Its all too easy to get 'stuck' in one way of thinking. Each of us has many demands on our time, and this can often lead to certain mental muscles being used more than others. Important as it is to stay grounded when working on mundane pursuits, being able to let your hair down and change into something more comfortable is crucial to success.

We all have our preferred role, as our brains are wired to prefer certain states. Add, to this, habitual patterning, and we become rather set in our ways. This is especially true after the age of 25, due to the developmental cycles our brains go through.

For some, this persona is a quick-thinking, anxious creature who is good at their job, but unable to accept criticisms. For others, the adopted mindset is slow to respond, quick to notice, and a bit of an isolationist who would really just be left at home. The list of potential personalities does go on from there, but these examples should provide something for your mind to latch on to.

If you have issues with getting stuck, I would recommend a minor exercise. It doesn't require a whole lot of skill or magical ability, as you're not going to be communing with any deific spirit, but it does require some patience and diligence.

At the end of each day, make a list of 5 people you've interacted with. When you've got your list, start at the top and try to become them....contemplate their thoughts, worries, concerns, and triumphs, that day. Consider what was important to them, and why they responded the way they did. Do so for a minute or two, then move on to the next. 

At first, your preconceptions will likely cause you to insert your beliefs about them, rather than what is authentically their persona, but over time you'll learn to connect. Doing so will help you to shift from one mindset to the next, making it easier for you to don new mental clothes in the future.

Have fun with it. Its a strange exercise, but it does work.
Blessings,
Chris/SE

Given the start of the new year & our eagerness to begin correctly, it seems appropriate to speak of foundations. In magic, foundational work usually takes the form of elemental rites as a basis for long-term achievements. That's rather fitting, as these are the assumed building blocks of our world.

And who amongst those creatures are more noted, in Western magical practice, than the "Elemental Kings": Nyxsa, Ghob, Djinn, and Paralda.

Now without getting in to the history behind them (as that's really rather convoluted), we'll instead take a more practical bend: focusing on how to work with them without much in the way of tooling.

If you have been reading my blog for a while, you'll notice that I've written about working with these spirits in an office environment. Those inclusions were a means of conveying the idea that you really don't need much to make this work....just some quiet and the ability to focus.

For those of you who like giving your monkey mind something to do so that it doesn't get distracted, raw simplicity doesn't quite work. When that's the case, I recommend procuring items that fit with your view of the element in question.

In my mind, the accessible elemental energies we're all familiar with are earth, air, fire, and water. They are respectively touted by the Gnomes whose king is Ghob, the Sylphs who answer to Paralda, the Salemanders who are ruled by Djinn, and the Undines who obey Nyxsa (or Nyksa, Nicksa, Nickse, Nyxse...there's a lot of potential Romanized spellings). There are other, more advanced components to this, but we're discussing basics, and these are the leaders of each.

I assume that each of you has a pretty good idea of what each element does and is used for, so I'll leave that out of this post. What may not be understood, however, is how to contact them and make use of their energies...there are a lot of ways to do it.

One such methodology involves the use of a miniature idol that you could carry with you to the office, then 'tap' as a means of activating that current. These should probably be the size of a dime or quarter, as you will wish to be able to keep them in your work bag or pocket. Beyond that, the form used is up to you.

When I first worked in an office environment in my teens, those items were a knife, a lighter, a USB drive, and a pen. The knife was made from ore, found deep within the earth, and formed into a shape useful to man. Dwarves & gnomes favor workmanship and tooling, and thus it was dedicated to them. The lighter is rather simple to connect the dots with, as flame is obviously sacred to fire spirits. Thus, they value the means of creating fire (matches work too, but they're a little less portable and water resistant). The USB drive struck me as being a means of storing and conveying data, which could be used to compress information. Information is valued by Sylphides, and so this became my micrototem for those spirits. Finally, the pen, while a simple and innocuous object at work, became associated with water for the simple facts that ink is a liquid & I've always had an easier time writing my emotions rather than saying them. And thus my my toolkit was built, and that was that.

I could use them in my day-to-day work (which was a serious benefit, outside the lighter) and nobody ever batted an eye at any of the other objects being used; I was constantly saving things on the USB, opening boxes with the knife, or writing notes. Easy, eh? And simplicity is usually more useful than complexity.

Whenever I needed to invoke a particular energy, I could just focus on the tool as a signal tuner, make the call to the appropriate King, then use the energy or spirit sent my way. It was fairly easy to get used to, and the spirits were responsive to my system. I could use it to make plans with friends more easily, help my boss to understand me, make writing a less difficult task, and so on and so forth. Didn't require a whole lot of effort, either, which in an office setting is basically required, lest you look like a total weirdo and get yourself fired.

If you like the idea put forth here, I would recommend giving this a go. Make a toolkit that works for you, and carry it about as a means of more readily accessing these currents. Over time, this will have an added benefit of making it easier for you to work with these energies, as well as show you what your strengths and weaknesses are.

It has been my experience that sometimes an immediate response is more useful than a large show of force. This sort of kitwork, if it works for you, will afford you a greater ability to utilize elemental magic in your day to day life, all while adding an element of expediency to it.

Have fun!
-Chris/SE

Hey folks,

This is a bit random, but seems appropriate to discuss given the social climate of late. The end of 2016 was stressful, and folks in the States pretty much collectively lost their minds thanks to the election and the like. I mention this not to start a discussion on politics, but in order to segue into a much more important topic: Binaries. Specifically, Binaries in a Magical Context.

If you're reading this, you probably live in an area of the world that believes in set extremes: good versus evil, black versus white, etc. That's called "Binary Opposition", and its a rather misguided concept without a whole lot of real-world application.

And this is especially true when dealing with spirits, spirit work, religion, belief, psychology, and so on. Reality is not reflected by the simplicity that's suggested by such a reductionist concept. You would do well to forget the programming to this end, as thinking of that sort limits you and holds you back rather substantially. When you get into the mindset of thinking about binaries, everything you see gets reduced into one category or the other. If each thing you see is always good or bad, you're missing the other points, benefits, and opportunities found in the gray area.

On the purely magical front, duality of this kind often shows up in the idea that magic is either all in your head, or its all happening despite you. Very few models seem to incorporate the idea that BOTH could be happening. If a spirit is strong enough to change bits and pieces in your world, its powerful enough to futz with your mental state to some degree. And it working on your mental state usually makes the physical result that much stronger, as then you're not standing in the way of magical work done to benefit you.

But when you tell someone "yes, this spirit is going to change your mindset some", people tend to freak out. Its a bit like we're nervous about the concept that our headspace might not be our own (that's only ridiculous because our mind isn't really "ours" thanks to one practice: marketing). If you're going to entrust a spirit to do stuff & things in your life, might as well trust it to do the same inside your head. If that's a no-go, perhaps you shouldn't be working with entities outside of yourself as a start.

Realistically, the only Binary Opposition that actually helps you is considerations along the lines of "is this actually helpful to me?" If something is helpful, great! If its harmful, not so great - the next step, after determining that something is ultimately harmful to you is figuring out of that harmfulness is useful. If its useful, then you have one of these gray areas where you need to use critical thinking and determine, for yourself, what route is best.

For just about anything beyond that rather primary concern, it doesn't really matter if something is to be considered good, evil, or indifferent because that answer is different according to each being you talk to. To a dog, the mailman is potentially a threat, whereas you and I probably see him as the bringer of awesome stuff. If you're behind on bills, that person's kind of the emissary of the Devil.

See how perspective makes a difference? Knowing this, you can apply that to all areas of life. I can't think of anything, off the top of my head, that doesn't, in some way, change as a result of one's perspective.

In that way, sticking to one perception becomes a logic-driven prison. We incarcerate ourselves with these limitations, and so if you're not choosing what your limits are, someone else is.

Is allowing someone else to set your limits helpful to you, or is it harmful to you?

Just something to contemplate. Blessings,
Chris

Greetings folks. Hope you guys & gals had a good weekend.

As a follow-up to my post about Goal Setting in a Magical Context, it seems worthwhile to discuss appropriate goals. Goal-setting is great, but the practice itself is really only as worthwhile as the goals you set for yourself. Regardless of whether you seek to achieve these things via magic or mundane acts, if the mile markers are placed in unrealistic ways, its not likely to work out for you.

For example, if you make less than 30,000$/year and your end goal is to make 350,000$/year by the end of 2017, you're going to have a bad time. Instead, you should be enchanting to place yourself in the right spot to take on additional responsibilities & the associated increase in wealth. The latter goal and focus will be far more helpful to you, as you're more likely to benefit from that.

Keeping on with this focus, floating goals work the same way too. Keep it simple, as if you focus on things that you can readily achieve, when you get into that pattern, its much easier to then push it a little bit further. No mountain was ever climbed without careful steps, after all.

So if you're struggling for things that you can start to achieve, here are some easy ones:

• Learn something new each day
• Understand more
• Fear less
• Be compassionate more often
• Read more books
• Exercise for 10 minutes a day
• Meditate each day
• Go for a walk once a week
• Hug/cuddle your spouse at least once a day

Those are really, really simple. They don't require a lot of effort, but it is something. And that's what's important. If you don't want to be one of those New Year Resolutioners that sets goals and doesn't bother achieving them, then don't be...start small, then work towards big things. That's how Empires are built.

Blessings,
​Chris/SE

​Hey folks. Happy New Year!

Hope the end of the year treated you well, as 2016 was a doozy. Now that we've moved on to 2017, we're presented with another opportunity to set ourselves up for success. Alongside New Year's celebrations, invariably folks want to talk about goals and resolutions, but how does that fit into a magical context? How do we go about setting & achieving those goals rather than slacking off and failing by default?

Well, I've got some suggestions for you!

Goals can either be soft or fixed points, depending on what you're looking to achieve. While mundane goals work really well when you've set something specific like "I will lose 20 pounds by August 1, 2017" , they don't work all that well with magic.

If that's your stated goal, magically speaking, success would mean getting there, not staying there. So you echant for it, your metabolism kicks in, your exercise is a bit more meaningful, and you eventually lose those 20 pounds. It doesn't carry forward past that point, energetically, so then your continued success relies on you having developed the skills and drive necessary to keep it up. In essence, you've reached your stop and that's that.

Then, you have to do the work all over again to achieve another incrimentalized goal, and that's a pain in the arse. If you're spending all of this time at the gym, the last thing any of us really want to do is have to start all over again, even if its only magical work we're doing.

So if, at the get-go, you shift your focus slightly and endeavor to "become a healthier, more fit person than I was in 2016" or "become slimmer & trimmer in 2017 than I was in 2016", your goal 'floats'. If its not a set number of pounds lost or a fixed achievement, its much more fluid and responsive...instead of a drop-off point, the juju continues to flow even after you've achieved your goal. 

You can continually piggyback upon that original rite and add additional subgoals or stiipulations meant to help you achieve it more readily. And its all doable without the "Wizard-Drop" down the road.

--

Likewise, the same sort of focus can be done when working with spirits, albeit usually when forming a pact. That's a subject for another time. ;)

Blessings!
​-Chris

Greetings folks!

I hope you had a wonderful set of holidays, enjoyed yourselves, and are now ready to greet the New Year as I am. Stay tuned for new posts, discussions, and magical tidbits.

Blessings,
​Chris