What Wicca means to me

Merry meet!

I feel that Wicca, or any Pagan path for that matter, can mean many different things to many different people at once.

For me Wicca started as a way of being able to become more in tune with the natural world around me and worship the old ways with the old Gods and Goddesses because Wicca is about the Earth or Gaia and protecting the world around you by not purposefully destroying it as well as helping to teach others how to protect Earth and care for her too.

I still very much believe in that aspect of Wicca. However I also believe that you constantly be learning and finding ways to improve yourself without harming any living thing (including yourself) or impinging on any living thing’s free will.

For instance I am really bad (hideously bad!) at visualisation during meditation. Try as I might I just can’t get myself to create the picture in my mind of those pretty fairies with blue wings holding their arms out to me inviting me to dance in the fairy ring with them. Or smoke rising up around me. I can’t get my brain to help me in creating the sensation of a tree growing behind me so distinctly that I can FEEL the bark. I don’t know whether it’s because I am doing something wrong or not but I just, so far, have not been able to do it.  HOWEVER this having been said this is where my personal concept of Wicca comes in. I believe in constantly improving myself. This means that I will be doing visual meditation practice (for now) twice a week for 10 minutes each and slowly working up to 10 minutes daily. And I will keep doing this until I can actually visualise things during meditation. Once I can then fantastic! Because I have learnt it but I will keep going because otherwise if I don’t practice I’ll end up square one with not being able to visualise again.

My Wicca also means helping those around you, whether animals or people. I have taken this onto myself to mean everything from getting non perishable food and basic toiletries to give to homeless people for Christmas, turning over pill bugs that have gotten stuck on their back, giving a teacher at school a chocolate you bought for them because you know their home life is really bad, helping rescue animals caught in traps, helping older people work out things on their phones and computers or simply across the road, and smiling at someone who looked like they needed it. Doing and giving random acts of kindness for people without expecting anything is return is a great feeling when you see the look of surprises and happiness on the other person’s face. It’s really touching and these simple acts of kindness can  not only improve someone’s day or week but maybe even their month as well as make the world just that little bit brighter.

I still follow the Wiccan Rede- “An it harm ye none, do what thou wilt.” However unlike most people who write about Wicca and Pagan paths that talk about this the tell you that messing with a person’s free will is wrong and against both the Rede and the Three Fold Law (whatever you send out into the world, good or bad, will come back on you threefold). But they specifically mention a person. In my personal concept of Wicca that I am crafting for myself I follow the meaning of the Rede to mean that messing with any living things free will is against the Rede. After all creating a spell that makes all bunnies do your bidding like stealing children’s Easter eggs on the Christian’s Easter so that they can give them to you may seem like a good concept of the time but the bunnies are living things and therefore you would be breaking the Rede.

I wasn’t born into a Pagan family and therefore I haven’t been studying as a young child. I think even if both my parents were Pagan of some sort though I still don’t think they would have started teaching me until I was at least 16 so I could choose if I wanted that religion. (My mom is Atheist, my dad is a Christian and my boyfriend is an Alchemist.) My parents never pushed religion on me as a kid because they wanted me to be able to look at them objectively, and if I so wished, choose my own path. Or if I didn’t choose a path then that was still alright for them because they would love me just the same. Point is with not having started to learn about Wicca when I was very young means I am studying all the basics that a Pagan born child would know and more. But the advantage I have that they might not, the gift that my parents gave me, is that I am learning everything from scratch which means I know, when I make a decision about something I incorporate into my beliefs and path, that I am deciding that for myself and not potentially being influenced by the beliefs or teachings of my parents which some pagan born children may have.

I am crafting my own path and enjoying it! J

Merry part!