Photo by Meckl Antal on Unsplash
One of the books I’m currently reading is Effortless Living by Jason Gregory (Affiliate link). In that book he shares the following: “When we fervently seek power or use force, we exhaust our system by swimming against the current of life instead of flowing with it. A sage or an artist allows life to present itself instead of dictating toward life…When you finally realize…that the whole universe is happening to you right now all at once, you will cease projecting yourself onto the world, because you will become receptive to the universe. This will align you with a real trust in life that confirms that you belong.”
Over the last couple of years my approach to magic has shifted toward a similar outlook. Instead of trying to control everything, I’ve surrendered myself to the experience and allowed the experience to speak through me and take me where I need to be. That kind of approach to magic can seem to be contrary what magical practice is, but I think that’s because a lot of how magical practice is discussed comes from a place of control (and I say that as someone who’s written about magic from that perspective and still does sometimes).
One of the hardest lessons I learned several years ago is that sometimes you don’t have any control and no matter what you do you’re just exhausting yourself. That’s what happened to me several years ago. I tried doing a bunch of different things and ended up exhausted. Fortunately I found a space where I could recover and think and really examine what went wrong and the conclusion I came to was that I needed to take a different approach to magic.
I needed to surrender to the experience and learn from it, instead of trying to force events to go the way I wanted them to go. But talk about taking such a contrary approach to magic. Let go and surrender to the experience? Many magicians would say that’s not magic.
I disagree though, because what I discovered is that when you let go and surrender to the experience, when you do magic from a place of mediation where you let the spirits work through you, it can take you exactly where you need to go through the experiences that you have. That was something which happened to me. I did the magical work, but I did it without trying to get to a specific destination. I did it from a place of Wu Wei, from not knowing, because what I knew wasn’t working.
I had to challenge what I knew by discovering what I could learn and that meant giving up trying to control everything because control had brought me to a place of exhaustion. It wouldn’t get me out of that place either. The only thing which could get me out of that place was giving myself over to the experience and trusting that if I did that I would end up where I needed to be. But having that kind of trust is scary. There were many days I woke up with fear, questioning everything I was doing, because it seemed insane. Yet sticking with my magical practice from a place no control worked. I came out of the storm I was in and gradually found my way to a new situation and a realization that letting go of control could be a good thing.
I still do a lot of magic from a place of control, but not all of it now. The major work I’m doing in my life is coming from a place of letting go of control and trusting the experience. It’s more about the journey and less about the end of the journey. And what I’m finding again and again is that the journey itself is the working and that the experience and change in identity is the result. By challenging what I know, I discover what I can learn and I am exactly where and when I need to be.
