The Circle Within: Creating a Wiccan Spiritual Tradition is your guide to creating a personal spiritual practice for daily life. The first section is a thoughtful examination of Wiccan ethics and philosophy that explores how to truly live Wicca. The second section includes devotional prayers and rituals that provide inspiration for group or solitary practice.

The Circle Within explores such topics as: cultivating an ongoing personal relationship with deity, ethics and standards of behavior, concepts of sacred space, elements of a daily practice, tuning into the Wheel of the Year and the elements, and creating meaningful personal rituals.

Move beyond the basics of Wicca, and enter the sacred space of the "circle within".

The following is excerpted from:
The Circle Within: Creating a Wiccan Spiritual Tradition

Wiccan every day when your lifestyle is better suited to urban guerilla warfare?

It isn't enough to be a Wiccan on full moons or sabbats. No one ever became fluent in a new language by using it once a month. The best way is to surround yourself with the lesson; to speak Wiccan from dawn to dusk until it becomes your nature.

One oft-overlooked remedy for our modern dilemma is the ancient tradition of a daily personal practice. In every religion the world over there are people who take the devotional path, giving over large parts of their day to ritual, prayer, and communion with whatever face God wears for them. The dictionary definition of the word devotion is to give wholeheartedly to something. Given the Wiccan view of the universe as a place of cause and effect, it would follow that the more you devote to your sense of the Divine, the more the Divine will devote to you. If our goal as Wiccans is to turn our belief in the God and Goddess into reality, immersing ourselves in our relationship with Them is the surest way to turn our belief into knowledge.

How do I know this? My life is every bit as hectic and the city I live in every bit as toxic as most peoples. I havent reached some blissful state of spiritual perfection, but I have seen its nearest neighbor in people I have encountered over the years, and I have begun to learn from their success. The first group I noticed whose religion and life were as one were Catholic nuns who worked in the hospital where I was a secretary at the age of twenty-two. There were several elderly Sisters who tended to the patients spiritual needs, and in a building full of trauma and pain they were always calm, gracious, and quick to smile. They moved with quiet surety through the halls, their voices gentle and almost musical. Speaking to any of the Sisters gave my spirits a lift, which was vital given how much I hated the job.

I had to wonder, though, what got them through? They saw the worst of humanity in an endless parade of communicable diseases and gunshot wounds, yet maintained their sense of grace. I had to know if they could still smile when they got home at night, or if it took all their strength just to stay human in such a place.

Finally I asked one of the nuns how she dealt with such a stressful workplace. She smiled at me rather beatifically and told me that when she got up in the morning she prayed. At breakfast, lunch, and dinner she prayed. At bedtime she prayed, and a dozen other moments in between, keeping in constant, loving dialogue with God. The nuns didnt just believe the tenets of their faith, they lived them from morning till night.

I couldnt help but be impressed, as well as feel a little sheepish. I had tried for a long time to tell myself that there was nothing that I could learn from Christians; that their narrow-mindedness was the reason the world was going to their hell in a handbasket. In other words, Id been as narrow as I thought they were. It was what some of my Pagan contemporaries call a cosmic two-by-foura whop in the head from the gods when youve been an idiot.

The idea of daily practice, however, stuck with me long after I had taken the lesson of tolerance to heart. I started to ask around among my Pagan friends, finding out to my chagrin that, for the most part, they were bereft of any sort of personal daily rituals beyond a few minutes of meditation. Life was simply too busy, they said, to do half the things they wanted to to stay in touch with the God and Goddess. That led me to wonder whether a life too busy for our deepest beliefs is really much of a life at all.