Purification at Imbolg

I feel a bit like I’d forgotten that spring was ever coming. As if instead we were in an everlasting winter of rain and wind, and then suddenly, snowdrops!

Yes, It’s Imbolg, the first celebration of spring. And this Imbolg I want to talk about something that is very important.

Purification.

I used to get cheesed off at the idea of purification. I came to the Pagan religions because they were free of extra existential shame! I hated the idea that we were somehow impure and needed to be cleaned, that there was something intrinsically wrong with us that needed to be changed.

However, I realised that purification wasn’t about removing who WE are – it was about removing all the things we put on top of us that PREVENT US from being who we are .

We get cluttered up with mental and psychic crap all the time. That blog post you read about gender inequality late last night. Your annoyance at the rude person on the bus. That lingering argument with your friend last week. What your friends and family think about your life choices. Your Facebook addiction. It all stays around, sloshing in our mind making us feel foggy and anxious and stopping our connection with our own true self, our deep self. Purification helps to remove all the things that are not us and are not acting in our service, all the extra onion layers that are messing up with us.

It’s like they psychic equivalent of cleaning your clothes. Wear the same clothes for a week and residue from all the experiences you have stay with you. When you spilt coffee on Monday Morning. When you got sweaty in yoga class on tuesday. When you went to a burlesque night on wednesday and got covered in glitter. When that dog jumped up at you and got his muddy paws everywhere on Thursday. By Friday, you are smelly and covered in everything that has happened to you that week and it doesn’t feel all that great.

Isn’t it nice to put a fresh set of clothes on and be all new again? It’s like a new start. It feels great. It’s a purification of everything that you don’t need.

I like to look at purification is like this: you are removing all distractions that stop you being vibrantly who you are now, that stop you being present with yourself and the world around you, and that presence is the doorway to connection with the divine and with yourself.

Another way to look at that thus: imagine you have a brand new smartphone, and all it does is call people, text people and take photos – all the things a phone is supposed to do. So far so good. Then, you install Facebook. Then CandyCrush. You put your Gmail on your phone and start getting notifications whenever you get a message. Then you discover FarmVille and SpaceTeam. You start playing on Instagram and download Shazam to find out what that song in Topshop is. You install the Etsy app and the Ebay app and the DPop app, and you are spending every spare second looking up things on Google or getting to the next level of CandyCrush or obsessively checking Facebook, even when you are hanging out with your friends…

You have installed all these things that split your attention and distract you from the whole point of having a phone in the first place: meaningful connection with people you care about.

You are that smartphone. You’ve installed all these attention-splitting apps which are not helping you – worry about next month’s project, a baseline sense of inadequacy, obsessive thoughts about last night’s CSI, an inability to stop thinking about work, a miscellaneous feeling of anxiety: and purification helps you delete all those apps and start again from scratch – back to being a phone designed to connect you with the people you love, back to being a person in connection with their own soul and living in the now.

Here is my favourite purification exercise, adapted from a fabulous ritual by Francesca de Grandis in her book Goddess Initiation
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A fast, simple Purification by Earth Ritual.

Take a deep breath.

Feel whatever it is in your body that you wish to surrender and let go of – that you wish to purify. It could be a sense of anger, frustration – I like to do it when I feel all lethargic and want to procrastinate.

Feel it as a presence, an energy field in your body.

Imagine Mama Earth catching you in a spidery silver net. It pulls through your body like a sieve, catching all the energy you want to purify and pulling it into the earth.

I like to imagine the net pulling the energy into a deep rabbit hole, where all the crappy energy can happily curl up and dissolve into the earth. Sometimes I like to imagine the net pulling the energy into the earth’s mantle, where the fiery magma incinerates it.

Ask Mama Earth to send you whatever it is you need. Then imagine Mama Earth sending you sparkling, sacred energy to fill up the spaces left by the crappy energy. Feel the new, sparkly energy fill every part of your body and shine out of you.