If you are new to practicing magick (with a k) or are just curious to understand, start here. Before we go further, magick, put simply, is the interaction between the mind, the will, and reality. It is not pulling a rabbit out of a hat or levitating 2 feet off the ground. It is becoming aware of every moment of every day that you impose a belief on to your world and choosing each belief for your highest good. It is highly practical and it can be surprising to realize that all of us practice magick to some degree, on a daily basis. Our minds are constantly projecting on to the people, places, and things before us. But what many of us fail to understand is that we impose our will on to the reality. Our mind, our identities, the sensation that we are all separate beings and things is an illusion. We create the illusion. We create It. Therefore we can decide to stop being victims of reality, but rather creators of our reality.

Here we will be discussing the use of ritual in High Magick as it connects to the emotion anxiety. Ritual is defined as “an act or series of acts regularly repeated in a set precise manner.” It involves setting an intention or intended outcome as you perform these acts. When you practice ritual, you repeat an intention with discipline and consistency (daily, weekly, monthly, or any time frame designated). This act of repetition creates a new belief, thought, and behavior pattern that embed themselves in to your conscious and unconscious mind. What happens in the rite corresponds or relates to what happens inside of your psyche. What happens in your psyche relates to what happens outside of your identified persona.

How do I construct a ritual? It is up to you and your relationship to Self. You can use imagination and any number of social, societal constructs with great success. A father guiding his daughter every morning to ride her bike without training wheels is a ritual. People gathered in a sports bar to cheer on their favorite team is a ritual. The transubstantiation in a Catholic church as the priest recites the words, changing the Eucharist and wine to Jesus’ body and blood, is also ritual. An old man waking up every morning to practice chi gong with the sun rise is ritual. You can practice ritual all day every day. But the gift of magick is that you are empowered in choosing. You are fully open to creative possibility as you choose which rituals you wish to participate in and which you do not.

Now, on the topic of anxiety: It is either defined as an emotion or it is defined as a mental illness, a chronic condition that manifests physically and/or mentally and sometimes with little known cause. From the standpoint of High Magick, anxiety is and will always be a construct of the mind. This is not implying that a construct is not real. It is real, especially if certain beliefs surrounding anxiety are locked in to place for decades of your life. Complex psychosocial constructs can gain incredible influence over your life if you give them that power over and over again. Aristotle said: “Give me a child until he is 7 and I will show you the man.” Some psychologists theorize that the experiences in childhood can determine personality and relationships with Self, people, and your reality as a whole. You establish a reality with limiting belief patterns as a child and you reinforce them repeatedly since they are the foundations of how you understand the world.

Additionally, victims of trauma tend to reenact or re-create what might have been experienced in childhood in to adulthood and much of this is occurring on the subconscious level of the mind. Therefore it does not seem effective to simply try harder to eliminate the anxiety or to just think more positively. It is possible, but difficult to address the unconscious mind with the conscious mind. This is why positive thinking alone does not seem consistently effective at eliminating anxious thought patterns. And it seems that the more you “try” or attach yourself to an outcome, the harder it can become to achieve that outcome. Trying still creates the belief that you will not be successful at doing what you desire… This is where High Magick and ritual come in to play.

Now the next lesson may be difficult to swallow. It is much easier to blame the people in your life for any form of mental anguish that you experience. It is much easier to pray to an externalized God to be saved from sin. But in ritual magick, unlocking your power as a magician requires an awareness that is far less comforting and easy. This awareness, fundamentally, is this: In order to alleviate all suffering (physical, mental, or spiritual) through the tool of High Magick, you must take full responsibility over every aspect of your reality. It is not enough to think, imagine, or even believe that you have the power to change or to banish the past when it no longer serves you. You create everything that You experience. These words are only an approximation of the divinity and wholeness of You because It simply Is. And You are It. All of It. Every man, woman, person, child, animal, plant, object, thought form. You are not your thoughts or emotions. You are the observer. And You have the ability to create, to change, and to evolve in every aspect of your being.

With this understanding of your true sovereignty, I am providing a list of simple, yet powerful examples of ritual that will bring your mind and body in to stasis. The goal is to create awareness and intentional interactions with your reality. I have placed each ritual in an order that I would intuit is most influential when it comes to balancing energy. Treat them as lessons or a series of energetic practices that become more complex or advanced as you progress. Therefore I advise mastering one ritual practice before moving on to the next. I find single pointed focus is highly useful in magickal practices and can allow you to make lasting changes to your routine and your environment. Don’t speed through your process, simply pick one technique and try it for seven days. Eventually, you will naturally create your own rituals which will unlock the unlimited depths of your own potential. Treat your world as an experiment, a discovery of Self.

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