Week 2

Survived my first week into Wicca, the first of many, and onto the second, which deals with meditation.  This concept is integral to the study of Wicca, as well as to leading a healthy and balanced life.  Yesterday, we were asked to consider two different methods of meditation, Eastern and Western, and to see which best suits our personality by answer the following questions.

Do you like your life to be perfectly organized or do you not mind a bit of chaos?

Do you respond to most queries with action or with contemplation?

Are you active and mobile, or are you laid back and sedate?

Do you believe that every question has a definite, logical answer, or do you think that questions can sometimes beget more questions?

Are you naturally internally focused or externally focused?

Are you naturally patient or not?

Are you strong-willed, decisive, and direct?  Or are you easy-going and more indirect in your approach to people and tasks?

I find that I lean more towards the Eastern style of meditation, being more laid back, easy-going, and internally focused.  So much of the day is spent thinking and moving that I enjoy being able to simply sit quietly breathing or chanting a mantra.  The Western style of meditation has the same goal, but uses imagery and guided meditation to accomplish it.  I've not yet tried guided meditation, but this week will give me the opportunity to try it out and see how it works.

Today was spent simply learning to breathe.  Most of us, myself included, take this action for granted, something that happens automatically while we're out living our lives.  It takes time to sit and notice how we're breathing and to learn to take slow, deep breaths.  This is something that I learned during massage school, to ground and center myself by taking deep breaths and quieting the mind.  As the book states, I can use this whenever I feel stressed or unfocused to re-align my thoughts and emotions.  Breathing keeps us alive, it only makes sense that we should learn to do it well!