Chicken Little is pretty well known for the whole “THE SKY IS FALLING” thing.
Chances are – if you’re casting spells when you’re reacting to a stressful situation in your life, you’re responding from a similar place – this is the “Limbic” system of the brain, and it’s telling you the sky is falling.
In this metaphor – what IS the sky falling?
Well, it’s whatever your brain thinks will keep you alive, so you cast a spell to respond and hope it works. We’re gonna call this “reactive magick.”
“I have a last minute bill I can’t pay!” – “The sky is falling”
“I gotta get a great grade on this test!” – “The sky is falling”
“I need to get back at this person for saying I smell funny 🤬” – “The sky is falling”
But why IS the sky falling, you may ask?
Because your brain, bless its soul, is trying to do its best to keep you alive.
It’s… just… kind of dumb.
Well… parts of it are.
Parts of it are VERY smart.
Your pre-frontal cortex? *chef’s kiss* AMAZING, beautiful, wonderful.
This is also where we get to *proactive* magick.
But put a pin in that.
Let’s get back to chicken little.
In short – your brain is lazy, it wants to conserve energy, and it wants to do it in the shortest path possible.
Most often times, that involves well-worn “desire paths” in your brain, paths you’ve forged in your brain through repeated exposure to a thought, or idea.
Then, you’ve got your “Google search function” – aka your reticular activating system. This will filter out irrelevant information.
Let’s not get too bogged down in brain science (because I could geek out for hours) – the point being: the more you walk down a desire path, the thicker/stronger it gets, which automatically trains your “Google search function.”
It’s similar to when you type in a search a bunch and Google helpfully (and sometimes not so helpfully) auto-suggest something. (THANKS GOOGLE BUT I WAS TRYING TO FIND PO—-MERANIANS.
And then we get mad at the Google search for bringing back what we kept searching for!
So – if you’ve got a thick “desire path” that says “all [insert group] sucks” – YOUR GOOGLE SEARCH IS LIKE “okee dokie, let’s continually find evidence of it” and BLAM.
SOMEHOW you’re knee deep in penguins because you kept thinking “all humans suck and only penguins are awesome” and now you’ve got a giant cave of penguins and you’re flying around the city fighting crime except penguins can’t fly so people are REALLY confused as to what you’re trying to accomplish.
(Then some “Batman” comes along with the same schtick and now YOU’RE the bad guy and you stopped flying and opted for an umbrella gun. Yeesh. 🙄)
SO – how do we freakin’ train our brain to DO WHAT WE WANT?
That’s where PROACTIVE magick comes in.
(BTW, Proactive vs reactive magick is an idea that I got from the awesome author, Taylor Ellwood – and I’m just adding some hot sauce dash of “neuroscience” to how these ideas work.)
Which – is a lot easier to think about when you’re calm and able to plan long term (which your pre-frontal cortex is responsible for.
Told you we’d circle back around to that.
Your pre-frontal cortex is located in the frontal lobe of your brain, sort of where your 3rd eye area is located, neat huh?)
What if…..
And I know this is SUPER DUPER CRAZY….
WHAT IF…. INSTEAD… of having to SCRAMBLE last minute to cast a spell to cover a bill…
What if…
You… were… just… super abundant and had a lot of money in your bank account instead.
Get ready to have your mind blown a LOT on this blog.
Okay, let’s play a little more…
What if… instead of getting a good grade on a test, you naturally believed you were smart and it was easy to learn. 🤯
What if… you didn’t care that people thought you smelled funny. 🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯🤯
Right?
That is the proactive magick at work.
We’ll use a little metaphor – imagine a clogged pipe.
The water has a REALLY hard time flowing through.
Focusing on only doing REACTIVE magick is pushing that water through a clogged pipe.
If you’re not getting regular results from your spells, there’s a good chance *that this is why.*
The water is the magick, the gunk is your gunk.
Proactive magick is like pouring magickal drano through your system – you clear out all the gunk.
BTW, this is can also be why when you have a “spiritual awakening” and you clear out a first layer of gunk, sometimes you’ll have a “tower card moment” that looks like your life falling apart…
When in actuality, maybe that partner sucked…
And those friends were draining…
And your job was actively holding you back from your ultimate purpose.
Your miles may vary, don’t go around being a dick to people, “you’re kicked out cause my Cherry Godmother said you’re holding me back from my ULTIMATE PURPOSE.”
This is where various healing modalities (stuff I’m currently researching into, like the the sciencey-based vagus nerve and the more esoteric “Emotion Codes”) will help you clear out and find your ACTUAL intuition versus like, ya trauma from ya mama.
Or papa.
Or that asshole from school growing up.
If you don’t know what’s going on when this gunk clearing happens – it can be INCREDIBLY disheartening to reach this new layer of self-awareness only to realize you’re standing alone at the other side of the river.
Luckily you’re on the right side of the river where you’re doing the best you can for your emotional health.
A universal truth is that you can only REALLY change you, but hopefully you’re around people who are own to grow WITH you, and you can share and geek out together on “what ancestral trauma are we healin’ TODAY!”
Take heart – one of the phrases I quite enjoy from the magickaly manifesty communities is “nature abhors a vacuum.”
Your miles may vary on this concept, but once you clean out that gunk, you’ll make room for new stuff, and it’ll happen so fast it’ll feel like magick.
Which… well… yeah. That’s… that’s kinda the point.
AND GUESS WHAT.
Even if you haven’t started cleaning out your own gunk – you’re still worthy and awesome of having a good life.
But now you know for something to look for: Your internal “gunk” (which is going to look a lot like “stuff [society/family/etc] told me that isn’t actually serving me.”)
Thought work and working with affirmations? Great, super awesome, love it.
Trying magickal methods with witchcraft to bypass your brain’s “belief” barriers to completely retrain the system? Now that’s somethin’ interesting to try…
So – what’s next? Learning how to learn witchcraft, of course.
and 
in Joshua Tree ©