Plenty of folks have done this topic for the Pagan Blog Project, but I don’t mention journeying very much on this blog, so it’s worth writing about for me.<\/p>\n
I journey, or pathwork, whichever term you prefer; I use both. To journey, for me, means to send my consciousness outside of my physical body and into a spiritual and\/or metaphysical location; going to the Otherworld, seeing the Unseen, that’s journeying. (I use the incredibly scientific and technical term of “throwing” for when I’m sending my awareness to visit a place in the physical realm; pretty sure others refer to this as remote viewing.)<\/p>\n
I don’t claim to know or even guess at how this works in scientific or spiritual terms, and the “how” doesn’t really matter to me. I may be playing pretend, I may be venturing through the astral realm, I may be inducing minor neurological hallucinations, I may be engaging with various psychological archetypes of my conscious and subconscious, or maybe some combination of the above. What matters to me is that journeying has a positive, beneficial, tangible effect on my own person and practices, and it doesn’t bring any detriment to me, and so I continue on my merry way. :)<\/p>\n
When I was wee, or at least more wee than I am now, I got my hands on some Wiccan books, an astral projection how-to guide, and Michael Harner’s Way of the Shaman<\/i>. I never got the hang of astral projection; I was always too aware of my physical body to make that separation, which is how “throwing” came about in its stead. But I learned different techniques for going to different non-physical “places,” and for a while there, I did so regularly as an accompaniment to my totemism practice, experimenting with more traditional forms of journeying with the aid of drums and more neo-pagan forms of journeying that were reminiscent of creative visualization.<\/p>\n
I don’t journey so much anymore; my studies in Kemeticism have taken me more towards the in-person ritual than the in-spirit pathworking. But it still feels like a core piece of my spirituality practice and my magical toolkit, and I look forward to the time that feels right for me to return to journeying on a regular basis.<\/p>\n