For me, meditation provides the simplest, richest, and most effective window into whatever issues are most urgent and troubling in my life. It doesn’t matter what I’m struggling with; meditation almost always helps. I have created downloadable guided meditations for meeting spirit guides, achieving relaxation and deep peace, and releasing fear. For now, only one is downloadable (see below).
Meditation to Meet a Spirit Guide
Below is a list of other things I offer through Druid Journal. There is no fixed price for these items; everything is available for a donation of any amount. If you’re curious about why, you can read the in-depth rationale here.
Meditation: Meet a Guide
This meditation is designed to help you contact a guide — such as your higher self, a spirit guide, a relative who has passed to the other side, or even spiritual beings such as angels or gods, depending on your level of vibration.
I’ve described a lot of my visualizations at length on this blog, and many people have told me that they enjoy reading them and wish that they had similar experiences when meditating. I wondered if there was some way that I could help people get the same benefit that I’ve had from this practice.
In this meditation, I lead you gently into a relaxed state, and then take you through a series of images designed to help you feel happy and fearless and loving. Only then do I bring you to a place where you can meet a guide. If the meditation is successful, you will have no chance of meeting any awful beasties, and — if not immediately, then with practice — you should be able to establish a good connection with Spirit.
You can go into this meditation with a particular guide or spirit in mind that you want to meet with. Alternatively, you can simply see who shows up! If there are guides with good intentions out there who wish to contact you, then they will probably jump at this chance to communicate with you.
Don’t be too disappointed, and don’t give up, if you can’t contact anyone on your first try. Like anything worthwhile, meditation takes practice, and it can take some getting used to. Repeat the meditation several times and you should find your results improving.
Please let me know how it goes, and don’t be afraid to comment, or let me know where you’ve had trouble. Here is some feedback I’ve gotten on it:
- The first time Kara-Leah tried it, she met a different kind of guide: “My four year old self turned up… we chased each other around the bench and played in the flowers and climbed the tree and had a chat… it was wonderful.” She has enjoyed the meditation so much that she performs it weekly, and has started using it with her yoga students.
- Slade said, “Your voice is wonderfully suited to this format. Your voice is warm, calming, authoritative, benevolent…”. He has a lot of experience meeting guides, but he found that the meditation opened him up to enable him to receive a message from someone else’s guide who had been trying to reach him.
To access the meditation, click here.
Enjoy! The meditation is 18.5 minutes long and 22MB.
If the meditation has helped you, please donate!
Astrological Readings
I first learned astrology back in the 1980’s, at my mother’s knee. I have worked with it ever since, for myself, for friends and family, and professionally. Today my astrological work is part of my spiritual practice, much as it probably was for the ancient druids.
That the ancient druids practiced astronomy and astrology is beyond doubt. It would be amazing if they did not, since practically all ancient cultures did. But beyond that, their astronomical knowledge is specifically cited by many of the Roman, Greek and Irish authors that describe them; and there are even a few archaeological finds that suggest it.
My own astrological practice is not meant to replicate what the ancient druids did — no one knows what that was — but draws primarily on standard Western astrology, with strong influences from Celtic philosophy, Zen Buddhism, the Eight Circuit model of Leary and Wilson, phonosemantics, and the Tarot. If you want an example of what comes out of such an eclectic mix, you can check out the reading I did for Barack Obama back in 2008. You can also read more about Druidic astrology here, and my own philosophy of astrology here, here, and here.
If you would like a reading for yourself, click the donation button below and enter an amount you feel comfortable with (most people pay between $50 and $100). Once you’ve donated, you can go to my About page, where you can send me a message including your date of birth, time of birth, and place of birth. Thanks!
Name Analysis
Why do you have your name? I believe that your name is a prime example of a “meaningful coincidence”, an instance of synchronicity. Whether you’ve chosen your name, or you’re still using the one you got as a baby, I believe it reflects your inner soul; it is a spiritual snapshot of your life’s trajectory. I can give you the benefit of my experience and knowledge as a linguist and a spiritual searcher, and another person’s perspective. I believe our names reflect both our character and our purpose in life. For a donation of your choice, I’ll give you a complete etymological analysis and phonosemantic reading — a full historical and spiritual assessment.
To order a name analysis, click the Donate button below. Once you’ve donated (most people pay about $20), you can go to my About page, where you can send me a message with details about the names you’d like analyzed and any other background information.
Thank you!
Decks of Cards
A set of not-yet-prime-time projects are Tarot decks. At some point I and my partner, Dakota Stengler, will work on the Wardrobe Tarot, inspired by the Chronicles of Narnia. I am also working on a deck based on Wilson and Leary’s eight-circuit model of consciousness. Links to those projects will be placed here when they are available.
Patreon
I’m super thrilled about this because it’ll give me a great excuse to share the stuff I’m most excited about with the people who are most enthusiastic to see it. There are always a lot of irons in the fire — a lot of half-crafted works in the making — so if you like my stuff and want to help keep things moving along, welcome.
- For Followers: the newsletter, updates, and fanfic-related materials. If you want a free introduction to my writing, check out Harry Potter and the Hourwick of Oz (ebook available for followers).
- For the STORIES AND SAGAS tier, $5: serialized chapters and stories, and illustrations to accompany them.
- For the WORDS AND WORLDS tier, $10: first drafts, maps, charts, illustrations, timelines, and all the other bones that go in to make the soups. And a continually-updated online encyclopedia of words and names from these works.
Harry Potter and the Hourwick of Oz
The Potter series is far from perfect. Quite apart from whatever opinions JK Rowling may hold, there were always certain aspects of the worldbuilding that struck me as weird. Where did the wizard magic come from? Why was it passed down from parents to children (but not always)? It didn’t really act like a genetic thing; and anyway, having “genetics” as an explanation for magic was quite unsatisfying. And what was the deal with house elves? Hermione’s attempts to liberate them are an important part of the books, but that just serves to lampshade the problem: it’s not clear why some wizard families have them and not others, and why the house elves are willing to serve wizards (despite the fact that it seems like elves are muchmore powerful than wizards), and why giving them clothing frees them, even if they don’t want to be freed.
But as I turned the matter over in my mind, things began to click. My very very very first book (way back in 1993! — it only exists as a huge printout in a closet) was about people who had captured magical beings in order to exploit their power. And there was also Oz, an amazingly rich source of lore and characters I felt it would be interesting to explore.
These story seeds combined with the house elf questions and led to Harry Potter and the Hourwick of Oz, which is all done, and I’m quite pleased with it. You can read more about it here, or you can just download it free here at my Patreon page.
Return to Sagaia
Some time ago, as I was working through the revisions of Axon, Inc., I got into an intense discussion with my brilliant and beautiful wife Alison about the Chronicles of Narnia. It’s a series I adored when I was younger, but when I read it again to my kids when they were very young, I began to notice some serious issues with it. Then Alison and I read Dr Michael Ward‘s excellent book Planet Narnia, about the medieval inspirations for the seven books and their symbolism, and it inspired us to read the series again together.
What we found was, frankly, kind of horrifying. It wasn’t that the books had a strong Christian message; the Lord of the Rings also has a strong Christian message, and it’s awesome. It also wasn’t the glorification of violence, or even bullying (which is tacitly accepted in some places, even while it is explicitly denounced in others). It was the sexism. Ye gods, the sexism!
We both considered writing in-depth blog posts on the subject, but we found that other people had done much more in-depth studies. (A quick google will show you a bunch of them, as well as a taste of the huge controversy about the topic.) And in any case, what we wanted, really, was not for Narnia to be taken down, destroyed, and shamed. We wanted a Narnia that we could proudly read to our children; a Narnia that fully explored the amazing potential of a world where women could be both queens and witches, where animals could talk and be treated as citizens equal to humans, where the intersection of Christian redemption and the wild beauty of naturalistic deities was explored properly. We wanted a Narnia we could believe in again. We wanted Narnia as it should have been.
I wanted a new story, a story that would (a) explain, in some way, why the original stories were ‘wrong’, and (b) redeem Narnia, make it whole. And the most natural person to perform this redemption was, of course, Susan — the lone character in the original books who is not redeemed, who rejects Narnia, and who, ironically enough, actually survives past the last chapter.
Return to Sagaia is a work in progress and has evolved far beyond its fanfic origin to stand on its own as a complete work of original fiction, with its own worlds, gods, languages, history, and characters. If you want to keep track of it as it develops, drop by my patreon.
Mere America: First Nations
Mere America is an alternate history of a mirror-reversed America, in which the California redwoods march down the east coast, and the Pacific breakers pound Manhattan Island. From the original Viking incursion in British Columbia to the technocrats of the 20th-century Iroquois, from the victory of the Confederacy (built on slavery and gold) to President Martin Luther King of the Free States of America, “Mere America” follows the grand sweep of history through the lives of key characters such as Leif Erikson, Virginia Dare, Robert E. Lee, Bright Path (Jim Thorpe), and Ronald Reagan.
Part One, “First Nations”, concerns the first clashes between Europeans and the ‘Namgis, the Cherokee, the Muwekma, and the Mohawk. This is the 2nd Edition, which is extended, revised and updated, with an all-new prologue.
Wild Enough and Free
I’ve gathered together my best short fiction, along with an introduction on fiction writing, and postscripts describing how each story came to be written, and put them together into a single 165-page volume. Named after the final short story, Wild Enough and Free is an eclectic collection that contains science fiction, fantasy, historical fiction, and general weirdness.
- The Last Man to Believe in God. John Doakes, of Gypsum, New Hampshire, is the last man to believe in God. Kate Wright, doctoral student in religious studies, has set herself the task of finding out why — why does he continue to believe, without support from family or community? What purpose does this belief serve, especially in an era when immortality drugs make the idea of an afterlife irrelevant? Is he psychotic? Or is he the last sane man?
- The Secret of the Day Rat. A story of a rat’s simple but determined quest for a higher standard of living.
- The Time Machine and the Prince of Mars. Frank really is a nice guy, once you get to know him. Of course, he did almost kill that one guy, and he killed himself too — at least twice, actually — but he’s not really a killer, when you get down to it. The first guy was really asking for it; and as far as killing himself, well, he did it to defend Ashley’s honor. Which, Ashely thinks, is really pretty sweet. Sometimes you just really can tell he’s a prince.
- Virginia Dare. What if North America were reversed east-to-west, with the Rocky Mountains on the east and the Appalachians to the west? In this alternate history story, the high Rockies slowed the advance of the Europeans enough that now, in the 20th century, Native Americans still live in powerful independent nations. This story covers a crucial episode in the 2nd World War. It’s a sort of ‘first draft’ of my big alternate history novel, Mere America, which is still in progress.
- Wild Enough and Free. In Greenland, in the year 1100 AD, the Christian missionary Mona wanders into the remote fjord where Ulf, one of the last believers in Odin and Thor, is living alone. Their intertwined journeys will carry them far from everything the Europeans have ever known.
- Zopyrus. Babylon is under siege: it has revolted against Persian rule, and King Darius I is leading his armies personally against the ancient city. The siege is already twenty months old, and the Persians are growing weary. Young Zopyrus, head of Darius’s stables, hatches a daring plan to break the Babylonians, for the glory of Persia. But even as he prepares to betray the Babylonians, he begins to wonder whether he will find himself betraying the Persians instead.
Druid Journal 
Leave a comment