 Hi, my name is Danny and welcome to Esoteric Moment. This week I wanted to take an opportunity to do my own video response to a question that I asked over at Pagan Perspective. I have included a link down below to the videos that they answered. The question that I posed to Pagan Perspective was about leadership in the Pagan community. Now I had read some blogs and heard some podcasts in the spring of 2014 that inspired this question. I wanted to know what other people thought about Pagan leadership, specifically how we educate and encourage those leaders in our community and whether people could do both Pagan leadership jobs and their own day job, or whether we needed to be able to support those people through the community efforts themselves. To begin with, I would like to just say that from my perspective, there are already leaders in the Pagan community. I know that on my personal path, the main authority for what I believe is true and right comes from nature itself and my own personal meditation and reflections and life with divinity. I can see how certain individuals would feel that because their authority for spiritual belief comes from themselves or nature that they don't need nor should they have any leaders. I would argue though that we are a community of people with similar but not exact beliefs or ways of interacting with the world. And because we are a group of people and humans are social animals, we naturally have some individuals who have more power in our group and those people we often call leaders. They might be the authors of popular books, they might be influential YouTubers, they might be leaders in specific sanctuary. For example, authors might be Scott Cunningham. A lot of people read him. He might be a Pagan leader. Someone who organizes a group and leads that, you might have Selena Fox from Circle Sanctuary or Philip Kargom who's the chief jurid of OBOD. Those people I think are clearly leaders because a group, a subgroup of Pagans in the community have recognized and looked to those individuals for direction or inspiration. I don't think having Pagan leaders is a bad thing. I don't think we need a single leader or even a panel or group of leaders to try and represent the whole community. We really are very diverse and I'm not sure that it's necessary to kind of try and put us all together or try and unify us in some big effort. But the natural leaders, the spontaneous leaders that happen in our community do need support. Many of the people that we already look to as leaders have some sort of education or natural inclination towards leadership. Maybe they have a background in psychology. Maybe they have a background in working with activism and organizing people. Maybe they just are a really strong natural leader themselves. Their personality is someone who just inspires groups of people around them. My question is, do we as a community need to support this education and continue this education? And what would that education look like? I think it's important that the people who are in leadership positions, whether they want to be there or whether they happen to find themselves there, feel supported by the community. Many spiritual faiths have divinity schools, pastoral care courses. These are all methods that allow individuals to feel confident and gain skills that allow them to better serve their communities. I think it would be really worthwhile if the pagan community helped get together to create some of these things, to encourage our leaders to go outside and use divinity schools or master courses that already exist to gain some of those skills. It can be really draining to hear all the problems of other people or have to negotiate and mediate between lots of different individuals. And when you put it in the frame of spirituality, you are often dealing with very difficult topics like death, illness, very triggering issues for people. I think our leaders are better served when they have the skills and the confidence to be able to help people in those situations. It also gives us as a community a chance to validate what a person is saying and really be confident that this person who says they're a leader actually have the skills to back that up. The final part of the question was about whether pagan leaders can have a day job or whether they should be dedicated leaders. And this is where I'm really torn. On one hand, I see the great benefit to the community of having our leaders be both a leader and a regular Joe. It allows leaders to stay in touch with what an average person has to deal with, balancing faith and work. It also doesn't put the pressure of supporting an individual financially on the community. And the community is not very big, so supporting a leader financially would be a big cost to bear. At the same time, having a dedicated leader means that the community has people that they can go to at any time of the day whenever they are struck with need. You might have a spiritual crisis at 2 a.m. You might have a spiritual crisis at 2 p.m. It really helps to have someone who's available at all times. I think even watching all of the videos this week, I'm still not very confident. I'm where I fall between having dedicated leaders and people who are torn between two. I just wanted to thank everyone at Pagan Perspective for their great videos. I loved hearing all the different perspectives, and I feel like it was a fun conversation this week. For those of you who watch Pagan Perspective, or if you don't, you should, I will now be the Thursday substitute host. So be sure to head over there this next week to meet all of your new substitute hosts. Always thanks for watching, and have a great week!