Featured Image by Jan-Willem Doomenbal Under Creative Commons License

The most important aspect of protection is your own confidence that you are safe.

Magick and manifestation are not the same, but they are cousins – hence what you feel and feed is a command which manifests within you and the world around you.

If you are anxious, always afraid that something is out to get you – that something is attached to you, gnawing at your energy – you will draw that to you if you aren’t already dealing with that.

If you feel good about yourself – if you feel good about your life and your relationship with your guiding spirits – that won’t protect you from every threat, but 90% of what people struggle with won’t bother you.

There is a lack of clarity –

What Are You Protecting Yourself From?

Most other practitioners don’t give a shit about you. Unless you really piss them off cursing, hexing, or binding you takes way more energy than it’s worth.

Most people slinging curses ain’t shit. The only curses they ever land are on people they trick into cursing themselves. In fact, if they tell you they’re cursing you, remember this – the only reason they’d do that is because you’re trying to psych you out.

The experienced magician will keep their cool and they’ll counter it immediately if they know it’s coming. Most of the people talking about curses and hexes are LARPers who delude themselves into thinking they’re as powerful as gods when they’d fold immediately in a face-to-face confrontation.

If someone with actual power tells you that they’ve cursed you, they will do it after the curse has worked its way deep into your field and they’re certain there is little to nothing you can do in reprisal.

So – it’s not that other people aren’t a threat, it’s that you can’t be vigilant about it all the time. You will look for threats and create them where there are none. Remember – most people don’t have the willpower to cast a curse that sticks.

To cast an effective curse, you’ve got to be able to muster the will to kill someone and feel no remorse for doing so, and once the rite is done, you have to completely detach from that emotion.

And this isn’t to say you’re setting out to kill – but you have to do this with your eyes open. Depending on the target, it could do anything from causing long-term mild annoyances to causing disease and premature death. A curse can manifest precisely as you mean it to, it can be milder, or it can kick off a domino effect. That’s why people will tell you that if you wouldn’t shoot someone you shouldn’t curse them.

Blowback from curses isn’t from karma so much as it is obsession.

Someone who watches whether a person’s life is driven into the ground is waiting for the pot to boil, and it never does. The energy bound up in obsession has not been released, hence it can’t manifest and it sticks to the caster’s aura and fucks up their life. (Guilt can do this, too, and will if deep down they don’t feel right about what they’ve done.)

You don’t have to worry about most of your enemies because most of them will do a great job of destroying themselves if you just go about your life.

For everyone else – trust your intuition to tell you something is off. Your intuition can’t work if your mind is always churning. You won’t catch everything before it happens – or early enough in the process to stop it before you feel the effects – but you’ll be in a much better position to deal with curses and psychic attacks if you learn to relax.

Think of it like this – if you’re always carrying tension in your body, it exhausts your physical and mental resources and makes you weaker and prone to mistakes if you get in a fight. If you are constantly running at a 7 or 8, your body doesn’t have far to go to hit 10, and that chronic stress will soften you up to the point anyone can fuck you up.

The same applies to magick.

The good news, though, is that when you live like that, a lot of people who would curse you see your life as a curse in itself and leave you alone.

Don’t live like that.

You’re perfectly capable of handling most curses and attacks that come from other people. I don’t know you, dear reader, but I know this – nobody can do to you what you’re able to do to yourself. Focus on that before you go looking at what other people might be slinging your way.

On Spirits

You have far more to be concerned about with malicious spirits than you do other people, but the same principles apply.

What is it within you that those spirits interface with?

Your paranoia.

Your fears.

Your vices.

Your weaknesses.

Your shames.

Your traumas.

And – because they are unseen and difficult to detect when you first develop your spiritual gifts, you will project most of that onto other people and the world around you.

This turns you into a combination battery and buffet for them. Your best defense against attack is to integrate your own shadow. Think of it as an inoculation within your spiritual immune system. When you can think about something that used to trigger you and you either feel nothing or it’s completely manageable, you cut off avenues of attack.

This is the unsexy part of spiritual protection – as with all forms of magick, the people most obsessed with it are looking for a shortcut, not realizing that their experienced reality is an extension of their inner selves. IE, winning the lotto won’t make you rich if you haven’t developed a good relationship with money.

All the protective prayers and rites in the world won’t help you if you stay paranoid. It’s like installing a state of the art security system in your home and answering the door when the local serial killer knocks. You can’t be protected from something you invite into your energy and your space.

Cast Protection in the Right Frame of Mind

I’m not telling you to never perform protective rites or prayers. Full disclosure, I do protective rites and prayers daily. I developed that habit early in my practice because the point you are most vulnerable to attack is when you are opening your gifts, building your confidence, and your energy grows stronger and lights up the astral plane.

But – it’s no more than a few minutes, and I do it out of gratitude toward my daemon, guiding spirits, and spirits I have built working relationships with. My mindset isn’t, “I am FUCKED if I don’t do this rite” – it’s “I don’t take you or what you do for granted.”

It’s about building those bonds and finding safety within them.

Stand firm in your power and know that ultimately you are responsible for your own life and you have the power to cast away any negative influences that try to feed off or control you.

And, standing firm in your power, commune with those spirits you look to for guidance and protection.

You are the foundation of your practice.

You will be attacked. You will face hardship. Embrace that – it’s how you become strong. It’s how you become clever and wise. It’s how you build that confidence I talked about at the beginning, and how you root those good feelings in something other than delusion and arrogance.

An immune system that’s never tested falters the moment it’s exposed to the most innocuous germs. The same applies to your energy and spirit.

The only way to build confidence is experience.

Too many want to pretend to be invincible and battle-hardened, seemingly unaware that being battle-hardened requires one to fight.

You can’t pretend your way to invincibility. You can vow to grow strong and stay disciplined, and then remain consistent until few things can harm you.

Don’t be a LARPer – and don’t expect protection when you won’t do the work on yourself.

Lean into what makes you fearful and uncomfortable until you are psychologically strong enough to face whatever comes your way. (And pace yourself – you can only handle so much, and pushing too hard will set you back, not propel you forward. Find where your comfort zone ends, go there, draw back, then go a little further each time.)

Do that, honor your gods and guiding spirits, and you’ll have all the protection you could ask for outside of exceptional circumstances.

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