3 lessons I learned when I surrendered to magic
and why this can help you get better results
The word surrendered doesn’t typically come up in conjunction with magic. Nonetheless, I’ve discovered that my most profound experiences occur when I surrender to the magic I’m working, instead of trying to control it.
This is counter-intuitive to how magic in the West is typically written about and explained. Results based magic in particular emphasizes the importance of exercising control over the magical practice to get results. While this can work for short term results, I’ve found that longer term magical workings require a different approach.
Longer term magical workings are done over an extended period of time. Typically they are done as a proactive practice of magic, designed to gradually align your life to what you want to manifest in the long term.
There is a need to let go and surrender to the process, and accept that there may be variables you never considered that will appear over time and have to be worked with or otherwise incorporated into your magical work.
However, I’ve also found that surrendering to the magic works with short term results based magic. When we can let go of the need to be in control of the process, that’s when the magic really begins to work.
There are 3 lessons I’ve learned about surrendering to the magic that has helped me radically change the way I practice magic as well as how I receive the results.
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Lesson 1: What you hold onto becomes the resistance that keeps you from the result
One of the mistakes I’ve made, and seen other magicians make, is what is held onto. You do a magical working to get a result, but you hold onto something, usually from a place of trying to control the working, but sometimes also from a place of resistance to the result.
For example, I’ve held onto fear and doubt about something I really want and let that get in the way of the manifestation of a result. What I hadn’t done was acknowledge that fear and doubt were there and then redirected the emotions in a way that was helpful for me.
It doesn’t have to be emotion. It could be that you continually are doing magic for the result you want, but not actually releasing the magic so it can fully manifest what you want it to bring into existence. I’ve known several people who kept doing magical working after magical working instead of doing one working and letting it land in them and in the world. When we continually do magical work without letting up, we aren’t actually surrendering to the experience and allowing the magic to work.
Have you had an experience like this? Leave a comment and share what you learned.
Related article of interest
Lesson 2: Your ability to receive correlates to your ability to surrender
How are you at receiving? If you struggle with receiving then it can often keep what you are manifesting from you. Sometimes we don’t feel like we deserve the result we are seeking to achieve and so we keep it from ourselves.
The ability to receive is essential. We can do a magical working and put it out there, but if we aren’t ready to surrender enough to receive the result, then all the work we do won’t matter. Magic isn’t just about what you put out into the world…it’s also what you allow in and enable yourself to receive.
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Lesson 3: The experience is the key to the transmission of magic and the change in your identity
Magic is an experience. I’ve learned that when I fully allow the experience into my life, there is a necessary amount of surrender that accompanies it. Too often I see magicians get caught up in expectation around how a result will manifest, which limits their ability to surrender to the experience as it unfolds.
The experience is part of the magic. I have been doing some wealth magic around money lately and have found that as I surrender to the experience the money comes into my life in ways I can’t always anticipate. For instance, I had a home warranty service pay out on a heater that ultimately didn’t need to be replaced. It wasn’t the way I expected the money to come into my life, but it illustrated the importance of being open to the experience and allowing it come through in the way it needed to.
In my system of spirit work I’ve learned to fully allow the spirit to communicate with me without expecting it to appear before me or talk in my language. Instead, the communication and overall work has occurred through experiential embodiment, where the direct experience is somatically encouraged and worked with.
This same approach is applied to magic as well in an act of surrendering to the expression and experience of magic. When the magic is worked, the experience is acted out through somatic awareness and then released into the world.
How are you applying somatic work to your magical practice?
Integrating somatic experiencing with magical work is a relatively new area of magical practice. If you’re a magical practitioner:
who struggles with visualization
who can’t fully access your psychic senses
who finds conventional magical practices to be limiting
and you find that what I shared above resonates with you, then you may find my Experiential Embodiment class helpful for taking this work further.
In the Experiential Embodiment class, you will learn a somatic system of magic that teaches you how to communicate with spirits and experience magic through the kinisthetic awareness of your body. To learn more and start getting results where you experience magic directly click the button below:
Conclusion
Magic doesn’t have to be a practice where we force results onto reality. We can learn to work with and surrender to the experience and as a result bring ourselves into alignment with the experiences and results we want to manifest in our lives.
The experience is important as is the sober control of results. The article is quite clear about this. But the experiental embodiment seems to be a completely different matter. Why? Apart from reports on obsession and similar states of delusion in psychiatric and even occult literature I had to witness a friend sliding into madness because of or at least speeded by a month's long ritual. It consisted of - broadly speaking - wanderings through the empty streets of the morning while counting the streetlights and aligning them with a system of correspondences of planetary hours. All was inspired by Crowley's Vision and the Voice transfered to an urban setting and even the Enochian proceedings were carefully observed.
But in the end there was no control, only a fated OpenBSD to powers that entered her: lamp-post bowed to her to whisper things unknown to others - as if to prepare a script for a horror film...
That's why I am most sceptical about surrendering to any forces, even seemingly slight ones. I firmly think that a ritual system of magic expounded e.g. by medieval grimoires provides an useable guideline because it includes a secure basis for a secure operation - a circle for example. I, for one, always use either a pyramid or a sphere of light which I impregnate, if I may say so, with a rune (without subscribing to Germanic thinking) or an Enochian letter or an appropriate image or simply a colour or a figure that embodies a clear-cut intention.
Anyway, this, our kind of, stuff discussed here is and stays fascinating and continues alluring us despite its traps and downfalls. Thank you for instruction and inspiration. All the best.