In our last tale, we two baldy bros raided occult shops and one of us decided to jump straight into the deep end of the Olympic pool. It rocked my shit. I didn’t walk away unfazed. But here I am: I didn’t break, I’m not seeing the shimmer invade my sight, and I’m alright.

But here’s the honest truth: If you’re prone to certain mental illnesses, jumping into the deep end without a lifeguard can be a colossal issue.

I really want to talk about this particular subject for a second and give you some info that is just honest, because, let’s face facts here, if we’re not showing up for ourselves honestly, we’re not gonna do it for our gods either, are we? Don’t you think they deserve more? Maybe You?

First, let’s start with the old stories, shall we?

Everyone goes away in the end.

If they can’t handle you at your worst, they don’t deserve you at your best.

He/She was too good for you.

The list goes on and on. We tell ourselves these stories to justify being in unenviable positions. ‘He was too good for me.’ ‘I’m just broken.’ But if every relationship ends the same way, maybe the math isn’t mathin’.

Boom. You look back and realize: Yeah, the events happened, but you were the asshole. You realize your defense system is fully automated, scanning for threats, but it has no guidance. That’s Shadow Work. And it’s boring as shit.

Listen, even this very concept has been commodified. I mean…need I say more?

I own a copy of this book. I’m probably not going to do it. Why? Because it sounds like VanDriessen from Beavis & Butt-Head wrote it. ‘Be kinder to that version of yourself. He was drowning.’

Stop right there. That version of me wasn’t drowning with me. He was trying to murder me in real time. And I had to put a stop to it.

Thing is, folks, I had it all wrong. I worked on the Hamr (Body) first. It was the easiest thing to change. I needed to see I could. But the saddest fact? I should have worked on the Hugr (Mind) first.

I was getting leaner, but my Legacy OS was crashing. The environment was colliding. It took six years to fix the Hamr, but only a couple of months to clean up the Hugr. And it would have been way easier the other way around.

The saddest fact of it all was that your Hugr is exactly what you feed it. I can prove that.

Killed the Twitter account.

Walked away from political and culture war discussions, no matter the cost.

Wherever noise crept in, I cut it the hell out.

Then, I went to work. I had a mini composition book that I wasn’t sure what I was going to do with just yet. In one moment, it found a purpose. I compiled a PDF, grabbed a couple of $3 journals, and proceeded in. Every night, fifteen minutes. Three things:

1. The Trigger: What landed in the moment and stuck? What made me irrationally angry?

2. The Response: What was my inner response vs. what I actually did?

3. The Win: Every single discipline win.

Turns out, most things I was handling okay. But I needed to trace the disease back to its root cause and kill it. No time for anesthetic.

I was eleven days into it when I noticed, I was more focused on just getting everything that I could do just done to the best of my ability. People’s meltdowns at me just weren’t sticking. In just a few weeks, I was struggling to remember spots that really pissed me off, then someone would give me a reminder and I’d have to write it down and dissect it. In another month, I’d dealt with unprocessed grief, I wasn’t so quick to join in stupid arguments because they didn’t involve me and my energy was precious. So were my words, my time and my resources. They were gonna be treated as such.

If you want to become adept at something, you have to start somewhere, people.

I’m an absolute beast at divination because I’ve been practicing that since I started the weight loss but I’ve never deepened my relationship with Tarot, my oracles or the runes. That needed to matter again.

Here’s the thing, physically, I proved to myself that I could have something akin to discipline without outside influence. Let’s face it my Önd (Spirit/Breath) was struggling, my Hamr was in agony and my Hugr was a mess. The fact that I managed to re-connect with my intuitive abilities …fuckin’ astounding. Sometimes, the gods will just give us what we need most, get what I mean?

I never talked about it openly because, it's not to wow you with a cinematic transformation like me blowing holes in the fat version of myself and burying the remains.

That’s all great to put into a story that makes you seem like you’re coming apart at the seams but, in reality, you’re trying to stitch yourself back together in some places.

What it is is just evidence. Raw data. For me, it’s evidence that true magick works over great periods of time. It involves some form of ritual, a sacrifice of your time. Sometimes, it’s an incantation you sealed in blood in that small codex months ago and had forgotten about.

True magick takes time, dedication, craft and discipline to enact. You have to know when to have your hands on it and then take your hands off.

It’s knowing when to engage and knowing when to disengage, judiciously.

The prerequisite is to have control of your mind.

If you consistently did one spell or one three-card pull every day but were spotty on results, how long would you give it before you said, ‘Fuck it, I give up’?

But if you were getting better every day? You wouldn’t give up. A better Hugr means better discipline, which means better results. You can’t shortcut this.

For most of us, this kind of psychological self-surgery is really the best thing going for us. Logically, we’ve had some serious cognitive dissonance in the last twenty years alone. Not only that but our technological proliferation that promised to connect us has bubbled us off and bombarded us with boggling bullshit to the point of complete culture collapse.

We’ve lived under a collective attack for years and more than enough of us are just done with it. All of it.

There’s a growing trend of people doing this kind of work. And listen, whatever that looks like to you is fine by me but whatever you do, get those old issues worked out and get your mind back on track before you perform evocations or try doing the equivalent of tuning your perceptive radio dial because you do not want to get lost in the frequencies, get what I mean?

And look, I know there are some of you out there, one of my readers spoke out to me, telling me that, because of some mental health issues, they kinda have to skip my spiritual articles like The Philadelphia Voidwalk. That, I absolutely understand. That’s someone with a boundary and I respect it. To that person, skip those articles, pursue a relationship with the Divine however that looks to you and re-engage whenever you feel like you’re ready. No pressure.

In this type of practice, you’re only seeing what it is that I do. I don’t see what you do or have access to it.

If all you can do is show up to honor your gods and serve your purpose, then I have good news for you.

Sometimes, that’s more than enough.

If that’s you, then welcome to Magnussonhallir.

The table here is round.

There’s always room for one more.

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