What Do I Have Control Over?

This is my April 2023 newsletter.

As I’ve been getting deeper into my spiritual practice, certain things have been opening up for me. I’ve been learning more about energies and the psychic world—which is a realm I have…complicated feelings about. 

When I was a teen, I wanted to be a witch so badly. I practiced spells in my room by myself, studying books about them, burning candles of different colors. But none of it really did anything. As I got older, I encountered things like the Law of Attraction, which makes sense to me in terms of the power of setting intentions, but also had this kind of culty vibe to it that implied blame—if you didn’t get what you were “manifesting,” you were doing it wrong. Even worse, if something bad happened to you, you must have “manifested” it through too many negative thoughts. Nope. Not for me. 

But I couldn’t ignore the call of spiritual connection. I kept finding it in different ways—through yoga, meditation, writing books about Tantric moon phase goddesses. In part through the help of my mentor Jacqui Willcocks, I’ve come to understand more about what this world means and how it works. Yes, there are powers you can access through the spiritual and energetic realm, but they are subtle. The subtle does affect the dense, but it is not the dense. There are energies that are external to us than can affect us, but we have choices. 

Julie as The Magician, photographed by Brittany Charlotte

And here’s where I think things get confusing. When we start to connect in the inner world (whether you think of it as magic or imagination, and I don’t think it matters), we can move mountains. We can shift major things with our perspectives and our lives. And yet there is a limit to that. We can’t “manifest” a million dollars in an instant. We can’t protect ourselves from anything bad ever happening just by thinking the correct thoughts. And if crappy stuff happened to us, it was not our fault no matter how many negative thoughts we had. Negative thoughts have a place, and ignoring and avoiding our difficult feelings just exacerbates our suffering in this world. 

This is a lesson about the material world as well as about the inner world. We have control over some things, but not everything. We don’t always get to know which is which. Setting intentions is powerful, but it doesn’t guarantee an outcome. We can be deeply in alignment with spirit and our highest selves and still lose someone we care about. We can do everything right and still have symptoms of a chronic illness. It’s not fair and it doesn’t always make sense. 

And this is true whether you have any interest in the spirit world or not. There are things we can do to make our lives better, to improve certain outcomes, to connect better. But none of these things guarantee we get what we want. They help, in aggregate, but sometimes things are just hard and crappy and we don’t know why. There are so many layers of reality that the concept that we could have control over all of them is just…not possible. Ultimately, we have to trust that our best is enough even if our lives don’t look quite the way we wanted them to. And that’s okay. What a burden it would be to truly have control over everything. We can do our best, connect the ways that resonate with us, but we can also trust that we’re not the boss of everything, and we’re certainly not to blame for the crappy things that have happened to us. And that’s just life—in the outer and the inner world.