I will try hard/ to be a spark of power/ I will, I'll never be your iron flower . . .

I took L's advice regarding trying out T. Thorne Coyle's Iron Pentacle meditation from her book Evolutionary Witchcraft (she's Feri/Reclaiming). I had been feeling like I lost my sexy like one loses one's keys and I only had nebulous ideas on how to get it back.

Now, in terms of my magical practice, I (mostly) make circle and/or grove for most of the wheel of the year, I do little charms and spells when I need something, I try to remember to light up my altars at least somewhat regularly to give thanks, I do some vision questing/meditation before bed on occasion . . .in other words, I'm like a half assed Catholic in the pagan world.

I've been reading more. Thorne's book is full of careful book marks of exercises I should give a go. But once I was almost done with the book and realized I would now need to actually do said exercises, I stalled out. Needless to say, I stopped reading it and conveniently picked up another book to avoid doing any bothersome work.

Now that I'm moved into my condo, I knew I needed to start fulfilling all of those promises I made to myself about being a better magical practitioner, treadmilling, writing, etc. because frankly there's no excuse anymore.

So Jow and I got home a bit earlier than expected yesterday and we had thought to maybe do one of Thorne's exercises. We brought our stuff in and I flipped open her book to find the Iron Pentacle meditation. Jow protested of course because he's v. methodical about doing each exercise in order. I pointed out that the IPM doesn't build on anything from her previous lessons (which I'd read) and it's what I need to work on in myself so let's start there. He also was unenthused at the time about doing magical work as we had eaten at cracker barrel and couldn't go for walkies because rain looked eminant. I pointed out if we didn't do the exercise right then, as soon as the laptop came on and the tv came on, there was no way our lazy asses were going to do anything because that is how we are.

So I then nominated him to go first while I read the exercise 'cause I'm gracious like that. So you know the layout of the IP, it looks like this. So, Jow can tell you his experiences in his blog or lj, I will tell you mine. First off, Bella (the cat) wanted to crawl all over us when each of us laid on the floor. Max (the other cat) who is no stranger to magic, disapproved strongly of this and shooed her off every time she tried. So you lay on the floor, arms and legs out stretched like a star(fish) and each limb represents one of the aspects as laid out in the diagram and the meditation goes through calling each piece back to yourself (sort of Soul Retrieval style) and then you meditate on feeling each bit connecting to each other in a star pattern.

So, I have crap spacial reasoning skills. As I was reading it to Jow, I was thinking, huh. I have no idea how this all connects in an orderly fashion. But when I was on the floor doing it myself while he read it, I felt the lines of the pentacle connecting in an orderly fashion. Now I had assumed (ass out of . . .) that the sex energy itself was going to be problematic and this was going to be like pulling teeth the whole way. But funnily, the sex energy came just fine in my forehead, my self came just fine in my hand (also surprisingly to me). When I got to Pride in my foot it felt painful, but it came (which is interesting, because I have dreams where huge hermit crabs attach themselves painfully to my Pride foot, I'm still trying to figure that mess out) and when I ran the circuit between the three, it went just fine. So I started to think, yeah! Maybe I just needed to remind myself.

No. When I got to power, it fizzled so much it was ridiculous. It felt like the alternator in my body just gave out (come on, come on, I see you turning! Please!). Passion flared up slightly better but it was like trying to light a candle that was mostly gutted. Once I started trying to run power through, well, power it was faint at best.

It was really interesting to me because I assumed that my lack of feeling sexy came from issues with my sex aspect, but it seems to be stemming from my power issues (it's hard to feel power*full after the last year I had) and I'm so worn out from everything, my passion has taken a beating. So those are things for me to think about.

What I really liked about this exercise was: (1) It was short, like my attention span. (2) I really liked doing it with Jow because we can compare notes and read the exercise for each other. (3) It's something I can incorporate into my shamanic practice. (4) I feel like I respond really well to reclaimist stuff. I need to stop being a snob about it, Thorne doesn't make any wonky anthropoloy claims, there's no need to not use something that works for me. (5) I feel like this is something I can do for a while and see where it takes me. I'm going to try to do it with Jow whenever we can and really work on this chapter. When I'm ready to move on from it, I'll move on from it and pick something else directly relevant to my life.