Many Mistakes Mages Make: Building the Right Foundation

Hello Family!

We had another chat with a Muse of ours and one of the things that came up was how things went for us both when we started feeling juju being an active force in our lives. He had a much smoother transition than we've had so far, and it got us thinking what was different.

The answer we came up with was foundation. Hero Training is serious business, and the juju can rip our lives apart if we're not careful. Any training has to have a solid framework to build on, and then also has to be stable enough to withstand the challenges of doing so. When working in Juju, a lot of the consequences are frankly unbelievable, which makes it even harder to recover from. It doesn't even matter whether it's magic, psychology, art, or technology, because these things manifest in pretty mundane ways when they happen!

That being said...

Foundation pretty much boils down to one thing: having a routine. It has been noted that people are more motivated when their basic needs are met, so why wouldn't that also apply to artistic or spiritual endeavors? When we can follow the same patterns on autopilot, it frees up our brain to do other things. We only keep growing when we can keep evolving, and environment counts for a lot of that!

A solid foundation is going to mean something different for everyone, but there are a few hallmarks. First, we have a safe, stable place to live. It means we can sleep when we need to, and can reasonably expect that we would only be disturbed in an exceptional circumstance. This could be a hammock in the woods, an apartment, a house... it need only be safe and dependable. Second, we have enough food to prevent our bodies from breaking down. Hungry people often have a hard time focusing on anything, let alone arts that require you to learn new ways of thinking. There are people who can function and focus without that, but they are by far the minority for the now. Third, we have supportive, loving people present in our lives. A lot of the juju shit that happens to us can drive us into some pretty wild situations; we need people to keep us home and keep us grounded when it becomes a major force in our lives.

Our experience with this has been pretty horrible, as hero training has taken us from a safe, sane (but complacent) living environment through homelessness, unemployment, and jail. The biggest reasons events like these happen is because the people around us didn't understand what we were going through. People are afraid of what they don't understand, and the conclusion people seem to come to is that use of excessive force is appropriate. The consequences of those events have lead to our mental issues getting worse. This kind of environment breaks our brain, training or not. Only a dependable, loving environment, whether it's surrounded by peers or on a hermit's retreat, can really heal that.

Seriously, for those of us wanting to start on a Hero's path, for our own sakes, bring a buddy. Better yet, invested partners we can train beside. We all need at least one other person who will be there to help each other up when one of us falls, and it will happen one way or another. Be excellent to each other, we don't always know what others have gone through.