Eldering as an intentional magical identity

Me just shy of 50

It’s my birthday today and I’m turning 50. For the last couple of months I’ve been preparing for this particular birthday with a specific purpose in mind - an initiation into the beginning stages of eldering.

On Monday of last week, I met with my magical men’s circle, and I shared a request - Would you bless me with a piece of gold that you’ve observed about me over the course of time you have known me. I asked for this blessing as something I could take with me as part of a ritual I am gifting to myself, which is the continued journey into sovereignty in my life.

In Western culture we treat aging as something to be avoided and prioritize youthfulness because we’ve been sold on the idea that being young has value, while being old is something to be dreaded. However, I’ve been finding that as I step into this year of 50, becoming older is something to cherish. I am at the prime of my life, in the best shape I’ve ever been and I have the weight of experience offering insight, even as I’m aware of how precious my remaining time is.

I am not an elder yet, but I am choosing to become one. When I sat in that circle, the other night, I asked the men, most of them older than me, the rest around my age, for their blessing. It was a magical moment, and one of them also asked something of me:

Imagine the man you’ll be at 60. Who is that man? What has he done? What has changed for him, from that man who was 50?

Want to actually do this, not just read about it?

Inner Alchemy is where I teach how to work on the self deliberately instead of waiting for time to do it. Get the book →

Not ready to buy anything? Why Your Spells Don't Stick is a free guide to the most common reasons a working stalls, and where to start fixing it.

If you want help with a specific situation, work with me one to one.

The Alchemy of Re-Patterning - How to recognize and break yourself out of the comfortable discomfort.

Have you heard about frogs and boiling pots?

If you drop a frog in a boiling pot, it will hop out. However if you put a frog in lukewarm water and then gradually heat up, it will never get out even when the water becomes boiling. While this literally happens with frogs, in some ways it can also happen with people.

One of the tendencies that many people have is to settle for what is comfortable, yet also uncomfortable. I call this the comfortable discomfort, and its the areas of your life where you find yourself compromising and settling for less because it seems easier to do that than to take action and create changes. It’s that little voice that tells you to sleep in a little longer instead of getting up and exercising. It’s that voice that tells you to stick with that job you hate, because at least you’re making enough money to survive.

The comfortable discomfort is the pot of water that is getting hotter and hotter. You feel uncomfortable, but you stay in the pot because its familiar, until…

One day you realize that you aren’t all that happy and you want to get out of that pot. You want something different, but it feels so familiar as well, so you stay, because its comfortable even as its uncomfortable.

It’s a contradiction!

I’m not a fan of the comfortable discomfort, but I’ve definitely inhabited the comfortable discomfort at different points of my life. What I have learned is that when I settle for the comfortable discomfort it keeps a vital part of me small and unhappy. That part of me will grouse and complain and itch to change something. The rest of me will try to justify why whatever the current situation is better than doing what I really ought to do, which is make some changes in my life.

This is a pattern of behavior. We stick with patterns we know because they are familiar, even when it can cost us a lot to do so.

One of the spiritual practices that a witch or magicians needs to learn is a practice of inner alchemy or what some people will call shadow work. An inner alchemical shadow work practice allows you to discover all the unconscious patterns of behavior that show up in your life. These patterns of behavior are usually safety mechanisms and survival behaviors you learned early on as a way to help you navigate through times. They may also be epigenetic shadows carried on from your ancestors trauma.

These patterns of behavior can often define our experiences in ways we don’t realize, so that we find ourselves unknowingly repeating them in our lives. When this happens, the shadow shows up. More importantly, you may find yourself in an all too familiar space - the comfortable discomfort, which will feel like the same old, same old.

Discover how easy meditation can be

If you’ve ever felt like you can’t meditate or you’re doing it wrong, this e-book is for you. In it you’ll learn:

• What’s really stopping you from meditation (it’s not you!).

• How to make meditation easier to apply to your life and have meaningful experiences.

• 5 simple meditation practices you can learn today that will show you results.

Many people will try different ways to change their behaviors and get out of the comfortable discomfort. They’ll try to adopt a new habit or they’ll try to abstain from an addiction. Often they’ll apply their willpower to making this change and for a short time it will work.

Until it doesn’t work.

You’ve likely had this experience where you’ve committed to making a change in your life and within a short period of time you’re back in the vagueness of the comfortable discomfort, back to your usual routines and habits, because it’s what you know, it’s easy and even though it’s uncomfortable, it has the comfort of what you know.

That’s why new years resolutions are such a joke.

The problem is that you’re trying to make a change on the behavioral level and force it into place with a limited resource, your will power, in the hopes that it will be enough. And usually it isn’t. In fact, I can’t recall a time in my life where this has ever worked, but it is often touted as the solution in so many self help books.

Short term efforts lead to short term impacts. If you truly want to change something in your life you need to take a different approach.

An Example from my Life

A few years ago I was lost. I had a home I lived in, but I didn’t really know anyone in the town I lived. I worked at a job during the day and I door dashed at night. I was stewing in a place of unhappiness and misery, and yet it felt comfortable. I also have to admit that in some ways I needed to be in that space because I had hit bottom in my life. I had lost relationships, my confidence and a lot more because of choices I had made.

I already that making short term changes wasn’t enough. I also knew impulsively leaping into yet another relationship would only be a short term distraction. So I worked during the day and door dashed at night and did a lot of thinking about my life. I didn’t have a solution though. I just had a better sense of how alone I felt. I was adrift.

One evening I had just gotten home from dashing. I was tired and hungry and feeling really unmoored. My room mate at the time asked me if I could give her a few minutes after I ate and I nodded my head.

After I finished eating, I joined her in a room that I called my sanctuary. It was my dedicated magical space, but I wasn’t doing a lot of magic then. We both sat on the floor and she pulled out one of my note books and flipped to an empty page. She drew a triangle and she labeled the the three corners. One corner was labeled home, another was labeled employment and another was labeled relationships.

She then shared that she was worried about me. She saw how unhappy I was and she shared that she didn’t think my routine was working for me.

“There’s more to life than just working and you’re not even happy with the work you’re doing.”

She wasn’t wrong.

“The only thing keeping you here is the house you’ve bought. You don’t have any roots or a sense of connection to anyone.”

She was right about that too.

She told me she was planning on leaving soon and she wanted to make sure I was going to be okay. It was a moment of clarity that helped me realized that what I really needed to change involved pushing myself out of the comfortable discomfort I was in. So I did something important: I finally went to a martial arts studio and started taking classes. I was truly uncomfortable initially, but then I discovered I was happier. I started to make connections with other people and truly build a life.

I continued pushing myself to go out and do other activities I had put on hold for way too long in my life. I started going to concerts, open mic nights, dancing, and a variety of other activities that brought me into contact with that part of myself that had been agitating for a change.

These weren’t just behavioral changes. They went deeper than that. They had to go deeper in order for me to push myself into a new state of being. They were changes I was making on the identity level.

I claimed the identity of being a martial artist and changed my life in the process. I started going to a school, learning kung fu and in the process making friends, because I pushed myself out of the comfortable discomfort and stretched myself to become a different person.

Oh, you might have noticed I haven’t written much about magic rituals in this article. This wasn’t something magic could solved. I had to be willing to change who I was on an internal level and bring that in the reality around me.

It’s the power of changing your relationship from the inside out. You change who you are on the inside and it translates to how you relate to the world around you. I went to martial arts, joined a men’s circle and put myself out into the world and it changed my reality. Suddenly I was meeting more people and expanding my horizons beyond what I knew and so my relationship with reality changed.

Of course, there are techniques you can use to help you with this process. I share some of them in Meditation Mastery 2, where I walk you through how to turn your inner fears and doubts into allies and show you how to dissolve tension with your breath. Techniques are good to know, but the real application happens when you actively change the way you live your life.

✨ Ways to Support the Fire ✨

Our hearth grows brighter when you add your spark. Here’s how you can weave your magic with ours:

🔥 Comment & Share — Your questions, stories, and reflections feed the field. Passing our posts along brings new voices and Experimenters into our community.

🔥 Join Our Communal Wealth Experiment — Contribute to Abundantia our Magical Experiments Community Wealth Spirit, a current of joyful reciprocity that fuels our work, delightfully returns to you, and ripples blessings back into our wider community.

🔥 Subscribe & Journey Deeper — Paid subscriptions aren’t about paywalls; they’re about connection. Subscribers receive discounts on classes, events, and offerings, and are invited into the monthly Alchemy Lab to experiment live with us.

Your support also helps us with:

• Books and research materials

• Time reserved for writing and editing

• Magical experimentation and development

• Photography, website expenses, original art, or production materials

• A portion of ordinary living expenses that makes the writing possible

Every act of attention, energy, and reciprocity keeps this experiment alive. Thank you for tending the fire with us

Cutting Up Reality - How words and art can become powerful spells

I’ve always been a writer and an artist. I started writing when I was a pre-teen and I started painting when I was 18. Writing and art are essential mediums of expression for me and one of the main ways I weave my magical workings.

I first became inspired to experiment with writing and art as a result of taking a class in college on the writing of William S. Burroughs. At the time I had been practicing magic for a few years and had just started learning about chaos magic. As I read his various books, I began to see the underlying occult themes and it inspired me to apply his practices to my writing and art.

What I discovered as a result is that I could create powerful magic without the usual ritual rigamarole and this allowed me to downsize my magical tool box significantly. You can do the same. And it doesn’t mean that you have to get rid of everything altogether, but you may discover a potent route for magical work that comes through your creativity.

What Burroughs really inspired me to recognize is that it is possible to cut-up reality. Reality isn’t a seamless container or experience. It offers us a rich and multi-faceted experience AND there are cracks in reality that can be explored, discovered and played with through the different mediums of expression that are available to all of us.

What might stop you from applying art and writing to magic

If you’ve ever had the thought that you’re not an artist or a writer or you’ve had a limiting belief that what you put out there isn’t artistic enough, that will get in the way of applying art and writing to magic.

And here’s the truth: You don’t have to be an award winning author or professional artist to apply your creativity to magic.

Give yourself permission to:

• pick up the paint brush, crayon, colored pencil, pen, etc., and work with it as a magical tool.

• treat your creative activities as sacred acts of magic that can change reality.

• know that perfection isn’t the aim, but connecting with the possibilities of reality is.

Something that I learned from the class on Burroughs was that the writing didn’t have to be good (a lot of his wasn’t good); it just had to be something that could invite you in to discovering the possibilities.

Writing, art, music and other creative activities are inherently magical. They invite us into discovering both our inner potential and the possibilities that await in reality. If we treat reality as an immutable and unchangeable experience we are doing ourselves a disfavor. If, on the other hand, we use our creative imagination as an extension of our magical practice, we can create powerful magic with our artistic skills!

Free Guide: Why your Spells Don’t Stick – 5 critical mistakes blocking your magic

You aren’t getting the results you want.

And trying to figure out what isn’t working with your magic feels intimidating because there’s so much to track.

Let’s make this easier for you.

Stop guessing and start taking action with our FREE guide - Why Your Spells Don’t Stick.

One Practice you can apply today to create magical writing and art

Getting started with applying your magic to your creative pursuits isn’t too complicated. If you already have your supplies in the form of artistic materials, pen and paper, scissors, etc., you already have your magical tools. The following three practices can help get started on the actual application.

Practice 1: Create a Collage Sigil

One the aspects of Burroughs writing and magical practice that stood out to me was how he applied artistic collage techniques to writing. He would cut up a magazine page into 4 sections and then splice the sentences from one section with another section to create a new narrative.

I’ll admit I found some of that writing hard to read, but that was actually the point. What Burroughs was doing was showing how writing could be used to either program someone’s experience or break them free of conformative experience through the writing. By cutting up writing, what Burroughs doing was breaking the original message and its hold on the consciousness of the reader.

I took this practice in a different direction. I created a collage sigil using the cut-up methodology to cut away the original meanings from both words and images and then reorganizing them around a central theme of my own.

You can do the same practice:

1. Choose a theme to use as the base of the collage…this is the intent of the sigil.

2. Next, take some newspapers, magazines, mail, and other print media as well as some of your own writing cut it up with a pair of scissors. You’ll want to cut the words and images that call to you.

3. Grab some glue and paste the words and images together to form new messages. They don’t have to make sense or be complete sentences. They just need to be relevant to what you are creating.

4. Hang the collage sigil on the wall, where you can see it, so that it embeds its messages in you…that becomes the firing mechanism for the magic.

This practice combines your art and magic together. In a future post, I’ll share some other ways you can apply writing and art to your magical practice, but give this one a try and see what you come up with.

In magically perfect space and time,

Taylor

P.S. I’ve written 2 books about my magical practices for art and writing.

The Magic of Art walks you through how to turn your art into magical workings.

Get it in paperback here and e-book here.

The Magic of Writing walks you through how to turn your writing into magical workings.

Get it in paperback here and e-book here.

Each book comes with exercises and practices like the one I shared here that show you how to change reality through your writing and art.

✨ Ways to Support the Fire ✨

Our hearth grows brighter when you add your spark. Here’s how you can weave your magic with ours:

🔥 Comment & Share — Your questions, stories, and reflections feed the field. Passing our posts along brings new voices and Experimenters into our community.

🔥 Join Our Communal Wealth Experiment — Contribute to Abundantia our Magical Experiments Community Wealth Spirit, a current of joyful reciprocity that fuels our work, delightfully returns to you, and ripples blessings back into our wider community.

🔥 Subscribe & Journey Deeper — Paid subscriptions aren’t about paywalls; they’re about connection. Subscribers receive discounts on classes, events, and offerings, and are invited into the monthly Alchemy Lab to experiment live with us.

Your support also helps us with:

• Books and research materials

• Time reserved for writing and editing

• Magical experimentation and development

• Photography, website expenses, original art, or production materials

• A portion of ordinary living expenses that makes the writing possible

Every act of attention, energy, and reciprocity keeps this experiment alive. Thank you for tending the fire with us.

Constructing Magical Space as a Praxis

One of the ways I continue to experiment with magic involves studying non-occult disciplines to discover what insights they can provide that I can apply to magic. For the last 7 years, I’ve been studying principles of architectural and interior design and spatial studies with a question - How can I use these principles to help me create better energetic flow and ritual space in my magical workings?

Questions like these are what lead me to books like Christopher Alexander’s Process of Life series where he asks a similar question - Can the process of creating buildings be done in an organic way that encourages a deeper appreciation of life?

At the heart of each of these questions is a desire to collaborate with and connect to the spirit of a given space. Reading Alexander’s series helped me revise my spirit work modalities by recognizing that a space is a spirit. We often associate spirits as otherworldly, but sometimes the spirit is the space you are in or traveling toward.

Another book I read, Welcome to your World by Sarah Goldhagen, provided a similar perspective in terms of the design of the environment, and spoke to how you can make an environment more dynamic and alive through the purposeful design.

Now when I walk in to a space or I decide to create a ritual, I look at the aesthetic and design and consider how I can include in my experience. In this article, I’m going to walk you through how you can intentionally work with a space to create a more powerful experience with your magic.

Welcome to Magical Experiments

The community for occultists, pagans, magicians and psychics who want to explore the evolution of magic and get better results.

3 practices for work with space as an active element of your magical practice

Practice 1: Tune into the space to understand how it lands in your body

Do you ever enter a room or house and feel as sense of tension or deep relaxation? Each space has its own energy and presence. Part of that energy and presence is defined by how the space is designed. Part of it is your response to the space.

What feels comfortable for one person, won’t necessarily feel the same for someone else, so its important to recognize how the response to a given space is subjective. Nonetheless, there are principles of design that can help shape the experience.

For example, take a pause from this article and look around the space you are in.

How is the furniture set up?

Where is the art located?

What else is in that space that stands out to you?

Unless you are outside (and maybe even then) you are in a designed space. That design creates your experience. You may or may not be able to change that design, but you can ask yourself what it is about that space that you like or don’t like and then take that awareness and apply to it your own space.

You can also extend this further. How would you take a given space and design it to enhance your magical spells and experience?

We’re going to explore that question with the next two practices below…

Discover how easy meditation can be

If you’ve ever felt like you can’t meditate or you’re doing it wrong, this e-book is for you. In it you’ll learn:

• What’s really stopping you from meditation (it’s not you!).

• How to make meditation easier to apply to your life and have meaningful experiences.

• 5 simple meditation practices you can learn today that will show you results.

Practice 2: Embrace working with all of your space

I want you to once again look at the space you are in. When you think about designing that space, whether it’s to create a ritual space or use it for some other purpose, what do you initially focus on?

I don’t know your answer, but my answer is the walls.

I think about what will go on the walls to make that space come alive. A blank wall feels empty. That can be useful to work with, as an awareness practice, but when I think of a designed space, I ask myself how I can design the space to simultaneously become a magical space and be reflective of my aesthetic and experience.

I don’t stop there though.

Another consideration I apply is how I’ll navigate that space. Movement is intimately tied to space, so the way a space is designed will shape the movement patterns you have access to. Movement can happen many different ways and can play a powerful role in your magical spells and workings when it’s incorporated purposely. I’ll share more about this in a later article.

This brings me to the next practice though and it can be a game changer.

Practice 3: Your space is a temple with many walls

Something that blew my mind when I read Welcome to your World was the idea of working with the ceiling of a room. I had never thought about the ceiling of a room as a design choice, but it can be!

In my bedroom and in my office, I have placed art on the ceiling of the room. I made this choice because I realized there was a dimension of the spaces I was in that I wasn’t connecting with in a meaningful way. I also realized I could use that same dimension to help create the magical atmosphere of my ritual space.

I tacked paintings on the ceiling to create the magical atmosphere that I wanted to work in. I treated is as an exercise in deliberately creating ritual space using all of the environment as part of the process. It changed my rituals because it added something extra to the space.

Look at your own space. What aren’t you using in that space that could be worked with?

One of the ways we can empower our magic involves also empowering how we collaborate with the environment around us.

Closing Thoughts

Anyone who has studied my work for a long enough time knows that I’m fascinated with the application of non occult disciplines to magical practice. What I find in various non occult practices is a perspective that provides a different angle for magical practice, and can create innovative processes and solutions.

In the case of studying these books on architecture, what I’ve come away with is a better awareness of how to appreciate and work with a given environment, whether it’s constructed or natural. I hope, in reading this article and applying the practices that you’ve come away with a similar appreciation.

In perfectly magical space and time,

Taylor

P.S. If you want more practical suggestions and ideas for how to work with space as an intentional element of your magical practice, then you’ll want to check out my class Space/Time Magic, where I show you how to work with space and time as practical elements of magic that help you get results.

✨ Ways to Support the Fire ✨

Our hearth grows brighter when you add your spark. Here’s how you can weave your magic with ours:

🔥 Comment & Share — Your questions, stories, and reflections feed the field. Passing our posts along brings new voices and Experimenters into our community.

🔥 Join Our Communal Wealth Experiment — Contribute to Abundantia our Magical Experiments Community Wealth Spirit, a current of joyful reciprocity that fuels our work, delightfully returns to you, and ripples blessings back into our wider community.

🔥 Subscribe & Journey Deeper — Paid subscriptions aren’t about paywalls; they’re about connection. Subscribers receive discounts on classes, events, and offerings, and are invited into the monthly Alchemy Lab to experiment live with us.

Your support also helps us with:

• Books and research materials

• Time reserved for writing and editing

• Magical experimentation and development

• Photography, website expenses, original art, or production materials

• A portion of ordinary living expenses that makes the writing possible

Every act of attention, energy, and reciprocity keeps this experiment alive. Thank you for tending the fire with us.

The ask for help spell

One of the most powerful and under utilized spells in the world is the ask for help spell. In this world of rugged individualism the default is to try and figure everything out yourself. That only gets you so far, and often not far enough. Yet many people will resist asking for help, thinking it’s a weakness, when in fact it is a strength.

I could share a number of reasons why this is so hard, but what I really want to share with you is how asking for help can transform your life and open the doors of possibility.

Before we get to that though I want you to imagine that you’re in a grocery store. You’re looking for something particular, but no matter how much you look you can’t find it. You see a grocery store clerk nearby, but you don’t ask for help.

How much time would you save if you asked the grocery store clerk to help you?

How much energy, thought and emotion would be freed up if you got help and found that item you were looking for?

This is a simple example, yet most people won’t ask for help in the grocery store, determined to find that one item on their own, even though there are people working at the store who can easily help and in the process save some time and energy for more important things.

Welcome to Magical Experiments

The community for occultists, pagans, magicians and psychics who want to explore the evolution of magic and get better results.

The power of help

Help is a magical experience. If I ask for help a number of things can happen:

• I can get the result I needed to ask help for.

• I get witnessed by someone else.

• I give someone the opportunity to be of service to me.

And I can also help other people. Help is an expansion of abundance and generosity. When I help someone else a number of things can happen:

• I feel a connection with the person I helped.

• I experience the generosity of giving and being of service.

• I support another person in a moment where they needed something.

The giving and receiving of help doesn’t have to be earth shattering. It often isn’t. The challenge for more people is asking for and receiving help. It often feels more comfortable to give help, whereas asking for help…that feels vulnerable, even though, if anything asking for help is a sign of strength.

Asking for help feels so vulnerable because we’re admitting that we don’t have it all figured out. We’re admitting that we can’t do something on our own. And in a hyper individualistic society, the emphasis is having it all figured because there’s a deep seated distrust of other people embedded in the individualism.

Yet here’s something to really consider: Every time you cast a magical spell or do a spirit working, you are asking for help.

I get that you might not frame it that way. Many people won’t. A lot of people practice magic because they want a sense of control over their environment. They want to call in results that transform life on their terms. But if you practice magic long enough you invariably discover that magic happens on its own terms. It will often bring in unexpected variables and synchronicities and other strangeness that demonstrates that the result happens in a way that calls for you to receive it outside of your expectations and need to be in control.

If we look at magic from the perspective of asking for help it opens up some very interesting possibilities that can be worked with, and open some fascinating doors into new realities.

Free Guide: Why your Spells Don’t Stick – 5 critical mistakes blocking your magic

You aren’t getting the results you want.

And trying to figure out what isn’t working with your magic feels intimidating because there’s so much to track.

Let’s make this easier for you.

Stop guessing and start taking action with our FREE guide - Why Your Spells Don’t Stick.

The Ask for Help Spell - an Experiment in Manifestation

I journal everyday, but not in the way you might think. My journal is a series of sentence prompts. One example is: “The story I’m telling myself today is…” I write out the story of the day. It’s a hypersigil for the day, with the story crafted in one or two sentences to shape my identity for that day.

At the end of July I added a new prompt, I need help with. I was inspired to add it because I realized that I needed help with asking for help and I figured I’d start by writing down what I needed help with. I’m glad I did, because it became a spell in its own right.

Each day I write something I need help with. Sometimes I need help with writing emails or learning a technology. Sometimes I need help with my home or having a difficult conversation. Whatever it is I need help with, I write it out. The act of writing it is an acknowledgement I need and it strengthens my ability to ask for that help.

But here’s where things have gotten interesting…

I started this experiment and I have had help show up, often without me asking for it directly. For instance, my neighbor recently offered to prune a set of bushes in my yard. I needed help with that bush and I knew something needed to be done about it. He offered to take care of it for me, and then came over with a friend and pruned the bush, for free. It made him happy to do it, for a couple different reasons and I got to practice receiving.

When I made the decision to make a room in my house an Air Bnb room, I got more help. My Sifu came over one day and took a look at my house and made some recommendations to me about how I could take better care of the house. He’s got an extensive background construction so I took in everything he shared and appreciated the advice and help.

I have gotten help in some other areas of my life. Opportunities have shown up, seemingly out of the blue, linked to what I’m asking for help around. And each time the help has arrived I’ve found myself marveling at what comes my way and how it shows up.

This is profoundly simple magic. You don’t have to burn a candle, incense or do a ritual at an appointed time. There’s no need to cast a circle, dress up in witchy bling or call on spirits.

All you have to do is write a sentence each day expressing what you need help with. And then let it go and let the help come in.

Now some of you will be tempted to skip doing this. It’s too easy, you might think or too simple, but asking for help isn’t that easy, or simple. It really does require a flex of yourself and an acknowledgement that you need help.

Yet it really will strengthen you and your connection with magic.

Ask for help and let yourself receive all the strange and wonderful ways it can happen.

In perfectly magical space and time,

Taylor

P.S. If you found this article helpful, I have a book The Magic of Writing, which explores how to work with writing as a magical process and spell weaving for creating realities.

You can get it as a paperback or an e-book, directly from me, or online retailers.

Want to actually do this, not just read about it?

How Magic Works is where I teach how to take a desire from intent to an actual result, step by step. Start the class →

Not ready to buy anything? Why Your Spells Don't Stick is a free guide to the most common reasons a working stalls, and where to start fixing it.

If you want help with a specific situation, work with me one to one.

Meta-programming Sigils: How to make multi-functional Sigils

The classic chaos magic approach to sigil magic assigns one purpose or function to a given sigil. You come up with a statement of desire and you convert that statement into a symbol that represents the desire. You then charge and fire the sigil and proceed to forget about it and get on with your life.

It’s a cut and dried process that works fairly well.

I’ve come up with variations for this type of sigil magic including:

• Banishing the sigil through detachment by making it become part of your background.

• Creating multiple sigils and connecting them together so when one manifests, it pulls the others into reality.

• And sigil webs where you create a life map using sigils to represent your habits, desires, people, events etc.

I share these techniques (and more) in my class Ultimate Sigil Magic.

However, as with any given magical practice or technique there is an opportunity to continually evolve and transform your understanding, so you can do more with the technique. A couple years back my friend Stephanie Connolly Reisner shared some thoughts on how sigils could become programming symbols1. At the time I was reading Robert Podgurski’s book The Sacred Alignments and Sigils, which explores how to use sigil grids for magical purposes. I immediately found a corollary with his work, my experiments with sigils and the concept Stephanie shared about sigils being a programming statement.

Welcome to Magical Experiments

The community for occultists, pagans, magicians and psychics who want to explore the evolution of magic and get better results

The benefit of applying a programmer mindset to sigils and spells

Before we go into how to meta-program sigils so they perform multiple functions, let’s take a moment to consider the advantages of applying programming as a discipline. Even if you’re not familiar with programming, the basic concept of it is easily applicable to magic.

If x happens, then Y occurs.

Essentially a programming statement describes the logic of how a program ought to work and what actions will occur when the code is activated. Let’s apply that same understanding to magic.

When the steps of a spell are performed, what we’re doing is programming reality with the spell. We’re saying if this action happens, a response will occur that brings the desired result into alignment. Take a look at any spell or practical magic technique and that’s what you’ll see at work on the information level of the spell. That information level directs the energetic aspects of the spell work and activates the underlying principles that makes the magic work.

One of the benefits of treating a magical spell as a form of programming is that it allows you to adopt an approach to magic where the spell can be revised. It has never made sense to me that a magic working would be static and unchanging once the magician has cast the spell, done the ritual, and jumped through whatever other hoops they feel they have to jump through. I treat a given magical working as programming, which means I can refine it, edit it, and change it as needed in order to help me accomplish my desired outcome.

If the spell isn’t initially creating the outcome I want, I don’t write it off as a failed spell. I get curious about why it’s not working, and because I treat the spell as a program, I can go in and edit the spell, making whatever changes are needed to get it back on track and performing the way its supposed to perform.

Free Guide: Why your Spells Don’t Stick – 5 critical mistakes blocking your magic

You aren’t getting the results you want.

And trying to figure out what isn’t working with your magic feels intimidating because there’s so much to track.

Let’s make this easier for you.

Stop guessing and start taking action with our FREE guide - Why Your Spells Don’t Stick.

Sigils as multi-functional logic statements

Let’s bring this back to sigils. A sigil contains the information that is put into it. It also describes the process for how a result will become manifested into reality, through semiotic, memetic and subconscious alignment. It’s programming you AND reality to connect and create the result.

A sigil is usually programmed to focus on one goal, one desired result. You can get around this by creating multiple sigils, but there is another way, which is to treat your sigil as a multi-functional logic statement. In other words, the sigil is setup to activate specific actions when specific conditions are met.

You can use this approach to design a sigil which works as a long term magical working. The sigil is set up as a staged process that manifests specific elements of the result within a specific order. As the result is achieved, the next level of the sigil is activated. This creates a sequential path of manifestation that the sigil uses to manifest the overall result. It also cuts down on resistance, both internal and external, because the sigil is designed to use micro results.

A practice example of this can be creating a sigil to help you get more clients. The sigil multiplies on itself with each client you bring in. Each client is treated as a micro-result that recursively feeds back into the sigil working, multiplying the effect. Instead of treating the sigil as an end statement, we treat it as an open looped iterative working that generates further results.

✨ Ways to Support the Fire ✨

Our hearth grows brighter when you add your spark. Here’s how you can weave your magic with ours:

🔥 Comment & Share — Your questions, stories, and reflections feed the field. Passing our posts along brings new voices and Experimenters into our community.

🔥 Join Our Communal Wealth Experiment — Contribute to Abundantia our Magical Experiments Community Wealth Spirit, a current of joyful reciprocity that fuels our work, delightfully returns to you, and ripples blessings back into our wider community.

Every act of attention, energy, and reciprocity keeps this experiment alive. Thank you for tending the fire with us.

Want to actually do this, not just read about it?

How Magic Works is where I teach how to take a desire from intent to an actual result, step by step. Start the class →

Not ready to buy anything? Why Your Spells Don't Stick is a free guide to the most common reasons a working stalls, and where to start fixing it.

If you want help with a specific situation, work with me one to one.

Get More with Less: An Introduction to Low Effort Magic

You ever feel like you put more effort into magic than you get back in terms of a result?

That’s the question at the heart of Low Effort Magic.

Recently I shared a statement about low effort on one of my substack notes. One person wrote back “Low effort provides “minimal” results?”

I can see why they wrote that question. We’ve been conditioned to believe that more is better and more effort produces better results. It is a capitalistic virtue signaling about effort that spills over in other areas of our lives and leaves us exerting more effort than may be required.

I’ve worked hard at different times in my life and I’ve worked smart as well.

Smart usually leads to less effort, at least down the line. Hard work, despite being touted as a virtue, is really just a grind that benefits the company or people you’re working for far more than it benefits you. If you think about it, its in their interest to get more effort from you, while putting less effort in on their end. They put in less effort and get more out of you, and you are left with the dregs.

Lately, I’ve been putting a lot of time into creating foundational systems that support magical experiments as a spiritual business. Some of this work has focused on technology, but some of it also focusing on connection and asking for help. What I’m discovering is that there may be some upfront investment of time and effort, but once I have the system in place, I’m putting less effort in overall and it’s freeing up more time for my creativity and experiments.

Less is more, when you understand how to apply it as a principle to your life and your doings.

I’m a believer in working less and enjoying life more and so it should be no surprise that even in regards to magic I’ve looked for different ways to work less and get more as a result.

Welcome to Magical Experiments

The community for occultists, pagans, magicians and psychics who want to explore the evolution of magic and get better results.

What direction do you want your magic to go in?

You have a choice with magic.

You can do the elaborate over the top rituals and put tons of effort into them. Or you can take an approach to magic that strips out the needless complexity and focuses on what is essential to make the magic happen. I prefer the latter approach.

Yet, at one time, in the early years of my magical practice, I did the elaborate magical rituals, complete with ceremonial robes, tools I crafted myself, and the hours of prep work put in to set the ritual up and execute it. Along the way I realized that most people don’t have the luxury of time and means to approach magic in that way. That’s what initially got me into chaos magic, because that particular system encouraged letting go of elaborate rituals for a more streamlined approach to magic.

When I took this approach magic became less about the performance of a ritual and more about the experience of the magic showing up in my life. I started appreciated how nuanced magic could be and how simple the practice of it could be. I could invite the complexity of magic into my life without making it complicated.

Take a moment and look at your own magical practice.

What’s working for you?

What isn’t working for you?

Write down your answers and be honest with yourself. This isn’t about how other people practice magic. This is about getting real about what works for you and what doesn’t, so you can claim your magic cleanly and clearly.

Often what isn’t working are the activities we do that we don’t fully grasp or understand. Set them aside. You can always return to them later and the experience you get in the meantime will undoubtedly inform what you discover and do as a result.

Free Guide: Why your Spells Don’t Stick – 5 critical mistakes blocking your magic

You aren’t getting the results you want.

And trying to figure out what isn’t working with your magic feels intimidating because there’s so much to track.

Let’s make this easier for you.

Stop guessing and start taking action with our FREE guide - Why Your Spells Don’t Stick.

Coming back to low effort

One of the books that has played a pivotal role in my life is Good to Great by Jim Collins. It’s a business book that explores what it takes to make a business great. I’ve drawn on it for inspiration magically because it shares a principle that I have recognized applies across multiple vectors of life.

That principle is the Flywheel principle.

If you push a flywheel the first few times it takes a lot of effort to push it, but at some point all that effort takes on a momentum of its own. You don’t have to exert a lot of effort at that point. You just need enough to keep the flywheel going.

The mistake I see many people make (and I’ve made it too) is putting a perceived valuation on the effort you put into making something happen.

More effort = good, whereas less effort = bad or not good enough.

Some effort is required with any endeavor, magical or otherwise, but more effort can be exhausting at a certain point and not necessarily yield a better result than what you would get if you were to use the least amount of effort to get the most amount of return.

The best way I can illustrate this is the myth of Sisyphus.

Here is a very smart man who has been punished by the gods to roll a boulder up a hill. Just as he gets close to the top, the boulder rolls down and he has to start all over again. The surface level lesson is that mortals shouldn’t try to trick the gods or they’ll be punished. The deeper lesson is that putting all your effort into making something happen can actually be an exercise in futility under the right circumstances.

Neither lesson is all that encouraging, is it?

One of the reasons I developed low effort magic is because I realized that feeling exhausted with magic, or anything else isn’t a virtue. It’s just exhausting. You can work hard, magic hard, and there can be a better way to do all of that, a way that demands less of you and brings in better results.

Effort produces byproduct. Heat is an example of byproduct. For that matter so is feces. Yet byproduct is an effort as well. Byproduct has its own value. Heat can warm us on a cold day. Feces remove the waste from our bodies, keeping us healthy in the process. So does effort produce byproduct or are we looking at byproduct and effort in the wrong way?

Low effort magic operates on the principle of using what is already happening as part of the magical operation. You can put more effort in if you want, but you could also work with what is already happening and make it part of the magical experience.

The lesson low effort magic teaches

If there’s a lesson to be taken away, it’s this: Your energy, and attention is finite. You don’t have to do a complicated ritual to get effective results.

Low effort magic encourages you to get creative about doing more with less, and to use the byproduct of your actions to fuel your magical work. When you take this approach, you’ll look for magic in the moment using what’s on hand. The benefit is you aren’t limited to a specific time of day or having the right materials. You work the magic with what you have on hand.

For example, your toothbrush can become a wand of purification. Each time you brush your teeth, you can turn it into a magical action. And chances are you brush your teeth multiple times of day. You’re using what you’re already doing as part of your spell work. It’s low effort and it works.

Add low effort magic to your toolkit

In the Low Effort Magic masterclass you’ll learn:

• How to use every day actions and habits to empower your spells.

• How let go of complex rituals in favor of working with what you have available to you.

• How to get results by creating spells that work with the path of least resistance to create consistent outcomes.

I’ve taught this unique approach to hundreds of magicians and its changed the way they practice magic.

Want to actually do this, not just read about it?

How Magic Works is where I teach how to take a desire from intent to an actual result, step by step. Start the class →

Not ready to buy anything? Why Your Spells Don't Stick is a free guide to the most common reasons a working stalls, and where to start fixing it.

If you want help with a specific situation, work with me one to one.

Fall Equinox Tarot Spread

Fall Equinox Tarot Spread - picture copyright Taylor Ellwood

I felt inspired by yesterday’s Tarot draw and decided to come up with a Equinox spread that you can to help you get prepped for the rest of the year, as well as to get some foresight into what’s coming your way in 2027. The picture above is an example of the spread but let me walk you through it.

The Root card is you/the situation going into the equinox.

The 4 cards above represent the last quarter of the year and the outcome that awaits you as you activate and work through the process of transition from summer to fall (or winter to spring)

The 3 cards above give you a glimpse of the next year, just enough to help you see the possible emergent patterns so you can beginning planning for that year.

The final card above is where you are going or what you are maturing into as a result of this transition.

In the example of the spread we have the daughter of cups as the root card, which shows the person in a stage of growth and curiosity.

The Ace of Wands, Two of Cups, Chariot and 4 of Pentacles shows the themes of the next quarter of the year. There is a call to focus, to enjoy the romance, to continue on the journey while working on the foundation.

The three cards above the 4 offer a glimpse of 2027. There is the Judgement card, the Ace of Swords and the Fool. They speak to a simultaneous need for discernment while taking calculated risks and being willing to wander into the unknown.

The Evolution card, what the person is transitioning toward, is the the Father of Cups. This speaks to the possible changes that the person can go through if they approach the transition of the equinox with purpose and apply it to the next few months.

I did this reading for myself, as part of the experiment of developing the spread. With that said the idea behind the spread is that it provides you some specific direction in the near term of the next quarter, and also shows you what could come your way further down the line. If you try it, let me know how it lands with you.

✨ Ways to Support the Fire ✨

Our hearth grows brighter when you add your spark. Here’s how you can weave your magic with ours:

🔥 Comment & Share — Your questions, stories, and reflections feed the field. Passing our posts along brings new voices and Experimenters into our community.

🔥 Join Our Communal Wealth Experiment — Contribute to Abundantia our Magical Experiments Community Wealth Spirit, a current of joyful reciprocity that fuels our work, delightfully returns to you, and ripples blessings back into our wider community.

🔥 Subscribe & Journey Deeper — Paid subscriptions aren’t about paywalls; they’re about connection. Subscribers receive discounts on classes, events, and offerings, and are invited into the monthly Alchemy Lab to experiment live with us.

Every act of attention, energy, and reciprocity keeps this experiment alive. Thank you for tending the fire with us.

A Tarot Spread for Mapping your Desires

I recently developed the Desire Alchemy Tarot Spread. This is a tarot spread that you can use to help you identify a desire you have as well as what is blocking that desire from manifesting.

Welcome to Magical Experiments

The community for occultists, pagans, magicians and psychics who want to explore the evolution of magic and get better results.

The picture above shows an example of the spread. I’m going to walk you through how the basics of the spread so you can try it out with your own divination reading.

Center card - Your desire

Card across the center card - What’s blocking your desire.

Card below desire card - the Unconscious motivation for your desire.

Card to the left of the desire - Your hope for the desire.

Card to the right of the desire - Your fear of achieving the desire

Left and right card above desire - The actions you need to take to turn your desire into a result

Outcome card at the top - what the result can be if you take action.

The Divination of Desire

Most of the time people get divination readings because they want to explore the possibilities and opportunities that are available to them or figure out how to respond to a situation.

But sometimes the best read is where you explore what you want, and why you aren’t getting it. I designed this spread to help you do exactly that.

Pick out a desire, something you’ve wanted, but never quite gotten. You’ll do a reading about this desire to find out what’s really stopping you from turning it into a reality.

This spread helps you discover the internal and external blockers that are preventing your desire from manifesting. Once you understand what’s getting in your way, the spread will also show you what actions you need to take to resolve the blocks and create the results.

Article continues below…

Free Guide: Why your Spells Don’t Stick – 5 critical mistakes blocking your magic

You aren’t getting the results you want.

And trying to figure out what isn’t working with your magic feels intimidating because there’s so much to track.

Let’s make this easier for you.

Stop guessing and start taking action with our FREE guide - Why Your Spells Don’t Stick.

A practical example of how it works

In the picture above, the Sun card is the Desire.

Lying on top of it is 7 of Wands, a feeling of being overwhelmed and taking on too much, which is obscuring your light.

Below it is the 5 of wands, which is an unconscious motivation of feeling scattered and trying to get multiple projects done.

The card to the left of The Sun is the Wheel of Fortune, which shows the hope that you’ll finally achieve success.

The card to the Right of The Sun is the 5 of Pentacles, which is a fear of being successful and the grief carried around not reach success.

The left and right cards above Desire card show you how to resolve the block. In this case we have the four of Wands on the left, which suggests laying down some of the wands so you can focus on the task at hand. The card on the right is the four of cups and it shows the importance of allowing the grief to come through and be expressed instead of suppressing it. This is how the lessons are learned.

Then we have the outcome card, which is the 7 of pentacles. This shows that your efforts will start producing results if you do do the work of focusing and releasing. Your desire now has a path to become a reality.

This is an example reading I did. You can use this tarot spread to do your own reading around a desire.

If you want to explore desire alchemy further come join Sheena and I in:

Wanting without Shame - Alchemize your desire into Reality

Join us for our next live class on September 19th at 9:30 AM PST

In Wanting without Shame, we work with desire as magical material.

Desire is not just a personal preference.

Desire is orientation.

It is the current beneath intention, ritual, spellcraft, spirit work, creative work, business, visibility, money, pleasure, devotion, and becoming.

In Wanting Without Shame, we invite you to come play so you can:

• Clarify the desire underneath your magical intentions, instead of casting from obligation, confusion, or “should.”

• Identify the old selves that distort what you think you want: the self other people imagine you to be, the past self still running old spells, the idealized self chasing comparison, and the present self who can actually cast.

• Work with shame, shadow, envy, greed, pride, lust, wrath, sloth, and hunger as information instead of contamination.

• Use Love and Loathe tracking as magical data for your practice, business, relationships, rituals, offerings, and creative life.

• Create Desire Statements that function as magical source code for spellwork, spirit petitions, sigils, business direction, offerings, and life choices.

Turn your desires into reality clearly and cleanly.

✨ Ways to Support the Fire ✨

Our hearth grows brighter when you add your spark. Here’s how you can weave your magic with ours:

🔥 Comment & Share — Your questions, stories, and reflections feed the field. Passing our posts along brings new voices and Experimenters into our community.

🔥 Join Our Communal Wealth Experiment — Contribute to Abundantia our Magical Experiments Community Wealth Spirit, a current of joyful reciprocity that fuels our work, delightfully returns to you, and ripples blessings back into our wider community.

🔥 Subscribe & Journey Deeper — Paid subscriptions aren’t about paywalls; they’re about connection. Subscribers receive discounts on classes, events, and offerings, and are invited into the monthly Alchemy Lab to experiment live with us.

Every act of attention, energy, and reciprocity keeps this experiment alive. Thank you for tending the fire with us.

A conversation about Angels and Demons with Emrys Abner

What if the relationship between angels and demons that we’ve been taught is actually wrong?

That was the question that motivated me to have an interview with my dear friend, Emrys Abner. He’s coming out with a new book in November, The 72 Angels and Demons, where he explores that very question and asks if we can actually work with angels and demons collaboratively at the same time.

In this interview, Emrys and I explore his magical experiments with ceremonial magic and spirit work, specifically around how to work with angels and daemons together. We also explore:

• Emrys work with solomonic pentacles

• How the Psalms can be worked with magically

• A unique exploration of the tree of life.

About Emrys Abner

Emrys Abner is an esoteric author, mystic, and folk musician best known for his work on modern ceremonial magic. He is the author of Solomonic Pentacles and the forthcoming book 72 Angels and Demons.

The Danger of Glamour: A commentary on the cult of personality and why being true to yourself matters

In my Pop Culture Magic series, one of the topics I explored is the danger of the cult of personality. Anyone who has tasted some degree of fame knows this danger and how seductive it can be. When you suddenly have people hanging on your words, looking to you as a teacher and guru, it gives your ego a tremendous shot in the arm. You’re also, magically, a recipient of the incoming energy and attention those people direct toward you.

I have a theory that one of the reasons so many celebrities or other people who experience fame go crazy is because they aren’t energetically equipped to handle the amount of attention being directed their way, or the pressure that comes with trying to live up to an image/persona of who people think you are, versus who you are actually are.

Imagine for example, trying to live up to the image of being a six or seven figure entrepreneur, where you’ve crafted a persona around how much sex you have or the cars you drive or all the other images you create to sell your persona of success, just so you can get people to invest in your classes. You attract people to you, who buy what you offer and now suddenly you’re on the hook. You have to live up to the image and persona you’ve created.

That creates a lot of pressure, especially if your public persona doesn’t match up with your private life. Something I’ve both observed and experienced directly is that it can be all too easy to try and live up to an image and feel like a huge fraud because the image of you is saying one thing and the reality of you is experiencing something else entirely. There can be a deep feeling of shame.

What you may not realize is that your persona has taken on a life of its own.

Your persona becomes a thought form

The persona is a separate identity from your own. It is made up of the thoughts, emotions, belief and energies that other people direct toward you as well as what you’ve put into it. Initially a persona can be useful. It gives you a way to face the world and be larger than life, but the reality is that a persona can also become an egregore, an independent entity that takes on a life of its own, with its own desires and needs.

The persona as an egregore doesn’t have your best interests at heart. You are a tool for it, that happens to have birthed it. Every action you take needs to feed the egregore and the attention and energy people direct you also ultimately goes toward the glamour egregore that you’ve created.

It becomes its own reality and it sucks you into that reality. Incidentally, this doesn’t just apply to celebrities or politicians or other people in the public eye (though its far more obvious there). It applies to anyone who feels like they need to live up to an image of who they think other people want them to be. It can apply to:

• The mom who is always taking care of everyone else in her life.

• The man who feels like he has to be a leader in everything he does.

• The student who thinks they have to get perfect grades.

And I’m sure you can think of a few other examples, perhaps even your own.

The glamour persona egregore can apply to anyone who feels like they are living a double life.

Article continues below, but first

Wanting without Shame - Alchemize your desire into Reality

Join us for our next live class on September 19th at 9:30 AM PST

In Wanting without Shame, we work with desire as magical material.

Desire is not just a personal preference.

Desire is orientation.

It is the current beneath intention, ritual, spellcraft, spirit work, creative work, business, visibility, money, pleasure, devotion, and becoming.

In Wanting Without Shame, we invite you to come play so you can:

• Clarify the desire underneath your magical intentions, instead of casting from obligation, confusion, or “should.”

• Identify the old selves that distort what you think you want: the self other people imagine you to be, the past self still running old spells, the idealized self chasing comparison, and the present self who can actually cast.

• Work with shame, shadow, envy, greed, pride, lust, wrath, sloth, and hunger as information instead of contamination.

• Use Love and Loathe tracking as magical data for your practice, business, relationships, rituals, offerings, and creative life.

• Create Desire Statements that function as magical source code for spellwork, spirit petitions, sigils, business direction, offerings, and life choices.

Turn your desires into reality clearly and cleanly

Who are you, really?

The glamour persona is a magical identity, but it may not be your identity. It’s the mask you put onto to face the world and meet the demands of your day, but it is really you?

Can you take off the mask?

Can you become the person you know yourself to be, when you aren’t wearing the mask?

The danger of the persona is that it can be a larger than life personality that doesn’t fit who you are. You construct it as an opportunity to become something new, with a perception around who you think you ought to be. That has its uses, but when it becomes something you wear to manage the way you handle the world, it also creates a separation because you’re always trying to fill the shoes of this being that you’ve created.

In magical identity work, instead of creating a persona for how you navigate the world, the focus is on picking a result and becoming that result. The difference is subtle, but important. In identity work you don’t create a persona that you use to handle situations, people, or experience. You define your desired result and then you become result. This is a process of transformation that isn’t based on trying to create a lifestyle glamour. Instead it’s based on bringing the result into your life in a meaningful way.

I came up with this approach after making the mistake of trying to craft a persona. I lived in the shadow of my persona and burned out because I was trying to be something that wasn’t real for me. My persona felt exaggerated and unreal and didn’t really match the person I knew I was. In trying to be larger than life, I actually found myself diminished by the persona.

I dismissed the persona I created and rethought my whole approach. I didn’t need to create a larger than life personality. I needed to be myself, but I asked myself if I could be myself and make changes that still lined up with my identity. That’s when I came to recognize that doing magical identity work was a better approach.

I focused on changed my identity from within myself by picking out a result and becoming the result. Becoming the result allowed me to organically accept a new outcome where I became the person who lived that result. I avoided the dangers of persona work in favor of simply choosing to become the result I wanted to live. Here’s a practical exploration of how this can work.

Step 1: Choose your desired result. It should be something that is a stretch for your identity, but also something you want to become. For example, I wanted to own a home, but had always been a renter.

Step 2: Create a practical magic working that connects your desired result with your current identity. For example, I created a sigil magic working, where one sigil represented me as a renter. Then I created a second sigil which represented me as a home owner. I drew a line between the two sigils.

Step 3: Activate the practical magic working so you shift from one identity to the other. I burned the first sigil and scattered the ashes. I took the second sigil and applied to applications I was filling out for home loans as well as paperwork for potential houses.

Step 4: Become your desired reality through mundane actions that support your magical work. I started shopping for homes. Once I found a home I wanted, I made an offer on it and did a working to Aphrodite to make my house offer more attractive. I also promised her that I would make her the patron goddess of the house. Then I imagined myself living at that house and being the home owner.

This is how you can get a result by changing you identity without using a persona.

Hot takes on shame, shadow & the magic of desires

If you’ve ever felt conflicted about your desire, or felt like you wanted something and yet found some way to sabotage it, you’re going to want to watch this episode of the Magical Experiments podcast.

Sheena and I share 15 hot takes on shame, shadow and the magic of desire and along the way explore:

• How shame and fear can small you and contain your magic.

• What love and loathing have to do with identifying your desires.

• How to use the deadly sins as information instead of as shaming.

And if what we shares lands with you, then you’ll want to join us for our upcoming live workshop on September 19th:

Wanting without Shame - Alchemize your desire into Reality

In Wanting without Shame, we work with desire as magical material.

Desire is not just a personal preference.

Desire is orientation.

It is the current beneath intention, ritual, spellcraft, spirit work, creative work, business, visibility, money, pleasure, devotion, and becoming.

In Wanting Without Shame, we invite you to come play so you can:

• Clarify the desire underneath your magical intentions, instead of casting from obligation, confusion, or “should.”

• Identify the old selves that distort what you think you want: the self other people imagine you to be, the past self still running old spells, the idealized self chasing comparison, and the present self who can actually cast.

• Work with shame, shadow, envy, greed, pride, lust, wrath, sloth, and hunger as information instead of contamination.

• Use Love and Loathe tracking as magical data for your practice, business, relationships, rituals, offerings, and creative life.

• Create Desire Statements that function as magical source code for spellwork, spirit petitions, sigils, business direction, offerings, and life choices.

Turn your desires into reality clearly and cleanly.

Fuzzy Intentions = Unclear Results

I want you to take a moment and think about a magical working that you did where the result you achieved wasn’t quite what you wanted. You did the magic spell or ritual exactly as it was written, or maybe you pulled together a working of your own, but regardless of how you went about it, the outcome just didn’t quite land the way you hoped it would.

This happens more often than you might think. It’s happened to both of us and it’s happened to other experienced magicians as well. The question is…why does it happen?

One of the causes that we’ve discovered with results that don’t quite manifest the way you anticipated is because the intention for the magic isn’t well defined. When the intention isn’t clear it leads to unclear results.

For instance, if you have a statement of intention that is overly broad, it creates a situation where any result that fits within that intention is acceptable. However, getting any result that fits within the intention may not actually be what you want. Similarly, if you’re an entrepreneur or small business owner you know that anyone is not your ideal client. If you are asked who your ideal client is and you say anyone, you aren’t actually giving the person who asked a concrete answer. What you’ve provided is a fuzzy answer and no one can do anything with an answer like that, because it’s too broad!

The obvious solution is to get more specific about your intention. If you are more specific with your intention, that typically brings more clarity. But as we shared with our previous article, getting more specific doesn’t always lead to the result you want to create.

Still, there’s something significant about the initial choice to avoid getting specific. The tendency to avoid specificity in your intention can be a symptom of what really needs to be addressed, both in your magical work and your relationship with your desires.

Welcome to Magical Experiments

The community for occultists, pagans, magicians and psychics who want to explore the evolution of magic and get better results.

Getting what you want means getting witnessed by what you want

We want what we want. Your desire isn’t something that can be turned off. It can be repressed and pushed down and ignored, but at some point, your desire will make itself known.

When you are unclear with your intentions around a desire it can be a signal that there’s something worth exploring around the desire itself. Maybe you’re feeling conflicted about the desire or maybe there’s some part of you that says you shouldn’t want whatever it is you want. We certainly get enough contradictory messaging in our lives from the people around us and some of that imprints on us, until we deal with the messaging decisively.

The reason a lot of desires come out sideways is that your internal critic has tried to shut the desire down. It hasn’t worked, but your desire doesn’t try to face the critic head on, usually because the critic is mirrored externally by people in your life or situations where you’re trying to to fit in and be accepted and approved of. Your desire comes out side ways and one of the ways it can do that is through your magical work.

So, you have something you really want and you decide to cast a magical spell for it. But some part of you hesitates, and what you come up with is a broad intention. That can actually be your desire coming out sideways, because what you think you want isn’t actually what you want. The magic spell you cast will make it evident that something if off and the result you get will bring something of what you want, without giving you all of it.

For September’s Alchemy Lab, we are going into this directly.

Intention Alchemy Lab

How do I know if I have a clear intention?

Thursday, September 10th
6:30 PM PT / 9:30 PM ET

In this Lab, we are going to explore how to tell whether your intention is actually clear, or whether something underneath it needs attention first.

A clear intention sits at the meeting place of desire, body, shadow, choice, and action.

We’ll work with three short experiments.

Bring one intention you are currently working with, or one area of your magic, business, creativity, relationships, money, spirit work, or life that feels muddy. We will listen beneath the first answer and see what else is there.

Then we will work with the body as a truth-sensor. A split intention often has a somatic signature: fog, collapse, numbness, throat constriction, restlessness, over-explaining, or the sudden need to convince yourself. A clearer intention may still be intense, but it has more coherence. It feels like something the body can stand behind, even if your ego is sweating or throwing a tantrum.

Finally, we will map the interference. When an intention is not clear, something is usually mucking up the works. It may be a competing desire, an old vow, a shame pattern, a fear of consequence, a shadow desire, or a part of you that benefits from the spell never fully working.

The interference is not always the enemy. Sometimes, it is information we need to fully step into our power as sovereign magicians.

Become a member of the Magical Circle to join us in the Alchemy Lab

This also flows into our upcoming September Workshop.

This Alchemy Lab is the perfect lead-in to our upcoming Magical Experiments class:

Wanting Without Shame

Desire Play for Magicians and Magical Creators

In the Alchemy Lab, we focus on intention: how to clarify it, how to feel whether it is coherent, and how to notice what blocks it.

In Wanting Without Shame, we go deeper into desire itself.

Because before you can cast clearly, you have to want clearly.

We will explore desire as a magical current, shadow material, body wisdom, business fuel, and creative force. We will look at the old selves that distort what we think we want, the desires we have been trained to hide, and the difference between casting from truth and casting from shame, obligation, or spiritual politeness.

For those of you building magical businesses, creating offerings, writing, teaching, reading, healing, making art, or trying to bring your magic into the material world, this is especially potent. Your business desires matter. Your creative desires matter. Your money desires matter. Your visibility desires matter. Your pleasure, rest, power, devotion, hunger, and ambition all belong in the room.

Magic Circle members receive 25% off Wanting Without Shame!

So this is a beautiful time to jump in with us.

Join us first for our Intention Alchemy Lab on September 10th, where we workshop our intentions together and explore what gets in the way.

I want to join the Magic Circle

Then join us in Wanting Without Shame, where we go deeper into the desire beneath the intention and learn how to work with wanting as magical material (and save 25% if you’re a member of the Magic Circle!)

I want to join Wanting Without Shame!

✨ Ways to Support the Fire ✨

Our hearth grows brighter when you add your spark. Here’s how you can weave your magic with ours:

🔥 Comment & Share — Your questions, stories, and reflections feed the field. Passing our posts along brings new voices and Experimenters into our community.

🔥 Join Our Communal Wealth Experiment — Contribute to Abundantia our Magical Experiments Community Wealth Spirit, a current of joyful reciprocity that fuels our work, delightfully returns to you, and ripples blessings back into our wider community.

🔥 Subscribe & Journey Deeper — Paid subscriptions aren’t about paywalls; they’re about connection. Subscribers receive discounts on classes, events, and offerings, and are invited into the monthly Alchemy Lab to experiment live with us.

Every act of attention, energy, and reciprocity keeps this experiment alive. Thank you for tending the fire with us.

Want to actually do this, not just read about it?

How Magic Works is where I teach how to take a desire from intent to an actual result, step by step. Start the class →

Not ready to buy anything? Why Your Spells Don't Stick is a free guide to the most common reasons a working stalls, and where to start fixing it.

If you want help with a specific situation, work with me one to one.

What happens when you limit your intention

A few weeks ago I was at a psychic fair offering divination readings.

On the first day I was setting up my booth, when the organizer of the event did a pre-event circle to set the intention of the event. Whenever I attend a metaphysical or psychic fair the pre-event circle is used to help all of us connect with each other and get ready for a fun day of readings, connections and community.

What stood out to me about this particular experience was how the organizer wrapped up the event invocation with a specific intention. The intention was:

May the people who come to us today get exactly what they require

I chanted this phrase with everyone else and didn’t think much of it at the time, but that day proved to be a very slow day with only a couple of readings. As I drove home, I reflected on the day’s events, trying to figure out why I had gotten so few readings and it came to me that perhaps the reason was the group intention.

People were only getting what they required. It seemed like such a limiting intentional and not nearly as beneficial to them or the readers.

I decided to conduct an intention experiment the next day to see if I could get better results with readings and the overall experience at the fair.

Welcome to Magical Experiments

The community for occultists, pagans, magicians and psychics who want to explore the evolution of magic and get better results.

Get our FREE guide Why Your Spells Don’t Stick and discover what’s blocking your results and how to make one change today to fix that.

An experiment with wording and deliberate intention

The next day I arrived at the metaphysical fair and just like the day before, the organizer asked all of us to circle up so we could cast our intention for the day. And just like before she wanted to use the same phrase, “May the people who come to us today get exactly what they require.”

I didn’t chant that phrase on the second day. Instead I chose to say something else that embodied the intention I wanted to bring to the event.

“May the people who come us today get what they desire.”

It was a subtle change, but an important one. The word require felt limiting, for the people and for us as vendors. I didn’t want people to limit themselves to what they required. I would rather they get what they desired.

I made that phrase my statement of intent and said it while setting up my vendor space for the day. I circled around my space three times, quietly chanting it to myself. And then I got ready for my day.

Business that day was much better. I did 7 readings and sold a few books, as well. They day before I had only done two readings. I had changed my intention and it changed my experience as well as the energy of the space, for myself.

It also proved to be a valuable lesson about the words we choose and how they can create artificial limits that aren’t helpful. In the context of this event, the word require was overly limiting. People might get what they absolutely needed, but they likely wouldn’t get anything else. A requirement isn’t the same as a desire. A requirement focuses on what is needed or essential and in certain situations that can be really useful. It wasn’t useful though at a psychic fair.

By changing the statement and focusing the intent on desire, I created a space where people could choose to explore what they desired, as well as whatever they require. A desire isn’t the same as a requirement. You can want something without requiring it, yet often what we want points to a deeper need. I created an intentional space where people could explore what they desired and that opened the door for more prosperity to come in.

Curious to learn more about how this works and how you can apply it to your life?

Then you’ll want to join at our next live class, Wanting without Shame, on September 19th at 9:30 am PST.

Desire Play for Magicians and Magical Creators

In the Alchemy Lab (on September 10th), we focus on intention: how to clarify it, how to feel whether it is coherent, and how to notice what blocks it.

In Wanting Without Shame, we go deeper into desire itself.

Because before you can cast clearly, you have to want clearly.

We will explore desire as a:

• magical current,

• shadow material,

• body wisdom,

• business fuel,

• and creative force.

We will look at the old selves that distort what we think we want, the desires we have been trained to hide, and the difference between casting from truth and casting from shame, obligation, or spiritual politeness.

For those of you building magical businesses, creating offerings, writing, teaching, reading, healing, making art, or trying to bring your magic into the material world, this is especially potent.

Your business desires matter. Your creative desires matter. Your money desires matter. Your visibility desires matter. Your pleasure, rest, power, devotion, hunger, and ambition all belong in the room.

✨ Ways to Support the Fire ✨

Our hearth grows brighter when you add your spark. Here’s how you can weave your magic with ours:

🔥 Comment & Share — Your questions, stories, and reflections feed the field. Passing our posts along brings new voices and Experimenters into our community.

🔥 Join Our Communal Wealth Experiment — Contribute to Abundantia our Magical Experiments Community Wealth Spirit, a current of joyful reciprocity that fuels our work, delightfully returns to you, and ripples blessings back into our wider community.

When shame undermines your magic

What you do with the signal transforms your relationship with your desire

Desire and shame often play with each other in a dance that at times seems coquettish and at other times can feel maddening. You want what you want, but shame rears up and says “No, you don’t actually want that!” You listen, back down, but then desire throws a curve ball that has you chasing after it like you were a dog. Then Shame shows up again and sprays you with water.

It seems to be an endless cycle and it can play out in your magical practice in both subtle and obvious ways. Over the last two weeks we have shared articles exploring the topic of intention and what happens when you aren’t clear with your intention in your magic and your life.

Shame can be an underlying experience and emotion that gets in the way of your desires. Usually, the feeling of shame is inherited from your family or society, although sometimes it also shows up based on how you really feel about yourself in the moment. Shame has a purpose. A lot of people get weird about shame, but that’s because our relationship with it is one of avoidance.

Shame and guilt are two different experiences. Shame is identity-based, while guilt is action-based. When you feel shame you feel bad about who you are. When you feel guilt you feel bad about an action you’ve taken.

One is an ontological experience and the other is based in a momentary experience you are having. Shame is the more powerful experience because of how it is rooted in our bodies and embedded in our psyche. It likely doesn’t help that shame is used to indoctrinate and enforce preferred patterns of conformative behavior that can undermine your magical workings.

Welcome to Magical Experiments

The community for occultists, pagans, magicians and psychics who want to explore the evolution of magic and get better results.

Magic is transgressive

It breaks conformative reality by offering you the opportunity to turn your desires into reality. And conformative reality doesn’t support this. It uses shame as a lever. When you’re working your magic and a sense of shame comes in, its because your ontological reality is set to resist your desire. You want your desire and yet the shame you feel pushes back against it.

Until you deal with the somatic experience of your shame, it will continue to undermine your magical work and results. It’s working on the identity level and most magical spells and workings focus on the persona level, trying to change through will and doing, instead of through being and meaning.

Being and meaning is where the change really needs to occur. The majority of spell work focuses on changing the world around you, but without going inward and changing your identity, all that spell work really does is set you up for short term results that don’t stay with you. You have acted on your desire, but what you haven’t done is address the shame that is at the root of the desire, waiting to rear up.

Your inner world needs to match the reality you’re seeking to create for yourself. One of the ways you do that is through establishing clear intentions about what you really want, without apologizing for it or trying to get the good opinions of other people to agree with your choices. Usually, when we feel shame its because we’re trying to measure up to who someone else thinks we should be or what society says we should be. We clear the shame away when we enter into a relationship with it where we co-opt it to work for us.

The Shame Compass Exercise

Most people treat shame like an obstacle. Instead, treat it like a compass. Shame often appears at the edge of the life you actually want to live. Rather than asking, “How do I get rid of this shame?” ask a different question:

“What desire is this shame trying to keep me from admitting?”

Take out a journal and draw three columns.

Column One: The Desire

Write down five things you genuinely want.

Don’t censor yourself. Don’t worry about whether they’re realistic, spiritual enough, or acceptable.

Simply write:

I desire...

Allow yourself to be embarrassingly honest.

Column Two: The Voice of Shame

Next to each desire, write every objection that immediately appears.

Examples might include:

• That’s selfish.

• People will think I’m weird.

• Good people don’t want that.

• You’re too old.

• You’re not worthy.

• What if everyone rejects you?

• You’ll disappoint your family.

• That’s not what a magician should focus on.

Don’t argue with these statements. Simply let the voice speak.

Column Three: The Origin

For every shame statement ask:

Whose voice is this?

Don’t overthink it.

Was it:

• A parent?

• A religious belief?

• A former partner?

• School?

• Society?

• An online community?

• A magical tradition?

• Something you concluded after being hurt?

If you can’t identify the source, simply write: Unknown.

The point isn’t certainty. The point is discovering that many of these voices didn’t originate with you.

Embodied Reflection

Now close your journal and take several slow breaths.

Choose one desire from your list.

Place one hand on your chest and one on your abdomen.

Say aloud:

“This desire belongs to me.”

Notice what happens in your body.

Do your shoulders tighten?

Does your stomach contract?

Does your breathing change?

Rather than trying to relax those sensations, simply become curious about them.

Then ask:

“What would my body feel like if I no longer needed permission to want this?”

Notice whether your posture, breathing, or emotional state shifts.

Magical Integration

Now rewrite the desire as an intention.

Instead of

“I want people to approve of this.”

try:

“I choose to become someone who naturally lives this desire.”

Before performing any spell related to this intention, read this statement aloud. If shame arises during the working, don’t treat it as a sign you’ve failed.

Treat it as confirmation that you’ve reached the boundary between the identity you’ve inherited and the identity you’re choosing to cultivate.

Change yourself, change your relationship with reality

When you change your relationship with shame, you also change your relationship with reality. Your shame is a signal calling for your attention and awareness to something deep within that is aching to transform.

Most people will hide from that transformation or try to numb it, but as magicians we have the opportunity to turn shame into a potent source of magical alchemy that brings us to our full potential.

Join us for our September 19th workshop:

Wanting Without Shame

Desire Play for Magicians and Magical Creators

In the Alchemy Lab (on September 10th), we focus on intention: how to clarify it, how to feel whether it is coherent, and how to notice what blocks it.

In Wanting Without Shame, we go deeper into desire itself.

Because before you can cast clearly, you have to want clearly.

We will explore desire as a:

• magical current,

• shadow material,

• body wisdom,

• business fuel,

• and creative force.

We will look at the old selves that distort what we think we want, the desires we have been trained to hide, and the difference between casting from truth and casting from shame, obligation, or spiritual politeness.

For those of you building magical businesses, creating offerings, writing, teaching, reading, healing, making art, or trying to bring your magic into the material world, this is especially potent.

Your business desires matter. Your creative desires matter. Your money desires matter. Your visibility desires matter. Your pleasure, rest, power, devotion, hunger, and ambition all belong in the room.

Wanting without Shame - Alchemize your desires into Reality

Sign up now and get access to the alchemy lab as a special pre-order bonus

Want to actually do this, not just read about it?

How Magic Works is where I teach how to take a desire from intent to an actual result, step by step. Start the class →

Not ready to buy anything? Why Your Spells Don't Stick is a free guide to the most common reasons a working stalls, and where to start fixing it.

If you want help with a specific situation, work with me one to one.

Can Magic be a Process and Still be Magic?

You’ve heard the bad advice:

“You don’t need to know how magic works. Just do it.”

That advice doesn’t really work though when a spell fails or a magic ritual doesn’t come together.

The fact is when you know HOW MAGIC WORKS you get better results. You aren’t wondering if what you’re doing will work. You know how it works and that makes you more confident as a magician.

And that’s why I wrote The Process of Magic. In this episode I talk about what a process is and how processes show up in magical work. For example:

• A spell is a process with step by step instructions for executing it.

• A sigil is a symbol that is created through a process.

• A ritual is a process as well.

I could give further examples, but my point is that when you look at magic as a process it changes how you practice magic. It also helps you understand what you are doing so you can get better results.

A Contest

Leave a comment with your BEST TIP on how magic works and get entered to win a FREE ebook copy of the Process of Magic.

I’ll announce the winner in Sunday’s Magical Experiment’s Chat. And if you want to order an autographed paperback copy directly from me, click the button.

I want the Process of Magic

And for the next 48 HOURS I’m offering a 10% Discount on the companion course Principle of Magic. In this class I share:

• What the underlying principles of magic are.

• How these principles can help you get better results with your magic.

• How to apply them to your spells and rituals.

This discount is only available until Saturday. Normally $97.00, but available for $87.30. Click the button to get the discount.

The Wanting Gap - The difference between want and have can transform your magic

Ever wonder why you can’t have what you want?

I’m about to let you in on a little secret that could change how you practice magic forever…

In this episode I share:

• The gap between wanting and having

• What happens when you have something

• How wanting becomes an addiction

If any of this lands with you, I invite you to join Sheena and I for our upcoming class on September 19th:

Wanting without Shame - Alchemize your desire into Reality

In this class you will achieve the following results:

• Clearly identify the energy of wanting in your life and how it’s keeping you from having your desired results.

• Turn your inner doubts, fear, and shame into allies that orient you to what you truly want.

• Claim your desires unapologetically so you can:

What Saturn Retrograde can teach us about shame: The hidden agreements and rules you didn't know were limiting your magic

We’re in a Saturn Retrograde cycle until December of this year that started at the tail end of July. As this particular cycle has landed in me, one of the themes I keep coming back to is the theme of hidden agreements, specifically the hidden agreements people make with themselves that hold them back from stepping into the life they truly want to live.

Saturn retrograde offers us the opportunity to shine some light on those hidden agreements and ask ourselves how they are serving us, and make no mistake…They are serving us in one way or another. We may not consciously want those agreements in place, but the deeper levels of identity usually have a reason for putting them into place.

Your hidden agreements can come in many forms. Here’s a few examples of how they show up:

Relationships - You find yourself attracting certain types of relationships, even though on the conscious level you don’t want that relationship type.

Success/failure - You experience a limited level of success in your life, but when you try to go beyond it you end up back where you were.

Money - Your relationship with money is one where you are always chasing after it, or never feel like you have enough.

Take a moment and consider the hidden agreements you have in your life. This is the right time to call them forth and look at how they are impacting your life. While you do that I’ll share a practical example, below, of how I changed one of my hidden agreements.

Welcome to Magical Experiments

The community for occultists, pagans, magicians and psychics who want to explore the evolution of magic and get better results.

The Hidden Agreement with Rejection

In my early twenties, I tried to date women that I knew would reject me. I did this because I had a hidden agreement with myself that it was better to know I would get rejected then get involved with someone and later on have the relationship not work. Once I recognized this hidden agreement for what it was, I realized that trying to date people that would reject me didn’t make sense. I changed the agreement and as a result changed my life.

Yet to change this hidden agreement I had to understand what was at the root of it. Shame was at the root. I had a limiting belief that could never be good enough for someone to date or want to be in a relationship with me. That obviously wasn’t true, but as long as I felt that way about myself it was my reality.

Once I changed that hidden agreement, I started dating people who were attracted to me. I had changed the way I valued myself and it changed my relationships with other people and the world around me.

Hidden agreements operate in the background of your life, influencing your decisions and experiences and shaping the outcomes you experience. Usually these hidden agreements have been put into place by parts of ourselves that are trying to protect us from getting hurt. The problem is that these agreements don’t actually serve us. They may have been what we came up with to get through a tough circumstance, but applied beyond that circumstance, they become Saturnian rules that limit us instead of liberating us.

How hidden agreements can limit your magical outcomes

You cast a spell and get a result, but then the result goes away or it only partially manifests the way you wanted it to. You wonder why…and if your magic is failing. It’s not the magic that’s failing…it’s the hidden agreements that are getting in the way. They kick in and they limit the reach of the magic and the outcome, because that outcome goes against the Saturnian rules you’ve written for yourself.

Change the rules and you change your relationship with magic and the results you get.

That sounds easy in theory. The practical application of it however can be more involved.

First, you need to recognize the agreement and how that agreement plays out in your life. Next, you need to recognize how that agreement is and isn’t serving you and make a decision on what you’ll do with that story.

Here’s a step by step walkthrough of how you can apply this practice to your life.

Step 1 Track how the hidden agreement is showing up in your magic.

When you’re doing a magical working, you want to keep a record of the results that you’re obtaining and also track how long those results stick.

Is the result sticking for a limited period of time, or is it something that has truly landed in your life?

If the result is sticking for a limited period of time, it’s times to find out why.

Complete the following sentence, without over thinking it.

The result isn’t sticking because ___.

Now read what you wrote down. Whatever it is you wrote is the hidden agreement that’s undermining your magic.

Don’t judge it. Judging it will reinforce the shame that’s at the root of your agreement and bind it even tighter to the Saturnian rule you are applying to your life.

Sit with it. Where did this story come from? Our hidden stories always have an origin.

Step 2 - How is (and isn’t) this story serving you?

The reason this story is in your life. It serves a purpose.

What is the purpose that this story serves for you?

What does it justify or rationalize or give to you that allows you to explain your circumstances away?

What is this story protecting you from?

There’s a reason this story is in place, and it’s usually because the story protects you from something.

After you’ve answered those questions, I want you to ask yourself another question.

How is this story not serving you? How is it actually limiting you from experiencing the fullness of life?

Both sides of this exploration. One side is telling you how the story serves you, the other side is telling you how it isn’t serving you. Take both of them in.

What you want to sit with is the incongruity of this story.

On one hand it serves you, and on the other hand it doesn’t serve you. You’re consciously pulling both sides in to create this contradiction that allows you to fully sit with and understand how the story is defining your life.

Now you have a decision to make. Do you want to continue to let this story run your life, or do you want to change the story?

Step 3: Rewrite the story (and the rules it embodies).

You have the opportunity to rewrite the story.

I want you to create a guided path working for yourself where you travel to the most recent retelling of the story.

Allow yourself to vividly recall that story and how it has played out in your life.

Now, retell the story, changing it. What details would you change about that story that would give you the preferred outcome that you actually want to achieve?

Use the same process to revisit at least two more experiences where you have told that story to yourself, changing it each time.

By changing your relationship with the story, you begin to change the way you relate to your reality. In our upcoming live workshop Wanting without Shame, Sheena and I will share how to use the orientation of your desire and shame to transform your hidden stories permanently.

The Connection between Saturn, Shame and your Hidden Stories

Saturn is the planetary force of boundaries and limits, but also the harvest. When Saturn goes retrograde, it calls you to review your stories and your rules and decide which of those are actually serving you and which are just creating needless limitations in your life.

Hidden stories are wrapped up in shame. Shame is that momentary impulse that limits and holds you back and causes you to second guess yourself. It shows up in the results that don’t stick because there’s some part that says, “I don’t deserve this.”

Shame acts as a limiter, keeping you within the specific parameters of your life and telling you all the reasons you can’t succeed or get what you want. It becomes a Saturnian rule enforcer that works through your hidden stories. You tell yourself those stories, the results go away and shame keeps you safe, and in the status quo that you feel stuck in.

But if you want to change that relationship and the rules you need to transform how you interact with shame and its opposite desire. Shame is underneath desire and it write the rules that govern how desire is experienced. embodied and explored.

Wanting without Shame - Alchemize your desire into Reality

In our upcoming live workshop Wanting without Shame we walk you through how to:

• Clarify the desire underneath your magical intentions, instead of casting from obligation, confusion, or “should.”

• Identify the old selves that distort what you think you want: the self other people imagine you to be, the past self still running old spells, the idealized self chasing comparison, and the present self who can actually cast.

• Work with shame, shadow, envy, greed, pride, lust, wrath, sloth, and hunger as information instead of contamination.

• Use Love and Loathe tracking as magical data for your practice, business, relationships, rituals, offerings, and creative life.

• Create Desire Statements that function as magical source code for spellwork, spirit petitions, sigils, business direction, offerings, and life choices.

✨ Ways to Support the Fire ✨

Our hearth grows brighter when you add your spark. Here’s how you can weave your magic with ours:

🔥 Comment & Share — Your questions, stories, and reflections feed the field. Passing our posts along brings new voices and Experimenters into our community.

🔥 Join Our Communal Wealth Experiment — Contribute to Abundantia our Magical Experiments Community Wealth Spirit, a current of joyful reciprocity that fuels our work, delightfully returns to you, and ripples blessings back into our wider community.

🔥 Subscribe & Journey Deeper — Paid subscriptions aren’t about paywalls; they’re about connection. Subscribers receive discounts on classes, events, and offerings, and are invited into the monthly Alchemy Lab to experiment live with us.

Every act of attention, energy, and reciprocity keeps this experiment alive. Thank you for tending the fire with us.

Want to actually do this, not just read about it?

How Magic Works is where I teach how to take a desire from intent to an actual result, step by step. Start the class →

Not ready to buy anything? Why Your Spells Don't Stick is a free guide to the most common reasons a working stalls, and where to start fixing it.

If you want help with a specific situation, work with me one to one.

What is your magic centered around? What you care about shapes your reality and your magic

In 2022, in the wake of a breakup, I lay in bed thinking to myself, “I don’t like who I am and getting into another relationship isn’t going to solve this problem.” I was centering my life around other people and avoiding my own inner work and it was costing me everything.

A few weeks back, I had the opportunity to interview Anthony Rella about Slow Magic. The interview got me thinking about something I had read in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.

What you center your life around defines your life. For example, if you center your life around work then work will define your life and the choices you make. If you center your life around a relationship, then that relationship will define your life and your choices. If you center your life around pleasure, then pleasure will define the choices you make in your life. I can continue but I think you get the idea.

Reading that point made me think of the moment of realization in 2022 that I was centering my life on the wrong priorities. The point the author is making is that so many people base their lives on external outcomes or relationships or desires instead of centering their lives around principles that help them live their best lives.

Welcome to Magical Experiments

The community for occultists, pagans, magicians and psychics who want to explore the evolution of magic and get better results.

Free Guide: Why your Spells Don’t Stick – 5 critical mistakes blocking your magic

You aren’t getting the results you want.

And trying to figure out what isn’t working with your magic feels intimidating because there’s so much to track.

Let’s make this easier for you.

Stop guessing and start taking action with our FREE guide - Why Your Spells Don’t Stick.

When I read that chapter, I squirmed uncomfortably. I have been that person who has centered my life around work, relationships, pleasure, and other situational experiences. It’s taken me a long time to recognize that about myself and also do the necessary work to change who I am. It’s an ongoing work in progress. It may always be an ongoing work.

In the interview with Anthony, we discussed the value of working with magic slowly, and being curious and open to how the magic unfolds. I’ve learned in my own life just how important it is to let the magic land instead of continually working it.

What long term magic has taught me is to look beyond the immediate situation and ask myself what the ultimate outcome of my life will be. It has asked me to look at legacy, specifically what I will leave behind and how that will be passed on to the future generations. It has required me to look at my life and ask how my life journey is actually aligning with my desired life outcome. Along the way, I’ve had to take a good hard look at myself and my choices.

Words such as responsibility, truth and integrity have taken on a different meaning through long term magic. I am casting a spell to last a life time (and beyond) and the values I live by play a role in that magical work. This has led me to ask a question in today’s article, both of myself and you.

What is your magic centered around?

This question is also prompted by another recognition I’ve had around magic. Many people treat magic as something to do, but magic is much more than that. Magic is relational and what I mean by that is when you cast a spell, do a working, contact a spirit or do some other type of magical practice, it’s not just to reach an outcome. There is a relational component that occurs where the magician is essentially trying to reach a different state of being through magic.

Can you emerge out the other side of the magical working okay with yourself and your new reality?

The question may seem self-evident but I don’t think it is. I think it actually requires us to reach a level of awareness and depth about who we are choosing to be and how magic can help us change our identity. Your magical identity is centered around what you orient yourself towards. That orientation defines your relationship with your magic, your life and everything else you have a relationship with.

A life based around principles uses those principles to define your life. For instance, I mentioned the word responsibility earlier. That word and the principle it represents has become an essential part of my life orientation. It influences my magical work as well, because I inevitably find myself inquiring whether I am taking responsibility for this magical working I’m choosing to do. There’s also a level of nuance, because I look at responsibility as the ability to respond. In other words, I am choosing my response as opposed to reacting to a situation…both magically and mundanely. All of this sounds good, but let’s bring a level of practical application to it so that you can see how what I’m sharing could apply to your life and magic.

Practical Exercise: The Principle Compass

“Your life follows what it is centered on.”

Every magical working changes more than your circumstances. It changes what your life revolves around. Over time, that center becomes your identity. This exercise helps you discover what currently centers your life, choose the principles you want to live by, and begin orienting your magic around them.

Step One: Find Your Current Center

Without judging yourself, answer these questions.

When I make important decisions, what usually has the final say?

What occupies most of my thoughts?

What am I most afraid of losing?

What do I continually organize my time around?

When I perform magic, what am I usually trying to protect, avoid, or acquire?

Now look for the pattern.

Perhaps your life is centered around:

• approval

• money

• certainty

• relationships

• pleasure

• safety

• achievement

• avoiding discomfort

• being right

Write one sentence:

At this point in my life, my world has largely been centered around ____________________.

Don’t choose what sounds noble.

Choose what is actually true.

Step Two: Choose Three Principles

Now ask a different question.

Instead of asking,

“What do I want?”

Ask,

Who must I become for my life to be worth living, regardless of circumstances?

Choose three principles you want to organize your life around.

Examples include:

• Responsibility

• Curiosity

• Integrity

• Courage

• Presence

• Generosity

• Patience

• Stewardship

• Devotion

• Compassion

• Discipline

• Truth

Write each principle on a separate page.

Then answer:

Why does this principle matter?

How would someone living from this principle behave differently than I do today?

How would this principle change my magical practice?

Step Three: Reinterpret Your Magic

Think about the last three magical workings you performed.

For each one ask:

What outcome was I seeking?

Which principle was this working expressing?

Which principle was missing?

For example:

Money spell

Outcome:
Increase income.

Missing principle:
Stewardship.

Question:
How would I practice stewardship before asking for more wealth?

Relationship spell

Outcome:
Find a partner.

Missing principle:
Integrity.

Question:
How can I become someone capable of sustaining the relationship I’m asking for?

Notice how the focus shifts from getting something to becoming someone.

Step Four: Create an Orientation Question

This becomes your magical compass.

Complete this sentence.

Today, how can I express _________ regardless of what happens?

Examples:

Today, how can I express responsibility regardless of what happens?

Today, how can I express courage regardless of what happens?

Today, how can I express curiosity regardless of what happens?

Ask this every morning.

The answer may have nothing to do with ritual.

That is part of the practice.

Build your Magical Life with Legacy Magic

Learn how to create spells that last a lifetime.

• The art of creating long-term magical workings that continue to influence your life after the first ritual is complete.

• How to use magic to build a life time of results, instead of one moment.

• How to calibrate and improve your life and magic through long term magical work.

Legacy Magic is for practitioners who want their magic to mature from isolated acts into sustained influence.

Long-term magic changes your orientation

Magic, of any type, changes your orientation. You may be doing magic to get a specific outcome, but you are also changing your position in the world and your identity. I don’t think this is always fully appreciated in short-term workings, because the focus is usually on trying to fix a problem or respond to a situation, yet underneath all of that is a call to change who you are to meet the new reality you are calling in.

Long-term magic, which is done to design your life and legacy, calls on the magician to make the conscious choice to re-orient their identity around the desired long-term outcome they want to manifest for their life. And yet living life also is a process of changing orientation. I can create a long-term magical working and still have to deal with the variables that life throws my way. What long-term magic does is keep your life journey oriented to the desired outcome, while also folding in the variables so they ultimately work to create your desired outcome.

For example, you might do a long-term magical working around your career. You have a specific goal in mind for the work you want to do, the money you want to make, and how you can serve your community. The magical working orients you toward all of that, but also does one other thing.

Magic works in mysterious ways

I have had many experiences come into my life in ways I couldn’t fully anticipate or plan for at the time. These experiences ended up being folded into the long-term magical working because they were synchronistic entanglements of probabilities that helped move the long-term magical working on.

The outcome or result of a long-term magical working is something which continually informs the magical work. The outcome also continually changes There’s not a singular moment when the result is declared done. Rather it is an unfolding through your entire life, which is continually brought into alignment through your magical work. You may reach a milestone with that outcome, but that milestone will reveal additional details that inspire the continuation of the long-term magic.

On that fateful day in 2022, I had already been doing long-term magical work since 2017. The realization I had changed the course of my long-term magical work. I made the decision that I would change my relationship with myself before I got into another relationship with someone else. I knew I needed to break the patterns of behavior that weren’t serving me. Breaking that pattern became part of the long-term magical working and it helped me change what I centered my life around. That change in orientation also changed the long-term magical working and the desired outcome. I share that last point to illustrate that the magic changes your life and is changed by your life.

Should you do a long-term magical working? The answer is yes. Just remember that you’re not trying to live a static life. Your magic shouldn’t be static either.

Softening Reality through Long Term Magic

It was November 2017. I put away everything I knew about magic and challenged myself to do something new: Practice a simple daily ritual to set the direction of my life, instead of continuing to cast spells to solve short term problems.

In Will based Magic, the magician tries to impose their will on reality to achieve a result. Sometimes this works and sometimes it doesn’t. In Legacy Magic, the magician or witch applies a different approach, softening reality through repetitive magic.

What do I mean by softening reality?

The softening reality technique recognizes that there is a certain level of resistance to change, especially when you go after more improbable possibilities. This level of resistance can be turned into momentum through repetitive magic. A magical working that is done again and again and again has an impact on the reality around it. It softens reality, making it easier to manifest possibilities into outcomes.

The conventional wisdom around magical workings and spells is that you only do a working or spell once and then you let it go and do its thing. This is sometimes a useful way to approach magical spell work but sometimes it can also end up being a limitation that actually doesn’t serve you very well.

Welcome to Magical Experiments

The community for occultists, pagans, magicians and psychics who want to explore the evolution of magic and get better results. Get our Free E-book Why your Spells Don’t Stick and find out why your results aren’t sticking and how to fix that.

The Principles of Legacy Magic

In Legacy Magic the focus is on designing your life through magic so it actually requires a repetitive approach to magical work that gradually steers you toward the specific result that you want to achieve. You’re not just trying to achieve a limited outcome in the immediate or short-term future. You’re actually trying to design your entire life. This requires an approach to magic that is fundamentally different from the way that you will typically learn how to do spell work.

You choose a magical working to practice each day. You’re creating an iterative process where you repetitiously practice that magical working with the specific outcome in mind. Certain fundamental principles at work make this effective. The first principle at work is that the act of repetition occurs through every single moment of the magical working that you’ve done. In other words, each time you do the magical working, that working encompasses all the other moments when you’ve done the same working, creating an iterative, repetitive process that softens reality.

The second principle is that you are present in every single moment of that magical working. When you do the magical working in the current moment, you are connecting across time to all the other moments that you’ve done that magical working. This serves a very important purpose because your future self is working all the way back to the very first moment that you began the working and creating a unified stream of magical consciousness between the last moment that you ever do the working and the first moment. It creates a continuum across time and space that unifies the magical working and allows it to occupy the entirety of your life, defining the outcome of your life through the magical work.

How Legacy Magic can change the journey of your life

Iterative magic weaves the flow of magic into your life, shaping and directing the experiences that you have. You’re actively creating your life from a place of design instead of waiting for your life to happen to you. Events that come into your life will inevitably end up playing a role in the magical work and will be part of the co-creation. People that come into your life will also play a role in your life in the same way, becoming part of the overall magical working that you’ve done and orchestrating the experience of your life that happens.

Something that is worth noting is that you will also be part of their lives in that the magic that they work (if they work magic) will weave into your own magic, creating some very interesting synchronicities. This is something that always happens when other magicians interact with you because you’re dealing with co-creative forces on their end as well as your own.

What I’ve discovered has been really helpful for achieving long-term results is to repetitiously practice magical workings and change the outcomes along the way. I have an overall outcome that I am working toward and an ideal magical life, if you will, but along the way I create results that stack up to that outcome. I work the magic toward those results. As I achieve those results, I adjust them so that I continually evolve the magical working to meet the circumstances of my life, rather than focusing on a short-term end result. This has greatly improved the overall quality of my life because I am continually changing what I’m striving toward and at the same time making it part of the same long-term magical working that I’ve been doing for years.

The reason I switched to long-term magic is because I realized that while getting short-term results was helpful sometimes, it was also a frustrating experience. I didn’t feel like there was a consistent theme in my life that was allowing me to create the life that I wanted. Sure it was fun to throw a sigil here or do a magic spell there or burn a candle during the full moon. But the question I kept coming away with is: how is this actually changing my life? What am I actually doing to create sustainable change that allows me to live the magical life that I really want to live?

What I realized is that applying will-based magic might give me a short-term outcome but what it wasn’t doing was creating the long-term change that I really wanted. I wanted to be living life on my terms. I wasn’t doing that by just doing the occasional spell. I needed something that would actually create a real, sustainable connection to the magic and allow me to soften reality so that I could achieve the results I wanted to manifest.

I changed my approach from will-based magic to long-term legacy magic because it made sense. Instead of doing spells to deal with specific problems that came up, I started doing magic proactively, creating a lifetime legacy that would allow me to steer my life in the direction I wanted to go in and improve the overall quality and well-being of my experiences because they lined up with the desired outcome that I wanted to manifest.

The first couple of years that I did this practice, there were some shake-ups. I definitely brought some real changes into my life that caused some people to fall away, relationships to change, and circumstances in my life to go in a different direction. When I compare my life now to where I was back in 2017, I do see a clear progression where my life has gradually improved and moved in the right direction.

The long-term magic that I worked has produced incremental changes that have steered my life in the direction that I want to go in. I’ve found my community, developed deeper and more intimate relationships and changed my life to fall in line with what my true values and desires are. It involves some work and the magic has been part of that work. Yet when I look at my overall quality of life, I am much happier and content because I have chosen to create a life by design instead of waiting for life to happen to me.

That’s what my class Legacy Magic teaches you how to do. It walks you through the fundamental process of changing your magic from doing magic to solve problems to becoming magic and changing your identity to align with what your deepest desires and values are. I’m not promising that you’ll have overnight changes because that’s unrealistic. What I am sharing with you is a process that allows you to start doing magical work on a regular basis to produce specific outcomes in your life. These outcomes align your life with your ultimate desired outcome and set up circumstances and events and even connect you with people that can help you move your life in that direction.

When I think back to what my life was like before I took this approach to magic, what I recognized is how chaotic my life was. I would react to problems that came up, try to solve them with magic, and then continue on without really examining my own role in the situations that were coming up in my life. This is something that can be changed but it requires a long-term perspective and that’s what legacy magic teaches.

You learn how to create a legacy with your life that supports the direction you want your life to go in and helps you manifest the experiences, people, and overall quality of life that you want to create. Ask yourself where you will be 5, 10, 15, 20, 30 years down the line. That’s what this magical practice is for. It looks at the long-term picture instead of focusing on the immediate environment around you, so you can design your life on purpose.

Build your Magical Life with Legacy Magic

Learn how to create spells that last a lifetime.

• The art of creating long-term magical workings that continue to influence your life after the first ritual is complete.

• How to use magic to build a life time of results, instead of one moment.

• How to calibrate and improve your life and magic through long term magical work.

Legacy Magic is for practitioners who want their magic to mature from isolated acts into sustained influence.