In yesterday’s post, we looked at magick as a path to becoming fully yourself in all your wonderfully unique glory. (If you didn’t catch it, I recommend reading that one first.)
In the process, we explored shifting our attention away from momentary outcomes to savoring all the good bits in between.
And we looked at how, when we live just for outcomes, we’re often impatient, antsy, and feeling as if life is on hold when, really, life is already happening. Right now! Here it is!
Today, let’s connect this shift away from fixating on outcomes to empower our magick.
And because magick is intertwined with paradox…guess what? The less we fixate on outcomes, the more likely we are to actually reach them.
Let’s kick this off with a personal example, one that I’m living as we speak.
I have a goal to bring my hormones into better balance, and to support that goal, I chose to do an anti-inflammatory elimination diet.
Basically, there’s a bunch of stuff I’m not eating, and then after eight weeks, I’ll slowly reintroduce each food, assessing how my body reacts. (If you’re curious, I’m using The Inflammation Spectrum as my guide.)
(There’s also a ton of delicious stuff I am eating, so it’s definitely not as glum as it sounds.)
I’m midway through the fifth week, and in addition to feeling different physically (more energy, less allergies, etc.), this process has been majorly eye opening about, unexpectedly, my creative process.
To break it down, let’s look at the food-related insights first, and then I’ll bring it back around to creativity–specifically, the romance novel I’m revising–all in service of learning how to empower our magick.
Ready? Let’s do this.
Within the first week of the diet, I learned, quickly, that I needed to have way more meals prepared than I’d anticipated.
Any lag time between “I’m hungry” and food sitting on a plate in front of me, ready to enter my face, increased the chances I’d reach for something off plan. And I needed to have a variety of things prepared, otherwise boredom could inspire off-plan snacking.
Probably super obvious, yes, but what I learned is how much these very important, practical details would often get glossed over in my thought process.
I’d be so focused on the desired outcome that the “how to get there” piece was decidedly more hazy, without me realizing it.
When my brain was in Outcome Mode, I’d feel excited about the end result, geeking out over how great it was going to feel to be eight weeks into the future.
But guess what? It was now, not eight weeks later…
…so unless I channeled that excitement into the present moment, I was way too up in my head and ungrounded to be very effective in the here and now.
The more I slowed down, coming back to the present, the more I gained access to an abundance of guidance: from my body, my environment, synchronous books and podcasts falling into my lap, spirit guides chiming in, etc.
For instance, one afternoon during week two…
…I wondered if maybe I should sign up for a separate yoga app, in addition to Centr, the fitness app I use.
As I was scrolling through options, a little voice in my head invited me back to the present moment.
I felt a constriction in my body and a fluttery, somewhat rushed energy in my mind when I contemplated signing up for a second app, and when I moved closer to those sensations, asking what information they held for me…
…I knew, in a flash, that having to choose which app I wanted to use before working out would make it harder, not easier, to get moving.
I didn’t need that second app.
In the past, I would have jumped on the desire for more, convinced that it would get me to my goal that much faster.
I’d leapfrog toward the outcome–gimme more apps! Better! Do all the things!–instead of getting up close and personal with the present, checking in with what I genuinely needed. Information that was readily available, if only I could slow down enough to receive it.
How does this relate to my romance-novel revisions?
Well, writing a book isn’t a skip-to-the-outcome sort of thing. It takes time! A lot of time.
But it’s easy to jump ten steps ahead in my mind, wondering if I’ll be able to land an agent for my fiction writing, get a book deal, what the cover art will look like, if I’ll be able to write the rest of the series I have planned…
WOAH.
Hold your horses there.
Today, all I need to do is focus on revising chapter eleven.
That’s it. And that’s plenty!
When I’m mentally rushing ahead, actually sitting down to write can make me feel antsy and bored, because it means I’m not already at the outcome–gah!!! Too impatient!
But sitting down and writing is, arguably, a pretty important step in the book-creation process…
…just like ensuring that I have enough meals prepped is vital for my elimination diet…
…and not signing up for a bajillion fitness apps is important if I actually want to, like, workout, not just scroll through my phone all morning.
Not to mention, I loooooove writing, so rushing my way through just to get it over with kinda defeats the purpose, doesn’t it?
And now, let’s bring this around to magick…
In Magick in Theory and Practice, Crowley writes that if we want to attract something to us, we must make ourselves (and our environment) a suitable receptacle for that energy.
We must arrange “conditions so that its nature compels it to flow toward [us].”
Rather than trying to force an outcome, we set up the conditions so that the desired outcome naturally emerges.
In a useful moment of synchronicity, I was reading On Method Acting, because one of my romance-novel characters is an actor, and I came across a section that would have garnered Crowley’s stamp of approval.
“You must realize that no emotion can be created by trying to recapture the emotion directly. It must be taken in steps with complete disregard for the end results.”
And a bit further down the page, the author describes a situation where the actor isn’t able to conjure up the appropriate emotion.
“What the actor did wrong was to anticipate the end result instead of trying to recapture the circumstances that led to the end result.” (emphasis in original)
This parallels nicely with Crowley’s assertion that we should devote ourselves fully to the process, ridding ourselves of the “lust for result.”
Going back to my elimination diet, when I was lusting after the result of successfully finishing the diet, I was completely ignoring the circumstances that would lead to that end result.
So, on this New Moon in Virgo, what choices can you make today to sloooow down and come into the present?
If you imagine that everything you need in this moment is already here, that you don’t need to rush into the future to find it, what shifts in your awareness?
How does your body feel when you’re not trying to be somewhere else?
What insights arise when you settle fully into this moment?
From this place, what would be a useful next step to create conditions–inner, outer or both–where your desired outcome would naturally arise in time?
Focus just on that next step.
The future will still be there later.
Write that step down…and take it.
Then, once you get to wherever you are next, repeat.
Focus on what’s in your zone of influence right now, creating the optimal conditions for your intentions to manifest…
…and let the universe take care of the rest.
Happy New Moon.
