Being realistic vs down talking yourself and your magickal abilities

Journals, Group Rituals & Free Readings
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The purpose of this post is to share my raw unfiltered thoughts about how I currently view myself and how I view magick in hopes that my fellow BALGers can give me constructive criticism, critiques & help me be realistic but still confident and self-assured on my journey as a mage.

I feel powerful, over myself and others, like I can make myself or anyone do or believe anything (with the help of magick) and through years of practice and experience. I’ve been reading a lot on here, other forums, books, I’ve seen what’s possible and it makes me feel powerful. I question myself asking , is this the “right” way to think, despite simultaneously feeling like there is no right or wrong way to think it is only what you believe. But at the same time I feel weak (in a magical sense) which I think comes from self doubt.
My self doubt in my magical ability comes from the fact that I don’t meditate consistently, I struggle to keep my mind focused while performing magick, and I call myself being realistic as far as research I’ve done and magick I’ve performed and got results from and how long I’ve beeen practicing.

been on my journey since January 2018, started doing love spells on the same person February 2020 & did over 6 that year had no idea what I was doing at the time and didn’t realize they were backfiring until it was too late, didn’t do anymore spells until this year, now this year I started off trying to remove & undo them, but no matter what I did it still felt like I felt the effects of the spell backfiring, the first thought as soon as I opened my eyes in the morning was him and all throughout the day I could not focus on anything besides him, and how angry I was about what was happening at the time and angry at myself because I felt like it was all my fault and that I shouldn’t have done love spells in the first place.my anger lead me to stop, trying to undo and remove the love spells, and into doing hexes but anyway.
I have over 60 books but I’ve only finished Witchery by Juliet Diaz & The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho. I’ve done around 15 candles spells (can’t tell if they’ve been successful or not due to my memory, I can’t remember how I felt or what happened yesterday or last week etc so it’s hard for me to notice if there was a change from one week to the next, for example I do a self love candle on Monday by next Monday it’ll be like I think I notice a difference maybe but I can’t remember how I felt last week to compare it to how I feel now, is an example of a problem I’ll have) i’ve also done three hexes, a anti-laziness jar(that didn’t work at all but I think would have worked better if if I shook it every morning ) & different types of protection work.
Which brings me to the title of this post.

How do you know when you’re being realistic with yourself versus being hard on yourself and ruining your magick.?
I know this post is all over the place but any thoughts or commentary on anything I said in the post would be appreciated even if you don’t respond to my question. Y’all my only magickal friends rn lol

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You are not alone brother/ sister! I hope that statement strengthens you.

I try to do something daily, but despite I put a lot of effort and serious work into my practice I still struggle with staying focused during ritual, I regularly have to take a step back in order to get myself back into a ritual state, which is very annoying in-and-of-itself, but especially if you’re in any kind of group ritual.
A lot of days I struggle getting off my arse and meditate even if it is just 5 mins. In the end, on the days where I have to go to the office, a lot of the times I end up just practicing a bit of sitting in (not that much-)silence for 5 to 10 mins on the train ride to work or back home. Anything I try to do concerning sitting still and focusing, usually ends up in at least partial failure. Unless I force myself to go take a walking meditation or otherwise more active mediation or go to the range and and practice quickly going in and out of meditative states while practicing archery.
I have the ADHD kind of dyslexia, where I sometimes have to read something 20 times and still fail to understand or remember what I just read. So I have read at least parts that interest me or were useful to my at the time from piles of books, but I haven’t actually finished most of them. It’s rare that I can read a non-fiction book front to back.

And I can go on for ages with examples that hopefully make you feel you are not struggling alone. Usually it feels like being negative/ dumping my problems on others. But it feels nice to share this in this context and at least feels good to me to know I am not the only one who struggles.

Don’t be too hard on yourself. One of the more valuable things I learned in cognitive behaviour therapy for my adhd is to dial down on the self criticism and ‘talk’ to yourself as if you would talk to a good friend in the same situation.
Don’t measure yourself by the succes/ results of others. This is a spiritual path and should be walked at your own pace.
It also important to celebrate your wins, however small. Even the backfire of a spell is a magickal result you can learn from and in such proof to yourself that indeed you are capable of doing magick.
And in that light, don’t be discouraged by failure. Write them down, try to examine where things went wrong and see it as a great chance to improve. If anything try a complete different approach in order to get the same results and see if anything in that approach worked better. It’s usually not your failure, but the adaptation of someone elses system that just doesnt really entirely work for you.
Don’t “punish” yourself into being more disciplined, inspire yourself to do whatever works for you in order to proceed on your path.

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Thank you so much for your detailed response! Definitely made me feel better and has given me some things to think about and new perspective to view things from!

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This part stood out a bit.

Not sure what you do to meditate, but I guess if it helps to not feel so discouraged, not all forms are suited for everyone. That’s not to say that one should give up if there are struggles, but if the ideal isn’t working at all, it’s okay to find something else that does. Perhaps see it as a “better than nothing” sort of thing.

I have ADHD too, albeit the inattentive kind, trying to sit and not have my mind wander — yea that’s not happening, even on meds lol. To deal with this though, I merge divination and meditation together, especially with tarot/oracle cards. I won’t look at the booklets (unless I really have no clue on something) and just let the art on the cards bring various thoughts to the surface. With most readings I’ll also write down whatever thoughts come to mind as well, this too helps with focus. Likewise even other stuff like drawing or merely looking at some forms of art gets me in the right mood for meditative thoughts — sometimes I don’t even realize I’ve stopped whatever I was doing and had been meditating until I break out of the haze.

and if it’s any consolation, I’ve been practicing magick in at least some form for decades and I still struggle with meditating. It’s a little easier today than it was 10 years ago, but I think for some of us it’s just not a forte. Try not to get too discouraged — a lot of this all is indeed forming your own path and figuring out what works best for you sometimes.

Perhaps I should be better about taking my own advice with this lol, but for real, it helps to record spells somewhere. Doesn’t have to be detailed, but if you work with specific spirits or candle colours or whatever else for equally specific things, simply logging that sort of information, like what materials or who you worked with, can help jog your memory or give you an idea as to when you did it, what it was for, and whether or not a spell worked later on.

Since you mentioned love spells earlier…
Something that doesn’t get said enough about them, they are simultaneously both some of the easiest and some of the hardest magick to effect.

When someone has an easy time with these sorts of spells or petitions, there’s usually already something there, something unhindered by any negativity, just sheer desire from two persons sparking the magick to happen quicker. Too often it can look like new mages are having easy successes out of nowhere and like …of course they are going to sometimes.

Then there are the situations where perhaps something has gone awry with a love, or perhaps the other person has never felt the same, or perhaps they’re committed to someone else when first met, stuff like that. Most who use the same kinds of love spells as in the prior example are not going to be met with the same kinds of success, not usually at least. And then of course most of these sorts of spells fail or backfire because more complex situations necessitate more complex solutions, all of which will (again usually) need a greater amount of knowledge, experience, and above all patience. The lack of patience is what often ruins it above all else, especially as other emotions seep in — anger, frustration, obsession, etc. — it’s a totally different picture than the first scenario and one that needs a whole different arsenal of spells to get the desired result.

This concept very much applies to many other areas of magick.

and this is so true and so well said. Backfired spells are very much indicative of magickal ability, a rather strong innate ability if anything if it happens to a new mage.

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