which can be practiced again and again. I hope to see more books like it in the future.

Further Reading

• Lessons in the Fundamentals of Go
  
• Trance-portation: Learning to Navigate the Inner World