Magic 501: Confidence

One of the qualities accompanying maturity and balance in vodou is confidence. Confidence is less a virtue or an aspiration than it is a side effect, something that happens as a result of the state of your soul. Who you are, you will reproduce: that is, where you know yourself and trust yourself, where you have done the necessary healing and elevation work, that is what you will project around you. That is what will be the foundation for everything you do, from the way you speak to the actions you take to the way you treat and understand yourself.

Vodou differs sharply where it discusses aspiration from a lot of the combination of wishful thinking, visualization, and delusion which tend to characterize the discussion. We do not visualize confidence, nor do we try to be confident, nor do we make vision boards, nor do we try to convince ourselves or others that we are confident. The consciousness, which all of these techniques enlist, is not where confidence originates, it’s where confidence is demonstrated. One cannot convince the rest of the soul of something from the consciousness that the rest of the soul knows is false.

We earn confidence, and we earn it in the spiritual work we do.

Confidence is considered a leadership trait, among other reasons because it is earned. It’s not earned with the community—the negative bias of consciousness being what it is, waiting for a community of people in various states of spiritual distress to acknowledge your confidence is pointless—though a community might notice it. Maybe.

Confidence is not earned anywhere outside the specific work you have accomplished on your soul with the help of your spirits and whomever they have aided in working on you. It is a demonstration of that work. In vodou, your elders are the people who have done the most learning, growing, and healing: people who have earned confidence through doing the type of work they ask others to do. Vodou demands action and proof, a continued and brutal reproduction of the state of your soul.

Confidence is also a product of humility, which tends to surprise people. If you do not have an accurate understanding of who are you and your relationship to the world around you, both physical and spiritual, you will reproduce that inaccuracy. The feedback from that reproduction is destablizing, if you can be destabilized. It demonstrates to the world around you where you remain ignorant, creating opportunities for problems for your consciousness and opportunities for you to see your own ignorance. If your confidence relies on the perception of others, if it relies on a false image of you to yourself, this will destabilize you.

If your confidence is something you have earned from the elevation and healing work you’ve done, it’s not that easy to undermine. Mood won’t do it. Opposition won’t do it. Time won’t do it, either. Feedback only allows you to strengthen that confidence further via elevation and healing work: you run into that feedback and promptly do the work required to resolve it.

Confidence is the lesson that what is yours cannot be taken from you.