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Photo by Christopher Penczak

Once you have figured out a regular practice after some milestone in training — completing a degree, system, or course by drawing upon the components from that training — the challenge can be how to also acknowledge any previous training. How do you work different systems together? Can you? Should you?

The answer is up to you.

The success or failure of such work—as well as its complexity—depends on the systems you are drawing from and how integrated they are in your own psyche.

The first—and more simple method—is to keep all things separate. In some systems, this is a requirement, and you take vows, more or less, to keep the traditions as you learned them. One or more altar or working space is required for each. If you are still learning a new tradition and are holding different traditions simultaneously, rather than putting the older one on hold, such separation can be necessary to prevent confusion. Learn the traditions “as is” at first. While cumbersome, this method can be self-explanatory and quite effective.

The second method—really more a deep yearning than a method—is synthesis. The practitioner embodies many different practices and world views and paradigms. Do you see them in the context of the greater pattern? Many deeply adept practitioners don’t find the answers they seek in just one place. Questing into other teachings helps gain perspective. The three-fold way of Dion Fortune asks us to eventually study, deeply, three ways to gain a greater perspective on the divine. She had Esoteric Christianity, Hermetic Qabalah, and the land-based traditions of Arthurian Myth. I have many strands of Witchcraft, the Vedic and Sikh yoga teachings of a powerful mentor, and a mix of Hermetic Qabalah and New Age Theosophy.

Many of us feel strong past-life connection and true memories, either as strengths taken in this life or questions for working out now to resolve our attachments to the past. Many are rooted in the cultural traditions of antiquity found in Egypt, Mesopotamia, Greece, and Rome; the Northern traditions of the Norse and Celts; and the traditions of the East, the Americas, and Africa. The access to information today helps us explore those memories and put things into some form of modern practice. So our studies may not be limited to one lifetime.

How does one synthesize? Here are some ideas:

Hoard—I remember Maxine Sanders speaking about how the Craft is a scavenger religion. We find things and gather them up. We save them and put them to use. We can be like magpies collecting shiny objects or crows mixing beautiful and functional objects, but soon we have a treasure trove and can just pull the right object out for the right moment, or use the right technique or teaching for the right moment in our lives. It’s intuitive. It lives mostly in memory, and at times it can be effective and other times jumbled.

Mosaic—we can take the parts we have gathered, and while still separate, arrange them in a beautiful pattern. We use them to create something bigger, with each part contributing to the whole.

Alloy—we can melt down our treasure, refine out its impurities, and then select the ones that will mix well into a new stronger or prettier alloy, combining properties of both. Like making bronze, pewter, sterling silver, or even steel, our practice will have some of the best qualities of the things we have combined, but it might have some unforeseen characteristics too, that will take a while to discover. It might not work, requiring us to go back to the drawing board and change the percentages of each source ingredient.

Compost and Garden—you can take all your source material and let it decompose within you, until the hard edges between the different practices naturally fall away. The resulting mix is fertile, and you plant your own seeds within it, letting the fertile soil feed your new idea. You aren’t inventing the wheel, so there will obviously be similar characteristics to ideas past, but in this process, these qualities become part of the natural growing and evolving structure of your practice and paradigm. The implication of growth means you don’t have to design something that is set, but will instead grow with you, and you can add more matter to the fertile matrix as you go. You don’t have to uproot your own garden.

Obviously this is all poetic. I can’t give you explicit instructions as I don’t know what you’ve got. Even if I did, it’s not my job. The whole point is that the work of synthesis is yours to do. I have my own to do. But can you see how these different approaches might inform you? They give you a guide for approaching what is really a lifelong practice, one where you may change your approach many times.

With some synthesis, go back and ask yourself the question from Part 1 again. See how they can change, and how your new ideas can be put into practice.

Photo by Christopher Penczak

“Do this five minutes a day, and you will be free from cancer.”

“Perform 108 repetitions daily, and you will never have heart disease.”

“Recite this mantra daily to be in tune with the universal powers.”

“Repeat this stretch twenty-one times daily to keep your spine flexible.”

These were instructions I received from one of my yoga instructors, passing on wisdom from their instructor. Did you know I almost became a yoga teacher just as I was beginning my esoteric professional career? I started in Hatha/Kripalu Yoga and made my way to Kundalini Yoga, and while I found the practice deeply transformative, the community was wrapped in dogma and dominant personalities, resulting in me going my own way and flirting with Vinyasana in my own practice of yoga today, though nothing quite matched the magick of Kundalini.

The teachings were filled with instructions of what you were supposed to do daily to prevent harm or generate benefit. If you added them all up, it was quite a list, and this was on top of the daily kriya, or yoga set, a teacher in training was supposed to do, usually close to forty minutes of yoga followed by fifteen to thirty minutes of chanting. I challenged my local instructor and said unless you lived in the ashram, how could you keep your daily life and all these practices? She replied that you can’t. And that began a discussion on how one must build their own practice together after learning initial trainings. Her words of wisdom guided me not only in yoga, but in Witchcraft and really all of life.

In talking to my Witchcraft mentors and teachers later in life, this was something that was inherent in occult teachings. Rarely is it spoken about unless a student asks a question, but the struggle of figuring it out was considered part of the training.

If you study a robust tradition with many practices, you’ll go through a series of rituals, meditations, alignments, and exercises as a part of your training. Some are peak experiences that you might not repeat until you help facilitate them for another new student. But most of them are meant to be repeated, to become integrated as a part of your practice. But how can you do them all?

You can’t. Everything that I tell my own students is a daily practice during the course of five-plus years of training cannot be done daily all together. Some are meant to work together, and some do not work well together. The graduate, at any level, must determine for themselves how to put it all together, crafting their own practice from the parts they feel most benefit them at the time, and most of us change our practice over time. Some change it daily, others weekly, seasonally, or yearly. Some are spontaneous and free with it, following daily intuition. Others are rigid and disciplined, with planned transitions. And most are somewhere between the two.

There is the danger you’ll pick only things that are easy or flattering, and either become egotistical, thinking you have done it all, or bored, and lose interest in practice at all. There is also the danger you’ll be heroic and pick the most involved and grueling practices, and then become discouraged or grow to hate the Craft. There can be a balance, and that is part of the teaching. The choice — and the responsibility — is up to you.

Magick is an art as well as a metaphysical science and a spiritual, religious practice. The artist must create and cannot grow stagnant, but there is an idea in the deeper arts training — be it writing, music, or magick — that you must learn all the rules perfectly before you break them.  Art can take many years to gain expertise, but that doesn’t mean you can’t practice or innovate until you have that expertise. On the contrary, you must create! That is part of the process.

We train to learn the structures, the foundations, and our history, and from that place, we can go further and develop what is next, grown from our own regular practice and the inspiration that comes from it. Those who teach and write unique things are ideally drawing from their own practice of it, but beware in all such crafts the attitude of “one and done” and really examine your motivations for studying and practicing. Have they changed since you began? For most of us, they do, as our understanding expands.

A very good friend who is trained as a Shakespearean actor, a lawyer, and a black-belt marital artist compared the three in a conversation with me, saying that essentially they are all the same in practice and pattern. If you haven’t been doing something diligently for 50 years, don’t dare to think you’ve mastered it and are done. The layers of subtle knowing and experience open in the sincere and open-hearted practice. As someone who has been doing her primary craft, law, for close to twenty years, she realizes that she understands enough to fully realize how much more she really needs to learn. While law might seem black and white to most of us, she describes the art in the crafting of contracts and the interpretation of law. She says the same goes for acting and for martial arts. And we both would agree the same can be said about magick. A thorough grounding in the technique and context gives rise to the truly inspired art. There is a union of the flash of the numinous from beyond into the matrix of the art, whatever it is.

People’s motivations are not always clear, even to them. Some learn to find community and belonging, and don’t care much for the art beyond the cool aesthetic. Some join because their peer group joins, and they fear being left behind. Many think it’s glamorous and enjoy imagining how others perceive them. For some it is a contest against others, not of the self. Many attain a level of outer accomplishment, be it black belt or initiation, and then drift away, believing they have accomplished “it.” Some seek the easy “A” rather than the desire to learn it all. I remember being flabbergasted by a student complaint that I was too “hard” and had too many expectations of my students, that other teachers, even in our tradition, were “easier” and expected less. It wasn’t fair, the student decided. I saw his situation as an opportunity to study with the teacher who literally designed the program and had the most experience teaching it, providing graduates with a deep and wide range of experiences because of my own. However, many students — having realized the work required for deep art in the context of a tradition — make such complaints as a way to ferment dissent and manufacture crisis and drama; this provides an escape hatch for themselves, allowing them to feel good about leaving rather than face the fact they don’t want to do something. But not doing something you don’t want to do is perfectly fine. Not all arts, and not all programs, are for everyone. We see it in theater groups, dojos, and yes, even Witchcraft groups and schools.

For many, the highest motivation is service. Like Gandalf in The Lord of the Rings, we are servants “of the Secret Fire…” with the sentiment shared in the Dion Fortune lineage embodied by the Servants of the Light — “I want to know in order to serve” — and in Gardnerian High Priestess Patricia Crowther’s autobiography High Priestess, where she espouses the mystery: “I wish to learn in order to serve.” Knowledge and training are put towards the service of “light,” of “humanity,” and one learns to becomes the light in order to serve. It’s not about servitude, but transformation, and the realizations that come with such transformation.

Whether you are done with a specific training entirely or are pausing at a completed level, you then have to ask yourself “What now?” Now that I have the knowledge, how do I put it into practice? How do I adapt it for my life? What do I use? What do I put aside? What are my needs? What is the time and energy I have to do this? The only taskmaster now watching your progress is yourself. Can you honestly assess and use what you have to craft something that is right for you? Can you determine when it will need to change and adapt? Probably not at first, and that is okay. It takes time. It takes making mistakes. It takes being overly ambitious and falling on your face, or under ambitious and growing stagnant. It takes recognition of your own health and your commitments to job and family.

Tips for crafting your own practice:

• Determine how much time you can reasonably commit.
• Determine how much time you want to commit, making sure you have free time other than your spiritual practice as it’s still a form of work, albeit hopefully enjoyable work and play.
• When will your practice usually happen?
• Do you have a clear space prepared for it?
• Ask yourself why you are keeping a regular practice. What is your motivation? If you know why, you’ll have more motivation when things are tough.
• What are the core practices of your tradition?
• What of these core practices are daily (perhaps forms of cleansing, meditation, and devotional work), weekly (deeper journey work), monthly (moon rituals), and yearly (seasonal sabbats)?
• What is done in community? What is done in small groups? And what is done in solitary?
• Do you have a main working altar? Multiple shrines? Is there one place where your work is consolidated?
• Is divination a part of your practice? How often?
• What do you feel called to do now? Why? Is it a comfort or a challenge? Can you balance the two aspects of practice?
• Is there a set length of time to such a practice? Perhaps set a schedule of a week or a month and then reevaluate that practice.
• Is there a progressive pattern to your practice? Working through a pattern, such as provided by the tarot, can give you focus and break monotony. Perhaps an elemental, planetary, or zodiacal pattern will aid your practice.

These questions can help you establish where you are and what you want to do next.

Your craft is your own. Your magick is your own. Contrary to the opinions of some, I don’t care what you do in your personal practice. While I care about people and want everyone who chooses to live a magical life with love and harmony, I don’t know how that looks for you. I don’t have attachment to its form. I can only give you a range of philosophies, techniques, myth, art, culture, and the support in the training to integrate it. What you do with it, and how connected you are to the community where it came from, is up to you.

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“I’m not sure I’m comfortable with that,” says both the new seeker and the more experienced Witch who thinks they have it all figured out.

Good! It’s Witchcraft. It’s not supposed to be comfortable all the time. That doesn’t mean you have to do anything you do not want to do, nor accept any form of abuse, but beyond that, if all the choices were easy, all the concepts instantly digestible, and all the tasks without effort, what would it be? It wouldn’t be Witchcraft.

Witchcraft opens the door to the uncomfortable. There is a reason why the archetypal Witch is not welcome in most stories. Today we embrace this idea, but many turn it outward only.

“I’m speaking truth to power.”
“I’m holding up a mirror to society.”
“I’m an untamed rebel, a wild and free spirit that can’t be caged.”

But to do any of that, you must continuously turn that attitude upon yourself and be ruthless in your own truth, mirrors, and freedoms. Otherwise you are simply unconscious, and those who are looking deeply inside can see it a mile away. Otherwise it’s all aesthetics and little soul.

We have to face what is uncomfortable, dissonant, and dark within us. If your magickal practice, whatever it is, constantly affirms your decisions, beliefs, and ideas with no deeper evaluations, no doubts, no discomfort, you have a big problem even as you have convinced yourself you have no problems at all.

Witchcraft is change. Witchcraft is growth. While some growth can be blissful, usually there is discomfort somewhere in the process. A seed is buried in darkness like it’s dead before sprouting new life. Some seeds require fire to germinate. Affirmation of “what is” never brings transformation on its own. Acceptance might, but joyful and unconscious affirmation does not. Witchcraft is at the edges where things are nebulous and lack definition. If everything fits neatly, no ambiguity, and all of it is already figured out, you are not at any edge, crossroads, or liminal space. We must maintain our own center, but we are also constantly pushed to our own edge. That is the paradox of it, centers and edges simultaneously. That is our squaring the circle. Only pushing others’ boundaries without asking the same of yourself —no matter what good intentions or reasons you might have—is disingenuous.

Witchcraft can involve, in no particular order: sex, death, power, body fluids, illness, faeries, gender, poison, history, myth, love, darkness, story, gods, language, water, foreign cultures, angels, writing, empathy, light, ethics, sacrifice, flowers, reading, temples, blindfolds, medicine, childhood, curses, patterns, snakes, thorns, intuition, the forest, devotion, understanding evil, listening, the future, gardens, knives, psychology, getting old, mystery, fire, music, injustice, the weather, conflict, theology, the past, family, and actually doing Witchcraft. Something somewhere in all that will catalyze a reaction and require a response. While we live in a world where we now often want to minimize our internal responses to uncomfortable things, for a Witch, that response is good.

Magick is dangerous, for magick is change. When you claim the identity of a magickal practitioner—be it Witch, magician, shaman, healer, or priest/ess—you initiate a process, even if you are not undergoing formal initiation or training. You catalyze things within you and things all around you. You step onto a crooked path of mystery. Even claiming acts of functional magick—simple spells and blessings—triggers internal processes. The buried burdens and treasures of the ancestors activate. The gods and spirits start to take notice. The adversaries and guardians of opposition stand by to test and make you stronger with challenge. It all unfolds uniquely to each of us, but the act of claiming magick requires one to live a more magickal, conscious life. Many people have a deep intellectual understanding of all these things, but confuse the intellect with the experience. I once had a student who, upon the completion of a psychology degree, declared he had all the spiritual experiences and was “done.” He understood the psychological patterns of self-realization, but he hadn’t done the work yet, and soon life showed him otherwise and he then more humbly understood.

I know a practitioner who avoids using the word “trigger” so as not to trigger anyone. If the word “trigger” is triggering, the remedy is to face that first and then get a greater understanding of other sensitive points, discover why, and move through them, with professional help and mentorship whenever needed. Only you can determine when you are ready to face something and if you want to do that, but one of the clear ideals of the Witch is to not be bound and controlled, and that includes the forces of our past and the forces within us. We can choose how, where, and when we can tackle difficult reactions—and by all means have a support structure in place—but we should be giving deep thought to the value of facing it. The only way out is through.

“Not yet” is an acceptable viewpoint, but we must keep the realization that it is there. We all have our different ways and our different capacities, but must learn more about our own uniqueness, including our unique challenges, and move through to the change that is correct for us. The way I navigate something will naturally be different from how you navigate something similar. But navigating is different than being oblivious or willfully ignorant. Otherwise all that we unconsciously carry will have as much access to our magick as our conscious self. This is the true secret to the beloved and hated “shadow work” of modern craft, often disregarded as not really Witchcraft by those who are, well, pretty unconscious of their own shadow. In truth, all the ancient mysteries have an aspect of what we would today call psychology.

Traditional structures that are often abandoned today, when held well, provide the container and support for this kind of deep work. Magickal groups grounded in a tradition and practice became catalysts for growth. Those of us on our own have to find other structures and support, but we can’t avoid our dark places and pretend they are not there. Worse yet, we cannot do so and then pretend mastery or feel well versed enough to offer advice and critique to others. Modern teachings often stress the permission to not face things when you are not ready, but provide no plan to get you ready or explain how to deal with these shadows looming in the background of your psyche.

What is true on one level can become false at a different point on the path. Experiences might cause you to question assumptions and where those assumptions first came to you. Know thyself, but be open to surprising yourself too. Every day you are growing and evolving, and you can’t possibly know where that path will lead if you are following it open-heartedly, no matter how accurate your psychic predictions are.

Learn to not only face, but to befriend discomfort, to invite it in, as you’ll be hosting it many times whether you want to or not, so embrace it when you can. By embracing discomfort, you are embracing yourself, your world, and your craft, loving it as is, and in that acceptance in the moment, evoking the change that is necessary without specific attachments. That acceptance and letting go while holding vision and seeking clarity is the heart of our magick. Consciously witnessing, even without taking direct action, is an act of high and deep magick. Growth takes us in new and strange directions. For a while we are comfortable, until we find discomfort and new growth again.

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When you enter into relationship with a magickal group, you participate in the group consciousness. Sometimes this is as simple as a temporary or loosely formed group mind where people of like mind share a structure and develop it together. It is mostly in the mental level and at times can exert an unconscious influence. Worst-case scenarios include devolving into a mob mentality. It’s why a group can descend into paranoia about other groups, or how one person’s character flaw can seem to manifest in others who previously didn’t have such a flaw.

In the best-case scenarios, you can feel the love and support of other members even when they are not present with you. You are uplifted, and in some magickal groups, you have access to skills and a depth of experience you otherwise would not have. Many people are more insightful or psychic in group, or spells in the group are more effective than when solitary. In the gestalt, the exile is really greater than the sum of the parts. It evokes that magickal quintessence where 1+1+1+1=5.

If you join a formal tradition or esoteric order, you might, through some process of initiation, be connected to the egregore of the group. This is more than the mental level of a group mind. It encompasses many levels and can be connected not only to individual humans, but also to a land, various gods and spirits, ancestors, symbols, and the mythos of a tradition can live and be expressed in the egregore. Each is different, and some are not consciously created, but many are purposely constructed using magickal building principles.

While the mechanics can be different, one receives the “current” of the tradition through a ritual or empowerment and is connected to the essence, or depending on the structure, a facet of the essence of the collective energy. Through this current, initiates are both contributing to the collective and receiving support from it. Initiation can confer relations with a group of spirits and ancestors you wouldn’t normally have otherwise or provide access to a body of both intellectual teachings through the members and intuitive wisdom.

The word “current” implies a linear connection, but that is just the limit of language. We can conceptualize a linear flow of energy, but it really comes from all directions and no direction. Those who wish to work wisely with this energy will literally sit with it, tune into it, and “work it.” While it is like a gift that has been given that we must unpack, it also comes with a responsibility to the past and the future. Those who are caretakers of a tradition will not only work it for their own evolution but will take action to manage the collective current, keeping it clear and clean, healing as necessary and adding to it when needed.

If a current has been passed to you, sit with it. Work it by listening to the consciousness within it. Feel the power. Be open to receive the move and offer moves in return. If you have received many, do the threads of initiation blend together or remain separate in you? Does the collective require anything more of you? Does it offer more? Are you asking it the right questions? How can you immerse yourself more deeply? How can it catalyze profound and lasting change for your greatest good? Work the current consciously before it works you.

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To live a magickal life is to walk a road of both joy and danger, for you are following the path deep into unknown territories. Author and teacher Raven Grimassi taught that we walked a well-worn path, which then came to a hidden path that would be well-worn for generations to come if enough of us take it. While there is beauty on the path, and love, there are also perils, and having an awareness of them, from those who have walked before, can help us avoid or — at the very least – better learn from our encounters with the perils.

Occultists like myself always look for patterns and correspondence, so I’ve organized some of the common perils through the well-known categories of fire, water, air, earth, and spirit. Of course this list is not complete, nor does everything apply to everyone’s path, as we are all on a unique journey with some similar landmarks.

Fire: Excessive Outside Validation

While everyone can benefit from praise, particularly from teachers, mentors or peers, there can develop an almost pathological need for approval, confirmation, or validation from others. Such confirmation often leads to a cycle of each new step needing an excessive amount of validation to feel secure. While so much spirituality tells us to kill the ego, we are really looking to identify with the part of us that is greater than the ego, so our ego doesn’t run the show. To transcend the ego as a step in the path, you must have an ego, and many people are so wounded that a sense of identity, let alone a healthy identity, never fully forms. Creating a healthy balanced ego is key, where one can listen to praise and critique but also navigate an internal sense of self at the same time, and then transcend it to make the ego one of many parts of our team. In this modern occulture—dominated as it is by social media—getting trapped in this cycle is even more likely to occur and even harder to avoid, particularly if you transition into a reader, healer, reviewer, or influencer too quickly, and that world and identity fuses with your personal practice.

Other fire perils can include burnout, hyper-sexuality, religious zeal, and over-enthusiasm when it blinds you to the reality of the situation.

Water: Victimhood

A huge part of the magickal path, whether called so or not, is healing. We gather lost parts, we reevaluate past actions and relationships, and we navigate new ways of relating to ourselves and others. At times we can build a sense of self based in victimhood. For some it’s a necessary phase. Our “fight” becomes “out there” and allows ourselves to turn our emotions into productive change, but some get caught up in the outer battle. The connection between inner and outer change is lost, and the focus on outer agencies alone, including the harm they do, negates the potential inner world change. Often those entrapped by this peril becomes the very thing they seek to destroy. Those raging against dogma becomes dogmatic in their rage. Those protesting lack of voice silence others in their protest. Those seeking equality for a specific group or identity will marginalize others, yet still hold the identity of victim even with greater external influence and power. When things become entirely external, one gets lost on the path.

Other water perils include not feeling worthy of love enough to receive and share in love, over-sentimentality, and having rose-colored glasses without a true understanding of the nature of the people around you, assuming all are altruistic.

Air: Distraction

Distraction is a seemingly harmless yet potentially devastating peril on the path, and due to the availability of more and more information in and out of the magickal path, more real than ever. When things get too tough in anything, including magick, we distract ourselves. When we are in pain, we distract ourselves from the pain. When we confront something difficult, we seek to look away. When we can justify the distraction as part of our magickal education, we think we can go around the next difficult step intellectually, and not face it. We can fool ourselves into thinking we have the experience because we have the knowledge. Teacher Stephanie Taylor and I often talk about the difference between knowledge and realization. I had a young student once, simultaneously enrolled in a master’s program in psychology, announce that he’d had “all” the spiritual experiences already, and without saying the word “enlightened,” was effectively enlightened. He got it. He was awake to spiritual reality. There was nothing more than to coast. As you can imagine, life on a magickal path disabused him of that notion fairly quickly when my heartfelt conversation could not. In less serious circumstances, we can distract ourselves with entertainment, information, and even some misunderstandings or misapplications of “self-care.”

Other air perils are all in a similar vein: the misuse of intellect or information towards ourselves and others, the need to be right in debate with others and equating that with spiritual evolution, difficulties listening to others and equating intellectual intelligence with emotional intelligence and maturity.

Earth: Impatience

The magickal path appears to promise the quick way—spells and talismans and workings of all kinds—but in truth it’s a very long way filled with many years of practice. Like any art or craft in which you seek mastery—music, dance, painting, sculpture, and yes, magick—many hours and many mistakes are needed to hone your craft. We think it took the Druids twenty years to complete their education. Pythagoras supposedly had to wait twenty years before being admitted into the Egyptian Temple tradition. His own students had to wait behind a curtain to listen to him lecture, neither seeing nor speaking to him until they reached a higher grade of initiation. Today many people want to rush to be a High Priest/ess in three years, or worse yet, a weekend. It’s easy to rush through because it’s hard to dedicate the time to the craft to gain a level of mastery. One must remember that achieving a black belt in martial arts means you have just started your journey, not ended it, reaching the minimum level of proficiently to really learn and do the work. Magick is similar with higher initiation really symbolizing a new beginning.

Other earth perils include difficulties with physical resources­­­­—especially money, home, and health—as we often emphasize the spiritual and do not take the next steps in the physical. Others have the inverse, focusing all their spiritual energies into manifesting physical things and losing sight of the inner initiatory process.

Spirit: The Full Cup

When you enter a new phase of training, particularly if you join a new group or study with a new mentor, you must approach things fresh. Many seek new trainings in order to validate what they already know, and can recoil from that which does not validate. It’s like the parable of the potential Zen student getting his cup filled by the master. He continued to tell the master all he knows and all he’s done until the tea overflows onto his hands, the master pointing out he is like the cup, too full for anything new to enter. One must find, regardless of expertise, a beginner’s mind when approaching new things. There will always be time for comparison, but if you mess with what you have done already, you miss what teaching is really before you.

Other spirit perils include excess pride, striving too much for your individuality without seeing the interdependence and interconnection of all things, and the inverse of being so focused on the collective that you lose sight of your individual true will and purpose within that collective, often to please others or conform to perceived expectations.

Recognize any of these from your journey? Even if you think you are past them, like many things, you’ll find yourself circling back time and again to refine your understanding and test your experience. Walk with courage, joy, knowledge, and patience, seeing each step as something fresh that can teach you to go deeper.