File this post under Spell Crafting 101–Banishing and Binding are generally the first things a magical practitioner learns how to do regardless of their path or preferred magical practice.  In fact, banishing and binding is so easily understood and readily practiced in our culture that even those who would claim that they absolutely reject any notions of magic routinely practice banishing and binding spells (New Year’s Resolutions are a prime example).  Because we’re still in the period of making resolutions and/or trying to find ways to make our resolutions stick, this is a great time to review the basics regarding banishing and binding.

First, and this is important in all spell casting, really think through what you are seeking to accomplish and what you are actually willing to do in order to accomplish that goal.  In my experience this is especially true when considering a banishing.  It is very easy in a fit of pique to say “Oh My Goddess, I’ve put on 20 lbs again!  That’s it!  I hereby banish junk food from my life!”  But do you really want to banish junk food from your life entirely?  Have you thought out what other areas in your life that such a banishment may affect?  What about those game nights with their requisite bags of chips, those birthday parties and other social gatherings with their cakes and cookies, the weekly office meeting with its trays of pastries?  Are you willing to give up your social life as well as your consumable delights in order to lose a few pounds?  Or do you need to refine your parameters to reflect what you are actually willing to do in order to reach your goal?

Perhaps banishing binge snacking or the eating of junk food in non-social gatherings combined with a binding to actively pursuing a more healthy diet and/or exercise regime would be the better choice of casting.  Successful spell casting relies upon the marriage of words and intent.  When the two do not match we will either circumvent and block the spell’s success through our unspoken desire for failure or we will allow the spell to succeed and become bitter and unhappy about the situations we created for ourselves.

The second important thing to remember about banishing and binding spells is that for these spells to be completely successful they must include both banishing and binding.  Too often in our spells or resolutions we try to focus on just one half of the equation even though we know intellectually that we have to have both.  We tend to be a bit better at remembering to include the binding after a banishing–it’s easy to remember that Nature abhors a vacuum and will fill any empty space that we create in our lives.  Anyone who has fought an addiction knows this firsthand–when I was quitting smoking, finding appropriate outlets for the hand to mouth/oral fixation that I had developed by smoking cigarettes for half of my life was a key element to my battle.  Fortunately that was understood by many of my friends and well wishers who offered substitutions ranging from the mundane (gum) to the erotic (use your own damn imagination) to the herbalist’s expert choice (licorice root, which I still use in almost every tea I make).

In my experience it’s much easier to forget to balance out our spells when we are focused on binding rather than banishing.  I believe this is because we live in a society that emphasizes accumulation.  We are taught at an early age that we should want and have every right to get the newest toys, the most toys, the best toys.  It isn’t until much later in life that we really start to learn that having means spending, that energy in a system is neither destroyed nor created.  So when we resolve to go to the gym every week or bind ourselves to a life of prosperity, we tend to forget that we need to let something go in order to bring the new in.  Where is the time to be spent at the gym going to come from?  What effort is required to gain and maintain prosperity?

Finally, remember to make your banishing and binding equivalent. Binding yourself to something that is unrelated or pales in comparison to what you are banishing still leaves a void which nature will fill for you with something you would likely not have chosen for yourself.  Similarly, when the focus is on the binding half of the equation, make sure that you are banishing something that is equivalent in type of energy and value.  For instance, in order to bind myself to a resolution to become a better read witch and get through some of those books that I’ve never opened, I have to banish my need to read Mercedes Lackey novels for the nth time as my way to relax before bed.  To make room in my life to write on a regular basis, I have to give up an hour of online gaming each day.

For all that I said at the beginning of this article that banishing and binding is spell crafting 101, it’s also one of the main tricks in any witch’s bag of spells and a major aid as we look to make both small and large changes in our lives.  What do you want to achieve and what will you give up to achieve it?

Yesterday I mentioned the big push of astro-energy that jumped us into the New Year.  Today I want to touch upon the other bit of astro-energy that is with us as we embark upon turning our resolutions into realities and that is the current retrogrades of Mercury and Mars.

To preface the article, I am not an astrologer (if you are looking for someone who really knows what they’re talking about when it comes to the stars, visit http://astrobarry.com/), but I do recognize that the movement of the stars and planets affect our lives.  Mars and Mercury are two of the three closest planets to Earth, so when from our perspective they are both moving backwards that seems to me to be a pretty clear message that we too should be looking backwards to find some clues about where we need to go from here.

I’ve also noticed that a lot of my friends and family are having a rough start to this year–missed connections, crazy weather, hard drive crashes, lost jobs, exploding energy plants, even just a general feeling of malaise seems to be stopping us all in our tracks.  How do we deal with these setbacks?  How do we reconcile them with a belief in a purposeful Universe that rewards positive energies?

I’ve written before about the Law of Attraction and how I think many of the people who teach it in our communities today do a disservice to their students by treating the Law of Attraction as if it is the Midas touch that turns everything to gold.  Personally I believe that the Law of Attraction is more about learning to find the positive aspects of everything that happens in your life, learning to accept life as it comes, and learning to live from a place of “No Regrets.”  That can be really difficult in the present when we are going through a tough time.  The present seems almost designed to make us question our choices and learn to regret them.  But before we drown ourselves in the ecstasy of “should have, would have, could have” let’s follow the lead of  the planets and really look back at our pasts to figure out when and we felt the way we want to feel and why.

One of my biggest goals in life is to live purposefully and make positive change in our world at large.  When I look back over my life to see when I felt most effective and guided by purpose, the first period I look to is when I was in college. I had grown up in a severely religious right home, and when my parents learned I was gay they disowned me personally and financially.  That experience was one of the most painful and traumatic events in my life, but not only did I still finish college in four years, I wrote articles that are still being published and republished to help LBGTQ youth and their families.  I found myself speaking and performing at national conferences and events.  I was interviewed and profiled in national publications.  When I look back at that time I am in awe.  How did I manage to raise and channel that much energy into positive change?

There are other periods of my life when I felt both effective and affective and all of them have been marked equally by pain and success.  My first (and to date only) tattoo marks a period of my life five years ago when I both lost my former husband and had breakthrough productions as both a performer and a director that have defined the course of my artistic career to date.  Even this past year, which was marked by amazing successes and development for the Circle of Dionysos, was personally and financially excruciating for my partner and I as we dealt with unemployment, eviction, and major health scares.  Frequently I had friends marveling at the creative life I was leading last year, and my response was that it’s easy to lead a creative life when there is no other choice but do nothing.

As I look forward to 2010 I do hope and pray that the current struggles ease and we all begin to make the sorts of breakthroughs that will assure our security in the long run.  But I also offer thanks for our hard times for they keep us truly alert and invested in both life and our communities.  The Latin root from which we derive the word passion is also the word for suffering, and it is from our passion that we truly derive fulfillment.

So here we are about a week into 2010.  How are those New Years Resolutions going?  I can hear the guffaws already.  Most people fall into two categories when it comes to New Years Resolutions–either they make New Years Resolutions every year in hopes that *this year* they’ll succeed at keeping those resolutions or they have given up on the notion of making resolutions altogether because they always fail to hold to those resolutions.  But the problems we have in achieving the things that we resolve to achieve at the New Year has almost nothing to do with resolutions themselves and a whole lot to do with our modern expectations and means of trying to do the things we resolve to do.

The notion of making a New Year’s Resolution has strong pagan roots.  Wiccan traditions start the New Year at either Samhain (Halloween) or Yule (Winter Solstice) depending on the tradition, and even today during the rituals held on the “New Year” Sabbat, participants are generally asked to state their intention (or resolution) for the year to come.  This actually comes out of our agrarian history–One can imagine our ancestors calling out that they intend to build a new barn this year, or they intend to double their harvest.

There are a few important things to note about these supposed ancient “resolutions.”  First, they are declarations made about tasks that will take all year.  Building a barn before modern machinery took a lot of work–chopping down trees, processing logs into lumber, then nailing each piece of lumber in place by hand was a task that took not only time but lots of manpower.  Harvesting twice the crops of the year before similarly required not only significant planning and double the work, but the time of an entire growing cycle (aka the entire year) to accomplish.  Yet today when we make New Year’s Resolutions, we expect to jump right into the task and see results within weeks if not days.  We don’t plan, we don’t gather our tools, and we don’t give our efforts time to produce results.

Second, declaring intentions in communal space made the community aware and responsible for helping the individual achieve his/her goals.  The person who declared that they were going to build a barn put the thatcher and carpenter on notice that they’d be called on to help, the person who wanted to double the harvest similarly asked for aid both from those who may have advice to give on better crops to plant or means to grow them but also those who could spare a hand or a horse to help plow.  That community sensibility is something we have a hard time tapping into today in our urban centers, but it is still vital that we find friends/family/community that can guide and aid us in reaching our goals .

And finally, by declaring their intentions in sacred space, our ancestors called upon whatever higher powers were out there to aid them.  By doing this they acknowledged the importance of providence (or alternately chance) in the achievement of their goal.  The farmers who wanted to double their crops needed the cooperation of the weather to succeed; the barn builder would get no where in the face of a giant fire.   But when circumstances lead us to fail we tend to blame ourselves or completely lose heart.

My personal experience with successful resolution making was the year that I resolved to quit smoking cigarettes.  I resolved to do so at Yule, but instead of quitting that moment, I spent a month buying tools– patches and licorice root sticks, getting acupuncture points put in that would help with emotional balance, etc.  Then, when I felt ready, I quit…for month, but then got involved in a show with a bunch of smokers and started smoking with them.  After the show was over, I tried again…until my dad, who smokes three packs a day, came for a visit.  And then it was September, and I still wanted to quit but was starting to get disheartened; everyone I knew was still pushing me to try to quit but starting to feel like it wasn’t gonna happen; and…Providence happened.  I caught pneumonia, and smoking literally hurt so much that quitting was the easiest route to go.

This year’s New Year’s Eve was a heavy hitter as we opened a new decade with a Full Blue Moon Lunar Eclipse.  That’s a lot of numerological and astro-energy being put behind those resolutions, so  don’t treat them lightly, give them time to mature, get your community involved, and don’t be afraid to ask whatever else is out there to give you a hand as well.  It may be a bumpy ride, but change always comes with a price tag…