Asking for More

So I have encountered something that I hear a lot of magic users encounter in their practice at least once : not asking for enough. I tend to make large offerings daily or weekly. I go all out. Using bread, milk, alchohol, left overs from dinner you name it. I have huge shrines outside of my apartment that are hidden in plain sight because I use everyday things found outside. I take each specific thing and bless them all for a week.

I charge them with power for the local spirits and the Gods to use. To focus their energies onto the land and aid not just me but everyone here in general.
From the animals and plants to the people also renting here. And I realized that part of the reason that not everything goes my way is that a lot of that energy is being redistributed. And not enough of it to me.

I do this because, I believe in aiding people and making a Community. I like to build, to create. In Hellenizmos, one of my Patrons is Haphaistos, the Black Smith of the Gods. Building is sort of my thing. Heck, my priest in the Temple even looked up my name in real life and in Hebrew it mentions building in it’s origins as well. I tend to think of everyone else but not enough for myself.

So, I over extend myself to high hell. Part of the reason that not all of the energy goes to me is because I am not thinking of myself. I was taught as a child to always think of others. The thing was, it was my family that wanted me to put them above everyone and everything else. As a child they demanded that obedience.

Whenever I wanted to help others or build social movements to help the poor they told me it was a bad idea. I had to be “loyal to Jesus” and them of course as my family. I spent time as a socialist working during my teenage years to fight for a better tomorrow and my Cuban family hated it. Not just for the obvious reasons that Cubans are the most reactionary of the Spanish speaking communities. But because they were so rigid and believed that you had to put yourself and family first and everyone else last.

A sort of Neoliberal family structure. No room to care for others. I stood up for the only African American child in my high school because I was his friend. The white Cubans and even darker skinned people in my school went after him. I went through hell defending him in middle school.

Not just against students or even racist teachers. But my family as well. I remember My Mother said,

“You’re becoming a bad person! You’ll end up being a terrorist like Mandela or a dictator like Fidel!,”

Yes, my Mother literally equated Nelson Mandela with terrorism. She doesn’t believe that anymore. But her far right upbringing with her father, a Batista soldier, hardened her. That was before my socialist years. I had never heard of Mandela before.

This was in the 90’s. So I researched him and right away I admired the man he was. I wanted to be just like him. It steered me towards socialism. It also helped that Cubans call everything from Liberals to Civil Rights groups “communist” they kept mentioning it so much that I had to research to find out what it meant.

I found that the values they embraced were not mine. Their values were destroying life while claiming to pursue freedom. Cubans have even been involved in CIA operations to destroy Democracies elsewhere. Cuban Exiles were in South Africa defending the Apartheid government while Che Guevara was with the African National Congress fighting against it. Say what you will about Castro, he ironically, fought more for freedom in other countries that he did in Cuba turning it into a Dictatorship.

I wanted so badly to help the world rather than burn it to the ground in some hypocritical zeal for “freedom” like my Community has and still does. So, I made my life about service. For the first few years of being a Pagan magician, I worked as an exorcist and a healer. I actually performed 25 exorcisms in the first 6 months. It usually takes years for people to get that far.

And I was doing it as an apprentice to someone else. I healed people that had body aches and head aches. I was proficient in taking away colds which also led me to study Mountain Medicine and Powwow. I was the healer of my Community. For years, I refused payment of any kind because I believed it was wrong for me to do this work for money.

Later on Facebook and MySpace, I met a lot of people who had the same opinion. It solidified my position on the matter. For a while. Except that I was being woken up early in the morning by people in other states. Asking me for help because they were experiencing a haunting of sorts.

Even online when I was writing occult blogs on Myspace, I had a lot of people that turned to me for help. I ended up getting requests from people farther and farther away from me. At first other states, then other countries. After a while, I was forced to become good at Remote Work. Doing magic from long distances.

I learned to use the energy outside of my body to send the needed help to other people. I found out I wasn’t the only one. Though sadly, there were charlatans. Lots of them. I called a lot of them out in my day.

One of these nut jobs called themselves demon busters. They would take donations from unsuspecting people who really thought they had the power to remove demons. Another guy from Argentina claimed he could remove all ills and black magic through detoxifying shakes that he would give his clients to drink. I spent time exposing them all and helping people to be safe from predators like that. I joined for a time, a national society for the Paranomal and I was working hand in hand with people who could do a lot of what I could do.

Most notably I worked with an initiated Native American Shaman named Michael Robishaw. He was like my brother. Still is. We worked on Remote Rituals together where I would do infiltration, that is to say, I would spy on the negative entity with divination. He would initiate open warfare on the spirits and obliterate them.

We were able to help a lot of people. We helped each other too. But as the demands of our job increased, the rewards became little. More and more time was taken away from our families. And when I asked for donations to buy my supplies because I couldn’t foot the bill anymore, I started to get angry emails. People calling me a charlatan or implying that I was taking advantage of their pain.

Something I had never done before.
People who once I looked on as friends, began to show me their true colors. Michael hadn’t had a good experience either. He asked for a donation for his work and the wealthy person who he helped never paid him. He was supporting a whole family. He needed that money.

One day….my magic wouldn’t work no matter what I did. I tried but nothing. They thought that I was making it up. But nothing was coming out. I went to my Madrina in Santeria for help. And she informed me that my Eggun (Dead) not just my ancestors but all of the Dead, as well as the various other spirits I work with had, had enough.

They refused to help a single person more if they did not start to compensate me. They went on strike. I had no idea that spirits did that but yes, even they can stop altogether if one isn’t measuring up. In addition to that, Yemaya and the other Orishas were concerned with my well being. So an overall concensus was made without me knowing of it, and they stopped the power flow.

They meant to scare me to shake me up. The irony is it did scare me. When I was a child up to when I became an apprentice to a few masters, I was scared of spirits and magic. I looked on my gifts as “the devil’s gifts” because that’s what my staunchly Christian family had taught me. It took me until my early 20’s to finally come into my power and accept that I wasn’t going to be living a normal life no matter how hard I tried.

Because when I ignored the power, it attracted things to me. Or unintentional things would happen like me healing people and taking their pain away and I was left with the negativity. Or I would look into people by mistake and know things about them and it scared them. They hated me for it. My life as a Christian was miserable because most churches don’t offer any real help.

Just prayers, and deliverances because everything is either Satan or God with them. And they engage in a “blame all ills on yourself” mentality. They claim it’s your fault you have gifts (from Satan of course) because you aren’t a good enough person. Or you don’t have enough faith etc..even when you’re a child they tell you this. I’ve heard it all.

It took me years to find Liberal Christians who weren’t bigoted and were open both to my new religious beliefs and to what I do. Some of them I found in the Paranormal. Others in Universalist Churches. But now the very power I was scared of for so long was cut off. And for the first time ever I felt so lonely.

So not like myself. I wasn’t me anymore. It was amazing how much I was able to feel with the ability. Energies from plants and animals and people and spirits.
It was claustrophobic.

Like being sucked inside yourself. So I realized, it wasn’t a curse but a gift. You don’t realize what you have until you lose it. And what I lost was a gift from the Divine. I shunned it for so long and now I begged to have it back.

They must have felt my pain because slowly the power came back on. They told me they didn’t mean to have that effect on me but I needed a wake up call. Because I was well on my way to poverty and insanity dealing with other People’s darkness all the time and nothing to show for it. So, as soon as I made it clear I needed to be compensated, everyone stopped asking for help. On the one hand it sucked because I was so naive I thought hey, that shouldn’t be a problem right? You do good work you get compensated.

Even Churches ask for donations for their works. But on the other hand it felt great to not deal with people and their issues all of the time. I rested and regenerated. In the end I discovered pretty quickly how many of them were false. One lady wanted me to protect her from DEVILS.

“HELP! THE BLACK ARTS ARE COMING FOR ME!!!”

And as soon as I mentioned compensation she went away. I guess the Black Arts took a vacation. After that I started to wonder how many of these people had looked for their own problems. Had they really been cursed by Warlocks? Or had they done something bad to warrant bad spirits and witches hexing them? I started to really look deeply at the people I was helping and became cautious with people. Even those who were ready to pay me.

I wasn’t going to help someone who didn’t deserve it. And, as if the Ether heard my thoughts I realized that one of those people who came to me for help was an unscroupulous and immoral man. He was screwing over families that he rented to. I not only did not help him but told everyone in the community not to as well. Later, factions within the society had me removed.

I was sad but sometimes blessings come in disguise. I started doing Community work again and then started getting clients that paid and sometimes handsomely. One woman who was a Hoodoo Worker and a Gambler sent me $500 for the removal of a Generational Curse that plagued her family for years. She gave it to me of her own free will.
So again, we arrive at the present.

The same issues coming back to bite me in the ass again. Which has led to the creation of this overly winded blog post : I have spent so much time trying to improve other people’s lives that I am having trouble improving my own.
In my zeal to be a better human being I managed to partially make my family’s rigid distrust of others and serial narcissism true. I needed to re-shift my focus back on to myself. My Madrina and another Temple priest recently told me that I need to start asking more, not less, from God and spirit alike.

That for all the huge offerings and devotional prayers that I do, I need a balanced exchange. Not to be afraid of demanding my rights or my blessings because the Gods want us to question them. Not just follow blindly like sheep.
So yesterday, I took the step of going before my Ancestral Altar and asking not only my ancestors but all my spirits for more. I needed them to give me more to make the exchange of energy equal.

More of everything good that there is in life. I think I need to get used to asking for more. But in the meantime, I have already asked that they balance things on their side. They told me to make them one big offering to set it in motion.
To give them the left overs in the fridge on the outside altars.

No one was going to eat it anyway, but it would serve as a feast for them to finalize the request. I felt it go into motion once I did.  Then, I asked the Gods for more right after. And last night, I felt Hestia answer my prayer. I gave her the final offering of the day, a long candle stick that I consecrated with the spirits.

And finally, I lit it and felt something move Spiritually. Don’t know how else to describe it. But I have already started to see the results for myself. In Santeria we have a saying : Don’t give your light away to those who don’t deserve it. When we give our Ashe or Grace or Light whatever you want to call it away; to people who don’t deserve it, you deplete your own blessings.

You essentially give your good fortune away to other people. And not only are your hurting yourself but you are enabling people to do harm to others.
You might as well be putting a knife in their hands. Because you don’t know what they do with that light. Medicine is good; but if you are taking meds you don’t need it can harm the body.

If you spoil a child you ruin them as they say. So with that said, I will no longer give my light away to people who do not deserve it. Only a fool does that and I am not a fool. Not anymore. On the next few posts hopefully I will start talking about Light Restoration and how it has worked for me.

Stay tuned everyone. Sincerely,

Your friend, M.