The Basics of Magic part 6: Magic is COMMUNICATION

Episode Transcript:

I’m Bridget Owens and you're listening to the Waxing Soul podcast. Join me on an exploration of mindful modern magic, a journey towards deeper understanding of self and transformative individual spirituality.
It's June 10, 2021, and today's episode is number six of a special seven-episode series on the Basics of Magic, all about magical energy as a form of communication and how important it is to be clear in our magical practice.
Are you ready to grow your soul?

Welcome to the next to last episode of the series on the basics of magic. I’m really enjoying how this is coming together, and it’s super rewarding to watch listenership go up through this so I want to say thank you especially to all the new people who are discovering the podcast and to everyone who has told their friends about it. I honestly get a lot out of the podcast creation process for myself, but it’s that much better when I know other people are listening and interested and getting something out of it too.

So I’ve kind of saved the two most important points about magic for these last two episodes. Or at least I would say that these are the two biggest lessons about magical practice that I’ve learned along the way.

And the one I want to deal with today is the idea that magic is, essentially, a form of communication.

I’ve talked a lot about, well, I just generally talk a lot about the nature of spirit in alchemical terms, and I want to revisit that here for a second. Earlier in this series I did an episode about how magic is all about energy, and in that episode I talked about how spirit is just another word for magical energy which really includes all types of energy.

And so now we’re going to take this one step further. Exchange of energy is communication. That’s the only way we can communicate. There has to be an exchange of energy of some kind. Sure, for communication to happen there also has to be some common language, some common form and interpretation so that the parties involved actually derive meaning from what’s happening, but the mechanism by which communication happens is energy exchange. Sound energy, thought energy, heck, think about how we transmit data in digital terms, pulses of electricity or light rendering meaning in binary.

So if, when we’re doing magic, what we’re really doing is sending out mental energy, other types of energy, to convey our intention, that’s communication in very basic terms, right? Or, at least, if we stop the exploration at that point we can at least say it’s an attempt at communication. And that’s really, if you want to learn how to be effective at magic, one of the keys is to kind of speak the right language with it so what you’re trying to accomplish is properly and clearly communicated.

So here’s where we get into one of the most important and hardest things to learn when it comes to getting really effective at magic. So I’ve told the story before of when I first learned about sigil magic and I did a series of sigil spells to kind of test out the process. If you’ve listened to all the episodes, I don’t remember when I told this story, maybe even episode one, but this is the pink bra story, or at least the… that was part of this series of spells. But what I learned from that other than to be open to various forms in which your intention can manifest, other than that I learned the importance of being really clear in stating your intention. It’s like with any communication. It’s not just a matter of knowing what you want to convey, but conveying it so that the other party really understands what you mean.

So, for instance, one of my spells was something about selling a piece of artwork that had been in my shop for a while and one was about losing a certain amount of weight by a certain date. But because I was also trying to be very brief and concise in my statements of intention when constructing the spells, some key details got left out. I did finally sell some artwork from the shop after a long dry spell, but it wasn’t the piece I was thinking of. And I did lose that amount of weight by the specified month, only it was a year later, and some time after that I came across something that reminded me of the spells I’d done and I realized that it had worked as specified, I just wasn’t as clear as I could have been.

And I always think of a story in the first Feng Shui book I got about a woman who wrote out an intention and placed it in her house so that she’d manifest a relationship that would end in marriage. Only she’d written, “I want a husband,” and then proceeded to date a string of guys who all turned out to already be married.

I think we often get more focused on the ritual and the mechanics of magical practice, what it looks and feels like and the various methodologies we want to use and all of that, when really the core of getting magic to work for us is to become good communicators. To become really good at saying exactly what we mean. Which, yes, means being clear in our own heads about what our intentions really are, but more than that means honing our ability to clearly state those intentions.

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Each week we will dive into a different part of the world of spirituality, magic, and self-evolution.
Check out last week's episode where we discussed intuition, our subconscious, and how our brains do magic.
And come back next week when we will continue the series and talk about how magic isn't just about changing the world around us, but about transforming ourselves.

I mentioned earlier the thing about communication involving two parties. It’s not communication if nobody gets and understands the message.

So when it comes to magic, who are we communicating with?

In a lot of ways, yeah, it’s true that we’re communicating with the universe, with the world around us, with whatever is around us that can be influenced by our energetic output and whatnot. But again, what I learned through experience – backed up with research, but definitely mostly through experience – is that we’re not speaking directly to the external. We speak first to ourselves, our subconscious, our souls.

In the episode about energy I talked about that relationship between energy flow and mental energy and the environment we’re in and the kinds of change that we make just through the application of energy or spirit. That’s how our magic functions, how the intention we communicate gets put into action. But the leadership in this process doesn’t rest with our logical brains, right? We’re not directly creating the outcome. We’re putting our intention out there and releasing the process. And our logical brains aren’t really capable of that.

Either we do things, we see what we want and we do the logical things we need to do to make that happen within plain, mundane, cause and effect type actions, or we have to give it over to something other than our logical brain. The energy exchange and flow that causes things to manifest as opposed to being directly created, that stuff comes from our deep self, our soul or subconscious. So the communication has to be with that level of our being.

When we create a spell or design a working, we’re communicating our intent to our subconscious. It’s kind of a delegation. It’s embedding a subroutine in our base programming so that our intuitive pathways take over and shape our interactions and get the ball rolling.

So the key here is to really learn how to speak your own language. This is yet another reason why I am so adamant that magic is individual and personal and comes from within. Even if your way of doing magic involves some other being, some other force, it’s not your logical brain that’s carrying on that relationship. It’s your deep self.

You know how, like, when you’re around somebody that you’re not really compatible with, not really comfortable around, and you’re trying to be really polite? Even if they don’t pick up on it, your subconscious self isn’t participating in that interaction in a positive way. It’s not, you’re not the same with them as you are with someone you hit it off with. So whatever you are endeavoring to have a magical relationship so they can help you manifest your intentions or teach you or whatever, you’ve got to get your soul on board with that. And that means knowing yourself, knowing how to communicate with your subconscious, your deep self, learning the language of your base programming, your operating system. And that’s different for everyone.

It goes back to episode 10 where I talked about wonder and awe and the stuff that really lights you up – that’s really the key to cracking the code of how to communicate with your deep self. Maybe you need ritual, maybe you need symbolism, maybe you need… maybe you need to bake cookies about it or draw up your intentions as cartoons. Whatever. It’s kind of like finding the little tricks to motivate yourself or bribe yourself to do things – not that we want to bribe ourselves do to do magic stuff but the language of how you do that is pretty magical, right?

And it’s a huge shift to think about your magic repertoire being really about your own inner language, your own code, and not about figuring out some preordained universal language or whatever.

In a lot of ways our internal language, our internal code is easier to learn to work with because it’s already there, it’s natural, we just have to learn to tap into ourselves and learn it if we haven’t already. But I think it helps to kind of think of it as a process of learning to hand over tasks to your inner self. Finding a working relationship between your logical brain and your deep self. Like they’re two different departments passing projects and reports to each other. It’s about clearly laying out the parameters of the desired outcome.

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Communication, finally, is also, really, a two way thing. It’s not just one party talking at another, it’s getting responses. So even in magic, communication means learning to listen and listening to understand. Active listening.

And we talked about this back in episode 2 about being open to the way things manifest. That’s a huge part of it. It’s not just being open to possibilities, though, it’s actually tuning your subconscious into the messages that come back from the universe and tuning our logical brain to listen for reports from our deep self. And that’s, that’s really a crucial distinction to make.

My point in episode 2 was really that we have to turn our logical brain off as far as looking for signs, looking for results, all of that because that’s a fast track to trying to micromanage the universe, to getting frustrated and down about things not working out the way we hoped. Because our logical brains aren’t good at letting go. They only really let go if they can trust something else to be on it, so that’s another great reason to get good at magic because it’s a way to take sources of stress off your logical brain and hand them off to the deep self to handle behind the scenes so you’re not obsessing.

But that means you have to kind of keep the logical brain off the job and instead of looking for signs from the universe and stressing out about that, just have it tuned in to picking up signals from your subconscious. And again, those take whatever form is kind of dictated by the inner language of your self.

Maybe it’s a certain feeling, an unusual thought, an impulse to do a specific thing. It’s either something you have to learn for yourself through experience, or it’s something you can include in your intention. Tell your subconscious how you want to be notified that something has worked. Which feels weird to some of you, I’m sure, but it’s something most magical practitioners feel comfortable asking of the powers and energies they work with, right? Like, here’s my intention, and here’s maybe the sign I want to see to let me know I’ve been heard. That’s not part of everyone’s practice, but it’s part of some, and really it’s a way to let our subconscious self, our deep self, our soul, whatever you want to call it that here’s the intention that my logical self is turning over and delegating, but also here’s the form I want reports in, please.

And then, still, forget about it. Release it. Which takes practice. All of this is magical PRACTICE, right? But let go of it because even if your logical brain isn’t actively thinking about it, your subconscious is going to be like, hey, remember when you asked me to make you think about squirrels when that thing you wanted manifested? Well, here you go. Maybe a weird example, but whatever.

Figuring out how to do that, how to clearly communicate, what it feels like to get replies, that all takes action and participation and practice. Sitting around thinking about it won’t really get you there. It’ll all remain theoretical until you do it. And this is why things like keeping a book of shadows, keeping a journal, doing small or experimental workings just to learn and see what happens, that kind of stuff that’s part of learning magic in a traditional sense anyway, that’s why it’s all useful and important.

It’s a process of learning to speak the right language and to be clear in your communication, learning from the times when maybe things don’t go to plan.

So just one more episode to go in the series, the expanded downloads are available, and the next invite-only livestream Q&A will be on the 28th either on my Facebook or on my YouTube channel depending on what happens technologically between now and then.

So so so very thankful for all the new listeners, again, and we’ll be wrapping up the series next week with a really great topic, the one that’s kind of the most important part of magical practice as I understand it, which is personal evolution. So can’t wait to dive into that with all of you!

Episode 33 Download: The Basics of Magic Part 6 Workbook

Thank you so much for listening.
New episodes of the Waxing Soul drop every Thursday.
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Many thanks to my readers, listeners, friends, mentors, inspirations, and my framily for riding with me into season two.
Until next week, blessed be and be good to yourself.