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Magic/Therapy

10:07 / 18.01.04

I've been thinking, lately, about the way we use what we learn of magic in helping other people - not in the casting a spell for someone sense, but in a more general and therapeutic sense. On a couple of occasions in my life to date I've used the things I've learned, through magic, about the way peoples' minds seem to work in order to help people cope with traumatic events or purge negative emotions and so forth. I seem to have a bit of an aptitude for it, and it's something I'd like to explore further. So the question is: what school(s) of therapy are closest to magical practice, and how does one get into studying them?

18:56 / 18.01.04

Great subject. Personally, a lot of, if not all actually of the magical work I've done leans towards the theraputic anyway. Thus the phrase "peson interested in my process" rather than magician. Seem closer to what I'm about (This is perhaps a weakness on my part, but that's a subject for another thread). Anything which can be seen as increasing self-awareness and understanding and working on one's conditioning can be seen as theraputic, I think. Where do you draw the line?

I've mentioned Wilhelm Reich several times on here, in this thread and in this one and I think his work is well worth checking out from a magical angles. It increases bodily awareness, lets loose blocked emotion etc etc. Going directly to the body is an excellent way to bypass all the bullshit, excuses, prevarication etc that we saddle ourselves with. The best way to pick this up is to construct your own curriculum out of the various books available, Hyatt's being a good start. Israel Regardie worked as a Reichian therapist and recommended some kind of psycho-theraputic work (not necessairily Reichian) before even beginning magick.

Anothr thing I found useful was working as a volunteer phone counsellor. I received some training in humanistic counselling folowing the works of Carl Rogers. At the tiem I saw loads of links between this and Thelema - probably had a lot to do with the amount of Thelemic stuff I was reading at the time. Rogers is (unsurprisngly) very open to the possibility of magickal phenomena. Doing something like this would be an excellent way to develop your inter-personal skills, listening, empathy, self-awareness again etc I think I was actually a bit too immature for it at the time, but I still find the mindset popping out quite frequently.

20:30 / 18.01.04

This article from Discover Magazine describes a psychiatrist's exploration of Native American Church peyote rituals as a treatment for alcoholism. Note that it's not just use of the drug—his thesis is that the peyote "serves primarily as an amplifier of emotions aroused by the ceremony's religious and communal elements."

Unconditional Love

15:34 / 07.01.07

I havd been thinking of starting a thread on this, but found this one, nice. Well i have been in group therapy for a little over a year now and have been through an emotional rollercoaster of various estates of habitation.

I find myself at the moment experiencing Rage, blinding silent rage, its something i have been putting into my daily devotionals especially upon the part of visualisation, the images i visualise as i invoke aspects of an entity are being filled with this force of emotion.

Since they largely act as protecters and warrior type figures i think this may actually be helpful, but also it gives a safe expression of that anger.

I am wondering how other people release emotion during ritual and what emotions they encounter, how ritual effects the processing of emotions, i see it almost as related to play, theatre and drama, i am keeping obvious ritualistic weapons out of my practice, so the anger learns to manifest as gesture, facial expression, tonality of voice and especially as visualisation, eyes open, the notion of creating thought forms comes to mind.

This rage is being processed within the the area of my stomach and genitalia, it literally comes up from the depths or underworld in my own system of relations, yet the anger is also saturated with pain, some of the ritual has conributed to overwhelming sorrow and weeping and a sense of loss.

The anger and depression tie into each other, the sorrow is anger if that at all makes sense to anybody.

Now without the therapy i am in i dont think my rituals would be quite so charged with emotion, The figure of Anpu, Anubis was chosen first because of appearence, but as time wore on and more research was done and especially jackal/wolf (egyptian) associations with renewal became prevalent, the digestion of decaying structure, a kind of hope at rebirth is involved in the ritualistic activity combined with the ongoing therapy.

In the sense that magic and therapy are seen to give birth to new awareness and cosmology i am thinking that the two make perfect partners for transformation, I wouldnt mind hearing how other people have approached this and what changes it made to them.

03:26 / 08.01.07

Christopher Hyatt's energized meditation techniques seem to belong in both categories, although I don't know if it (or perhaps just the good doctor) is everyone's cup of tea. I'm just starting to explore those options, but I'll report back if anything really interesting happens.

I inadvertently awakened my kundalini last Spring during shadow work (and possibly a bunch of other stuff - ritual and meditation - I was doing at the time). It was a pretty astonishing experience that I know I keep alluding to in some of my posts - one day I'll get around to tracking down the kundalini thread and describe it in more detail if anyone's interested.

The description of how you process your rage is very reminiscent to me of similar sensations in chakra work, and the pranic eruptions (for lack of a better term) that ritual and deep work within the psyche can create. Purging base emotions like that will activate those pathways.

But yeah - I used to think kundalini was a metaphor to describe psychological transformation, and I was convinced that psychology was psychology and magic was ... well, also psychology. I no longer feel certain that they are the same thing, nor whether they can be cleanly delineated either. Now, I mostly wonder if they are doorways to the same mysteries. Explore one earnestly enough and it seems likely you'll eventually encounter the other.

sorry if that was more like rambling than help.

00:42 / 10.01.07

I think all psychology is magic if it works. Of course most of it doesnt. This evening i was reading an article on http://www.psychologytoday.com/ and took a look at their "find a therapist" box. try it with a random city in the US. They have photos of the therapists. Look at the tension lines! shocking. i wouldnt take any sort of advice from those people. of course one cant generalise too much, i just saw a really chilled out looking therapist a minute ago..

as for the question other than reichian, and various breathwork types I would say NLP! not really a school of "therapy" per se(Richard Bandler certainly wouldnt call it that)but the same sort of thing. The way he teaches it its more or less chaos magic with therapy glamour