Sometimes the best response to a situation is to call back what belongs to you, while also returning what doesn’t belong to you. I recently decided to do a return to sender working, using a meditation shared by a friend. I have been working with it a few days and I have noticed some experiences that I have found useful. I share my thoughts on this work in the latest episode of the magical experiments process.
How to Turn Tower Time into Opportunity
I discuss how to turn your tower time into opportunities for growth and change. While it can be hard to go through a tower time it is also an invitation to change. I discuss how to use tower time to uncover opportunities for change and growth in your life.
Interpersonal Growth and the Magical Life
Your interpersonal growth goes hand in hand with your magical practice. If you aren’t growing and changing as a person then your magical practice will go stale. I share why you can’t settle for less in your life if you truly want to live a magical life.
How to Work with Qi when Wintering
I discuss how to work with qi when wintering. I share why working with the element of water can be very helpful and allow you to restore and recover your energy when doing qi work.
Why you don't want to draw on your own energy for magick
I discuss why its not a good idea to draw on your own energy for magick and share what some of the potential issues can be when you draw on your energy too much instead of taking the necessary precautions to draw on other sources. I share a personal example and the consequences of doing this based on my own experience.
Shadow mask work
Image courtesy of Taylor Ellwood 2023
I recently created a couple of masks to do some shadow work. The first shadow mask I created was for the shadow of co-dependency, which is something I have struggled with most of my life. The second shadow mask I created was for the shadow of the nice guy and all the passive aggressive behaviors the nice guy embodies. While the two masks are related, they are also distinctly different in some ways.
I created each shadow mask to embody the specific behavior I wanted to call forth. I painted the 'face' of each mask. On the inside of the face I created a collage where I glued the internal messages I tell myself. By externalizing the shadow into a mask I provide myself the opportunity to explore how that shadow shows up in my life and consciously make myself aware of it, so I can work with it in a way that doesn't allow it to sabotage my life.
Shadow Work Initiatives
Photo by George Becker: https://www.pexels.com/photo/pawn-chess-piece-136351/
One of the projects I'm working on in my life is what I call shadow work initiatives. Shadow work initiatives are opportunities I am taking to explore the shadows within me as it relates to aspects within myself that I feel I need to work on. For example one shadow I've been doing a lot of work has been around my identity as a man. I've recognized how I've lived a nice guy life and I am working on changing that by learning how to communicate what I really want, but also exploring the nice guy in context to the divine masculine.
What I've discovered in this context is how much the nice guy has embodied the shadow in my life. I've bent over backwards for other people, placed my own needs and wants on hold or in suspension, in a way where I wasn't fully conscious of it. Once I started exploring the divine masculine, it forced me to also explore the shadow from a conscious place of awareness, bringing it into the light, where I could see how it played a role in my communication.
My current project around shadow work involves embodying shadow as a mask. I'm going to create a mask of codependency in order to contemplate and understand how codependency has shown up in my life as a mask I've worn both in relationship to other people and to myself. I recognize as well that codependency plays a connective role to my nice guy behaviors, which is important to see, but that its also distinct in relationship to itself.
My ongoing experiments with scrying
I discuss my ongoing experiments with scrying, my upcoming book Scrying the Divine and share how this work is helping me refine my spirit work.
The Somatic benefits of martial arts
Photo by Craig Adderley: https://www.pexels.com/photo/photo-a-man-and-woman-doing-martial-arts-1543932/
I recently started learning Kung Fu at a local studio. I had been interested in studying Martial Arts for a long time and had gotten into Qi Gong because of that interest. While I continue to practice Qi Gong and appreciative the meditative and energetic aspects of the practice, I also wanted to branch out to a more martial form in order to better understand the differences, but also see how one practice might comment on the other.
While I definitely have gotten that benefit from starting to study Kung Fu, what I also came to appreciate about Kung Fu were the somatic benefits of the practice. As I learn a given move and enmesh it within my body memory, what stands out to me is how the practice engages me on multiple levels of knowing and consciousness. My body consciousness is engaged when I learn how to step or move a part of my body, but my memory is also engaged, both in learning the move, but also considering how I might have applied it in different situations in my life. My emotional consciousness is also engaged and I am able to work through and release emotions with the practice.
Somatic work has become a kind of buzz phrase of late in the holistic sphere of activities, but somatic studies have been around for a long time, and whenever I learn a new form of body work I look at how I can integrate it into the existing body practices I already practice. For example with Kung Fu, one of the experiences I’ve been paying more attention to is the angle of a movement. I first learned about the angle of a movement by studying the dance disciplines of Laban, who broke movements of the body into the platonic geometric shapes and showed how a given movement could be performed with these geometries in mind.
Fear as an Ally in Your Magical Practice
Fear, in all of its guises, can be a force in our lives that either stops us in our tracks or motivates us to make changes The relationship we cultivate with fear can either turn it into one of our greatest allies or one of your greatest enemies. In this video I explore both aspects.
How I apply self-love as a magical practice
I share how I apply self-love as a magical practice and explain the practical benefits of self love but also share why there needs to be a practical application of self love in order to benefit from the practice.
The nature of attachments and how to liberate yourself from them
image courtesy of unsplash
Lately I’ve been doing a lot of work around attachments, and my relationship with myself and those attachments. I’ve come to recognize something fundamental about attachments: They operate from a place of fear and scarcity and possession. You think you have something or someone (you don’t) or you want to have something or someone (you won’t) and all this comes from a place of fear that leads to attachment. Attachments operate from a place of control, a desire to make the world around you conform to your will, but they ultimately weigh you down.
Understanding the nature of an attachment can help you liberate yourself from it. An attachment is ultimately informed by a sense of scarcity, but also a limiting belief that if you don’t have something or someone in your life you won’t be happy. Ironically you give away the very control you seek when you are attachment, because you are basing your sense of happiness and well being on something or someone external to yourself. Even if you temporarily attain what you are attached to, it doesn’t provide happiness. You might feel a sense of pleasure, but pleasure is fleeting and immaterial and if you don’t attain the attachment it becomes a perceived source of unhappiness because you are holding on to a limiting belief that the desired object, event, person etc., has the key to your happiness, when in fact the opposite is true. If anything the struggle around attachment keeps you from truly appreciating and enjoying whatever experience you have as well as whoever you are with. Most importantly it keeps you from enjoying yourself.
So what do you to liberate yourself from an attachment?
First you need to recognize that the attachment won’t bring you happiness. Your attachment is to a sense of happiness originating from an external source. When you recognize that happiness comes from within and that no one or nothing else has that happiness then you can let go of trying to find that happiness somewhere else. You’re looking in the wrong places when you look for happiness from someone or something else.
How to start listening to your soul
Photo by cottonbro studio from Pexels
When I look back at my life what I see is someone who has not been successful in the conventional sense of the word. I have not stuck with a career for an extended period of time nor have I struck it rich with a business or even multiple businesses. I've had some successes in writing books and I've accomplished some activities I've set myself to do, but I've also spent a lot of time wandering, trying to find my purpose.
Is my purpose just to write books on magic and the occult? I think that's one part of it along with other writings I've done or want to do but I've realized for a while that there's something else calling to me as well. I haven't always known what it was and sometimes like I've gone in multiple directions exploring different interests and coming away with richer experiences and more insights.
I know I'm also not alone in this journey. I've been reading a book called Soulsshaping by Jeff Brown (affiliate link) which has described his own journey toward discovering his purpose. Reading Choose Yourself by James Altucher (affiliate link) has provided a similar perspective. Reading both books and some others has helped me recognize how much societal, cultural, and familial pressure often has us buying into ideas of success that aren't always accurate or realistic and may not apply. Certainly they haven't applied to me.
Scrying for changing behavior
Picture copyright Taylor Ellwood 2023
Sometimes the reason you want to scry is because you want to change a specific behavior.
For example, you become aware of a behavior you do that sabotages your interactions with other people. You aren't sure how to change it.
Scrying may be just the right tool you could use for the purpose of behavior alteration.
Why?
The act of scrying opens us to the experience of using fascination to draw us into the underlying narrative that informs the behavior and it provides us a ways of changing that behavior, because we use scrying to change the narrative.
The key though is to create the experience of fascination via the scrying tools you are working with. And there's a hidden component to this as well.
My Experiments with Scrying
Last year I took a class on Scrying taught by Harper Feist. It was a fascinating course that explored the sensory aspects of scrying in relationship to our senses.
Not just the five senses of sight, sound, taste, touch, and smell, but also kinisthetic, thermal, and other more subtle senses all of us have access to, including of course the "psychic senses."
Since taking that course, I've been continuing to experiment with scrying and have made it a regular part of my practice.
Even before I took the class I had done some scrying with bowls of water and with a crystal globe, but after taking the class I added a couple of tools to my scrying practice.
I bought a black scrying mirror and I started adding candles to the mix in order to create a source of light.
Lessons I learned in 2022
I reflect on the lessons I learned in 2022 and share my vision for what I plan to manifest in 2023. I also discuss the false intimacy of social media and share why I’m making some changes in what I share on here and on social media in general.
How to get unstuck in your life
Photo by Andrea Piacquadio: https://www.pexels.com/photo/sad-isolated-young-woman-looking-away-through-fence-with-hope-3808803/
There is nothing worse than feeling stuck in life.
You're going through your daily life and everything seems to be going swimmingly, but at your core you feel something...off. A deep feeling of dissatisfaction, a sense of feeling stuck somewhere in your life. Maybe it's with your job, maybe its with your relationship, maybe it's something else altogether.
At the core of that feeling of stuckness is an experience of anxiety that we often try to bury deep within ourselves. That feeling of anxiety could come from a desire for approval or a fear of abandonment or something else altogether, but it keeps us trapped in a cage of our own making.
How I'm learning to choose myself
I’ve never been good at choosing myself.
I’ve never been good at saying yes to myself.
I’ve recently come to realize that because I’m going through this intense transformation in my life, where I’m looking at everything that’s come before and I’m seeing all the patterns that have influenced my choices, whether those choices have been relationships, or jobs or anything else I’ve done and what I’ve come to recognize is how much the choices I’ve made have been about saying yes to other people and no to myself. And pretty much everything I’m saying yes to are old patterns that have kept replicating themselves with new masks, but underneath it all is the same narrative, the same giving away of personal autonomy and sovereignty and the person doing that isn’t anyone else other than me.
How to Apply Awareness to Magic
I discuss how to apply awareness to your magical practice in order to get better results, but also put together better magical workings. I discuss why awareness can help us with the process of letting go of the lust for results so that we can focus on the magical work we need to do.
How to flip the script in any situation
What role do we play in our lives? We don’t necessarily have control of everything or everyone around us, but what we do have is control over the role we play. I share a technique I’ve been using in the last couple months that has helped me change my perception about the role I am in and allowed me to flip the script on the situations I’m in.