The Three Catalysts

This post started out as a continuation of the Pagans and Depression series but ended up taking on a life of its own, so please forgive its length and rambling-ness. 

Whether your spiritual path is Wicca, Buddhism, Catholicism, or the First Church of Some Dude Named Leroy, what gives it validity isn’t the name or the vocabulary words, nor is it the tools and trappings. What makes a path valid is its effect on your life. 

Does your spirituality help you cope with the slings and arrows of daily life? Does it encourage you to become a better person? Does it lead you to grow and change? Does it give you tools to transform yourself and your world?

If so, then in my mind it doesn’t matter if you’re an AnarchoFeminist Klingon Pagan or a Semi-Radical Ninja Feri. There are plenty of people in this world who cling to dysfunctional or stagnant ways simply out of habit and tradition, and whether those ways fall under the umbrella of mainstream acceptance or not, religion is not spiritual if it doesn’t change you. 

In my experiences in the Craft I’ve come to the understanding that there are essentially three kinds of transformative experiences on a spiritual path, each with its own blessings and pitfalls. Eventually all three are going to find you; it is through the dynamic interplay of the three that we become mature practitioners. 

The three categories are ecstasy, practice, and breakdown.

Ecstasy includes all those Peak Experiences that walk hand in hand with our religious lives. Moments of mystical unity with the Source, however they come, are bound to change us, and that’s why we have them—to remind us why we’re here, what we’re working toward, and why it all matters. 

As awesome (in the true sense of the word) as these experiences are, however, they can be the most slippery. How do we take an indescribable feeling like ecstatic union with the Divine and translate that into our daily lives? How does that rush of joy really affect us the next day when there are dirty diapers and office jobs to deal with?  

I’ve had many ecstatic experiences in the last 13 years, but not all of them have led to lasting change in my day-to-day existence. Usually what happens is we have the Big Moment, it passes, then after a day or two of walking around feeling like a completely new human being, we start to forget. Without some hard work, we go back to the way things were within a month.

It’s absolutely possible to take that energy of inspiration and connection and use it for something, but it’s difficult, and the day after, often it seems almost like we dreamed it all. It is vital, however, to learn how to integrate mystical experience into the everyday; ecstasy is grace, transformative energy handed to us at no charge, and if we squander the gifts of the universe eventually the universe stops handing them out.

That’s where the second category, practice, comes in.

If there’s one thing you should know about Practice, it’s this: it is not glamorous. Practice is not big bonfires and Circles cast in flame. It’s the way you live your path day after day, sunup to sundown, and sometimes, well, it sucks. It’s grueling work that slowly chips away at your established patterns and illusions, and sometimes it’s painful, because in order to transform something you must first invoke it. 

My realization has been that what you do every day matters more than what you do once in a while. Your daily work may not seem like it makes a lot of difference at the time, but it serves several vital functions: it lays the foundation for all the Big Moments to come, it brings a calm and stable center to your life, and it enables you to cope better with the third category of change when it inevitably hits you.

It doesn’t matter how many trance journeys and Drawing Downs you undergo—if you don’t back it up with daily meditation and devotional ritual, none of that ecstatic energy is going to stay with you. Your practice opens you up to a greater influx of Divine energy, and it allows negativity to flow out of you more easily instead of clogging up your life.

That’s how the Pagan Community ends up with such a large percentage of people who claim to have been Pagan for twenty years yet can’t hold down jobs or relationships, are constantly drowning in drama, and have the aura of adolescent chipmunks on acid. You can’t just show up eight times a year and expect your life to come effortlessly into rhythm with the Dance; you have to commit to more than getting laid and drinking mead.

A house with no foundation will blow over in the first stiff wind.

Everyone, regardless of how long they’ve been practicing, has times when they’d rather sleep in. Everyone has fallow periods when the idea of meditating is about as appealing as a lobotomy performed with a rusty nail. It’s always hard. It doesn’t matter who you are. But the fact that it’s hard means it’s working. 

Why? Because you can’t change what isn’t there. If there is no resistance, there’s no need for transformation. Resistance becomes the raw material for creating something powerful and purposeful. The energy we spend fighting ourselves is powerful energy indeed, and our job is to alter the course of that energy, diverting it from self-sabotage to self-actualization.

On the grand stage of spiritual drama, Breakdown is the diva. Breakdown is the Tower card where Ecstasy is the World and Practice is Temperance. Traumatic experiences, deaths, crises of faith, and bouts with depression (although usually less dramatic than, say, a nervous breakdown) are all tools of the Tower, tools of the chaos that periodically overtakes our lives. 

Some people become addicted to the breakdown because they won't commit to practice and either don't trust or block out ecstasy.  Those who believe themselves powerless or who give away their power can only affect change through what amounts to spiritual violence.  The term "drama queen" really should be "drama junkie," because often that's exactly what drama queens are--they are  unable to function unless life is just a big Mongolian Catastrofuck.  It's an oddly pervasive form of self-abuse among Pagans; the "fringe" nature of our communities leaves the door open for all manner of potentially dangerous pathologies.  Our responsibility to mature extends beyond just ourselves; it extends to our tribes and communities who need functional adults, not attention-starved children.

Why do bad things happen to good Pagans? Hell if I know. I believe there is an order to the Universe, and that everything happens because of a complex web of choice and interaction, but I also know that Web is far too vast for me to see its edges, or even the weave beyond my own life. So I don’t waste my time shaking my fist at the sky (okay, not much); instead I’d rather figure out what I can take from what falls on me, and how I can use the embers of the present to rise into the flame of a new way of being. 

Crisis in all its forms is a vitally important catalyst for change. It gives us an opportunity to reassess our path, to question our beliefs, and thereby grow stronger in them (or change them completely). “Losing your religion” doesn’t mean you’ll never find it again. It could mean that there’s something you have been ignoring or denying for years and the gods have finally decided enough is enough and slapped you in the face with it. It could mean that you’ve been heading in the wrong direction and need to step back and figure out if your life is really going where you want it to go. Often breakdowns occur because we repress and deny necessary change until the Universe decides, “Okay, I tried to do this the easy way, but nooooo…so put your helmet on, dumbass, here we go!” 

Then again, sometimes crisis doesn’t really have anything to do with us initially. The fact that I was raped doesn’t mean the gods sent the rapist to get my attention and make me change my life. It means that some evil motherfucker decided he had the right to use a woman’s body for his own enjoyment and my will was irrelevant, and I couldn’t fight him off. It was not a gift from the gods, and it was not a failure on my part to put my “good intentions” out there. It was the horrifying result of my life intersecting with someone who had violent intentions. I had no choice in the matter. Sometimes you don’t—I don’t care what the Law of Attraction people say. If we have free will that means other people do too, and sometimes their will is going to hurt us. Occasionally you’re just going to be in the path of the tornado. That’s just part of life. 

However, once something terrible has happened to you, you do have a choice, and that’s when the opportunity for evolution arises. When someone dear to you dies, when you are diagnosed with cancer, when the world falls to hell all around you, no one can dictate the person you will become, except for you. 

Shit happens. It’s up to you to fertilize something with it. 

What I have found is that into every life, a certain amount of change must fall. If you work through your issues on your own with the help of your practice, you can avoid some of the Cosmic 2x4s; bad things will still happen, but you won’t bring so many on yourself. I speak from experience when I say it’s far easier to face your negative patterns through meditation and prayer than it is through your entire life collapsing and forcing you to rebuild yourself from the ground up.

Comments

[Sheila]

Right on! I especailly LOVED what you wrote about crisis and free will...I am relieved to hear someone honor the complexity of life and our interactions rather than focusing soley on one part like "the seceret" folks. Thank you. I'm truely encouraged by your words.

[Derek]

Wow. Therein, somewhere, is my diagnosis. Good stuff.

[Kimberly]

I have just recently started reading your blog, and every post seems to have well thought out purpose, even if its only to relieve your mind and for no one else's benefit. This one was something that hit close to home. I've copied down peices of it to tape to my mirror so that my husband (who is going through a break down moment of his own) will have to read it, and maybe it will help. Thank you. :D

[sravana]

Though I can't wait for you to get back to depression (oops - that didn't come out right...), this post was informative and illustrative of why this Moon opposed by Uranus, Sun square Saturn woman has some issues with her religion not being transformative.

Thank you!

[Hecate Demetersdatter]

Diane,

You write such incredibly good, good stuff. Thank you.

[Beth]

SO, so applicable to any path in life, and so clearly articulated. I'd like to link to this post from my blog -- would that be all right? Much food for thought.

[Sylvan]

Beth:

Go right ahead. :)

[Dani]

Thank you for this. A friend referred me to your site today and I have had a wonderful time reading your recent posts. This one especially was powerful for me.

Bringing the spiritual into the everyday can be challenging until you realize that the everyday already IS spiritual. I agree that the "ritual junkies" among us (sometimes I will admit to falling in that category!) get caught up in the high of the Ecstasy, as you describe it above. But you are correct that it is in our everyday Practice of our beliefs, in our daily expressions of our Spirit, where we all should focus more attention. Life can't always be about dancing nekkid round a bonfire! (Though it is often nice when it is. ;)

Blessings,
Dani

[Heather]

I was referred by the same person as Dani and just e-mailed her to thank her for the link. You have beautifully articulated some of my dearest-held beliefs. Thank you thank you! I'm going to print this out to remind me as I'm going through the practice-part of my life!

Metta,
Heather