When you think about your emotions, perhaps the last thing you might consider is that there is a magical aspect to your emotions, or that emotions should even be worked with magically. After all, emotions seem to fall in the domain of psychology and while you can do shadow work around emotions that isn’t always considered “real” magical work. Yet in my own experiences and in observing other magicians, I think there’s a real need to work with the emotions and to do so in a way that is healthy, while also recognizing the role emotions can play in magical work.
What I’ve discovered in my own magical practice, and from observing other practitioners is that while magic can solve some problems, it can also exacerbate other issues, and this can include issues around the emotions. Certainly when I look back at my younger self, I see recognize times when I was reactive with my magical practice because of the emotions I was feeling at the time. I let those emotions take over my identity in the moment. As I began doing internal work aka shadow work around my emotions, it also changed my magical practice. I became less reactive in my usage of magic to resolve problems and started to carefully consider the impact.
Emotions are part of our spiritual journey. Learning how to feel and express them and work through them is something that isn’t talked about much in esoteric circles, but its worth having a conversation about and while such work shouldn’t necessarily replace work that you might do with a therapist, it could be valuable work done alongside the work you do with a therapist.
I can’t say that doing internal work automatically resolved all my issues with my emotions or in general. Even now I can safely say that I am a work in progress, in terms of making better choices and living by my values, but as I’ve continued doing the internal work around emotions, I’ve necessarily found that such work does inform what I do with my magical work and why I do it. It reinforces why its so important to do internal work and treat it as a part of a holistic approach to magical workings.
And then there is the actual integration of emotions into magical workings. I have always found it helpful to use emotions as a source for magical workings because you are already feeling them anyway and they are an expression of your being that can be used to strengthen a given magical working. In my own experiences, I’ve also found that emotions can sabotage a magical working, and so knowing that this can happen, it can be very useful to find a way to redirect the emotions so they actually work for you, instead of against you.
For instance, if you’re doing a magical working for a specific result, but you discover there’s some emotional fixations getting in the way of achieving that result, what you can do is turn those emotions into a fuel source for the working, so that whenever the emotions come up they get redirected into feeding the working instead of getting in the way of the working. This can help you remove an obstacle in your magical workings and turn it into an advantage that helps you.
When we learn to make our emotions part of the spiritual work we do, we integrate them into ourselves, instead of compartmentalizing them and locking away a part of ourselves that is a necessary component of the human experience. When we acknowledge that emotions can play a role in our magical work, we also acknowledge that the magical work happens on all levels of our being and isn’t something we can just regulate into a specific category.
