Spiritual humdrum

In the spirit of learning in public, I am going to share a recent failure in my spiritual practice.

I’ve become an armchair wizard.

I read devotional texts. I make offerings. I dream. I keep the holy days. I meditate. I pray at the shrine twice daily. I might take a devotional walk here or there. It’s all passive routine and habit now. I used to write liturgy more often, but most of my liturgy for my seasonal holidays has been written now, so… writing has fallen off the wagon.

Hela recently threw up her hands at me – metaphorically – and explained that she wants me to do the work. The spirits have said that they are effectively ‘full’ and don’t want more offerings. They want me to commit to devotional actions, like practicing spirit flight or tinkering with seidr skills. Hela told me to stop worrying about maintaining relations with the spirits; calling on the spirits to do the craft of practice will further the relationships themselves.

One could argue, I suppose, that both I and the gods are a little bored!

I happened to get a tarot reading from a fellow Troth member recently who ended up confirming the same – the time is now to prepare for deeper spiritual workings.

For the past nine months, there have been major shifts in the organization and presence of my spirits: various deities organized themselves into groups, like the Holy Mothers; peripheral spirits settled deeper into my practice, such as Jack, as a storytelling ally; newer spirits emerged; older allies returned; and so on.

I remember panicking last summer as I felt these seismic shifts happening. It felt like too many People were asking for my attention. In these past nine months, the spirits have been working with me on how ADHD has been affecting my attention span and capacity to perceive spirits. I was also gifted a sigil in a dream to explain the working power dynamics and hierarchy of spirits in my practice; it was a great boon. A vision also guided me: the gods suggested that they are a storm of beautiful butterflies that I get entranced by (which has, frankly, been a decade-long issue). The goal has been to focus on one butterfly so that I can deepen my practice with that one deity. I could presumably switch my focus to another butterfly, but what has co-creatively emerged is that Hela is the focus of my deity worship alongside an ancestral hearth practice. Freya and Queen Guinevere are her co-Queens who oversee domains in my practice that fall outside of Hela’s jurisdiction (like Freya overseeing my physical wellbeing or Guinevere guiding my storytelling).

Granted, I think the underlying subtext of my central worship of Hela has been present all along, but that I needed to really dive in and clarify what I needed from my worship and practice. Monasticism still feels like the right goal for me, but she has asked me to wait until she declares me ready to take the oath.

I recently learned to perform the Birth of Taelisin which feels like an appropriately skaldic tale to herald this new phase in my practice, especially now that I am four months into an oral storytelling apprenticeship.

If I want to take a more positive spin on all this, one could say I was pregnant with the gifted sigil for nine months, and now having given birth to it, I need to tend to the new life of my spiritual practice.

Have you ever fallen into a more passive state of practice? What shocked you out of it?