Magic 501: Challenge

For every lesson that can be summarized in a sentence or two, there are volumes of lessons which accompany it. If, for instance, you are learning a lesson about integrity, you will also be learning lessons about endurance, strength, connection, relationship, energy, balance, etc.

The point of a lesson in the life of a vodouizan is not just the most prevalent thing they are intended to learn, it is the connected lessons which give that particular lesson its power to change you. If the lesson was able to be learned by a lwa giving you a sentence or two, without it being a set of situations in your life, it was a very minor lesson.

This is why, often, when a lesson is being presented in the life of a vodouizan, it is presented with minimal information and often no announcement nor fanfare. No lwa comes down and says “tomorrow, you will learn about integrity.” The most you might get is a statement which will turn out to be very true, that you have not been acting with integrity. You might even just get a statement about a specific way you aren’t practicing integrity made by someone you don’t think has a lwa in the first place. You might simply have a nagging feeling that what is happening is about integrity.

You won’t, however, be given a step-by-step guide to having integrity. That guide would divorce the lesson of its context, and rob you of the tools necessary to not have to repeat the lesson.

In retrospect, the lesson rises in what appears to be a very natural way out of the conditions of your life, once you have made the changes necessary to notice the pattern which helped create the lesson. The lesson is a product of the complex conditions of our lives, the cascade of action and reaction with ourselves, our environment and the people in it, with the various energies and spiritual forces around us.

The challenge is the question of whether or not you intend to do what you need to do to learn that lesson, which often involves a complex and creative mix of actions taken to recognize the lesson and make the decision/do the actions which establish the lesson—which make the lesson permanent, which make the lesson unnecessary to repeat—in our lives. Some people thrive when challenged. When they recognize the need to do something, they do their best to meet it. Some people grow the most when challenged.

Reaching that point, however, requires a ton of loss: the loss of the fear of losing, the loss of the fear of being a loser or winner (and the recognition that it’s irrelevant), the loss of the fear of confrontation or the challenge itself, the loss of the fear of the unknown and not knowing. It requires a cascade of other lessons, usually a product of things being rough.

It requires strength, which is always purchased in loss, discomfort, and adversity—the adversity which is the most common motif in the stories about the lwa. There’s no way to avoid adversity, lessons, and challenge. There’s no way to procrastinate it either. The lwa meet their challenges and expect us to learn to do the same.

Challenge, along with lessons, is an inherent part of the accelerated path of elevation, healing, and growth that vodou offers.