Hibiscus Moon said...

Can you tell us more about how you do your pathworking meditation? I would love to hear more about that.

----------------------------------------------------------

I would be glad to try.

I posted last night and this morning found the post garbled and at least half of it missing. I will rewrite it and post it again later. sorry. blogger must have had a hiccup last night.

Here is the second rendition, I hope I didn't leave anything out.
----------------------------------------------------------

I was a solitary witch in the most 'living in a bubble' sort of way. I had only a few books, I never thought to do research or buy more books or even search the internet. I was really content with my knowledge of the goddess and everything else was secondary.

I worked off and on with meditation. When I was interested in Shinto I tried it. When I got into a little bit of Yoga I tried it. My brother taught karate as a lifestyle instead of a sport and he persuaded me to try meditation. I had so-so success with it and never really worked at it much.

A few years ago I started working on it more as a stress reducer than as a spiritual practice and found that with some practice I was able to shut up some of the mind chatter for a short time and that was a huge stress reducer.

Backing up a little bit; I lived in the southwest for many years and was very interested in the shamanic journeying that is part of the spiritual practice of many of the Pueblo Indians. But my understanding was that this work was augmented by drugs, primarily peyote, and fasting, often to the point of starvation. So while I was interested in it, I also accepted the 'scientific' explanation that it was primarily hallucinations brought on by extreme physical stress and drugs.

A few years ago when I began doing much more studying of the craft and researching of topics that interested me I did some reading on pathworking and tried it myself for quite a while. I think I had some inhibitions against it, didn't really believe that it could work, or at least that it would work for me and never had any success.

Then I discovered guided meditations and found that some worked very deeply for me and some not at all, the imagery had to be just right for me for it to work. And it had to be simple or it just became more mind chatter rather than less.

I started looking for guided meditations for pathworking and discovered that there were very few, most were too detailed and I somehow got the sense that even the narrator didn't believe this stuff.

Then I found Ariel's meditations online, including one called Working with Your Guide. Ariel's meditations can be found here and they can be downloaded at iTunes.

The Working with Your Guide meditation is guided, but you have to fill in the details yourself.
I did this meditation everyday for a few weeks and I still use it if I have trouble focusing on this.

My pathworking goes like this.
I do some breathing and relaxing exercises, like any meditation. Then I visualize myself standing at the top of a stone stairway that leads down into the ground. I concentrate on this visualization until I can feel the stones under my bare feet and I can reach out and touch the stone walls.

Then I go down the stairway and come into a room or center hallway. It is constructed all of stone, the sun is shining into it and a large room and two hallways lead off of this central area.

I wait there for my spirit guide, sometimes he is waiting there for me or he is sitting in the room, which is sort of a library. If there is no one there I wait. Sometimes I go into the room and look around but I don't go any farther. If no one shows up then nothing happens. If the meditation goes well and my spirit guide shows up he leads the way. Before the meditation ends I find myself back in this center hallway and then the visualization dissolves.

The key for me has been having a specific, detailed place to start the meditation. This stairway and room is so real it is nearly like a vivid memory. Until I found this technique I had no success with pathworking. Just clearing my mind and hoping someone would show up and talk to me did not work, ever.

This is something that no one ever told me and I never found it in anything that I read about pathworking. It is worth trying for anyone who has tried pathworking with no success.

This has been a long roundabout way of telling this, but many people have told me that they have had no success with pathworking. I think it takes time to find a technique that will work for you, to let go of the inhibitions against this and to let down your guard enough to let whatever is going to happen...happen.