Free Wicca for Beginners by Thea Sabin Page B

gods. The gods exist on earth, but it’s easier to reach them on their own turf—the otherworld, the spirit realm. In meditation, you can travel to the worlds of the gods and learn about them in context. They may show or teach you things in a pathworking that would be difficult to experience on the mundane plane.
    to build an astral temple. An “astral temple,” at least for the purposes of this book, is a place you create in your mind where you go to do magic or communicate with the gods, among other things. Pathworking to an astral temple usually involves taking multiple trips to this place, making it more concrete and clear each time you visit, until you can go there at will.
    to get psychic information. You can use a pathworking to meet helpful guides whom you can ask for information. For example, you might design a trip where you meet your inner self (a personification of the subconscious), and ask it to locate the source of pain in your body. Or you might visit the animal or human spirits of a sacred site to learn about the significance of the area. Likewise, you can use pathworking to meet, talk, and get information from the dead.
    One of the most important things to remember when doing pathworking is that you must have a single starting place for your journeying, and that you must leave your pathworking the same way you came in. For example, some people visualize beginning their journey by going through a door or gate, and they pass back through the door or gate on their return to the “real,” or mundane, world. Others imagine beginning at the mouth of a tunnel, and returning back through the tunnel at the end.
    Retracing your steps is important because it signals your mind that you intend to come back to the mundane world. You want to make this clear to yourself so that you come back completely, and not with one foot in the otherworld and one foot on earth. When you are on a pathworking journey, your psychic or spirit self, not your physical self, is the one that makes the trip. You want to make sure that the psychic self reunites with the physical at the end of the pathworking. If they don’t reconnect, you can feel disoriented, dizzy, queasy, muddled, or incomplete, for lack of a better word. Eliade posits that shamans are considered a little bit crazy because they are simultaneously in both worlds and therefore never completely in either. Do not panic, though —if you do pathworking and wander off track, you’re not going to become a crazy shaman. If you have not managed to come completely back from a pathworking journey, you can fix the situation by returning into your pathworking through your gate or whatever visual you used, visualizing yourself reintegrating whatever part of you was left behind, and clearly and deliberately returning back the way you came, followed by a thorough grounding once you’re back.
    If you are truly worried about not being able to return, try the Theseus trick I discussed earlier in this chapter. When you enter the pathworking, tie a golden rope or thread to your gate or doorway and the other end to your wrist. If you get lost or disoriented in the pathworking, you can follow the thread home. (I’ve found the thread to be more reliable than a Hansel and Gretel trail of breadcrumbs.) Another option is to have someone stay in the room with you while you are pathworking. He or she can “talk you back” by verbally leading you to your entrance point if you get lost.
    It’s also important to use the same entry and exit point because you will ensure that your mind knows the place well and you can get there easily, especially if you didn’t bring your golden thread. This makes it much simpler to get into your pathworking and find your way back. It also means that you can spend less time and energy with your “induction” (the beginning part of your trip that you repeat each time you journey) and more on the actual journey.
    Setting Up a Pathworking
    To set up a pathworking,