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.

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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.

Surrendering to the current: Power with, instead of power over in magical practices

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.

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.

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.

Enchanting for the long term: What happens when our magic focuses on legacy instead of short term results

In 2008 I walked in to Planned Parenthood and got a vascetomy. I didn’t want to have kids. It was a fateful choice, a declaration of the legacy of my life.

When you think of the word legacy, what first comes to mind? Do you think about future generations or what the impact of your choices will be on those down the line or do you think of something else altogether?

For me legacy is a really important word because I don’t have any kids and I never will have any kids. My legacy is my magical writing, my classes, my art, and my overall devotion to the evolution of magic as a discipline and practice. I first began thinking about legacy magic, or long-term magic, back in 2017.

I had an important realization that my approach to magic, which was will-based at the time, was not working the way I hoped it would. I was putting a lot of effort into getting results and sometimes I would get the results but I would also come away feeling exhausted. I was essentially trying to muscle my way through magical workings instead of taking an approach to magic that involved less forcing and more collaboration.

I was particularly exhausted in 2017 after a year of intensive magical work and other mundane efforts, which had ultimately resulted in a business that I was running crashing down and me burning out. Everything I had done to try and sustain it and make it work had failed. I had failed. I questioned everything that I knew about magic and I questioned whether or not I was even really a magician. It was a humbling moment that forced me to come face-to-face with my own limitations and it also helped me realize that I needed to find a better way to practice magic.

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

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The Flaw of Will Based Magic

I had actually been practicing long-term magic before 2017. I have an elemental balancing ritual that I do, which is a year-long working and in some cases has been two or three years long. This definitely would fall under longer-term magic because it’s a lot longer than what most magical workings are. Most magical workings are typically a once-and-done affair or a spell cast here, a spell cast there. Rarely is magic viewed from a sustainability perspective, in which it is worked with iteratively.

My elemental balancing rituals had taught me the power and presence of longer-term magic and how, when magic is worked with over an extended period of time, it both shapes and is shaped by the ongoing evolution of changes in the magician’s identity and in the way the working shows up in the magician’s life.

I learned that magic wasn’t always a one-way street, which is one of the fallacies of will-based magic. Will-based magic is power over magic. It is magic based on trying to have power over the environment, power over spirits, power over other things in order to achieve results. It’s a forceful way of approaching magical work. It shows up in a lot of Western magic, particularly from the 19th century on.

However this approach to magic is ultimately flawed because it focuses so much on exerting power over the environment, power over spirits, and power over other people and beings. It creates a tension in the magical work that inevitably creates a backfire for the magician. This is why many magicians who have approached magic in this way end up leading rather chaotic lives because they are continually trying to force their will on reality and causing a rebound effect to occur.

My own experiences in 2017 and really in other areas of my life pointed to this fact as well. I had found a pattern where I would get a result using will-based approaches to magic but then inevitably end up having to do more magical work in order to maintain that result.

What had really ended up happening is that I was continually trying to force reality into a specific shape that suited me instead of actually opening myself up to a communion with reality that was informed by curiosity, imagination, and discovery.

The weakness of this approach is that the more you try to force reality into a particular shape, the more it actually resists that and pushes back against you. This can lead to the chaos that I mentioned earlier as well as an experience of burnout with magic because the magician is always trying to force results into place instead of working organically with reality to create a shared and collaborative experience that allows results to naturally occur.

Tracking Your Magic Exercise

Much of twentieth-century occultism inherited an implicit model of will from industrialism: the stronger the will, the greater the result. Will became analogous to horsepower as a finite resource that you can direct against resistant reality.

If you observe practitioners (including yourself) over years rather than reading their theories, a different pattern appears. Burnout rarely comes from “doing too much magic.” It comes from using will as a technology of control rather than a process of relationship.

One of the best ways to understand the burnout effect of Will based Magic is through the following exercise.

Go through your magical journals and pick out 2-3 spells/workings you did that you might identify as will based magic.

See if these patterns fit those workings:

• Everything depends on my will - with this pattern everything about the magical spell becomes personal. Every setback is treated as evidence that you didn’t visualize well enough, ritualize enough, focus enough or believe enough.

• Constant energetic tension - Power-over magic creates chronic muscular contraction on the physical, mental, emotional and energetic body of the magician. You never stop holding the spell and so you never let it fully land in your being.

• Every obstacle becomes an enemy - Will based magic creates adversarial perception that focuses on overcoming resistance instead of cultivating curiosity. Are you fighting the world with your magic or creating a relationship with it?

• More Power is needed - When force doesn’t work, apply more force. Will based magic tries to force the outcome into place instead of creating harmony with the outcome.

Review your magical workings to see if any of these patterns fit your spell work. If so, you may want to change you relationship your Will, specifically how you apply it to your magical work.

Instead of taking the approach:

“I will make reality conform to my will.”

Change your approach to:

“I will organize myself so that this possibility has the greatest opportunity to emerge.”

This changes everything about your magic.

Your magic becomes:

• orientation instead of pressure

• participation instead of domination

• listening instead of constant assertion

• adaptation instead of escalation

• stewardship instead of ownership

You align your magic with the dynamics already present. If you want to learn my practices for doing this type of alignment, sign up for Legacy Magic.

From Will to Legacy

In light of what had happened in 2017, I evaluated how I practiced magic and came to the conclusion that I needed to take an approach that was informed by the conscious decision to surrender to the experience of the magic. I allowed it to show up in my life in a way that shaped me as much as it shaped the environment. Instead of just focusing on externally shaping the environment around me, I started to explore how the magic shaped my identity as well as the environment and how it created a shared consensual experience.

This approach to magic flew in the face of conventional Western wisdom about how magic works. Yet nonetheless it made a lot of sense. The more I dove into it, the more I began to see that this was a particular trait of Western magic as opposed to other magical experiences. My studies in the esoteric practices of Taoism and Dzogchen had already shown this to me to some degree because the approaches of those two respective schools of thought and practice demonstrated a willingness to let go of being in control and created a focus on the harmonization with nature. Additionally I had some experience with indigenous practices that I had learned and those practices also pointed to the same conclusion. Magic that is done to collaborate with reality is more effective than will-based magic.

However what I didn’t have was an approach that was based in my own background of Western magic that actually allowed me to create a similar harmonization and collaboration with the environment around me. I realized that I needed to develop my own practice for long-term magic. The elemental balancing ritual was the seed for the long-term magical work, but I needed something else as well.

I started studying with R.J. Stewart. I’d taken a few of his classes but I was drawn in particular to the Sphere of Art, which was a practice that was partially derived from his studies with William G. Gray. I had read William G. Gray’s works and been heavily influenced in my magical practice by how Gray framed magic and explored its workings. Gray, in my mind, was one of the original magical experimenters in that he rigorously tested and explored what magic could do. He did it from a perspective that was significantly different from the will-based approach to magic that was being espoused by so many other Western magicians at the time he was alive.

Studying the Sphere of Art under R.J. Stewart proved to be very helpful. It meshed with my existing system of space-time magic. It also fit within the container of my studies around William G. Gray’s works. I found that I could apply my martial arts studies and Taoist magical practices into the system which was significant because it allowed me to integrate my inner alchemical body work into the long-term magic as well. I adapted the sphere of art to fit my own particular system of magic and used it as a way to create a system of long-term magical work that was focused on designing my life proactively instead of using magic to reactively try to solve problems.

The majority of spells, sigils, and magic techniques focus on solving problems in the short run. A long-term approach to magic actively sculpts and shapes the design of your life in order to create a particular outcome. When you focus on legacy or long-term magic, what you’re doing is you’re asking yourself, “How can I shape my life using magic in a process that is repetitive but creates a significantly easier path of manifestation?”

When I started practicing magic by design, creating a long-term vision for how I wanted my life to manifest, it changed the way that I practiced magic. I focused less on solving the immediate problems and more on identifying what within myself needed to change in order to align with the ideal reality I wanted to create for myself. This exploration naturally brought a lot of change into my life because in questioning how my life was in the moment, I began to see what wasn’t working and I identified where I needed to change myself to design a better life. I ended up leaving a lot of things that weren’t working in my life behind so that I could create a life that brought me a deeper sense of contentment and happiness than I had ever experienced before.

I share that because when you start to practice long-term magic, you will naturally end up questioning the direction your life is going, and it may require significant changes to who you are. Long-term magic is inner alchemical magic, because it requires you to become the most honest person with yourself. That necessarily means that you are going to shed everything in your life where you are being dishonest with yourself and other people.

It is a path of surrender instead of forcing, discovery through curiosity instead of domination through will.

In the next article we’re going to explore this path in more depth to understand how it can be applied to practical magic.

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.

Slow Magic with Anthony Rella - A contrarian take on how to change your life with magic

Anthony Rella and I explored the topic of Slow Magic (or Long Term Magic) in this episode.

If you’ve ever felt burned out with magic, or gotten a result and watched it slip away or felt like you are pushing a boulder up a hill when it comes to manifesting something you want, this episode offers a different on how to create results with your magic.

We covered the following topics:

• What happens when will-based magic fails and why it fails.

• The difference between Slow Magic and will-based magic.

• How to Recognize Spiritual Burnout and what you can do to receive your magic.

• How to apply Slow Magic as a magical practice to your life.

If you’ve been feeling like your magic isn’t getting the results you want or that something is off with your practice, watch this episode and learn a different approach to magic that goes slow to get better results.

Welcome to Magical Experiments

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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.

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A Strategic Lens with Magic -

Photo by Nadine E on Unsplash

In my previous article, I talked about the importance of taking a 2X approach to magic instead of a 10X approach to magic. One of the reasons that I take this approach is that I am applying a strategic lens to the magical work that I am doing as it applies to my overall life.

For many people, magic is reactive. They apply magic in the moment to fix a problem that has arisen in their life or to trigger a short-term reaction that helps them reach a desired result. What is not often applied is a strategic lens that examines what the consequences of achieving that result will be or how achieving the result will affect you down the line. This lack of foresight or planning can often create unintended effects that cause you to scramble in your life. You may end up doing more magic in order to resolve the consequences that have occurred because you didn’t take the time to fully map out what you really wanted, not just in the short term, but for the long term.

Magic never happens in a void. It is always situational, based on the context of our lives and the events, people, and places that are present. Yet although it is situational and based on the context of the moment, we can still apply magic with a long-term lens that helps us design our lives.

An Exercise in Long Term Planning

I want you to imagine, as an exercise, yourself as an old person. You're on your deathbed. What kind of experiences has that person had? What kind of life has that person led?

If you were to ask that person a question, one of the best questions that you could ask is: "What is it that you want me to do that you wish you had done?" This question creates a very intentional awareness of your life that prompts you to explore what you actually want for yourself, not just in the short term but for your overall life. For instance, do you want to live in a home that you purchased? If so, that's a long-term decision.

Putting the mortgage payments aside, One of the things that you may want to think about with that home is how long you would want to live there and what you would need to do in order to make sure that that home is livable as you get older.

A strategic approach to magic looks at how magic can be applied to help you achieve the outcome that you want while also considering the variables that are inevitably going to occur in your life, such as getting older. Although we can never know the full extent of how our lives will unfold, what we can do is apply strategic planning to our lives in order to create the desired outcome we want to live.

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.

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Why we don’t think of the long term

The reason many people don’t focus on the long-term application of magic is because they’re focused on the here and now. It makes sense because that’s what we’re living with. We’re living in the here and now, but the reality is you’re likely going to get older. You’re likely to have changes in your life that affect your ability to do certain things, and you also want to think about your future not just in terms of ease and comfort but in terms of the overall quality of your life.

The lack of a strategic lens in Magic is reflective of the lack of a strategic lens in your overall life. Many people live paycheck to paycheck and in all fairness a lot of this is because the standard of living and the cost of being able to afford things is pretty high. Nonetheless, one of the things that a person can do is choose to save some money. Even if you were to save $5 or $10 a month, each month, that is going to be that much more money that you have when you need it for down the line or if you have an emergency situation.

A similar approach to magic can be applied where you start creating the circumstances in your life that favor you for both the short-term and the long-term moments. This means that you can do magical work to help you achieve a short-term outcome and at the same time you can ask yourself how this will help you achieve a long-term outcome, such as more financial stability or a high quality of life even when you’re older.

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When my Magical Practice became Strategic

I didn’t always have a long-term perspective when it came to magical work. I did a lot of short-term magic, especially in my teenage years and 20s and early 30s. My main focus was on solving the immediate problem in front of me. This is something which is typical for a lot of people. What we see in front of us is the most pressing problem so that’s what we apply magic to.

I began to change my focus to the long term when I started to see how the choices I was making in the short term were nonetheless having an impact on my life down the line.

I realized that as long as I was making short-term decisions, I wasn’t effectively planning for the rest of my life. I knew that it was important to respond to the immediate situation but I began thinking about how that response would also play out in the long term.

What really brought this home for me was getting divorced in my early 40s and realizing that I was starting all over with my life. I couldn’t afford to make short-term decisions anymore. I needed to be thinking about what was going to happen to me down the line and what I was going to do to make sure that I took care of myself.

The truth I’ve also come to recognize is that even when I plan for the long-term strategy, there are going to be short-term experiences that will change what the plan is. This is true for all of us. You can plan for the long term and nonetheless have a variable enter into your life that changes the equation dynamically. For instance you meet somebody and that person changes the entire direction of your life because you choose to be with that person and you want to see where things will go. That can change your plan significantly.

The key approach that you want to take with long-term magic is that you consider the direction of your life and you plan for those variables. If someone comes into your life, for example, you ask yourself: Does this person match my values? Does this person fit in my life in the long term not just in the short term? This kind of thinking can seem a little bit cold and clinical but it’s really designed to get you to think very carefully about your choices, so that regardless of what happens you are taking care of yourself, your life and your legacy.

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Why I do magic when life is good

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