One of the yearly practices that I do is around this time of the year, when the winter season sets in. The longer dark nights and the coldness of the season creates a natural sense of introspective awareness that simultaneously calls for some minimalism in spiritual practice. Recently my magical mate and I followed through on this sense of introspective awareness by creating a wintering altar, where we took many of our ritual and magical items and “retired” them for the season.
Doing this activity gives those ritual and magical items a rest, and it also gives us a chance to evaluate what is absolutely essential to our spiritual practice. Sometimes, when you do an activity like this, what you are really doing is also creating a specific purpose for whatever you leave out. In the case of the wintering alter, leaving out only the essential ritual and magical items involves picking out what would be used for wintering practices, but you can apply this same understanding to a different type of ritual and find that you would use different ritual items based on the purpose of the magical work.
One of the minimalistic practices that I’m applying with wintering is the use of a candle flame, where I stare into the flame for a time, with no other light in the room and allow my consciousness to appreciate the light of the candle, in relationship to the dark. I then blow out the candle and close my eyes, allowing the after image of the flame to imprint itself on my mind. Eventually even the after image fades to darkness and I contemplate the darkness. I can then start up the process again or leave it as it is.
You can do similar process with sound. Take a bell and ring it. Listen to the sound as it fades. Then listen to the silence. Then ring the bell again and repeat the process. When we create practices around our senses that incorporate this kind of minimalism it can teach us a lot about how to incorporate one of our most potent tools into magical and spiritual work: Our bodies.
A minimalistic approach to magic, for whatever the reason or purpose asks that we get creative about our practice because it calls on us to give away what isn’t absolutely essential to our practice, but to figure that out we have to actually assess our practice and determine what to keep and what to let go (for a time). Yet the essentialist aspect of this work also challenges us to discover how we create an experience with less that nonetheless takes us to more.
