Pathway Here

I took my first yoga class from Teri Veireck in 1985 in the basement of the Fairbanks Athletic Club in Island Homes. After about an hour of stretching, Teri had us lie on the floor and imagine the room filled with blue light. Breathe in the blue. This was my first guided meditation instruction. It reminded me of when I would lie on the living room floor as a kid eating peppermint airball candies and trying to levitate. I would hold the puffball confection in my mouth, close my eyes, and concentrate on air. Light as a feather. In the 80s, we didn't have yoga studios. We had to study with books or VHS cassettes. I practiced on my own for a while and taught my first yoga class as part of a health fair for the Tri-Valley Area at the Healy High School. That wintry weekend in 1996, I was carefully instructed by the school nurse to guide only stretching, nothing spiritual for my yoga class. I understood and offered no meditation, made no prayer hands, no sound of OM at the beginning or the end. Despite my physical fitness focus, the nurse still received complaints from parents "...when the mind is empty, the devil gets in!" And I got my first taste of witchy persecution.

I found my first Tarot deck on the side of the road in the Goldstream Valley in 1996. A German guy was having a garage sale on Miller Hill Ext and sold me his Thoth deck with the Angeles Arrien interpretive book. This is likely my first formal introduction to the Occult. Occult which generally means of, involving, or relating to supernatural, mystical, or magical powers or phenomena somehow bears the mark of the beast. And so does Alister Crowley's Thoth deck. People get scared and demonize things. It's what we do. There's a pretty big conversation we could have about othering the shadow and repressing the dark. Suffice it to say for now that my learning of this deck stayed in secret for a long, long time. The roots of the word occult from the Latin celare, occulere, and occultare point to hiding, secrets, and the need to conceal. Tarot is an efficient system of containment for the greater and lesser secrets and the Thoth deck is a contender for packing the most potent imagery into its 78 cards.

I joined my first unofficial coven in 1997 when Cathleen Doyle invited me to a book group with three other women. We met weekly on Mondays at 5:30 and our first book was Anodea Judith's The Sevenfold Journey: Reclaiming Mind, Body & Spirit Through the Chakras.

This entry is in progress and to be continued!