It was 2017. I was burned out trying to make my business work and the credit cards debt were piling up. All the magic spells I cast felt like they were hitting a wall. No matter how hard I tried I couldn’t get reality to conform to my will.
I needed to do something different…and it started by changing my magical practice.
Long-term magical work requires a different mindset than what you’ll find in short-term will-based magic. Short-term will-based magical practice is about having power over the environment around you in order to create a result as quickly as possible. It operates from a place of reaction, where the focus is on trying to take back a sense of agency by controlling the environment around you. It is reactive magic.
Long-term magical work, in contrast, focuses on working with the environment around you as well as working on yourself. Its primary focus is on changing within in order to change what is around you.
When we change who we are on the inside, this opens the doors for possibilities to flow into our lives much more easily. We aren’t trying to fight reality or force the universe to conform to our will. Instead what we’re doing is aligning our identity with who we want to become, making the changes inwardly and then setting it up so that reality can more easily meet us where we are because we have already changed who we are.
Long-term or legacy magic is magical identity work. It is the ontological approach to magic, which emphasizes that changing who you are is more important than changing the environment around you. It acknowledges that when we change who we are, the environment around us changes as well.
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How Identity Work Applies to your Life
The easiest way that I can demonstrate this principle at work is to think about the people in your life. When you have changed who you are, chances are some of the people have dropped away because you’ve changed. This isn’t a reflection on you or them. It’s simply a fundamental transformation in the way that you relate to the world and the way that you relate to other people. When we change who we are, we also change the environment in our lives.
Another example that I can use is when you’ve changed your internal beliefs about yourself. When you’ve made those changes, chances are it has changed the opportunities that have come into your life and the way that you have responded to those opportunities. For instance, if you’ve held a limiting belief about yourself that you couldn’t do something, but you changed that limiting belief and you decided that you could, in fact, do it, this changes your reality. It changes your relationship with reality because you’ve changed your identity. What you’ve done is you’ve transformed your capabilities and so you’ve changed the way that you relate to the circumstances in your life. This opens up possibilities that would otherwise be closed away as long as you held on to that limiting belief.
I think it’s also important to recognize that it’s not just about changing a belief about who you are. It’s also about putting the necessary effort into learning new skills. I can have a limiting belief that says I can’t do this specific task and that will in and of itself stop me from doing the task. I may also not have the actual skillset involved. I could change the limiting belief that I can do this task but if I haven’t learned the skills then I will still need to acquire those skills. However I will be much more amendable to learning the skills because I now have the belief that I can do the task.
Identity Orientation Practice
In Identity Orientation you learn how to consciously shift from reacting as your current identity to responding as the identity you are cultivating in your life.
Step 1: Name the Identity
Choose an identity instead of an outcome.
Outcomes focus on external circumstances or act as a reaction to the change you want to create:
I want six figures.
I want to lose weight.
I want a relationship.
Notice that each of these outcomes is focused on a want, making them something external to who you are.
Try this instead:
I am a magician who consistently creates results.
I am a devoted partner.
I am an adventurous creator.
I am a financially responsible business owner.
I am a healthy, in shape athlete.
Outcomes are destinations you are trying to get to. When you apply identity as a magical you focus on becoming the outcome instead of striving for it.
Step 2: Identify the Organizing Values of the identity
Choose a specific identity, either rom the examples shared above, or an identity you genuinely want to become. Now, complete this sentence:
Someone with this identity naturally values...
List five to seven values that fit the identity. For example: A person who chooses to identify as a sovereign might value:
Presence
Responsibility
Trust
Initiative
Emotional regulation
Service
Honesty
These become the internal “rules” by which the identity organizes experience.
Continue reading the article to learn how you can apply this to your magical workings and spells.
Bringing this Back to Magic
I used those two examples to give you a very grounded understanding of how this ontological approach works. It’s not just limited to magic. It applies to any area of your life. Magic, however, is one of the best ways to actually design your life when it’s used as a proactive and strategic process for creating change. In previous articles I have shared the limits that I perceive will-based magic to have so I’m not going to recap them here. Instead, what I want to show you is how long-term magic can be used to design and sculpt your life in a way that allows you to align your desires with the reality and the environment that you’re living in.
In long-term magic the focus of the magical work is on practicing magic over an extended period of time. What that means is that instead of doing a spell in the moment for a specific short-term situation that you’re trying to get a result around what you do instead is you map out the way you want your life to unfold. By having a clear and concise picture of the life that you want to create, you can direct and steer your magical work toward achieving that life.
Naturally if you’re planning to do long-term magical work, one consideration is that your long-term goals may change. This is an inevitability simply because when we live our lives, situations will change. You may end up getting divorced or getting married or having some other kind of life event occur, or have an opportunity come your way that you never thought was possible that changes the course of your life. All of that is understandable and it could actually be argued that this is a result of doing long-term magical work because what you’ve done is you have created a very specific path in your life to achieve a long-term outcome. You are attracting potential events, situations, people, etc. that can help you accomplish that outcome.
Long-term magic operates on the principle that every change in your life ultimately moves in the direction of the outcome that you want to go to. Long-term magic is done every day, and becomes part of the background of your life, moving your life toward the outcome you’ve chosen. In a very real sense what long-term magic does is steer your life toward the outcome that you want to manifest. You are changed by the magic that you work even as the environment around you meets you through those changes.
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What long-term magic teaches us to do is also work with the environment. Instead of trying to have power over the environment, we actively work and collaborate with what is already present within us and around us in order to create the desired outcome. We surrender to the experience that is already present instead of trying to force it into conformity with what we want. And through that act of surrender we discover the opportunities that bring us into contact with the desired outcome, allowing it to manifest through the changes that have been made within ourselves as well as in conjunction with the environment around us.
This is different from Will-Based Magic, which tries to impose the will of the magician on the environment around them in order to create the outcome. What a long-term magician does is chart the path forward and then surrender to the journey itself, allowing it to take them where they need to go. The magical workings that they are doing are part of the journey. It helps to create the journey and manifest the outcome. In one sense the magician is on a river and what they are doing is paddling the boat at different times in order to help steer the direction that they are going in. The boat is being carried by the river itself. When the magician paddles, that’s when the magician is using magic or other skills to help paddle the boat in the direction that the magician wants to go in.
This approach to working magic emphasizes power with instead of power over. The magician isn’t trying to control the river; the magician is working with the river. The magician knows when to paddle and also knows when to stop. The magician knows when to draw on magic and when to stop. The magician allows time for results to fully settle into their ecosystem and identity, rather than constantly doing magical work to control the environment around them.
In my next article I’m going to explore the type of long-term magic that you can do. If you’re curious about getting started with this practice, I recommend checking out my class Legacy Magic, where I show you how to create long-term magical workings that you can use to transform your life by using magic as an expression of identity and creating a long-term vision and strategy that you hold to as the ultimate outcome for your life.