It’s Week 5 (out of 6 weeks) for the Decluttering Goddesses eCourse that I have decided to take… and I have to admit, I’m TORN.

The course is made up of 2 parts — decluttering your space and reinventing your relationship to your STUFF, and a more spiritual aspect where the participants are encouraged to create space withing their homes that nourish their souls.

I am working through week 5 on the decluttering part (after a brief period of time where, because of the kids and work and social obligations I was unable to really unload my stuff or go through parts of the apartment), I’m revising my lifestyle and reviewing the way I shop and what I am trying to accomplish with the shopping thing. I feel good about this part.

But the spiritual stuff? OOOOH… stuck stuck stuck!! SOOOO stuck.

Why am I stuck? Well… simply? I don’t feel SAFE with my spirituality.

And about now people will be thinking I’m cracked (as I hedge, and realize I am doing so and that its not necessarily BENEFICIAL to assume what other people are thinking… sigh) or that maybe what the course is asking me to do is something so against my personal spiritual beliefs that I might feel like doing so was putting my very soul in jeopardy.

Absolutely not.

Week 1 was the process of setting up an altar. An ALTAR. Something that I have wanted to set up in my home for YEARS. But yet, without that shove and “love letter” from Goddess Leonie I had avoided and dodged having an altar before this point. And even though I read the course materials the minute they came out, I waited until the last day of the week 1 before I even attempted to set up my altar.

Week 2 I was to smudge and cleanse my space. Umm… totally didn’t do it. I avoided it. I had all sorts of excuses… and yet the excuse of not knowing how to do such a thing? Not at all true. I have incence. I have access to smudge sticks and sweet grass I can burn… In my past life I did house cleansings and clearings and blessings. I have been to sweat lodges where I smudged and was smudged. I have cleared and cleansed my crystals and sacred areas many other times. But I couldn’t bring myself do do it this time. I resisted… I avoided… I HURT…

Week 3 came and I still felt so stuck. I couldn’t concieve of setting up “prayer (spell) spots” in my home. I might not understand Feng Shui, but I know spells, I have done spells (or prayers) in that way before. But looking at the grid and making any attempt to make heads or tails of where my space was in accordance to a grid (okay that is DEFINATELY a difficulty for me, spacial manipulations are extremely difficult for me to do)….

I was resisting. I knew I was resisting. I just couldn’t figure out why I couldn’t do something so SIMPLE… so consistent with my beliefs… and I started to feel broken and tearful whenever I looked at it, and the resistance became a big fat blob of dark, icky, sticky, sappy, GOO that I couldn’t move through and I didn’t know how to get it OFF. And the more I felt it around me, the more scared I was…

I didn’t know what to DO. I was unable to move forward. Here I was, a Witch who couldn’t do the smallest things to clean and clear her space! This feeling of “ickied-stuckness” was what led me to join this course, and yet, here it was again, stopping me from moving forward.

I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t want to bother anyone with my issues — these are my problems, I shouldn’t be so presumptuous to think that anyone else would want to know about these things, because they were so UNUSUAL — and so I kept silent. I focused on going through the minutia of my STUFF and tossing things out… and I avoided the big scary thing that I couldn’t make eye contact.

But I could FEEL it… the sticky, gummy… STUFF. Like pine sap sticking and clinging and holding me back, making me feel like I’m fighting to pull off stuff and out of stuff, only to be *shmph* right back stuck in the sap again. Every time I braced myself and read through the lovely handwritten love letters from Goddess Leonie it was like combing the pine sap out of my hair (I have a LOT of experience with sap in my hair, being that I practically LIVED in pine and fir trees when I was younger) and every time I became mired in the sappy stuckness I struggled… like a butterfly fearing she was going to be consumed by amber…

But I couldn’t ask for help.

I didn’t know where to turn to, I didn’t know who might UNDERSTAND the stuck. I was afraid. But I did soemthing that was very scary for me…

I reached OUT…

• I tweeted about my stuckness with the feng shui stuff.
• I chatted online to Kyeli
• I emailed Goddess Leonie and Lisa with some of what I could “verbalize” that was sticking me
• I talked to friends (who I don’t think understood why I have such problems with simple things)
• I cried… a LOT.

Eventually I realized that there was something THERE, keeping me from being able to be spiritual.

I did not feel SAFE to be open with my spirituality. I don’t feel safe, even in my own HOME, not yet.

I am afraid that the kids will see my altar and tell their father, and that their father will try to sue for full custody. Yes, I know that he has no legal leg to stand on, because nothing I do is in any way harmful to myself or my children… but after 14 years of being cautioned to fear my fundamentalist Christian in-laws (because they would either a) try to “deprogram” me, b) try to take my children from me, or c) constantly prosteltyze to me or “save” me) I still fear being too open with my beliefs around my children. My ex is too afraid of his father to stand against him (a HUGE reason in his controlling behaviour towards me — a “good husband controls his wife”), and I know that he would do anything to hurt me even if it meant hurting the kids in the process.

I am afraid of being judged by Reg. He knows, conceptually, that I am Pagan. He doesn’t know what that means, but as I don’t really talk much about my spirituality or religious feelings. But I have had bad experiences in the past, and I am afraid of being too “different” too quickly…

I know its all in my head (and heart) and that its not a REAL barrier… it doesn’t exist in the real world. But its still there… I still feel like i need to make my home SAFE for me, to accept ME… to make me a nest so I can start to HEAL from my marriage, where I can learn to accept myself, where I can feel secure enough to dance, draw, sing, create, love, and BE loved…

Its WHY I started this process, its what I blessed and charged my altar for… its just gonna take some work.

But its now week 5, at the end of next week the course is over, and at this rate I will NOT be done getting through the different tasks, and I won’t have anyone I can reach out for for a bit of support or when I can’t bend my mind around the stuckness… I feel like I am too broken to complete this in 6 weeks. I feel the panic of time running out, of what will I do if I still have a question after this is over???

For now? I am going to try and draw out what i *think* my house looks like, and ask for the help that was offered, take a deep breath, and know that its okay to cry if I have to…