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Imagine a friend has a complex medical condition. Multiple Sclerosis, epilepsy, etc. You want to help them. You research the condition, identify a change you’d like to make to the energy of a particular tissue, and figure out an energy signature to use. You do the healing technique.
What’s the chance of success?
Or more critically: How disappointed should you be if it fails? And how should you present the technique to your friend?
When we settle on a current best guess, it’s easy to idealize it. We see the reasons it should work. And it took so much effort — in a fair universe, that effort ought to produce a success.
But my first plan rarely works. I say this with the confidence of years of experience, years of debugging techniques until the third or tenth version works. The human body is deeply complex. Ethereal structures are deeply complex. And I rarely see the entire picture in my first attempt.
The effort to produce a success is 10x or 100x what feels fair. But that’s not reality’s fault for being unfair. It’s an error in my fairness-detector.
I typically assign my initial best guess 5% probability of success. For every 20 conditions I take on, I expect one technique to work on the first try. (The other 95% probability goes to the billions of options I haven’t thought of.)
My second technique draws from what I learned. It usually gets 10-20% chance of success. And my third technique is higher still.
But until a technique succeeds, I never assign it more than 50% chance of success.
This keeps me from getting too hopeful, then too disappointed. And it keeps me from over-selling the results to my friend. They should know this is going to take research, testing, refinements and even fresh starts. Knowing that going in gives us the time and chances to develop a successful technique.
And when that first technique fails, I don’t say I’ve failed. I say, “The technique failed. We haven’t found the correct healing technique yet.”
Then I get back to work.
If you liked this post, consider visiting my current blog at mikesententia.com.Tags: Doubt, Healing, Learning Magick
I think that’s a smart approach to working with new techniques. I do the same thing, when I’m developing a new technique.
I rarely see such humility among practitioners of alternate medicine. They promise to heal 100% all the time.
Thank you! It feels great to know that this post resonates with you and other readers. This kind of honesty, of admitting when a technique didn’t work and then fixing it so it does work, is critical to building magick into a modern discipline / modern science. Seeing readers liking this post makes me hopeful.