Photo by Alexander Milo on Unsplash
In last week’s blog post I shared the importance of why you are your own authority and I talked a bit about a moment when I had to start over with my spiritual path because I had gone down a rabbit hole of sorts. In this post, I want to share what that process looked like and how starting over with my spiritual practice ended up being one of the best decisions I ever made in my life.
Starting over with any discipline can be intimidating, because in one sense you really can’t start over. You have all the knowledge and experiences that brought you to the point that you’re at. You can’t erase it or wish it away. It’s part of you and so that will inform everything you do.
So how do you really start over with a spiritual practice?
I have a principle that I apply to this kind of situation: Challenge what you know by discovering what you can learn. You ‘know’ what you know, but if you’ve recognized that what you know is a blinder, then you challenge it by discovering what you could learn. You take a class from someone else or read a book or do something where you ‘know’ the answer, but you challenge that knowledge by doing it anyway to discover what will really happen.
I do this with my magical practice, my writing, and everything else, because if I focus on what I know, that knowledge may be helpful, but it may also be incomplete. By focusing on discovering on what I can learn, I step into the role of being a newcomer and I try to discover what I don’t know that might change what I know. For instance, I’m taking a class on what to do when you’re starting at zero as a writer. Now, obviously I have written a number of books and I’m not starting at zero, but the teacher and the class may still teach me things I don’t know. So I challenge what I know by doing something and accepting that what I know might be flawed…might be an incomplete picture.
A few years ago, I completely revamped my magical practice. I had hit bottom in my life because of some bad choices I made and I surveyed my life and decided to challenge everything I knew, including my magical practice. I stopped doing the daily work I was doing and stopped working with some of the spirits I was working with and changed everything around to focus on practices that were less about try to control outcomes and more about being in the moment, with the current, instead of fighting it. I recognized that what I knew wasn’t working for me, so I had to go into unknown territory, had to challenge what I knew by doing something radically different.
In my case, this lead to taking on a magical practice where I learned to submit to the current and work with it, instead of trying to impose my will on it. It was a humbling readjustment to everything I knew, but it taught me to let go of a lot of things that were getting in my way and contributed to the mistakes I made. I was forced to come up against my ego, my need for recognition and the emptiness I felt in my life and re-evaluate my life accordingly. By starting over with my spiritual practice, I had to address these issues and come to a place where I could recognize them and work through them so they didn’t show up and pollute my spiritual work, writing, or interactions with the community.
Starting over with your magical practice can be exciting and challenging, but it also liberating. What we know becomes its own obstacle and can cause us to calcify and become stagnant. By changing things up and examining our own responses to the change, we can start over again and come to a new relationship with our practice and ourselves that helps us become better people and magicians.
