The other day, in Facebook, I commented on a post where the writer was asking what people thought about having periods of time where their magical practice wasn’t very intense or magical. In fact it was just them doing the work and not necessarily seeing anything from it. My response is that its perfectly normal to have experiences like that in your magical work. In fact, when you have such experiences that’s usually when the magic is working in the background, preparing you for more intense spiritual work.
I do a daily magical practice and I can tell you that more often than not my daily practice isn’t all that sensationalistic. I do my meditation and magical work and nothing intense or magical overtly happens at the time, most of the time. Usually those experiences happen later and occur as a result of doing the daily work at a steady pace. What I’m really doing is seeding the garden of my mind with my daily work, preparing the way for the magical work to come through my life…this is especially the case with long term workings, which is what most of my magical work is.
I know, I know…people want the Hollywood version of magic, where there’s tons of glitter and everything is magical all the time, but that simply isn’t the reality and the reason is quite simple: The work you do must have time to permeate your consciousness and work itself into your life. That doesn’t happen instantaneously, but when it does happen the results can be dramatic, with everything just seeming to slide into place in order to pave a path toward manifestation. But all that happens precisely because a person has continued doing the work for a prolonged period of time.
The dry periods we experience in our magical work are actually periods where we’re sewing the seeds into our consciousness that will bloom into the needed internal transformations that help us handle the change we’re calling for in our lives. Yeah that’s a mouthful to read, but let’s seriously consider that you’re practicing magic to get results, but more importantly to bring about transformation in your life that is good for you. When magic works at its most effective state, it does so when it creates change in your internal environment as well as the world around you. But for those changes to happen we do need to realize they may not be instantaneous.
For example, lately the sphere of art work has felt like a real slog for me. There’s been no amazing realizations or intense experiences. It’s just been doing the work. Nonetheless last night I had an inspiration that came to me while writing which I attribute to the sphere of art work. It was something that needed to work its way through my consciousness so it could be realized, recognized, and worked with when I was ready for it.
When you experience the doldrums of doing magical work, when it isn’t exciting, you might wonder how to motivate yourself to do that work. I find the best way is to simply make it part of your everyday life and do it, trusting that the necessary experiences will reveal themselves as and when needed. It’s easy to write that of course, but on the days I don’t feel particularly motivated to engage in my spiritual practice, what helps me do the practice is that intrinsic awareness that why I’m doing the work isn’t about an external reward, but rather an inner discipline that guides me through the work. It is that inner discipline which will keep you on course, because you know the work you do is more important than the external result. The work, the journey is the true result, the true path for realizing your power in the world.
