I share how I apply self-love as a magical practice and explain the practical benefits of self love but also share why there needs to be a practical application of self love in order to benefit from the practice.
Magical Experiments podcast: Heart Magic with Irisanya Moon
In this interview Irisanya Moon discusses what Heart Magic is and shares how it can be used to help you heal your heart as well as sharing her work with Aphrodite as a goddess of love and initiation. We talk about what the relationship with a godd can look like and what that entails for one's personal work as a result.
Get Iris, Goddess of the Rainbow and Messenger of the Godds - https://amzn.to/3r7XPgj (affiliate link)
Get Aphrodite: encountering the Goddess of Love, Beauty, & Initiation - https://amzn.to/3ngHfK6 (affiliate link)
Get practically pagan: An alternative guide to health and well-being: https://amzn.to/3Gen3A5 (affiliate link)
Get Reclaiming Witchcraft: https://amzn.to/3tkKjsy (affiliate link)
Irisanya Moon (she/they) is a writer, priestess, and teacher, and has facilitated classes and camps around the world, including the US, Canada, UK, and Australia. She was initiated into the Reclaiming Witchcraft tradition in 2014. She is a frequent contributor to Moon Books anthologies, a contributor to Witches & Pagans magazine, a columnist for Pagan Dawn, a blogger for Moon Books, and a blogger for Patheos.com (Charged by the Goddess). Irisanya has written and published four books: Pagan Portals - Reclaiming Witchcraft; Pagan Portals - Aphrodite; Practically Pagan: An Alternative Guide to Health and Well-being; and Pagan Portals - Iris, Goddess of the Rainbow & Messenger of the Godds. Three more are in the works. She is a devotee of Aphrodite, Hecate, the Norns, and Iris. They seek to find love and to inspire love by reminding us we are not alone, while meeting at crossroads, holding the threads of time, and bringing down messages from the godds. She is passionate about the idea that life is a love spell, a dance of desire and connection, a moving in and out of the heart, always returning to love.
Should you call someone into your life?
Should you call someone into your life? I weigh the pros and cons of evoking people into your life and share some of my experiences with this kind of work.
Creativity, love, and magic
One of the books I’m currently reading is Creativity by Robert Fritz (affiliate link). He provides a fascinating definition of love, within the first couple pages which has really stuck with me. He explains that love is at the center of creativity, but that in the context of creativity is an active force, instead of a passive experience. Love as a passive experience, is an experience where love happens to you and you get some type of benefit from it. In contrast, love as an active force is a form of generative process, where you are actively creating something.
This concept of love as an active force reminds me of another book I’m reading by Christopher Alexander which explores the process of generative creation in context to architecture. Both authors have a similar stance in that they opt for an iterative approach to what is created, recognizing that such an approach brings an organic awareness with it that informs how we appreciate the act of creation and the result.
The Ethics and Pragmatics of Love Magic
Should you do magic to find your ideal romantic partner? And if you do love magic should you try and get a specific person to love you or should you take a more generalized approach? I answer these questions and explore the topic of love in general and share my own pragmatic approach to handling love and love magic.
A broad approach to love magic
I think its best to take a broad approach to love magic. What I mean is, its better to do love magic that isn't focused on getting a specific person, but instead is focused on drawing the right people to your life. And its important to remember that any love magic also needs to focus on self-love. Looking to someone else to fill something in for you won't work. If anything the person you bring into your life into emphasizes the issues you need to work on. That person has their own issues and you will embody those issues, even as that person embodies your issues. Thus the person you bring into your life necessarily will be someone who challenges you in some ways as much as s/he also brings joy and happiness. People have this idea about love, prompted by the concept of falling in love, that its always something wonderful, but while falling in love is a wonderful experience, being in love is necessarily an experience where you truly face your own issues as well as the issues of the other person. The challenge is how you face those issues and evolve past them so that you can truly be with someone, and also so you can truly be with yourself. People go into a relationship hoping their partner will somehow fill in the gaps, somehow solve everything. Little do they realize that your partner isn't a cure-all and if anything s/he will exacerbate the issues because s/he is a mirror that shows you both the wonderful qualities and unpleasant aspects of yourself. Of course you do the same for that person.
Kat and I have, since February, been reading books on relationships and love together. These are typically the books people will turn to when their relationship is in trouble and they are grasping for anything that will save the relationship. I got these books when I was in my previous marriage for that very reason. This time we took a different approach. We decided that we wanted to read these books and talk about the issues that came up as a proactive activity, as something we'd do in order to build a dialogue around love, and allow us to learn more about each other and where we were respectively coming from. And thus far the journey has been very illuminating for both of us. The discussions that have arisen out of what we've read have helped us both look at our respective issues and understand how they contribute to the relationship, as well as what we can do to change those issues.
What I've learned about love magic is that it rarely brings what you think you want, but it always brings what you need. The question is: Are you prepared to accept what you need? For me that preparation has involved doing a lot of internal work, owning my baggage (and letting it go), as well as coming face to face with my desires and understanding where they fit into the entire mix. And I'm still doing this work! It's nothing something where you just get finished, but I can say that taking a proactive approach can make for a much smoother relationship, with both yourself and your partner.
Here's a few books I'd suggest complete with affiliate links
Perfect Love, Imperfect Relationships
Book Review: Brain Magick (Affiliate Link) by Phil Farber
In Brain Magick, Phil Farber presents a thorough approach to invocation that is a combination of neuroscience and NLP, and is by far one of the best cutting edge books on magic that's available. The author includes lots of exercises the reader can do to test his concepts, and at the same time makes all of his explanations easy to follow. Farber shows you how to bring some woohoo into your life!