Where psychology fits into magic

Jason recently posted about some of his thoughts on where psychology fits into magic. He and I share a similar opinion about the perspective of treating magic as just a psychological phenomenon, but I agree with the point he makes: There is a place for psychology within magic. In Magical Identity, I discuss different psychological methodologies and how they can be applied for magical work, especially for internal work.

One of the areas that I personally feel is neglected far too much by magicians is internal work, i.e. working with your internal values, beliefs, attitudes, and dysfunctional issues. Meditation is one method for doing internal work and when it's combined with psychology, it can be truly dynamic. I've made some amazing breakthroughs using meditation as well as working with a therapist, and applying psychological perspectives to my work, which in turn has allowed me to achieve greater clarity and focus in my life, making the living of it much, much easier. I've actually found that the need to do more overt acts decreases when you do internal work.

Before I did internal work and underwent therapy, I was a mess. I could practice magic as effectively as any of them, but my use of magic was mostly reactive, used to solve a crisis or problem, but with little thought put toward understanding my role in that crisis or problem. Choosing to do internal work freed me from a lot of unhealthy behaviors and provided me the opportunity to become much more proactive and focused in my magical work.

Aside from that psychology can provide a useful avenue of exploration in terms of understanding your magical process and how specific techniques work. It's fair to say that my background in social sciences informs my magical process and some of that background is related to psychology. Where I make a key distinction is recognizing the limitations of using psychology to describe magic. It's a different discipline and where there are insights, there are also limitations.

If I had only one technique I could keep it would be...

Meditation. Jason Miller said much the same thing in the Strategic Sorcery Course. I think meditation is the most crucial skill a magician can have. It's something I do as consistently as possible. Occasionally I miss days, and I can always tell when I miss a day because I'm less focused. Meditation is similar in benefit to exercising on a daily basis: It keeps you toned.

There are some magicians who will say they can't meditate, but I don't buy that. They can meditate, but they're unwilling to discipline themselves enough to do so and they've likely bought into the popular idea that meditation is just about emptying your mind (that's one form of meditation, but not the only kind). The key is to accept that if you do have random thoughts arise, you don't give up. You note them, maybe even follow them, and then return to the breathing, letting it carry you deeper and deeper into an altered state of consciousness. It takes some work, but if you are consistent about it, you'll succeed eventually.

I think one reason people say they can't meditate is that they are so distracted by every thought and emotion, and perhaps even afraid to face those thoughts and emotions. Meditation does give you the chance to work through thoughts and emotions and sometimes its not fun. But doing it frees you of those thoughts and emotions. It gives you clarity, focus, awareness, and perspective.

Meditation teaches you to sort through the chaos of your internal reality. It's doing the internal work, so that the external work of living your life and manifesting your magic is a lot easier. Certainly in taking up a dedicated practice of meditation I have needed to do less overt acts of magic, save on the rare occasions where its really warranted. By doing the internal work, my life has gotten much easier. It didn't happen over night, buts it a cumulative effect if you are consistent.

So that's the one technique or practice I'd keep. What about you?

Appreciation for the moment

One of the most mindful practices we can do each day involves finding appreciation for the moment. Appreciation for the moment is really the ability to take everything in without having to filter or label it. It just is. You are one with the environment around you and within you. It's a practice that can be done each day, but it takes discipline to do it, because cultivating such a mindset isn't something that comes naturally to people. Monkey mind is always active, chittering away about random incidents from the day, or wondering when something will happen or who knows what else.

An initial approach is to enjoy something beautiful, like a view of the sky or a natural feature such as a mountain or the ocean, something so large that it can create an appreciation for all of you. But you won't always have access to those features. So finding appreciation for the moment can also involve simply taking in the everyday and appreciating it. A walk in your neighborhood can be an opportunity to practice mindful appreciation, or spending time in your garden or doing chores. Allow the activity to define the reality and appreciate it as an opportunity to be in the moment.

Meditation that's focused in this way involves taking in the world as part of the meditation. You allow the activity to take over for your thoughts. You let the scenery become part of your sense of self. Everything is a reflection of your relationship with the world and with yourself. Te simplest way to practice is to simply take it all in. Let it fill you, lose yourself in the moment.

Habits and Magic

I've been reading The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg. He breaks habits down to a cycle of a cue, routine, and Reward and explains that what makes habits really stick is the craving we feel when we get something that we want more of. When I read this I began thinking about how it applied to magic, or didn't apply.

I could see it applying to a daily practice. A person does a given set of exercises and meditation practices each day and receives an award of not only feeling accomplished about it, but also feeling physiological responses that create craving to experience, kind of like a runner's high. I know after I do my meditations each day, I not only feel calm and focused, I also feel a sense of pleasure and that's part of what motivates me to continue doing the meditation.

But this can be extended further. We talk about results quite a bit in magic, and what defines if someone is successful is the achievement of a measurable result. And the achievement of that result brings a sense of happiness, and a sense of power...and perhaps a craving for more results. This could even be where the admonition of lusting for results comes into play.

At the same time creating a habit of your magical practice doesn't have to be about a lust for results, so much as its about achieving a sense of well-being and fulfillment that a person wants to sustain. And then there's the added factor of considering whether the craving a habit can bring about is a conscious experience, or just a physiological inducement that we may not entirely be aware of.

How much of what we do is a result of habit? It's an interesting question to consider both in context to your life and magical practice.

Elemental Fire Month 3

12-26-11 Fire burns and consumes. What you don't want can be burned away, turned to ashes. You can recycle the ashes, contribute to new growth. For Christmas, my mom gave me a picture album with lots of pictures I don't believe I ever saw. I can't remember anything about a lot of those pictures, because most of them were when I was really young, or before the age of 7. I don't have many memories from before I was seven. It's as if they were wiped clean. It's quite frustrating. I've been thinking a lot about safety and what constitutes safety for someone. What makes a person really feel safe? What does safety embody for a person? I think of fire as an embodiment of safety. The warmth it provides, and even a psychological fascination with light, and the idea that being in the light can make you safe. There's this draw to a fire and what it represents. We can be warmed by the fire, can even have a degree of visibility and protection, and yet the fire can also be a detriment. Your eyes have to adjust each time, and what feels safe may ultimately be an illusion.

12-27-11 Today's meditation focused on desire, specifically what desire for others is really about for me. I think that's such a hard question to answer in a way, because it really involves recognizing that there's some level of selfishness associated with desire, and while that seems like a given it did make me think about what that really means. Selfishness isn't bad per se, as long as it isn't taken to an extreme. It's just that when it is taken to an extreme it can go overboard, to the extent that the other person isn't even considered. In looking at my past, I can safely say that I have been that selfish before and while the short term gratification was nice, the long term result was anything but. So for the moment I'm focusing on the selfishness piece of all of this.

12-28-11 Today's meditation focused on polyamory. I've been in a closed relationship for almost two years, which has been the longest time I've been in a closed relationship. I've used the time to do a lot of thinking about poly and why I've considered myself poly. In all honesty, I'd have to say that my participation in poly is a text book case of bad poly. I've made a lot of the mistakes people make in such relationships and as I've looked over those mistakes and also what's drawn me to that lifestyle, I've come to realize that I chose that lifestyle in part based on a belief of: "There's no one person who can fulfill all your needs and its better to have multiple relationships to get all your needs met." Or if I flip it a little I get: "I've been considered to be too intense, and its better if I spread the love around so I'm not too much for anyone person." Both reasons are ones I've told myself and others and yet in considering them carefully, I've come to realize that for me, they are unhealthy reasons.

My reasoning about this matter is as follows. If I really believe I'm too much for one person and feel the need to spread the love, am I perhaps ignoring what it is that makes me too much for a person? am I perhaps displacing my needs onto other people, without examining them and seeing what's healthy or isn't healthy? And also what is it I am telling myself if I believe this message? When I've considered these questions, I've realized that poly, in the way I've approached it, has ended up being a crutch that has helped me avoid intimacy with myself, let alone someone else.

With that said, I know I'm capable of loving more than one person and I think it can be healthy to love more than one person. However, I know that even though I am capable, I also haven't really laid a strong foundation to support such relationships. I've closed my relationship with my wife, in part because I know that I can't do good poly, if I can't even do good with a single relationship. We may never open the relationship up and that would be okay, because I would rather get it right with one person than continue to get it wrong with multiple people.

1-1-12 New year, new me. Today's mediation focused on judgement. In all honesty, I can be a fairly judgmental person, but show me someone who isn't. I don't think I know anyone who doesn't in one form or another judge others. But what Dragon pointed out is that the best thing I can do is acknowledge the judgments as I make them and then question them. So I applied that to judgments I'd made, and I realized as I looked at those judgements, how many of them were informed by things I had learned or observed about parenting based off how my parents raised me. It's an eye opening perspective that is helping me view the person in question in a different light, and consequently influences my interactions with him. And I guess that's the thing about judgements...where your judgements come from is based in part on experiences, observations, culture etc.

1-5-12 To be clear I'm not suddenly anti-polyamory. I think polyamory can work, and I know people who've made it work really well. But when I think about my desires, what I see that is problematic is my communication around those desires. It's not the desire itself that's a problem, but how I've communicated about it. Part of communication is vulnerability and that's not something I've handled well in the past. When you grow up self-sufficient and think that you can't rely on others, you don't let others in. With Kat, I've been learning how to be vulnerable, how to really open up, and also how to listen. Its taken me this long to learn those lessons in communication, but then again I think its takes many people time to learn such lessons.

1-9-12 I've been meaning to write this since I realized it. I was feeling antsy the other day and when I got to the heart of my restless, I realized something fantastic, liberating really. I realized how much I've been drawn to, addicted (that could be too strong) to newness. Neophilia. It's something that plays out in multiple areas of my life. New homes every few years, new relationships after a year or two, new jobs every so often, new video games (those aren't so bad), new, new, new...And I realized I'm not really used to being stable or establishing roots. I don't have many friends from long ago that I've stayed in touch with. Stabilizing myself, getting stable that's just nothing something I've done. That search for newness has always stirred up some kind of drama and restlessness. Stabilizing with Kat, settling into a relationship and intentionally focusing on just that relationship...That's new for me, but a different kind of new. I don't need a fresh injection of something new to take away something blue. I just need to settle in and trust in what I discover as a result.

1-12-11 I'm reading the Art of War, which is about blocks to a person's creativity. One of the forms of Resistance is Sex: "Sometimes Resistance takes the form of sex, or an obsessive preoccupation with sex. Why sex? Because sex provides immediate and instant gratification. When someone sleeps with us, we feel validated and approved of, even loved...In my experience, you can tell by the measure of hollowness you feel afterward. The more empty you feel, the more certain you can be that your true motivation was not love or even lust, but Resistance."

That quote speaks to a lot of my experiences with sex. Sex to feel loved to feel approved of, but also that emptiness feeling, that hollow sense of non-gratification, that desperate air of the hungry ghost. I know that all too well. Sex, for a long time, was just the big empty. Sometimes I used it to escape from everything, and sometimes all it really did was remind me of how hollow my life was. Nowadays it's different, the sex is more about connection, an intentional conscious bond.

I've also been thinking about how I spend money. I'm mostly satisfied with my choices, but there's also a sense of: what do I really have to show for it? I'm tired of just floating in some space. I want to make definite plans, move forward, and although I have a better financial sense of things then I used to have, and can make my pennies squeak for all their worth, I've also got a feeling of wanting more for that buck.

All of these things are distractions from that internal fire, yet they are also relevant to my fire, because they are shadows cast by the flames. I feel like a lot of my life has just been a shadow. I've never really known fire...I've just known a shadowy impression.

1-17-12 One of the activities that Kat and I have committed to doing involves reading books on relationships and money together. We're currently reading Your Money or Your Life and Journey of the Heart. Both are excellent books and as I re-read them, I catch things I hadn't previously gotten in the first reading. And what it makes me realize is how important it is to cultivate your inner fire. I've only seen shadows and I'd allowed my fire to gutter out, especially several years ago. Now I'm feeling more creative than I ever have been, more inspired really, and at the same time happier than I've ever been.

Yet I think I had to let my fire gutter out. I had to experience what it was like to lose that edge, so that I could really appreciate what I have with it. When I did the Love and Emptiness workings in particular, I put myself through the abyss and experienced my shadows fully. Identity saw me crawl out of the abyss and start a path of re-discovery, which continued through the year of Time and space and has moved into this year of Fire. But a big part of that work has also been an intentional cultivation and creation of my relationship with Kat, and that very intentional focus has also spread to cultivating that internal fire that inspires my creativity.

A fire that isn't carefully cultivated goes out eventually, but if you know to feed the fire, you can keep it going for a long, long time. The books I read with Kat and the conversations we have around them feed my soul and creativity. There are perspectives she offers that I in turn apply to my life. I have a true partner, someone who is willing to walk this journey with me, and so I find that I have help cultivating that inner mounting flame.

1-20-12 There is something to be said for being in an uncomfortable space, because of the opportunities it affords you to grow. I've said that before, and I'll likely say it again, but I realize it anew in the context of choices I've made in my relationship with Kat and in my life in general. I've always had a fear of letting someone in. Most people only get to a certain level of closeness and then I keep them there. I know where it comes from. It comes from having the rug pulled out from underneath me when I was 10. One day I had a step-mom, I called mom, and the next day I had someone taking out her anger and frustration on me. And this has been a rinse and repeat cycle several times over. It's hard, consequently, to really trust someone, to really believe that the closeness you feel is genuine, or that it will last. My biggest challenge with Kat has really come down to opening up to her and telling her where I am at, or how I am feeling, when I feel afraid to be that honest. Coming from a life, where I learned early on that it was better to hide an unpleasant truth, learning to be truthful enough to no longer hide has been hard. Yet when I look at previous relationships, I clearly can acknowledge that my dishonesty hurt those other people far more and created far worse problems, than if I had simply opened up and been honest. Yes, the truth might not be something the other person wants to hear, but at least it will set us free to be present with each other, instead of just going through the motions.

Resistance and internal work

I've been reading the War of Art (affiliate link) lately and the author talks a great deal about resistance as an enemy to creativity. I think he's right, to a point. I also think resistance can indicate something that needs to change, but what's relevant here is how resistance can be used in internal work, to discover what you need to work on and dissolve.

Any time you feel resistance to doing something or you feel a need to distract yourself from what you are doing, it presents you an opportunity to do internal work to dissolve resistance. The desire for distraction is a form of resistance, even as simple dislike for doing something is also resistance. When you come up against it, embrace it and start meditating on it. Listen to what your resistance has to say, and then dig deeper. What's really underneath that resistance? What's the underlying emotion that's really prompting that resistance to doing what you need to do?

When you focus your meditation on answering this question, you may find that it uncovers a lot that you weren't facing. It's important to face the issues and deal with whatever emotions arise as a result of the dissolving work. As you resolve such emotions, you will that it frees up a lot of energy, and that your resistance will also dissolve. Resistance is not necessarily a bad thing to feel, as long as you can knowingly act on it and use it to work through what is underneath it.

Elemental Balancing Ritual Fire Month 2

11-27-11 Something which has always frightened me has been my own fire. It's frightened me, in part because of the various people in my life who at one time or another told me I was too passionate, too intense, or just plain too much. I've gotten so used to pushing that intensity down or directing it other places because no one wanted to handle it. But it wasn't just the intensity. It's also been the anger. Fire embodied anger for me for a long time, and I've never been comfortable with anger, from myself or anyone else. As I was meditating today Dragon pointed out that fire didn't have to be any of these things. That the only one who'd perceived it that way had been me, but also I didn't have to continue perceiving myself in a particular way either. That's something I've been discovering in my relationship with Kat, and also discovering that I am not too much for myself or someone else.

I've always been driven by my passion. That can be good or it can be bad. Just depends on what you make of it, but I'm not going to bank the fire of my life or my relationship with fire because of an ill conceived perception. If I hold onto it, I empower it...and if I let it go, I open myself to new possibilities.

12-2-11 The meditations have focused on anger this week. Dragon had me do a history of anger, both in terms of how I've seen anger expressed and how I've expressed it. When I look at the history of anger, I start with my Dad. With him, anger was always a volcanic eruption. It would build and build up and then one day explode. His anger was always fast and hard, and you never knew what would set him off. Both my step-mom and mom tended to be more passive aggressive in certain ways, though my step mom would also be overly aggressive. She encouraged it in her daughter as well, who learned early on that she could take her anger out on me with no repercussions. What I learned early on was that I had to repress my anger. I wasn't allowed to show it, and if I did show it, I got disciplined.

Even later on I had experiences where for the most part other people expressed anger, while I kept a lid on it, except for the rare occasions when it'd pop out in a volcano. Consequently my own relationship with my feeling of anger is an uncomfortable one. Even with the internal work I've done, I still feel afraid of my own anger. I've recently been working on expressing it, and listening to it, instead of repressing it and this seems to help, but learning to listen to an emotion you've normally repressed isn't very easy. Listening to my anger means letting myself be vulnerable to feelings of hurt as well. It's not that I'm not aware of those feelings, and that I even feel them, but feeling them in conscious conjunction with anger is a whole another experience.

12-5-11 In today's meditation, Dragon pointed out that anger, for me, seemed to really be about control. specifically not feeling control and wanting control. I think that's true for me. When I look at the situations in my life a common theme is not feeling like I had control...feeling like I was under someone else's thumb. And the anger I feel is an anger of not feeling acknowledged. It's an anger that I haven't let go, because I'm trying to cling on to some kind of acknowledgement of the hurt I've felt. Yet that anger doesn't give me that acknowledgement. It just ends up being something I stew in.

I've come to realize as well that I'll likely not get the acknowledgement I want from the people who've hurt me. and Maybe even if they did, it wouldn't be enough. It all comes back to holding on to this anger, to this hurt that I've felt. Dragon asked me what it would be like to actually let go of that anger, to actually release it, instead of holding onto it and letting it define my identity. I don't want that anger to identify my identity, but I know why I've held onto it so much. For so long, going back to my childhood, holding onto that anger was what got me through difficult situations. They couldn't take my anger from me, and I could use it to prove they were wrong. That kind of motivation was what kept me going through a lot of hard times. But holding onto it now doesn't really help. I'm not happy holding on to it. I need to learn to let go.

12-7-11 I allowed myself to articulate my anger, and the underlying feeling of rejection that seems to accompany that anger. It's not anger toward just one person, but a lifetime of people, who in one way or another showed me that I wasn't a high or important priority in their lives. Being able to articulate that to Kat, to share that pain and anger helped. The realizations I've been having about my anger and the underlying emotional bedrock that supports it shows me how important it is that I finally feel like I am an actual priority to someone. There's a sense of relief and disbelief.

12-8-11 I always find it fascinating how the experiences in my life fit neatly into the theme I'm working on. Today at my small Business Management class, the instructor brought up the value of changing your stories. He said the stories we tell ourselves set up the scripts and situations we find ourselves in. I certainly know this, but hearing it again today caused me to experience it a different way and apply this idea of rewriting old stories into new ones to some of the stories I have been telling myself as I've been working with my anger this month. For example, telling myself a new story of: I am loved, wanted, desired, needed, appreciated, and supported in what I do, and how I choose to do it is a powerful change for me. I hadn't, until recently, ever really felt supported. Now I do.

12-17-11 Owning my anger, acknowledging and taking responsibility, but also choosing to know I can feel anger. I've been thinking about that all week, and how I can own my anger to empower myself. Owning anger isn't pushing it down. Owning anger, for me, is learning to let go, instead of holding on so tight. I don't need it to define my identity anymore.

Desire has been coming up a lot as well, which makes sense, given how much fire is associated with desire. I've explored desire in other elements, but fire brings its own perspective on desire. Desire has such twists in it. to be desired and to desire. Am I desired for one aspect, or is the desire for the real me?

12-18-11 Sometimes the person I'm the angriest with is myself. I've always found it hard to forgive myself for what I consider mistakes. My first marriage is an example of that. I'm angry at myself for staying so long in what was clearly an unhealthy relationship for myself and the ex. The choices I made in that relationship are ones I've looked over and questioned, because they were symptomatic of the underlying unhappiness. I'm responsible for staying in that relationship for so long. Still hindsight is 20 20 and as I've continued the internal work around that relationship and the choices I made in it, I have to acknowledge that where I am now is not where I was then. I can look back and judge myself or I can look back and see a very fallible person who made very real mistakes and has since learned from those mistakes. I don't feel the anger often toward myself anymore, but occasionally it still comes up, and tells me I still have healing and forgiveness to do.

12-21-11 The other day Kat and I were having a conversation and she said, "I know you're angry with me. Let me in." It took a while, but eventually I told her what I was feeling angry about. It was interesting for me, because even though I knew I felt angry, being so honest about it involved being so vulnerable as well. It was hard to be so vulnerable, but it was also so freeing to tell her how I really felt. So often I've held my anger in, until finally its erupted...how much better to simply admit it, and be open about it. As this month ends, I feel more comfortable with my anger, and with what the work with element fire has revealed about it. That's what the elemental balance work is all about.

Change starts from within

"Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing themselves" Leo Tolstoy When I think about Western Magic, and one of my problems, this statement from Tolstoy sums it up nicely. In late teens and early to mid twenties, I remember being that person who wanted to change the world, but didn't think of changing himself. That's not surprising because within western magic there is no overt forms of internal work provided, beyond perhaps some pathworking exercises. I had to go to Eastern systems such as Taoism to really discover in-depth meditation techniques. Since learning those techniques and implementing them into my daily practice, I've found that there is much less of an overt need to change the world. In fact, usually where the change needs to start is from within.

Magical techniques such as sigils or evocation aren't focused on internal work. There's nothing wrong with that, but it is worth the magician's time to actually apply some degree of introspection in order to look at the underlying motivations behind doing the work. Such internal work can help clarify the motivations and even ensure that the working will be successful by removing any internal resistance toward it.

Internal work is an essential part of magical practice. When I take magical students on, we spend a fair amount of time initially exploring what their values and beliefs are, how they define themselves and their place in the world, as well as teaching them meditation techniques. I've found that this initial work is crucial because it helps them remove a lot of internal obstacles and most importantly helps them understand how to effectively use magic to make changes in the world around them. Practitioners who actively use internal work will also cut down on the need to do more overt acts of magic...and not surprisingly will also lower the overall level of drama and chaos as they work out their issues. Instead of having such issues come up in their lives, the practitioners are able to identify  the triggers and make changes to their behaviors. The result is a better life and more clarity about what they want and need to live such a life.

Elemental Fire Month 1

10-22-2011 I've been staying very mindful of the element of fire in my life. I attended a divination party tonight, where you could offer readings or get readings. I did five readings for different people and told them about the magical experimenters meeting. And while doing their readings, while talking with them, I had a sense of seeking, a sense of fire as seeking, discovering, but also a sense of fire as a qualifier. Intuitively I knew that the people that needed the invitation would follow up on it because it was the right invitation for them and they'd fit the group as well. 10-25-2011 The last few days has involved a dialogue between Dragon and myself about Fire, passion, and consumption. What stands out most is the focus on fire as a metaphor for passion and why that's not such a good thing. Dragon points out that fire ultimately consumes, and if passion is fire, than its more about consumption than anything else. If fire is a metaphor for passion, there can be danger in that metaphor, in terms of how people approach passion. And I think he's right. My experiences with passion, in part, has been more about trying to experience a sensation that I might think of as fire, but in the process I've gotten burned a lot, because it's not something which is sustainable. Dragon pointed out that fires eventually consume themselves, until there's nothing left to give...Some interesting thoughts come to mind about American Culture and its focus on consumption. What does that teach us, about ourselves, others etc? Is it all something to be consumed, or can we really experience it?

10-31-2011 Fire just is. The association of doing and activity is meaning attributed to fire, but dragon asked me what it would be like to just contemplate fire as it is, instead of contemplating fire as doing something.

11-07-11 Dragon brought up something that really grabbed my attention. He said what a person fixates on or desires or obsesses over can burn him/her and the people in his/her life, because f how it consumes them. But if a person can consume and let go of what s/he desires, then it no longer takes up his/her energy in quite the same way. Now this is nothing new...you find this advice in meditation, but looking at it from the perspective of fire, and consuming something so it turns to smoke and then is wafted away...that's what grabbed my attention. And I have to admit that I'm in this process of consuming instead of being consumed. Not an easy process, but it is freeing up a lot of energy.

11-16-11 I haven't been as good about updating this entry as I'd like, but a lot's happened. Kat and I noticed that the stray black cat that lives near our house had kittens. It's getting really cold out, and this summer we'd actually found a dead kitten. It was pretty upsetting. So we decided to catch the mama cat (to neuter it) and catch the kittens as well. We managed to catch two of the kittens. The other one is gone, may be dead or alive, and the mama cat hasn't shown up lately. I took the trap back today, but I'll deploy it if she comes back. What does all this have to do with fire?

Dragon brought up a very important point. When you create a spark, you are responsible for nurturing it and using it wisely. When I think about the mama cat, I remember that my ex-wife chose to feed her. I don't know if it would've stuck around anyway, but I do know that feeding it encouraged it to stay in the neighborhood. I realized that I should've tried to catch that mama cat much earlier than now. More importantly, in catching these two kittens I felt that I had chosen to take on the responsibility of doing something with them. The animal control shelter told me if they weren't tame enough, they'd be euthanized, and that they might be euthanized anyway because of how many cats they have. There's no way I'd let two cats be euthanized simply because they'd been caught. I've learned about another place, the Cat Adoption Team, where they don't euthanize cats, but we have had these kittens for a week and we've all gotten attached to them. They seem to feel the same. And the point here is this: You always have a responsibility to see through what you take on. I've taken on those two kittens. They're part of my responsibility, that spark of life I've nurtured by capturing them and taming them.

11-18-2011 Sometimes I wonder if I've left my passion for all things occult somewhere else. Actually I sometimes wonder if I've left my passion for lots of things somewhere else. And I guess that's a reason I'm doing this work with the element of fire. I want to get in touch with that passion, and yet ironically I think I am in touch with that passion...it's just a slow process of rekindling it. I let it get banked by personal circumstances, by my choices to try and make myself into something I wasn't. Never again. Never again will I give my fire, my passion, my intensity away or push it down. That kind of give away can hurt you so much and it hurts your creativity as much as it hurts in other ways. I feel like my creativity is finally coming back because my passion has a safe place to be.

11-21-11 There is nothing worse than feeling that you failed yourself or someone else. And yet failure prompts growth and change. It forces you to reassess what's truly important and then claim that importance through the actions you take to bring change to your life. The ashes of defeat are also the loam that prompts growth. What you hold dearest can fall away in a moment and yet when it falls away it reveals who you are through how you respond. Do you rail against it? Do you accept it and learn from it? Do you burn yourself or do you warm yourself? It's a fine balance to walk. I choose to cultivate a warm fire instead of a vengeful fire. Where that takes me as a result is hopefully to a better place in my healing as well as in my passion.

Shunning as Banishment

I've been thinking a bit about shunning as a form of magical banishment. In my own experience, when I've decided to cut a person out of my life, I essentially end up shunning them, but shunning for me works on a magical level as well, because part of that process involves systematically getting rid of everything that connects me to the person and using the process of destroying such connections to build the banishment up and create a field of shun (as it were) that keeps the person from connecting with me as much as possible. I use a shunning banishment when I recognize that I will still encounter the person in my life, but I want to minimize those encounters to as few and far between as possible. The field of shunning essentially keeps the person away and interactions to a minimum.

My reasons for taking this kind of action is based on a fundamental recognition that a person brings with him/her a level of chaos and dysfunction that is no longer considered acceptable, or considered to match up with where I'm at. The person and I no longer fit and the relationship has become toxic enough that its no longer sustainable. Under such circumstances, creating a banishment of shunning can be useful for insuring that the person's presence intersects with you only on rare occasions if at all. It insures that you can move on with your life, without having to put energy or effort into a relationship that you no longer want to have. Such relationships take up more time and energy than you want, and you may find, as I have, that the best way to move on and heal is to simply move on, and see as little of the person as possible.

Some might argue that shunning seems a bit extreme, but to my mind, why allow more drama and toxicity in your life than you need? It's as simple as that: I value my sense of well-being and happiness over putting up with people I'd rather have nothing to do with. Instead of trying to sustain a relationship with those people, I feel its better to focus on the relationships which do matter to me, with people that I have confidence in.

It is possible to keep certain things that you might associate with the person and still set up a shunning field. While I normally will get rid of everything I have that connects me to a person, I have on occasion kept a couple things, after disassociating the person from those things. This can be accomplished through purification workings.

I don't recommend doing shunning for every situation in life. You have to be willing to invest in the relationships you have in your life, instead of giving them up at the first sign of trouble, but shunning works in cases where such a relationship has become unsustainable because the amount of toxic interaction exceeds any positives the relationship might bring with it.

Book Review: Rhythms of the Brain (Affiliate Link) by Gyorgy Buzsaki

This book was a hard read. Thanks to reading a variety of other books on neuroscience, I was able to understand what the author was explaining, but I wouldn't recommend this book to someone who hasn't read any books on neuroscience. The author discusses oscillation theory and although he does his best to make the concept approachable, it still ends up being fairly esoteric in content because of the technical information he provides. It is a good book, and one I'd recommend. Just make sure you've grounded yourself in other books on neuroscience.

4 out of 5

Book Review: Buddha's Brain (affiliate link) by Rick Hanson

This is a good 101 introduction to your brain and how it works, as well as providing instructions on how you can consciously work with your brain through meditation. I'd recommend this book to someone that wants to do inner alchemical work or internal work with their body, as it provides some well-rounded information on the brain and how changes can effect you. The authors provide some useful stories and metaphors to explain their concepts and I like the exercises because it provides a practical component to the book.

5 out of 5

Switching to Elemental Fire

Every year on my birthday I switch to a new element. This year, it felt like a good idea to switch to the element of fire. I feel like I'm ready to work with fire, to find my balance with it and through all of that come to know it in a different way than I had before. I first did the closing ritual to the elements of Space and Time. I evoked the spirits for those elements, thanked them for their transformative work and promised to keep the lessons I'd learned embodied in my actions and life, and that I'd continue to work with them.

Then I pulled into the circle a dragon statue I have. I placed my hands on it, and called to the spirit of the Fire Dragon. I was born in the year of the Fire Dragon and this coming year will be a year of the dragon, albeit, ironically the year of the Water Dragon. Nonetheless I felt it was auspicious to work with this entity for the element of fire.

I invoked the dragon into me, and began to do bellows breathing, focusing on a rhythm that would allow me to simulate the feeding of fire by a bellows. Once I'd gotten to a point where I felt connected to the element of fire, I explained my desire to connect with it, and invoke it into my life for the next year, as part of my balancing work. I also explained that while all they ears of my elemental balancing work had helped me manifest many changes, I felt my fire had become banked and I wanted to develop a healthier relationship with it.

I felt this warmth go into my hands from the statue. My hands felt very warm, felt very much on fire and that warmth then spread into the rest of me. As it did, I heard the dragon speak about fire as both a creative and destructive force. It inspires, but also destroys. It burns, but from the ashes growth can come. It can warm you, but it can also hurt you with that warmth. All of these things and more said to me and I realized that fire, both as a literal and metaphoric force has many sides to it.

I'm looking forward to this year's work. Since fire is an element I already resonate with, I think this work will help me channel that element in many useful directions.

Why and when I first started Experimenting with Magic

I've told this story a couple of times, but its one that's pivotal to my magical practice and life. I was 18, when I was diagnosed with bipolar 2 depression, otherwise known as manic depression. My family on my mother's side had a predisposition toward depression and I had spent a good part of my life depressed, as much by life circumstances as by genetic predisposition. I knew that such a disorder usually brought with it medication and I was very reluctant to use medication because I didn't want to deal with the said effects. I decided to look toward magic for a solution. I already did daily practice, which included some form of meditation, so that helped quite a bit. Even to this day I still meditate every day, in part because of the mental health, but those benefits alone weren't enough.

It wasn't until I was 20, and now living in State College, Pa, while attending college that I found the solution to my problem. I was reading Hands of Light by Barbara Ann Brennan and Programming the Human Bo-Computer by John Lilly. Brennan talked about Lilly's concepts at length and included an exercise where you could travel into your body as a cell. I thought it intriguing and used the technique to travel to my brain. I then made some adjustments to the reuptake cycle for my serotonin production. This adjustment slowed down the absorption of serotonin, which in turn stabilized the electro-chemistry of my brain. This experiment also started my fascination with neuroscience and magic, which I still pursue to this day.

That experiment taught me to look beyond the conventional perspectives that were available in magical works, but also to look beyond such perspectives within any discipline or tradition. I realized that conventional thinking would always blind people to alternative routes and possible solutions, and that sticking with it would have had me on medication for something that I ultimately could treat through my own methods. I've continued to refine and develop techniques based off that initial working, in large part because I don't believe people should have to suffer because of a biological or genetic predisposition. I do think its important people consult with a doctor or psychiatrist, but I also think there's nothing wrong with trying to find your own answer to the problem, so long as that answer doesn't harm anyone else.

That initial experiment inspired me to start exploring other aspects of magic with an eye toward meshing that magical work with other disciplines. I explored elemental magic with an eye toward applying it to DNA, as an example. Nothing was too outlandish or impossible for me...and even to this day that's still the case. Some people have and likely always will dismiss this as being too open or being flaky, but I think the profound results to the quality of my life speaks much more eloquently than anything else. It's better to pursue your ideas, and your path, than let others tell you how to do it.

Music and magic meditations

At the most recent magical experiments night, we decided to do three meditation exercises with music out of the book Arcana V (affiliate link). I was intrigued by the exercises, partially because of the focus on space, sound, and silence, and partially because it reminded me of my own experiments with music and magic in my early 20's. The first experiment involved a minimalistic approach to sound. The goal was to focus on the silence that occurred between sounds being made. I chose to ring a bell for this exercise. I'd ring the bell and as the sound faded, we focused on paying attention to the silence. What we all agreed on was how little silence there was! Whether it was the bark of a dog, the hum of the refrigerator or the sound of a lawn mower, all we heard was sounds. I personally think that silence is an artificial construct, as opposed to an actual experience. There is always sound around you...you can't get away from it...at least not on this planet.

The second experiment involved listening to music that could be defined as sensory overload music...in other words white noise. I picked Merzbow for this experiment. The goal of the exercise was to meditate and in the process ignore or block out the sounds. Everyone had varying degrees of success. We noted that when vocals were included it was a bit harder to ignore the sounds.

The third experiment involved listening to layered music, or music with multiple sounds themes (but not white noise). The goal was meditative absorption...absorbing the music without dwelling on a particular theme or noise or word. We listened to Tangerine Dream's Atem, which is richly layered music. I found that relaxing into the music allowed me to be with it. This was the easiest exercise, probably because I listen to music all the time, when writing or working, and actually just absorb it as a way of keeping me focused.

All three of these experiments were fun to do and brought to mind the early experiments I did, where I would use selected albums to create sonic soundscapes for ritual purposes. We'd put the music on in the background, while doing our ritual, using the music itself to create the sacred space as well as any defenses we felt we needed, while we were doing magical work. I particularly liked using Coil's music for that purpose, but have also used Rapoon, Scorn, Current 93, and other such bands to produce sacred space and altered states of mind for doing ritual work.

The other experiments this reminded me of were experiments I did with my voice. I created sound sigils, which I would activate through vibratory vocalization of the sigil, or through whistling specific sounds at specific tones to activate the sigil. I also experimented with using vibratory vocalizations for invocation and evocation work. I still do use these techniques now, but using them now is not so much of an experiment for me anymore, though I suppose it could be an experiment for others. It is something I will write more about for an occult journal or two.

Why its not a good idea to destroy part of yourself

The other day I decided to do a meditation technique to work with a part of myself that I thought I wanted to change. I did the meditation technique and basically I ended up poking a part of myself that didn't care for what I was doing and responded with quite a reaction, which showed up both internally and also in my life around me. Fortunately, I was able to sort matters out in my life, but I realized that what I'd tried to do, which essentially was to get rid of a part of myself, wasn't really a good idea. At times, in our lives, there can be a temptation to try and get rid of part of yourself or change it or try to fit it some standard of behavior that doesn't really apply to it. Inevitably, what ends up happening is that the part you try to change defends itself quite vigorously and you realize that it wasn't such a good idea.

This isn't to say you can't change behavior. You certainly can, but trying to do a radical change is never advised, and doesn't make you happy. Instead such changes need to occur gradually, being worked through, and even when such changes are made, they usually focus on behavior, as opposed to identity, which is essentially how you define yourself. You can change behavior, but changing identity can be a lot harder and you genuinely have to no longer want to identify yourself in a particular way to make the change successful. This means you need to work with the values and beliefs that represent that part of your identity and determine if they no longer relevant to your life.

My main point is this: Don't try and get rid of part of yourself for anyone or anything. Better to do the internal work and determine how it really fits into your life. Accepting who you is the greatest liberation you can give yourself.

Book and Video Review: The Lost Secret of Immortality (Affiliate Link) by Barclay Powers

The video is well done and presents a lot of ideas on internal alchemy as its done in both the the East and West. I'd particularly recommend it to anyone just starting out as it has a wealth of information, but even more seasoned practitioners will find it useful. The book serves as a useful complement to the video, providing further information on concepts discussed in the video. I'd have liked to have seen some exercises included in the book, but the author does a good job of pointing to additional sources. Overall a a useful resource guide.

Using sleep deprivation as an altered state of consciousness

Whenever I don't get enough sleep I can feel it through out the day. My response time is a bit off, and my thought process just isn't as focused. I don't normally go out of my way to get into a state of sleep deprivation, but I recognize that it is an altered state of consciousness, albeit one that is less than pleasant to experience. The feeling of fogginess is a state that can be worked with in a magical context. Sleep deprivation causes a blurring, not quite in control feeling. That feeling is useful for doing magical work where you are raising magic through activity, such as exercise or ecstatic dance. The reason its useful is because you're pushing your current state of sleep deprivation through activity to a point of exhaustion which in turn creates an altered state of no-mind, which can then be used to focus on the goal the person wants to achieve.

Ideally what will happen is that a person will use a state of sleep deprivation in tandem with an activity such as dance. S/he will either create a sigil or will develop some other magical technique that s/he will employ while dancing. For the sake of example, we'll just say the person will focus on the sigil while dancing. Eventually when the person is truly exhausted, s/he will stop dancing, but will continue to focus on the sigil, using the exhaustion as a way to focus every last bit of awareness on it. Then when the person can't keep awake any further s/he will go to sleep, continuing as best as possible to focus on the sigil, so that s/he can charge it in his/her sleep.

When a person has been sleep deprived and goes to sleep exhausted the sleep can be much, much deeper, so this is useful because as the person sleeps s/he allows the sigil to germinate.

Now if the person has thought ahead, s/he will have the sigil positioned in such a way that when s/he awakes, s/he will see the sigil, and recall the activities of the other night, and in that process, fire the sigil. It's a long build-up, but its effective, because you combine a variety of states of awareness into the working and when it fires, all of that effort contributes to the realization of the possibility you want to bring into reality.

Developing a relationship with the spirits

I've been reading a lot of spider-man comics lately and one theme I've noticed in some of them is an exploration of the spider as a totemic being that spider-man is aligned with. It's interesting to me because at the same time the question is raised as to why Spider-man hasn't explored this connection in a more meaningful way. He's accepted the spider on the surface level, but not necessarily gone deeper. I think that commentary speaks as much to people in general as it does to him, but I'm not referring so much even to an exploration of the spider in more depth, but really a more in-depth exploration of any being or spirit a person would work with.

In the comic book, the character of spider-man never really does explore the connection he has with the spider to any greater depth than he had before. There's a brief move in that direction, but then other writers took over, and spider-man moved on to other things.

How I apply this to magic is just this: it seems like in some cases, working with an entity is really a casual experience. You get an idea or two or something and then you move on. But I think that kind of approach is really the wrong way to go about it. When I started working with elephant, I did some research by reading about elephants and did some meditation work as well to just get to know him. Even now I've continued to learn about Elephants, because its a relationship I want to maintain and explore. I recognize that there's a lot I can learn about Elephants and to just work with the spirit of elephant on a casual level doesn't really do justice to the relationship I could have.

The same has applied to working with Goetic spirits, angels, and other spiritual entities. Really working with these spirits means forming some kind of relationship that goes beyond just calling them up when you need something from them. But there's this tendency to do exactly that. What I've found to be most meaningful is developing a relationship with a given entity in such a way that it knows there is reciprocity involved. And there's good reasons to do it, not the least being, that you can learn the full extent of how you and the entity work together if you take the time to really develop that relationship.

Spider-man never really gets curious. Maybe part of him is even afraid of what he'll discover.  But it seems to me that curiosity is a good thing with entities. We ought to really know more about what or who it is we choose to work with. And when we don't take that time to really explore this relationship we've created, at some point you've got to wonder when the piper will come for his due. By taking the time to get to know different entities, to form relationships that involve treating the entity as a separate being instead of a psychological construct, and understanding that for what is given there is always a price, I've learned a lot about the entities I work with. I feel like we've got the measure of each other, and that's definitely a good thing.

Conscious awareness as a reaction

As I've been writing Neuro-Space/Time Magic and exploring the concept of Identity, and how genuine changes occur in a person's life, I've been thinking a lot about consciousness. Consciousness is put on a pedestal in a way, as a big accomplishment, and I understand why that is. Consciousness, when applied in a mindful manner, can help a person control his/her reactions and even develop proactive strategies. As a friend of mine put it, it's awareness of awareness, which is significant when you consider that such awareness can be used to put a situation and responses into perspective. But (you knew there was a but coming), I also think that consciousness is a reaction. It's a reaction to the environment around you, as well as your internal responses to that environment. It's a reaction that focuses on controlling your response. You realize that a controlled response is the best possible solution for handling the situation. And perhaps what makes consciousness so useful is that such awareness can be used to put into place responses that are more useful for handling future situations. Awareness without action won't change anything, but awareness with action changes a lot. Those actions can be integrated into how we respond to situations, and in that process we can acknowledge that such actions are still reactions...conscious reactions applied to handle a situation from a place of awareness.

For a change to occur as it applies to behavior, you've got to make that change on a deep level. It's a change of identity, which includes a change of values and beliefs in order to support the action you'll take. Those kind of changes go deeper than conscious awareness, but conscious awareness can be used to go in and implant those changes and make them part of your reactive responses.

Consciousness is a tool. It provides some awareness of self, enough to be aware of the need to change and enough to allow a person to enter into an altered state of consciousness to go in and make those changes...and we'll still react...we'll just react with chosen reactions as opposed to ones put on us by events an circumstances.

A couple of upcoming classes

I have a couple of upcoming classes. One is a local class, for those of you who live in the Portland-Vancouver area and one is a Teleclass. Details Below: Breathing Meditation class

In this class, Taylor Ellwood will teach you Taoist breathing techniques that you can use for meditation and for achieving closer connection to your body. Knowing how to breath correctly can help improve your health. You will learn:

• The Fusion of the Five Elements breathing and how you can use it to help you work with negative emotions and release them
• The Taoist Water breathing technique which can help you dissolve internal blockages
• How to use your breathing to attune yourself to your body’s consciousness.

When: July 9th at 1pm at New Awakenings Bookstore 404 East Main Street, Battle Ground, WA 98604 RSVP: 360-687-7817

Space/Time Magic Course

Space and time are two elements of our lives that we live with and use every day. In the classic models of magic, these elements are not overtly included. In this class, I will show you how to integrate both of these elements into your magical work. You will learn why its important to factor time and space into your magical workings, as well as how the inclusion of these elements can radically change your understanding of magic. You will also learn:

• How movement and space can be used to construct sacred space.
• How to manifest multiple possibilities using sigils.
• How to create a sigil web that maps your life in terms of space and time.
• How to work with your future and past selves.
• How to work with alternate selves and learn from them.
• Free e-book version of Space/Time Magic included! 

Space and Time are two elements that we can’t ignore if we want to really understand magic. This class will help you take your magic to the next level.

To RSVP, go here

The Microbot approach to sickness

I've been sick lately, a weird kind of flu where my temperature has gone below the usual temp. It's not a fever, but the result is I still feel sick. Never being a person to turn aside opportunity, I've been working on a technique to deal with illness that I've been using for a little while now. It's worked to actually stop a fever in the past from developing, and in this case has been used to mitigate the current sickness and speed up the healing. The technique is based off a video game called Microbots. In that game you are a microbot sent into a body to heal it by getting rid of the virus that is in the body. The developers of the game created a stunning environment that looks like the biology of the body. Useful for visualization purposes if you're doing work to contact neurotransmitters, but also useful if you want to combat a fever or flu, especially if you want to use the microbot for that purpose.

When I feel sickness coming on, or in this latest case, when I'm in the midst of experiencing it, I'll meditate before resting and create a health servitor that will go in and start combating the sickness, while also offering support to the natural systems already in place. My microbot servitor is equipped to not just fight the sickness, but also comes with healing tools that can be used to heal the body, where needed.

I like drawing on pop culture for inspiration, and the microbot game has proven to be the perfect inspiration for this work, because its provided a model of internal work I can use with my body. It demonstrates the importance of drawing on such inspirations for your magical work. I can't say I've found anything else that provides such a useful tool for health and healing work. I'm going to continue experimenting with it, and will be sure to share details either here, or in Neuro-Space/Time Magic.

How to use distraction to improve focus

Sometimes when I do my daily meditation, I turn on the TV or music and play it in the background where I can see or hear it. And then I do my meditation, using the distractions as a way to focus my mind. You wouldn't think it would work, because it is a distraction, but it does work, because I use the distraction as a focusing tool to help my improve my discipline. Anyone can meditate in a quiet room with nothing going on around them. Admittedly, the distraction then might be the monkey mind chattering away, and it is a potent distraction, but sometimes I find that external distractions are even harder to silence, as it were, because they grab the monkey mind's attention and get it chattering about the distraction.

That's the whole point of having active distractions going on. It forces you to focus or get lost in the distraction. I see meditation as not just a practice to calm my mind, or even focus it, but also as a discipline tool for any kind of magical work I do, and since magic doesn't always occur in the confines of a quiet room, it can be very useful to create an environment where you might need to do some magic.

Its the same reason I'll sometimes meditate near a busy street or in a park where people are playing. Learning how to tune out the distractions is an important skill all occultists to cultivate. When your dealing with the chaos of people around you, or a TV or video game playing it forces you to sharpen your mind, to pay more attention to what you are doing. And that's something we need to do. When we start to take what we're doing for granted, we get sloppy. But if you have to focus all of your attention on what you are doing because of a distraction, it causes you to appreciate anew what it is you are doing and why you're doing it.

So next time you do your daily ritual, do it with a television on, or an obnoxious song playing. Do it where other people are doing things. Use it to focus you on what you are doing. Everything else is just an illusion in the background. All that really exists is you and the magic.