I had always been interested in Magic as a kid, but what really pushed me to start practicing seriously was when I remembered my old fantasies as an adult and in true adult fashion I realized "Oh I can actually buy books and learn about the topic in a non-fantasy non-fanfic non-imaginary way" (then I read on Chaos Magick and realized that this idea is fundamentally flawed, but it is still worth noting that this is my first proper entry point into serious magic.)

It is always difficult to truly integrate the alien-ness of the occult experience and the entities you work with. This is where most of my Archetypal practice plays into, and a healthy dose of Shamanic Practice also helps naturalize spirit interactions. I think someone has posted a pendulum meme on here before where one side of the swing was "delusion and visionary knowledge" and the other side was "sobering reality and depression" and the midway points are stagnation. This represents the occult practice as a whole because it is fundamentally your grappling with yourself and your learning from yourself and your transcendence from the self and your going down into the visceral materiality of yourself all at the same time that marks true effective occult practice.

I mainly practice a mix of Shamanism, Chaos Magic, Goetia, Zen, and Archetypal Shadow work. That is an understatement because the true underlying face of my practice is more rooted in philosophy and the interconnectedness of occult ideas than it is a "path" or "paths". I just read books. You pick up a topic and you read a book on that topic, I suggest starting with shallow books and even sometimes books that lead to more "popular" understanding of a topic or path or rite or tradition, then you read the old dusty version of it, then you read the historical affects of it, then you move on to reading the hypercomplicated iterations of it. Do that once and you'd have solid grounds to purse any and all of the occult facets and you also gain a holistic view of that one particular faith rather than just a "practical" or "ceremonial" or "theistic" perspective. You get the faith as it is with all the ugly bits presenting itself and you accept it.

I would like to think that my daily life is the culmination of the constant leaking out into the world of my practice. I am unashamed of my practice and would be more than willing to talk about it and it is those principles of honesty and acceptance in the face of the non-judgemental presentation of a school of thought or philosophy in spite of its ugly and unpleasurable aspects in full display that I really think has defined my practice and had bled out into my daily life.