Navigating and Explaining My Beliefs to Others

It’s hard to make someone else believe in your beliefs. Wars have been fought over the millennia on this foundational principle - what is different from me is bad. This happens on a geo-political sphere, but also within the family space. When I “came out” to my family about my traditionally unconventional beliefs for our community, it took them a long time to accept and then understand. I won’t mischaracterize their acceptance - they are not dancing with me under the moon and making offerings to the Goddess. They’re neither going to burn me at the stake, nor are they going to let me be misclassified as a Satanist. But that is also only a subset of my family, friends and larger community. The hardest thing to navigate is those close to you not allowing you the space to explain and also holding a witch-wound.

A witch wound is a psychological and emotional scar from times past, a deep remembrance of what happened to past women - maybe even past incarnations - when they dared to believe in, practice, and revere the feminine power. Women were hunted, tortured and burned for things ranging from assisting in childbirth to owning a black cat to being an outcast at the center of gossip. Many women who walk in the space of “other” and different than their communities may have this wound and therefore armor around their beliefs.

The way I have learned to navigate the differing opinions is by boiling down my beliefs with another at the core values -- universal power and love. Universal power is another lens to view God(dess), creator,  the Universe, Allah, the cosmos, and Jesus through. Love is a way of explaining the deep motivation that we both feel, what prompts saints and apostles also guides me in my work. I have found this dispels (pun intended) the misconceptions that others have about myself and frames it into a more palatable image for them to dissect without watering my beliefs down either.