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February 20, 2008
Tech
A friend of mine who is a professional sorcerer and I were exchanging notes about various kinds of magickal technique. "If I steal any tech from you," he wrote, "I'll give you credit."
Earlier in the day I'd been working with Danny C on an area of his organizing where he has some problems, and I said, "It's just tech at this point."
Tech... short/code for technique... what you are left with, or left looking to find, when you've made up your mind what to do and now you just need to know how to do it.
A lot of this blog is CR tech. Eat more protein, especially for breakfast. RDAs as a tactic, not an ideology. Eat fat with your meals, eat flax oil to make your skin silky soft and improve your interpersonal relationships. Use portabella mushrooms as pizza crusts. Use zucchini as the "pasta" in your lasagna. Yogurt is better in a soup than cream, just add it after removing from heat.
Among magicians, tech can mean a lot of things. How you do what you do can vary a lot, based on who you are and what you're doing. A traditional New Orleans witch is going to do things differently from a Kabalistic sorcerer. There's nothing more fun than when magicians meet, especially magicians/witches/sorcerers of different traditions. I had that happen to me recently when I met someone who is either a classically trained Kabalistic sorcerer, or just really works like one. I'm somewhere between a Chaos magician and a lazy American Christian witch, but I do seem to get my stuff done.
How you do what you do all hinges on what you really want to do. A lot of my entries here aren't tech -- they're polemics, designed to make you make a choice about whether or not you want to take control of your own health. Of course, in the course of so doing I'm constantly talking myself into doing it for myself. CR is hard, but the rewards are amazing. I've figured out most of the tech, and I attempt to share it with you so that you may take what you will and leave the rest. But knowing what it is that you want to do, and knowing what you want to do is an extension, ever so subtly, of knowing who you are.
A lot of my blog has been a journey into the middle of who I am, then out again, then back in. Tech, whether it be magickal, organizing, or CR, served as a series of tools to better articulate who I am and live in my body/mind/psyche/career in a way that was wholly consistent with my ideals and goals.
And then there are those months when everything just goes to hell and I'm lucky to spend five minutes meditating and eat one tablespoon of brewers yeast. And I'd have to admit that during some of those months I've had the months I've had the most enlightening, empowering discoveries of all. Not that I'd want to stay there, but sometimes the chaos and the dark undertow of passion that ends in eating fries off of someone else's plate and staying out way too late drinking that last glass of pinot noir and knowing that I shouldn't is exactly precisely what I needed to take everything to the next level, where everything is organizing, CR, exercise, love, the whole package.
I was saying to MR tonight over dinner (a nice eggplant dish with cauliflower and asparagus, plus basil, oregano, roasted garlic, eggwhites, flax and olive oil, and capers) that I've never been a person who could compartmentalize. Life is all of one piece to me. Love, fitness, magick, organizing, and scrubbing the kitchen floor are all stirred together in my psyche. I've become rather addicted to Pilates as of late, and I'm working on a class for all my co-workers to take. I was role-playing some work scenarios with Danny C today and I was tempted to hit the floor and do some Pilates crunches, but decided that it would be unfeasible in my professional clothes. But sure enough, just post dinner, I changed into my workout clothes and proceeded to do another demonstration class while MR finished his eggplant. My body is zinging from the alive feeling of being truly engaged and focused with the exercise, and it spills out into everything else I do.
This morning I took Pilates class, and while I felt exhausted from doing a whole lot of cardio and practically teaching a class the night before, I felt like I was taking my workout to the next level. Nearly shaking as the energy exploded inside me, I felt like I was learning how to rely on my own internal balance, not intellectualizing it or seeing my body, but allowing the natural balance to take over without interference from my own head. Much like how I teach organizing: destroy the ego, stop thinking, act directly from the heart and the instinct with no fear of rejection, and if you can't do that, go get yourself rejected until you can handle it.
And then this afternoon, after much work, one of my organizers made a definite breakthrough. I love teaching, and I love the moment when I see the light come on and it's there. Some of it is tech, but there's something deeper, the realization that what we're doing isn't just a means to an end, it's the only means to the only end that matters to us: that of workers gaining real power in a world where they're usually exploited and way too often with their implicit if not explicit consent. Organizing is hard, and you have to do it from the heart, not from some sort of intellectual commitment. The brainwork needs to be there, but you can't do it from the head alone.
So the tech has to be there. But more fundamentally, there is the decision to employ that tech to the result that you've committed yourself to.
I can't make that decision for you... I have trouble making that decision for myself! There are so many conflicting forces that swirl around us, not the least of which are the simple biological programmings that tell us to eat eat eat and carry triplets through a famine.
Decide for yourself... use the tech if it suits you.
Hope this helps. :)
Posted by april at February 20, 2008 8:21 PM