Letting magic inform all aspects of your life

If you don't read The Alchemist's Garden, please start with this post.

I want to quote him a bit:

Any magical practitioner should at least attempt to integrate their magical practice, politics, religious beliefs (if any), and everyday life. Compartmentalizing those things is, clearly, a great way to end up being a hypocrite and perhaps even a fraud. It’s one thing if you can’t express your magic openly in your everyday life because to do so would result in the loss of your job or the burning down of your house (perhaps with you in it). It’s quite another to have the advantage of Western freedom and yet insist that magic and politics and everyday life must remain separate in order for “real” magic to happen, as if real magic is a soap bubble destroyed by the slightest draft of the mundane. Is your magic that fragile?

I couldn't agree more. I belief the Earth is sacred and my body is sacred and thus I should act like that is true. Meaning, that means the way I cook, the way I treat others, they way I do my "mundane" job should all be informed by my magic and beliefs. More over, if everything is both material and spiritual, then it is only reasonable to address my challenges both spiritually and with action in the physical realm. Doing both magic (or prayer) and doing physical work together help us be the most successful. In large part this is why the idea that you should do magic as a last resort is bad one. Start with a blessings. Draw on your magic and your relationship to the gods or spirits to help you get through the process. Give thanks in the end. Let yourself engage with the whole process on all levels. Don't limit yourself.

And while I'm ranting, I want to add a quote by Eliphas Levi regarding the defination of the "Great Work" of Western magic: "[It] is, before all things, the creation of man by himself, that is to say, the full and entire conquest of his faculties and his future; it is especially the perfect emancipation of his will." Given that people generally have things like bodies, have to eat and pay bills and all that stuff - it seems like a reasonable proposition that the emancipation of our individual wills occurs in the here and the now. We take the magic and wisdom we learn from our of spirit work and meditation and use those lessons in our everyday lives.

This links to the domestic craft I've been posting about it. Every action has a spiritual dimension to it. Both because the world is also sacred and because we are spiritual and physical beings at once. And if every action has a spiritual dimension, then any action can be done with intention and symbolism enough to make it magical. Everything you do can be an act of spiritual devotion or spell, if you approach it in a certain way.

Acts of self-care and care of one's friends and family are a powerful act of magical practice.