More women than ever are incorporating some kind of spiritual practice into their daily lives, and not always in traditional religious form, but as alternative or hybrid practices. In Practicing the Presence of the Goddess, Barbara Ardinger offers a wide variety of meditations and personal rituals to help women honor the feminine spirit and commune with the Goddess. These include creating a sacred space at home, building a meaningful altar, using ritual and meditation to enrich awareness, and inventing new rituals to celebrate personal events. The author's wry, gentle humor and loving attitude shine through the text, which offers possibilities ranging from bringing love into one's life to having a heart-to-heart with the Goddess.
This practical approach to a growing movement offers suggestions for honouring the feminine spirit and communing with the Goddess. It includes chapters on the Goddess of the spheres, pagans and witches, re-creating the sacred dimension, altar etiquiette and invoking deities. The author shows how how to build a meaningful altar, use rituals and meditations to enrich awareness and invent new rituals to celebrate personal events. Her suggestions run from the mundane, to the exotic, to the extraordinary.
Bring the presence of the Goddess into your daily spiritual practice with Goddess Meditations , a book of 73 unique guided meditations created for women and men who want to find a place of centeredness and serenity in their lives, both alone and in groups, either in rituals or informally. Call on a Hestia for a house blessing ... the White Buffalo Calf Woman for help in learning from your mistakes ... Aphrodite for love and pleasure ... Kuan Yin for compassion. Although it's directed toward experienced meditators, this book includes guidelines for beginners about breathing, safety, and grounding, as well as instructions for rituals and constructing an altar. Also featured is the powerful "Goddess Pillar Meditation," based on the Qabalistic Middle Pillar Meditation; nine Great Goddess meditations that address issues such as protection, community, and priestess power; and seven meditations that link goddesses to the chakras.
Humorous and witty entries for every day of the year provoke new ideas and new ways of exploring paganism as a spiritual practice, revealing how contemporary spiritual experiences show up in the most unexpected places. Original.
This is a handbook on how to perform sacred ceremonies in the tradition of Goddess spirituality in one's own home with ordinary household items. An annual cycle of celebrations is included, as is advice on how to set up an altar and use simple tools. The author, a practitioner of Wicca (witchcraft), expounds the life-affirming, eco-feminist values of that tradition. Suggestions for rituals and ideas for inventing one's own are given. Poetry and blessings blend in a title which supports celebration of the Goddess image in daily life. These rituals are personal, moving rites which celebrate love and peace, and which act as meditations for considering new rituals, old traditions, and the course of women's lives.
A manual of magical and mystical techniques for contacting the Goddess within • Draws from two thousand years of source material to demonstrate the ongoing reality of the feminine power and its relevance for today • Includes rituals, exercises, and techniques for evoking the Goddess • Explains how the dynamics of the sacred or magic circle serve as a guide to living harmoniously In this wide-ranging view of magic and ritual, Gareth Knight demonstrates the presence of the Goddess throughout Western esoteric traditions. From Greek myths and the Mysteries of Isis to the emergence of the cult of the Blessed Virgin and seventeenth-century Rosicrucian spiritual alchemy, he shows how the Goddess--the elemental consciousness of Earth--has revealed herself in different times and places. Honoring her many guises, Knight explores the powers of the Goddess as maiden, mother, initiator, protector, sorceress, and faery queen. Guided meditations on each of these qualities lead the practitioner into direct contact with the potent healing energy of the Divine Feminine. The author also offers rituals, exercises, and other practical tools for integrating the Western magical tradition with worship of the Goddess. He shows how we, and our planet, have suffered due to the repression of the feminine principle. For our own health, and that of our environment as well, we must recognize the power of the Goddess within to reconstitute and guide our existence.
The hard work required to make God real, how it changes the people who do it, and why it helps explain the enduring power of faith How do gods and spirits come to feel vividly real to people—as if they were standing right next to them? Humans tend to see supernatural agents everywhere, as the cognitive science of religion has shown. But it isn’t easy to maintain a sense that there are invisible spirits who care about you. In How God Becomes Real, acclaimed anthropologist and scholar of religion T. M. Luhrmann argues that people must work incredibly hard to make gods real and that this effort—by changing the people who do it and giving them the benefits they seek from invisible others—helps to explain the enduring power of faith. Drawing on ethnographic studies of evangelical Christians, pagans, magicians, Zoroastrians, Black Catholics, Santeria initiates, and newly orthodox Jews, Luhrmann notes that none of these people behave as if gods and spirits are simply there. Rather, these worshippers make strenuous efforts to create a world in which invisible others matter and can become intensely present and real. The faithful accomplish this through detailed stories, absorption, the cultivation of inner senses, belief in a porous mind, strong sensory experiences, prayer, and other practices. Along the way, Luhrmann shows why faith is harder than belief, why prayer is a metacognitive activity like therapy, why becoming religious is like getting engrossed in a book, and much more. A fascinating account of why religious practices are more powerful than religious beliefs, How God Becomes Real suggests that faith is resilient not because it provides intuitions about gods and spirits—but because it changes the faithful in profound ways.
Michael Scanlan's message is that prayer cleanses from sin, drives away temptations, comforts the fainthearted, gives new strength to the courageous, brings travelers safely home, calms the waves, confounds robbers, feeds the poor, overrules the rich.
A shamanic ritual with the Egyptian goddess Sekhmet to bring about alchemical transformation at the deepest levels of your being • Details how to work with Sekhmet to transform your negative behavior patterns and character flaws into creative impulses and higher energies • Leads you through guided visualizations, illustrated with photographs, to Sekhmet’s chapel at the Temple of Karnak and through her shamanic ritual of transformation • Includes initiations, rites of passage, and transmissions from Sekhmet to release your fears and anger and rejuvenate your body, mind, and spirit Sekhmet is the lioness goddess of the Egyptian Pantheon, a fierce protector of truth, balance, and the Cosmic order of Ma’at. Known and feared as the goddess of war and destruction, she also represents the transformative power of kundalini energy, or sekhem, and is the main goddess to harness this power for healing. As “She Who Comes in Times of Chaos,” she takes offerings of fear, rage, and weakness and transforms them into alchemical gold, the universal medicine for physical, emotional, and soul healing. In this book you are guided through a shamanic ritual of alchemical transformation and initiation with Sekhmet, working with this powerful goddess to release your most deeply rooted negative behavior patterns and be reborn into a more purified state of consciousness. Using intensive self-examination exercises to help you prepare to meet the goddess, the author leads you through a guided visualization, illustrated with photographs, to an ancient statue of Sekhmet in her chapel at the Temple of Karnak. There, you will be shamanistically devoured by the goddess, directly experiencing the alchemical process of transformation in the belly of Sekhmet until you are rebirthed as a fully realized adult child of the goddess. You will experience how your offering of pain, fear, rage, and self-sabotage is digested, absorbed, and assimilated by Sekhmet while you are initiated into the alchemy of total transformation. The initiations, rites of passage, and transmissions from Sekhmet included in the journey restructure the most important aspects of your body, mind, spirit, and soul. This journey of shamanic death, illumination, and rebirth in the belly of Sekhmet provides an opportunity to heal on all levels and allows you to release your rage, anger, and fear as you transform the energies that maintained them into creative and constructive solutions that benefit yourself, your community, and the planet.
In this timeless classic, missionary and mystic Frank C. Laubach unveils a profound spiritual practice: infusing every minute of our lives with divine presence. With eloquence and simplicity, Laubach invites readers to play the ultimate game—a game where each moment becomes sacred, where the mundane transforms into the miraculous. Through practical wisdom and heartfelt anecdotes, he shows us how to weave God into the fabric of our existence, turning ordinary hours into extraordinary encounters. Whether you’re seeking deeper communion, inner peace, or a life of purpose, The Game with Minutes offers a path to abiding communion with the Lord.
