A Witch's Job Is To Turn The Wheel -- And Round And Round The Wheel Doth Turn

Diane Sylvan does better writing about the nuts and bolts of regular Pagan spiritual practice than anyone else that I know. She has some v. important things to say about the reasons for regular spiritual practice:
If there’s one thing you should know about Practice, it’s this: it is not glamorous. Practice is not big bonfires and Circles cast in flame. It’s the way you live your path day after day, sunup to sundown, and sometimes, well, it sucks. It’s grueling work that slowly chips away at your established patterns and illusions, and sometimes it’s painful, because in order to transform something you must first invoke it.

My realization has been that what you do every day matters more than what you do once in a while. Your daily work may not seem like it makes a lot of difference at the time, but it serves several vital functions: it lays the foundation for all the Big Moments to come, it brings a calm and stable center to your life, and it enables you to cope better with the third category of change when it inevitably hits you.

It doesn’t matter how many trance journeys and Drawing Downs you undergo—if you don’t back it up with daily meditation and devotional ritual, none of that ecstatic energy is going to stay with you. Your practice opens you up to a greater influx of Divine energy, and it allows negativity to flow out of you more easily instead of clogging up your life.

That’s how the Pagan Community ends up with such a large percentage of people who claim to have been Pagan for twenty years yet can’t hold down jobs or relationships, are constantly drowning in drama, and have the aura of adolescent chipmunks on acid. You can’t just show up eight times a year and expect your life to come effortlessly into rhythm with the Dance; you have to commit to more than getting laid and drinking mead.

A house with no foundation will blow over in the first stiff wind.

Everyone, regardless of how long they’ve been practicing, has times when they’d rather sleep in. Everyone has fallow periods when the idea of meditating is about as appealing as a lobotomy performed with a rusty nail. It’s always hard. It doesn’t matter who you are. But the fact that it’s hard means it’s working.

Why? Because you can’t change what isn’t there. If there is no resistance, there’s no need for transformation. Resistance becomes the raw material for creating something powerful and purposeful. The energy we spend fighting ourselves is powerful energy indeed, and our job is to alter the course of that energy, diverting it from self-sabotage to self-actualization.

T. Thorn Coyle is blogging about the v. same thing:

But sometimes an old pattern rears it's head and takes over temporarily, even though we fight it. And watch ourselves fight it. And sometimes watch ourselves lose the fight. Sometimes we get overtired - or have a blood sugar crash, or an extra glass of wine - and our equilibrium is off. Sometimes we are just cranky.

We may not be able to control our behavior in those moments in the ways we wish to. But the good thing? We can know it is not our whole life. We can know that this particular situation will pass and tomorrow will be another day. We can know that emotions rise and fall and that annoyance or insecurity or whatever will once again give way to breath and stillness. To a strong will and an open heart. We don't have to hold on to the injury and build a new scar. We don't even have to make a temporary event into an injury in the first place.

This is what spiritual practice brings us. Not always being centered, but a way to return to center quickly: whether in minutes, or a day or two, rather than months or years. Hopefully it also helps us to not calcify around more flotsam than our beings already have stiffened around. We can continue to learn how to live cleanly and clearly and with a full range of motion.

It isn't easy, or fun, or glamorous. All that it is is necessary.

If you're not sure how to start, start like this. Every day, sit quietly in the same place. Light some incense or some sage or a candle. Ground (see Starhawk's Spiral Dance). Do the Ha Prayer (see Coyle's Evolutionary Witchcraft). Pick a Tarot card or a rune and see what you think it means. Write it down in your journal. Record your dreams. Blow out the candle. Live your life as if what had just happened mattered. That's "all" that there is to it. But if you are anything like me, mastering that is the work of many lifetimes.