The Altar, Yourself

Religion is a funny thing, I think. In the last few years, I have been losing my religion and gaining an awareness of increasing intensity at a rate that was at first profound and is now slightly tapering off in a way I never knew it could or would go. Let me explain.

I started as a Southern Baptist, which is kind of hard to get away from. It is like hellfire and brimstone being ground into and under your skin if you veer away from the religion even slightly. I had to train myself psychologically to never say, "For God's sake." Years after my inception into the Craft, it was constant "don't say that" or "hey, no" to an end that never worked out. Those phrases stayed in my repertoire. I could never fully get rid of them, to be honest.

The Craft did not teach me much except that there are many contradicting rules and commandments and bits of advice that one should probably always follow. I needed something with more science behind the why it worked instead of "Yeah, if you just believe, then it'll happen." Nothing ever worked for me. What did work then?

Good question: if you study something long enough and know its behaviors and why it would do a thing, you begin to get a sense of the outer self. The things going on around you. And because of that, you can pretty much predict when something is going to happen. I study psychology now to understand better why and when someone will do a thing and what they might do.

Here is the issue when your prediction is wrong, what can you do? Let go of it. Seriously. What can you do? If you try to make it better, there will always be that chance that it will worsen. In my case, I do not know how to make things better. I try. I do not have the touch anymore. I must heal myself before I can heal others again.

I do have the healing touch to unravel muscles from being knots. I can speak honeyed words to soothe your anger, and I can say your name to calm you. I am the calm before the storm. And I am the storm.

I came to this realization through many years of heartache, many years of lessons learned through my relationships, and in my religious experiences, I had learned that every goddess and god lives in us, as ourselves; we are the deities we worship. In saying that, we are not invincible like the mythological deities. Unfortunately, our selves are very much breakable. Sometimes our psyche is the thing that breaks the most, and our bodies try to help us recover from it in a way that will ensure we can keep functioning. Our minds have the capacity to shut away things we need not remember until we are ready to confront them and heal fully.

Psychologically speaking, our brains become a safety box in which it puts away traumatic events that have happened to us for later reconciling. When this happens, DO NOT CONCEDE. Do not just surrender to the memory and let it be there to possibly harm you again. Armor yourself and prepare yourself to confront it and embrace it. Then let it go.

It happened. It was not your fault it happened. It just happened, and you were hurt in the process. You need to forgive but never forget it happened. By never forgetting that it happened, you can ten assess another situation that may be similar and resolve it in much the same way.

My trauma gave me another religion or practice to embrace. The path that I follow is probably one with destruction on the mind one follows. It is a dark path, full of mystery and science and the occult. I have yet to find what the name of it is. Maybe it is just Occult Witchcraft. I have no real idea what it is. It is shrouded in so much mystery that I have not figured that out yet...