Choosing Your Magical Path(s)

How to Start a Spiritual Practice: Part II

Hello friends,

The New Year is a time many use to reflect on their goals or larger aspirations for the next twelve months.

One of my current desires is to spend more time concretizing my spiritual desires. I want to demonstrate how spending time in ritual devotion + doing magic, can impact one’s life. I’ve seen in big and small ways how building relationships to spirits can change me. This year, I wanted to dedicate space to longer-term magical and spiritual goals, taking notes along the way and really tracking how my life changes through contact with the divine. Then, I want to share my insights with you! But for now, I want to show you how I landed on my current divine tasks.

In this essay, I will walk you through some of my preferred methods for determining a spiritual path, specifically through the lens of astrology. That includes building relationships with planets, stars, daimons, gods, lunar stations, etc. I will give you some practical tips for choosing a certain spirit (or two or three) to focus on. At the end, I will reveal the three spiritual goals I chose this year, as well as the practices they entail.

May you enjoy ✨

Last year, I wrote an introduction to beginning a spiritual practice.

This initiatory text is meant to introduce you to sparseness. To sitting still and paying attention to your experience. I drew heavily on my decade plus+ Zen practice to help explain how such spaciousness changed my life.

There’s an emphasis on simplicity when you first begin practicing, especially in the Zen tradition. Follow the breath. Feel your hands. Hear the sounds around you. Let all thoughts, visions, feelings, sensations, come and go like clouds across a blue sky. Stay with the raw experience.

You can spend months, years, whole lifetimes simply sitting. It is where the Great Mystery comes in, a calm void to, at the very least, continually return throughout your practice.

But there other uses for attention than attention itself. It also allows us to see the numinous in all things, filling our big view with all the myriad details and contours through which spirit enters. Basic meditation allows us to receive the divine, making it a perfect initiatory step into building spiritual relationships.

Rather than prizing space and quietude alone, we must also be able to find the divine in the myriad things of our lives. There are as many deities or gates to be found in a morning routine, grocery shopping, private time with lovers and friends.

How do we attune to this choosing? How do we decide which beings or planets to spend time with for a committed period of time? This is the question I wish to address today. Here are some avenues for choosing that have worked for me and I hope they provide some benefit to you.

First Steps: Opening up to the textures of your life

The space cultivated in the prior essay is meant to do many things in your life: increase awareness, cultivate compassion and wisdom, leave space for the mysteries, just to name a few. But the impact of meditation I want to focus on today is that of helping us be with our life. This staying present and focused on our experience is no small thing. It is through presence that we can let god in.

One of the effect of this process is noticing. Are there certain numbers, plants, peoples, ailments, songs, dreams, feelings, foods, etc that keep arising at certain key moments in your life? Does a certain animal sighting tend to mean something specific in your life? This sort of awareness and pattern recognition is the basis for attuning to what sort of spirits or paths are already in your life. My friend Hawk calls this omening and has a whole beginning-of-the-year practice for building a relationship to these potent symbols in our lives. But by noticing these and taking notes in any way, we begin to see the meaning, the spirit, the potential, already present. From there, you can begin to read the meaning of these signs.

I encourage you to have a dedicated notebook or note in your phone or google doc to record the recurring omens in your life and what they may mean. If a certain being keeps showing up to you through the synchronicities of your life, that’s a good sign to say hi.

Spirits and Dreams

This month, I dreamed of lady’s mantle.

One way of accessing spirit messages or omens is through dreams. Already a mysterious, often deeply symbolic, realm we visit each night, I have often been visited by important deities, celestial spirits or daimons through my slumber.