I've continued working with the five step process detailed in Feeding Your Demons. It's proven very helpful so far when I've had insecurities come up. It serves as an excellent complement to my Taoist breathing practices which are also focused on the dissolution of blockages. One issue that this process has helped me recognize is an awareness of focusing on how much time one spends with me as a way of recognizing my value. In recognizing this issue, it's helped me start reconsidering if that's a valid measurement of worth and also helped me further explore how to develop my own sense of worth more. I'm also writing about this process in my monthly report for the elemental working, so you'll see more information about it in two weeks. On magic and social responsibility, I've been delving further into Mencius and also just started reading Investment for Change, which examines the ethics of investing as a form of social responsibility. Mencius shares information that I find intriguing and useful for considering magic and social responsibility. One idea involves turning a vice into a virtue by sharing it with people. It argues that if you keep what you enjoy to yourself then it becomes a vice, because it's done primarily for selfish reasons, but if you share what you enjoy with others, the pleasure becomes a virtue because it is done with other people. In a sense, it also might be argued that by sharing what you enjoy with other people, you make it into a social activity where the activity can be enjoyed but also moderated by social boundaries and mores, whereas if you keep it to yourself, it may be done to excess and addiction. Also if you share your pleasure with others, perhaps you are helping to fulfill the needs those others have through the act of sharing. And how does that apply to magic? If magic is done primarily for self-gratification, is it a selfish act? If magic is shared with others as a means of empowering those others as well as yourself, does it then create social responsibility? While I don't think magic done for the self is always inherently selfish, I do think that exploring the concept of sharing magic with others is worth exploring in terms of fleshing out whether magic can have an aspect of social responsibility to it. The investment book I mentioned is focused on the idea of investing with an eye toward manifesting change into the world through your investments...while not inherently magic, it does fascinate me to explore finances in that way, and of course wealth magic provides an opportunity employ magic toward that purpose as well. Undoubtedly it is something I will explore further.
There's a few other projects, but they are not in a coherent form just yet...