Avoiding Spell Failure – A Rant

Hey there Occulties,

I'm clearly a big believer in magic, – I've built my whole life around it, so of course I am. But it often impresses me how people who themselves enjoy casting a spell or two just can't understand a few basic things – for example:

The petitioner is at fault for 95% of all spell failure. How can this be? Well…. Are you obsessive? Do you stalk your target? Do you constantly think about the situation being worked on? Do you obsess over your issues? If the answer is yes, spellwork may be a very bad fit for you. And the cure is basically for you to take responsibility and stop letting the situation and people involved stop having so much space in your mind. Still, every single day, multiple times a day, I get texts and emails with "So I was thinking about this all night, and I wonder if (insert name) will just like show up when my bicycle gets a flat tire in the park. I'm not really sure why I think that will happen but I had thought about it and isn't it perfect? My bike is in perfect condition, but sometimes people will drink in the park at night and leave the bottles and they get broken. Can't you just imagine (insert name) being chivalrous, and fixing my tire? I can't wait!" Meanwhile I am on the opposite side of the screen wondering what in the hell reconciliation has to do with your bike tire getting popped and what 1 in a bazillion chance it would be that your ex just so happens to be there in the incredibly unlikely event you would drive over a huge shard of glass in the park. If it's not apparent to you that you're thinking the work to death, it should be. The how and the why they come back are not something you get to know until you get them back, and your behavior is just hurting the spell. While I can say with some authority that reconciliation work most often will take a pretty normal and standard course of action, – so nothing too theatric or incredible is apt to occur, – you are very unlikely to guess exactly how it will happen before it does. Trying to do so is actually draining the spell of it's energy. 

And if you can't let it go, stop wasting your time and energy on magic. That's all there is. It might sound cold but when you spend at least five hours a day every single day (probably much more,) like I do reading and listening to obsessive people ruining their spellwork and more or less guaranteeing themselves even more of a wait, it becomes clear that some people just aren't suited to cast spells or have them cast for them. 

And it's not just limited to petitioners who are obsessive -  sometimes what you believe you want isn't yours to have, nor would you want it if you had it. That might sound silly, but your unconscious mind keeps pushing you to be self-defeating in many of these cases, and it becomes apparent to the outsider somewhat quickly. Several years ago, I'd worked for a client who was in love with a close friend, and who had an on-again, off-again affair with him. During an "off" time, he'd dated some crazy girl who pretended to be my client and had sent crazy, hurtful texts, which of course caused a great deal of emotional damage to my client, especially when she was at one point, believed to be the actual source instead of the victim. It had been around that time I had been brought in. So, I would reconcile the fellow and almost immediately my client would scare him off by insisting he explain himself for dating this person who had hurt her, for not believing her, and to apologize and make it right. Her target would immediately become angry and defensive, and then I was expected to "fix" this. The solution here was for her not to call him out and insist he apologize for events that had happened in the past before they could move forward, but no amount of my asking and advising her of this would stop her from doing it over and over again. Her target missed her and wanted to be with her, but when he made the move to get back with her, this behavior scared him off. This happened not once or twice, but several times! Clearly, some part of her really just didn't want him back. The spellwork was working just fine, but if she refused to follow a few simple guidelines, then it wasn't the spell that wasn't working…it was her trying to tell herself she was better than this guy, and then acting in such a manner as to prevent him from coming back. When she moved on, the guy wouldn't stop trying to get her back, and she realized all that time she could have had him, even said as much, if she'd just listened to my advice, and being as she's a rather sensible woman, wondered why she didn't. I told her she probably realized he was Mr Wrong, but her conscious mind didn't want to hear it right away. 

And of course there are just people who expect instant results, and act out when they do not receive them. I'm not sure I'd categorize them as obsessive or self-defeating as they might be neither, but no matter how often you tell them that the result is not apt to be immediate, they will complain rather quickly that "nothing happened." While that is incredibly tedious, rude, and obnoxious for someone in my position to have to deal with (because I never said expect this to be fixed in 48 hours, and so now you are wasting my time complaining when you don't have a problem other than you're impatient,) it also means I might have a client who will shortly be engaging in very unhelpful behaviors which could ruin the spell. Furthermore I find these people easily collapse into obsessive behavior patterns. 

Let's not forget the "married to unhelpful ideas" petitioner. Some years ago, I was tasked with reconciling a client's lover. When he'd returned and they were back together, she told me I'd "failed" her as the client's reconciled lover did not dream about her as his reason for coming back. How did she know? She'd asked him if he'd dreamt about her, and he'd replied probably not, but even if he had, he really never remembered his dreams, so he couldn't say 100%. She wanted the guy back. I brought the guy back. But I'd "failed" because he probably (no one knows for sure) didn't dream about her. Let me be frank, "dream work" is not exactly this all-powerful useful tool people tell themselves it is. Even if you take away the enormous percentage of people who don't remember their dreams, now you move onto the percentage of people who assume dreams are ALWAYS the unconscious babbling to itself and not really worthy of note. That leaves a much smaller percentage of people who are going to even pay any dream that they may have any mind. And let's say your target is the kind of person who places a great deal of importance on all of their dreams. Well, out of the ones they are apt to remember, not all of them will be anything to do with what you want, and those dreams which are the unconscious babbling incoherently to them can interfere with the ones you are trying to send a message through. So, this is why you can probably HEAR my eyes rolling the moment you suggest dream work, although I will do it. Keep in mind, I don't feel there is NO MERIT to dream work, rather I think some people just think it to be more useful than it often would be. HOWEVER, if you task me with something – such as the above, to return a lover, – and that lover returns, then it's neither here nor there how it happened. That isn't failure. One's unhelpful ideas of how spellwork SHOULD work in their heads is not often the best course of reaction in reality. All that tells me is that the petitioner is very green/naive about spells and how they work, and also has some serious control issues. I mean, I'm not picking on my "dream people," I've had the same logic applied to the Intranquil spirit being used for everything, as well as many other specific kinds of magic. 

This isn't nearly an infinite list, and the reality is that spells do not require some amazing feats of mind control and patience and zen to work. Instead, they require something far more frightening and difficult – for the petitioner to be honest with themselves and for that person to actively work on their own behavior. It requires you to have FAITH in the process and not try to micromanage the outcome, those involved, or HOW the spell manifests. That might mean, for some people, that readings are not helpful, and can actually harm their active spellwork. 

Take for example those who want a reading to gauge how a spell will manifest – this is quite common, honestly, and for the most part, it's not going to be problematic, – but certain people will actively harm the manifestation by taking whatever the reading said as an infallible truth. So if I say to a client that I think she is wearing a particular green dress, she might go out of her way to frequently wear this dress to "attract" the outcome. As she so frequently wears it, the dress gets ruined before the spell manifests. Now she becomes despondent and morose and worries it can't happen. This leads to lust for results and spell harming behaviors. Another client is told he runs into his target at a Walmart. He thinks to himself that this must mean he is at the store closer to his target's home, and takes the extra time to drive there when he needs something from Walmart. What he doesn't realize is the target was supposed to run into him at the location closer to his home. 

Let me let you in on something… I've been psychic my whole life, and I would describe it as having a sense and foreknowledge of a larger event coming definitely, but then the "fine details" are in constant shifting flux. So what dress you wear or what store you shop at are likely not going to be the details to get hung up on. It is the major events that are the important part. If you want a job at a specific company, it's not really relevant in most cases what the tie the interviewer is wearing will look like, and yet I guarantee in just this month alone at least 10 of my reading clients will hold on to a little detail like that, and even try to use it to "draw" the outcome they want. People like these little details because they feel like you are more on point, and there's nothing wrong with that, but when it becomes unhelpful and starts to create a fixation in some people, it becomes a situation where I actually start telling the client I won't read for them because it is prolonging their manifestation phase. 

This baffles some people but I might get myself a reading once a year or so, if that often. I read for myself less than once per month. I do pick up on many things as it is an innate gift, but I do not focus myself on my own life to get the deeper finer points unless I have a sense of upcoming danger. I am a much less anxious and wound up person for it. People who live in the past are depressed, and those who live for the future anxious as they say, and it's not wrong. I don't dwell on my past, nor do I fixate on my future. If you're becoming too dependent on readings or dwelling too much on what has already happened, you need to come back here to the PRESENT, and keep your mind focused on that. 

Many many years ago, when I fell in love for the first time, the gentleman who I fell in love with and myself kept running into each other repeatedly well before we even struck up much of a friendship. I'd met him for the first time and had a conversation with with him, and thereafter for 6+ months, I would literally run into this man everywhere, and to be fair, there is absolutely no way it could have been on purpose for either of us. In fact, meeting up with him would even be incredibly unlikely in a few cases. While the story ends badly as most stories of the first time one falls in love generally do, there was a very strong sense of things having been "meant to be." I've seen similar cases of this happening with people in my life who are important in my life. HOWEVER, if I "planned" to run into anyone or had even had my mind set that I could be running into someone who would later become greatly important to me, I would likely not have had those relationships at all. If I realized how important these people would be to me, or the impact they would have on me, such knowledge would have completely altered their impact. Now, sure, some of them brought me some incredibly painful lessons, and had I been forewarned, I'd surely have avoided them entirely, but in retrospect, if I had avoided those people, I would not have come into contact with many of the absolutely awesome people in my life who had a very beneficial impact. 

So, I say the above in the hopes that I can help illustrate how you can become a person which spells manifest for…because it may surprise you but the person who has strong manifestations is not the one who has a very distinct plan on how they will react to some very specific scenario…it's the person who doesn't have to plan that, or does not require some exceedingly exact series of predetermined events. While magic tends to take the path of least resistance to manifestation, you more than likely are not really 100% clear on the clearest of days as to what path that is. If it's that you run into your target at the park, or that they text you out of the blue, you should be able to react to the situation presented without created anxiety. So if I was reconciling a guy, I'm going to know how to react when they reach out or I run into them. I'm not going to upset myself with events which have never occurred and then blunder through like a complete idiot because I've had an entirely different idea of what would happen than what is happening. That requires the petitioner to be able to problem solve a bit, and problem solving doesn't come from preparing for some specific social instance. I'd put it more like…say I learned survival skills so I can hike and hunt and I know which plants are dangerous and what terrain is unstable and so forth, so when the day comes that I'm injured on a trail, I wisely had packed so I can alert others to my location, and I can clean and dress my wound while I wait. I don't go out with the assumption I will become injured, but I know how to handle it if I do. Life is very much like that. If I encounter a situation which is unfamiliar to me, panic and fear are the worst response. I merely compare it to anything of some verisimilitude in my experience. I then TRUST MYSELF to handle the situation as best as possible. If you panic or seize up you neither trust yourself nor have faith in yourself….that's implicative of a person who will have a hard time with spell manifestation. Wisdom and faith are your greatest resources. Simplicity and practicality are also quite helpful. See, if you look back on the above paragraphs, there is the story of the young woman who wanted her ex back and then said I "failed" because he didn't dream of her. To me it was "Get the ex to reconcile with the client," but to her it was an overly specific and rather unhelpful series of events that had to happen PLUS her ex came back for her to consider me successful. I'm practical and straightforward. I know can control a situation to some degree, but I don't overdo that by MICROMANAGING, whereas she entirely lacks control as she wishes to master every single thing around her so that the situation becomes what she wants 100% how she envisioned it…which is not practical nor simple, nor from a human standpoint very likely. God/Goddess/The Universe may be capable of such control but for a human, we know what we want, we can put an order in for it, but if we have to dictate how and why it happens, we are not very smart in that regard and will not pick a course that will be 100% viable in every respect. That means we should educate ourselves and be confident in our own ability to react to many different situations, which would mean we admit….we don't have 100% control of how or why things happen, but that we do "plan" for unforeseen events by knowing how to handle them. Go back to where I compare this to having wilderness survival skills and therefore when I do find myself injured, I know how to get help and treat my own problem. This doesn't mean I worry every time I go out that I will be hurt. I assume, and am generally correct, that no harm will come to me. But in the event it does happen, I am not crying and fearful but know how to handle it. That is the same with spell manifestation. It's not really likely to be something you just can't handle. It isn't apt to be scary. You aren't likely to act like someone who can't find your own ass with 2 hands and a flashlight. BUT, if you become anxious, if you attempt to micromanage a situation using magic, or even you work yourself into anger, panic, or frenzy if and when that spell manifests, you may very well fumble it. 

Hopefully this long ramble has helped some of you, – I am expecting a big influx of requests because it's about to be Mercury retrograde, and that tends to draw some exes back in the picture for all of us.

~Cat