spirits, Magic
Taylor Ellwood
The relationship between sacred kingship and ...

One of the books I’m reading lately is King, Warrior, Magician, Lover by Robert Moore and Doug Gillette. It’s a fascinating book that explores the archetypes of the mature and sacred masculine. This is currently part of the spiritual work that I’m engaged in as I explore my own relationship with masculinity and heal the ancestoral and contemporary wounds that I’m becoming aware of as it relates to how masculinity is treated and perceived in modern times.

One of the aspects I’m exploring in particular is related to sacred kingship and the land. I am in the process of exploring the new city and surrounding areas that I live in. While I’ve lived here for a year, I didn’t have much opportunity until recently to really begin exploring the area and developing a relationship with the land. I find it fitting and useful that part of the process has also involved cultivating a relationship with the land, particularly on the basis of the relationship has with their home and how that relationship plays out in sacromagical work one does in connecting with the land.

internal work

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Shadow mask work

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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.

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Fear as an Ally in Your Magical Practice

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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.

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The nature of attachments and how to liberate yourself from them

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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.

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How to start listening to your soul

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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.

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Scrying for changing behavior

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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.

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How to get unstuck in your life

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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.

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How I'm learning to choose myself

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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.

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How to Apply Awareness to Magic

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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.

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What does it mean to have Awareness?

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One of the books I’m lately reading is Awareness: the Perils and Opportunities of Reality by Anthony De Mello. It is a book about cultivating awareness but what I find fascinating is that it really brings up a fundamental question of what awareness is, which I think is something we can take for granted. Is awareness being conscious or is it something else? It’s a question I’ve been pondering as I’ve read the book and considered the various insights that it offers.

I can’t say I’ve always been or am the most aware person. I work at being aware, but like anyone else I have my distractions and attachments and other things which get in the way of awareness. A metaphor I’ve seen used elsewhere is the metaphor of red dirt in the water. If you let the dirt settle, it goes to the bottom of the class and the water can seem to be clear (Aware), but if you stir the water the red dirt kicks up and the water becomes muddy. Sometimes I think I got awareness down and then the right circumstance comes up and I see that I ‘ve got attachments and those attachments are showing that I’m not so aware.

How to Cultivate Awareness and Let Go of Attachment

Attachments come in the form of ideals, concepts, categories and all the other ways we try to define the world and ourselves. If we want to cultivate awareness we need to recognize how our attachments actually get in the way of genuine connection. In this video I discuss how to cultivate awareness and let go of attachment.

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.

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How to release your neediness and discover your actual needs

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In the last few months I have had a great opportunity present itself to me. I have come face to face with my neediness and co-dependent behavior and I’m going through this process to recognize and release the neediness in order to discover what I truly need. That probably sounds a little contradictory until you consider that the root issue of neediness is based in fear. When we feel needy, we often feel that way because we are afraid to discover ourselves and what we truly need.

This journey of mine has involved me learning even more about my relationship with fear. I already knew a lot about it, but I’ve come to recognize how fear is the root of neediness. When I feel needy or clingy, what is operating at the root of that needy clinginess is the fear I feel. Part of what has helped in doing this work is connecting with Saturn, because in a very real sense Saturn is an embodiment of fear.

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Goetic pathworking for internal work

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Over the course of this year I’ve been taking a Goetic Daemon a week course offered by S. Connolly on her Patreon. It’s been a fascinating course to take and its helped me expand my experiences and knowledge of working with daemons. While I already had some experience working with them going into the course, I’m glad I’ve taken the course because of the insights I’ve gained.

One of the suggestions that S. Connolly is working with the Daemons for the purpose of doing internal work and I’ve found this to be a great practice. Often it seems that people think of working with the Goetia when they need an external result or want to do an evocation, but there is a lot of value to be discovered in doing internal work with them.

How to become resilient in Magic and Life part 2

In this week’s video I share how resiliency must come from within, but also why the right resources can help you cultivate that resiliency and strengthen your inner core. I also share how to identify those resources and why it’s important to develop an approach to self-care that carries you through any situation you encounter.

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What is the benefit of internal work?

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One of the questions I sometimes ask myself is what the benefit of internal work is. I ask this question because it can be easy to get so caught up in the internal work that you don’t seem to really make progress because you’re busy dealing with whatever is coming up internally. You can get stuck in your head and your heart at times because of how intense internal work can get. Yet I think that staying the course with internal work is ultimately beneficial. After all, when you are doing internal work you are getting the opportunity to recognize your issues and triggers and work through them in a way that can liberate you from them. A life unexamined, in contrast, is often messier in the long run, even if in the short run it seems less complicated.

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How justification and rationalization can get in the way of magical work

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One of the books I’ve been reading lately is Mistakes were Made (but not by me) (affiliate link). It’s been a hard book to read because what it naturally causes a reader to face is how they have justified their own mistakes in order to avoid taking responsibility for them. While I’d like to believe that I do take responsibility for my choices, I’ll admit that reading this book did cause me to examine some of my perceptions and beliefs about situations and recognize how I had justified my own behavior or painted other people in a specific light to justify my choices. Needless to say, it made me squirm a bit.

As I continued reading the book I also considered how such justifications can show up in magical work. While I have written and shared my own failures with magic with a fair amount of candor, I still revisited various workings as a result of reading this book and asked myself if I ever justified why a working failed or succeeded. It was a good exercise to take on, because it required a willingness to put aside whatever justifications I had applied to a situation and ask myself if there was anything else that could have contributed to the situation.