So something I often ask people to do in my courses is to ask people to create Sacred Space ready to perform a ritual.

But what do I mean by Sacred Space? And how can you do that?

Here is my guide to making Sacred Space.

The point of sacred space is to create a window for the divine in your every day life.
Sacred space is an area where the presence of the divine can be felt, ready for you to perform your rituals or meditations or whatever while being in tune and connected to the sacred.

For me, making sacred space is a ritual that gets my mind in the right place to be able to do spiritual work. It’s like sweet talking my soul into relaxing into the sacred, ready to do some magical witchy priestess stuff. For me, the act of making sacred space gets me into the mind frame where I am open and ready to fully be with whatever priestessy witchy delights I have planned.

In reality, every place on earth is sacred: the goddess is present in every thing, landscape, place and person. But taking time to make sacred space does two things – it’s an act of devotion and respect to the Divine and the Sacred, and it also changes your consciousness and tricks your mind so you can access that Sacred layer of existence – because, lets face it, most of the time we bimble about in a muggle haze and we are not peacefully rooted in the sacred at all.

For me, there are two kinds of sacred space. 
The kind of sacred space I use most often is one where I am honouring and creating a portal for the divine, a series of simple rituals to ground myself into the sacred.

The second kind of sacred space I use is the witches’ Circle Casting. This creates an energetic boundary around you to protect yourself and to energetically contain whatever working you are doing in your circle – perhaps a deep meditation, or a spell, or something where you need the energy to build on itself.

Use your body, not your mind. 
Creating sacred space is about creating a consciousness shift in ourselves, and the most direct way to do that is through using your body, movement, interacting with things that smell good and excite your eyes and senses. This is because we live most of our lives in our heads, and if we want to change consciousness, we have to shake ourselves up and perform a pattern interrupt.

Just using our mind to change consciousness, no movement or incorporation of the other elements or senses, means having to exert a huge force of will and intention to bring our minds into order and rapt attention, and most of the time we don’t have that. It’s soooo much easier and way more fun to seduce your mind into the sacred with scent, movement, words and actions. Why would you take the hard option if you didn’t have to?

Sacred Space Making is part wooing yourself, part wooing the divine. 
That’s why I refer to a lot of devotional practices as a seduction. You are seducing yourself into the presence of the Divine by using yummy words, scents and sensual delights – and you are seducing the Divine into your presence by using yummy words, scents and sensual delights.

How I Make Sacred Space

This is my own personal ritual for creating sacred space. As I use this in my everyday life the order of things change, sometimes I skip bits or add new bits in. Sometimes I don’t do all of it, and that’s ok. Sometimes it’s easier to sink into sacred consciousness, sometimes it’s more of a challenge – every day is different.

First, I will usually burn some white sage or some other herbs – I have a bundle of dried lavender and rosemary with a teeny bit of english sage that I like to burn best of all. I do this as it’s a big showy sensual gateway into the divine – it says to my nose and my eyes and my mind, something’s happening! I waft the smoke over my body, imagining it breaking up the resistance and fogginess and the overactive mind and I see it purifying the space around me for sacred work.

I will then light a candle on my shrine or workspace.

I keep loads of essential oils on my shrine, so I’ll often open one up for a whiff here. It’s another way to take my mind out of muggle reality and into sacred reality – I find scent really makes a huge difference to me.

I will then ground and centre. (Here is an article on how to do that). Depending on how in my head I’ve been that day, it might take a while to get my mind to focus clearly on the meditation. Sometimes an in-the-mind grounding and centering won’t work for me, and I have to physically do it – this usually looks like me patting every bit of my body from the ground upwards, and then doing a really big stretch to the sky, and then maybe doing it again. If I am very scatty, I will spend five to fifteen minutes doing some exercise – either dance or yoga – before trying to do anything sacred.

(Note: I have found it always, always helps the richness of my spiritual practice if I do some exercise first.)

I will imagine my heart chakra filling with the energy of the grounding practice and emitting a beautiful light that fills my sacred workspace.

Sometimes I will then call in the eight directions of some goddess wheel or another, depending on who I am working with that day – perhaps simply the Great Goddess (Maiden, Fire Goddess, Lover, Water Goddess, Mother, Earth Goddess, Crone, Air Goddess) or the Wheel of Rhiannon or the Wheel of Morgan le Fay.

And then usually I will pop a timer on and do seven to nine minutes of meditation practice. I love to do an Empty Presence meditation, where my my mind and body is emptying to receive the energy of the Goddess, but sometimes my mind is too mischievous for that and it won’t co-operate. So then I use a meditation visualisation to distract me – something simple like being in a shower of light, visualising the a cross at a horizon point that extends into infinity, or breathing in the energy of the Goddess I will be working with that day.

Note – I won’t do a proper guided visualisation here. This is Calm the Fuck Down Time – my mind isn’t ready for a guided meditation yet. It needs some space to surrender to peace and to the resonance of the sacred before it can fully immerse itself in anything exciting like a guided meditation without being distracted. For me, this takes time – I need to ease into it with patience.

Then usually I am ready to go.

Witchy Circle Casting.

I started out on my spiritual path in witchcraft and neo-wicca, and these traditions often have a ritual known as a Circle Casting.

Now, when I was a kid, I used to do the whole shebang with all the fancy add-ons – a circle casting can take a while! – but now I’m grown up and am a #lazywitch, I don’t have the time or interest in doing that.

Steps of a Circle Casting.

1. Ground and Centre using whatever technique you like.
2. Purify the space with the four elements: light some incense and sage and walk around your space in a circle,  light a candle and walk around your space in a circle,  have a little bowl of water and flick water around your space in a circle, and take a crystal or stone in a walk around your space in a circle. Here you are blessing your space with the four elements of creation.
3. I’d usually go for a purify yourself bit here – dip your finger in your water (you can make it sacred water by dropping a pinch of salt in it) and anoint your third eye.
4. Call in the circle: extend your right finger out from your body and walk in a clockwise circle around your space, imagining it leaving a trail of bright white light. When you get back to where you started,  imagine the trail of white light hooking up to form a circle about you. I like to then draw a vertical circle above and below my space, once again ending where you began your circle. Now you have two circles about you cast in bright white light – one horizontal, one vertical.
5. I like to raise my arms slowly above my head and imagine the white light building to fill the gaps in-between the circles, so a bubble or sphere of white light is formed. I then clasp my hands and bring them down the centre of my body to my heart, imagining as I do this the circle solidifying and “becoming real”. Then when I feel that the energetic boundary of the circle is strong I will clap my hands and say “The Circle is Cast”.
6. Then I will turn to the four directions and call in the elements – in my tradition, the four directions are Air in the North, Fire in the East, Water in the South and Earth in the West. Your tradition may be different, and that’s cool. I will usually start by turning to the north, and call in the element by saying:

   Element of Air, bless my circle with your energy and magical assistance.

   I then imagine a great wind wooshing from the north into my circle, swirling around in a clockwise manner. I will remember blustery autumn days, chill winter storms, and the wind over the ocean, and remember it so hard that I am feeling it with my whole body.

   I will turn to the East and call on Fire in the same way, imagine a blaze rushing through my circle in a clockwise way, then Water in the south, then Earth in the west.

7. Lastly, I will raise my arms over my head and ask the Goddess to fill my circle with her light and presence. I pretty much always ad-lib here, and say whatever my heart feels, and then I imagine bright energy entering my circle from the top and filling it up until it’s radiating and vibing out hard. I will call on the good ol’ generic Great Goddess and visualise bright golden-white light, or more usually I will call on one of the goddesses I work with or who I will be working with in the ritual I will be doing, like Morgan le Fay or Venus.
8. We are done! Usually here I will click my fingers and say something deeply inspired like, “It is done” to seal the ritual. You could say something witchier like “So mote it be” if you like.

Once you have opened the circle, you have to close it when you have finished your witchy adventures.

1. Arms up, thank the goddess for her presence. Speak from the heart.
2. Next, move around in an anticlockwise way and thank the elements for their presence. I start in the West with Earth and then work anticlockwise to the south, east and north, and say this old chestnut:

   Element of earth/water/fire/air, thank you for your presence and magical assistance, Merry meet, and merry part, and merry meet again. 

   That last line is an old standard witchy saying at the end of rituals. As I say it, I imagine the energy of the element wooshing anticlockwise out of the circle and through the portal of it’s direction.

3. Pop your right index finger out and walk around the circle in an anti clockwise manner, imagining it cutting the energetic sphere of light around you like a knife. I like to imagine the sphere of light shrinking away from the cut, like when you put a piece of cellophane under a heat gun. When you get all the way around the circle and are back where you started, keep moving counter clockwise and cut a vertical circle above your head and beneath you.
4. Clap your hands and say:

   The circle is open yet unbroken
   Carried in my heart
   Always merry meet
   Always merry part.

5. Next I like to wander around my circle anti clockwise and waft the air with my hands like a mad woman, dissipating any energy lingering around from my circle. For me this really dismisses all that circle energy.
6. Lastly, I like to lie on the floor in Childs Pose, sitting on my knees with my head and arms on the floor, and imagine all the excess energy draining into the earth – this is particularly important if you have done a hard energetically charged ritual. You might want to eat a little somethin’ somethin’ and have a drink of water too.

Some Frequently Asked Questions.

Do I have to be a witch to cast a circle? 
You don’t have to all yourself a witch to cast a circle.

When would you cast a circle and when would you just do sacred space?
I’d cast a circle when I wanted to build some energy that I wanted to contain, like in a spell, or in a difficult ritual or guided meditation – say, I was doing a ritual for grieving, I’d probably want an energetic sacred circle to hold what I am doing for my own comfort purposes and so that it doesn’t sneak out and leak into the energy of the room I am working in.

In Sacred Space, I would do guided visualisations, meditations, prayers, devotional offerings, craft sacred things like incense and magical tools, say affirmations or visualise things.

There are no hard and fast rules. I’d say though, if you are doing something that conjures up a lot of emotion, a circle is nice, because you dispel the energy afterwards.