🧿 for the ask meme!
Thank you!!
🧿 - Did you have any other spiritual beliefs before discovering your current practice?
Yes and no! Meaning: I think my current practice is a natural evolution of what I've always been up to, but there has been some meandering along the way.
I have early memories of being taught animist and folk magic adjacent things - talking to trees, making rowan berry necklaces for protection, family talking about how there was a tomte in the house and älvor in the meadow, and reading everything I could find (not much back then) about folk magic and beliefs.
When I was around 6 I think I would have identified as a Christian, even if it was a strange home brew sort of Christianity and not something I was really taught at home. I learned to read very early and had a child's Bible and access to a large quantity of 19th and early 20th century books and that does things to a kid. What I remember being taught at home was pretty much that people (and animals!) go to heaven when they die, and that I could pray to God or to my guardian angel for protection. My mum had a book about people's encounters with angels that fascinated and terrified me and I think that laid the groundwork for some things. We also had these cassettes with guided meditations that I would play around with from a very early age, so the concept or journeying in your mind or outside of the body was kind of always there.
I can't remember when I stopped identifying as a Christian, but by my early teens that was behind me. I remember clearly that I decided no not be confirmed, not because I didn't believe, but because I believed in something else. I was bringing home everything I could find in the library on magic and the paranormal. A lot of things back then were either very new age or neo wiccan flavoured, and then I had relatives that suggested I read people like Jung when they saw I was interested in the esoteric.
I think for a while in my teens I tried to pray to the god and goddess as amalgamations of all gods and all goddesses because I'd read about that somewhere, but it never sat quite right. It was more of a forced replacement of the evening prayers I'd incorporated as a child, and I stopped using those when I got the sense that I only did because of routine. I think after that I decided that deities weren't really my thing - until D came crashing into my life in 2015.
Before that, a period of time where I was still discovering my own things, while at the same time my mother got involved in a religious organisation (cult) that I was kind of on the fringes of. Lots of meditation but apart from that not really a cohesive practice as I remember it - I was more into metaphysics in a sort of general way. Those metaphysics aren't really in conflict with my current beliefs, but they're on a level where they don't really feel relevant most of the time. If there is an unspeakable creator force out there, what am I supposed to do with that information? I get more out of crawling into a ditch to speak to the land.
