Cody’s Column: Inner and Outer Balance Magick
The key to keeping your balance is knowing when you’ve lost it. – Anonymous
We learn to walk by scooching, crawling, toddling, and then finally by upright walking. I’ve seen this in my own children with lots of falling in between each stage. We are, however, born to balance along with many of the other creatures and plants of this world. Balance is what connects us on a primordial level.
Many of our senses give us a view of reality by balancing light and dark, cold and hot, pressure, pain, pleasure, tastes, smells, and sounds. We use this sense network to create a blueprint for our brain to interact with. The very fact that our senses give us an incomplete picture of reality is a philosophical wonder, and it causes our brain and soul to strive for balance.
In nature we see the same pursuits of balance from the microbes to the flora, to the fauna, and even at the macro scale with habitats, biospheres, and continents. The patterns are everywhere, a little snail building its shell while growing at the same time, salmon returning to their same stream to deposit their eggs and sacrificing their own bodies to enhance their surroundings, the elk moving through the forest scape making trails and leaving fertilization offerings, rivers moving sediments downstream building new land, and oceans eroding land to shift it elsewhere. Even in death life strikes a balance, returning our bodies to the earth and bringing new growth from our minerals. This is true for plant and animal bodies as well.
Weather has a role to play in balancing, even as it shifts. We come to expect weather to work like clockwork and be the same each year, but the weather works on its own timescale, extreme at times, shaping new patterns. All our pursuits are done on this pale blue dot which is undergoing its own dance of balance with the cosmos. Solar energy enters our ionosphere and creates the northern lights instead of vaporizing life into unbreathable gases. Our cosmic dance with the sun and all the other planets should be enough to convince us “As above, so below”.
A rider must balance on their mount to create a journey together. So too we must balance our inner life in order to experience balance in our outer life. The same could be said of the reverse, we must balance our outer life in order to experience balance in our inner life. When your inner life consists of magick, then your outer life too will consist of magick. Many times, this magick is simply the act of achieving balance. I will share a mix of inner life magick and outer life magick that can hopefully assist you in finding a new balance. I do caution you, however, in only following a prescription. You can do so much more! We are so divinely unique and are so uniquely divine that we can achieve our own balance in a variety of situations. Trust in your own divine uniqueness and the ability to balance. Treat these following words then as nudges.
Inner Balance Magick is what your brain thinks about its own thinking, what your heart feels about its own feeling, and what your soul knows about its own knowing. We often get stuck in the mud so to speak trying to sus out the exact boundaries of our thinking, feeling, and knowing but suffice it to say that these inner magicks work on a continuum with extremes on both ends. Be aware of this continuum when conducting Inner Balance Magick. Being aware of our inner surroundings and observing our inner life will open many doors of understanding about our outer life. This can help to slide us out of the mud so to speak and back onto solid footing of understanding about our place in the cosmos on our pale blue dot.
Rather than define what makes thinking different from knowing and feeling, I will concentrate on what I call inner dialogue and inner peace. Inner dialogue may be the words you hear by yourself, the assurance of being listened to during a prayer or evocation, or quite simply a journal entry. This dialogue may be colored by our emotions. That is normal and perfectly suited for Inner Balance Magick. The first step in developing Inner Balance Magick further is to observe the inner dialogue. Being an observer does take some concentration, but it’s analogous to cooking dinner while listening to music. Once you observe your own inner dialogue, you can find ways to balance by adding more down time to your schedule if needed, journal during particularly busy times, pick up a hobby to nurture your creativity, or perhaps just get out for a walk after dinner. The key to balancing is often just to do more or less of something without making the situation worse. Sometimes the key to balancing is to move faster or slower without making the situation worse.
The Inner Balance Magick of breathwork cannot be overlooked. Many traditions hold breath in high esteem for good reason, breath is essential to our life. When working Inner Balance Magick try thinking of inhaling as a gift of source energy, the element of air working for your very being, or peace and calmness entering your body. Hold your breath and know that you have received life giving magick, obtained enlightenment, and are now filled with love. Exhale and release your tension in your body, push away negative energy, or just simply be present in your body. These manifestations of breath are vital for observing your inner life which depends on breath for its vitality.
The second Inner Balance Magick I wish to speak on is water. Water is the first medicine because we are nurtured along in our mother’s womb by the waters of life. Think of the water in your body as the ocean, essential for life, ebbing and flowing with the moon phases, being revitalized by each cup of water we drink. Water can remember thoughts and intentions and change its frequency to match. Each sip of water we receive, let it enter our body with life giving energy. As we sweat, urinate, and respire let us release any toxins that may have accumulated, keeping in mind a sense of balance that we can feel in even our bones.
Outer Balance Magick can be correlated with our Inner Balance Magick and confirmed to be harmonious when we take the time to observe our actions. Think of walking… we take the time to put a destination in mind (or not) and then we journey there, arriving having been the co-force along with the universe to get us to our destination. Walking can be powerful medicine. Walking is an act of Outer Balance Magick. I recommend finding a good short trail in a forest. Learn everything you can about that trail. Travel it on many different occasions throughout the year. Walk it with a friend or family. Take care of the trail by picking up any litter you find. Now you are getting into the mind of Outer Balance Magick.
What we do outside affects what we do inside. What we do inside affects what we do outside. Once we learn these truths we can make even more powerful Outer and Inner Balance Magicks. We can even come so far as to create balance between our Outer and Inner worlds. This is the goal in my opinion of Balance Magicks. Once we begin to have harmonious balance we see the world differently, act differently, feel differently, even become different than we were before. Use this magick well to help increase the potency of magicks you currently create. Occasionally we are in a place to assist others with our Inner or Outer Balancing Magick. Use your discernment and as you learn, your wisdom will grow in how to assist others.
If you are out of balance and you know it, then as the quote says, you have found the key to balance. Lean into restoring balance when it seems right to you and you will have a wealth of wisdom to share. Next month, I plan on sharing some of the wisdom I have learned from the last ten months of our local community’s wisdom gathering. Until then, walk in balance my friends, breathe, and take cool sips of water on these hot summer days.
I am a husband, father, farmer, and friend. I live on the banks of the Magic Skagit River, ancestral lands of the Sauk-Suiattle people. I practice rune reading, tarot, land magic, and work with many spirit guides. My life began Pagan but I veered off into the Christian church in college. I found my way back to my Pagan and ancestral roots in 2005 and have journeyed along this path since then.
