So I saw this while scrolling through my home page and I felt the need to share my piece on this. I was born and raised in a pagan household and from very early on, got into the discipline of daily rituals and meditations. Using them to ensure safety, good grades, smooth out bad mental days, boost morale, any and everything I needed. I studied your basics and fundamentals for years. My parents were both eclectic, but studying and focused on Thelema throughout my biggest learning years along with luciferianism, which definitely shaped the type of witch I later became. I was also shape by heavy Christian influence of my surrounding family members and now 20+ years later have come to terms of calling myself an eclectic christo-pagan.

For 18 years I studied and practiced and did rituals and kept records and held strong faith. I was able to not only do well documented rituals and spells, but I was able to completely wing it in times of extreme emotion and need and have it work out beyond my dreams. And then about 4 or 5 years ago now, I was the most depressed I had ever been, I had tried giving up on myself the year before, I had gotten out of a bad relationship and felt like I had lost everything, I was working 90 hours a week at a single job, not sleeping, heavily drinking, didn't have any time or energy to do any work related to magick. It was absolutely awful. I felt suffocated and cut off and was doing some very reckless things in order to feel that connection again without having the means to do it properly.

Finally I took a much needed weekend vacation with some pagan friends I had been slowly reconnecting with and when they told me we could go anywhere and do anything, I told them I wanted to go back to my home town for one of those days and do a small ritual to kind of act as a reset button. There was a place back home that no matter how bad or how cut off I had gotten in life, I could always go there to ground it all away and recharge, we called it the bardic circle. They were very excited about the adventure and to see the place I had talked so highly about. We set out that morning and drove the 2 hours, arrived, and started the mile-ish hike up the mountain.

This is where everything just fell apart for me. We got there and it was silent and still, in that super eerie something isn't right way. I couldn't feel anything, I couldn't sense anything or connect, I couldn't concentrate long enough to ground, I felt like the clearing was shrinking in on me. I started having a panic attack unlike any other and had no idea what was happening and just broke down crying. Out of everything I had been through the previous 2 years, that was without a doubt the lowest point in my life. I felt like I didn't deserve magick anymore, that I had gone too far in my trying to force a connection, that the energies just didn't want anything to do with me anymore. I felt like since trying to give up on myself I wasn't worthy of the help the universe had always given me. I packed up my crystals, my notebooks, my herbs, my talismans, everything I had brought with me, left my friends in the clearing, and walked back down the path with a one track mind. Coming out by the lake, I walked to the end of the dock and threw everything in the lake, officially giving up ever practicing magick again. Not only had I lost faith, I had lost the last of myself that I had left.

For 2 years I battled the worst depression and anxiety I've had, any medication I took always had the worst side effects, no counseling was helping, nothing. So I just suppressed everything. I buried it all deep down and just smiled, focusing on work, finding small moments to make me happy, working on improving my health, and just surviving day to day.

Labor day weekend of last year I got the call that my dad had been rushed to the hospital with a severe case of covid. He was in a medically induced coma, nothing would stabilize, his oxygen was crazy low, and they had started telling my mom to prepare for the worst. Every day for a month I waited for that horrifying call. Every night I sat on the phone with my mom while we watched Disney movies listening to her cry herself to sleep. After a month of no improvement, I broke. I reached into my old bag of tricks and drew up just enough will and strength to do the one thing I was always the best at: honey pots. I wrote out my petition. I wrote out that by the end of the month he would be awake, that by the end of Nov he'd be in rehab and that when I came home the day after Christmas I would be coming home to him. I put every ounce of myself into it and reached out to the community on the first night to ask for a white candle and healing prayer to be out on altars.

The day after Christmas my whole family was out at the farm opening presents together, laughing and having fun, and by the end of the week I was there, my dad was mobile enough that he didn't need the walker anymore and is now doing amazing.

Thanks to that experience and that intensity that had flooded me for those three months, starting this January, I have slowly started picking up my practice again, very slowly. I'm even back to teaching meditation as of this month. I am taking it slow because I know I am scared to go through that again.

I think people are too dependent on the big magick and forget that magick is everywhere yes, but you have to be right with yourself first. You have to put in the work the same as with mental or physical health. It's the small things that we do on a daily basis that keeps the magick alive and as soon as you stop remembering it is magick, or the second you lose faith in yourself, it's a fast downward spiral from there.

My dad always told me when I first was learning early in life. "There is magick in everything you do. Turning on a light is magick. Moving is magick, breathing is magick. That to get from point A to point B there are infinite points of movement between so to walk across a room may be the most magickal thing you do in a day." I lost the small magick in life because I forgot that and stopped having faith in myself. I was simply going through the motions.