First of all…OW. What is it with the non-stop injuries? Now my back is out, and it kept waking me up all night because of the pain. At least because of the last ER visit I now have prescription pain meds so I can sleep? Ugh. At least the brace is now off and my wrist is now fine? Ugh.

Morning rite otherwise went well. Later on in the day I got both a workout and a long walk in, to and from dinner, plus did some laundry.

Had some interesting insights about the astral, namely the idea that it’s made up of “thought stuff”, similar sort of substance of whatever makes up consciousness. Makes sense that part of the astral may serve as the realm of the dead.

The walk plus workout and stretching helped my back and neck, but wondering what sleeping will do. Stillness doesn’t help this sort of thing; keeping the muscle warm is good.

Evening rite went well, performed after rite to Zeus.

O. M. F. Gs.

Yeah. So. Yesterday’s insanity has continued and has been dialed up to eleven. I am not taking it as a bad sign; if anything pissing off all the right people is completely the way to go, Abramelin or no Abramelin. Purifications must continue. I must get on board with the devotionals. Today’s Hermes day so we’re set there.

Morning rite went okay.

Today was…strange. And mixed. I will have tomorrow and the day after to work from home, as nearly everyone is out of the office. I have spent more days working from home this month than I have actually being at the office. It’s not like I’m on vacation so much as it’s a separation. It gives me time and space to myself. I also feel incredibly…weird. Surreal is the word, maybe. I’m sure this is helping with the Abramelin. It’ll also give me time to get laundry done and continue working on the purification. Although, I do wonder how much this is lighting me up like a Christmas tree.

Evening rite went well, and I gave Hermes his due attention beforehand.

Morning rite done, but just barely. In the chaos of the morning I somehow remembered having done it even though I hadn’t. Also, I am learning what are internal warning signs/messages for certain things such as “Expect drama llama from bullies and leeches”, etc. On day 40 I should have a clue and get my shit taken care of, and realize that things I could normally let slide, during this operation I have no leeway on. I cannot skip a week’s worth of devotional activities. I cannot be a day late to do laundry. I am a magnet and lit beacon to my usual leeches let alone new ones right now, and continually purifying is of utmost importance right now. I need to be more discerning with my time and energy and guard vigilantly against negativity, Debbie Downers, and psychic vampires. If this means ignoring my email, FB messages, and texts throughout the day, so be it. I also need to not engage the argumentative and the stupid. The things people choose to argue about online are so bizarre and inane that I don’t know whether or not to laugh or cry. But hey, I was warned how this day was going to go: do not engage. Do not give them your attention or energy. They will cling and will never let go. On another note, I VERY much enjoy looking younger than my age and getting carded, but it will also guarantee people will be talking down to me for many, many years and it may never end. Heck, they’ll give my grave a visit and wax poetic about how much older they are than me and therefore know better than my pretty little head ever will. Anyhow.

The key is not avoiding or repressing negative emotions but not letting them rule your day. That downward spiral is a tricky one. I am relearning emotions and how to think about my emotions, and reminding myself that then is not now, then is not now.

There’s a huge difference, I’ve found, between taking care to be aware of others around you versus using religion and philosophy to excuse self hatred. The idea of letting go of the ego has nothing to do with the ego being bad but instead is about focusing on the others in your world and in your life. If you become self centered you miss the point of being here; reality is about everyone’s shared perception of the world and life around us. Without other people reality wouldn’t even exist. Heck, physics has even demonstrated this. I do not comprehend what it means or feels like to hate oneself. I have never hated myself. I have genuine love for myself although I have habits which are insanely exasperating and I sometimes do not have the patience to deal with me, but I am working on them. I sometimes think that people would not hate others so much if they did not already know what it is like to experience self loathing.

I am getting a little bit more aggressive on the job search front. This is not something I want to do and it’s something I want to delay as much as possible. I’m feeling like yes, I need to move on but not immediately. Key is when and where to. I was contacted about a gaming/e-commerce job; frankly that sounds very much up my alley. I’m just noticing that my job is cranked up to eleven with so much bullshit I haven’t done any coding in almost three months. Not a good sign.

Interestingly, after mentioning this in my morning ritual I have been contacted with an opportunity, I guess you could say, that I cannot refuse. But I’ll know once I manage to get in and get interviewed how well it’ll go. The fact that I am already employed tends to be of help. My fingers are crossed.

Evening rite went well.  I made note of the need for additional purification and attentiveness to Having My Shit Together Needed. No leeway here.

Morning rite went well. I am working from home today because the idea of putting on real clothes is a joke, and the side effects from the pain meds make it even more of a joke. I can wear yoga pants to hang out with friends but ya know, why push it?

It’s interesting how I read through the entries and how time feels like it’s passing differently than it actually is. Events which feel like two or three weeks ago are more like a week or less. I think on events which happened the previous day and think of them as being more like a few days ago. My sense of time is growing increasingly whack.  I’m not sure why this is.

Memory lane, memory lane, memory lane. More and more people whom I haven’t heard from in ages randomly contacting me, many of them from my GD days. Interesting.

I have been talking with other friends of mine who also were friends with my friend who had died in the fire. There’s a lot of pain and anger there. While I’m no longer crying daily about it, it still hurts and it makes no sense. I know she keeps bright company and I’ve seen her dressed in white. She is in no dingy underworld; wherever she is at would be what might some perceive as “heaven” and she is okay. I do not think it was an easy transition; she was a punk rock girl to the core. But she was and will always be a fighter no matter what form and vessel her spirit takes on. I went to read some more entries from her Livejournal today and saw that it had been into memorial status. I have no idea why reading such a notification would affect me so deeply but it has. It’s just another reminder.

During the whole process (and as it remains even now) the challenge has been going back and forth between mourning her and acting as priestess and counselor to others mourning her. This is not deliberate; this is my nature and something which puts me into an internal tug of war.

On this and related issues, something I have learned the hard way which not many, I think, want to admit because it’s something they do not want to believe or accept: time does not heal all wounds. You can cover shit up, bury it, get distracted, they might gather dust and be less conspicuous, but time does nothing. I don’t even think that feelings are bound by time, actually. I’ve caught “future echoes” of some before they happened, strong ones. It is what it is. Anyhow.

I spent some time ranting about my job to another friend of mine in IT, and confirmed my suspicions: I will need to get out, sooner as opposed to later. I am in a lead role and if let go for any reason it will be seen as performance related. It will have to be voluntary. The place is a hot mess, and it’s a damned shame, but it was like this before I came on board and there’s very little I can do about it, and anything I could potentially do my hands have been tied on. I would absolutely hate to lie to recruiters and future employers, and there’s no professional way to explain “I walked into a hot mess and then was turned into the sacrificial lamb for said hot mess”; it’ll just sound like sour grapes.

Evening rite went well but painfully aware of the fact that the chaos of this week has prevented me from my usual devotional activities on Wed, Sun, Fri, and Mon. Hoping to do better this week.

Morning rite went well. I can now move my fingers which makes typing SO much easier. I didn’t want to type up yesterday’s entry with one hand and kept it short as is.

I really like this new setup I have for myself on my computer. I get tired of seeing the same negativity, whining, passive-aggression, and all that nonsense on social media harshing my chi.

There’s something to all of that positive, feel good affirmation shit. The idea is not to ignore negativity; obviously if you spill something or something breaks, you need to clean it up and replace it, not ignore it and hope it goes away. But dwelling on it doesn’t fix the situation either.

There was something I neglected to mention in my journal entry yesterday: an interesting dream where I was somewhere seeking asylum in some Jewish temple and wound up having yet another strange conversation with the Jewish god. Yes, I’ve had a few of these dreams; one of the blessings of being a polytheist is not freaking when I have any sort of experience with any other deity. I’ve also been informed that that whole polytheist vs monotheist battle thing is a human thing, and They Just Don’t Care. I sometimes wonder if it’s the equivalent of inheriting an ancestral deity? No idea. Anyhow.

Wonderful evening with friends, at a gathering for my birthday I wasn’t going to have until my friend died. One of the people who thanked me for being in her life. Apparently not many have stuck around for her. I remember reading through my now deceased friend’s LJ and crying when I found out that she too avoided people because so many close to her had either betrayed her or died and how much I related to that. It woke me up. It’s amazing how much in the process of social interaction we can take for granted because of the hurts of the past and the temptation to withdraw into our little shells. People have left my life for a reasons, but they entered it for a reason too. You can’t be so afraid to die that you’re afraid to live. I am insanely blessed to have the people in my life whom I do, and my friend may not realize it but what she said to me was the best birthday gift I could’ve been given.

It still feels hard and surreal knowing my now departed friend will never again attend another one of my social events nor I hers. She had been to my birthday dinners in the past. I miss her.

Evening rite went well, but I was wiped.

Morning rite went well. I remembered this morning how I would start my day versus how I’ve occasionally done so in the past, and it worked.

Still facing a good deal of legal aggravation with the refi. But you know, it’s amazing how the techniques I’ve been making an effort to use have been helping me to adjust my focus.

My HGA is conspiring to have me work from home as much as possible, as I took a nice fall on my way to work. I thought I was fine until the pain in my wrist increased by quite a bit this evening and I wound up in the emergency room. Prescriptions for strong pain meds are awesome and cheap however.

Evening rite went fine although some creativity was involved. It’s amazing how much we don’t consider that we do with two hands. Minor things, but did fine.

I should not be waking up in the morning and first thing I do before I even do the Abramelin is be on Facebook. That ends today. It’s embarrassing to admit to but there you have it; it’s an immense energy suck that is doing no one any favors. I think this morning’s rite went well, but it mostly went into a rant on–you guess it–boundaries. I like to be a force for good in the world and there are certain causes I believe in. But I need to figure out a) how to be discerning in which ones I engage in b) more discerning in how I choose to engage them c) how much energy I engage in the doings of said things and d) how to let go after I’ve engaged so that it doesn’t continue to drain the life out of me in the rest of my day. I also need to figure out how to best communicate this to people in a way that doesn’t make them feel that they’re either bothering me or it’s their fault; it’s not. I want to continue to be around for people when they need me, and my nature is to do and be just that. I just have to monitor myself accordingly so that I can be of better help to them because let’s face it…they deserve better and so do I.

Or as I best phrased it online:

If I were engaged in looking upon cute cat pictures after I wake up and before I do my Abramelin rite, I could at least argue that I’m focusing on uplifting shit which puts me into a positive frame of mind. If I spent it in private message with someone offering hugs and support in a time of crisis, I too could argue I’m spending my time doing good things before I enter into the temple room for my morning operation.

When I find myself engaged in arguments online before I do my morning rite, I am in need of adulting. I have to put on my big girl pants and stop this nonsense. I am badly in need of being more discerning with how I’m spending my energies.

Anyhow.

So I spent the day on two things: 1) moving my focus elsewhere 2) finding new avenues for that.

Evening rite went okay, but I am WIPED. Lots of stuff I’m still processing, and I think it’s drained the crap out of me.

Morning rite went well. Last night got a bit…well, intense, so there was some struggles.

The day however seemed to veer in an entirely different direction. I don’t know if I’m turning into some pagan/occult version of Veronica Mars or reeling in the strange, elusive karma which seems to haunt me in regards to Calling People On Their Shit. To my credit, I DID confront the perpetrator with what was said about me. Of course he denied it…then went to others and not only restated what he did but claims that I am the one lying about it. Fascinating.

It is a challenge not to have emotional investment. 1) I do not like people being abused and used in my name, or people name dropping me in order to manipulate others and 2) I know what it’s like to be screwed and deceived before in the name of spiritual and magical development, so it’s an issue deeply personal to me. It’s hard not to react. It’s hard not to been incredibly skeeved and creeped out by what has been said about me (the person in question has some deeply rooted clinical issues and is apparently quite obsessed with me) and it’s also hard not to be filled with utter rage that people were abused like this while my name was being dropped as proof that this person was on the level, which he obviously was and is not.

This issue and the mortgage refi drama basically framed my day, but the latter was really a drop in the bucket. I am doing my best to keep a level head and focus on what I need to, but I had my little shit fit and acted accordingly. No details, just suffice to say I put in an appropriate request, a message in the bottle for those who need to know, so to speak.

Evening rite went well, I think. I asked for clarity on many things and just spoke my heart, as always. It’s all I can do.

It’s interesting to see the pattern of entries right before certain issues come up. It’s like I have my finger on the pulse before things happen. First my friend, then this.

Morning rite went well. Today is my birthday and apparently EVERYONE at my tiny office is working from home so I get to do so, too. Nice birthday gift so far!

I spent the day getting some work done then walking around, generally feeling good. Still tangled up in straightening out some very epic drama involving someone in the community. Liars and abusers and creepers. That theme continues. I am getting shit straightened out and am helping people caught in the aftermath. My HGA, apparently, has a lot to say to me on this subject but I’m also sure he’s quite aware of why I started this operation to begin with.

Evening rite went well, too. I will have a lengthier entry tomorrow to be sure. I have a lot going on and am still processing it all.