When I first started doing full moon circles with my friend, who initially sparked my journey into Pagan practices, wheels started turning on defining and structuring my own belief system. While she would pray to goddess and her husband would pray to science, I didn’t feel like either was right for the loose understanding I had of my own faith.

Growing up in a household without religion, prayer was never something I was taught. We didn’t go to church. God was always more of a “maybe” concept. Living in the South, my classmates’ bullying about my lack of faith left me with a general aversion to any kind of religion, especially Christianity, and I was a staunch atheist throughout high school and onward. I’m sure I will delve into all that at a later date.

My lack of religion did, however, motivate me to learn about various religious practices from a philosophical and metaphysical perspective. Rarely did I apply them to my own life, but my curiosity and hunger for knowledge was insatiable.

I knew that I believed that the human experience is intrinsically connected, that most religions tell the same story, and that we live on through the memories and hearts of the peoples’ lives we touched, but that was about where my soul-searching ended.

Making A Mantra of my Own

While, initially, I didn’t understand the “power of prayer” or even the purpose of it, when I thought about my own beliefs a certain phrase had always resonated and encapsulated those beliefs.

Once upon a time, when my sister and I were younger, baked out of our gourds, laying on the bedroom floor, she came to a revelation that has stuck with me ever since: “Everything has something beside it.”

Everything has something beside it.

Meaning that every object in existence has another object beside it no matter what direction you go. Every cell of our being vibrates against another cell. Our planet resides next to a wide variety of cosmic bodies. Each moment in time is preceded and followed by another.

My Mantra to Interconnected Energy

That phrase, mentioned above, became the beginning of the mantra I wrote to open my rituals, which I have included below.

Everything has something beside it.

Cardinally. Chronologically.

Within you. Beyond you.

Atomically. Astronomically.

Through time’s constant persistence,

bear witness to an interconnected existence

as the universe experiences itself.

— written by me, inspired by my sister

Since this is the mantra I use to open my rituals, I thought it would be the perfect opener for this blog of shadows.

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