One of the best things you can do in the winter to assure your herb gardening success is to look at your land.  Winter is a great time to do this.  The trees are without their foliage, the shadows fall cleanly, and the ground is hard enough that you can see the way winter rains flow off the landscape with minimal interference from plants and grasses.

Everyone can grow SOMETHING on their property, even if you don’t have a plot of land.  Many herbs, such as chives and rosemary, do quite well as potted plants.  There are even herbs for shady areas, such as sweet woodruff and foxglove.  Even if all you have is a ditch, you’d be surprised just how much plants like mugwort like that sort of thing.   The point is, you have to know what you have before you can plan what you want to have in the way of herbs.

Before you begin, grab yourself some graph paper and make a rough drawing of your yard.  If you can get the plot drawing from your county courthouse, you can use it as an easy template so you’ve got something to scale (this helps people who are drawing challenged)!  Once you have your template, you can then begin to mark areas.

Here are some things you need to notate about your gardening space:

Do I have room in the yard or in will I be confined to growing things in containers?  I prefer growing things straight in the yard as there is less chance of error when I let Mother Nature do her thing.  Pots require careful tending and making sure that you don’t over or underwater them — I will say upfront that I’m liberal with the watering can and end up doing potted plants more harm than good, so I stick to the ground.  *smile*

What area of your yard gets the most sun?  The sun in the winter is lower in the sky, but it still follows the same general east-to-west pattern each day.  If you can remember back to last summer, what area of the yard was always in the sun?  It’s probably still in the sun in the winter, although for a shorter amount of time.  Mark this place because many herbs want sun, sun, and more sun.

What area of your yard gets the least sun?  Obviously, the north side of the house is going to be sun challenged as will anything with a northern exposure.  But what about summer shade?  All those trees are going to leaf out!  If you’ll go outside when the sun is up and check it several times a day, you can tell by the shadows that fall (more or less) where your foliage is going to be.  Any land under a tree is going to get only morning or evening/afternoon sun.  Any land away from the trees will get more sun at some point during the day.  Mark areas of full and expected partial shade/partial sun on your yard map.

What area of your yard gets flooded when it rains?  This is your “moist” area.  Plants that really love that bit of extra moisture are going to do better near this spot.  You might not want to plant your herbs directly in this area but even planting them near it will allow the roots for water-loving plants to leech moisture from the nearby soil.  Now, once you have figured out where that moist area is, look at the surrounding slopes to find your areas with the best drainage.  Mark these on your map as well.  Plants that traditionally grew on slopes and mountainsides are going to like land that drains well and dries out quickly (many of your Mediterranean herbs are like this… they don’t like wet feet, and the drier soil helps concentrate their herbal oils).

What area of your yard is “southern exposure”?  The southern exposure area that backs up to your house is a “sweet spot” for gardeners.  It’s a great place to put plants that normally don’t do well in your climate band.  The full sun southern exposure gets them plenty of warmth, even in the winter, and if it’s backed up to the house, the house becomes a radiant heat collector for solar energy, gently warming the plant at night.  Plus the house shelters the plant from the harsh north winds.  I have managed to get a Bay tree to grow outdoors year-round in the Chattanooga area just by finding a good “sweet spot” and carefully taking care of her.  Find your sweet spot on your map!

Now that you’ve marked these areas, be sure to mark where your outdoor water spigot is located as you’ll be needing it.  Also, give some thought to where you think you might like to put garden beds.  Don’t actually draw them out on your map.  I like to use construction paper and make several “plot” shapes and move them around until I finally decide on one I like. 

If you want to grow a long-term perennial herb, such as echinacea or valerian, you need to find a spot that you can dedicate to those kind of long-term plants.  Both of these plants (as well as others) require that you allow them to grow a season, sometimes two, before you harvest them.  I tend to keep my long term bed as a separate bed because they will require a different care schedule than other plants.

It’s a good idea to try and get your garden beds to conform to the landscape.  If the plot is on a hill, consider taking the time to terrace the hill a bit and plan for the work it will take.  If the plot is flat, raised beds are a wonderful investment, look nice, and make it easy for you to establish both permanent and rotational beds (meaning you change what you plant there each year). 

Once you have these main areas marked out, you can begin to select plants for them.  But that is another gardening lesson entirely!  We’ll save that for next week.  In the meantime, get out in your yard and see what there is to see.  Successful gardeners have a relationship with their land, which means accepting it as is and learning its quirks.  Go have a talk with yours today!

Photo by Rosefirerising (via Flickr).

I’m going to do a short series on herb gardening based on my much larger workshop that I give at gatherings about the same subject.  Herb gardening is one of my favorite practices as a Witch, and I have loved putting in and maintaining a garden wherever I have lived.  There’s just something about being able to go outside and gather what you need when you need it, getting your hands in the dirt and developing a relationship with your land, and taking that energy from the plants you’ve raised into your body and your magickal work through food, recipes, spells, and healing preparations.  I love it!

I’ve known people who have told me that they just can’t grow anything in a garden, that their thumbs are black, that giving them plants is like giving the poor living green thing a death sentence.  That doesn’t have to be true!  I’ll share with you some secrets that will give you an edge for success in your herb gardening endeavors, even if you’ve never grown anything before!

As we move along through the spring, I’ll add more articles to this series, including landscaping tips, herb information, garden blessing, inviting plant devas and maintaining good relationships with them, harvesting and storing of herbs, herbal recipes, putting your garden to “sleep’ for the winter, good tools to have on hand, and more! 

If you have a great recipe to share with my readership, feel free to email it to me and I’ll be glad to post it with credit to you!  Everyone needs to know an extra use for rosemary or what to do when you have too much thyme on your hands (haha!  gardening jokes will abound, too)! 

Spring is coming, and that means good “green” Witches start their gardens when the ground is still cold!  Tomorrow, I’ll tell you what that means!

Photo by Maia C (via Flickr).

This, of course, is the time that most of us chicken out because we don’t feel adequate enough, ready enough, strong enough for the task.  If that’s you right now, I don’t blame you one bit.  I’ve been there and felt that fear and it absolutely sucks.  But why is it so bad?  I’ll tell you.

Remember I said that the first step to making a change is conscious awareness that a change needs to be made.  If you’ve become conscious of the need to change your negativity, then there’s also a good chance that you’re feeling pretty bad about yourself right now.  I don’t know of anyone that has faced this beast without a moment where they looked in the mirror and really, really, didn’t like what they saw. 

There are three basic ways to respond to this moment of clarity. 

The first reaction involves beating yourself up for being such a horrible person.  If this is your tendency, then you have a chance to get a HUGE head start on your gardening work.  Go into the moment and listen to yourself.  Listen to every nasty, mean, cut-down you want to level at yourself and write it down.  Once you write it down, put a voice to it.  Who said that first?  A parent?  A boyfriend?  A friend?  A teacher?  Was it something you told yourself after someone broke up with you or rejected your friendship or after you let a parent or friend down?  If you can put a voice to the negative words you tell yourself, you have found the first of your creepers and roots!!  Congratulations!  Now, all I want you to do is sit there with these creepers and watch them wave at you.  They can’t hurt you now — you’ve seen them!  If anything, take a moment and realize the separateness between you and them.  You are not your negativity; you are something more than your negativity, and it needs you to live.

The second typical reaction is to deny it.  Denial comes in all sorts of ways.  Clues to whether or not you’re in denial:  you’re blaming someone else without taking at least partial responsibility; you’re coming up with excuses as to why you couldn’t have made any other choice; you’re shrugging it off with the thought that people can either deal with you the way you are or they can go jump off a cliff; you tell yourself that you need your anger/mistrust/fear/hatred/worry/etc. to protect yourself and then you go right about the business of your life.  Basically, denial allows you to look in the mirror and then immediately forget that what you see there applies to you.  It’s like looking at something close up in clear focus and then, choosing to look at something far away — the close-up object goes out of focus and disappears to your vision.  The minute you become preoccupied with other people and what those other people are doing or you begin projecting things onto other people, you have lost your close-up focus.  You’ve lost the mirror and the lesson you could learn.  If this is you (and if you are aware that this is you), then your job is to sit with the mirror for a bit.  It’s not going to hurt you.  The negativity is not you.  It’s just something you’ve let go on a little bit too long.  But you can’t do it if you’re too busy denying how your garden grows.

The third (and only) response (not reaction) is to do nothing.  You see it.  You look at it.  You hear the negativity speak in your head.  You cry or get angry and you let it flow through you.  You might feel disgusted with yourself, but a little healthy guilt isn’t a bad thing — it’s a sign that you need to realign with something higher and more pure.  I call this third option a response and not a reaction because this actually shows you are present in the moment — few people can do this automatically, so don’t feel bad if you don’t fall in this group.  I didn’t the first few times I was faced with the mirror.  The way you know that you are in this moment is because all it engenders for you is a feeling of peace.  That’s what true knowledge does — it answers completely.  You know the situation.  You see it.  It is what it is for whatever reason it is at this very moment.  What it will become isn’t decided and what it came from can’t be changed. 

So what if you wake up like me and find that you’re a whining, drama-stirring, stress-addicted, pain-filled person who has been beaten, abused, molested, taught to fear life and God and the world itself, never allowed to pursue your own dreams, grown up believing that everyone else was more important that you were or could ever be?  SO WHAT?!  It’s not the truth — it’s not the soil, the core of you.  These are just the vines choking you, trying to kill the life and the light within you.  Being able to sit in that moment and not try to change anything, just to be there and look yourself in the face and not push away any of the realization… that’s important.  No, that’s crucial.

The negative voices can be loud though.  You might hear yourself say, “Yeah, but so-and-so is just as bad about doing this as I am!” or something like that.  Again, SO WHAT?!  You can’t change them.  You can’t make them make better choices.  You can’t weed their garden for them because, guess what?  They’re not going to tend it and it’s just going to end up covered up again unless they make the choice to get rid of the infestation on the inside themselves.  All you can tend is your own plot, your own spirit-land.  It’s very easy to give yourself an out — oh, kudzu chic is in this year!  All the neighbors are doing it! — but really, you know better, don’t you?

What I’d like to see you do is get to a point of calm acceptance of where you are right now.  That is the best preparation you can do before heading into the wilds of your negativity.  You need to realize that the infestation is not you.  It’s only your lack of attention and self-maintenance that has allowed the negativity to get out of control.  With some hard work and continued focus, you’ll whip it your inner landscape back into shape and it will be much easier to maintain positive grounds.

You’re not destroying your garden — you’re doing some much needed weeding so that the things that you want to grow have the chance to grow.  So grab your pruning shears and your shovel, and let’s go take a look and see what’s gotta go!

More next week!

Photo by Pensiero (via Flickr).

Yesterday, I mentioned that almost everyone has an area of personal negativity that can use a bit of magickal elbow grease.  I also listed ignorance of your own negative tendencies as a risk factor.  Before we get into the nature of negativity, I’d like to talk about personal ignorance and its incredible ability to undercut our personal power.

To begin simply, you cannot change what you do not know needs changing.  Change is an act of will.  Change requires an understanding of the current state and perceived new state that is different than the current state.  Then it requires the energy to move from one state to the next.  It takes willpower. 

Willpower takes conscious thought and is most effective when applied in a specific direction.  We can use tools to help us do what we need to do.  Tools are useless without willpower — a fulcrum does nothing just sitting there, and a lever is just a bar without placement and correct pressure.  But when used with focus and a goal in mind, a fulcrum and a lever (or, let’s say, a Witch’s tools) can move very heavy objects.  Negativity, by the way, is a very heavy object.  Moving it can take all our willpower and every tool in our arsenal, but it can be done!

In yesterday’s article, I likened negativity to a tenacious vine.  I would like to stick with that analogy because it gives us the best understanding of how many aspects of negativity works. 

Every human being begins their life as benign as the soil.  Depending on the kind of person you are, your personal “soil” might be very rocky and not conducive to much foliage, or your soil might be rich and lush with nutrients and plenty of water and the ability to hold that water.  Negativity is like a plant.  It is born from another plant of like kind.  It might develop from a seed and have a chance of growing or not.  It might start from a creeper off another full-grown plant, or maybe a part of root that has broken off and come to life on its own.

Let’s apply that analogy to negativity. 

Some negativity is just a seed.  A stray occurrence or situation that isn’t your usual life.  Depending on the conditions of your internal “soil”, that seed may or may not get what it needs to grow. 

If you’re fairly rocky (meaning solid, less fertile to change, more defined in your internal conditions), that seed may not get much of a chance.  A negative moment drops into your life and then doesn’t even get a start.  However, we also know that negativity is a creeper vine.  It doesn’t need deep soil — even the most shallow person can be beset with negativity.  And creeper vines, with time, can split rock.  It’s just a little harder to get started in hard ground.

On the other hand, if you’re fairly lush and fertile, you have the makings of a perfect storm.  If you have plenty of water (emotional energy), plenty of heat/sun (creative energy), and plenty of depth (spiritual capacity), the chances of negativity worming its way in and doing a systematic takeover is almost a sure thing at some point in your life.  Witches are especially subceptible to negativity because our Path involves close work with creative forces of the Universe, because magick draws deeply on emotional energy, and because the Craft requires maturity gained through experience and spiritual depth.  

But seeds aren’t the only kind of negativity that can root inside us.  You also gather negativity from proximity to other well-established sources of negativity.  Negative family members, negative friends, negative spouses/lovers, negative coven  members, negative community members… each of these already has an established crop of negativity growing.  If you’ve ever grown a vine plant, you know that all a vine needs to spread is the promise of fresh, non-viney soil.  Similarly, you might have also noticed that it’s quite easy for you to pick up negativity just by being around other people who are negative.  Their mentality “creeps” into you and before you know it, you’re overrun.

Situations and experiences that are negative can also be the cause of negativity infestation.  In this case, a situation or experience is the root of the problem and this root breaks off deep within you, deep in your past.  This root can lie dormant and fail to live, or it can slither its way up through the soil in all directions, sprouting multiple plants simultaneously until you wonder how, suddenly, you got to be so negative all the time.  The plant looks nothing like the root, after all… hell, you might not have seen the root for a long time.  But it’ll be getting down and digging out that root that gets rid of the infestation.

If all of that wasn’t bad enough, negativity’s vine has one final, detrimental quality.  It doesn’t matter what beautiful things you have growing in your garden — how sweet, kind, honest, creative, talented, beautiful, or understanding you are — like a vine, negativity can cover these things up, pull them down, and destroy them.  When negativity overruns you, your good qualities are masked.  Other people can’t see them, and you can’t let them shine.  It’s not that they’ve disappeared, but good traits need air and sunlight and water, too.  Negativity sucks up all the nutrients your character needs, smothers them, pushes them down, and eventually, you can’t see them either.  If you’re not careful, negativity can outright kill some character traits, and you won’t be able to get those back until you deal with the negativity choking everything out.

Negativity can also be kind of pretty and useful.  There are some people that love negativity and wear it well — we go to them to bitch because we know we can always find a friendly ear and more fuel for the fire.  Sometimes it’s cool to wear that angst like a crown on your head, becoming the gothic equivalent of the May Queen or May King.  Negativity makes a very useful trellis and prop for your bad habits to where you don’t really feel like you have to change them.  And negativity flowers at least a few times a year – you know, when you expect the worst and you get the worst and then you can say, “See?  Told you so, at least I’m not disappointed!”  Ah, the sweet smell of negativity in full bloom!  Just pleasant enough to keep you from ripping that patch up in the garden, nevermind that you complain about it the other 340 days of the year.

I hope this helps you understand a bit more about what we’re actually dealing with when we begin to work on negativity.  Most of us are far beyond the ”have seed, might sprout” state.  When I came to the realization about my own negativity, you would have thought I deliberately planted the stuff — and I did, at times.  You probably have, too.  More on that later.

Tomorrow, though, we’re going to prep the gardener a little bit.  It can be daunting looking out your back window and seeing a jungle that you know wants to eat you waiting for you to step out and wage war against it.  For now, just give it a glance, know it for what it is.  Your negativity is not you.  You are bigger than it, beyond it.  It needs you to live.

That means that you are more powerful than it will ever be.  Take a moment and really get that.

You are more powerful than it will EVER be.

More tomorrow!

Photo by KudzuPlanet (via Flickr).

Everyone has areas of negativity that need to be dissolved for optimum health and happiness — some people have more than others.  How much negativity you have within you is based on a lot of factors. 

Here are risk areas for potential negativity.  I will list these as personal traits or past experiences for reasons I will explain later.  You might have one or a number of these, ranging from mild to strong in severity:

Abuse in your past (physical, emotional, mental, sexual, spiritual).  This includes physical violence, sexual molestation, rape, emotional battery, mental assault, spiritual restriction/repression, ranging from an isolated incident to living in conditions where these things occurred for a long period of time.

Mental illness (either diagnosed in you or in a family member with whom you grew up).  This includes everything from depression to bipolar to various personality disorders.  Mental illness affects the mind, which includes perceptions.  A person acting under the influence of mental illness will not behave the way a normal mentally-healthy person will behave, and as a result, can do damage to those around them very easily, especially the young.  If we love that person, it can be even more damaging as we are more likely to internalize their actions.

Major loss (death, destruction of home or family).  Major loss, especially when young or still dependent, can cause a sense of “life being against you” or a fear of future loss.  Fear is a majorly debilitating form of negativity, especially when worry-based.

Poverty (lack of necessities, including a lack of love and nurturing).  Includes physical poverty in forms of not having enough food, water, shelter, clothing, medical care, but also includes a lack of emotional support or mental engagement with others.  A lack of love and nurturing creates as much of an energetic impoverishment for some as being without food.

Stress (either from a traumatic event or traumatic surroundings).  Stress can be transitory or, in some circumstances, a way of life. 

Lack of mentoring from parents or other guides.  Most people are not taught how to monitor their thoughts or their emotions, about the connections between them, and how to divide what is real from what is merely perceived.  Without these skills, negativity breeds easily.

Natural mindset.  In the whole nature-versus-nurture argument, there are some things with which we are simply born.  I believe that some people are born with a potential for accumulating negativity.  It’s just “how you’re wired”.  This isn’t to say you can’t learn new skills, just that you have an affinity with darker energies that others never truly encounter or understand.  This is very normal for Witches, as we must work with Light and Shadow equally. 

Fixed personalities.  Includes both people who have serious trouble with change as well as people who are older and more set in their ways.  Everyone has a degree of “fixedness” in them.  Astrological charts can help you determine how “fixed” your personality might be — look at how many planets you have in Taurus, Leo, Scorpio, and Aquarius (give more weight to the Sun, Moon, Mercury, Venus, and Mars being in fixed signs).  Combine a Fixed personality with other negative risk factors above, and you have someone who is likely going to stay in a negative rut unless jostled out.

Social conditioning.  Our media and entertainment industries are geared to make us focus on the negative.  The old line “If it bleeds, it leads” in mass communications classes is a good example.  Do not underestimate the effect of reading/hearing about deaths, rapes, missing children, natural disasters, political scandal, immoral activity, crimes, drugs, murders, and wars on the baseline psyche of human society.

Being unaware of negative potential.  Many negative people are unconscious of their own negativity, and what you do not know you are doing, you cannot change. 

Company of other people who are victims of negativity.  This tends to go hand in hand with being unaware of one’s own negative potential.  Negativity has a frequency, like any other kind of energy.  It doesn’t harmonize well with positive energy (unless the negative person can tap into and drain the positive energy from the “up” person — also known as a form of psychic vampirism).  But negativity harmonizes well with other negativity.  The phrase “misery loves company” speaks to this.  Negativity expands exponentially when combined with others’ negativity — hence the reason “bitch sessions” and “mob mentality” have very real power.

This list is by no means complete, though I do believe I’ve covered most bases.  Could you see yourself in any of these situations or statements?  Don’t be afraid to admit it to yourself — it’s okay.  You can’t be any worse than my count:  I had them all.

Let me shine a ray of hope for you.  Negativity is not an externally created state.  It is created and maintained within yourself.  If you feed and water negativity, it will grow as quickly as ivy or kudzu (a tenacious vine seen especially here in the South where I live).  If you can cut out the root, you can destroy it.  It does not have to take over your life and pull down your good memories in a tangle of fears and anxiety and anger and depression.  But like any vine, negativity must be tended with vigilance and without mercy or it will creep into all areas.  It can be hard to do that first clearing out of your own negativity — just as it’s hard to uproot an ivy patch — but once it’s done, minimal and regular checks to yank up negativity “creepers” becomes second nature.

I’m here to help you with your negativity, to help make your life better from the inside out.  In the next couple of weeks (and for longer, if I find more to say about the topic), I’ll be sharing with you my experiences of one of the most important pieces of magick you can work for yourself.  I’ll give you some tools — but remember, tools only do work if you actually use them.  I’ll share some insights about negativity and how you can recognize you’re getting “in that bad place”.  I’ll tell you some personal stories about my life and what created my “negativity set-point” and about the difficult relationship situations that showed me that I needed to change. 

If you are ready, joy awaits you.  I promise.

Photo by Eddi 07 (via Flickr).

This time of year (especially between Imbolg and Ostara) is a great time to make blessed water from fallen snow.  The sun is growing in strength and light — a very positive energy thing! — and the clean cold air tends to make cleaner snowfall.

First of all, stop and think about how magickal snow is.  It takes very precise conditions to get good snow.  The temperature has to be just right.  The low pressure system has to intersect an area with sufficient moisture in order to have the precipitation fall, and if it’s not cold enough, you’ll get sleet, freezing rain, or just cold rain.  Not to mention, snowflakes are unique, each and every one.  That’s incredible to think about when you realize that water is one of the simplest molecules and yet it can form so many different patterns (just like humans can have such a wide range of abilities and traits and yet, we’re all different).

Making blessed water from snow allows you to capture all of that magick.  It’s different from gathering water from a stream where it’s flowing year-round.  To make blessed water from snow, you have to wait for that special gift and stop YOUR life to go gather it. 

The process of making blessed water from snow is very simple:

1.  Wash your hands with water and salt.  You want to cleanse your hands of all dirt and energetic “ick”.

2.  Take a large bowl — stainless steel, silver, pure copper, or glass are the best because they are fairly non-reactive with water (though any bowl, you’ll want to dry thoroughly when you’re finished).  Wash the bowl briefly with the salt water left over from your hands.

3.  Gather snow!  Take only the surface level — it’s the cleanest, as it was the last to fall, and it’s also furthest from the dirt.  Be careful if you scuff up bits from the ground to avoid getting the dirt in with the snow.  Do not take snow off your cars and watch for areas where you know people walk their dogs.  You will want to gather a large bowl full because you’ll be surprised how little you end up with once it’s all melted!  You can draw a pentacle in the snow or other sacred symbol and then scoop up the snow where you wrote the symbol — it will put the energy of the symbol in your bowl, too!  Consider writing words of blessing in the snow and scoop them into your bowl.  The possibilities are endless!

4.  Find a nice sunny place to place the bowl if you want sun energy infused in your water.  You can also make moon water if you know the night is going to be warm enough to still melt the snow — just put the snow in your freezer until the moon comes up and then set it out.  It’ll be melted by morning.  I personally prefer sun energy for this kind of blessed water.

5.  Adorn your bowl of snow with herbs and flowers that have the vibration you want in your water.  I use my water for cleansing, banishing, purification, and protection.  Rosemary and bay leaves, therefore, end up in my bowl.  Today, I found some bright holly springs complete with red berries to add as well.  I also sprinkle the bowl with blessed salt in order to add that energy as well.

6.  Place other symbols that have meaning to you in the snow.  I place a large metal pentacle in the bowl as well as my smaller pentacles.  I also placed my Bride’s cross and my amber flame of Bride pendant in the snow because I wanted the energy of Imbolg in my blessed water.  Pentacles, lotus blossoms, Celtic crosses, keys, various gemstones… there are all sorts of things you can add to your snow that will infuse the water with their powers as the snow melts.  Just do your research on what you will use the water for and add objects accordingly (ex. pentacles are empowering and protective symbols, and so are very appropriate to the water I make).  For the best results, use only pure metal items (sterling silver, gold, copper, etc).  You can even look to see which metal is associated with which planetary energy and use those correspondingly — get as specific as you want!     

7.  Allow the snow to melt.  Once it is melted, you will strain the water through a cheesecloth or metal strainer straight into its container.  This is VERY important.  Do NOT go fish your jewelry, symbols, stones, or the herbs out of the water!  You don’t want to touch the water in any way until you have it decanted into the bottle.  The point of making this water is that once you have begun the spell by letting the sun melt and fuse the energies, the water remains untouched. 

8.  Once the water is decanted, label it with the date, stopper it, and add it to your magickal cabinet.  Any jewelry items you added to the water should feel wonderful!  Be sure that you write down what you used in the spell, the date and moon phase, and the results.  Part of being a Witch is replicating magickal experiments!  Make sure you know what you did, what you got from it, and how to tweak it next time.

*SPECIAL NOTE:  This is one spell that is perfectly safe for children to help with.  My daughter did!  We had a wonderful time gathering items for the bowl and preparing it for the sun’s kiss.

I hope your blessed snow water turns out wonderfully — a little gift from my Book of Shadows to yours!

Photo by Bestrated1 (via Flickr).

I also mentioned that the easiest way out (or the one, I should say, that takes the least effort) is to simply end the relationship.  This post is dedicated to talking about the dynamics that occur when you end a negative relationship, what you can expect, and what to do when someone ends a relationship with you (remember, relationships involve two, and if you are negative, too, you may be the one “getting dumped”).

The first thing to remember is that negative relationships, by virtue of the fact that they have polarity, are codependent.  In short, it is impossible to maintain a negative relationship by yourself.  You can maintain a negative viewpoint for yourself all you want, but there is something about negativity in relationships that wants an audience, wants a sympathetic ear, wants company for its misery, wants to relieve its pain by being surrounded by others’ pain. 

Once you understand that negative relationships are codependent, a whole other set of realizations come into play.  Codependent relationships are based upon understood roles to meet personal needs through another individual.  As such, a relationship with high negativity is also a “needy” relationship in which people play certain roles so that everyone “feels better”.  A person complaining needs someone to complain to.  A person whining needs someone to whine to.  A person who is critical needs someone to criticize.  In short, it takes two/to – you and that other person — to make a negative relationship.

When you set out to end a negative relationship, you can expect a storm.  For healthy people, ending a relationship is still sad, can still make you feel rejected and possibly wonder why someone didn’t want to continue a relationship with you.  These feelings are normal.  But for unhealthy people, ending a relationship is like severing their arm.  When you choose to leave, you are taking away their audience, their charity case, their confessor, their gripe session, their bitch partner, their wound licker.  Because the other person is so wrapped up with their identity in the relationship, for you to choose to step out literally threatens their existence. 

This is very frightening for a codependent person.  It is the equivalent of pulling the rug out from underneath them, but to them, it feels like an 8.0 earthquake.  As a result, ending a relationship with a negative person can be difficult to do.  They might bother you repeatedly or say they’ll do anything to keep you from leaving.  They might trash you on their blog or social media site and try to make sure they do as much damage to you as they feel you did to them (which is still engaging in a codependent expression, since their actions are attempts at making you feel connected to their pain by causing you pain also).

When you end a relationship with a codependent person, you have changed the rules of the game you were both playing without telling them.  When that happens in real life — say, over Scrabble — people get upset, call each other Cheater!, refuse to play, argue, say it’s not fair.  It’s the same thing here.  When you change the rules of the codependent interaction, the other person is going to get upset.  And understand, from their perspective, it’s justifiable.  If they cannot see their own negativity and the state of the relationship, then they’re not going to be able to see the codependency either.  They are going to react because they aren’t personally empowered.  They are going to blame you and they are going to get mad (though there are many forms the anger can take, not just blowing up). 

Try to remember, as you end the relationship, that you need to be gentle but firm.  Sometimes you can end the relationship by simply staying away for a while, testing out “life without X”, and let the relationship naturally drift and decline.  Sometimes you have to make a clean break, though, and that can really hurt.  When you have to make that break, it’s your responsibility to own up to your half of creating the negativity in the relationship — either by generating it yourself or contributing to the cedependency by being the “other person” necessary for negativity to flow.  There are times that the other person will agree with you and you can work together on being more positive and supportive, choosing consciously not to let the relationship lapse into negative areas.  But there are times you won’t be able to do that, and you’ll have to part ways.

When that occurs, remember that all things have their season.  Letting go is a vital lesson to learn, and it is a hard one.  We often let go and then, when we’ve done so, immediately grab the situation back up mentally again and worry over it.  That’s not letting go.  That’s playing catch with the situation — tossing it up, and grabbing it again of your own free will.  When you catch yourself doing that, mentally make yourself release the problem/person/situation again and turn your attention immediately to something more constructive.  This is vital to moving on.

But what if you are the person that gets dumped, released, rejected?  It hurts.  It’s worse if the person doing the rejection blames you for everything that went wrong and isn’t wise enough to realize they are equally responsible.  First of all, understand that you can’t control others’ choices and that it’s not 100% you, no matter how much they want to make it all your fault.  It isn’t.  Look carefully at the reasons they give for ending your relationship and see if there’s any truth there.  You might not be able to change their mind, but you can learn not to make the same mistake again, or you can improve yourself as a person if someone has shown you a flaw that needs fixing.  Again, learn to let go and realize that not all things were meant to last forever.  Do keep a good ethical head and make a choice not to retaliate against them — no, it’s not easy and it’s a natural tendency from our animal natures to fight back, but having Divine energy means being able to rise above those urges to retaliate.  Those who attack in order to cause pain or humiliation or who intentionally seek to defame others haven’t mastered their primal selves — they’re still in “cornered animal” mode.  Recognize the capacity for retaliation within you and rise to a higher level.  Finally, ask your Gods for the lesson in this moment and ask them to lead you to new opportunities.  Many times, the end of one relationship is the beginning of a new phase in which greater and better things are brought to you.  Open yourself to the possibilities before you — be here Now — there is a larger plan and more out there than just this one person, this one relationship, this one heartbreak.

I will say that, as you get older and you find your “groove” in life, you will naturally come to resonate and find people who are most like you.  If you are true to yourself, you will be able to be who you are without thought or care, and that is real social freedom.  If you continue to allow others to engage you in codependent relationships and if you continue to take part in the polarity plays, then you will continue to repeat the patterns again and again until you break free from the cycle.  There is great wisdom in the statement that you are known by the company you keep.  Think about what kind of person you want to be and work to surround yourself with people who are headed in that direction or who have already attained something you want to attain for yourself.  This is a great secret of successful people, in both business and pleasureable pursuits. 

Your energy is your responsibility, and your relationships (where you share your energy) are your responsibility, too.  You can’t change others, you can only change yourself and how you choose to interact.  Next week, I’ll go into more detail about what happens when you realize that you are the negative person in your relationships and how you can transform yourself.  Believe it or not, most of us are at the mercy of negative chatter in our brains unless we have recognized it within ourselves and taken the steps to change it.  Doing so takes willpower and a mercilessly compassionate hand in assessing our progress.  But it can be done, and you can do it.

More next week in my series on Transforming Personal Negativity!

Photo by Eddi 07 (via Flickr).

In our society, friendships are a luxury.  You might laugh at that or disagree, but it’s true.  In modern times, we are not directly dependent upon each other for survival.  Think back to how many times you or someone you know has “lost” a friendship or other relationship.  How many times was it over something trivial?  Something as simple as “I don’t like it when you…” and that Whatever-It-Was happened to be something non-lifethreatening, something really more just a disagreement about something?  It happens a lot. 

When people actually depended on each other for survival, two things were most likely true:  (1) you were too busy trying to survive than to pick fights over Facebook or MySpace, and (2) if you milled flour and the blacksmith worked metal and you and the blacksmith had a falling out, holding a grudge could mean both of you suffering because you couldn’t get over your squabble and continue to support each other in an independent manner.

These days, we all are under the illusion that we basically support ourselves without any interdependence or need for each other coming into play.  We all work daily and pay our own bills (at least, I hope you are fiscally responsible for yourself), cook our own meals, care for our families and homes, and generally, if Suzie and I don’t get along, it doesn’t mean I’m not going to eat tomorrow.  Friendships have become luxury items.  When we get tired of one, it’s all too easy to abandon it and get a new one. 

Sadly, our stress levels show that modern humans need social relationships of positivity and strength more than ever before to limit the severe effects of stress upon our bodies and minds.  We need each other, and more importantly, we need each other in a POSITIVE way.  I suppose the good thing is that, since friendships aren’t a matter of physical survival any more, it’s a little easier to pick and choose for personal health.  At the same time, your relationships do directly impact your physical health (which is your survival, at a base level), so choosing and maintaining relationships effectively and in a positive way is extremely important.

We’ll go into maintaining positive relationships in next week’s continuation of this series, but first, what do you do if you need to extract yourself from a negative relationship? 

1.  First, realize you have contributed to it and how.  This can be a difficult thing to do, but it’s vital that you start here.  Why?  Two reasons — (1) the person creating the negative relationship could be you, and it’s crucial you figure that out early if you can; and (2) you are the only person’s actions that you can change, so it helps to know what you are currently doing.

2.  If you figure out that the negativity generator is even at least partially you, you have some work to do reprogramming yourself.  If you have come from a negative family background, or were abused, I will tell you now from personal experience that it takes time to change how you think, to change what you expect, and to rewire those buttons.  Affirmations won’t do it entirely… they’re just a cutesy bandaid on the problem — vital to keeping things clean and protected and helping wounds heal, but no damn good if you stick them over a dirty wound.  If you look in the mirror and realize that you have more negativity within you than you thought, you’re going to have to learn new ways to interact with the world around you.  If this is the case, I’ll be talking to you next week about ways to fix this and things you can do.  I know… I’m telling you to sit tight and wait, but in the meantime, use the next week as an opportunity to watch your thoughts carefully so you’ll be able to tell where to apply the information I give you on changing your outlook.

3.  If you are simply a co-conspirator in the negative relationship (and face it, you will be if you aren’t the cause itself), then the task falls to you to limit further creation of negativity in the relationship.  You do not have to end relationships to make this happen, but it’s the way most people choose to go because it takes the least effort.  It’s far easier to say “You’re not right for me and my life” or “You are negative and bad for me, so I don’t want to be around you any more” than it is to actually learn to be tougher energetically, or to call your negative friend on their negativity and say “Hey, can we pick a more positive subject?” or “When you want to stop talking about other people, let me know.”  After all, negativity and defensiveness go hand-in-hand, and it takes a pretty big person to be called on their negativity and say, “You know, you’re right.”  Many times the negativity is a habit long ingrained, or it crops up because we’ve had a bad day.  Well, then, what needs to be talked about is the bad day and how it can be turned around, not just general negative blather spewing all over. 

4.  Ways to limit a negative relationship without ending it:  (a) spend less time with the person; (b) have an honest talk about why you are concerned about the relationship and how you would like the relationship to proceed, and set some “rules” for interaction, such as “I like being around you, but I really don’t want to listen to you making fun of/bitching about people”; (c) be sure to keep your side of the engagement positive and redirect conversation when it’s going into a negative arena — if you can’t redirect, you may have to shield until you can get away; (d) take a cleansing bath after being around negative people — believe me, a bit of salt water and prayer really do work; (e) stay grounded and centered and detached when you catch conversations going into negative areas — you’ll be less reactive and less likely to pick up negativity when you aren’t personally vested in the moment; (f) stay in the Now — people who are negative tend to live in the past or in the future, either regretting about what’s happened or fretting about what’s to come — you can combat this be simply being Present.

Tomorrow, we’ll talk about the choice to end a relationship (or what happens when someone ends a relationship with you).  Sometimes ending it is the best way, but even with “choices for the best”, such things can still hurt the worst. 

Photo by Eddi 07 (via Flickr).

By psychic protection, I don’t simply mean casting a circle around yourself and maintaining shields.  Many times, psychic protection comes simply down to the kind of company you choose to keep.  Are you surrounded by negative people?  Overly-critical people?  People who don’t respect your path?  Each of these environments can take its toll on your personal energetic state.  While Witches who are adept at shielding can walk through the proverbial rainstorm without getting wet, most of us can’t, especially on days when we feel frazzled and our mental focus (and thus our emotional clarity) is compromised.

It can be difficult distancing yourself from relationships in which there is negativity.  Negativity is a charge, and it tends to need to draw upon positivity.  Just as heat flows from the warmer object to the colder object, good emotions and feelings run from the perky person to the “down” person.  If the perky person doesn’t know how to conserve their energy or draw upon more energy, it’s very easy for a negative person to have the psychic vampire effect on the perky person and drain them. 

Sometimes it is difficult to even recognize a negativity-infused relationship, but here are some signs:

1.  Conversations have to do with bashing other people who generally are not in attendance.

2.  There is “one-ups-man-ship” on who has had the worst day, week, month, life — EVER!

3.  You don’t walk away feeling inspired to try something new or feeling renewed.

4.  Each time you gather, it’s the same old story, same old complaints, just a new day/week.

5.  Your ideas aren’t listened to freely before you are told how to do it better or how what you want won’t work.

6.  You spend more time griping, complaining, criticizing, arguing, or defending than you do sharing positively about your goals and dreams and what you are doing to achieve them.

7.  Laughter is generated at someone else’s expense, even if that person isn’t there.

8.  There is more conversation about “the good old days” of the past, telling victory stories, than there is taking practical action in the Now and creating a better future (this is negativity generated by inertia, the “going nowhere” feeling).

9.  You are afraid to share, afraid to speak your mind, for fear of what someone else might say or do.  This can manifest as “Why bother saying anything?  It won’t do any good.”  This, too, shows a negativity within you that has settled in, likely due to patterning in the relationship.

10.  Comparitiveness is high.  One of the quickest ways for people to feel better (or worse) about themselves is when people start comparing themselves to each other.  Areas most commonly seen:  money (who has the best or worst situation), traumatic events, children’s performance in school or at home, politics/viewpoints.  It is rare for people to have objective discussions without ego getting involved, and anytime the ego gets involved, there is going to be a lot of defensiveness.  Defensiveness automatically sours an encounter — just as someone showing up to your party armed because they thought you would hurt them can sour an evening.  It takes a tremendous amount of strength to NOT be defensive when someone else looks at you like the offense.

If you notice any of these trends in your relationships, be careful!  Also be aware that relationships take TWO people to create and TWO people to maintain.  If your relationship is negative, you are partially responsible for that negativity, even if all you do is keep your mouth shut and don’t rock the boat (you’re allowing it to continue unchecked, and thus, unchanged). 

In tomorrow’s article, I’ll go over ways you can limit the effects of these negative relationships without actually ending the relationships, and then, on Friday, we’ll discuss what happens when you have to end a relationship (or when someone ends a relationship with you).

Photo by Eddi 07 (via Flickr).

In a meeting today, someone discussed a smoking cessation workshop and how the program was designed for people who want to quit for themselves, not because someone or something else was impressing upon them to quit.  As the discussion went on around me, I thought about recent habits I am changing in my life and how an attitude of desire is critical to success.

Many of us have habits that dictate our lives by allowing unconscious patterns of behavior to continue.  When we pay attention to those behaviors — when we choose to maintain focus on the moment and what we are doing and creating and thinking in that moment — we have the ability to alter those behaviors.  Doing so changes the moment, creates a new present and a new future.

I believe that making the right choice in each moment determines at least 99% of all success.  The thing that makes choice effortless versus difficult is whether or not we are resisting the choice — basically, do we want to go there, do that, think this, become something.

There is an alchemical shift when we desire a thing because we want to make that “other” part of us.  Instead of becoming hard and fixed, resisting the change we wish to make, we become soft and accepting, allowing ourselves to be the change.  We welcome it in instead of feeling forced or laboring under the whip-crack of the evil overseers Should and Must and Gotta.

If there’s a change you need to make and you’re just not quite to the full-fledged motivational desire point yet, there is a solution.  It’s a small step, but I can tell you from experience that it works.

Ask your higher power, your God/dess, the Universe to ready you for transformation.  To prepare you.  To bring you to intense desire to accomplish your goal.

It’s not a sign of your weakness if you aren’t ready.  Even seeds must have a time period where their seed coat — the hard outer protective layer — must soften before the seed can sprout and growth can begin.  Allow yourself to soften, deepen, become more accepting of the changes that are to come and how you will change and grow during your transformation.  If you are intent on maintaining yourself — on keeping that hard outer shell — you won’t be able to change.  Or even if you do, you have a high likelihood of reverting to old behaviors because you didn’t surrender yourself entirely to becoming something else.

Just a simple prayer can pave the way.  Speak it.  There’s no formula or recipe spell for me to give you.  These are words that must come from your heart, spoken into the Heart of the Universe, that say:  Please help me ready for transformation and to truly desire the changes I wish to make, desire that brings action not daydreaming, desire that feels like destiny, desire that moves me daily, easily and joyously to success. This is all you need to do.

Then, perhaps the hardest part — surrender.  You’ll know when you’re ready to begin.  The energy will well up inside you and burst forth like the green shoot from a seed and growth will be as effortless as a tree budding.

Photo by Mike@Bensalem (via Flickr).