There’s all sorts of ways things are defined, especially on the Web. So for clarity read below to see what we mean by self-help, and why magical exercises allow you to build the most powerful personal toolbox our species has ever discovered.
I read something on the internet awhile back that continues to bother me. Since it’s highly relevant here, I think it worthy of a blog post. The posting claimed that “self-help” implies we need to align ourselves in relation to what our societies consider normal or successful or, in the case of spiritual self-help, ‘spiritual’. Self-help was defined as an action taken to turn oneself into the visions/expectations of one’s societies, peers or parents. Hence, self-help is a euphemism for achieving conformity. I couldn’t disagree more. That is not the way Magical Notions is using the term.
Unless we are hardcore narcissists, we all have areas in our lives and personalities that we’d like to improve. We wish to do so to satisfy our own preferences and goals, not society’s. After all, we are adults now and neither adolescents nor children. That is what I believe, and it is also the way I believe that most people use the term ‘Self-help’.
Self-help is when you decide to improve upon your condition to meet the goals you have set for yourself. You are doing so without reliance on another’s approval, though you are free to use whatever methodology that gets you to your goal or creates the state you are striving for. To me, that is the opposite of conformity because you are not accepting another’s roadmap. You are creating your own, based on the wisdom of others, yet it is still uniquely your own.
That is how magical exercises, aka spiritual exercises, work. At our cores we are human beings, not goldfish, elephants or ET’s. Thus we have similar needs, advantages, weaknesses, dreams, desires and fears. That is why we can learn from one another, and how we can distinguish ourselves from one another as well. For example, we all know what confidence feels like. We all know when we feel it, or lack it. How other human beings have sparked their confidence is useful knowledge if we wish to spark our own and don’t know how. That’s all magical exercises do.
They take the core spiritual essence at the root of all human beings, show us how to find it, how to develop it and how to use it as our own personal North Star by which we guide ourselves through life. That’s it; that’s all magick does. Yet to have that knowledge creates the most powerful personal toolbox ever discovered by our species. That’s why it’s been around for millennia and will continue to be valued as long as human beings exist.
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Blessings upon you!