Communicating With Deity: All the Small Things

The second day, we wandered to a market and I found a bracelet that said “Follow Your Arrow”. I was drawn to it instantly, as it echoed messages I had been receiving from my gods. I was compelled to pick it up, but I still did math to ensure I could afford it. It was only $10, but that felt like a lot to me for frivolity. In the end, I brought the bracelet home.

That trip, I wrote my first story since graduate school, which was a huge milestone for me. When I returned from Florida, a confluence of events caused some chaos in my life but I rode the wave and find myself in a much better place.

I still wear the bracelet every day to remind myself to keep striving to better myself. Though there have been a couple close calls, I haven’t managed to lose it yet.

• Emotions – A Deity could cause you to be overcome by an emotion for seemingly no reason.  I’ve experienced Freyja using this technique, where I’ve felt Her in the pit of my stomach and then my eyes well up with tears.  I asked blogger and freyjaswoman Laine DeLaney to talk to me more about her experiences with Freyja communicating through emotion:

Freyja reaches out to me in a lot of different ways. She has guided me through lust (and I am certainly not the only Vanic person to relate this) instilling an attraction to a person that She wants me to interact with. Sometimes it happens both ways. In any case, the maddening urge to be intimate with the person generally subsides after we’ve had the interaction or made the connection that She wanted. Sometimes we’re still attracted to each other, more often we end up just being good friends.

Sometimes the Lady does guide me through emotion. However, the emotions that I know that I receive from Her are accompanied by a sense of Her presence. At this point, I’m fairly well-attuned to Her presence. It may be possible that She and other deities guide and communicate with people through their emotions without them being aware of their presence. In fact, I’m fairly certain of it.

• Thoughts and Images – This is a very popular method that Deities use to communicate with their devotees.  Often a random thought will appear in the devotee’s head, seemingly out of nowhere.  Or they might have a strong feeling that they had been discussing a topic, but nobody can recall them doing so.  Laine also broached this topic in our conversation:

Having spent years developing a connection to [Freyja] and finding ways of clearing my mind to determine what is coming from within versus what is coming from without, I most often receive communication from Her in thoughts and images. They can influence our minds, and a trained mind can become increasingly skilled at discerning when that influence is external rather than internal. When people speak of the ‘Godphone’ that is what I think of – Her ability to put thoughts and images and convey emotions to me, and my ability to recognize which ones are from Her. Divination is a vital tool for checking these impressions; learn a system or two, make sure that the Power is comfortable communicating with you through that system, and use that to check against your mental and emotional impressions.

• Sensory Perception – A Deity uses your sight, sound, smell, or touch to communicate with you.  While this could include full auditory or visual hallucinations, it can also be much smaller.  For example, take one of my experiences cooking:

Because I make an effort to connect with Brighid when I’m in the kitchen, I sometimes get little “hints” from Her on what I should add to a meal.  On one occasion, I reached out in my mind to Her, and in response I began to smell butter.  I presumed that She thought my recipe could use some butter.

• Synchronicity – Also known as “crazy random happenstance“.  This will manifest as one or more curiously-timed events that seem to work toward a common goal.  My Vermont fire story would fall into this category.  A more extreme example occurred to Kaela when she was first contemplating whether to pursue a devotional practice with Loki:

At first, I was looking for confirmation that I was actually working with Loki so another local pagan suggested that I ask for a sign. It came, in the form of my customary dreams with the individual that I thought might be Loki. Of course, my rational mind reasoned that I could have had that dream because I wanted it badly. So I thought it clever to ask for a bigger sign.

The whole next day, books kept falling on my head, especially if I pondered this question. My roommate watched as I pushed the books as far back as I could on the shelf, and we had a laugh when that did nothing to help my predicament.