...have a surprising amount in common, I'm learning.

Lately, I've been on this journey of exploring the Bardo with help from Spirit. Its been an ADVENTURE! But, its also an adventure with details I can share.

I've noticed a thing and it fascinates me.

Buddhist tech has this thing called the Generation Stage of practice. When you're in it, the supplicant/monk/practitioner is supposed to visualize Deity and then fill that space in their mind in with details supporting Deity. In short, you make a shrine in your mind and fill it...

There's a parallel in Ceremonial Magick of all stripes, too:
We conjure and evoke a spirit into a space created for them, personifying their virtues and energies with the intent of allowing that spirit to appear in person and without delay.

The difference is that one is in the mind, the other is in the space in front of you....but is that actually a difference?

To my brain, it isn't, because my neurodivergent self can see the connection between those two points. What about you? Do you see this connection too?
-Chris

...is hard work, but you don't have to do it alone.

One of the things you learn when you've been around trauma and traumagenesis for as long as I have is that these feelings are shared more often than they're not. Trauma comes in many forms and we're subjected to it every day between our home lives, work, school, socializing with others, and just dealing with the intense social dysfunction we're subjected to every day and every waking moment.

Seeing all this while actively in-recovery is HARD. Its hard not to feel isolated and alone, particularly if you've got the voices of your abusers in your head or you're forced to live through something that re-traumatizes you regularly. 

When and where that's the case, its not unusual to need help. That help can come from family, friends, trained therapists, trusted advisors, spiritual counselors, from our daily rituals, and from the mindsets we carry around inside.

As it turns out, one of the toughest things to dismantle is that internalized sense of shame that we often get beaten-down by. So if you're one of those persons who has been shamed into obeisance of structures and persons that seem to exist to harm you, try to see that shame as a tool for the victimizer.

DON'T LET THEM USE THAT TO CONTROL YOU. Take your power back and defeat your shame. Don't let it be the leash or lash by which nonconsensual power is reasserted!

​I've written and rewritten this post in my head some dozen times over the past several months, trying to figure out how to let my readers in and teach something useful without getting bogged down in trauma. Its going to be a tricky line to walk, but I think I've got this.

To talk about a topic that's deeply and immensely important to me, I first need to provide some context and background. Its a context I don't get into much, as both my magick and spiritual practice were forged in the fires of my personal hell.

I didn't have a happy childhood. Full stop.

Gang violence was prevalent, systemic abuse was rampant, and I did not have "safe spaces" around me. My grandmother really tried her best, but the people being cruel to me were also charged with my protection & did everything they could to make me viscerally afraid of the law as weapons and tools of that systemic injustice all around me. The youngest expression of self spent the late 80s and early 90s growing up as a kid of mixed heritage in a space that was fundamentally polarized by racial violence and hostility manifesting as gang violence and casual discrimination from within and without my peer group. I was called banana and gaijin by my cultural brethen and sistren, while simultaneously being looked down on by white folks. It was a weird space to be in, and safety came down to what I could make for myself in the moment.

Magick was raw, visceral, and guided by a spirit whose pact with me was as simple as the phrase "I can teach you how to make [the spirits and dangers] go away". This spirit introduced me to all manners of wonderous teachers along the way, allowing me to properly be a child of three worlds culturally, as well as bodily, emotionally, and intellectually.

With a white father and a mixed-heritage mother from Japan, that coupled with my horrifying experiences, having a loving spiritual parentage made me a child with backup. I had one person I could truly rely on within my family as a kid, and there was only so much she could do.

The rest came from Spirit, the lessons they teach and the way I've been learning and growing from my work with them these past nigh-on 34 years. I let you in and give you this context to paint a backdrop upon which these very practices I teach were developed.

Something you learn as a little kid with "irresponsible caretakers" is not to rely on authority figures. You learn that they're out for themselves. You learn that they only give a shit when you're creating a problem, so you learn to hide. You stop asking, you stop  presenting a target - why bother if they're going to hit or scream at you? You stop asking them entirely. 

...Instead, I turned to spirit. I largely pretended to follow their way of doing things while doing my own, convening Nichiren Buddhist Prayer, concepts that made sense from my father's Lutheran services & all that I learned from Spirit along the way. I turned away from the abject cruelty and despair existing in my personal life and sought more and more understandings of spirit without any real care for personal safety. By extension, spirits didn't feel intimidating. Sure, many of them were said to be angry, violent, loud, cantankerous, and mean-spirited, but how was that any different from what I was experiencing at home? Real talk, if you're used to being bullied all the damn time, grumpy spirits don't seem to be much of a threat. 

After a time, that mindset and approach of talking to every spirit I saw and connected with, I started to learn that what we knew of Spirit was completely freaking wrong. We (in the Pop Culture Collective sense) have long contended that spirits are just vendor windows for magickal acts that don't have feelings or desires or wants, but the opposite is true. Its only recently that we've begun to see more examples to the contrary, and some of these entities represented do indeed have enormous personalities! They can be a wealth of love and affection while being **super** spicy, and its that personality that gives us the ability to really get through to the heart of whatever it is that we're working through.

You see, I started to learn that these wrathful, angry, mean-looking, and even demonic spirits were not at all what we thought. They were rough around the edges, sure, but they had a depth of understanding and knowledge that far outscales our own. These spirits are FIERCELY protective, while being equally willing to point out our every fault FOR OUR BENEFIT. They speak truth not to hurt us, but to give us what we need to know so that we may be more successful.

In this, they can help those of us with traumatic experiences in our past a way to reexperience some of the intensity of the relationships we had with those who were super challenging for us, but they do it in a way that allows us to experience genuine love and care. They do it in a way that allows us to ask for help and properly receive it, and that can be super novel and scary at first. Especially when you're not used to it.

If you're on the fence about working with spirit, and fear is what's keeping you back, I recommend doing it. Those of us that need help can get it, and if you need help getting help, I can help! 

-Chris

//

I owe thanks...

To Many Faces, Kali, Mother Tara, Palden Lhamo, Simhamukha, Kurukulla, Ekajati, Sgrolma, my Dakini teachers, the Five Wisdom Kings, the Four Demon Princes, to Belial, to the Goetia and their retinues, to the ancestors who support me, and finally to others. I owe thanks to those who taught me as a child, to those who saw to my development as a teen, and to those guiding me as an adult. Y'all ensured that I made it through childhood when I didn't I'd make it to my 18th birthday. 

Moreover, you help me to help others now as I learn to mend ancient cycles of grief and guilt, shame and sorrow. Thank you!

I've been made aware that a handful of folx have been pretending to me on Instagram lately, and its time to clear that confusion up.

My two accounts on Instragram are:
@SorcerousEndeavors
@SorcerousEndeavorsIG

The former is my main account, the latter is my backup - anyone else isn't me. If you see someone pretending to me, block em & report them to Instagram proper.

Thanks for your support!

It’s that time of year again, and as Mercury‘s retrograde looms overhead towards the end of the week, we are given an opportunity to do something different.

It’s a time of acknowledgment & a time for change, with growth happening in the littlest shifts of awareness that then lead towards greater realizations and the manifestation of satisfaction. This kind of satisfaction can only come to us and only be made manifest to us when we acknowledge what is & how that differs from what will be. As we come to grips with what is and why those things exist for us, we are granted the opportunity-through-awareness to do something differently and it is this quality
 which defines and underpins Mercury’s upcoming retrograde. 

If you’d like to surf on the September slide, start by acknowledging the negative biases against yourself & actively challenge them. Reorient your expectations and find yourself in the sadness.

For those of you who would like some help finding your balance, I am offering a giveaway through my Instagram this week only. Click the link and sign up! 

I will be working to create changes of awareness AND luck so as to manifest great fortune for myself and others. So if you find yourself struggling with this, sign up - it’s 100% free, and all you need to do is sign up, follow the instructions on the post linked above, and spend some time adding your energy to this. YES, it is THAT SIMPLE & I am indeed offering that kind of help to dig you and others out if your respective burrows so we can all reach for the stars, for that is what we are made of!

Blessings,
Chris

Trauma is pretty well ubiquitous as far as human conditions are concerned. Everyone has some modicum of expedience with it to a greater or lesser degree, and each of us have things that we struggle with. That’s OK!

….it’s also equally important that we have tools to deal with these pains so that we don’t hurt other people on OUR sharp edges. Through this post, I hope to give you some tools and access to a new perspective.

Pain and heartache suck, and I’ll make no bones about it. We don’t like going through difficult things in our lives, and sometimes life can be really damn unkind. When it feels like life’s goddamn unfair and we’re getting battered at every turn, it can feel like there’s no way to win, and that feeling of situation-enforced helplessness is AWFUL. It’s a saddening, sinking feeling & I don’t love it.

BUT, we are blessed to have magick at our fingertips. As witches and witchy folk, we’ve got the opportunity to use these difficult situations as a catalyst for change. As witches, we’ve got the ability to find a way to win, and it all starts with being able to redefine winning by intentionally getting the marrow out of every bone placed before us.

Every obstacle is a lesson, every lesson is a gift. They may not fucking feel like it in the moment, but when you’ve made the situational and behavioral changes the lesson’s meant to articulate, you win. When you make those changes and reorient yourself towards the success you wish to be having, you become more successful and more capable. Every hurdle you surmount and every challenge you overcome makes you stronger and more capable; let those wins make you more confident & the next time you encounter an obstacle like the one that hurt you before, remind yourself that you’ve already been here before and that those lessons from the past are now helping you architect yourself and your future.

Sure, you can get mired down and stuck - sometimes that happens - point being, though, is that it doesn’t NEED to happen. If you’re stuck in that mental space, reach out; I won’t process your trauma for you, but I can facilitate you doing so more easily by working with angels, demons, and all kinds of spirits in-between.

Blessings,
Chris

Those of you who have been following my work on Instagram have probably already seen the self-love focused work I’ve been doing with Vajrakilaya and the related self-healing endeavors I’ve been getting up to here. That’s come more sharply into focus as Chiron’s gone retrograde & I’ve had the opportunity to connect more deeply with myself. It seems like the more time I connect this kind of deeply with myself, the more I see these opportunities to connect in other people, and it’s from this space and awareness that I’m writing this post.

The internal perspectives we carry with us are really goddamn important; when they’re healthy, we can be healthy and do more with our days. When those perspectives are unhealthy, we find ourselves stuck in trauma, doing emotional labor on a given subject for the 5000th time. The positive perspective gives us lift, where the negative perspective drags us down, and so it is that what we see in ourselves matters.

More importantly, what we choose to see in the mirror every time we look at ourselves matters!

And yes, it IS a careful line to walk. There’s such a thing as too much self-confidence (like when we step into the realm of narcissism) & there’s such a thing as too little (like when we look at ourselves and choose to second-guess our self-worth without objective cause) - those are extremes, however, and we should aim to find ourselves & our headspaces somewhere in the positive-leaning center.

When you struggle with this, keep in mind that it’s possible to do magickal work to heal and grow. If you find yourself becoming too arrogant, work for clarity and awareness of what you do in the community around you. If you find yourself becoming too self-deprecating & depressed, work to see and acknowledge your own objective worth to your community at large.

Keep these things in balance and you’ll find that you enjoy life more fully and more thoroughly. This is one of those things that you’re going to be automatically afflicted or affected by, so you owe it to yourself to be kind to yourself and diligent with these perspectives you carry within.

Food for thought! Be well & stay tuned. If you need some help, you know where to reach me. 😉
-Chris

...And spotting them

This article's meant to be a brief dialogue into the mechanisms that sometimes keep us stuck & today I've noticed a big goddamn pattern with a client that's kept him stuck for entirely too long!

This client was dating a woman a good while back, and she has pretty well persisted in his life in an ongoing way for a couple of years now because he doesn’t want to do the work to separate himself from her fully. Instead, he’s living life
 with resistance bands around his ankles, chest & heart and I don’t love it for him.  

((something, something, maybe listen to your worker…I digress, but **frustration noises!**))

While I am working with Deity, I am spotting more and more of that pattern and have recently articulated it to him. I’m sharing it here in the hopes that people who are going through similarly abusive situations can spot their own patterns in
 their own lives and make the changes necessary to be happier and to live easier, more enjoyable lives.

I’m going to call this person [Jonathan], as while this is definitely not his name, we all know a John and this can totally be a helpful “dear John letter”. 😁

So John gets a blessing and things get better, and then his ex notices and does ritual work to drag him back because she can’t tolerate the idea of him leaving and not having her babies. Go figure, he is a literal male Adonis and she’s missing out! ((Maybe treat him better next time??))

Now, she’s gotten to the point where she can’t actually take his blessings because my work is GENERALLY pretty damn bombproof. Instead, she has decided to work against his trauma that he also doesn’t want to work at, in effect blinding him to his blessings by using his fear against him. Now that he’s in the space and he’s being actively gaslit by a combination of his own headspace and his fear, he can’t take advantage of those clearly manifest blessings ((like getting a well-paying side gig that is literally perfect for him to have stability while letting him also engage in entrepreneurial endeavors!))

As a result, that blindness to the really happy things that are going on in his life is keeping him in a scarcity mindset when the scarcity he’s afraid doesn’t actually objectively exist FOR HIM right now. It is quite literally down to him choosing what he asks for, and he’s been tricked-by-conditioning into not asking for enough…. Big problem!

This then leads to this incredibly difficulty emotional circumstance in which he is super attached to one outcome while simultaneously believing that he cannot actually have and materialized that thing. And the extra shitty part is that it’s all elective. He doesn’t need to go through this at all, but since he has trouble spotting the pattern and doesn’t want to spot the pattern because then that exposes him to risk by & through things changing, he’s resistant. John is affectively worsening his own life rather than making a handful of very easy changes that will drastically improve his life for the better within about six months.

Does this sound like anything y’all might be going through? If it does, I really hope that spotting this pattern through reading this blog post is helpful to you! Please, let me know about it if this helps, as feedback like this directly influences what content I create & share with you. 

I’m already offering one on one tutoring for clients who have asked for it, and now I’m trying to figure out how to better offer & make accessible those tutoring services to more folx! If this is helpful, it would really help me if you let me know! Please feel free to send me an email!

Be blessed, I hope this is helpful!
-Chris 

PS: My thanks to Borborophorba for Her help in this & other matters!

I'm a lone Magickian, but I feel strongly whenever my Brothers, Sisters & Those Between are targeted; where one of hurts, we all do. Such is the nature of what it is to be alive and so deeply interconnected. A great harm has been done today, and we will feel the effects of this for YEARS, make no mistake. Spirits shudder and tremble at what this means; we should too.

To all those who feel similarly, I've created an Enochian Chapbook for the day's efforts. Sing along and let your Heart move you. Raise your voice in song this day and let it all out. We have our turning points, this is one.

1) OPENING CALL TO PRAYER

SOLPETH, MONONS-MANIN: JAIDA IAD, JAIDA I eL, TON I eL, JAIDA I PRONOA*.

SOLPETH, MONONS-MANIN: ZZZDZ ZZD (“zohd-zoh-dee’), ZZZDZ Z L, ZDLZL, ZZZDZ Z ZLDLDZ.

2) PRAYER TO ALLOW EVOLUTION OF THE HEART IN CONNECTION WITH THE UNIVERSE

JAIDA OD MAAH: AQLO LOAGAETH COMMAH TON. GRU OI/UNAL MONONS, NOAN MAD, OD eL—NOIB, DRALCOM*—A TON AH, FAFEN MONONS PAAOX A ALMADAR, OVOARS POROMA*.

3) PRAYER FOR THE REFORMATION OF THE SOUL

IEH eL, IEH IAD, IEH JAIDA, IEH MAAH, IEH AHAH: SOLPETH K’ BIEN! DLUGA UNDL, RIT, NACRO, OD BLIARD K’ PAPNOR DE TIBIBP A OI MANIN OD QAA, JAIDA! IX OHIO OD CIAOFI DE OI MANIN, IUSMACH DE DOALIM: NOIB, OI FABOAN, CARMA. IX OI MANIN OM ETHARZI, IEH L, OD ZIMII POAMAL DE AQLO NAH MADRIAX.

4) PRAYER FOR THE UNIFICATION OF THE MANIFEST & THE DIVINE

ANGELS ON HIGH, SUPPORTS BELOW, CALL ON YOU TODAY WE DO WITH ALL THAT WE DO KNOW. WE RAISE OUR VOICES IN SONG, SPIRIT TO SPIRIT, VOICE TO VOICE, RAISING THE RAGING WATERS WITHIN AS A THRONG. AWAKE, AWAKE AND VANQUISH, WITH FURY THOU WORKEST AND ABOUT US THOU STAND QUICK. HAIL HAIL HAIL, MOST MIGHTY ON HIGH - RAIN HAIL HAIL HAIL UPON ALL SOURCES OF UNDUE OPPRESSION!

RAGE, RAGE, RAGE, THOU VOICES ABOVE US ALL!

​Working with clients through pain and heartbreak has taught me a whole hell of a lot over the years, and its incredible what we put ourselves through.

What we hold inside of ourselves is a lens through which we see the world. Every bias, every fear & every resentment becomes a focal point for our minds, and we interpret data from within that mental landscape.

.....This is the way of things, and we cannot escape ourselves. We can either choose to grow past our fears and limitations or we can succumb to them.

Which are you going to choose? To fight fear, or to fight back your happiness OUT of fear?

Food for thought.
Blessings,
Chris​