Bone and Briar

Bone and Briar Feri/Reclaiming

Dedicated to Sound Living  in Reality As We Know It

About us:

In the Bone and Briar line of the Reclaiming branch of the Feri tradition we lean with Joy into the transformative powers of magic. Through trance and other tools pulled heavily from the Feri tradition we weave our energy and Work through all parts of our lives.

Our mission and purpose is to strengthen the existing pagan community through work with those aligned with Reclaiming/Feri principles, concepts, and values.

One can be from any religious tradition to attend our open workshops, intensives, and classes; it does help to be pagan friendly. Our workshops/classes have included spiritual practice bootcamp, ritual arts, building healthy community, introduction to trance techniques, basics of musical priestessing, and the four core Reclaiming classes: Elements of Magic, The Iron Pentacle, Pentacle of Pearl, and Rites of Passage. (Core class definitions are available on the Reclaiming.org web site.).

Along with building the larger community we also offer private classes and individual apprentice relationships, plus potential initiatory relationships.

Our Work involves deep personal transformations with respect for fellow living beings. We hold certain values surrounding how we engage in the Work:

• We value self-care. We trust all the humans to listen to their core and know when they need self-care and to take appropriate steps.
• We value standard courtesy in conversation which includes not “helping” others by offering unasked for advice or comfort, thus allowing each person their own experience, even if their experience makes us uncomfortable.
• We value the clarity of “I” statements and we hold the belief that every person is speaking from their own personal “I” point of view, even if they do not start every sentence with “I”.
• We value healthy appropriate disagreement with others, including disagreeing with the teachers, and that is okay. We expect everyone to remember that even in disagreement, we all can and do only speak from our own experience.
• We value not taking things personally, but not as a loophole to be unkind to others.
• We value tears as well as laughter and hold neither in higher regard, knowing both have their place.
• We value feelings and the insights they bring, judging them as neither right nor wrong. We trust you to know your feelings, to know yourself, and to decide wholly and on your own terms what you choose to share and what you choose to keep within. We honor your decision.
• We value healthy community process and we believe in redirecting energies toward that goal whenever necessary.
• We value boundaries. We expect you to know your personal boundaries and to hold them appropriately. We will be holding ours.
• We value Joy and Play and the rush of transformation that accompanies the Work.

 Reclaiming/Feri Tradition Basics

 Overview of key pieces of Reclaiming as a whole:

• A working definition of Reclaiming can be found at Reclaiming.org.
• For a value statement about the tradition, look here.
• Large gatherings at Witchcamps offer a different kind of transformative experience from smaller local rituals. At the witchcamp web site the most local location for these intensives is named Spiralheart and it is the Mid-Atlantic resource for the weeklong camp intensives.

In the Reclaiming/Feri tradition there are practitioners who lean more Feri and those who don’t. The Feri side is based on the Victor Anderson Feri path that he created from a variety of sources and personal gnosis acquired via visions and trance. Starhawk (co-founder and most public member of Reclaiming) was trained and initiated by Victor into Feri before she co-created Reclaiming and became an early leader in political feminist pagan Goddess spirituality in the San Francisco Bay area. Anderson Feri is in and of itself a separate living tradition without the added aspects of the Reclaiming tradition. There are many overlaps of the two, but they are not the same.

Reclaiming is a dynamic branch of the Feri tradition and as such each line gets flavoured a bit by the individuals in the downlines and the unique qualities they bring to ritual and practice. In this tradition anyone who follows the definition and values of Reclaiming may call themselves a Reclaiming Witch. Anyone who has the experience and skills to teach core Reclaiming classes may call themselves a Reclaiming teacher. Initiation is not necessary for the above though initiations can and do happen in this tradition. Initiation marks a culmination point of experience leading up to it and also a launching point to serve the community (encompassing beings both seen and unseen) as priestess.