HOW TO SUCCEED AT PRACTICAL MAGIC WITHOUT REALLY TRYING

Let’s imagine that right now you’re someone with a deep and abiding interest in magic, but you don’t think of yourself as being a masterful magic person. Instead, you feel a little dorky and self-conscious about your interest in magic, a self-consciousness which is made way worse by the fact that most of the people around you don’t identify with magic at all. Maybe the people around you are all about science and atheism, or maybe they’re Christian, or they’re very into punk rock and video games, or they’re just uber-normal and into shopping at the mall and watching TV.

Whatever it is, you still feel alone.

I know this frustration very well. I spent my adolescence and the first five years of my adulthood surrounded by people who thought my love for magic was either a horrible flaw or just some laughable quirk.  People actually spat on me in the halls of my high school because I wore pentacle jewelry.

In college, I tried to pretend I wasn’t into magic at all – instead I just suffered silently in an addiction to heroin.

As you can guess, that whole heroin thing was an incredibly dark and ugly chapter of my life. I realized that I was using the drugs in part because I felt so isolated and so ashamed of who I was. By the time I arrived in my early adulthood, I got clean from heroin and got willing to do the hard work of actually accepting and enjoying myself even if everyone else wanted to reject and mock me. I tried everything I could think of in order to access and get in touch with the suppressed magic in my being. I wasn’t sure exactly what result I was looking for – but I figured I would know that I had found it when at last I wasn’t super-miserable.

So I read every single tome in the Occult section of every single bookstore and each library I could find.

I hung around coffee shops reading tarot cards with other weirdos. I went to Pagan, Wiccan, and New Age gatherings of all flavors. I’ve spent substantial time with druids, hedge witches, Thelemites, Chaos magicians, A Course in Miracles teachers, Wiccans, yogis, Hare Krishnas, psychonauts, tantric Buddhists –  the works. Let’s put it this way: if you can think of a fringe spiritual group, I’ve not only hung out with them – I probably led their events committee for two years and baked a lot of cookies for them.

And I still felt really, really frustrated.

I made some great friends, but I still felt like I wasn’t getting something. So back to you – is this frustration something you’ve experienced? Feeling always kind of like a magical fraud? Not 100% happy with what you’re doing and the results you’re getting?

I figured out that the only thing that stood in between me and feeling fully alive in my magic and fully connected to other magical people in the world was shame. My shame often took the form of some lingering ideas of what I “should” be like in order to be acceptable and worthy of the approval of some group, some tradition or some teacher. Well, fuck that.

Finally, one day, I had a strange realization – it occurred to me that no tradition, no group could give me what I was most hungry for: my own inner authority, my own power.

And then everything changed.

If you’re feeling frustrated and lonesome right now, I know this will be hard to believe – but I have to tell you that it’s completely possible for you wake up in the morning and feel wildly delighted to be you: fully confident in your own power to create the magical results that you want to create, and fully supported in deep and rich relationships with other magical people. So I’m excited to be offering a deep-dive course this fall on mastering practical magic, INFLUENCE.

What’s practical magic?

As I define it, it’s magic that gets results in the real world: with other people. Practical magic deals heavily with power, love, money, sex, and friendship. Don’t get me wrong – I think that non-practical magic (like simply communing with daemons for the fun of it) is cool too. But what can I say? I’m an old-fashioned lady from Pittsburgh and I’ve got Taurus Rising with a Capricorn Sun. I like stuff to be down-to-earth, immediately useful and applicable.

So if you decide to take the course with me, by the end of the 12 weeks you’ll have:

• immense new freedom from shame and doubt
• anchoring in your own inner authority
• fruitful connections with other magical people from all over the world
• a deep grasp of three essential practical magical techniques that let you have exactly what you most want, all the time (yes, I know that sounds like a crazy infomercial, but I’ve found again and again that it’s just plain true – soooooo, there it is)
• the ability to inhabit your power and be in-tune with the powers around you

You’ll be hearing a lot more about INFLUENCE starting the second week of September.

Registration for INFLUENCE will open on September 13th.

The course will meet 6 times over 12 weeks, and will cost about as much as taking yourself and a friend out to fancy dinner and drinks. And the course is designed to provide you with a return on your investment – so if you apply what you learn in INFLUENCE to your money life, you’ll be able to afford a lot more fancy dinner and drinks than ever before. Keep in mind that the next time I offer INFLUENCE, it’ll likely cost at least twice as much. If you’re interested in INFLUENCE and want to know more, feel free to write to me at carolyngraceelliott@gmail.com.  Otherwise, you’ll just have to sit in antici… pation.