High Magick: A Guide to the Spiritual Practices That Saved My Life on Death Row - Damien Echols 2018
Working with Doubt
Preliminaries
Ijust talked about the role of belief — or, at the very least, nonchalance — in energy work, so this seems the perfect time and place to say a few things about doubt. Doubt is entirely normal, especially when it comes to magick, and I don’t want you to view it as some kind of aberration or obstacle.
Doubts are just a part of the process of learning magick.
Most of us have been told that magick isn’t real. We might grow up believing in it, but the world tells us that growing up means becoming realistic and seeing that magick is just a fantasy — something relegated to fictional books and movies. This unfortunate message, in addition to other forms of societal disempowerment, can make it difficult to trust the process when we first start to practice magick.
Everyone experiences doubt when they first start working with magick. It’s not just you; it’s everyone, including me. Doubt takes lots of forms: you might wonder if you’re doing it right, or you might question if you’ve got the details of a certain visualization correct, or you might ponder a lot on one step or the other (for example, “Am I supposed to use my right hand if I’m left-handed?”), or you might have a vague sense of messing up. Well, I just want you to know that these kinds of thoughts are to be expected on this journey. Doubts are just a part of the process of learning magick.
Some of us experience doubt every time we try something new, and this can be especially true with something as out of the ordinary as magick. You might think, “This isn’t what I thought magick was going to be like, so I must not be doing magick,” but don’t fall into that trap. The most important thing to remember here is to keep trying and don’t let doubt get in your way. Just keep going and you’ll eventually make progress and gain confidence. And remember that magick is sentient. If you reach out and really try to engage magick, it will meet you half way. Magick will speak to you if you work through your doubts and find what’s waiting on the other side.
When I was practicing magick on death row, I regularly wondered if I was doing it right, mostly because I had to figure out a lot through trial and error. And darker doubts plagued me as well. I was using magick to free myself from prison, all while I witnessed more than twenty people walk down that hall to go to their execution. These were people I knew. And never once did I see someone walk down that hall to freedom. Not one of them was allowed to go home.
“Do you really think you’re going to be the first?” I asked myself. “Do you actually believe that they’ll let you out of here?” These were just a couple of the doubts I dealt with on a daily basis. Sometimes it brought me to utter despair — I can’t even begin to describe that experience with words. In the end, I didn’t give in to doubt; I simply put one foot in front of the other and kept going. I figured I didn’t have anything to lose, so I put my heart and soul into my practice. And that’s why it worked.
Think of doubt as a growing pain or a form of initiation. Remember that everyone experiences doubt — even me! — but whenever it arises, it will help you to keep going if you try the next step or technique in this book.