Silence

So I am almost done my silence spree. 18 hours almost done. Short one or four slips. I found that when I got really irritated or surprised or wasn't really thinking about it (ie. when I'd been reading and my mom asked me a simple question) that I would slip a couple of words out and then catch myself and mentally swear a couple times then go back to the silence.

I found that it was easy to keep the silence up when I was alone, but when my parents came home and brother, they didn't really get it, so they kept asking me questions or trying to get me to reply to them, but not understanding why I was doing this. I've found it both easy and hard, satisfying and yes irritating at the same time. I feel like Emma and I connected being home and both not speaking today. Though after a couple hours she started barking at me, actually it could've been the dancing around like a weirdo while no one was home, but mostly the not speaking to her even the little thoughts I would usually just "think out loud" about, like calling her from outside to come in, or to not run off before I got to wipe her feet. It was kind of silly, but nice too. She's probably the only one who understood me without my having to write out what I was trying to get across on paper.

So, just a little under an hour left of this, so I'm going to go do some meditation and get ready for dinner.

Blessed Be.

Mediation and Silence

So I have been trying to keep up the meditation challenge, but I think I just passed out last night without actually meditating, so I decided that today I was going to do a day of silence so make up for it. I don't have school today, so it should be interesting. I'm going to aim for 18 hours, since I started at 10:30pm last night when my parents went to bed and I realized I was too tired to meditate. So I should be able to speak after dinner tonight. We shall see if I make it that far. And what kind of things I notice while holding this vow of silence. Thus far I've found it really hard not to talk outloud to myself when trying to figure out things (like how many hours I have left, lol) which just tells me how often I talk to myself O.o and also my mom keeps trying to talk to me and get me to talk back, which is kind of mean, but I wrote it down and she said okay, but still kind of tried to trick me into talking.

It's Earth Day today, so I think I'm going to get some clothes on and go see what the Earth has to say today, since I'm probably more apt to listen today.

Blessed Be.

Some more magical workings added to the list. . .

So added to the meditation challenge, or rather because of it, I've been inspired to buy a new book "Aphrodite's Magic" and now Saturnine and I, along with another friend are going to be doing a long-distance spell/workshop. The whole book is one big working, like a workshop you'd find at a pagan goddess conference. Getting in touch with your body, loving yourself and all that feel good self-esteem working-on lessons.

"It's a recipe book showing us how to become women of more wisdom and power, and helps us to cook up more love for ourselves and each other." -Annie Sprinkle, Ph.D. Sexologist

So it's like going to a conference and doing the workshop, but from the convenience of your own home. Plus you can do it over a longer period of time, as a spell. We are going to start on Beltane, with reading through introduction and meditating on it as part of the Beltane rituals, and then on the full moon we do the first ritual, at a synchronized time or potentially over Skype. Then every month we do the readings on the ritual and meditate on it, recording our thoughts on here or in a journal and discussing what we find resonates with us from each ritual and each chapter of the book. There are 7 rituals after the Beltane one, so it'll be a 7 month long spell working. Should be quite a buildup by the end. I can hardly wait to get started. But first I have to get through exams!

Anyways, that's all I've got for now. If anyone else reads this and can get a copy of the book and wants to compare notes - that would be totally awesome!

Meditation Update 2

So after that second night with the meditation I haven't had much success with getting into a trance state again. I've been so tired from only getting 6 or 7 hours sleep when I'm used to like 10 or 9 on the weekends, that I have just started lying down, or only getting through about 20 minutes of grounding and trying to focus on mediating but everything else in my day comes to my mind.

I think I need to set asside an hour or even just half an hour before I go to bed where I turn off the computer, light the candles and get ready for bed, before I get too tired to be able to concentrate on meditating and I start falling asleep or just wanting to lie down.

On the upside I've gotten more random trances in since I started this, that I almost thought I was falling asleep through my day but realized I'd actually just been meditating for 10 minutes. It happened the other day when I was cuddling with Nick, we were just lying down listening to music and not really talking and I tranced out and then came to gradually, so much that I thought I'd fallen asleep. On Thursday we were doing yoga together and at the end they have a meditation section to close off on and I actually got into it, but the video ends really abruptly and starts into a very loud and jarring infomercial.

Tonight is a new week, and a full moon, so I'm going to try to incorporate that into my meditation. Maybe use the meditation as part of the full moon ritual. We shall see how it goes.

Anyways, off to the States for me. So I'll be back later!

Mediation Challenge: Update #1

So I started the Meditation Challenge last night, and didn't really get anywhere. I tried to listen to SJ Tucker's music to zone out to and try to ground, center and clear my mind, but I kept being distracted by little things, or noticed that I didn't like the song that was on for the purpose of meditating, etc. Suffice it to say I lasted about 3 minutes and then ended up giving up and just going to sleep. I had a dream, which I don't really remember now, but it was vivid.

Tonight I tried again. This time, I turned off the lights, lit candles and put on a yoga/meditation cd that had nature sounds in it, and I did have sustained meditation for at least 30 minutes. I still don't really see anything like in the movies when people have meditation trances and they physically see themselves in a different place interacting with people or animals or anything like they were really there. There was no desert, no First Slayer, no message for me. I did however get the sensation of flying, the brief visual idea of being in the valley between two mountain ranges, seeing the forests growing there and then I had an aerial view from above of what looked like the same area, but then seemed to be more of a grand canyon feel, of earth eroded by water flowing through it over the millenia. Then I was back to blackness and random sensations of rocking like in water. Then I saw a lion. It looked me right in the eyes, roared, shook it's mane and then I resurfaced in my bedroom.

Not sure what it all means, but it's progress. I didn't really see myself at all, didn't get any real messages that I could figure out, but hey, it didn't finish within 2 minutes of starting, and I got some good sensations and a few pictures. So that's good enough for me for the second time around.

Night all!

Meditation Challenge

I have been challenged by my friend to join her on her meditation challenge, but I see it more like a quest. The Meditation Challenge as penned by my friend Saturnine is simple. Meditate everyday. Well, on second thought it's not that simple. Meditating is pretty hard. I've gotten a bit good at it but not in long or concentrated segments of time. I can 'ground and center' pretty well, and the timing on it is getting shorter, but extended meditations with actual results and goals, visualizations, etc. is a bit out of my reach right now.
I'm really excited to attempt this challenge! I have been having an issue with negativity lately myself, but mostly in regards to self-image and self-esteem (as seen in my previous post), plus with it getting down to the brass tacks of end of term exams in school, I'm getting really stressed out! So all the more reason to get on board the quest! In the post (linked above) Saturnine came up with some rules for herself for the challenge, so I'm going to do that for myself too. I'm borrowing some of her rules and making some of my own.

1. Keep it short, but do it everyday. This isn't a marathon.
2. Choose a focus. Either a sound machine, meditation CD, candle, singing bowl or mandala.
3. Meditate before bed. This will allow me to fall asleep after and as well as not feel guilty when my mind inevitably wanders.
4. To begin with I'm going to just try some simple visualizations and then progress to scenery and hopefully eventually meditation quests
   
5. Allow God/dess/es and allies to join me and help me release my problems.
6. Do until sleep or until mind wanders too far.
7. Sleep
   
8. Record my memories of it in the morning so I can compare how it affected my sleep and dreams and how well I remember them. This will also help me with the dream journal I keep meaning to keep.
   

So those are my rules. I think I will start tonight. So here's the other side of it - if you are reading this, you should try it too! Join the challenge! *smacks with gauntlet* Do you take the challenge or continue to live the way you have been? *Dun dun DUH* We shall see how this goes. I'll try to do daily or weekly updates on how it's going. Then the end of the month I'll post my challenge completion journal and compare to my friends who joined in on the challenge.

Hormonal/Self-esteem lacking rant... please disregard.

Do you ever get those days where you feel like a useless part of society? Where your self-esteem is about 20ft below ground and you don't want to leave the house?

I'm having one of those days.

I have put on so much weight since school started I feel disgusting. My mom took me out shopping to get clothes that fit me since she's apparently sick of looking at me in tight t-shirts, and I've gone up at least 3 sizes. I had to get new bras because the old ones just wont hold them in anymore. I hate mirrors.

Then I was talking about getting clothes for Ania's wedding from this cool website and she rubbed it in my face that I don't have a job and that I can't even afford to go to the wedding (ie. getting a present) let alone getting the steampunk clothes to wear to it.

and then I came in to my room and looked at job ads and there's like none that I would apply for. I can't do construction, I'm not going to fuck up my hands working at a fast food place (ie. deep fryer hands part 2) and I don't think the rest are even real.
At one point I came to the conclusion that I am worth more dead than alive, because alive I am -$7,000 on my line of credit, plus another -$10K in OSAP debt. But dead, they'd all be paid off. Now considering the amount of death that has been staring me in the face lately, this is a stupid line of thought... but hey, I'm having one of those days.