Starting to Spell: Forget in order to Remember

So! Here goes with the new blog format--three posts per nine-day period:  a mindfulness post, an herb post, and a word post, adding up to a spell. And what's another way to say "nine-day period"?  "Nine-day spell"! Ah, synchronicity.

Synchronicity also underlies today's post. This time, I'm starting off with a mindfulness post, but the order will vary.

I've been having issues around boundaries lately, specifically around persistently acting out a behavior pattern that belongs to someone else, a pattern that crossed my boundaries and I was having trouble expelling. My problem went back to "don't think about monkeys."

The Law of Attraction teaches to focus on what you want, not what you don't want, because you get more of what you focus on. But if I want to banish something that crossed my boundaries, how do I do that without naming it and thus invoking it? Obviously, what I want is an inner space in which there is no place for, no trace or vestige of, no welcome for that invader. 

It's easy for me to go off and get lost in my head, and it was in danger of becoming a semantic conundrum.

So,  I got out of my head and designed a very physical boundaries spell to perform on my birthday. It involved objects, actions, and objects. The wording of the spell mostly felt good, except for the ending. 

Then I went to the synagogue with some friends--the "outward/social" portion of a mostly solo day. 

Toward the end of the Parsha (the day's reading from the Torah) was the destruction of Amalek--a tribe representative of lack of consideration, greed, destructiveness. The final line goes

תִּמְחֶה֙ אֶת־זֵ֣כֶר עֲמָלֵ֔ק מִתַּ֖חַת הַשָּׁמָ֑יִם לֹ֖א תִּשְׁכָּֽח

timche et-zeker Amalek m'tachat hashamayim, lo tishcach

"You will wipe out the memory of Amalek from under the heavens; do not forget."

For two reasons, this gave me chills, gives me chills again as I write this. FIrst, this passage was the lyrics for a Hebrew pop song I really liked when I was 16, and that final line was the climactic tagline. So of course the song instantly started going through my head, and instantly twined in with the words of my spell.

But what blew the top off my head was that juxtaposing of "obliterating the memory" and "do not forget." (The Romans had this concept too, incidentally; cf. Damnatio Memoriae.) Erase the memory of those people--and don't forget that happened! Don't forget not to remember!

That's like don't think about monkeys, don't look at the elephant in the room, right?  Isn't that like focusing on what you don't want through the back door?

It hit me that in fact this solves the problem I was getting into with how to get something out of my boundaries without letting it back in. I banish it from my universe with my strongest and sincerest magic,  But I perform preventative maintenance, which means I don't forget that I had to perform the spell.

Without naming the invader, I wipe it out from under my own personal heaven so that it does not inhabit my space. Without naming it, I preserve the memory of how I felt when overrun like that.  So, wiping out the memory establishes the boundary, and not forgetting maintains the boundary. 

I've been so motivated to pay attention to how I'm discriminating since then, and this attention and discernment have strengthened the spell's effect. Of course, part of how the spell works is by setting the intention.

So, part one of my first spell--a story about a spell!

Comments (2)

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  Jess mc Bride

  03 March 2015 at 11:58 | #

  Hi Ela, How are you doing ? I hope all is well with you.
  Not to much has changed around here. I bet Tucson is nice. Miss you.

  reply

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    Ela

    24 March 2015 at 20:01 | #

    Hey! Wow, it's so good to hear from you! Sorry it took me so long to check my comments.
    Tucson is lovely. Very different from Homer. I was thinking of you recently when the air got full of pollen :) But most of the year it's not polleny.
    We're getting hot already--80s and 90s this week!
    Miss you too!
    Ela

    reply