You challenge your fears.

See, an element of true beauty in this path is that there is nobody there telling you what good or bad looks like. All there should be, is a teacher who helps you orchestrate a specific sequence of experiences which aims to be in harmony with your inner readiness to change. Should you choose this path, then be prepared to spend a lot of time with your personal fears. Not because your teacher or yourself is supposed to be a sadist, but because on this path we perceive fears to be doors. Behind each of these doors lies a power. Some of these powers are too strong to be handled by you at this stage in your life, others are perfectly adequate.

Figuring out when to search for which door, knock on it and enter - that is the role of your teacher. Of course he or she is bound to make costly mistakes. Learning that nobody but yourself can protect you or expose you is a lesson anybody on this path learns very early on.

Before any magician on this path enters into a magical circle, they will work with their fears. In the ancient mystery cults neophytes often needed to pass four tests, one for each element. What you experience on this path at this stage is pretty comparable. What you gain from it is three things: scars, strength and humbleness. A scar is just an experience that was rough but you survived it in one piece. Learning about the resilience and self-healing powers we all contain within us is a significant milestone on this path.

Strength on this path isn’t measured in muscle. Strength is measured in degrees of freedom, in the degree to which you are able to stand on your own. Not with tailwinds but in headwinds. Strength on this path is measured by how much you begin to learn what you stand for, how much you live up to your own values in times of adversity. Strength is measured by the things you do when nobody is watching.

Humbleness on the other hand is measured by how much you can laugh when you fuck up in front of everybody else. At this phase of the path you begin to understand what it means to be a container, a vessel, a qlippoth of power. Humbleness is the quality that will help you not to die as a practicing magician within your first two decades. It's the quality that will teach you which doors not to knock on. Very important.

Example: After the first couple of years my teacher told me I would need to spend a night out alone in the woods. I said that’s no problem, as the city I lived in had plenty of large parks and I could simply sit on a bench for a whole night. He shook his head and said I don’t understand. I should simply come to his house when I was ready.

A couple of weeks later I arrived at his house on a Saturday. He then told me that we would travel out into the woods close to where he lived and we would need to hike into a remote area of the mountains for a couple of hours. That’s where I would spend a night, watching and listening and not sleeping.

I said, but what if I get scared and need to leave the wood? He answered: ‘That’s the whole point of the exercise. You can’t leave the woods - it will be the middle of the night, you are too far away from the next road and you just can’t get out on your own.’ It was about lunch time when he told me, and suddenly the nature of this exercise had changed quite drastically. I began to doubt whether this was the right day, whether the weather would be stable enough, and whether my equipment would be good enough to go so deep into the woods.

He listened, smiled and said: ‘All you need is someone who kicks your ass and that will be me today.’ Then we drove out in the woods, parked the car and walked for what seemed a very long time. At some point he mentioned, now I should choose a place. I was so nervous at this point I just couldn’t make up my mind and kept on walking through the brush-wood from one place to another... Finally, I settled in what seemed a completely random place; probably I was just exhausted.

My teacher said goodbye quickly and walked off. As I hadn’t been allowed to take anything with me that would make light, I rolled out my sleeping bag on the ground and settled down. Looking back today, the details of this night completely blur: I recall the dusk and how quickly it fell, I remember how cold and damp it got underneath the huge trees and I remember the waves of fear washing over me like an

invisible sea. Besides fighting these waves of fear, nothing meaningful happened that night.

I sat for hours, fell asleep for short periods and listened to the many unfamiliar sounds in the darkness, all while trying to stay calm. Of course factually, there was absolutely no reason to be afraid. The Bavarian woods don’t come with wolves or bears. Yet, still waves of seemingly irrational fears attacked me one after the other.

It’s funny - out there in the woods in pitch black darkness, surrounded by the strangest noises that never seem to stop, without a single match or knife, the line between reality and fantasy just disappears in the blink of an eye? A wood at night changes its nature; and it brings out a different nature from within us. That’s what I learned that night when my teacher kicked my ass. Yet the moment that blew my mind, was the moment late during the next morning when I reached the car park. I unlocked my car - and just couldn’t believe how bright the day was, how calm the woods were and how strong I felt from inside.

Whatever had happened that night, the world was still here and so was I. What I really learned on that morning was this: Fighting your fears doesn’t mean to conquer, kill or overcome them. Someone who tries that would be like a man throwing chalk against his own shadow on a wall. Fighting your fears means to actively invite them into your life and then to endure them. It means we allow them to take a place in our life for a certain, limited amount of time - and to know that their presence will neither kills us, nor harm us. It is our fantasies that do.