Let’s Talk Witch – Celebrating The Sabbats in Your Own Way

 Let’s Talk Witch

Celebrating the Sabbats in Your Own Way

 

In your personal practice, it is better to observe how you feel for a year and base your own festivals on those observations than it is to consult a book, find out that it is the fall equinox, read that it is associated with endings and harvests, and celebrate accordingly. But what if you think of fall as a beginning? While celebrating the age-old associations can be positive, in that it nurtures a sense of unity with your ancestors and with the earth, it can also be counterintuitive if it does not coincide with the energies of your geographic locale. A green witch seeks to honor the energies to which she is seeking to attune herself.

So how do you celebrate a solstice or an equinox? There is no right or wrong way. There are no traditions that must be marked, no rituals that must be enacted. Every green witch creates her own tradition, her own expression of the seasons and how they change. That unique expression will reflect how the season affects her spirit, her heart, and her body.

The most basic way to celebrate the solstices and equinoxes involves allowing yourself to interact with the natural environment around you. Spend the day outdoors. Go for a walk through your neighborhood and look at how things are changing. If you prefer, you can celebrate indoors. Gather seasonal greenery and decorate your home. While some green witches believe that nature’s bounty should be left outdoors and appreciated in its place and not be harvested for something as minor as decorating, others advocate using flowers and greenery as they are available and always with a sense of harmony, responsibility, and fair use.

Meditating at each seasonal shift is one of the most direct ways of experiencing the energy of the natural world and tracing your own response to its ebb and flow throughout the year. Use the following seasonal meditation outline as the basis for your meditations. Appropriate seasonal variations (as listed in the section on each season) are given. Using a consistent meditation with only small differences according to the season allows you to easily sense the minor differences that come out of the meditation that you might otherwise miss if you followed a different sequence each time.

 

 

The Way Of The Green Witch: Rituals, Spells, And Practices to Bring You Back to Nature

Arin Murphy-Hiscock