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I don't know how common this experience is, but for a very long time I've felt both a strong attraction toward and an even stronger resistance against actually practicing magic. One of the most challenging aspects of my priestess training has been actually doing the basic energetic and magical practices. There's all kinds of simple, reasonable explanations for this: my "low church" orientation that just wants to go inward and connect without a lot of mumbo-jumbo hand-waving and chanting of dead languages; my "rationality filter" that's a side effect of growing up in a modern, rationalist household with a King of Swords for a father; and my life-long impatience about repetitious learning (dooming my study of foreign languages and limiting the scope of my musical abilities). But there's always seemed like there was more behind it than the simple and obvious explanations. Over the last couple of years I'd become semi-convinced that there were bindings of some kind on me, preventing me from fully engaging my actual abilities.
I've tried to avoid making it an excuse for not doing the work, but fear I was only partially successful, especially in recent months. I started to focus more on finding the roots of the bindings (if indeed they existed at all) rather than just doing the work. But I was growing tired of feeling like I was putting more effort into simply motivating myself to start my daily practices than I was actually doing them. For the last few months I've done only the simplest of my assigned work.
Then, on the evening of August 28th, a few days after my balcony vigil, I reached a crisis point.
( Direct from my practice journal. Square brackets are my comments from today. )
I've tried to avoid making it an excuse for not doing the work, but fear I was only partially successful, especially in recent months. I started to focus more on finding the roots of the bindings (if indeed they existed at all) rather than just doing the work. But I was growing tired of feeling like I was putting more effort into simply motivating myself to start my daily practices than I was actually doing them. For the last few months I've done only the simplest of my assigned work.
Then, on the evening of August 28th, a few days after my balcony vigil, I reached a crisis point.
( Direct from my practice journal. Square brackets are my comments from today. )
