Read Online A Teaching Handbook for Wiccans and Pagans by Thea Sabin - Free Book Online Page A

or online, and asking people what they think the class is worth.
    What do you feel comfortable charging? You need to feel good and satisfied about the amount you charge. You don’t want to feel like you’re selling yourself short, and you don’t want feel like you’re taking advantage of your students.
    Making a Living Teaching Paganism
    Once you start teaching, you might decide you like it so much or find you are so good at it that you’d like to do it as a career. Certainly it is a wonderful way to bring your spiritual and material worlds together. I have never taught Paganism professionally, so I asked Christopher Penczak and T. Thorn Coyle how they decided to make the transition from teaching once in a while to doing it more or less full-time. Christopher responded:
    On a Friday, in meditation, the goddess Macha appeared to me. She had done this so many times before, asking me to “teach more.” I refused many times, and my personal practice was falling apart as I could progress no further in meditations and journeys. That Friday I said okay—but listed all the things in my life that took up my time that I didn’t want to lose. I guess I thought the job was a no-brainer, but on Monday, I was laid off.
    I think it was decided for me. Being directed by the Goddess to do something and having all your other job prospects close down in an otherwise prosperous economy is a good sign. After eight temp jobs to make ends meet, the last one burned down the day before I started, so I stopped looking for a real job and actually started teaching meditation classes first, and found I could make some money, enough to survive.
    I was technically on unemployment for seven months, which helped me start a professional practice of healing and reading for clients, establish a class schedule, and I wrote my first two books.
    T. Thorn Coyle’s story of her transition was more about an evolution than a calling:
    I didn’t decide to teach Paganism professionally. Many years ago, after I’d been studying magick for around a decade, a mentor must have seen something in me and asked me to assist her with a class before she moved across country. This was eye opening—all of a sudden I saw that teaching could be a revolutionary act. So I started teaching like most people in Paganism, with small groups in living rooms. I also was on teams, helping to lead ritual. Teaching and leadership was an organic process unfolding over many, many years’ time. It was never my thought or plan to make a living teaching magick or spirituality.
    After several years, there came a point when I decided to say yes to whoever asked me to teach, wherever their group was in the country. A floodgate opened, much to my surprise. This was even before my first published book came out. After about a year of this, I realized I could no longer hold a day job and teach as much as people wanted me to. There still wasn’t quite enough income at this point, but I was able to “fill in” in various ways. There have been many points since then when I considered taking on another job, but something has always shifted—whether in my attitude and approach or in the cosmos in general—and I’ve been fortunate enough to be able to pay my bills this way.
    This whole process—from beginning to teach to making a decent living without a lot of financial stress—took twenty years. Would this have been different if I had set out to teach professionally? It is difficult to say. The thing I appreciate about my career, as it stands, is that the whole process felt very organic to me. I was working on my practice and my skills, started out sharing some things, people responded, I kept up my work, more people responded … and over time the transition happened to full-time. It doesn’t feel like something I could have or should have planned, and I am therefore loath to give “business advice” to people