Story time again, happy readers: it\u2019s time for another episode of Great Moments in Holy Fuck I Was A Dumbass Once Upon A Time.\u00a0 I tell this story now because it\u2019s almost come up in quite a few conversations over the last months, and because I don\u2019t often see discussions on the internet (might just be looking in the wrong places) of how magical practice can directly impact your health.<\/p>\n
When I was in high school, and for a while after, I liked to use magic to get high.\u00a0 I hadn\u2019t really experimented with serious rites yet, mostly just casting circles and the push-and-pull of auras and pure-thought-visualization magics.\u00a0 So I would get high by drawing in all the power I could, doing breathing exercises until I was dizzy, then put on a talisman to keep me steady* and go out rolling<\/em>.<\/p>\n Then I lost touch with the people I was practicing with on a regular basis, and I got to where the only times I did any magic were when I was warding my house, helping someone else with theirs, or celebrating the Sabbats with the KU Cauldron.\u00a0 I started attending the annual Heartland Pagan Festival \u2013 and oh, sweet gods, was that a high.\u00a0 In a period of a couple months, I went from a regular, intense practice, to a feast-and-famine cycle of about four to eight weeks.\u00a0 <\/p>\n Somewhere along the way, I blew a fuse.<\/p>\n From about the time I was twenty \u2013 not long after my friends disappeared and I moved out of my parent’s\u2019 house \u2013 I started getting migraine headaches.\u00a0 For those of you who\u2019ve never had migraines \u2013 and especially you bastards who don\u2019t quite believe they\u2019re real \u2013 imagine overdosing on caffeine and then suddenly and inexplicably suffering the worst red-wine-tannins-and-cheep-gin-hangover of your life.\u00a0 The light hurts not just your eyes, but your skin.\u00a0 Noises and smells hurt your brain.\u00a0 The only thing that helps at all is lying down somewhere dark and quiet.<\/p>\n After a while I noticed that the migraines came about every two to three weeks on average \u2013 sometimes more \u2013 usually right after I did a lot of magic, or after I\u2019d gone too long without.\u00a0 <\/p>\n I started up a semi-regular meditation practice, and laid off some of the big solo ritual, but the net result of that correlation was to slowly stopped practicing magic<\/em> altogether.\u00a0 I was about twenty-three.\u00a0 The headaches went away.\u00a0 The being crazy got worse.\u00a0 I spent about a year and a half in my basement, writing a lot and meditating a little, and trying to get my head screwed on straight.\u00a0 I stopped seeing auras.\u00a0 I missed a Heartland Pagan Festival in favor of Laid Back Labor Day.\u00a0 I looked back through my journals and the things I remembered seeing and doing \u2026 and I started wondering if I were really<\/em> crazy.\u00a0\u00a0 As in, sending the nice young men in their clean white coats crazy.\u00a0 I realized I hadn\u2019t actually practiced any magic in a year or more.\u00a0 I was \u2026 empty.\u00a0 Hollowed out.<\/p>\n Then I went back to Heartland.\u00a0 I took a great big breath of the life and power of that sacred land.\u00a0 I drank deep of the power and beauty of the rituals.\u00a0 (I might have even gotten laid.)\u00a0 I rediscovered what I was missing.<\/p>\n I talked to D it a few months later.\u00a0 I remember still-being awestruck by the experience \u2013 telling her how I\u2019d been starting to think I\u2019d imagined every magical experience I had before that.\u00a0 Although I didn\u2019t connect the two events at the time \u2013 and it would be more than two years before I actually left<\/em> – I think it was within the next six or nine months of those events that I started to feel the urge to leave Lawrence \u2013 a steady restlessness, and certainty that it was time to move to a new stage.<\/p>\n The migraines have never returned.\u00a0 My practice has slowly escalated since that nadir, but I have never felt as strong \u2013 magically speaking – as I did before I started getting the migraines.\u00a0 Even now, with a daily ritual practice and a steady observance of both the Esbats and Sabbats \u2026 I think I may actually have diminished myself by abusing my talents back in the day.<\/p>\n *In this instance, a hematite ring which \u2013 unlike a lump of hematite, which would have grounded me out fast and hard \u2013 kept me at a steady level, draining off very slowly.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Story time again, happy readers: it\u2019s time for another episode of Great Moments in Holy Fuck I Was A Dumbass Once Upon A Time.\u00a0 I tell this story now because it\u2019s almost come up in quite a few conversations over the last months, and because I don\u2019t often see discussions on the internet (might just … 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":[],"class_list":["post-89","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-witchcraft"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8kUcm-1r","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89","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=89"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=89"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=89"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=89"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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