by Elle L. Fauntleroy
I guess I’ve eternally had a knack for complicated dudes. A friend and I recently coined the nickname “Captain Save-a-Bro” for me in reference to the variety of broken people I would tend to bring in.
The truth of how I see it is, it’s not just them. My problem has often been that I’ve fixated on magick in order to make my relationships work. A great deal of this year for me has been focused on tearing myself away from that.
Except I had to admit that I was lying to myself.
I started practicing sex magick more regularly than usual this year. On my own.
I still feel odd talking about magickal practices in general, because magickal experience is so intimate and personal. It’s ironic that I bring that up in the context of sex magick and masturbation, I know.
Still not sure why sex just seems like a bunch of fun and preferences to me, but magick is about your relationship with the divine, and that is so much more insanely intimate. Let’s rewind a little bit.
I’ve been on a pretty specific spiritual path for the past several years now. Let’s just say it’s occult-based with strong roots in Abrahamic threads (like, technically according to it, I’m a monotheist. I also consider myself simultaneously somewhere on the atheism/agnostic spectrum, which I’ve simply weaved into my practice and cosmology as part of everything else.)
Earlier this year, I began experimenting with sex magick.
Ok, let’s rewind even more. Before this year, and until about 2013, I had been a practicing witch on and off in a newb, slapdash, eclectic way for close to two decades, with mostly Pagan inclinations towards the wheel of the year and some spellwork peppered in there.
I think my problem/ symptom happened to be that spells made it into the mix when I wanted somebody to fall in love with me or become attracted to me.
A lot of you probably know how this story concludes. At best, when you direct this stuff towards another human being and their will, you usually get slavish devotion for a time that is likely to go up in some pretty large flames.
I dig powerplay, but it has to be based on consent.
After 2016 proved to be a pretty heartbreaking debacle in my lovelife, I concluded that I was done messing with magick in order to get people to like me. And it kinda-sorta worked.
I certainly didn’t fall back on any spellworking, and I learned from mistakes made energetically crying out to potential lovers in my despair.
Then 2017 happened.
Early on this year, my main teacher at the moment explained to me some of the methodology behind sex magick, and how you can do some easy, energetically renewing practices without a partner around.
Full disclosure, 2017 was also kind of monumental in that I got my groove back—I had been on birth control medication for 5 years until the very end of 2016, which killed my sex drive, with or without a partner around. So this was a big biological shift for me overall.
Not terribly long story short, I started trying to send a lot of the buildup energy to various people in my life. I sent it for innocuous purposes (like when I thought that maybe someone could use a creative boost) but I also sent it for… lustful purposes.
In one case I didn’t think I could be forthright asking the guy involved out directly, because he’d given me a bunch of subtle messages seemingly suggesting that it wouldn’t be a good situation for a variety of reasons. Upon deeper assessment, I’m pretty sure that he was right.
Energetic things happened anyway.
It wasn’t like there was some big production around it like in Artemisia’s fabulous chronicle. There was no goddess backstory, as my personal relationship to the divine feminine tends to revolve more around simply being present and conscious in my own body, and actively avoids connections to biology in some other ways, because that’s what works for me.
But in the meantime, I didn’t bother trying to date like a regular adult. At all.
I found myself heinously picky and unwilling to put up with hookup/dating culture.
Maybe I was striving to soak in my own desire rather than the outcome, which was less practically important to me. At the end of the day, it was pleasure for its own sake, though I hoped that it would have a positive byproduct.
So here I am at the end of the year, having to come to terms with the fact that I failed at breaking myself of the habit I said I would break.
I never tried to manipulate anyone’s will to like me in this case, but energy follows focus. If you are “giving it to someone” energetically, it’s very likely that they’ll respond in kind.
Nature just kind of works that way. And they did respond.
I couldn’t help but feeling like I’d cheated because I knew some energetic shortcuts and in the meantime, didn’t want to try to combat my intense introversion or lack of desire to bother with contemporary dating like a regular adult.
To be clear, I don’t feel a whit of guilt for doing the thing physically and having a bunch of fun orgasms in the name of mostly positivity.
I feel crappy that I broke a resolution to myself about avoiding this shortcut and fell short of trying to reach out to people on a human level. Owning and claiming the information on this level has been part of the journey, too.
In 2018, I will do this like a normal person. Maybe. I’ll try.
IN CONCLUSION
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About the Author:
Elle L. Fauntleroy is a writer and performance artist in Los Angeles. Her background is in modern witchcraft and Experiential Kabbalah.
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