Zeph's Bookish Rambles

I joined ADF (Ár nDraíocht Féin) for the first time back around 2010. I've lapsed and re-joined a few times since then and am a current member, but to be honest I always find it's not a good fit for me and I always wind up deciding it was a mistake. Nothing specific about it, I guess it just never really vibed for me.

I do know that one of the bigger problems I had was the meditation requirement. I just couldn't get into sitting still and counting my breath every day, and I didn't really see the point. They have something called a Two Powers meditation, and that was better, but...then what? I'd be like “ok, chill, I feel the two powers, love it, I'm a tree, cool...has it been 20 minutes yet?”

In one of my classes at school we would spend a few minutes meditating at the start of every day to “let our brains catch up with our bodies” and I hated that because I didn't know what my brain was supposed to do to catch up to my body. It's just...there. I talked to a classmate about my frustration and said I understood it was a metaphor but my brain doesn't really need to catch up and I'd just sit there waiting for everyone else.

Eventually I realized that this is likely an autism and dissociation thing. It's not that my brain was already there, it's that my mind never feels like it's a part of my body, it's always floating a few feet above me and kind of observing. So meditation for me would require some much more intentional work to get my consciousness to feel more embodied. I started doing a lot of guided meditations focused on feeling every part of my body from the head down to the toes. It helped a lot.

It's also helped me take advantage of ease with which my mind dissociates from my body and my tendency to imagine complex and beautiful worlds for it to live in since it's never really liked this one. Now that I understand that's not how consciousness typically works and have gotten a bit more control of it, I can switch back and forth with some effort. So I enjoy doing meditations that involve visualization and journeying through the inner world, and then taking a few minutes to feel my body again when I'm ready or when I'm having trouble with anxiety or focus at work.

I realized the core of meditation, for me, is really about understanding what your mind does naturally so that you can develop a strategy and try different methods to get it to do what you want it to do. So there's not going to be a one-size-fits-all approach since all our minds work so differently. My partner can't visualize things at all, so he'd never be able to do the journeying stuff I enjoy so much, but he can sit and breathe for soooooo long.

(Honestly, I'm getting a little better at that, but it's definitely not my favorite.)

One of the things that helped me was finally joining OBOD, another modern druidry group. I'd avoided it for quite awhile because it's far away whereas I've always had ADF groves fairly close to me, even if I never actually went to them. But since I don't actually go and ADF clearly hadn't been working for me, I gave it a try and have been working through the Bardic course they offer. I love it! I've been learning a lot and making a lot of progress with my meditation practice.

I can't really share details, but for meditation specifically, the former chief Philip Carr-Gomm does “tea with a druid” videos on youtube that end with guided visual meditations I find really useful. They do mesh very well with both the meditations from the course and my own inner landscape, but I think they'd also be very good on their own. So that might be a good starting point for someone looking to incorporate inner world journeying into their own spiritual practices.

I want to talk more about my inner world map and what I do there, but I've also just realized the intro to this post is a full post on its own. So I'll do that as a separate entry and post it soon. In particular, I'll eventually get to this post and give some more background on how I use these cards. But I also have some other non-card-related meditations and I'm excited to talk about all of it. Soon!