📖 Book Groups 📚

🌏 Spiral Dance has 13 chapters, plus the notes in the back for all of them.

• • I have lead a group through reading and discussing this book over the course of one year, reading/working through 1 or 2 chapters per month. But I typically combine some chapters so that it ends up in 8 groups, for 8 discussion sessions. This could be over 8 consecutive weeks, or 16 weeks, with meetings every other week.

🦢 Swans (as I call it in short) is arranged to be like the experience of taking a Path at a week-long Witchcamp, but in book form! As such, it has 7 chapters, one for each day of the week. It is also broken up into three Paths: Elements, Inner, and Outer.

• When I have lead groups through this book in the past, we did it Path by Path, and discussed over 8 weeks -- one per chapter, plus a week for wiggle room or final wrap-up at the end. This looked like doing the Elements Path for 8 weeks, then Inner Path for 8 weeks after that, and Outer Path in a final 8 weeks. While we took breaks in between (either one week, or one month between at times), this means it typically spans 6 months.

• When I first read and worked through this book by myself, in 2013, I did so Path by Path, but as I had the time and space to devote to it, I did one chapter/section per day, rather than per week. So I did one week of Elements Path, the Inner Path in a second week, and Outer Path in a third week. This is a great way to do it, in my opinion, IF one has the time to not only do the reading, but also to actually do the practices. Since most people do not have that space and time, I have not lead a group through it in this more intensive format.

• Another thing to note is that each Path builds on the one before it, which is relevant in two ways:

  1.  If I were to break these up into fully separate groups, I would still require folks do them in order -- you'd have to do Elements before Inner, etc. just like you have to take Elements of Magic before doing our other core classes -- so I prefer to keep it all in one group and make sure it's a format and timeline that people want to commit to for the duration.

  2.  Each one is more pages than the one before it! I try to balance this accordingly, as well. The Outer Path is twice as long as the other two, so the same amount of time for them doesn't spread the work evenly for you.

• Due to both the benefit of giving these books the time needed to actually do the practices (and not just the reading!), plus the nature of people's lives and schedules, I do tend to favor a more spacious schedule for these book groups! Now, perhaps not everyone has six months to devote to Swans... but perhaps a 2-month (8-week) version could be a good middle ground!