I’ve always had difficulty establishing a regular practice. This has caused me an undue amount of stress in my magical career, as the most common advice I got from more established magicians was always “have a daily practice,” or at the very least “meditate regularly.”
I still don’t meditate, and perhaps I would benefit from it, but I have managed to build a daily practice for myself. I have noticed a significant change in how I approach magic, how I plan for it, and how I integrate it into my mundane life.
As a young magician, I started out with ceremonial magick. It had clear instructions and rules, a pretty good expectation for most results, and had been vetted by a few generations of practicioners, so it seemed like a good bet. After studying Crowley and Regardie for a while, I climbed out of the armchair, Don Kraig’s Modern Magick in hand, and performed my first LBRP. The LBRP is a foundational practice, which is advised to be done daily (sometimes twice a day!), and so I repeated the ritual the next day, recording my results. I continued my streak for around 90 days, and then I missed one day, and I stopped.
This mindset has been one of my largest obstacles to continuing a daily practice for extended periods of time: Breaking the chain is a failure that ruins the practice, so there’s no point in continuing. This is apparent in my magical journals that shows regular ritual work for months that stop abruptly, as well abandoned exercise and dietary plans, social commitments, study schedules, and even this blog.
My work with Rufus Opus’ Seven Spheres showed me that I could motivate myself to engage in a regular practice if it was a scheduled component of a larger working. If a ritual was part of a larger series, I was much more likely to perform it (and at its recommended time) than otherwise. It was also relatively easy to build those cycles into larger cycles and continue the work. Viewing such workings as cycles also helped: my previous ceremonial work was framed as a constant escalation, which eventually led to burnout.
My work with Seven Spheres also marked a shift in my primary magical approach, as I moved from an energy-based model to a spirit-based model. When ritual work and offerings became more relational and transactional, keeping a regular schedule became more that an obligation of habit. My work affected other beings, so I was more likely to keep up with them. I think it was Jason Miller I heard on a podcast speaking on this, pointing out that you don’t skip feeding your pets or your children because you don’t feel like it; it’s part of taking care of them, and relationships with spirits are no different.
I took an online class with Jason Miller, and part of the practice in that class involved a specific number of repetitions of mantras every day. The idea was that a daily practice established a kind of energetic chain that stretched back through your workings. If you missed a day, it wasn’t the end of the world, but there were consequences: when you sought to resume the practice you had to recite ten times the normal number of mantras to “repair the chain.” I really liked this approach, since while it wasn’t a disaster to miss the daily practice there were consequences, and I have adopted the idea of additional offerings of atonement for other regular practices I have missed. It’s a great way to acknowledge the failure of obligation without feeling like a failure, which could lead to abandoning a practice altogether.
There are specific details to a regular practice that I’m not addressing here: to whom offerings are made, what offerings are to be used, what rituals should be done, and how to adopt those obligations into your daily routine (or lack thereof). I can (and probably will) dig in to those later. But a regular practice is something I’ve struggled with in the past, and these changes in perspective have made it easier to maintain such obligations, to the benefit of my magical work.
Blacklight Metaphysics 