Wax on, wax off: how learning physical fitness helps with magical fitness

When I decided to do the Abramelin in 2014, I knew there was no way I could have the “ideal” conditions for it. I researched the ritual at great length through both the translations, Mathers and Dehn, and determined that if I were to take the plunge I would take it with this attitude:

  • I will never do things perfectly.
  • If I wait to be “perfect”, I will never get it done.
  • I need to be willing to potentially make mistakes, learn from it, and move on.
  • I have nothing left to lose at this point and I desperately need to get my shit together.

As some people who have been following me online know, I’m also a passionate fitness enthusiast. I’ve had my ups and downs and learned a lot from them, but on the whole I’ve made great progress in this arena. I ran a 5K, 10K, and half marathon this past weekend at DisneyWorld with only the bare minimum of muscle soreness afterwards and felt great enough to start getting back to routine two days later. While I still have a great deal of progress to make I’ve also come a long way.

So without further adieu, here’s a list of things that hold true in the wide, wonderful world of fitness which also apply to magic:

  1. You need to pencil in your workouts and get them done. Make them non-negotiable. Get your magic done. Feed your altars. Have regular things you magically contribute to. Things like employment, finances, and well-being are things which need to be perpetually fed. Do NOT get complacent in this arena, not even if you land the perfect job or win the lottery. This is a magic which needs to be kept up. Anything you need on a regular basis is something you can get done regularly.
  2. Length doesn’t make strength. You don’t need to work out for hours a day in order to get results. Likewise with magical ritual. It doesn’t need to go on until the wee hours of the morning to be effective.
  3. You have to train for half and full marathons, you can’t just jump into them and you have to have the proper gear or risk injury. Meditation, trance work, and energy work, while both can come more easily to some than most, do require proper training. Expect your immune system to be shot afterwards. Ask anyone who’s done the Abramelin or any lengthy  working if they got sick after they completed the rite. It can happen to you, be prepared.
  4. If you run into obstacles, work around them and get done what you can. Can’t do a full workout? Do a partial. A partial is better than none. Not much more I need to add to this one. Life happens, just keep moving.
  5. You will have good days and bad days. Motivation is like bathing; you have to keep working on it because it doesn’t last. Just keep going and remember what brought you here to begin with. In short, you will struggle, you will fuck up, you will have days when all you want to do is stare at that Candy Crush game on your phone and just be mindless. And that’s okay.
  6. If you fall off the wagon, just get back on and don’t waste any time or energy beating yourself up over it. It’s very easy to get jolted out of our routines and find it difficult to return to them. We may even feel like we failed on more than one level. Don’t worry about it and either just pick up where you left off,  go back a few steps and start from there, or just start a new cycle over again.
  7. Find something you love to do which works for you and your goals, and keep doing it. If you find a particular system of magic to be drudge work and not very effective, stop torturing yourself with it and find something else. What works for others and calls their inner spirits and get results won’t necessary be the same for you. I love to run and lift weights while there are people who loathe running and would rather do crossfit or Zumba. There are a myriad of systems and disciplines out there. Find one that works with your personality, suits your goals, and keep going with it. This doesn’t mean that you need to find something which isn’t hard. Newsflash: it’s ALL hard. You need to choose your hard and get your self discipline on, but it’s got to be the sort of hard that you will want to invest in.
  8. Don’t judge your beginning by someone else’s middle. You may be working on a discipline which someone else has been working on for years, and you just got started. They’re getting great results while you’re just turning up pennies and feel like the spirits are laughing at you. What gives? It’s not you, they’ve just been at it longer. Be patient, get better at it and the results will come.
  9. Stretch and foam roll after every workout to prevent muscle injury. I’m going to equate this rule with a few things: magic doesn’t begin and end only during your ritual work and the proper conditioning will not only make you more effective but also help you to not burnout. The more strenuous your practice, the more that this becomes important. Obviously a quick candle ritual or offering rite is going to need a lot less “decompression” than an hours-long recitation and ritual, and some might not need any if much at all. There are many ways to do this ranging from shutting down with a banishing rite to just quietly going off to meditate. It’s all about doing grounding and centering rituals. In fact I’m going to go with just the basic idea of grounding and centering as being excellent analogies for stretching and foam rolling. Just. Do. It.
  10. Fitness is 80% diet, and 20% exercise. It’s not just what you’re doing but how you’re feeding your body which can be the more important of the two. You can’t out-train a bad diet. Saving the best for last and I bet you’re wondering how this translates into magical practice and work. Well, here’s the deal and I’m going to italicize and bold this for emphasis: you need to take care of yourself and do the necessary internal work and personal development just as much if not more so than the actual practice of magic. Personal growth and development is the “diet” of the work. Do not confuse it with the “exercise”, which is magic. Personal development is not magic, but it helps feed you as a magician so you can do your magic. Got it? Good.

And now I’ll end this blog post with a piece of advice from one of my favorite fitness trainers, Tony Horton: “Do your best and forget the rest.”

A rebirth

RendingTheVeil.com is having technical issues, and as this has happened before I thankfully had a backup of the blog I ran under there.

This will now be the place I will post new blog posts too. If there’s a way to crosspost or back them up to Rending The Veil in case people still check there, I will do that.

In the meantime, expect me to be here more often. :) I have lots to talk about, I always do.

Public occultism: is it dying or merely an oxymoron?

Herein I will respond to a post on a public occultism blog which claims that public occultism is bad, and succeeds in demonstrating this but for entirely different reasons than the intention of the blogger and his post — and not just due to extreme irony.

Other rebuttals to this post are fantastic and I don’t feel the need to repeat and rehash their points. I will instead make a couple of points not fully covered which badly need to be addressed:

Firstly, let’s cover the definition of public:

adjective
1. of, relating to, or affecting a population or a community as a whole: publicfunds; a public nuisance.
2. done, made, acting, etc., for the community as a whole: public prosecution.
3. open to all persons: a public meeting.
Next, the definition of occultism:
noun
supernatural forces, being, and events collectively
adjective
hidden from view
The inherent problem of “public occultism” is exposing something to public view which typically isn’t meant to be exposed, and the challenge becomes how much of occultism do you choose to make public and why. It’s a double edged sword. On one hand, you bring about a much-needed body of information and people who have it accessible to those who either want or have need of it, but on the other what is being exposed to the masses isn’t meant to be exposed to the masses, and under the weight of that contradiction there will be problems and friction.
And then you just have the Internet in general, which is inherently a hot fucking mess no matter how you slice it.
Secondly, let’s address this part, shall we?
If you publish anything, whether it’s a public blog, books, etc., on a specific selection of topics and discuss them at great length for everyone to read you are setting yourself up as an authority on those particular topics. And as an authority of these topics, by putting yourself out there online you are inviting people to comment and ask questions. If you don’t want this, then stop writing books, quit writing blog posts, remove yourself from social media, and don’t present topics to the masses like you have any sense of understanding or knowledge about them. The ability to present knowledge to the public is power, and with power comes responsibility. If you don’t want this responsibility, don’t be accessible online or otherwise. Period. You can’t have it both ways; you’re either an authority on subjects people care about or you’re not. If the notion of being a leader and an authority is burning you out and giving you more trouble than you can handle, it’s time to cool your jets and take a much needed hiatus from the whole thing, and I’m going to beg Nick to do just that. Nick, with all due respect as a fellow magician, it’s clear that you’re stressed, frustrated, and burnt out and judging from your numerous “get off my damned lawn” type of posts as of late, it’s high time you logged off and focused on your own personal work and development. No harm, no foul–and no shame in doing so. Please take my advice; you’ll thank me for it later. I learned the hard way about this myself after I got burnt out in the Hellenic pagan community after years of leadership. And don’t trick yourself into believing you have to be here “for others”. Martyrdom sucks, my friend. Don’t fall prey to it (like I did). Rest and recharge, or regret it later. Being a leader, whether self or community appointed or both, is a thankless and stressful task.
Let’s talk some more about this idea of public occultism and positions of authority, actually. It’s rather relevant to the next point. Nick has argued in his blog that occultism has been “dumbed down”, is too accessible online, is too contaminated by a number of issues including over-analyzing, making magic purely psychological, and people on the whole are too lazy, don’t want to do the work, don’t want to properly pay respect to a teacher’s time and energy by valuing their time, etc. A number of these points I agree with, especially the part on armchair magicians and treatment of magic as being purely psychological. I frequently liken these types to the “theoretical magicians” of the Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell novel. I personally would much rather be a practical magician, thankyouverymuch. I think a degree of this “magic is only in your head” nonsense is laziness, some of it is cynicism, and the rest is people not able to do the more fantastical aspects of occultism and declaring it impossible simply because they themselves haven’t succeeded in bringing those aspects out in their own practice and experiences as of yet. And then you have so-called “experts” in the community writing entire books dumbing-down magic and presenting it as being “all in your head”, and it’s not helping.
Sadly many of these issues outlined have little to do with the Internet being to blame and much to do with human nature. But here’s the thing: the problem with the Internet is that absolutely anyone with any degree of clue who sounds intelligent and is able to present themselves well on social media and blogs can set themselves up as an authority on the occult, WMT, or any given topic without much fact or background checking–and pretty soon you have a cult of personality. This problem is absolutely universal online and goes well beyond the occult community. The fitness and nutrition related communities online, for instance, are riddled with bad armchair advice from people completely not qualified to give any sane or sound information and people wind up getting sick, hurt, and almost dying from bad advice from loud people who gain an audience from people who swallow their shit and think they know what they’re talking about. The blogosphere and social media both have the ability to hand anyone a sound box where they can stand and voice off on absolutely anything under the sun, and as a result you have a lot of noise to wade through before you can hear some decent information. The noise amplified is in both directions and the dumbing-down and lack of quality goes both ways, not just in terms of the students but in the available teachings online and the teachers/people in positions of authority whether assumed, earned, or otherwise.
Unfortunately many of these teachers come in, have some good points to make but rather like the blog post I’m replying to make those points along with a bunch of other suspect bits or hastily made conclusions–but due to actually making sense in parts it’s assumed everything’s golden. And with just a spoonful of that sugar, you’ve just swallowed a ton of horseshit. People brand new, unassuming, and perhaps a bit too trusting in their desperate quest to Learn Stuff can fall in with the wrong people as a result. Been there, done that. And then you have the other side of the coin, which is good leaders/teachers/people in positions of authority who have their good nature and patience tried and tested with the scores of people who want the Great Work handed to them on a silver platter on the backs of rainbow-farting unicorns and sides of fries with that. As much as I disagree with some of Nick’s points–especially the ageist ones that pin this on it being a generational issue versus a human one–I can totally understand and sympathize with his frustrations. Some of the questions I myself receive from others as a result of my blog and social media presence range from creepy to WTF. And that’s what I get for putting myself out there online.
So what to do with “public occultism”? Well, make it less public, that’s for sure! Some of the best places online right now are all closed or secret groups on FB, message boards with huge sections only available to approved and registered members, and emailing lists that also weed out the noise, spammers, etc. I run a forum online called The Great Work which has about 95% of its boards invisible except to registered and approved members and is low in noise and high in content. I stick to the quieter corners online and avoid the exceedingly large groups where noise to quality ratio is not to my liking. It keeps my blood pressure low and prevents me from wasting my time online on shit that doesn’t matter.
And for all else? Just log off and focus on yourself, that’s what matters.