New Moon Ritual: September 2023

One thing I will say about the spirit I invoke to assist with these new moon dream rituals is that She is that, when she decides she has a message, she is not subtle in the slightest. My experience with this month’s ritual was one of self-reflection and being challenged to think about how I let other people show up as their authentic selves, even when that authenticity might trigger something in me.

In this dream I progressed through a series of rooms. In each room I encountered a person who was an exaggerated stereotype of themselves. It would have been camp were it not for the the very embodied sense that I was being tested and running a gauntlet. Each of these experiences challenged me to grapple with a preexisting prejudice or internal bias I hold.

It’s important to name that carrying biases is part of being human. Many of these biases are things we are socialized to hold from a young age. The work of maturing and committing to social justice is not, in my opinion, the pursuit of erasing biases from ourselves - because I don’t think that is possible - but of recognizing what biases and prejudices we hold, challenging ourselves to see if they are clouding our thoughts and actions, checking ourselves to mitigate harm, and acknowledging when we aren’t in a space to be doing the most good and finding the people who are.

At the end of this trial I found myself in a room with a large mirror. When I stood in front of this mirror I saw my reflection wearing clerical vestments. I realized that I’d been wearing these vestments the whole time, I just could not see them from my point of view within the dream. This meant each of the folks I encountered on this journey were engaging with me in the role of a spiritual care provider.

The lesson I took from this ritual is that practicing a liberatory spirituality means we are seeking more than just liberation for ourselves. A true liberatory spirituality also seeks liberation for those we encounter. The liberation we seek for ourselves and others is the freedom to live authentically.

And authenticity is a uniquely personal expression. Liberation for others does not mean the imposition of our personal values, customs, spiritual rites, etc. Many of us come to paganism from the major Abrahamic faiths with a cultural legacy of conversion, erasure, and eradication of other cultures and cosmologies. Unless we do the important work of self-healing and unlearning this approach to approaching the divine we’re likely replicating it within pagan spaces - pushing out those who don’t do things exactly like we do, or coercing others into following our way of believing.

One of the experiences from this ritual that I am still carrying and processing is the experience I had with a figure who was stereotypically “Christian” in nature. This person did not do or say anything to harm me, but given my personal experiences and trauma associated with the Catholic Church and growing up in the South, my instinctive response was to try as hard as possible not to engage with this person. I kept assessing everything they were saying for double-speak.

In dreamspace time works differently, so I don’t know how long I spent with this person. But my felt sense is this is the room I spent the longest time in. I was able to honor that my initial reaction to this person was born from a place of self-preservation, again informed by my own lived experiences. Once I was able to honor that I could transition into a place where I was able to engage with this person and we had quite a deep, meaningful, and pleasant conversation.

I’m still processing this experience but one of the biggest questions I am grappling with is “How do I honor someone else engaging in a spiritual practice that I find triggering because of my own past harms, yet their expression of it is in alignment with social justice and collective liberation?”