Many women long to be part of a circle where they can speak and be heard, a circle that meets regularly enough so that it can be a dependable source of support, and a circle that affirms not only their right to be in it but also their right to be here on this blessed planet. What we are really saying when we wax poetic about our desire for community is that we desire a circle of people who, while they may not share our lived experiences, hold the same hopes for the children of the future that we do.

If you feel like a Priestess and are called to circle, having searched high and low for a small group of like-minded “wild ones” who will listen while you weep and work magick with you, for you and the wounded world, but have not found that sense of untamed belonging and fierce acceptance in any existing space, then it may be time to create your own. Ask yourself: What is the conversation you want to have with the global community through your circle? How is your circle an expression of the values you hold dear for all humanity? How will your circle embody and honor the holistic, integrated, and primal feminine?

Begin there. Begin with your core values and deepest truths. This is how the circle grows up round from the roots. Consider your circle’s mission as primary, so that every meeting and every member is threaded together by red-hot convictions that do not change. Each individual within the circle is a icrocosm of the circle itself, which is, in turn, a microcosm of an envisioned juster collective.

The circle is not an escape. The circle is not a wild retreat from the workaday lives of its members. The circle is a living expression of how you want the world to be. It is a real and tangible reflection of what you wake up hoping for and an in-your-face answer to the injustices that keep you awake at night.

The fire that boils beneath the circle’s surface is what keeps it alive and well amid the cyclical nature of its membership and the naturally wayward energetic investments of its participants. Resist the predictably skeptical voice inside your head that warns you to shrink back, that says you do not know enough or that no one will come. Resist the urge to dilute the circle’s message to gain attendance, resist the need to know exactly what your circle will be. Take stock of your deepest, most immutable values and begin there, with what you know for sure, and do not back down from these tightly held convictions.

Handwritten Verses: The Circle Is Always, the Circle Is Never

In digging out your circle’s mission statement from your vast storehouse of beliefs, complete these two sentences as many times as you can:

The circle is always…
The circle is never…

Circle all the sentences that meet the following condition: They affirm the values I want the global community to embody. From those sentences, create a mission statement or manifesto. Do not worry, not yet, about how often you will meet or precisely what you will do during your meetings. Fuse the bony foundations together now—the rest will come. Allow your inner Witch of Sacred Love to work with the Prophetess to form a vision for your sacred work, and know yourself as a wise Craftswoman who works in the art of circling as a potter works in clay. Permit circle-craft to empower rather than burden, to liberate rather than cage, and always grant your circle permission to swell and shrink as if it were a living, breathing entity.

The circle is versatile. For some it is only a space of open-hearted communication, their place to speak and be heard. For others, it is a candlelit container for communal magick, chanting, and spell craft, or a driven and purposed boundary for activism and community planning. Whatever the circle’s nature, whatever the intention that anchors it firmly to ground, it is an organic shape in which the most intense learning often occurs. The circle is a teacher-in-the-round, an entity in and of itself, and a mirror for the greater global collective as you would like it to be.

Too often, ours is a quiet and lonely practice. Dissatisfaction with our garden communities leaves us in a precarious position, at once longing for truly empowering spiritual community and resigning ourselves to a life of solitary Craft. Sometimes, in our more bitter moments, we attempt to become our own support system, struggling to embody an entire coven within our own skin, all the while wondering if we can, one day, muster the energy and know-how to start our own circles. But if we take our lessons from the wild, we know the merit of belonging and trust in the power of community. Know this, Priestess: If the wild women of this world could truly come together with their shared magick to support a common vision of a healing planet and could cease battling one another and using the stillsharp weapons of capitalism and colonization, then we would become precisely what was so feared during the burning times. We would become the wise change agents—the heathen collective come home.

Danielle Dulsky is an artist and yoga teacher who leads teacher trainings, women’s circles, witchcraft workshops, and energy healing trainings. She is the author of Woman Most Wild and The Holy Wild: A Heathen Bible for the Untamed Woman (New World Library) from which this essay is adapted. DanielleDulsky.com.

BY DANIELLE DULSKY

The ebbs and flows of the great earth’s natural cycles live within you, Witch. Know the wild feminine as circular, and concerned above all else with the interconnectedness of all things. That logical left brain of yours wants to separate, fragment, and linearize all that you perceive, but your generative, intuitive right brain knows a deeper truth. In your cells you know that this world lives in you as much as you live in it. The rhythms of nature are the rhythms of your energetic womb, the cycles of your emotions and creative work, and the continual, spiraling understanding that divinity exists in it all, forever and always. The recollection of your embodied cycles is the key to the broom closet’s first lock; without this, your Witch consciousness remains dormant.

The intentional embodiment of your wild rhythm is integral to your spirituality because it grounds you firmly in this world; it creates opportunity for continual affirmation of your sexuality and creativity as hallmarks of your very nature. Your sex and your spirit were forced into a divorce long ago, but now, now let these two parts of you be reunited under red satin sheets. The first pillar of wild woman spirituality is the marriage between the Witch’s whole being—that is, her soul, body, mind, and spirit—and the cycles of the world around her. You are not merely in the world, my love; you are of the world.

The psyches and bodies of women are meant to wax and wane, swelling and thinning out with much majestic variability. The feminine is neither even-keeled nor easily predicted. We are changeable creatures. We women experience spiritual winters during which there is a divinely fallowed time when we care not for prayer or ritual. So, too, a woman experiences these sacred voids in terms of love and relationship, body and health, creative work, and every aspect of her way of being in the world. When compared directly and unknowingly to a high-fire inner summer, when deep, purposeful, and fertile transformation is being birthed over and over again, these inner winters can weigh heavily on a woman. She sinks low into a depression made far worse by a rejection of this time’s validity as a dark-moon psychic state during which a woman craves solitude and emptiness.

We are the living feminine, Sister, and we have a cosmically sanctioned right to check in and check out in accordance with our inner resources. Our energetic wells can only source so much work, play, nurturing, and devotion before they become depleted. We are not meant to be constantly turned on, and the world needs our darkness as much as it needs our light.

From the time we are girls, we learn to shut down our natural and intermittent inclination to run into the dark void of nothingness. The technologies of woman taming are as old as dirt, my love, and the most sinister of these has been the strategic condemnation of the Still Woman. When I say wild, I do not mean out of control; rather, I refer to the freedom of both stillness and doing, a sacred liberation that was slowly taken from us when we were young. The wild is your human way of relating to the lifeforce that is beyond human but wholly natural. Little girls are kept wild when their caregivers affirm their right, and affirm it often, to be of the world. A good deal of preparation for the battle of adolescence is necessary for children of all genders to psychologically survive the inevitable woundings. Particularly for those who do not neatly match our culture’s presented image of normalcy, the survival skills required are immense, with the suppression of the wild a common response to the threat of abandonment. We conform in order to belong, in order to keep from being left behind, with every act of perceived rejection driving the wild self deeper into the shadows of our psyche.

It is beyond terrifying, I know, to crack wide open the shell that has been layered so thickly around us by so many years of snickers, eye rolls, turned backs, insults, and punishments. Hear me when I tell you that you are not who they say you are, and the greatest gift you can give to the global community is to be fiercely authentic. Unlearn the mechanisms of control that keep you believing that you must keep going no matter how loud your heart-voice is screaming for rest. Reclaim your wild rhythm, and awaken your Witch consciousness; she is sleeping, small body curled with the petrification that comes of allowing ourselves only small movements. Wake her up, and let her show you the way home.

I see you now, my Sister-Witch, ear pressed against the door, hearing the call of your wild nature like a gut-born drumbeat. Remember the nourishment of nature-aligned rhythm, and insert that ancient, rusted key -into the lock. Turn the key. Hear the sound of your inner Witch waking up with a soft, sultry yawn. Embodying the rhythms of this strong earth is your first act of liberation, and it is the most fundamental, central pillar of wild woman spirituality. Once you have acknowledged the organic power of the world around you as kith and kin to that which lies within you, once that is done, there will be no turning back.

Danielle Dulsky is an artist, yoga teacher, energy worker, and founder of Living Mandala Yoga teacher training programs. This essay is excerpted from her book Woman Most Wild: Three Keys to Liberating the Witch Within (© 2017 New World Library). LivingMandalaYoga.com