How to tell what your intuition is exactly telling you?

[Ahyoka]

Howdy!

Brand new here.. thank you for having me. I'll just go ahead and spit out my question with a follow up explanation and a little backstory below for anyone who hates reading an essay to just cook the recipe.

After being a practicing witch for over ten years, I agreed to re-open a bible to learn the other day. A gut punching feeling came over that physically knocked the wind out of me, which is a very familiar feeling to me. My intuition was definitely telling me something there. So how do I tell if that necessarily good or bad for me? When this happens, it's usually just a strong feeling and I've never been great at deciding that for me... that's where I leave it to my ancestors and deities. Im battling this overwhelming feeling of guilt for them, I know I could never turn my back since they are so deeply rooted to me at this point. SO, has anyone battled this feeling when dabbling into any new or familiar religion? And did you ever decide if this was a feeling of dread or the "green light"?

Im definitely not a stranger to the book, I grew up in south MS and southern methodist. You can say I had a horrible experience with every church growing up. I am also cherokee/choctaw with family members to show me some old practices I now know as shamanism. So naturally, I got curious in my teens and was stumbling into every 2010 witchcraft forum you could find. I then decided to research as much as possible before practicing which sort of became my life. So far Ive been a Buddhist, then Wiccan for the majority of my twenties, which slowly turned into a bit of paganism and now I've pretty much come full circle upon moving back home. My main deities I work with are Diana and Hecate. Which I'm sure some of you here know.. they can be pretty intense when responding to any decision making of your own. So, I find myself back in my hometown, now in my mid 30's, after exploring the world, and in a relationship where literally every person in both of our families are die-hard southern christian. Lately, ive been wondering if putting a very well cultured, well researched, fresh set of eyeballs on this whole thing. Not abandoning my faith in my other practices, but sort of entertaining the possibility id finally be able to go to church with my family without wanting to physically vomit I guess.

Ugh.. I dunno. I know someone here has been in this sort of situation, if you wouldn't mind giving me some outlook that would be great. I have seen firsthand the wrath of these ladies I hold dear, and would hate to anger them. Is it possible to remain strong and devoted in that faith and in this one?

 

[Durward]

Howdy!

Brand new here.. thank you for having me. I'll just go ahead and spit out my question with a follow up explanation and a little backstory below for anyone who hates reading an essay to just cook the recipe.

After being a practicing witch for over ten years, I agreed to re-open a bible to learn the other day. A gut punching feeling came over that physically knocked the wind out of me, which is a very familiar feeling to me. My intuition was definitely telling me something there. So how do I tell if that necessarily good or bad for me? When this happens, it's usually just a strong feeling and I've never been great at deciding that for me... that's where I leave it to my ancestors and deities. Im battling this overwhelming feeling of guilt for them, I know I could never turn my back since they are so deeply rooted to me at this point. SO, has anyone battled this feeling when dabbling into any new or familiar religion? And did you ever decide if this was a feeling of dread or the "green light"?

I'll just try to ignore your desire to return to the biggest farce religion on the planet, and consider it as a temporary lapse in judgement. I measure by results and skills, and I don't see anything but evil being produced by anything in that group. They are good at hen-pecking and gossip after church, while being rude to the wait staff. Remember that these are the folks with a history of burning witches, 600 years of Inquisition, and destroying the cultures of others, starting wars, misogyny, incest, division, and other forms of hate, for thousands of years. While having no skills or powers from this waste of time religion. You can't belong to a misogynist hate cult and somehow try to justify it, make it into something it isn't, or try to say it isn't all bad. What's next, we allow this cult to take over the government and force the puke on the rest of the free world?
Anyway, rant over. I abhor the Abrahamic cults, over. If there ever was some mind-control evil demonic barf nonsense, this is it.

I would like to say that your soul is crying when you even think about returning to that hate cult.
But, my own way of trying to discern what strong or unusual feelings are about is to lower myself into the "fulcrum", which is the place between being awake and asleep, while floating that experience or feeling in front of my hypnagogic attention. Sometimes you get visuals that explain things better, or a scene, or the memories that were buried come to the surface.

You can reach this state by falling asleep with your arm propped up at the elbow. When your arm drops, you are usually there and it will bring you back. You keep doing this until you can hover in that state. So, whatever works for you to get out of the way of the intuitive you.

In my case, the Southern Baptist psychos tried to starve me in a closet and exorcise the demons out of me for telling them future events that came true, as a child. The beatings, the starvation, the constant bible study and church visits, were all nothing but child abuse and frikken ignorance. They are mouth-breathing morons to me, and abusive, and usually about as intelligent as a rock. Nothing but frightened babies that have no clue what is real.

 

[Morell]

Intuition - unconscious recognition of known patterns

Intuition is very useful thing to have. However you need to know what it is and how it works. Once you learn about something, your inner animal learns too. If you have food every day at the same time, your animal will instinctively get hungry at that time. If lifted hand means attack, animal you will learn pretty fast to expect attack whenever hand is lifted. If you have religious trauma from the bible, even looking at it will make your inner animal uneasy. So much for intuition.

As a magic practitioner you should know about egregores and energy charging of objects. Egregores of Christianity are big and have a lot of energy and ability to influence people to feed them. Bibles are powerful and sometimes really heavy charged objects. Interacting with religious books most of the time tends to summon spirits that will try to convince you about the religion to be true and for you to become a follower. Happened multiple times to me. But knowing who i am and my path I can keep my ground and these spirits just waste their energy on me and leave disappointed or angry to seek other victim. So if you want to research Christianity, you need to keep in mind that it is mix of mysticism, spirituality and soul trapping nets seeking to make people as limited as possible. But who are you? That is important. You better know what is your own path and always remember it and be loyal to it, to yourself.

Also when it comes to family, You have no obligation to them based on them being a family. Toxic people do not deserve your love because they are family. Period. Love is to be deserved and worked for. Family are people who support each other through both good and bad times, people who always have open arms for you no matter what happens. That is family, not the bloodline.

You speak about those ladies who are easy to anger and you actually fear them. I don't think that you love them, you want to love them and hope for them to love you in return. But apparently that is not happening, they would not love you, but a very specific kind of person you would have to become to be their beloved one. Becoming a dream of someone else is task worthy of a slave, or a robot, but not of a human being, which in Christian theology is a child of the highest god. How dare one limit a person of such a noble blood?

 

[beardedeldridge]

There are plenty of people who choose to walk a line between different traditions.

Now about your question:

Sounds more like it could just be a learned physical response due to baggage from your stated previous experiences or maybe it is something deeper. Personally when I don’t know for sure I push deeper until I do.

Now if you can’t move past it, so be it. Don’t let people make you do something that you don’t want to do.

But if you want to clear away that baggage (regardless if you want to reenter that religion), then push deeper. But you really should deal with that baggage at some point either way.

Now if you want to give it another go, even to just dip your toe in to honor your ancestors that were from that tradition, then do that. Don’t let people in our community talk you out of something either. Every religious/non-religious group that has ever existed has done horrible things. People are horrible creatures who in enough numbers will use any excuse to do horrible things.

Take care of yourself.

-Eld