Where do you find the balance?

#1

Between study, practice, and your more mundane life… I’m trying to tap dance the knife’s edge of my magickal goals, my intellectual goals, and my purely mundane goals… which is extremely difficult due to some polymathic tendencies… but that’s beside the point…

My question is how much time daily,weekly or monthly do you devote to study and training, how much to practice, how much does this make up of your overall schedule of things? do you find your life being focused on the occult or enhanced by it? How much would you say your waking thoughts is devoted to subjects related in someway to the occult? Are you currently satisfied with the current circumstances of your existence? what specifically are you dissatisfied with(with relevance to the current topic)

#2

For me it’s an all in one package. My occult life and my mundane life intertwine a lot. As I use the occult to influence my day to day existence and guide myself in the directions I want to go and still maintain a level of normalcy to the people around me that don’t know anything about that part of my life. My occult doings are usually practiced when I’m alone which isn’t much although there are some things that I tend to do around people such as practice energy work and healing as well as a few other things I’ve learned that don’t require full blown ritual to achieve the change desired. But I eat sleep and breathe my practice as much as I do my regular existence and so for me there is no real separation at any time. I could be in the middle of a super market in this long ass line and decide to astrally create a circle and triangle to summon a cashier at another register. (did that once it was funny as hell) or I could be at home doing a tarot reading on how best to plan out my mundane life for the following week. Some people compartmentalize but I don’t think I could really say I schedule every bit of my occult life around my mundane life. I like to let them intermingle in subtle ways that only I notice and watch them enhance each other.

#3

Like Kitari, I also let my lives overlap but in terms of dedicated “practice” - that is performing daily rituals and exercises it does tend to vary. I will almost every day do hatha yoga (~30 - 45 mins) and meditate (atleast 15minutes).

Beyond that it goes up and down between several hours to nothing. For the last month I have very much been on holidays, I didn’t need to bend the world to my will because everything was flowing and I also had a series of mundane activities and experiences which dominated my time so I was happy to let thing go. But I know that everything goes in cycles and I have mastered my patience and now I dive back in.

For reading I do that every day, at least an hour a day, often much more. But I am lucky that I can get a lot of reading done at work.

I think there definitely becomes a point with magick where you realise one of the main reasons you are doing rituals is so you can create more time to do rituals. Once you get over that hump things become way easier.

#4

I usually work 60hrs a week so it gets hectic from time to time.

I usually meditate for 30 minutes a day both before and after bed. I have 3 main types of meditation I do to keep things from feeling routine, a darkness meditation, a no mind meditation and a mandala meditation. I follow up the darkness or no mind meditation with visualization exercises and found that to be really beneficial as it makes the visualizations much more vivid. I usually do the exercises when I’ve woke up and they last about 20 minutes or until I cant’t hold the image anymore.

Another thing I enjoy doing is drawing one major and one minor card from the tarot decks and contemplate their relationship to each other. I can do that throughout the day so it doesn’t interrupt other things I have going on.

I don’t really watch tv so I’ll usually read a book which is almost always occult related. I don’t practice magick daily but work on skills or a magick related project almost every day. I don’t practice around my family so the biggest challenge is finding time to do rituals.

#5

Thanks for your responses… Except for kitari(you’ve already explained this) how active is your social life? is it fulfilling or do you feel it sometimes gets in the way?

#6

I think it depends on what you mean by active. I am in a stable long term relationship with my girlfriend who I live with, I always make sure we spend at least one night/day a week together doing something beyond the normal interaction that goes along with sharing a living space with someone.
Other than that, my days of partying hard are behind me. I’ll catch up with friends, maybe go out dancing or something every other week?
I think this is really an age dependant thing, most of my friends have jobs and commitments of their own, its not like when I was at Uni and we would go out 4 or more nights a week because it doesn’t really matter if you show up to a lecture hung over or coming off something. Even without my commitment to self-mastery, my job is such that if I tried to pull that these days I would end up killing someone.

What it comes down to is what is more important? Self development so that I can achieve my assorted goals or maintaining superficial relationships with people who don’t have the vision to break away from mundane life?

#7

true that… the main reason I was wondering was because based off everything I want to accomplish, I would have to severely limit my social contact, so I’m debating the how’s what’s and why’s of my plan… though at the present I am limited in scope in what I can accomplish due to financial constraints… though that is going to change soon enough…