Welcome, part 4:
Wiccan Adventure
& Wiccan Prayer

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5

The Action Part:
Wiccan Adventures of the Week

At the end of every lesson, you get the priceless opportunity to practice what you learn! This is the good stuff! This is where you get to take what you've learnt and fly it for yourself.

This is the core of the whole course.

Following research with action
is the most important part
of this or any spiritual study.

I'm all too human myself. I understand how easy it is to get busy or lazy and skip the action parts. But if you do, you're not becoming a Wiccan.

None of what you're learning here means anything unless you use it in real life. Learning all this without following it up with actual practice is like mixing a cake and then neglecting to bake it. Not very tasty!

It’s the final step that gives you the results you want.

This is the most vital part of the whole course — experiencing for yourself what it's really about. You can't learn Wicca without practicing, any more than you can learn swimming without going in the water! Just not possible.

Wicca is a spiritual path, not a religion or philosophy. In other words...

It's only real if you MAKE it real.

If you only read about it and think about it but don't actually do anything about it, you are not going to be a Wiccan.

So these assignments are the "practice" portion of Wicca as a spiritual practice. If you want to progress spiritually, all the information in the world is useless until you've turned it into action.

And that in a nutshell is the difference between a real Wiccan and a wanna-be — real Wiccans actually practice; wanna-be's just read and think and talk about it, without putting it into action.

In case I'm not being clear, let me state it plainly:

If you want to really BE a Wiccan,
you have to really DO what Wiccans do.

And it'll make Wicca a lot more fun for you to actually do this stuff!

Of course, you don't have to do this part — nobody's going to be checking up on you — but it's in your best interests.

You'll need these skills because future lessons will build on what you learnt earlier. So when you get to Circle Casting in Lesson 6, say, you’ll need to be really comfortable in the Grounding technique and drawing Pentacles — or you'll be struggling with your memory instead of actually experiencing the power of a Circle.

The more you do the practices, the more magickal this course will be for you. So please don't look on this as homework or a chore. This is the part where you will really begin to feel a connection with Nature, with yourself, with the Divine, and with Life.

So do yourself a favour, and DO THEM. You'll also be doing the Earth a big favour, which you'll figure out as you go through this year-and-a-day.

I hope it's your favourite part of the whole course!

The Inner Adventure: Your Reflections

And following your actions with reflection
is the second most important part
of spiritual development.

Reflection is how you cultivate a discerning, aware mind that is sensitive to the Divine, able to perceive subtle guidance and deeper reality.

So at the end of every adventure you'll be reminded to reflect on your experience:

	How it felt to go through it,
	Any difference you feel compared to before the adventure
	What you think of the experience as a whole
	What you've learnt by this experience
	And to write these things down in your journal, Book of Mirrors, or Book of Shadows (next week’s lesson will help you decide where you’ll keep your Reflections)

This is also part of the Adventure!

After all, if you aren't paying attention to what's happening, how it's affecting or changing you, and what the experience has taught you, you won't really be learning what Wicca is about.

And writing it is a very important part of the experience. If writing really doesn’t work for you, you can make brief point-form notes and draw (or paint, or collage) your Reflections. The important part is to put it on paper.

Why?

Because when you put your feelings and thoughts down on paper, it does several valuable things:

1. It takes indistinct ideas and fuzzy feelings, and brings them to clarity
   (You won’t even realise just how indistinct and fuzzy they are, until you put them to paper.)
2. It accesses a different part of your brain, bringing deeper levels of understanding
3. It reveals pieces of the experience that you won’t otherwise be aware of, allowing you to learn more about your Sacred Self
4. It integrates and gels your experience in different levels of awareness, so that you can remember and retain the benefits much more
5. It gives you something solid to look back on, so you can assess your progress
   All work on a spiritual or deep level is hard to keep track of, partly because it changes you as you go. There’s a tendency to think we’ve always been how we are now. And that makes it hard to notice how far you've actually come!
   Having a written record not only helps you remember your journey, it helps you gain confidence as you see how far you've progressed
6. It shows the Universe what you want and believe and intend — which enlists Divine assistance with these things. Another way to say this is... it gives power and permanence to what you are learning and becoming.
7. Best of all, this practice trains your brain to notice and remember spiritual and psychic occurrences in your life, which develops your intuition, psychic ability, and ability to perceive Divine guidance

So when it comes to the Reflections part of the lesson...

Know that you MUST reflect on these things
in order to learn the most about yourself,
access greater levels of Power, and
set clear intentions for the Universe to aid you.

To merely think about them
fails to empower you to the degree possible.

The time you give to this portion is a reflection of how much you value your soul and your journey into Wicca.

Wiccan Knowledge Self-Review:
A Wiccan Initiate Needs To Know

Each lesson comes with questions at the end for you to answer. Some of the questions will be easy to search for in the text, with the answers spelled out specifically; others will be implied or explained in long form and you’ll need to sum up for the answer.

This section serves two important functions:

1. To ensure that you've picked up the most important things, and
2. To reinforce and help you integrate what you've learnt

No sense in reading it and then forgetting, right? This will help make the knowledge part of you, something you really know, instead of just something you have to memorise.

This might seem a bit like being in school, if you're fresh outta there and still a little sensitized. But these review questions are for your benefit.

This isn't high school; we’re not checking up on you, and no one is insisting that you memorise useless bits of information. You're not here because you have to be.

You're here because you really want to learn about Wicca, right?

Well, these questions are designed to clarify the most important parts of the lesson — so you know if you understand what a Wiccan needs to understand — and to help you assimilate the information on deeper levels than mere short-term memory.

Each lesson builds on previous lessons, so you do need to understand and remember the important bits before you move on.

The review section is here to help you. I hope you can use it in this spirit.

The Sequence Of Learning Wicca:
What Comes First, Second, Third...

Most beginners want to know the sequence that a study or practice of Wicca should follow. I'll tell you a secret (not a big secret ) — there is no singular, required sequence.

There's a structure that we follow in doing a ritual or working magick, but not in whether you should start an altar first or do a ritual first, not in whether you should practice visualisation or meditation first. The order of these things doesn’t really matter. Do what's practical.

This course is going to present things in an order that makes sense: what you need to know this week, in order to be able to understand and do the lesson next week.

All the lessons build on the previous ones. It's just practical.

But that doesn’t mean this is the only way a Wiccan course could be sequenced. A lot of the stuff sorta needs to be covered all at the same time, but of course that's not possible. So we adjust and make it as smoothly functional as possible, to get you from the starting line to up and running right away.

Still, it's always a good idea to begin with an intention, a dedication, and a blessing. With that in mind, let me offer this...

Wiccan Prayer

The final thing I'd like to share with you in this lesson is a very beautiful Wiccan prayer. No one seems to know who wrote it, and I’ve made some modifications.

It might also be one of the first things you'll want to put in your Book of Shadows (but be sure to read that lesson first, as it will lay out a good way to start your Book of Shadows).

You can save this image to your computer, so you can print it out and pin it up, if you like. (Right-click, or Control-click for Mac.)

It's a lovely way to begin any Wiccan ritual or meditation. So in the spirit of this prayer, let us begin your education as a Wiccan with...

Continue with Welcome, part 5:

Wiccan Adventure
Review
Conclusion
What's Coming Up

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© erin Dragonsong 2012

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