One of the things that that I have struggled with is knowing I can do more and not necessarily knowing if I should do more. This has had to come with trial and error – with trying to do all the things and sometimes not getting half of them done. This has come with exhaustion and delays in my personal progress and direction because I lived for a long time by the phrase “those with the ability have a responsibility” and there’s a lot of Truth to that statement. It is a pretty good way of giving self-direction and giving that extra little bit of motivation to keep moving forward.
It took years for me to finally set boundaries of what I will do and stick to that. This partly came from realizing, I think really only a couple of times, a couple of situations that it’s not always in other people’s benefit that I take away a problem for them that they may have to learn later. Now, most of the things that we cast for I don’t consider as Life Lessons. I think by-and-large that casting for others is a beneficial thing and largely won’t do any harm to whatever lessons they are supposed to learn. You can use some form of divination, your gut or clairs to try to determine this, but I don’t necessarily think that someone else’s intervention is going to mean that that lesson doesn’t get learned by their higher Self however you define that. If you look at it from that perspective most of these daily things we come up against probably aren’t as large of a lesson as we need for the refinement of the rest of our Self. Truth is, looking at every obstacle and nuisance as a lesson is more of a lower self thing to do – the ego of our smaller Self pretending it’s the most important. In my opinion, it’s this smaller Self that thinks it has to do it all, too, however altruistic the intent.
If we want to get better in a certain area of magic especially relating to baneful and influence or straight up manipulation the world provides as many opportunities as one can seize whether this is at a local level like your community or the larger regional level. Or even larger than that like maybe a national level. There is more work than one can handle and due to world conflicts the same can be said for learning more beneficial magic,to heal and ease suffering. It’s easy to come up against the same temptation to try to fix as much as you can, where you can. It can even lead to guilt and regret for feeling we should act and didn’t or to feel we didn’t do enough to prevent this or that whether working at a more local level or a larger one.
It isn’t our job to. The entity that first taught me this was – Hecate. I don’t remember the exact scenario that I really started wondering about whether there should be limits or not, but it was pretty early on in my practice in Hawaii where I looked at some…national event or disaster or something like that and I asked her, “You help other people so much and so do the other deities. But why aren’t they all helped even if it’s not a lesson for them to learn?” I didn’t really get an answer and I’ve asked other entities along the way since then and they don’t really give answers either at least not in the way that I understand. But part of it has to do with limiting what they will do that isn’t in their interest – not necessarily against their interests but literally it isn’t in their interest.
While that seemed so cold at the time I’ve begun to see that that change is also happening in me. I’m not losing my compassion or my willingness to help others. I think it’s more about realizing I have to spend as much time on myself and what I want to achieve as I do helping others. If I don’t continue to place a priority on myself, my practice, and my own goals, I’ll be less able to help others more productively in the future. I also risk burnout and disillusionment by continuously feeling pressure to do more than my share coupled with self guilt that isn’t necessarily mine to bear to begin with.
If the Gods and Goddesses of comfort and compassion place limits on helping without being asked, should I not follow their example as I strive to be like them?
