Used with Bara Cerna’s permission Copyright Bara Cerna 2020
Recently I shared a friend’s memetic flowchart about cursing and how to evaluate the effectiveness of that curse, based on the curser’s happiness, success, and whether or not they have their lives in order. I saw another friend share some thoughts which may or may not have been in response to the memetic flowchart. He essentially made the point that a person doesn’t have to have their lives in order or be happy and successful in order to practice effective magic and that using such metrics to assume the effectiveness of a person’s magic or lack thereof is faulty. He makes a good point and this leads me to ask an important question.
Is success and happiness (and for that matter having your life in order) integral to getting results in magic?
On the surface, the answer is an easy no. People can practice magic and get results and not have their lives together or be happy and successful. And these same people can curse other people. I should know because I’ve been cursed a few times by people that didn’t have their act together and aren’t happy or successful people in any sense of the word and for a short time the curses worked until I figured out what was going on and took appropriate action to remedy the situation.
But I’m going to give a more nuanced answer here, based on my own experiences. I want to be clear this isn’t a commentary on other peoples’ lives or magical practice per se, but simply an illustrative example of my own life and where happiness, success, and having my life together fits into my magical practice.
I have not always had my life together, nor have I always been successful or happy. In fact its fair to say that it wasn’t until my late twenties/early thirties that I even began to get my life together or find some semblance of happiness and success. Yet, as many of you know I started practicing magic when I was 16. I can tell you I wouldn’t still be practicing magic if I wasn’t getting results.
When I look at my early magical practice (1993 to 2004), what I see for the most part is a practice where I had problems come up and I used magic to solve those problems, but did little in the way of internal work or reflection on why those problems kept coming up. Basically I was living my life by reacting, waiting for things to happen to me, before addressing those things. And yes, the magic helped me solve those problems, temporarily, but the same problems would crop up again and again. So the magic was only successful to a limited degree.
Now not all of the magical work I did was reactive. When I was 20 I used magic to alter my brain chemistry and get rid of the neurochemical induced state of manic depression (As I’ve shared in further detail in the Inner Alchemy series), but while that working did help me in a very permanent way, I didn’t anticipate the resultant flood of emotions and having to figure out how to feel and understand those emotions (because I had never really felt them before). I make that point, because even when the magic produced some very effective long term results, it didn’t automatically make everything better.
In 2004, I had a dream which made me realize that the path I was on was not a good one and that I needed to find some way to address the internal traumas, issues, and other problems that I hadn’t fully addressed. In other words, I needed to get my life together. At the time, I was in a Ph.D program, had published a few books and had a good relationship. On the surface it would have seemed like I had my life together and was happy and successful, but I wasn’t. I had gotten into that ph.d program because I didn’t know what else to do with my life, and I wasn’t a good romantic partner to the person I was with (or other people I dated). The surface can be very deceptive.
I got into Taoist water meditation in 2004 and also created my elemental balancing ritual, wherein I worked with an element for a year or more to achieve some type of balance with that element. That first year I worked with water, because 8 years after I had done my inner alchemical working to change my brain chemistry, I still didn’t have a handle on my emotions. The combination of the Taoist water breathing and elemental work did help me start getting my life in order, but to be brutally honest my life got worse before it got better. The result of doing that work initially made my life MORE reactive, and in the first couple years, I ended up breaking up with the person I was with, dropping out of Ph.d program, hooking up with somebody else, following her across the country and marrying her. I don’t know about you, but none of that strikes me as exactly being stable or having one’s life together, but doing the internal work helped me clear out what wasn’t working with my life.
Continuing to do the elemental work and water breathing gradually brought some more stability to my life. The year I worked with earth as an element, I started learned about how to think about and work with finances much more proactively. I became a moderately better person to be around, though I still had my issues and I was NOT a healthy person to be in a relationship. However continuing to do the internal work helped a lot because I started figuring some of the issues out and stated living less reactively.
2008 - 2010 were pivotal years for me. I worked with the elements of love, emptiness, and identity. Those were hard years because I really dug in deep into my dysfunctions and they spilled over into every part of my life. The truth about internal work is that you can’t do internal work without it affecting your life, initially, in ways that will upset the apple cart. I ended up getting divorced and I lurched from technical writing into coaching and self-employment. I also kept practicing magic and I found that as I worked through my issues, messy as it was sometimes, I did have less of a need to use magic to reactively solve a problem. Instead I started taking my first steps down the road of designing my life proactively. I still had a lot to learn through.
In 2010 I met my wife, and I continued my internal work and magical practice. From 2010 to 2016 I had some success and happiness, and I was more even keeled than I had been. I got my act together more and I found that my magical practice changed to a certain extent. I was much less reactive and much more focused. The coaching work helped a lot because while I was helping my clients, I was also using that skillset to help me work on myself as well and how I showed up in my relationship with myself, and with my wife. I had a lot of work to do become to a good partner, and she fortunately stuck around even though it wasn’t always easy to be with me. (Though what relationship is always easy?)
Then 2017 came rolling around. I got impatient and wanted some short cuts for my businesses. I got caught up in the dubious lures of online marketing gurus who were really toxic people, but on the surface seemed successful. They had lots of money and lived life as they pleased and yet all the while burned through their audiences. I didn’t pay attention to the warning sides, and my coaching business crashed and burned and magical experiments nearly went the same way, because I almost alienated my community (and in some ways did).
I ended up having to go back to work for someone and it was one of the lowest moments of my life. I hit bottom hard and I asked myself if I could even call myself a magician any more. I seriously considered unpublishing all my books because I asked myself how I could even claim to help people when I hadn’t been able to help myself? Fortunately I realized that was my ego speaking and even though I as humiliated and afraid, I decided to pick myself back and start over with everything, including my magical practice. I took a long hard look at myself and my issues and made some radical changes. I also, for the first time in my life, really sat down to figure out what I really wanted to with my life. I was 41.
Fast Forward to now: I figured out what I really wanted to do with my life: Be an indie author and teach magic. I have an amazing relationship with my wife, as a result of the internal work we’ve both respectively done and the work we’ve done on our relationship. I’m working my way back toward self-employment and should be out of the day job, conservatively, within a year (likely sooner). I have an amazing community of magicians I connect with every day and awesome friends I love and respect. I am happier and more successful than I have ever been in my life, and the way things are going, and how I’m applying magic toward my efforts, it’ll just continue in that vein. Financially I am more stable than I have ever been. I’ve got my life together and the proactive use of magic and internal work, along with other tools is keeping me calibrated and focused.
But it’s taken a lot of work, discipline and focus. And not all of that was magic. The philosophies of Essentialism, the slight edge, and other such systems of thought are ones that have come from outside of my magical practice, but nonetheless have been essential to steering my life in the direction it’s going in. And I’m still very much a work in progress. I still make mistakes and I still have issues I’m working through and I probably will the rest of my life.
I’ve done some amazing magical work in my life, gotten some results that still boggle the mind, but I didn’t have my act together for most of my life and I wasn’t very successful and happy for most of it. So yes, I agree success and happiness aren’t always the best metrics to apply to magical work. They are only suitable, truly, if THOSE are the results you’re going for.
But this is why I say that magic isn’t a cure all for your life. Yes magic can help you get results and it can help you improve your life, if that’s the direction you want to apply it, but that’s not everyone’s goal. There are many magicians who go through their lives without ever getting their acts together (Aleister Crowley comes to mind as the most notorious example). They can still do some amazing stuff with their magic, but magic alone is not enough to solve your problems. Only you are.
Two final thoughts…
The first is this thought: All of the problems in your life have one thing in common: You. I am NOT saying you are solely responsible for the problems in your life. But you have a role in your problems and if you never examine that role, those problems will likely keep happening.
And on the topic of curses, I typically do not throw curses at people or anything else. I have on a few occasions in the past, and they worked each time, but I came to the conclusion eventually that throwing a curse was more about my ego than anything else. Occasionally a curse IS warranted, but most times it really isn’t. When I’ve felt it’s warranted it’s been about boundary enforcement or as a response to someone attacking me. I find though, that people are their own worst enemies, their own curse. Certainly I have been that for myself and have mucked my life up more with my own efforts than anything anyone else could come up with.
I've come to the conclusion I’d much rather get my life in order, and do what brings me joy instead of focusing my efforts on other people, because I don’t like them. Who, after all, has the power in that situation? The person you are acting against, because they are more important to you than anything else in that moment and even if you do hurt them, they still own you. I’d rather bid them farewell and do what speaks to me and through me. On that path, for me, lies joy and success.
Edited to add: The definition of success and happiness varies from person to person, so what my definition is, may not be the same as yours.
