Warding in Ritual

I’ve been invited to be a panelist on the topic of Warding in Ritual at Pantheacon, which is the largest Pagan conference and takes place in a few weeks in San Jose, California. The folks organizing the panel worked to create an outline of questions and topics, which is very helpful for us panelists! Since I’m thinking about all of these questions, I thought I’d work up my responses as a blog post. In fact, it’s a 2-parter, because (as I tend to) I went into some depth.

Part of why I want to think about these questions a bit is because I’m a bit of the “devil’s advocate” on the panel. Meaning, I don’t really approach warding as a magical act. For me, it’s very pragmatic. In fact, I don’t even really call it warding. And yet, that piece of what I do in a ritual is still incredibly important and is still the foundation of an effective ritual.

Let me back up a bit. I approach religion and spirituality as a pantheist. I’m not a polytheist or an animist. Heck, most days I’m barely a theist at all. It’s not that I haven’t felt the grip of divine communion, of connecting to the greater mystery, it’s just that when that happens to me, even if it’s in the form of working with a specific deity, I look at that deity as a mask, a lens, a part of the greater whole. I see the various deities and archetypes not in a polytheistic sense but as a part of the All That Is.

I’m also not a dualist. Dualism (loosely) means that there is good and evil. Duality is more commonly seen as the idea of transcendance; the idea that the body and earthly concerns are to be “transcended” and that spirit is the ultimate attainment. It implies that spirit (or “up”) is “good,” and earth/body (or “down”) is “bad. Dualism then bleeds into a lot of other dualities–white/black, male/female, etc.

Because, as a pantheist, I believe in the immanent divine–that is, that everything is already divine–I don’t believe that a ritual space needs to be cleared because it’s not impure. I believe that we need purification in the sense of focus. We can’t just go from “driving our car” to “in ritual headspace.”

Being a nondual pantheist, I don’t really work with the idea of bad spirits. In my theology, I don’t need to set up magical protections against evil spirits because I don’t believe there are spirits out there with evil intent.

But that asks the question, what does warding even mean for me?

What does warding mean?
If you’re worried about a bad spirit, I can’t help you with that, it’s not my theology. For me, warding is about the people in the room and their intentions and energies.While I don’t really do much magical warding in ritual, I see the general concept of warding as establishing a boundary of general safety for the ritual work. I’d say that in most rituals, warding serves a few primary functions.

1. To protect the group from spirits or deities that might cause problems in the ritual.
2. To protect the group from humans (not present at the ritual) who would harm the ritual working
3. To protect the group from humans (present) who have ill intent toward one of the ritualists or ritual attendees.
4. To ensure that the people at the ritual can handle the ritual working, that the ritual won’t harm them, that participants have a reasonable degree of safety within the working of the ritual.

Since, theologically/cosmologically, I don’t really work with 1 or 2, I’ll focus on 3 and 4. Now–I’ll go into this more in a bit, but I hold a paradox about ritual. My job as a ritualist is to make the work as safe as I can for the participants. And, I don’t feel that deep, transformative ritual or any ritual where we’re connecting to the divine is actually ever “safe.”

First, let me talk about my concrete, brass tacks approach to ritual warding:

1. I tell people ahead of time what the ritual theme is going to be about. If we’re going on a journey to the Underworld to face our shadows, I let people know that in the email or Facebook event invite, and I also address it before the ritual begins. This gives people a chance to opt out if they aren’t prepared for such work. I feel it’s pretty rude to do an intensive ritual and not let people know ahead of time.
2. I give people some general ground rules. Some are things I don’t generally have to say, like “nobody punch each other.” That one is kind of assumed. I offer a few general agreements such as:
   1. Self responsibility: People can leave the ritual space if they need to use the bathroom, get some water, handle a coughing fit, or even just get some space.
   2. They are responsible for themselves and taking care of their needs. I just ask that if they return to the ritual area they do so with respect. That can mean something as simple as opening and closing the door quietly.
   3. Self responsibility also extends to our emotions. Especially if I’m facilitating an intensive ritual, I offer that people are welcome to express emotions. Fear, rage, sadness. That if someone’s on the floor weeping in catharsis, I’m not going to come over and “fix” them, I’m going to trust that they are expressing an emotion and leave them to it. And, if they do need help, that they can ask for it. Or even if they need a hug. I’ll usually have my ritual team raise their hands, and I’ll also have people raise their hands that are happy to give comforting hugs if asked.
3. I give participatory ground rules. Because I facilitate ecstatic, participatory ritual, I usually need to make clear that people have an obligation to participate, and that can involve speaking, moving, and singing. That participating is important to the ritual, that the ritual won’t work without each person adding their energy. And yet, I also offer choice.
4. I also address safety. This can range from:
   1. Letting people know where the bathrooms are to letting people know how they can take care of needs like getting warmer, getting water, or sitting down.
   2. I make sure people understand they have a choice in how they participate in a ritual, and that even though I will be inviting them to stand, to dance, to sing, that they can stay seated if they need to, and they can ask for help bringing a chair closer to the center if they like.
   3. On my earlier ritual promotion emails and flyers I used to clarify “no drugs or alcohol” but I have found that it really doesn’t come up in the rituals I offer.
   4. I have also offered words like “all genders welcome at this ritual” which lets trans and genderfluid people know that they, too, are welcome. In essence, I let people know who is welcome and what kind of ritual work can be expected.

In essence, I let people know what behaviors are acceptable in as concise a way as I can. I don’t usually specify, “If you’re here, and that person you hate is here, don’t glare at them,” but I always say something about how I assume that everyone has come to the ritual in the spirit of mutual respect and to do spiritual work.

Ritual Space:
For me, a huge part of warding is the space the ritual is held in. When I facilitate rituals, there are usually three scenarios.

1. One is I’ve rented an inside venue in Chicago, so the ritual is held in a large room.
2. Or, I’m offering a ritual at a Pagan festival or conference.
3. The third is when I’m offering a ritual at a public park venue, such as for a Pagan Pride event.

Where the ritual is located, and how much privacy we have, is core to the concept of warding, safety, and boundaries. There’s an intimacy I can achieve in a group ritual where the doors close that I cannot get in a ritual hosted in a public park where people are standing around watching us. Four walls, or the privacy of a grove of trees at a retreat center, are almost the definition of boundaries. Boundaries are establishing a line, a space. For me, I don’t really cast a circle, it’s more that I acknowledge that the ritual is beginning, that we’ve chosen to be here and do this work, and we are moving into sacred work. Having a good physical space for the ritual where we won’t have interruptions is key.

For instance, the energetic scenario of doing a ritual at a public park for a Pagan Pride and we have people standing around watching us is completely different from an evening ritual after we’ve all been working together for one or two days in a retreat format.

Warding Gone Bad
I can honestly say that the only times I’ve ever had a problem are when I didn’t lay out (or properly uphold) the above group agreements. Typically I facilitate deep, intensive rituals with cathartic, transformative work. I use ecstatic techniques, and there’s often a significant part of the ritual where people are facing shadows or releasing wounds from their past, transforming their pain…really intensive work. In the Reclaiming tradition there’s a phrase for this, “Puking Cauldron” rituals, because sometimes the ritual gets “taken over” by the most overdramatic person who needs a lot of attention.

However, I don’t have this happen in my rituals, largely because I set up pretty clear agreements for behavior.

That being said…there was this one time where I had a guy in my ritual. We’ll call him Anger Management Guy. Without getting into too many details, I was asked to teach some classes on ritual technique and lead an Imbolc ritual for a midwestern Pagan group.

When I arrived, Anger Management Guy was the one who picked me up at the bus station. We had to stop off at his house so he could smoke pot before he took me to the venue where I was going to teach the Friday night class. The guy was very agitated, and he and his very pregnant wife seemed to have a strange dynamic that set off my red flags. But, I was a guest, so I brushed it off. The next day, during the Imbolc ritual, I had three people (including his wife) taking on the role of various Brigids during the ritual. I stood at the altar of Brigid of the Forge.

We were chanting as each ritual participant went to the different Brigid altars. When Anger Management Guy went over to his wife’s altar, he flaked out. He started actually seething, rocking back and forth, shaking, spouting out nonsense.

Now–I was able to manage it in the moment, however, this shouldn’t have ever happened because I should have trusted my instincts about this guy and not allowed him into the ritual. During the car ride from the bus stop, he had told me some things about his life, and he spoke in a way that seriously concerned me.

Warding 101: Before you even look at magical options, just look at logistics. Are you doing an intensive ritual? Is that person really a good fit for the ritual? You’re there to ensure the group’s safety, and each individual’s safety. Trust your instincts, and if you’ve established what behaviors are acceptable and unacceptable, and someone crosses that line, that boundary, it’s your job to kick them out.

In fact, I’d offer that one of the most important warding jobs, particularly at a public ritual, is the person managing the door.

Warding and Psychic Attack
I’ll take that a little further and address the aspect of warding that is related to the function of group safety, and in specific, people who are worried about other people sending negative vibes from outside the ritual, or people who are inside of the ritual sending negative vibes at each other. Sometimes when people talk about warding they talk about psychic attack. A quote I often hear is, “Moonpie was at that ritual. He was psychically attacking me,” or, “Featherbottom was throwing off the energy of the whole working.”

In a purely psychic sense, I don’t really think it works like that.

One single person can throw off the energy of the room, but it usually requires action on their part. One person who keeps interrupting the facilitator, or who is sitting there glaring and being rude to people, one participant who is drunk and disorderly…there are a dozen scenarios where one participant can throw off the energy of a ritual, but simply thinking negative things at someone isn’t going to do a whole lot. It’s when people take concrete actions that things get wonky, like Anger Management Guy.

One negative participant can throw the energy off if everyone’s worried about that participant. That collective worry about aberrant behavior will throw things off. For instance, I led a ritual where one participant got more and more agitated until he left. Until he left, everyone kept glancing over at him. They weren’t paying attention to the rest of the ritual, they were worried about the guy because he’d been rude.

If the presence of an ex or someone you had a falling out with is going to throw you off as a facilitator, there’s an easy answer to the problem–that person shouldn’t be in the ritual. For instance, my ex isn’t welcome at any ritual I offer. I’m not worried he’ll send psychic energy at my ritual and throw it off from outside the ritual, because I personally don’t think energy works like that. I don’t need to protect against him because he’s not in the room.

That being said, I have twice now taken supporting ritual roles where my ex also had a ritual role. One time in specific, another ritual participant was the woman he had cheated on me with and a bunch of her friends who hated me. She literally stomped and pouted when I walked by her. If I’d been leading the ritual, she wouldn’t have been welcome, but that wasn’t my call. This basically breaks my cardinal rules of ritual facilitation, because there were enough people in the ritual who knew about the breakup with my ex, and about the cheating, and all the bad blood and drama. That many people who are aware of drama can, absolutely, throw the energy off.

And for certain, she was glaring daggers at me from across the room and wishing me ill.

In my case, I let it roll off of me because 1. I don’t believe her ill will can actually harm me, and 2. my focus was on the larger group and the integrity of the ritual. I was fully invested in helping to heal the rifts in the community that had sourced from the messy breakup, and so I was able to ignore her pouting and stomping. Ok, I admit, I laughed a little, and that helped.

Essentially, to psychically manage that ritual (since I was responsible for getting people chanting and raising energy), I had to completely, authentically, fully invest in the energy of community building and healing. I had to believe that this ritual would help that process, and that allowed me to move past any fears or nervousness I had about facilitating in a hostile environment. Because it mattered.

Part two will be posted tomorrow!

Pagan Infrastructure: Fundraising Challenges We Face

It’s probably pretty obvious that I’m in support of Pagan infrastructure, whether that’s seminary/clergy training, leadership training, physical sacred land, or other Pagan organizations.

My own 5-10-year plan is to have land of my own outside of Chicago; a seminary/monastery/temple/farm/cooperative living space. I want to help offer leadership training to Pagans who are looking for that, as well as have self-sustaining land.

But there’s a few challenges to building that infrastructure, and to fundraising for that. Some challenges are easier to overcome than others.

I’ve been thinking a lot about sustainability in the past years as I’ve worked to create an organization focused on offering Pagan leadership training to bring forward what I learned at Diana’s Grove and other places.

As I post this, I’m in the final hours of my fundraiser on Indiegogo. I’ve become aware in the past months that I can’t keep going traveling and teaching the way that I have. It’s not financially sustainable for me. And yet, I feel strongly that Pagans need the infrastructure of more leadership training, Pagans need access to it, but therein lies one of the conundrums. There are many infrastructures that I think Pagans really want–and that our communities really need as we move forward–but there’s a few things in our way.

————————————————————

First–a quick plea for assistance. I’m in the final days of my Indiegogo campaign to raise funds so I can continue traveling and teaching leadership and writing articles like this. I’m offering cool perks from $1 and up, including leadership resources. Every dollar helps. If my writing is useful to you, please consider contributing so I can keep doing this work.  http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/leadership-education-and-writing-for-pagan-community/

——————————————————————–

I’ve worked to observe the Pagan community and try to deconstruct some of the less-useful statements like “All Pagans are broke” and look at what’s going on beneath the surface. Here are some of the challenges in the way of building infrastructures for the Pagan community, and thus, challenges to fundraising.

1. Pagans are often anti-establishment and resistant to donating money, especially Pagans who converted from one of the dominant religions. (Though, Pagans are just as susceptible to capitalism as anyone else and will pay for “shiny” things/events.)
2. Pagans are often counterculture and creative types  which seems to result in less Pagans having higher-paying jobs, or, Pagans who are more adversely affected by the crappy economy. We have a lot of artists, creatives, and dreamers, and typically folks like this take lower-paying jobs or are more adversely affected by an economic downturn.
3. A lot of Pagan leaders and groups out there have screwed up with money in the past, making it difficult for Pagans to want to donate to them, or to other groups. A group in Michigan dissolved after decades of work raising 25K for land which was embezzled by a board member with catastrophic medical expenses.
4. Many Pagan leaders don’t have the business/not-for-profit management skills to manage an organization and make it financially sound. In fact those skills take money to gain, so it’s a catch-22. I’ll tell you this–if I had the money to go back to school, I’d finish up my bachelors and get a certificate in NFP management.
5. Numbers. We’re perhap 1/2 of 1% of the population or less. So the population size that many of the dominant religions pull get tithes/donations from for tithes isn’t feasible for a Pagan group just because of numbers.
6. Diverse traditions. Just because there are maybe a few thousand Pagans in all of Chicagoland, doesn’t mean all of them follow my tradition or your tradition or any of the traditions represented by a local group. In fact, there are dozens and dozens if not hundreds of specific traditions–someone might be the only Hellenic or Celtic Reconstructionist in a hundred miles.

All of these factors–and more–add up to why it’s difficult to build Pagan infrastructure. Not impossible, just an uphill struggle.

We can do it by solving problems on both ends of the spectrum–the problematic leadership issues, and, the Pagans who feel they shouldn’t have to pay for anything. I think there are a number of factors that could shift the balance in fundraising:

1. Strong, healthy organizations that are vocal–we need some organizations that don’t have a back history of disgruntlement to step forward and do great work and have clear, clean books. And, perhaps as well, longer-term orgs who may have made mistakes but who have worked to correct those, and there’s a few orgs that could fall into that category. Basically, we need some “poster” organizations, some flagships, to say, “See, an ethically-run NFP can do a good job with your money, and here’s how they did it.”
2. Continue developing Pagan interest in philanthropy. This one’s harder, and requires Pagans to see the value in donating to the orgs out there doing work. But, #1 helps with this. Focusing on the needs of Pagans is another way–ie, making a strong connection between, this is your money, and this is what your money buys in terms of Pagan services.

What does the future look like?
There are some really amazing possibilities and resources out there. There are some Pagans doing things that are already providing resources for our communities, like Circle Sanctuary, that does a lot of Pagan advocacy. Cherry Hill, that is a non-tradition-specific Pagan seminary providing tools and skills including pastoral counseling, among other things. There’s the new organization, the Pantheon Foundation, that launched at PantheaCon this year, that will offer fiscal sponsorship to smaller Pagan groups that don’t have the resources to get a 501C3 designation on their own, among other things. There’s The Wild Hunt blog, which is a news outlet for Pagans about news within the community, as well as an aggregator about Pagans in the news.

There are a lot of other resources out there. There are success stories and there are failures. There are many Pagans who have tried to create a local Pagan community center, or who have bought Pagan land. Some have been successful, some have not. Any group out there that organized a Pagan Pride event or other small festival probably had to raise money somehow to make that happen, or at least marshall volunteer forces.

The one thing that is consistent in all of this, however, is that these organizations need money to do the work they do. And that’s for various reasons and doesn’t at all have to do with largesse and mismanagement of resources. It takes money to build infrastructure. It takes volunteers to build infrastructure. It takes professionals to build infrastructure. 

We can have some amazing resources as a community if we work together. Some of the problems we face don’t have easy solutions, but if there is one strength to the Pagan community, it’s that we’ve always done a lot with a little. We know how to stretch our resources. We know how to be creative.

I’m an optimist. I’m excited for what we can do together. On Wednesday, I’ll be announcing a call for writing submissions on an anthology for Pagan leadership through Immanion Press, and I’d love to hear of some of the success stories out there. I’d love to be able to talk about the things we’ve done, and what we can do together if we put our collective brilliance to it.

Pagan Infrastructure: Fundraising Challenges We Face

It’s probably pretty obvious that I’m in support of Pagan infrastructure, whether that’s seminary/clergy training, leadership training, physical sacred land, or other Pagan organizations.

My own 5-10-year plan is to have land of my own outside of Chicago; a seminary/monastery/temple/farm/cooperative living space. I want to help offer leadership training to Pagans who are looking for that, as well as have self-sustaining land.

But there’s a few challenges to building that infrastructure, and to fundraising for that. Some challenges are easier to overcome than others.

I’ve been thinking a lot about sustainability in the past years as I’ve worked to create an organization focused on offering Pagan leadership training to bring forward what I learned at Diana’s Grove and other places.

As I post this, I’m in the final hours of my fundraiser on Indiegogo. I’ve become aware in the past months that I can’t keep going traveling and teaching the way that I have. It’s not financially sustainable for me. And yet, I feel strongly that Pagans need the infrastructure of more leadership training, Pagans need access to it, but therein lies one of the conundrums. There are many infrastructures that I think Pagans really want–and that our communities really need as we move forward–but there’s a few things in our way.

————————————————————

First–a quick plea for assistance. I’m in the final days of my Indiegogo campaign to raise funds so I can continue traveling and teaching leadership and writing articles like this. I’m offering cool perks from $1 and up, including leadership resources. Every dollar helps. If my writing is useful to you, please consider contributing so I can keep doing this work.  http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/leadership-education-and-writing-for-pagan-community/

——————————————————————–

I’ve worked to observe the Pagan community and try to deconstruct some of the less-useful statements like “All Pagans are broke” and look at what’s going on beneath the surface. Here are some of the challenges in the way of building infrastructures for the Pagan community, and thus, challenges to fundraising.

1. Pagans are often anti-establishment and resistant to donating money, especially Pagans who converted from one of the dominant religions. (Though, Pagans are just as susceptible to capitalism as anyone else and will pay for “shiny” things/events.)
2. Pagans are often counterculture and creative types  which seems to result in less Pagans having higher-paying jobs, or, Pagans who are more adversely affected by the crappy economy. We have a lot of artists, creatives, and dreamers, and typically folks like this take lower-paying jobs or are more adversely affected by an economic downturn.
3. A lot of Pagan leaders and groups out there have screwed up with money in the past, making it difficult for Pagans to want to donate to them, or to other groups. A group in Michigan dissolved after decades of work raising 25K for land which was embezzled by a board member with catastrophic medical expenses.
4. Many Pagan leaders don’t have the business/not-for-profit management skills to manage an organization and make it financially sound. In fact those skills take money to gain, so it’s a catch-22. I’ll tell you this–if I had the money to go back to school, I’d finish up my bachelors and get a certificate in NFP management.
5. Numbers. We’re perhap 1/2 of 1% of the population or less. So the population size that many of the dominant religions pull get tithes/donations from for tithes isn’t feasible for a Pagan group just because of numbers.
6. Diverse traditions. Just because there are maybe a few thousand Pagans in all of Chicagoland, doesn’t mean all of them follow my tradition or your tradition or any of the traditions represented by a local group. In fact, there are dozens and dozens if not hundreds of specific traditions–someone might be the only Hellenic or Celtic Reconstructionist in a hundred miles.

All of these factors–and more–add up to why it’s difficult to build Pagan infrastructure. Not impossible, just an uphill struggle.

We can do it by solving problems on both ends of the spectrum–the problematic leadership issues, and, the Pagans who feel they shouldn’t have to pay for anything. I think there are a number of factors that could shift the balance in fundraising:

1. Strong, healthy organizations that are vocal–we need some organizations that don’t have a back history of disgruntlement to step forward and do great work and have clear, clean books. And, perhaps as well, longer-term orgs who may have made mistakes but who have worked to correct those, and there’s a few orgs that could fall into that category. Basically, we need some “poster” organizations, some flagships, to say, “See, an ethically-run NFP can do a good job with your money, and here’s how they did it.”
2. Continue developing Pagan interest in philanthropy. This one’s harder, and requires Pagans to see the value in donating to the orgs out there doing work. But, #1 helps with this. Focusing on the needs of Pagans is another way–ie, making a strong connection between, this is your money, and this is what your money buys in terms of Pagan services.

What does the future look like?
There are some really amazing possibilities and resources out there. There are some Pagans doing things that are already providing resources for our communities, like Circle Sanctuary, that does a lot of Pagan advocacy. Cherry Hill, that is a non-tradition-specific Pagan seminary providing tools and skills including pastoral counseling, among other things. There’s the new organization, the Pantheon Foundation, that launched at PantheaCon this year, that will offer fiscal sponsorship to smaller Pagan groups that don’t have the resources to get a 501C3 designation on their own, among other things. There’s The Wild Hunt blog, which is a news outlet for Pagans about news within the community, as well as an aggregator about Pagans in the news.

There are a lot of other resources out there. There are success stories and there are failures. There are many Pagans who have tried to create a local Pagan community center, or who have bought Pagan land. Some have been successful, some have not. Any group out there that organized a Pagan Pride event or other small festival probably had to raise money somehow to make that happen, or at least marshall volunteer forces.

The one thing that is consistent in all of this, however, is that these organizations need money to do the work they do. And that’s for various reasons and doesn’t at all have to do with largesse and mismanagement of resources. It takes money to build infrastructure. It takes volunteers to build infrastructure. It takes professionals to build infrastructure. 

We can have some amazing resources as a community if we work together. Some of the problems we face don’t have easy solutions, but if there is one strength to the Pagan community, it’s that we’ve always done a lot with a little. We know how to stretch our resources. We know how to be creative.

I’m an optimist. I’m excited for what we can do together. On Wednesday, I’ll be announcing a call for writing submissions on an anthology for Pagan leadership through Immanion Press, and I’d love to hear of some of the success stories out there. I’d love to be able to talk about the things we’ve done, and what we can do together if we put our collective brilliance to it.

Assumptions, Expectations, and Boundaries

If you don’t ask for it, you won’t get it. But asking is sometimes the hard part.

“Let’s meet at ___ location at about 6pm.” What does “about” mean here? Does “about” mean, “I want you to meet me exactly at 6pm?” Does it mean that we might be there by 5:45, but that it also is acceptable if we aren’t there until 6:15?

“I like it when someone else takes the trash out.” What does that mean? Does that mean the person is hinting that I should take the trash out?

“Someone needs to design a flyer.” What does that mean? Is someone being asked to design a flyer?

“We need to clear the debris out of that room.” Who’s being asked to do this? What’s the plan? Am I being asked to help, or is this just a statement about the need to clear the debris?

“I have a train that is leaving at 6:30 am.” Is this even a question? If my intent is to procure a ride to the train station for myself, shouldn’t I be asking a specific question of someone? Something more like, “Hey, I have a train leaving at 6:30 am, would you be willing to give me a ride to the train station?”

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First–a quick plea for assistance. I’m in the final days of my Indiegogo campaign to raise funds for a car so I can continue traveling and teaching leadership and writing articles like this. I’m offering cool perks from $1 and up, including leadership resources. Every dollar helps me to get a safe, reliable vehicle for those long road trips. If my writing is useful to you, please consider contributing so I can keep doing this work. If everyone who read my blog this week contributed $1-$5, I’d have a pretty reliable car.  http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/leadership-education-and-writing-for-pagan-community/

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Back to the article….I experience that many people are afraid to ask direct questions, particularly when they are asking people to do something–or worse, to do something for them. It’s part of this whole cultural passive aggressive baggage that really hinders communication efforts.

Why are we afraid to ask for help?
I can speak for myself on this one—I’m afraid that if I ask for help that someone might say no. That someone might resent me or judge me for asking for help. That I will then be stuck owing that person or be labeled as needy. There’s a whole host of reasons. Every once in a while, my deeply-hidden people-pleaser rears its ugly head. People who ask for help are judged as needy and helpless, I think. People will resent me for asking for help.

Energetically, it feels better if I hint and then they offer. That way I’m not owing them, right? Or at least, it feels more that way. Many communications lack the specifics that would actually get us what we want.

“Let’s meet up at 6pm” is at least somewhat specific. However, if Person A said “Let’s meet around 6,” and then Person A gets pissed off that Person B didn’t show up until 6:15, that really isn’t fair. “About” is a pretty vague word. If Person A needs something to happen by no later than 6pm–such as a departure–what would work better is, “I need for us to leave no later than 6pm, so please be there by 5:45.” It’s more clear and puts their needs forward. They are setting themselves up for someone to fail them if they are vague.

Why might they be vague? Well, let’s face it, being that specific and clear can be taken as being confrontational in our culture.

Here’s something that makes it more difficult is when someone asks a question when they already know an answer. Here’s an example. Let’s say Person A knows they want to leave by no later than 6pm to get somewhere else by 7pm. But they first ask Person B, “What time do you want to leave?” If Person A already knows they want to leave by 6pm, why bother asking?

And yet, we learn how to do these polite things that actually get in the way and cause micro conflicts and set us up for frustration.

Similarly, we learn that to be clear and to hold boundaries is to sound controlling and bitchy. “We need to leave at no later than 6pm, so be there at 5:45, please,” can come across as sounding harsh and unyielding.

And yet, it puts forth a clear need. If it’s actually going to tick you off to leave at 6:05, or, cause you to risk being late, it’s really your responsibility to communicate that up front.

“Let’s meet around 6ish” is something we learn to say, but it isn’t really what we want. I experience that people get really ticked off at people who don’t do what they wanted.

However, you can’t know what someone wants unless they tell you.

Expectations Uncommunicated
In fact, I notice this a lot in relationships when one partner has an expectation of another partner but never communicates it. One partner I was with expected that if someone didn’t jump up to take care of a problem that was hinted at, that that person didn’t love him. We finally came to be able to talk about this after therapy. It was an expectation he’d learned from a family member. His frustration could be anything from, the laundry pile was too full, to, he wanted to go out to dinner.

He just held the expectation that if there was something he wanted me to help with, that I’d somehow telepathically know. And when I, of course, did not read his mind to know what he wanted help with, he’d get increasingly frustrated but not tell me that he was frustrated until he exploded in anger.

You can probably start to see how something that’s really fairly miniscule like doing laundry becomes a major conflict. We’d end up in this cyclical argument where ultimately he’d say, “If you really loved me you’d just know, I wouldn’t have to ask.”

Perhaps you too have had relationship arguments that just ran around and around the barn like this.

Expectations in Groups and Leadership
The point is–you can’t expect something of someone if you haven’t asked them or told them what you want. I’m using an example from friendships and romantic relationships, however, this happens in a group setting just as easily.

“Someone needs to design the flyer” is not asking anyone to actually do that work–but you can bet that the group leader who mentioned this is going to get upset when nobody reads their mind and creates the flyer. Or the silent expectation that everyone knows they need to be at the venue 2 hours early for setup.

If you don’t ask people to do something specific, you can’t expect them to know you needed the help. I talk to a lot of group leaders who get frustrated with people in their groups who aren’t stepping up to do the work. And yes–volunteers often drop the ball, it’s the nature of the beast. However, many of these group leaders are not properly articulating the question, they are not asking people to do a task.

Here’s a mistake I’ve made in the past–I’ve put out the email to “everyone” listing the things that need to be done for XYZ event, or the Facebook post saying, “Can anyone do XYZ?” And then I get no responses. What gets a better response is, “Hey Pat, I know you’re really a great graphic designer, would you be willing to design a flyer for the event? I understand if you are busy.” When you actually ask people for help, you might get it–and you might get the help you are actually asking for.

But if I sit there and angrily stew that nobody is helping me with tasks–and I never asked them explicitly to do those tasks–that one’s on me.

Sometimes the Answer is No
Going further, you can’t really expect someone to act in a way that goes against their nature, against their values. I’m not talking about high-minded values, I’m talking about, what you value in the sense of, where you are willing to spend your time, energy, and money.

I value having time to spend working on writing, artwork, and community building. I’ve simplified my life in order to reflect those values. I don’t value expensive food, going out for dinner, or drinking, for instance. A former partner of mine was an extrovert (I’m an introvert) and greatly valued hanging out with people, going out for dinner. He was a foodie, I wasn’t. He liked to drink, I didn’t. He would get mad at me for not caving to his wishes and coming out with him to social events that I didn’t want to spend the money on. They were events that I wasn’t going to enjoy, and I didn’t value spending my time or my money on them.

“If you really loved me you’d do things you don’t want to do because I want you to do them,” was among his ways of trying to manipulate me.

And here’s the thing–group leaders sometimes do this. Visionaries, stubborn group leaders, we do this, and we don’t mean to. It’s a mistake I’ve made in the past and I’ve worked to correct that. I’ve tried to pressure people into going against their nature, guilting people into doing something “for the event” or “for the group.”

Sometimes, when I ask someone for help, the answer is no. And as a group leader, I have to be ok with that, I have to respect someone’s “no.”

Manipulation and Expectations
Let me take a moment to step back and point out how putting pressure on people to do what you want them to do can be incredibly manipulative whether it’s a friend, lover, or someone in your group. The person who is trying to hold a boundary and say, “No, I don’t value that,” is made to feel horrible by the guilting.

When my own former partner tried to get me to do what he wanted, I began to  doubt myself. I was pretty clear at first that I was just holding a boundary. After a while, I began to wonder, “What’s wrong with me? Am I really that terrible?” Sometimes, my partner’s words led me to going against what I knew was good for me. In the context of a relationship, this can end up into a very abusive, codependent spiral. In my case, this exacerbated my existing depression and made it worse.

However, group dynamics and relationships are very similar, and a leader who is pressuring people to do things in a group–even for altruistic reasons–is still sliding on that slippery slope into an abusive dynamic. Pressuring people to taking on event planning roles might get your event done, but it’s ultimately not going to build a healthy group. I’ve learned that the hard way.

Groups are a Relationship
So when the group leader (Person A) really wants people in the group to volunteer to take ritual roles but nobody does, Person A is going to get frustrated. However, Person A didn’t communicate their need clearly, and then usually ends up browbeating people for not volunteering.

If they set up the expectation up front–or better yet, walked through what they need, and listened to their group members who might not want to take ritual roles–there would be less frustration all around.

Nobody likes the abusive dynamic of waiting for the group leader/parent to blow up at them. If the group leader puts out there, “We put on 8 sabbats, and I need at least 5 people to step in and take ritual roles each time or I won’t be able to facilitate the sabbat, how many of you are interested in volunteering?” and then perhaps also asks, “Are there any of you who really don’t want to ever take ritual roles?” and then listens to those folks share why, a conversation can happen. Negotiation can happen.

Maybe some of the folks don’t want to take roles because they are shy, but would be willing to take really small roles and learn to get better at public speaking work, but they are afraid to take on the bigger roles that the group leader is offering. Maybe some of the folks just have absolutely zero interest in facilitating.

Help people in your group build healthier boundaries–a healthier sense of self, and the ability to say no to you, the leader. And yeah, as a visionary, sometimes that sucks. Sometimes it means the event isn’t going to be as grand as your vision. I’ve been there. I have another T-shirt.

Organizing Events
Pagan Pride or another local festival is a great example. I hear from a lot of PPD organizers that they have a hard time getting volunteers, and have a hard time getting local people involved. They get frustrated when their local community doesn’t even show up for an event, or when local community leaders don’t take an active part.

But I wonder, how many PPD and festival coordinators actually work to establish relationships with local community and leaders by going to other folks’ events? Some do. Some don’t. How many festival organizers actually make the time to research local groups and go and introduce themselves? How many ask for specific help? Putting out a post, “I need help with XYZ day-long festival, I need volunteers,” is vague. “I need 10 people for 2-hour shifts at the info table greeting people” is specific.

I’ll be clear–volunteer management is not my strength. If I’m working with a skilled volunteer coordinator I can help break tasks down simply like that, but it’s not an area where I have as much skill. However, it’s an important factor in breaking down tasks because volunteers are much more likely to help when you outline exactly what you need.

Getting Other Groups Involved
Many Pagan organizers find it challenging to get other groups involved. One thing that I can say–and I’ve worked with a lot of groups in a lot of regions–is that most groups tend to get tunnel vision.

Now–sometimes this is just boundaries and focus. People only have so many hours in the day, and when you are running a small group or an activity as a volunteer, you may not have time or resources to do more. Remember–sometimes the answer is “no.” No is the answer you are giving when someone asks you to help with their project and you just never get back to them, it’s just an indirectly communicated no.

Event organizers and visionaries also get the tunnel vision of “I want everyone to like my project! I want everyone to want to donate time to this cool thing that I’m doing!” I see a lot of Pagan leaders do this. I’ve done it myself. What happens is, a leader gets a great idea for something, and gets upset that everyone is not as excited as they are, and that their requests for help aren’t met with overwhelming enthusiasm. Much less people jumping on board to read the organizer’s mind and take on tasks like vendor coordination and fundraising and programming.

However, the truth is, that not everyone is as excited about that thing as the person/group that came up with it. And other groups have other focuses. What’s also ironic–and this is something that I see a lot too–is that the folks organizing a bigger cool event, like a Pagan Pride or other day-long festival, get upset when more local leaders and groups don’t get involved, but then those organizers themselves don’t reciprocate and support what other groups are doing.

I have seen local event organizers get snippy when more people don’t support their event, and then they themselves plan fundraising and other events and other events right over the top of what other groups are doing. They don’t do it out of malice, just carelessness.

But what it can look like to a local Pagan leader is something like, “So you want me to donate my time and energy to your event, and then you just scheduled a fundraiser at the same time as my open ritual/class/event/thing and you never come to my events. Nope, not going to support your event.”

Which…is part of why we have so many petty conflicts, because scheduling accidents happen and people take things personally, but a lot of it boils down to awareness. Keeping track of what other groups are doing is a mighty challenge, and we have little infrastructure for it.

Assumptions
There’s that old saying about assumptions, and it really is true. Whenever we have an expectation or assumption about someone else–an assumption about their motivation..”They are doing this because they hate me, they are out to get me,” or an expectation, “Why aren’t they doing this thing that I need them to do for this event?” In these instances, we’re setting ourselves up for conflict and failure.

So what can we do? First is strengthening our own healthy boundaries as leaders, and working to help members of our groups strengthen their boundaries. Then there’s checking our assumptions. Is that true? Or are we just pissed off? There’s our expectations; did someone fail to live up to your expectation? Did they betray you? Or, did you never effectively communicate your expectations to your group members?

What we can do is work to be better. Notice the places where we’ve been hitting our heads against the wall and are frustrated, and work to change things so that it’s better next time. For an excellent resource on boundaries, I recommend the book “Where You End and I Begin.”

If you want things to happen, begin by asking for them. Clearly, and without ambiguity. You might get a yes, you might get a no. But at least you’ll know, and you aren’t setting yourself to be ticked off at someone later for dropping the ball. When a volunteer drops the ball, it often means that they should have said “no,” but they felt pressured to say “yes.”

Pagan Leadership: Dissent, Feedback, and Group Leaders

In the previous posts in this series, we’ve talked a bit about the challenge when you have issue with a leader. I’ve focused primarily on leaders who are in the level of incurable jerk, in other words, folks who aren’t going to listen to any feedback.

Dissent is part of a healthy group. There’s a difference between dissent and dissension–dissent is a disagreement, dissension is a quarrel. The problem in our communities is twofold; leaders don’t always provide a way to offer feedback about their leadership. So people gossip behind their backs. Feedback happens. But, how can we make it more constructive?

My mentors had a rule of thumb, that if people don’t have a way to complain about leadership, a way to offer feedback, they’ll find one. And this is where we cross over into that realm of the conflicts that rip a group apart, or, spread out amongst many smaller groups within a local community. If there is a local leader who’s acting in an unethical way, or even just making some mistakes, but if that leader is coming from a place of egotism and arrogance and isn’t willing to listen to feedback, it’s a powder keg waiting for a spark to explode it.

Thus, a pretty simple piece of advice for any group leader is, if you want a healthy group, provide a method by which people can offer feedback. Feedback about your leadership, feedback about the ritual you facilitated. Often it’s as simple as being open, honest, and approachable. But the second part is, you really have to be willing to hear that feedback and not jump down someone’s throat for it.

As soon as you’ve done that, you’ve told them that you’re not actually open to that feedback.

Now–This is easily said, not so easily done. Many of us taking on leadership roles are putting our blood, sweat, and tears in, and we can be really emotionally raw sometimes about hearing how we screwed something up. Or even just hearing that someone didn’t like the ritual we did, even if we didn’t do anything wrong. I sometimes have a hard time hearing negative feedback about events I’ve hosted. So this is a piece that can take rather a lot of personal work. My article on Hypersensitivity might be of value to those of you who value hearing people’s feedback, but who also feel like negative feedback is a kick to the gut every time.

It’s a tough balance. Some feedback isn’t really useful. “You can’t host a picnic in that park, it’s in a bad neighborhood.” Yeah, sorry, I hosted a Pagan Mabon picnic in my neighborhood where there are people of color, so automatically it must be a bad neighborhood. “Why don’t you host events out in XYZ suburb where I live?” Because…I don’t live an hour and a half away in your suburb. Some feedback you can easily discard. Other feedback is useful, if painful to listen to. And a lot sits in that gray area between. On the one hand you have the advice, “Don’t let the haters get you down,” on the other hand, you as a leader do need to be able to hear genuine constructive feedback. It’s a tightrope, I won’t lie.

Leaders
Then there are those situations where there is a leader who may or may not have one of the major personality disorders, or who is just completely unreasonable. Some group leaders seem to genuinely have no idea how destructive they are, but my goodness. You try to give them negative feedback and they will singe your ears back. They tend to lean mostly on the “Don’t let the haters get you down” side of the spectrum…but the truth is, some of these leaders really are making big mistakes that are harming their group, or even the broader Pagan community.

Sometimes a local group leader doesn’t just affect their own group, they affect their whole region because they are involved in every single local Pagan thing. I’ve been asked before how you “stop” a leader like this who is really harming the local community by their actions. If you’ve read the previous articles In the Pagan leadership series, you know there aren’t a lot of great answers on this one.

Some very few of these leaders can be reasoned with. Let’s use the Pareto principle and say 20% of them. The rest may simply not budge. Some of them may have severe and untreated mental illness. Whatever the reason, you have to make a judgment call about how to engage this person. Often the only tool you have at your disposal is to simply not engage that person, to not support their events, to not send people their way.

In some cases, however, the most damaging leaders are the ones who are convinced that they are doing amazing work and that they need to be involved in everything. And here’s the sad thing–they may have initially built something really incredible. They may have started a local Pagan festival, a temple, a church, a Pagan pride.

In many instances, over time that leader’s behavior has a consistent negative impact not just on their own group, but on the rest of the community. Other community members and leaders feel the need to respond, to decry them and speak out. And this is where you end up with one of those untenable “witch war” conflicts that has no end. There is no solution.

Remember–you cannot make anyone stop. You have no power to do so, except in the rarest of circumstances.

In some rare instances, particularly when there are multiple witnesses to (and victims of) of poor behavior on the part of that group leader, it’s possible that raising all the voices together can have some impact. But again, you can’t stop their inner circle from following them–even if you know the likelihood of that inner circle eventually getting betrayed by that leader. You can’t take away their title, you can’t make them stop running a Meetup, or take down their web site. The only exception to any of this would be collecting evidence of illegal behavior.

It should be pretty clear at this point that we’re not talking about dissent any longer, because there’s no viable way to voice that dissent in a way that it’s going to be heard. We’re talking about dissension, a quarrel that really has no winners.

In some cases, I’ve seen a local community gang up on a particular leader to the point that that leader’s will broke and they retired from community leadership. However, there’s two sides to that. Often the times that this tactic is the most successful is when it’s employed by relentless bullies, not by the community members who are on the right side of that conflict. Very rarely do I ever see this tactic work on a community leader who is clearly engaging in harmful behavior.

There is always a line. There’s always a time when an abuse becomes so extreme that you (and others) may have to stand up or you can’t look at yourselves in the mirror. But understand that there’s really no way to actually make that group leader stop.

Just because you stand up and speak out doesn’t mean it’ll have an impact. And, that sucks.

Once things get to the point of dissension the conflict, by its nature, spills outside of appropriate borders and boundaries. Well–given the Pagan community’s structure and lack of structure, it’s useful to look at it as “when” that happens, not “if” and thus, how to handle it when it does.

Dissent and Group Structure
Ideally, each group creates a strong group structure with very clear agreements about how things are to be handled, and builds a group culture that’s in alignment with that, so that when something like that comes up it can be handled in-house. Not so much a sweeping under the rug, but more of a, this is the most effective way to handle this. I look at that as compassion and effectiveness rather than secrecy.

Once a conflict spills out beyond the boundaries of one group, it becomes more problematic and more damaging as more gossip and more hearsay enters the fray.

Here’s an example of how a group leader is accountable not just to their own group, but to their local community.

I lead public rituals in Chicago, and slowly over time my leadership team and committed group members are beginning to form what I suppose you could call an inner court, or rather, a more stable group that could become a working group. I’m not teaching any one tradition, so that becomes a bit more challenging to define.

However, I take a lot of interest in the local Chicagoland Pagan community, I’m a resource for other groups, and I also teach and travel nationally. I do consider myself a servant of the broader Chicagoland community, and thus if people would have challenges with something I did, I feel that I’m accountable beyond just my own small group.

If someone’s in a position like I am, where I’m often a more broad resource, there’s even less of a specific way to offer feedback because the further out from me you go, the less people know me and the less they might feel comfortable offering me negative feedback.

Thus, we have the situation where people get so mightily pissed off that they use the only avenue they feel they have a voice on–they post publicly on Facebook, Yahoo groups, or talk loudly at events, because they feel powerless. They feel they have no recourse.

However, going back to feedback…when I get hatemail about my Environmental blog posts, it’s certainly not going to stop me from writing them. That’s feedback that I dismiss most of the time. If I had feedback about my leadership, I’d take it more to heart.

However, because of the lack of structure in the broader Pagan community or in a regional Pagan community, you basically have the passive aggressive problem where 1. people hate to offer small negative feedback, they only offer feedback when they are pissed, and 2. people offering me feedback would ultimately have to trust that I’m not going to come down on them like a ton of bricks and “excommunicate” them. The only way they can know that is if they get to know me and my ethics and my integrity.

Most of the time when I experience folks who are really frustrated, it’s because they either
1. have no method of offering feedback, or
2. feedback has been consistently discounted.

As I posted in previous blogs on this series, there isn’t really a good way to remove a leader who has acted consistently in a way that is detrimental. One exception within a group that has a legalized Not-For-Profit structure is if the bylaws provides for removing a group leader or group member for specific misconduct.

People in a local community might get really frustrated by the actions of one leader. However, there’s a fallacy that crops up. Let’s use the example of a Yahoo group or a Facebook group. People there will begin referring to the Chicago Pagan community, or whatever region.

And here’s the challenge–here is no such thing. There’s the hundreds of people on a Yahoo list or FB group. And there’s the vocal 10-20 people on any of those kinds of lists. But, those people do not comprise the whole of the community. There is no central place where that entire community gathers. Those vocal few are but a subset of a local community, but when those vocal few start butting heads, the quiet masses retreat. People say, “The ___ community is just a wreck, it’s terrible.” No, it’s not terrible, it’s just that the really vocal 10 people are being upsetting. You could do your own thing. But, those fisticuffs tend to neutralize any desire to build community because they are seen as “the” community.

There is no one community. There’s individual groups, and there are leaders, and cliques, and popular people. There are vocal people. But don’t ever mistake a group of vocal or popular people on FB for “the” community. There’s the idea of “Trial by Facebook” to get rid of a group leader, but there are hundreds of people who will never see it, never hear about that. Or, see it and never speak up. There is no community, there are communities. One of the great sins of FB and Yahoo groups is the illusion that the internet group IS the community. It isn’t. It just tends to be the vocal people who spend time on FB.

I have seen the several Pagan communities (ie, the interconnected individuals and groups) basically shatter because the primary local FB group had massive fighting on it, and many of the solitaries went back undercover, and several of the long-running groups stopped organizing because they couldn’t take the drama. Nobody’s willing to step in and do anything new, no individual is inclined to get involved, because of the explosion on a FB group of 10, maybe 20 people at most.

In a word, the verbal asshats demonstrate to all the people on the edges that drama and arguing is what community will ultimately lead to. The vocal people are seen as leaders, whether or not they are. And here’s the thing–sometimes the vocal people are genuinely pissed off for good reason. Maybe they’ve been seriously wronged. But in coming out in that forum, it’s not like a court of law where some judge will come down from on high and say, “Hmmm, yes, your Facebook post is more valid than Fred’s, you are right and this leader shall be taken down from their pedestal and banned.”

What happens is the urge of the truly wronged butts up against the urge of the egotists and narcissists and the “I cannot cope with being wrong or being shamed even if they are right” folks.

And there’s no way for someone on the edges to know the difference.

Thusly why trial-by-Facebook usually fails. There are only specific instances where it can work, and that’s rare. And typically requires people who have been egregiously harmed to stand together and tell their story truthfully. When that kind of evidence is seen as being consistent, and when the people telling the story have nothing to gain from a power play, that can change the situation.

It’s the deep need of the wronged to have their pain heard and witnessed, to have justice served, to offer feedback, that is why many Pagan groups blow up particularly online. This is very common in Pagan communities where there are a number of people frustrated with a situation where they feel they have no control.

One of the most common questions that I get when I teach Pagan leadership, involves people dealing with a local situation where someone’s doing something that they morally object to, or something similar, and they want that situation to stop, but they have no control over that other person.

We want to talk about the thing we didn’t like. We want to be heard. We want to be able to effect a change. And when we can’t, our frustrations mount.

The answer is pretty clear. If you want to have your own group be healthy, spend the hours it’ll take to set up a process of feedback. Find a way to accept anonymous feedback if need be. And find a way to deal with hearing that feedback. In my case, that’s exploring techniques of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy so that I can separate “You did this thing I don’t like” with “You suck and I hate you forever and I want you to die.”

Learn how to give effective feedback. And then, teach your group members what effective feedback looks like. I’ll likely do more articles on that in the future, but a good place to start is the book Nonviolent Communication by Marshall Rosenberg.

Herding Cats: Why I Dislike This Phrase

I really, really hate this phrase. Every time I tell people I teach Pagan leadership, they think it’s so funny to bring up the old joke. “Pagan leadership is just like herding cats,” they say with a nod or a smirk.

Like I haven’t heard the joke a thousand times before.

And if you’re one of the folks that has done this–don’t worry, I’m not mad at you. I’m mad that our community in general continues to perpetuate this very unhelpful phrase, this unhelpful story.

This is Part 4 of a series on leadership, so you might want to check those for additional context. I completely reject the “myth” that Pagan leadership is like “herding cats.” Yes, sometime it comes to pass that Pagan leadership is frustrating. Why is it like that? Because we keep saying it is. We make that reality happen. You know–words have power. Words have a lot of power. Words shape reality.

I actively encourage people to not use that particular phrase because it just reinforces the story that Pagans are hard to lead. In fact, it’s more accurate to say, people are hard to lead. Pagans are a subculture with unique difficulties and our leaders don’t have appropriate training in leadership, which exacerbates the problems we face. But this phrase does not serve us in moving forward. Words have power–I’ve written a whole blog post about that on Pagan Activist.

I’m about to publish two books that will include all of my current collected articles and blog posts on leadership, personal growth, and ritual facilitation. I posted on my  Facebook that I was looking for some suggestions for the title of the leadership book.

How many people suggested herding cats? Title suggestions below:

• Leading Pagans: I did those things so you wouldn’t have to
• Tales from the pagan pulpit
• A Herd of Cats is Called a Pride: Transforming Criticism into Leadership
• Herding Kittens without Losing Your Mind
• Lightning in a bottle: Leading Nature’s children on a common path
• A Flame in My Heart and a Target on My Back
• Wearing Midnight: Leadership Roles in Modern Paganism
• Acorns to Oaks: Planting the Seeds of the Future
• The Center of the Circle–Phaedra (plus the Target t-shirt)
• Heavy Sighs and Facepalms
• Herding Cats: Planting the Seeds of Pagan Leadership

I think that the “herding cats” myth we tell ourselves does us a disservice, just like shrugging and saying, “Oh, that’s Pagan Standard Time.” It excuses rudeness and poor leadership. And yes, we have a lot of rudeness in the Pagan community. There are a lot of inconsiderate people. And there are also a lot of clueless people too who have no idea that they are being disruptive.

Kenny Klein wrote an article admonishing Pagans for what’s often referred to as “Pagan Standard Time,” however, for me, this could just as well refer to the other choice phrases we use to identify ourselves. Like, “Pagans are broke,” or, “Pagan leadership is like herding cats.” Words have power, words shape reality, and these phrases do not tell the story we want for our future. 

“Get over it! You represent the Pagan community! Pull yourself together! I know, it is a hallmark of our culture in general that people are rude, late, and self-centered. But as Pagans, shouldn’t we be above that? As people who, after considerable thought, gave up the status quo to pursue our true selves, shouldn’t we be the shining example, not the common problem? I think we should.” - Kenny Klein *
http://www.witchesandpagans.com/Pagan-Culture-Blogs/pagan-standard-time-1.html

*I added the boldface, it’s not in the original article.

If Not Herding Cats…Then What?
Herding cats roughly implies that Pagans are too individualistic to ever follow someone else, and trying to organize and lead such individualistic people is impossible.

However, that hasn’t been my experience at all. Most Pagans I meet are desperate to find a group that is stable and healthy where they can get basic education. Sure, many Pagans are also argumentative and rude. In fact, many Pagans also lack some basic social skills, and I’ve gone on about why I think that is in the past, but I can dig up a link if folks are interested in more depth on that topic. I think the previous posts in this leadership series probably do a decent job of looking at some of the core problems.

What are the Problems?
There are a number of key problems that contribute to the difficulty that Pagans seem to have in achieving healthy groups and healthy leadership. In the world of design–product design, event design, urban planning, etc. –there’s a saying that the solution is within the problem, and that you can’t really solve the problem until you deeply understand the problem.

Here’s a quick list of some of the problems I’ve witnessed:

• Poor access to leadership training: Most people who end up as leaders didn’t want the job, and never got any training in communication, group dynamics, or psychology. They make honest mistakes that have big impacts.
• Leaders who are jerks: As discussed in previous articles, grassroots and ad hoc communities are vulnerable in that anyone can step up to be a leader, there’s no “gatekeeper.” And, many of the folks who do step up to be leaders have issues ranging from untreated mental illness to severe egotism, or they may even be sexual predators. Often it seems that the people who are stubborn enough to tough it out as leaders also are motivated by self-centeredness, ego, or other instabilities.
• Numbers: It’s a numbers game. If Paganism is less than one half of one percent of the population, that means that Chicago should have thousands of Pagans. However, how many come out to Chicago Pagan Pride? Maybe 500. That’s the most well-attended Pagan event in Chicago. Most of those Pagans won’t come out to anything else the rest of the year. There are only so many Pagans in any given area, spread out across geography, and interested in different things. There are only so many people who are actually interested in leadership, or willing to be a do-er and volunteer.
• Burnout: The lack of motivated volunteers and leaders tends to burn out the leaders we do have.
• Sins of the past: Many people who used to be heavily involved in the community got burned out by the conflicts of the past. This disproportionately impacts leaders, such as a leader who stepped into a leadership role even though they didn’t really want to, and then another local leader started backstabbing them and badmouthing them. Many people can only undergo stress like that for so long before they give up and go into hiding.
• Rejecting: Most Pagans are folks who, for whatever reason, did not find a home in another faith community. In fact, Pagans tend to be members of several overlapping subcultures. Renfaires, SCA, BDSM, Polyamory, Hippies, Scifi/Fantasy geeks, liberal activists…it’s not to say all Pagans are these things. However, if you’re talking numbers, there’s frequently a heavy overlap in many of these subcultures. Generally, many Pagans seem to value being unique individuals, but more than that, many Pagans were rejected by the dominant culture, or, rejected themselves from it. I believe that this leads to one result that becomes the kicker–we have a fairly small base population to begin with. And, what I have witnessed anecdotally is that Paganism has a higher-than-average percentage of people who have mental illness, treated or untreated. Thus, you often have a lot of people with a chip on their shoulder about something, making it more difficult for them to get along with each other.

There’s other challenges, but those are a few of the significant ones.

What you end up with is a ridiculously small base population, spread out over distance. You have people who tend to be apathetic. That’s not a Pagan thing, that’s They want people to do things for them, not to be the ones doing it, or a do-er. Do-ers are rare. Most people are more interested in “being,” or Be-ers as I call them. In fact, the drive to be a leader or event planner is fairly rare, as is the drive to step up and volunteer.

What I see in the Pagan community is a high percentage of leaders who are 1. unskilled and untrained, or 2. their drive comes from them being stubborn egomaniacs or from untreated mental illness.

It’s kind of a recipe for disaster.

What’s the Solution?
I have a hunch–no solid evidence, just things I think about when I’m staring at the ceiling trying to get to sleep at night, pondering the nature of life and Pagan community. I’m an insomniac. I do this with some frequency.

My theory is that some of the sociological root of many religions’ admonishment against contraception and the religious direction to procreate and multiply is to solve some of the above “numbers” problem.

As a minority religion that lives spread apart, there’s only so much you can do both in terms of proximity and money. A hundred Pagans that have to drive 1-2 hours to get to a ritual are going to have a hard time making that commitment. However, a hundred Pagans that all live within blocks of a church/temple/community center make that far more viable.

Plus, more people in closer proximity like that have the potential to raise more funds. Many Unitarian Universalist churches have only 100-200 tithing members at a church and they are able to support a building, minister’s salary, and other administrators’ salaries on that. I’ll be doing a whole article series on Pagans and fundraising as part of the leadership series to follow up on my Pagan Activist post on Pagans and money.

Here are some things that are way more helpful than making the joke about herding cats.

Teach our Emerging Leaders Good Leadership Skills
Give them the tools to do the job well. This means–yes–paying for training. We don’t have all the skills we need within the Pagan community. We’re going to need to pay for training for our leaders if we want to build that capacity within the community.

Focus on Mental Health
Let’s all get healthy. That means me, and that means you. I can’t even articulate how often my own depression and anxiety issues have made me a poorer leader. What has made me a better leader is working on my issues of self esteem; it turned me from a stubborn egomaniac into a reasonably stubborn visionary who can hear the word “no” without throwing a tantrum.

Focus on Physical Health
What does that have to do with leadership? I’ve written about my own process of getting healthy at some length in past blog posts, but the bottom line is, when I figured out some of my food intolerances and cut those foods out of my diet, my own mental health improved. Pagans tend to lean on the “Screw you I’m fat and I don’t care” side of things. But this isn’t about fat, it’s about health. Physical health leads to mental health. I’m 180 pounds, “fat” by the standards of the dominant culture, but healthier than I’ve ever been in my life because I’m eating foods that aren’t poisoning me.

Personal and Spiritual Growth Work
I can teach you all sorts of amazing communication tools, conflict resolution tools, and I can teach you about group dynamics. None of that is going to fix anything for you if you’re just a total jerk. Once upon a time, I had a boss. He was one of those total asshole bosses, a really toxic guy.

One day, he asked for my help and that of the other designers on my team in preparing some design concepts to the executive vice president of our company. I asked him what he’d like for me to do, and he did a poor job of explaining it, I asked him, “Like this?” and he just grabbed the board out of my hands and muttered, “I’ll do it myself.”

I was fuming. I went back to my desk almost in tears. And then I realized.

I. Totally. Do. That.

That was not a good day for me. I realized what a totally shitty leader I was at times. This was in context of the (geek alert) scifi conventions I used to attend where I led a team of Star Wars nerds in creating Star Wars reproduction scenery. I would do a terrible idea of explaining the concept of what we were doing, and when people failed to do what I had in my head, I’d grab their work out of their hands and just do it myself.

Leadership pro tip: Nothing disheartens a volunteer more than this behavior.

However, we’ve reached a key point here. In recognizing that I did that, I was able to confront my shadow and work to shift the behavior. I’m still not the best volunteer manager, but at least I’m not a jerk about it like I used to be. There are so many things that we each do, as leaders, that we probably aren’t aware of. We’re shooting ourselves in the foot all the time. When we explore our shadows and our issues, we can work to become better leaders and better people.

Looking Forward
Trotting out the “herding cats” joke just makes crappy behavior okay. Let’s instead work to be better, to tell the story of what we could do if we worked together. When we hold a vision of the future, when we speak it, that’s an act of magic. Words are magic. Let’s use words that paint the picture of that stunning, shining dream of what we’d like to see, not the poor behavior of the past.

“Dream no small dreams for they have no power to move the hearts of men.”
–Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Grassroots Leaders Who are Incurably Bad

This is the 3rd article in the grassroots leadership series. Sometimes there are leaders who are just real jerks. Maybe they have problems with egotism. Maybe they are unstable and mentally ill. Maybe they are alcoholic. Maybe they have some other problem.

As I discussed in the last blog post, when I teach leadership, Pagans and other grassroots leaders ask me, “How do I deal with a community leader that’s a total asshole,” or, “How do I warn people away from the really bad group leaders?”

The challenge is, if they are verbally abusing you or undermining you, there isn’t really a lot you can do. If you’re a member of that group, you can leave. But, you can’t (in most instances) take another group leader “down.” It’s a frustrating prospect. Let’s go a little deeper into what kinds of leaders out there cause problems so bad that you , as a leader or group member, might consider extreme measures to keep your community protected from the bad behavior of a leader.

Predators
Most of the people I’m going to talk about in the rest of the article aren’t predators, they are just jerks. However, let’s address the really bad folks first; pedophiles, rapists, abusers, psychopaths/sociopaths. There’s nothing you can do to help them or fix them. They will keep doing what they are doing until they die or are incarcerated. If someone in your group or another group leader is abusing minors, raping people, or engaging in other harmful, illegal activities, go to the police. Do not try to protect them just because they are Pagan, or an activist, or a member of any other grassroots cause. Don’t worry that them in the papers will give your community a bad name. If you have reasonable evidence, these people need to be prosecuted.

However–and I hate that I have to say this–don’t ever lie and suggest a leader is engaging in illegal activities just to strengthen your position while speaking out against them.

Making the assumption that what this other group leader is doing is not illegal, there aren’t many options. Let’s assume that this leader is engaging in harmful, unethical behaviors, and you are not “above” that person, meaning, you have no control over their actions/ability to lead a group.

Speaking Out Against Someone
What tends to motivate people quickly into the Speaking Out scenario is fear and anger. People feel powerless in response to actions by a group leader who is perceived as powerful–whether a leader of a group they are in, or of another group. They feel powerless, they get afraid, and they get angry. They post on Facebook, email groups, talk about them at Pagan gatherings to others they know. In essence, they try to spread the word–this person’s a jerk.

However, we Westerners have a penchant for the Underdog. Most of the time people who speak out against others are thought of as drama llamas trying to stir the pot, even if the person they are speaking out against is actually harming others. Whether or not they are passing along accurate information, most times this is not an effective strategy for dealing with a harmful group leader, because people won’t listen.

I’m not advocating silence out of fear of judgment. Because, so many Pagans and other grassroots groups have kept quiet about abusive, hurtful leaders, and all that silence does is perpetuate more abuse.

But, if you’re going to speak out, be really, really clear that it’s for the right reasons. And, be willing to stand in the fire. I’m not talking about the “I’ll throw away my own reputation to destroy this person” out of a vengeance mindset. And anyone working withing the Pagan community needs to think about the impact on community, and community safety, not their own vengeance.

And once again, you can’t “make” another leader stop leading a group. In almost all cases of Pagan community disagreements, it’s Person A said ____, Person B said____, with no way to prove it either way.

One exception that can help with the Speak Out method is if there are fifteen Person B’s, and you all speak out, that may have more of an impact. This strategy is only useful or necessary if the leader in question is a really bad egg. Like, really actively harming the local community, acting in an abusive way. Perhaps it’s not illegal; in most cases, sleeping with your adult-age group members isn’t illegal. Nor is manipulating people to get what you want and then throwing a tantrum and turning everyone in the group against them. However, if a leader is really damaging the reputation of Pagans locally, or is a danger to younger, newbie group members, it might be worth considering trying to take some larger and more visible community action.

You still can’t actually stop Person A, under most circumstances. In the rare instance where it’s a tradition with religious superiors, you can go to them, but I haven’t experienced that doing much good. Most traditions take a pretty hands off approach to local clergy.

Another exception is if you yourself have a lot of visibility, local clout, and fairly unimpeachable ethics.

An example: I spoke out publicly about my ex partner. I suffered some backlash initially, and it took a while for the truth to come out. What tipped the balance for people who initially supported him was when other women he had hurt started coming out about it, and he started doing crazy, rude stuff at various events. He really ruined his own reputation, I just sped up the process.

The truth will point to itself, but that does take time.

Vengeance can’t be your motivator. Your motivation has to be about the health of your community and your group. It’s a subtle difference, particularly if the group leader who is acting in a harmful way is backstabbing you personally and working to undermine your group.

Incurably Bad Leaders
Let’s take a step back and look at what this means. We’re talking about leaders that aren’t necessarily a predator, or, they’re on the legal edge of predator. What I mean is, they aren’t targeting minors, but they are targeting the vulnerable newbies in their group or at a festival to pressure them for sex. We’re also not talking about leaders who just have strong personalities and are stubborn, but who are basically good people.

I have another blog post coming up on trying to discern some of these differences, particularly through a conflict resolution process.

We’re talking about the leaders who are so stubborn and set in their ways they are completely unwilling to listen to you. People who refuse to communicate. Who badmouth you  to undermine your group because they are threatened by you. People who are unstable, who throw major temper tantrums and go absolutely postal when you offer them negative feedback. People who verbally abuse others, people who lie and manipulate others. One example that I’ve heard of in a few places is a local leader who goes to public events run by other groups, and then when they begin a ritual or workshop, will actually step in, interrupt the facilitators, and berate them for “doing it wrong” or try to take over.

We’re talking about someone who completely derails meetings by making it all about them. People who yell at their team members in front of other people, consistently. We’re talking about people who consistently disrupt any unity effort by trying to take it over or trying to destroy it–or both. Someone who joins your email list and posts rude things or hijacks threads to talk about their own events. People who are just consistently rude.

There’s actually a big difference between someone who is just a stubborn, empowered visionary, and someone who is an incurable jerk. There’s a spectrum there–any of us who step into leadership may have a little stubborn streak, but that’s different from someone who just is rude, year after year. There’s a Pagan leader I know who seems to think every local Pagan leader needs to swear fealty to him. He actually has a ceremony where he gets people to do this, he tells them they are being “made” a community elder. And during the ritual, they have to kiss his ring. I am not kidding. I don’t care if that person has served the local community for 30 years; doing that, and working to sabotage groups that don’t toe the line, is inexcusable.

If I, personally, find myself in a position of actively speaking out against another group leader, you can be sure that I have heard rather a lot of bad things about that person, and, I have fact checked and screened my sources. 

What Do You Do?
Most leaders who are being jerks I can pretty safely ignore. Maybe they badmouth me, maybe they are using and emotionally abusing a few newbies, and there’s not much I can do about that. If I do decide to speak out about a group leader, there’s a spectrum of response. If it’s someone who is on that verge of being dangerous, I’m happy to be public about speaking out–and, I pick my battles. More often there are just leaders that I don’t recommend for various reasons. So when seekers come to me looking for group recommendations, I tell them who I recommend, and who I don’t, and why. I give them the informed choice to do what they want.

Walk Away
This is sometimes referred to as the “high road,” although that’s not always an accurate statement–sometimes people say they are taking the “high road” when what they are really afraid to do is take a stand. Not that I blame them most of the time. Often, all ou can do is to walk away from a group, and to privately/one-on-one tell people about your experiences there.

Or, if you’re a group leader or part of other groups, you can very simply choose not to work with that group leader. Sometimes shunning is the only thing that you have. There are groups in the Chicagoland area I’d love to shut down, specifically the unethical sex temple there. I keep tabs on what local groups are doing. For that matter, I keep tabs on what dozens of groups are doing around the midwest and other places I’ve taught, since people ask me for consultations on problems in their area, and occasionally I’m asked to mediate a dispute so I like to know what’s going on.

Basically, I keep tabs, and I choose whom I recommend and whom I do not when seekers come to me looking for a group.

Honest Mistakes
There’s all sorts of situations which lead to bad leadership dynamics. One is just honest failure; most volunteer leaders weren’t trained in leadership. Most leaders I talk to don’t even want to be leaders. They screw up because they volunteered to host classes out of their homes and suddenly became the group leader.

And sometimes, it’s not that a leader is a bad person. Sometimes our personalities are just incompatible. The sad thing is, even when I’ve gotten a group of other leaders into a room together to plan an event together, it doesn’t usually work well. Maybe we’re all just used to steering our own plow. Even when we’re all reasonable people, we all have different styles.

I’ve seen entirely new conflicts arise out of “roundtable” and “unity” efforts like that.There’s other group leaders where I respect their work, but our work style/approach is just really different. And I recognize, if we tried collaborating, that would probably be a disaster. Not that either of us is bad, we’re just not going to be good collaborating.

Mental Illness
Some leaders have real mental illnesses. I can’t tell you the number of group leaders I encounter that have symptoms of Borderline Personality Disorder, Narcissistic PD, or any of the antisocial PD’s, or Bipolar. I myself have struggled with depression much of my life. If you meet me while I’m teaching a workshop or leading a ritual, you probably won’t know that I struggle with social anxiety.

Many mental illnesses can be managed through therapy and in some case medication, like Bipolar. Other things are more challenging, like the antisocial PD’s.

It really, really will serve you to understand the red flags for these (and other) mental illnesses. Sometimes, you can work with someone if you know what they have going on. There’s a massive difference between someone with Aspergers who is perceived as rude and speaking out of turn, and someone who has Narcissistic Personality Disorder who is ultimately going to try and overthrow your group leader in order to turn everyone around them into a “mirror” and make it all about them. Antagonists in the Church is a good book to start with for understanding some of the more toxic personalities; it’s written for Christian church leaders, but you can translate it to any group.

Holes in the Ego and Egotism
Some leaders just have huge gaping wounds from their past. Maybe they don’t have a personality disorder, perhaps they are just a jerk.

I’ve worked through a lot of old wounds in my own life. I used to be massively defensive, control freak, can’t ever be wrong know-it-all. Because, somehow in my teenage mind, being “right” meant I was giving the finger to all the kids in high school who made fun of me. Thing is, being right doesn’t really lead to anyone wanting to spend time with you…and I had to learn that the hard way.

Those old holes in our egos, those old wounds, become our shadows. Many leaders have these shadows. These are the shadows that can often be dealt with if we’re willing to look into the mirror, and maybe get some therapy.

Unfortunately, it seems that a significant percentage of grassroots leaders who are stubborn enough to keep a group going for more than 5 years also seem to have problems with egotism. I think this is both a testament to how difficult it is to build a strong group (it takes that kind of fierce stubbornness to put up with all the drama llamas and volunteers dropping the ball) but it’s also a testament to how we need to steward better and healthier leaders, not just leave leadership to the only person willing to do it. Who also just happens to be the person who’s crazy motivated…because, they are actually a little crazy.

A Winter Knight’s Vigil: Pagans, Leadership, and Romance

I’m sure that many of you probably don’t read romance. However, for those that do–I have a novella that came out today, A Winter Knight’s Vigil. Unlike most romance novels, this one deals with Pagan characters–and, not witches cursed with ancient powers, or druids who happen to be werewolves. Actual, regular Pagans.

The characters in the story are all members of a coven. The twelve of them are on a Winter Solstice retreat weekend in a woodland cabin. During the weekend, the two main characters, Tristan and Amber, both go through the various rituals and work through their own personal shadows.

Among these shadows are them dealing with their attraction to one another. Their coven has a rule that covenmates can’t get romantically entangled in order to prevent group dynamics and drama. After a hot night together, they have to face the consequences, and figure out if they’re going to hide what they did, or risk one or both of them getting kicked out of the coven.

Pagan Group Dynamics
While the book is not intended to teach in-depth ritual facilitation techniques or leadership for group dynamics, or even a guide to shadow work through Arthurian myth, all of those are components of the book. I hope to show a healthy way that things like that can be handled. Because, if you’ve read any of my blog posts about sex and ethics or other group dynamics, romances within the Pagan community tend to be one of the big problems with groups that go kablooey.

That being said, the book is an erotic romance, which means that there’s no closed doors. It’s rather spicy! So if that’s not your thing, you should know that up front

In the novella, Amber and Tristan are going through their own journey through the Longest Night vigil to step into Knighthood. To step into Service. To stand with integrity and make a commitment to their coven.

I think that non-Pagans will certainly enjoy the book–it’s about two people finding love together, it’s not about being Pagan. But, I also think that Pagans will get something special out of this story because it has some of the unique quirks of our community, of the things that we do. There’s Arthurian myth, there’s ritual work, there’s characters who do the Renaissance Faire and SCA (Society for Creative Anachronism), and just for fun, the coven hosts Heather Dale for a house concert.

Word of Mouth
If you like romance, consider checking out the book. And, if you know folks who like romance, consider the book as a Solstice gift or just mentioning it to people that might enjoy the story.

As more and more books are published, it’s sometimes difficult as an author without a massive marketing budget to get the word out about my works. Advertising is expensive. As I work to bring in enough income as an author and artist to fund my work so that I have time to write about Pagan leadership and ritual facilitation, I definitely appreciate any help my readers can offer in spreading the word.

I often say words are powerful magic, but it’s true. Word of mouth is pretty potent, particularly when promoting small and independent writers, artists, musicians, and publishers.

Pagan-Owned Businesses
I also want to give a shout-out here to Pagan Writers Press. All month long, Pagan Writers Press is offering discounts and giveaways to celebrate the Winter Solstice. Buying from PWP supports another Pagan-owned business and Pagan authors. PWP is a small press, and can also use any help you might offer in promoting their books.

What’s the best way you can help Pagan authors and Pagan-owned businesses? Other than buying books that you enjoy, the best way you can help is by sharing the link to the book on your Facebook or Twitter, and even just telling people about books that you like. Writing a nice review–even a short one–is a great way to help a book get more attention and sell more copies.

And, for those of you where Romance novels aren’t your thing, no worries. I have a book on Dreamwork coming out from Jupiter Gardens Press in a couple of weeks. Jupiter Gardens Press is another Pagan-owned business. More on that soon!

A Winter Knight’s Vigil is an erotic romance novella available through Pagan Writers Press.

About the Book:
Sexy, kilt-wearing Tristan has captured Amber’s attention on many occasions. But as members of the Kingsword coven, which has strict rules about intimate relationships inside the circle, dating him is out of the question.

When the coven heads to a secluded woodland cabin to celebrate the Winter Solstice, Amber finds herself closer than ever to Tristan. As the Longest Night approaches and their group’s ritual workings intensify, the pair realizes that they can no longer hide from their feelings.

Just as King Arthur held vigil before being knighted, Tristan and Amber face their shadows—and the realization that one or both of them might have to leave the coven.

Or can they be together without breaking their honor?

***

Excerpt (PG-13) Amber experiences a trancing and drumming ritual   |  Excerpt (Spicy hot)
Buy the book for $2.99  | Smashwords   | Amazon  |  Barnes & Noble  |  All Romance eBooks

Free Giveaway: 
I’m hosting a giveaway including one hardcopy of the Wild Shifters anthology (with my story Werewolves in the Kitchen in it), one eBook of A Winter Knight’s Vigil, several pieces of hand-made jewelry, 3 gently used Sherrilyn Kenyon books, one set of 4 handmade cards, and one small painting. Click the link to enter by liking my FB page, following me on Twitter, and a host of other ways to gain additional entries.  9 winners will be chosen.