Omg, Day One?! Get ready to look back at this day as one where you started a huge change in your life.

That’s why we’re here, right?

If there was one thing that I learned growing up, it was that I never seemed to fit the same mold of time that others did. I hated being late, but could never be exactly on time. I had to be early, or late. A 9-to-5 job never seemed to feel right because I had to completely overhaul my natural rhythm in an attempt to fit to one where I didn’t need a nap in the middle of the day. Never made sense to me. There were just certain aspects of the modern daily life that, no matter how hard I tried, I COULDN’T align to.

What spoke to my soul, though, for as long as I could remember, was the idea of LIVING as a witch, and being tuned in to the natural ebbs and flows of energy. There was always a question at the back of my mind of "What if I lived by nature's clock instead?"

Now, I didn’t know a dang thing about witchy life or the Wheel of the Year (the seasonal calendar, or Witch's Wheel) when I started. Not-a-one. But I really wanted it to become a part of my life. I saw people talking about it all over the internet, and it seemed like every witch used the Wheel to govern what they did. Probably a good place to start, right?

I had a Harry Potter planner at the time, and I had just gotten used to writing down my online class homework and daily home-based things to do in it. So I had a tool to use, that I liked using, but a second problem came up: What even were these cycles? What the heck was the next witchy day? What was it called? How the heck did I celebrate it? Immediately, I had to fight the overwhelming swell of questions that flooded my brain. I took a deep breath, determined to figure out the problem, as well as the solution.

Okay, I thought, let’s tackle the first piece of that problem: What is the next witchy holiday, or sabbat? When do they normally occur?

Below you'll find a printable for you with the general dates of each sabbat, so you’ll know which is the next one coming up on your calendar. Think of them like we do Christmas, or Easter. Though the days may shift, we have general times of year, or general dates on the modern calendar that they line up with.

The first thing I did was go through that planner and write all of the sabbats down. I knew NOTHING else about the sabbats, but that way I would at least know when one was coming up. I knew nothing else, and that way okay. But I was becoming AWARE of the sabbats so I could hit up the ol’ Google everytime I saw those little reminders. Took me maybe 15 minutes to write down all eight of the major sabbats in my planner. No sweat.

But now I had a new problem: the next sabbat wasn’t for a few weeks. There wasn’t one close enough for me to start preparing for! It was January, and the next sabbat was Imbolg/Candlemas which wasn't until February! There wasn't really a use in looking into it yet, and it didn't give me the instant gratification that I wanted. It felt like there was a piece missing. I needed something to live by daily, something to help me feel witchy EVERY day. What was that?

The answer came a few days later: The Lunar Cycle.

The Wheel of the Year/Seasonal Cycle provides a wonderful set of changes in the natural world to start paying attention to, as the sabbats are days of peak energy shifts and changes. But It wasn’t like my mood or daily life stayed exactly the same between each sabbat. There were patterns I couldn't make sense of with so much time between sabbats (six weeks is a long time!). I went through my monthly cycle, but that wasn’t witchy enough. I had a weekly work schedule, but I hardly aligned to that as it was, so that definitely wasn’t the missing link here.

The Lunar Cycle, however, made perfect sense. The moon went through its own phases, everyone seemed to talk about it, and I had only been obsessed with the moon for as long as I’d been able to watch it out the window of my parents’ car as a small child. What if I learned more about the moon phases? The Moon's face changed every day, just like I did. What if there was a pattern in me that matched the moon phases?

I wanted to write those down next. I took another 15 minutes to write down the next Full Moon, First Quarter, Third Quarter, and New Moons for the next three months. I lucked out, and there was a New Moon coming up in the next day or two. Perfect! Something to do NOW. Hello, instant gratification.

Though that story may seem insignificant, it was my "one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind," moment. It was the first thing I did that really put my determination to live my life like a witch into action. These 15-minute sessions made it feel possible. Made it feel real. I wrote down days like Christmas and Halloween in my planner because they were real, important days in my life. If I wanted those sabbats to feel just as real and concrete in my life, I needed to treat them the same way!

So, we are going to keep things simple today, but extremely important. I want you to do three things in your working grimoire (or a planner, where the equivalent for each activity will be in parentheses like this) to cement the reality of living life as a witch in a very tangible way that you'll use every day:

1.     Mark down the different sabbats in the Wheel of the Year, there should be eight. Use the cheat sheet I gave you above, and write down the different days. Here are a few different ways you could do this, no matter what tools you have on hand:

a.     Flip through a traditional planner and mark down the sabbats on their days, for the entirety of what’s left in your planner.

b.     Take a notebook/blank journal and make a list of these dates that you can come back to whenever you need to. It can be as simply as the name, the dates it happens on, and a few words about the sabbat. Nothing fancy needed. Heck, make your own version of the cheat sheet!

c.     For those that prefer a technological approach (I have this in ADDITION to my working grimoire) go through your Apple or Google calendar on your phone (or computer) and mark down the sabbats. Set reminders a week beforehand so you know they are coming, and can have some time to look into them more before trying to celebrate them in your home.

(No matter what you normally use in your life, you can start tracking them, but it’s time to stop procrastinating and get started! If you’d like, use a few different methods. I have a working grimoire that acts like a combo of the first two options, but I also mark them on my Google calendar too!)

2.     Next, repeat this process with the Lunar Phases, but only do it for the next three months. Going beyond this can end up with a slightly-off date for the Full Moon or New Moon. Not always, but I found that doing it every few months actually creates a ritual that helps you realign your own life. If you don’t want to do three months at a time, create a ritual for sitting down at the beginning of every month/lunar cycle to record the upcoming dates of the phases. There’s a bunch of different ways to do this, so long as you are doing it! This is where you can experiment and find what fits best into your way of life.

a.     There’s a cheat sheet for the different phases as well, below!

3.     Sit down and create a small way to track how you feel, and what you experience on the different days:

a.     This could be anything from a color code system, to a small template that you fill out every day such as this:

Mood:

Moon Phase:

Season:

Productive/Low-Energy:

b.     Creating this small tracker, that you fill out EVERY DAY will become a very powerful tool in your life, in many areas, that you will be able to put to very good use. But the most important piece of being able to use that tool is collecting the information every day. This will allow you to predict that maybe you get tired on Full Moons, rather than energized. Or, maybe the Dark Moon seems to be when you go on a cleaning rampage throughout your space. Paying attention, and becoming AWARE, are the first steps in this whole process of learning to live by the Cycles.

That's all we will be covering for this first day, but everything we do in this course will build on what you do here. So DO NOT move ahead in this course until you do it!