A Field Report About Repairing Your Practice

Those who have taken my Sorcery of Hekate Course know that there is a commitment to recite the main mantra 100X a day every day. This doesn’t take long and it doesn’t have to be anywhere special. Do it on the toilet for all I care. Just do it.

Why do we do it? To keep the thread of practice moving from one day to the next. That’s it. Keeping the minimal commitment doesn’t actually move you forward in your practice, it just keeps you in the game. It stops you from sliding back, from losing what you’ve built over months and years. Its like going to the gym and doing the minimum: you haven’t gained much, you have kept it going from one day to the next.

Of course we all fall occasionally and we all need breaks occasionally. I myself have missed days here and there and twice over the last 20 years have taken deliberate extended breaks from the practice. Thankfully there is a way to repair the thread of broken practice: The full ritual with offering, and 1000 mantras. It takes about 90-120 minutes to accumulate 1000 mantras, but the reconnection is amazing.

I want to be absolutely clear here: you are not apologizing to Hekate, or doing penance, or being punished or anything like that. There is no backlash from stopping the practice, and you are not upsetting the goddess or whatever other kind of drama you want to imagine.  It’s actually quite mechanical: you took the time to develop a practice and build something over time, then you broke that thread, and now you are repairing it. It’s THAT simple.

Emmanuel Leidi is a serious Sorcerer, and from what I have seen he is dedicated in everything he does. If you want to check out his work in the occult, I recommend his classes in Quimbanda.

He also works in the medical field during a pandemic in a country that has some stability issues, so shit can be stressful. I will let him tell the rest of the story in this fantastic field report:

For these past few months, I’ve been….straying away from Hekate, not doing the mantra repetitions….to be honest, I believe the whole current situation is getting to me (and all of us who work in the medical field)…I wasn’t feeling to do the bare minimum. Yes, I did the odd spell here and there, quite a few readings, but not kept up my practice. I always kept saying I wanted to, but I was bullshitting myself. Today, however, I decided to stop. I prepared my offerings, and decided to do the reparations. IT. WAS. HELL. (sorry for the caps, but seriously).
By the time I was on my 200th rep, I felt nauseated….
by 300th I wanted to vomit…it kept increasing more and more…
by the 700th I felt like dying…
until around 900th (I thought for a minute that I was going to faint) where I started to feel relief.
The whole temple came back into focus, and so did the red mantric light….it was gorgeous and astounding…the nausea was gone…I feel lighter and much better (of course, I’m going to keep up with my health, physical, mental and spiritual). I kinda saw Hekate smile, as if she was silently smiling to herself. My best guess, is that being lazy with the practice, coupled with the whole current world situation, was building some kind of “poison” (I don’t know how to best describe it) within me, and through the mandala it got burned out….did anyone else had some similar experience?

Yes, Emmanuel, I have had a similar experience a few times, and I know it well.

So here’s the thing. When you are building a practice over time, it feels amazing when it starts out because its brand new. Eventually you plateau and while you are actually still on an upward trend, it just feels normal. When you stop, that feels normal too, and new normal slides backwards into old normal easily until one day you notce a lack. When you repair, it hurts. You are ripping those muscles apart all over again, but you do it and BAM. You are back.

Now, in Sorcery of Hekate we have a process set by Hekate for a very specific set of practices and rules, but that doesn’t mean its the only place where this is applicable. If you maintain a regular practice: devotitional, energy-based, body-based, whatever… realize that when you break your pattern of work, you are damaging what you have built, and if you want it back, you need to repair it with extra effort.

Magic is work.