Magic 301: Gratitude and Emotional Discipline
Every priest or spiritual worker uses their own disciplines to manage their emotions and mental state. We cannot afford to just feel or do whatever we wish. This is just one of my disciplines, not the only tool at my disposal.
If you will be wrestling with the unpleasant—unhealed people, various spiritual entities, assorted assholes and assholery—there are a few specific things you can do to manage the emotional toll or urge to do something unwise about the situation. It helps to remember that emotions are a form of energy. Anger, hate, fear, love, desire: all of these are specific energies with varying intensity from the slightest stirring to something that intoxicates the person and dictates their behavior. If you’re paying attention closely when the people around you are feeling strongly emotional (or when you are feeling strongly emotional), you will have noticed that in each emotion is, with varying strengths, the other emotions. The relationship between something like fear and anger is easy enough to see, but if you’re really paying attention to the emotions, you know that you can evoke some intensity of interest from fear or anger. The emotions which are most opposed are the easiest to evoke at strong intensities. Joy contains the seeds of despair. Aggression contains the seeds of passivity, etc. There might need to be some emotional states to bridge the two, but the energy of opposing emotions contains each other and the energy of any emotion contains the other.
In vodou, nothing is just one thing and everything is one. The question is what is strongest or most intense in a situation.
Part of the training a priest or spiritual worker goes through via the lessons given them in their lives is the ability to invoke and control their own emotions. These lessons tend to be incredibly harsh and will be repeated in iterations (sometimes across lives) until the priest or spiritual worker has very good control over their emotions.
It is not uncommon for the priest or spiritual worker to be exquisitely sensitive to the energies that unhealed person or negative entity is producing. That training does tend to heighten sensitivity. However, unlike the often complained about tendency on the internet of ‘empaths’ to absorb that energy, a priest or spiritual worker will recognize the energy and have a variety of tools at their disposal to deal with it, both at the time of experiencing it and later. We still feel it, in varying strengths, but we are not compelled by it.
I prefer, as much as anything, to sit with gratitude for all I have been given. When my name is dragged through the mud, when people gossip, when they project their motivations on me, when they try to get rid of me, I like to light a candle and sit with the energies I’ve been exposed to, and then speak of what I have gratitude for. A side effect of those incredibly harsh lessons has been knowing that I am obligated and owed nothing, not even my continued life.
I am invoking an opposite energy to the emotion that tends to occur when dealing with the energies negative entities and unhealed people tend to emit: gratitude instead of resentment. Gratitude instead of paranoia and hatred. Invoking this is surprisingly effective, even when the energy you are dealing with is particularly strong.
A teacher can help you learn how to do this, but expect learning it to involve a great deal of discomfort.
