All The Ways I've Hindered Myself As A Magician [REPOST]

1/3/2022

Hello, hello, dearest readers of mine. I wanted to keep today’s post kind of short and sweet; easy on the eyes, you know? I feel like I have a tendency to write very elaborate and long-winded posts, so it’s good to break it up a bit with some good old fashioned bulleted lists. Continuing the theme from last week’s post (where I discuss my own struggles with how my diet relates to my spiritual life), I wanted to discuss some other ways that I (and many other magicians) have been an hindrance to myself.

• Not meditating I’m not here to shame or guilt anyone for their meditation practice- mine is, admittedly, very irregular! However you just can’t do magick without utilizing meditation.

• Poor Discernment- Knowing where my imagination ends and where the working begins. Learning discernment between reality and magick is such a difficult task, and one that I don’t think is talked about enough. As occultist Josephine McCarthy says, the imagination is a tool. You can never remove imagination from the equation, for it is the lense through which we can perceive these things. Too much imagination can be bad, for perhaps some obvious reasons. One's mental health is the first thing I think of. When you are in imagination overdrive, it can take a toll on your psyche. One personal example of this is when I first started seeing Angel Numbers. I began convincing myself that I could see my own fate in the numbers and that all things were unavoidable. Very quickly, I only started seeing bad things happening, everywhere I looked was an evil omen. It was absolutely maddening and actually landed me with a pretty nasty energetic parasite. It wasn't until I slowed myself down, stopped looking at repetitive numbers, and really observed my life that I realized I had created a self-fulfilling prophecy. On the flip side, nothing kills magick more than overly-rationalizing everything. The scientific method is beaten into our heads almost from the moment we first step foot in a school. That’s all well and good, I appreciate the scientific method of course. I, myself, am a science major (yes, Anthropology cam be considered a science)! Magick is not science, however. I think both magick and science exist on opposite sides of the same spectrum, but they are most definitely not interchangeable. To approach spiritual experience with the scientific method, is to set one’s self up for failure. My personal example for this is a situation I’m sure many people like me have heard a thousand times before. (Honestly, this example deserves its own post.) When I was younger, more of a novice, I leaned pretty heavily on tarot and astrology to be an ice-breaker in social situations. One night, after starting a new job, I was invited to a bar by some coworkers for the first time in my life. I was terrified of being perceived as ‘uncool’, so naturally I whip out the big guns. The ‘coolest’ thing I can do- tarot. Long story short, I flopped. Do yourself a favor, and avoid reading you coworkers in crowded bars when you're drunk. The romantic partner of one of my coworkers just so happened to be a staunch athiest and was tickled pink by the opportunity to 'intellectually obliterate' the edgy 21-year-old in front of him. His words cut deep and sent me into a tailspin of trying to prove things. In my desperate search for proof, nothing ever happened. It was a dark time. No matter how hard I looked, I couldn't find magick in anything. I couldn't find the higher power. I was incredibly depressed. However, by slowing down and refocusing, I was able to balance myself out again. Do I still have moments of imbalance? Duh. No one is balanced all the time. I learned from these situations to take the time to understand myself, to understand where my boundaries are.

• People pleasing My prior example of the very big brain atheist man making me cry in a public setting also happens to work well for this point! Like I said, he sent me into an absolute tailspin for a good year or two. It was like, in that moment, every little bit of my personal power got sucked into his gaping maw, like some sort of psychic vacuum. I had a personal mission from then on to prove to the whole damn world that witchcraft is real and I was going to prove it by…. Constantly talking about all the cool shit I can do to my coworkers? See, I didn't have a social life outside of this particular job at the time. I was a single mom with a 1 year old, working a B.S. entry level job for not enough money, and I was still pretty fresh out of a very truamaic relationship (prior to the one with my child’s father). I was, shall we say, in a weakened state. My mind compensated for this by attempting to come off as ‘the dark and mysterious sorceress’, however I think I probably missed the mark by a wide mile. The more I talked, the more I shared, the less I and those with the misfortune of hearing me actually believed. I became so desperate to prove myself and prove my beliefs that I became willing to say or do anything just for someone to believe me. I had really lost my way. It wasn't until 2019, when I left toxic friend circles, got a new job, and started doing the inner work that I realized the obvious…. My practice is for myself and absolutely no one else. You don’t have to justify a damn thing to anyone.

• Thinking spirit/deity names really mean anything This is actually a fairly recent conclusion I've come to! I’m all about holding accountability and growing as a person, so I'm not afraid to call myself out here. In a previous entry, I talk about my experience working with deities and other named spirits. While the experiences are very much real (told through the lense of my imagination), I do feel like there were some subtle inaccuracies in the way I referred to deities by name. Like I said earlier in this post, imagination is a lense through which we observe magick. The way spirits ‘appear’ to us is through our imagination. So as you can imagine, there can be a lot of things that get lost in translation or added in-post. Humans gave these things names. We like to name things and categorize them. The spirits don’t care, they’ve been here since before time and will always be here, long after we are all gone. I’m not saying don't work with named spirits. All I'm saying is don’t fall into the trap of believing that named spirits are some how separate, autonomous beings exactly like people. They are not like you or I. I think the best way to describe it is with a mushroom metaphor 🍄 When you see a mushroom, on a log, the ground, a tree, etc., you are seeing just one fruiting body in a vast, invisible network of fungi and bacteria. All of which works together to keep the forest in working order. You can name that single mushroom “Kevin", but “Kevin" is just a single appendage. Am I still going to work with deities and call them by their names? Absolutely! Will I be more aware of the tendency to personify them from now on? You bet!

• Religious based fear Whaaaaaaaat?! You screech in disbelief. Sigrid has religious truama too?!?! I can't deny it. Christianity has permeated every aspect of my culture. I grew up in Midwest America where the people care about three things: Guns, Jesus, and the American flag! It can be somewhat of a hellscape at times, if I may be honest with you. My parents did not raise me religious (thank the gods), but nearly everything else was at least touched by Christianity. There are Christian grocery stores, Christian day cares, Christian restaurants, Christian libraries, Christian schools, churches on every corner of every denomination. I went to school with kids who were raised to believe dinosaurs were faked by Satan to brain wash humans. I was once dumped by a boy because I wasn’t baptized. I’ve been handed flyers in my home town explaining how I’m going to hell for existing, and I’ve been heckled on the street for wearing a Pentacle around my neck. The stigma has definitely let up just in my lifetime. I feel like being open about being pagan/witch/occultist is becoming a lot more common place. However, old habits die hard. While I do take a somewhat gnostic approach to Christianity, I don’t actually believe it. Any of it. I’ve never understood it, nor felt any of the warm J.C. fuzziness that people talk about. Even as a child, I remember being very confused about not being able to feel ‘God' the way others expected me to. This confusion later gave way to fear when I learned from the kids at school that you have to go to church or you’ll go to hell. The descriptions of Hell from my peers left the sharp prickle of dread in my very soul. It terrified me that this ‘God' guy had the power to make people suffer for whatever arbitrary reason he felt like. As I grew older, I didn't pay too much attention to Christianity- I didn’t believe in it after all. However to say that this cultural programming didn’t have an effect on me would be a lie. I spent a long time harboring a silent fear of malevolent entities attacking me, or fears of being wrong and being punished for being wrong. I would go as far to say that a lot of my early magick was done based in those fears. I wish I had not ignored this fear early on. Magick, to me, is about strength, trust, and empowerment. This opinion is one I’ve held consistently through my practice, so it seems incredibly strange to me that it took me so long to figure it out. Which, I suppose leads me to my last point….

• Its not a competition or a race There is no big scoreboard in the afterlife that ranks the ‘most spiritual’ people. That, to me, seems like it’s based heavily in ancient Roman/Colonizer ideals. Fuck that noise. If you try to force things or operate under an assumption that you have a ‘time limit’, you’re going to make yourself sick. Look at the meditation sickness called “lung" (pronounced loong). Essentially, this is when you become obsessed with the idea of enlightenment to the point where you quit engaging in the world around you. It can cause depression, anxiety, insomnia, madness, and even suicide. You have to have mundanity to balance the magick. Too much of anything can be detrimental. There’s no pressure to be anything but what you already are. If you experience meditation sickness, stop mediating and just get out for a bit. Talk to a therapist if you need to. You’re not any less spiritual for taking a break once in a while.

Well that about does it for today. Hope that someone can resonate with this and maybe avoid some of the silly mistakes that I’ve made! As always, I thank you for tuning in this week. I’ll see you in the next one! Blessed Be