The Role of Ritual and Healing

“Do as thou wilt shall be the whole of the law. Love under law, love under will.”

• Aleister Crowley

Our theme is recovery and effectively handling chronic illnesses.  I am a 3rd degree witch/priestess of an eclectic wiccan tradition and I am a former chemical dependency counselor. I currently struggle with my own chronic illnesses of depression, type 2 diabetes and autonomic neuropathy as well as retinal neuropathy.  In this article I want to start discussing the use of magic and ritual in recovery and healing self esteem including becoming self actualized.

Magic was once defined by Mr Crowley as the science and art of causing change to occur in conformity to will.   Ritual is often added at this point as the process by which we harness our will to create that change.  

Rebuilding self esteem is the cornerstone of successfully managing the stresses of chronic illness and recovery. There are several approaches to how this is done.  I want to propose that while there can appear to be a clear cut difference between a mundane and spiritual approach to the matter creating that change hinges on intent or recognizing that something needs to change and having a singular focus to fix the issue.   

The other day I was revisiting my teacher’s edition book of shadows that our tradition uses. I was reminded of how we have taught the process of maintaining the cycles of balance. As this information is widely available in other printed forms I do not feel out of place publishing it here. Maintaining cycles of balance in any area of life there are five basic principles:

Intention

Preparation

Invocation

Purification

Consecration.

I bring this up because these really are the steps to effectively rebuilding our self esteem. Our intention is recognizing that we need to alter how we are evaluating our worth. The process to fix that ends up being the other points whether we are invoking the use of a therapist or magical tools we still end up needing to detox the negative judgment and the recognize that we are something pretty amazing.  In a different vein we can ask some questions of ourselves as a part of identifying what we need to rebuild by asking if we have become stuck because we are overly focused or worried about our problems? Have we forgotten who we are? Do we understand the power that resides in us?  Once we can honestly answer those questions we can take a look at practical and magical ways to create the changes that we need.

Now that I have satisfied my own need to share my foundational knowledge there will be future articles on different processes both mundane and spiritual to consider for your bag of tricks.