Heading to Dedication: My First Year Priestess Training in Avalon

In two days, I go back to Glastonbury for my Dedication to the Goddess ceremony as part of my Priestess Training with the Goddess Temple. It’s been a wild year! And I feel so changed and so, so ready to move onto the next spiral.

This is an epic 2000 word post right here! And of course as ever I am honest honest honest. So get a cuppa and settle in to read about what it’s like to train as a Priestess in Glastonbury Avalon.

How the Course Works

The full-time course is structured as 8 weekends of learning in Glasto. This is a big financial and time commitment, especially for peeps on the course who travel from overseas every weekend!

Three weekends a year the Correspondence Students join us, and those are always the best weekends, with incredible ceremonies and experiences planned for us. These weekends are utterly life transforming. Of course we also get to hang out with the amazing correspondence students as well, which is amazing!

The rest of the weekends we meet with our other full time students, spending time talking and learning about the goddess, walking on the sacred land, and creating stuff. They are a lot less ceremonial, and one or two of them honestly felt a bit like a filler weekend to me. There is a big emphasis on creating stuff and unleashing your inner creativity, and as a pretty much full time creative it was a bit wasted on me. I’d like more ceremonies and rituals please.

The first year is all about immersing yourself in the Goddess and the wheel of the year, really feeling and experiencing the seasons of the Goddess here in Avalon. So we met at the eight cross quarter festivals and spent every weekend honouring and experiencing the energies and the Goddess of that season.
Whenever I was in Glasto I figured my main job was to spend as much time outside on the sacred land talking to Goddess as possible, and I’m beginning to think that that’s the important thing about visiting Glasto so often on this course – immersing and dedicating your time fully to Goddess and being present on the sacred land of Avalon, rather than exactly what you get up to  while you are there.

The People I Met

The first thing that I learnt on this course is that goddess people are my people! I’ve hung out in all sorts of pagan moots and gatherings before but I just didn’t fit in, and I didn’t like the peeps I met there at all. I was terrified starting the course that I wouldn’t like anyone else on it, but instead I found the most wonderful community of loving, amazing, wonderful people from all over the world who have become my spiritual sisters and brothers.

I met incredible people from all over the world – amazing men and women who love the Goddess and who are so so dedicated. People from as far afield as Mexico and the US and Sweden and all sorts who are all doing things for Goddess in their own lands. I can’t tell you the love I feel for this amazing community of people on our course, and how much I am constantly blown away by their skill and talent and bravery.

It’s amazing looking at my Sisters and Brothers on the course and seeing how much they have transformed over the last year. It’s unbelievable.

My relationship with the Goddess

I started this course thinking I didn’t really want to be a public Priestess of the Goddess and that even though I loved the Goddess like crazy I didn’t feel like there was much evidence of her in my life. I wasn’t psychic or a super tarot ninja or anything – I wasn’t spiritually special – and I guess I didn’t fully trust that She was there for me.

Right after my first weekend, everything started changing. I begin trusting my intuition. Working with the wheel so closely, I start to learn and understand what the Goddesses are about and what they want me to do. My prayers are answered. Almost infallibly answered. Every time. If I prayed to the Goddess in a crisis, she would tell me what to do. (When working with Kerridwen, if I wasn’t praying to Her, She’d create a crisis so I would start talking to her again.) With her help, I moved out of times of financial disaster. With her help, I made it through times of intense sadness and hopelessness.

She showed me that the world is abundant and joyful, and that She is helping me, that the universe really does have my back.

I know that She is there, and She is real. She always answers.

I now trust that I can hear her in my own ways, and that just because they are not theatrical it doesn’t mean that they don’t count.

I know that She is no where near as demanding of me as I am of myself. She doesn’t care for perfection. All She asks is that I show up so she can show me her love and support.

Surrendering to Her

Slowly, slowly over the last year, I have been healing my fear of surrendering to Goddess and making a full commitment to her. This weekend I dedicate my life to her and I dedicate myself as a Sister of Avalon, and I am REALLY excited about it.

Surrender is a weird concept (that I am totally writing another blog post about for the future) and I have really struggled with giving power over to an invisible force that most of the world doesn’t believe in and thinks I am mad to do. I was really freaking out about it a couple of months ago. What if I surrender to Goddess, and then she turns me into some poor miserable nomad who can’t afford cereal? What if she turns me into such a massive hippy none of my friends recognise me? A big part of it is fear that surrendering spiritually means I will be financially fucked. I love money. I want to travel the world and swim in every ocean and buy expensive cereal and wear sexy cowboy boots and feel free, and I worry that if I do spiritual things that the pay-off is being poor and small-lifed.

Now, I am so excited to surrender fully to Her and trust Her to lead me where I need to go. She knows my loves and desires, and She is ABUNDANT. This means that her mission and will for me is only ever going to be stuff I LOVE and enjoy and am passionate about, and, if I want to be, it means I can be financially happy as well with her at my back helping me and guiding me every step of the way.

How I have changed

If you ask my course mates, they are as amazed in the changes in my as I am at the changes in them. We have all changed so much.

They tell me I was so heartbreakingly sad when I rocked up at my first weekend, and now I see the potential and joy in life.

I feel that everything has changed in the last year. Spiritual-wise I so much less shy about my spirituality than I was before. My faith in Goddess and confidence in myself has grown so much, and my connection with the Goddess is the best thing EVER.

But it’s the non-spiritual stuff that has changed the most.

I’ve really grown up in business in the last year. I’ve gone from feeling completely out of my depth and overwhelmed (I run two businesses, plus this blog, plus odd temp jobs for art colleges and stuff) to feeling like I can mostly handle it all now. I’m transformed from someone who was too terrified to answer a sales call to actually enjoying them and wanting to take the duty over from others because I know how to do it well now. I feel NINJAFUL.

I see the world differently. Things I brain-knew I now heart-know. I know that life isn’t meant to be a struggle, and there is always the option to choose to be happy. I know what other people think and how they react doesn’t have to bother me.

I feel like being myself, in every area of my life, is totally fine and the best way forward. Before I felt like I had to be this “professional” who talked about herself in the third person and used jargon and didn’t tell people that I wasn’t perfect. Now, I know that being myself works SO MUCH BETTER than trying to be something else, in every aspect of my life.

I feel confident enough in myself to really dedicate time to my Rockstar Priestess site and create stuff for peeps who were where I was – loving but lost. I have wanted to do this for the last 3 years, but was never courageous enough. Now the Goddess is nudging me every day to be on here creating for you guys.

What is next?

As I am coming to the close of my first year of priestess training in Glasto, I am getting ready to start year two – the Practice of a Priestess year, where we fine tune all our out-there-in-the-world priestess skills.

Part of what Kathy and Erin say is the point of teaching these trainings is so that there are Priestesses out in the world in their own communities creating new temples to Goddess.

Whereas I don’t think it’s in my destiny to create a physical Goddess Temple here in Cambridge (one of the most crazy expensive places in the UK to buy or rent), I am dedicated to being a public priestess here in Cambridge and serving the Goddess community here.

This doesn’t mean that it’s not shit scary to start sharing what has always been so personal and private to me with friends and people in my area, because it totally is.

The Goddess has been telling me to get a move on with my public priestessing every morning for the last month. So I am making it happen, slowly.

I’m creating more for Goddess too – I am having a great time painting my mermaid tarot cards, and people keep asking for them to be grouped into an actual tarot deck, so maybe that will happen. I am working on a 40-card Oracle of Avalon deck for the Priestess of Avalon Tradition, though I will confess I am very intimidated by what a huge project it is – if anyone wants to nudge me on it go ahead!

I’m totally immersing myself in my Mermaid-ness and bringing forth a cohesive way to share and teach Mermaid Spirituality with peeps, because I feel it is IMPORTANT, and also because mermaid everything please, so be looking out for that in a few months time!

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The course is a huge investment of time, energy and money and it is really a transformative experience – every aspect of your life gets prodded and nudged, checking that it is still serving you and that it doesn’t need to be dropped. Even aspects of your life you thought were fine – Superman and I had a rocky start to the year, and usually we are sickeningly happy and harmonious so that surprised me. You go through terrible times and through blissful times.

But when you come out the other side, you are more YOU. You learn so much about yourself, about Goddess and how you are never, ever alone. You see proof of how the Goddess is working in your life. You begin to see that, actually, you are fine as you are, and the Goddess doesn’t want you to be anyone else.

And it feels amazing.