There are so many misunderstandings about magick and the Law of Attraction and how they actually work in everyday life. I wrote about this in my most recent book, The Heart of the Goddess: A Handbook for Living Soulfully. Here’s an excerpt:
Let’s start with a couple of definitions. What do I mean by “magick,” and why is it spelled that way? Magick is the art of changing your consciousness using your will, which then changes your experience, what enters and leaves your life. Many modern-day Pagans and witches have chosen to add a “k” to the end of the word in order to differentiate it from the notion of magic as staged illusion.
Magick (with the “k”) is more than a mere trick, although it can look like one if you’re seeing it from the outside.
How does magick work?
All that you perceive around you is a reflection of your inner world. On one level, you observe what you do because of the way your mind filters things. This is due to your previous experiences, your beliefs, and the habitual way you have trained your brain to process events.
Science has demonstrated this in many experiments and studies. A well-known one is to have a group of people observe an event, then question them separately about it. Questions – and answers – about the color of the clothing worn by the key players, the order in which things happen, and other details show clearly that we aren’t all seeing things objectively.
On a deeper level, your thoughts and beliefs affect what you draw into your field of experience. Everything is made of energy, including you. Energy moves – it vibrates and emanates in waves. When you are on the same vibration as something, you can draw it to you much more easily than if your energy doesn’t match up.
When you learn to change your thoughts and the feelings that underlie them, you can shift your vibration, and as if by magic (which is really magick), you achieve the results you desire. This is a simplified description of how you work magick.
Now is a good time to define the Law of Attraction (LOA) and address some common misconceptions about it.
This natural law is explained and popularized by the film The Secret, by the work of Abraham-Hicks, and in many books and teachings. There are a lot of misunderstandings about what it does. Many people have developed a negative view of the LOA, seeing it as wishful thinking, a justification of class privilege, or a blame-the-victim philosophy. These misunderstandings are not surprising, given that a quick explanation leaves out some essential points.
The LOA is basically the method behind the magick described above – you attract people, things, and experiences into your life based on your energy vibration, or in other words, your thoughts, feelings, and beliefs.
The idea of using the LOA to attract what you desire is that you “don’t have to work” to get what you want. That’s where many people get confused. “What? You mean that I don’t have to work three jobs and scrimp and save to build my dream house?” “No,” the answer might be, “you simply have to align your vibration with the dream home you’re looking for, and it will soon be yours.”
The problems with this reply lie in our understandings about two of the words – “simply” and “soon.”
Yes, at its root, the concept of the LOA is simple. However, for most of us human beings, the journey to learning to align our energies with our desires is not easy. It is actually a whole lot of hard work to learn to attract ideal experiences into your life – but not the common notion of “work.” Let go of trying to control your physical experience through force and physical exertion, like working hard at a job you resent and saving up, penny by precious penny, while trying to resist the mainstream advertising that urges you to spend, spend, spend.
Instead, your work is to train yourself to value your vibrational alignment over all other experience, to practice strengthening your connection to the Divine Source within you, and to uproot and transform old beliefs.
You’ll do all this while living in a culture that considers such inner work a waste of time, misguided, strange, or even harmful and wrong.
As for “soon,” as Abraham often says, you could indeed manifest your desires immediately if you could tap into the purest vibration of your longing. But most of us have a lot of blockages and old habits to dismantle before we get to that point.
Back to the idea of finding your unique magick. In order to attune your vibration to the point where you can draw to you the experiences that are perfect for your joy and growth, there’s plenty of inner work to do. You’ll be unlearning old beliefs and habits, while at the same time building a new toolkit to help you stay in the flow of connection, and return to it quickly when you stray from your path.
The tools and techniques that you use will be drawn from your innate preferences and talents. Remember, magick is an art. Like visual artists, who have a wide variety of materials to choose from – watercolors, oil paints, charcoal, fancy markers, crayons, colored pencils – you get to decide what you’ll use to create your own magick. You’ll build – and actually, you’ve already been assembling – a tool chest that holds your favorite magickal tools, the ones that are most fun and effective for you.
You’ll then employ these favored tools, and new ones that you’ll experiment with and adopt along the way, to focus your will and to create change. What do I mean by “will” in this usage of the word? I’m not talking about the surface desires of the conscious mind, although they are fun to play with sometimes.
When I speak of will, I mean the deeper yearnings of your soul.
You’ll become most clearly aware of what these are when you learn to listen to your intuition and align your mind and heart, which is part of the essential work of a priestess or conscious co-creator.
But even if you feel unclear about your callings right now, you probably have plenty of clues in your experience, ones that bubble up through the layers of your conscious mind and form a thread of meaning in your life.
Learning to work with your will means using your consciousness tools to bring you into a state where you align with the vibration of your desires.
This requires practice and focus. Happily, this kind of inner work isn’t boring or tedious.
If done with an attitude of curiosity and an open heart, it is intensely fun and rewarding. Not that there won’t be tears and struggles, especially as you discover and root out old patterns. But the discovery of and alignment with your personal brand of magick is like unearthing a cache of priceless treasure at your very core – one that you weren’t aware of for much of your life, yet it belongs to you, to enjoy and share as you desire.
The riches that you have deep inside you, waiting to be found, are beyond those of your wildest dreams!
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