Banish doubt and eagerness

Wiggling open more room for connection and clarity

As a student of the Western tradition of magic, I came to the practice with both great skepticism and deep eagerness. Young parts of me that yearn to live in an enspirited world of meaning hoped for profound, powerful experiences. But older parts of me that are wary of being duped, manipulated, or hurt tended to want to assess and thoroughly deconstruct every opportunity before they would allow that enthusiasm to take hold.

This tension has manifested in a variety of ways over the years. Sometimes there’s a sense that “nothing is happening” with great sadness and envy, or a feeling as though I’m trying too hard to make something happen. On the other hand, sometimes things begin to happen and I feel a bit freaked out, I want to lock up. In recent years, I’ve started noticing that the parts of me that want cool things to happen, and the parts that are afraid scary things will happen, can get so loud in my head that perhaps I am completely unable to notice what actually is happening.

The word subtle often shows up in esoteric work. The subtle arts, the subtle body. Subtle means an experience that is quiet, small, and easy to overlook when there’s too much noise and stimulation. To sense what is subtle, you need to become sensitive. Profound experience may be constantly infusing your being, but you’re so busy doing life that you don’t have the stillness to pay attention to it. It just feels like another sensation, a background noise you have to filter out so you can focus—like construction noise constantly going in the building next door while you’re trying to work.

Often when I go to public rituals, someone leads a “banishing,” which in pagan traditions is a practice of sending away any thoughts, concerns, or tendencies that would keep you from being fully present. It’s the psychic equivalent of taking off your winter gear when you come into someone else’s house for dinner. The winter gear isn’t bad—it’s necessary—but if you’re wearing it the whole night you might feel too warm, uncomfortably padded, and you might get snow everywhere. You take it off at the beginning so you can be in the experience and enjoy it thoroughly, and then you put it back on when you leave.

The most common banishing at public ritual is “doubt,” which makes sense, especially if you think of it like a winter coat. Doubt isn’t a bad thing that must be gotten rid of, but it can be too loud when you’re trying to do subtle work. The practice is to let go of doubt for a little bit, to practice as though you fully believe what’s happening is real and matters, and then to let doubt return afterward.

All of this lead-up comes to a realization I recently had with my own practice, as I evolve into something I keep calling in my mind “something like Neopagan Daoism.” The doubt within me cannot fully relax and let go because that other thing inside me, the part that really wants cool experiences, needs someone to mind it. In spite of my most guarded personality, I’ve had moments of being taken advantage of or just confused because parts of me really take these practices too seriously. Sometimes they override my doubt because they want to believe another person knows better than me, or they want to ignore common sense safety because they want to believe magic is so powerful.

But there’s also just simply the loudness of a part complaining that nothing is happening when a lot may, indeed, be happening. One of my friends a long time ago said, “If you’re bored, you’re boring.” Which I assumed to be them quoting something they often heard. But there’s something to the posture—to be bored is to be passive, held back, blocked from expressing yourself. If the boredom can soften and let you lean forward and take interest, then what was boring minutes ago might become fascinating. I once experienced this by really paying attention to an ant as it crawled across the broken terrain of tree bark.

All of this to say is that in a recent experience, when we were called upon to banish doubt, I also decided to banish the eagerness. They are like two teams playing tug of war with my attention. When both could sit back and watch, true presence and attention emerged, and there was alchemy within me that was richer than I could have fathomed.