It's been EIGHT MONTHS since I did an episode! But I'm back and grabbing hold of my witchy ways with both fists. I was so not prepared for any of the things I was dealing with, so today's episode is all about how you can be more prepared to get through rough times by using your witchy toolset.

Let's clarify the difference between casting a circle for a ritual versus a spell, and go into detail about what a ritual actually is and what it might include. Of course, as always in witchcraft, the real answer is there is no real answer. Hopefully this episode can at least give you some ideas about how you might define these things for yourself.

This episode is all about things you can do when you're traveling to stay connected to your practice.

It's not a practice if you're not practicing, so let's talk about how to bring in weekday correspondences to strengthen your connection to magic and witchcraft every day.

The Gateway Experience is a series of tapes used to learn how to access altered consciousness in order to communicate with your higher self, use energy to heal your body or emotional state, access the universal consciousness, project thought holograms, and even access the past and future by entering the infinite energy dimension. In the 1980's, the CIA participated in the Gateway Experience at The Monroe Institute so they could analyze the potential for spying by using out of body experiences (OBE) and whether other countries might use OBEs to spy against us. They also analyzed the potential impact to society, and therefore national security, if this method essentially disproved the existence of God.

For the next few episodes, I'll go over my experiences so far using the Gateway Process, but I also want to tell you about all the things the declassified CIA document talks about. To me, it provides a scientific explanation of magic and how I believe it works. It's helped to re-energize my connection to the magical realm and I hope that learning about that will help anyone else who's struggling between "faith" and science. So I'm using the CIA document to understand it all, and the tapes to sort of hack my own brain.Oh and PS -- I know I pronounced "synapse" as "synopse" and that the word I was looking for there was "neuron" but I had a brain-cramp...

The one question I'm asked the most is how to find a witchy community/coven/circle/study group. I've avoided it until now because it's so difficult to answer, but in this episode I'll tell you about the ways I know to find a group, plus a few things to watch out for before you join one.