Recently I was talking to someone about their progress in the occult and started talking about talking with and learning from spirits. She said something to the effect of, “that’s easy for you to say, you were born with all these gifts,” and I was startled to discover that she assumed I was born a powerful wizard or something. This is so not the case. What’s worse is that that where that assumption leads, and that’s to people thinking they will never be able to be great magicians because they weren’t born special.
I was not born with special magick powers. I have always been able to feel if a house was haunted and I can occasionally see ghosts out of the corner of my eye. Later I realized that I was clairsentient, that I feel spirits and energy and other phenomena, but growing up and for most of my life I never would have thought of myself as psychic. I didn’t really believe in magick until I got older. Religion was my gateway to magick and I didn’t even start becoming religious until I was in my mid-twenties.
I probably started my first form of meditative prayer when I was 27 or thereabouts. I was horrible at it. Luckily Catholicism has several forms of prayer that are borderline meditation, especially the Rosary. Praying the Rosary was excellent prep for meditation. But when I did start trying to really meditate about 5 years after, I went a good 6 months of not being able to do it at all. I would sit there and my mind would constantly wander. But one day I was fasting, for something different, and it was like my 5th day without food and I was doing my meditation practice when suddenly BOOM! I went into a deep trance. That’s misleading to some because they think a trance is when you black out or something. A meditative trance is actually sort of the opposite. You are so focused on one thing that you kind of fade away.
So it took years of hard work to really even begin to be able to meditate, which is really one of the most important things I ever did that would improve my magical abilities, though that wasn’t my intention at the time. In meditation practice you begin to really know yourself and all your inner voices and their motivations. This becomes increasingly important to anyone who wants to begin talking to spirits as well as to attain knowledge and conversation with your Holy Guardian Angel. Because these beings speak to you in your head, often very quietly, and you must know your own voices well enough not to mistake them for you.
The other thing I did early on that helped me was working with a book by Natalie Goldberg called “Writing Down the Bones.” This book is an excellent book on writing practice and it trains you to turn off your internal editor and trust your first thoughts. This is another skill that has proved invaluable to communicating with spirits. This is because I’m not good at hearing spirits. It’s not like when someone is talking to you and you just hear them. It’s a tiny voice that often is in your own voice and mixed up in all of your own internal voices. Learning how to just go with the first thing that pops in your head without editing or judging is vital. As you practice you get better and better.
I’m not trying to give a lesson on spirit communication here though. All I can say is that I am where I am now because I put the work in. I spent time practicing and learning all about myself. I wasn’t born from a long line of powerful witches. As far as I know I’m not a deity who has incarnated or a reincarnated wizard who is remembering his prior skills. (My strongest and most recent past life memory is of being a whore in New Orleans so I’m probably remembering a completely different set of skills!) Everything I’ve learned how to do you can learn how to do. That is the real point I want to make, so I’ll say it again. You can become a powerful magician and use magick to change your life no matter how little natural talent you start with.
