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

The Passionate Marriage

Undefended Love

Journey of the Heart

Perfect Love, Imperfect Relationships

Love and Awakening

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!

A wealth magic article, a book review, and body paint

An article on wealth and magic on Reality Sandwich I've already gotten some interesting comments on it. I hope that it gets people to think about what wealth is to them and how they manifest it. I also think there's more to explore there...I may do so in a follow up article down the line.

Review of Meta Magick: The Book of ATEM by Phil Farber

Meta-Magick is an intriguing book which presents readers with an opportunity to create not one entity, but actually a number of entities based off of principles such as attention, passion, trance, language, making, and Fitting. Additionally Farber provides 36 exercises which can be used by people to learn how to integrate these principles into their lives.

Farber also focuses on eight powers: Communication, neuroplasticity, transformation, transmission, beauty, understanding, balance, and opening. The book doesn't overtly focus on these powers much...instead the focus is more subtle. You will experience them through doing the exercises in the book, which is what the author intended.

Meta-magick definitely is not intended to be something intellectually read, so much as it is intended to be experienced and worked with. You will get a lot of leverage out of this book if you do the exercises in them. It's an excellent book to introduce people to magic, but is also good for intermediate to advanced practitioners.

5 out of 5

I did some work with body paints tonight. I find body paints to be intimate as well as beautiful. I use body paints a fair amount in my magic as a way of connecting with spirits, but also connecting with my body and its consciousness. I recommend the body paints which can be washed off with water and soap...you can find them at costume shops fairly easily.

A day of ritual work

Right now Portland is experiencing an unexpected snow storm, which has pretty much shut down the ability to travel in the city. I'm not one to spend my time idly, however. So I decided to do some ritual workings today and have another I'll be joining astrally later tonight for the solstice. I first decided to the second invocation of Atem from Meta-Magick: The Book of Atem by Phil Farber. In the second invocation you create a magical circle in which you anchor specific attributes of attention, passion, fitting, trance, language, and making into the formation of the circle. These attributes are used to form the entity of ATEM. By anchoring the attributes into a physical space, the magician not only creates ATEM, but also utilizes a physical space for Atem and the associated entities of the attributes to reside in. It's a clever approach. I like how it ultimately utilizes the physical environment of the person to create a space where ATEM resides, strengthening the connection it has with the person working with it.

I also did another space/time Tarot invocation of my future self, as well as the evocation of Thiede, Purson, the spider goddess of time, and Xah. I've thought about the role those entities have in this type of working. Thiede is my Space/Time guardian spirit, Purson is finder of potential, and the spider goddess is the weaver of those possibilities into reality. Xah, as my personal Daemon, is both the future self I invoke and also the fox spirit that walks alongside me whenever I walk the silver strands of the web of time. With this working I did my invocation and evocations and then invoked Xah, entering into a trance wherein I could interface with all of the entities while letting my future self shuffle the cards of the second deck. It felt odd to shuffle the cards and yet be in a trance...the movement was much less directed, so the shufflking continued for a while...It actually helped increase the trance. The working itself showed me the steps I needed to take...a lot of it being confirmation of some situations in my life...so I think for the meantime, I'll likely hold back on doing further space/time tarot work until those situations are fully taken care of.

Tonight, I'm going to take a ritual bath and use music, chanting, and trance work to synch in with the solstice working...and enjoy relaxing in the comfort of my home while doing it.