In the Beginning<\/p>\n
I have intended to participate in Andrieh Vittimus’ Do Magick <\/a>Challenge for some time.\u00a0 My tendency to lose months at a time has resulted in me checking the web page\u00a0days into each challenge and having missed the research period several times, now.\u00a0 Including this month, actually, but Jason and Andrieh made it clear on the podcast that one could join at any time this month.\u00a0 And so I did, posting my Statement of Intent<\/a> on the second day of September and diving in head first.\u00a0 I set myself a number of goals: daily meditation; magickal art three days a week; conjuring the Spirit Bune; and, finally and most importantly, the rediscovery of my sense of magical play.<\/p>\n Week One<\/p>\n On the first week, I opened strong.\u00a0 On Day One<\/a>, I sat down to meditate for the first time in weeks — it had been perhaps months, actually, since I last mediated outside the Esbat circle.\u00a0 On Day Two<\/a>\u00a0I performed Andrieh’s Baphomet ritual, and then confronted the reality that the mundane world changes at its own pace.\u00a0 On Day Three\u00a0<\/a>I made my first serious efforts at my goal to do more magical art, devoting hours to my Mask of Venus, then spent the evening in Esbat rituals attempting to rid myself of baleful influences.\u00a0 On Day Four <\/a>I did more magical art — working on both the Venus Mask and a number of apotropaic jewelry designs — and made myself a charm against the evil eye.\u00a0 On Day Five <\/a>I continued my mask-making and escalated my mediation practice.\u00a0 On Days Six <\/a>and Seven <\/a>I coasted, only meditating, but I began to notice changes in my dreaming.\u00a0 Additionally, on Day Seven Aradia began joining me for meditation.<\/p>\n Despite resting on my laurels the last two days, I feel like the first week was a success.\u00a0 I did a lot of magic and a lot of art.\u00a0 Coming from practically no meditation to meditating daily is an intense lifestyle change.\u00a0 The depression and anxiety that plagued me before beginning the project did not, of course, vanish immediately.\u00a0 In fact — an upside to journaling, I guess — they initially got worse.<\/p>\n Week Two<\/p>\n In the second week, Aradia and I added planetary invocations to our daily work, immediately before nightly meditations.\u00a0 Days Eight, <\/a>Nine, <\/a>and Ten <\/a>were slow days for most of my goals, but I continued to escalate my meditation times slowly and escalated the\u00a0planetary magic from previous versions of our ritual\u00a0by reading both the Thomas Tayor and Apostolos Athanassakis translations.\u00a0 On Day Eleven <\/a>I returned to my masks, and did some divination to help me decide how I wished to approach the spirit Bune, and on Day Twelve <\/a>I went through with that conjuration.\u00a0 Day Thirteen <\/a>was meditation only and on Day Fourteen <\/a>I strung myself a necklace for my Baphomet pendant but missed my daily meditation.<\/p>\n In this second week I continued to increase my daily meditation time and, in doing so, I\u00a0began discerning changes in my energetic body.\u00a0 I also particularly struggled to balance my mundane and magical lives.\u00a0 I made my three days of magical arts and crafts, and achieved my goal of conjuring the Goetic spirit Bune, but failed at my goal of daily meditation.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Week Three<\/p>\n In the third week, my physical health failed me.\u00a0 Day Fifteen<\/a> was exhausting, and I barely managed my daily routine.\u00a0 On Day Sixteen<\/a> I turned a museum trip with my mother into a magical experiment, examining mummies with a magical eye, then collapsed onto the couch for the next two days (17<\/a>, 18<\/a>), though I was able to resume meditation and planetary rituals on Day Eighteen.\u00a0 On Day Nineteen<\/a>, I was feeling mostly better and went through with teaching a class on using the Classical Planets as a source of power for freeform\u00a0energywork.\u00a0 On Day Twenty <\/a>I collapsed again, sicker than I had been yet; I went into work then needed someone else to drive me home.\u00a0 On Day Twenty One <\/a>I called in sick and spent the day on my couch, working on magical jewelry designs.<\/p>\n I managed only one day of magical art and missed a second day of meditation.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Week Four<\/p>\n I did my best to come back strong in week four, but my total collapse in week three left both me and my house in serious disarray.\u00a0 It was struggle to resume even daily planetary rituals and meditation, let alone my loftier goals.\u00a0 In retrospect, I pushed myself too hard, because I wasn’t really fully myself again until Day 28.<\/p>\n On Day Twenty Two<\/a> I managed 22 minutes of meditation.\u00a0 This would prove to be the peak.\u00a0 It was also the second day in a row when I experienced intense sensory non-sequiturs.\u00a0 See the daily records for details.\u00a0 On Day Twenty Three<\/a>\u00a0I experimented with adding the Qabalistic cross and pentagram banishing to my daily rituals.\u00a0 On Day Twenty Four<\/a> I began designing and constructing a new set of house wards.\u00a0 That night I gave up on my goal of escalating to 30 minutes of meditation by the end of the month and began setting my timer for 15 minutes.\u00a0 On Day Twenty Five\u00a0<\/a>I decided to fumigate the house to clear out any lingering bad vibes.\u00a0 On Day Twenty Six<\/a> I meditated only, and on Day Twenty Seven<\/a> I managed only\u00a0my planetary\u00a0ritual and meditation.\u00a0 On Day Twenty Eight <\/a>I succeeded in tracing an amulet gifted to me to a particular grimoire,<\/p>\n Overall, in that week\u00a0I succeeded only at meditating daily.<\/p>\n Denouement<\/p>\n On Days Twenty Nine <\/a>and\u00a0Thirty<\/a>, I concluded my Beginner’s Mind experiment by erecting the first two layers of my new household protective wards, invoking the Sun and Moon by Taylor’s Orphic Hymns and empowering the talismans with Picatrix invocations.\u00a0 I meditated fifteen minutes each night.<\/p>\n In theory, I wanted to end the month of magic with a bang.\u00a0 In the moment, though, I was just glad to have made it through.<\/p>\n In Conclusion<\/p>\n At the beginning of September, I chose a particular (broad) interperetation of the Beginner’s Mind challenge.\u00a0 Where others cracked open grimoires,\u00a0 or sought to master various forms of divination, I sought to reclaim a portion of my own mind.\u00a0 Over the course of several previous magical experiments and programs, I have painted myself into various corners.\u00a0 I miss the enthusiasm with which I once pursued and practiced the magical arts.\u00a0 To that end, as detailed above, I set myself a number of smaller challenges.<\/p>\n I challenged myself to meditate daily, starting at five minutes and escalating to thirty.\u00a0 I … mostly succeeded.\u00a0 I meditated 28\/30 days.\u00a0 One day I missed in favor of a hot date.\u00a0 One day I missed because I was sick as fuck.\u00a0 I ultimately capped out at 22 minutes of meditation, then settled for a more achievable goal of 15 minutes.<\/p>\n I challenged myself to work on magical art three days a week.\u00a0 I succeeded at that for the first two weeks, but failed abominably in the second two.<\/p>\n I challenged myself to conjure the spirit Bune.\u00a0 I did so.\u00a0 That conjuration has yet to receive results, but so far the spirit contact has proved positive and potentially fruitful.<\/p>\n I challenged myself to follow my magical whims.\u00a0 They proved less, well, whimsical than I had imagined they might, but overwhelmingly succeeded in this.\u00a0 I can recall only one whim I did not follow through on, and that was because the particular school of thought I wished to apply to a situation proved inapplicable in that moment, and then I forgot about it before the opportune moment arose.<\/p>\n All this with the ultimate goal of reclaiming my magical practice.\u00a0 Of finding the fun back.\u00a0 In that, I think, I succeeded.\u00a0 I no longer feel so constrained by the schools of thought I have studied.\u00a0 I feel like my magic is my own again.\u00a0 And I’m excited to move forward with my art and experiments.<\/p>\n I am also reminded very viscerally of the value of daily meditation.\u00a0 At the beginning of September, I was a depressed and anxious mess, despite how objectively awesome my life is.\u00a0 During the first week, perhaps slowing down to confront those feelings, I actually fell down a little further.\u00a0 In the weeks since, however, despite the physical illness I suffered in week three, I’m feeling incredibly better emotionally.\u00a0 We can see some evidence of this, in fact, in this and my previous blog post.\u00a0 I’m actually writing again, something I hadn’t done in a while.<\/p>\n The Do Magick Challenge came with its own requirements, chief among them daily public journaling.\u00a0 The value of that has been demonstrated what I should have already known, which is the value of\u00a0such journaling.\u00a0\u00a0 I don’t wish to spam my followers (or continue the particular self-censorship public journaling requires), so I must now challenge myself to do one of the important sorcerer’s tasks I have never quite managed before.<\/p>\n And with all this written up, I now look forward to the next Do Magick Challenge.\u00a0 I’ll try not to be a stranger here in the interim.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In the Beginning I have intended to participate in Andrieh Vittimus’ Do Magick Challenge for some time.\u00a0 My tendency to lose months at a time has resulted in me checking the web page\u00a0days into each challenge and having missed the research period several times, now.\u00a0 Including this month, actually, but Jason and Andrieh made it … Read More<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[5],"tags":[329,328,134],"class_list":["post-4696","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-witchcraft","tag-beginners-mind","tag-do-magick","tag-keeping-score"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8kUcm-1dK","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4696","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4696"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4696\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4701,"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4696\/revisions\/4701"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4696"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4696"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4696"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}