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When it comes to counselling, incorporating unconventional methods such as magick can offer profound insights and healing. Perhaps you’ve found yourself drawn to magickal practises, wondering if there might be more to this world than meets the eye.
Maybe you have experienced counselling or coaching but it didn’t quite engage your spirit. We believe that by lowering the barrier between the spiritual and the psychological we can show that “magick” and “wellbeing techniques” need not be separated when aiming for meaningful, intended change that takes place in the real world.
We believe the real power emerges when you learn to use counselling techniques alongside magickal practises. The combination of these seemingly opposite approaches creates something rather special, and potentially more effective than either approach alone. For example, magickal practises such as journalling align beautifully with counselling tools when aligned for introspection and reflection. Integrations such as this offer numerous benefits whether you’re just beginning a therapeutic journey or further along in the process.
There’s a substantial overlap between what happens in a counselling room and what unfolds during magickal work. For example, research conducted by Harvard has demonstrated that ritual practises can reduce anxiety, increase happiness, and improve emotional regulation. This isn’t particularly surprising when you consider how both magick and counselling work with symbols and archetypes that resonate deeply with the human psyche. What’s more interesting is how individuals with a positive mental outlook are more likely to have positive experiences and engage in behaviours that support their goals. This something both traditions seem to understand intuitively.
The thing is, conventional therapy approaches don’t click for everyone and sometimes magick simply doesn’t deliver. In therapy or coaching, sometimes you need something that speaks to different parts of yourself such as the symbolic, the intuitive, the part that understands meaning through metaphor rather than analysis and process. Similarly, spells that don’t engage your subconscious mind will lead to rituals that simply don’t work. In this article, we’ll explore five hidden connections between these seemingly different worlds that can enhance your experiences. From symbolic rituals to tarot readings, we’ll demonstrate how these practises bridge ancient wisdom with modern psychology in ways that might surprise you.
Symbolic Rituals as Emotional Anchors
The first hidden connection might seem obvious once you think about it, but it’s often overlooked: both magick and counselling rely heavily on symbolic rituals to create “emotional containers”. We’ve found this fascinating because whilst someone casting a spell will identify with the word ritual, a therapist is probably not calling their structured sessions “a ritual,” but that’s essentially what it is.
Symbolic rituals have served as powerful tools for healing across cultures throughout human history. What’s particularly interesting is how these practises naturally bridge ancient wisdom with modern psychology, offering structured approaches to processing difficult emotions that feel almost too neat to be coincidental.
So what exactly are we talking about when we say “symbolic rituals”? These are structured, emotionally significant actions that assign a deeper meaning to the act itself. So unlike routine habits you perform merely to accomplish a task, such as how you go about making a cup of tea, rituals are meaning-loaded practises that direct focused attention. They engage symbolic thinking, activate emotional responses, and create boundaries between different psychological states.
Think about it this way, when you light a candle to represent new beginnings or burn a letter to symbolise letting go, the meaning you are attaching to that activity means you’re creating a tangible representation of the internal processes of beginning or letting go. The primary purpose of symbolic rituals is to provide what we might call a container for processing complex emotional experiences. They serve as a kind of go-between to translate an abstract meaning like letting something go into something you can literally feel by doing it and a counsellor might suggest either (or both) of these rituals to clients as part of their therapy.
In magickal traditions, rituals have long been used to mark transitions, process grief, and manifest desired changes (these are all things that happen in good therapy, coincidentally). Similarly, in counselling contexts, structured symbolic activities help clients externalise internal struggles, making them more manageable. This overlap reveals something rather profound about how humans naturally process emotional material and yet most people don’t attempt to bring therapy and magick together in this way.
Here’s where it gets really interesting from a psychological perspective, and why we believe breaking down these barriers is important for spiritually minded people just like you so that you can achieve desired change. The power of rituals stems from how our brains process meaning and emotion. The human brain loves metaphors, and it also loves to find patterns. A ritual involving a candle becomes a powerful symbol containing all sorts of metaphorical significance that in turn triggers profound emotional responses.
When integrating magick into therapy sessions, symbolic rituals such as the ones described here offer something rather special when they act as a bridge between clinical practise and spiritual or magickal traditions. It is this integration of honouring diverse belief systems whilst maintaining therapeutic effectiveness that means you don’t have to choose between magick and psychology, you deserve both.
Tarot as a Mirror of the Subconscious
Most people hear “tarot cards” and immediately think of mysterious fortune tellers with crystal balls. Maybe this is your experience too. We get it, this stereotype is frankly not entirely undeserved given how the practise has been commercialised. But here’s what we’ve discovered through our work: tarot cards offer something far more valuable than predictions about your future romantic prospects.
What tarot actually provides is a profound psychological gateway into your subconscious mind. The rich imagery and archetypal themes create a structured framework for exploring psychological landscapes that might otherwise remain frustratingly out of reach. We believe this makes tarot exceptionally valuable for both magickal practitioners and counsellors who understand its true function, which is that of a mirror, not a crystal ball.
Magick and wellbeing techniques can easily be combined through mystical cards such as tarot because each card you draw becomes an opportunity to project your inner experiences onto visual symbols. The cards can give form to abstract emotions and thoughts. Think of tarot not as receiving mystical information from some external source, instead you’re accessing what your subconscious already knows.
The process works remarkably similarly to psychological projection tests used in clinical settings. When you look at tarot imagery, you unconsciously assign meaning based on your personal experiences, beliefs, and emotional states. For example, we will often invite our clients to look at the cards and tell me what they see, and together we interpret the symbolism and find what resonates. This projection mechanism is precisely what makes readings feel so personally relevant and insightful.
Ultimately, tarot’s power in emotional healing comes from its ability to bridge conscious and unconscious aspects of your psyche, which opens the door for meaningful, intended change to take place in the real world.
Affirmations and Intention Setting
Words carry more weight than we often give them credit for. They can reshape your mental landscape and emotional reality in ways that might surprise you. We’ve found that at the intersection of magickal practise and psychological healing, affirmations emerge as particularly potent tools for change. These carefully crafted statements serve as bridges between conscious desires and subconscious beliefs, creating pathways for genuine healing and growth.
The magick of affirmations occurs in their ability to counter fears, self-doubts, anxieties, and those negative thought patterns that seem to replay endlessly in your mind. Unlike ordinary positive thinking, which can sometimes feel hollow, affirmations function as energy shifters that help you reprogramme outdated beliefs and harmful mental narratives. They influence your subconscious mind and manifest changes in both your internal and external reality.
For instance, when you regularly use affirmations, you can replace shame-based notions like “I’m too sensitive” with empowering statements such as “I am proud of my empathy.” This seemingly simple shift in how you view yourself can liberate positive energy and relieve tension you may not even realise you’re carrying.
It’s possible you have tried affirmations before but for you they left you feeling frustrated. We have seen this with clients who have started out too big. This means their affirmations were huge statements that the subconscious struggled with, either because they contained too many instructions or there was an authentic block that needed exploring. One key to an affirmation’s success lies in its authenticity and believability.
Effective affirmations should also be stated in the present tense (“I am successful” rather than “I will be successful”). They should always use positive language focusing on what you want rather than what you don’t want, and they should be specific rather than vague for more precise results. It is also important that you repeat them often. This moves a belief from your conscious to your subconscious mind. When you consistently hear a simple, positive message that sounds authentic, it’s more likely to sink in and become part of your natural thought patterns.
Affirmations can become mystical when combined within a magickal practise, such as a ritual we described earlier. Just be conscious of identifying goals in areas like confidence, health, or relationships, and craft a ritual that becomes symbolic and add your affirmation that reflects these aspirations.
Guided Visualisation and Future Pacing
Intentionally creating your future by using the power of your imagination might seem like something out of Hollywood, but it has its roots in psychology and when used magickally through meditation and visualisation it forms one of the most potent bridges between magickal practise and psychological healing. Both magick and psychology have recognised for millennia that the mind’s eye holds remarkable potential for change. What’s fascinating is how these seemingly different approaches actually work similarly with your brain’s natural mechanisms.
Visualisation sits at the heart of virtually all magickal work. We’re not talking about casually wishing for things, when combining visualisation with real meaningful change your visualisations need to involve accessing deeper levels of imagination where you create vivid mental images in your mind’s eye. The difference between simply wishing for things to happen and visualisation lies in focused intention and the engagement of all the other senses. As you develop this skill, you learn to taste, smell, hear, and feel your visualisations, making them increasingly real to your nervous system. It is this multisensory approach that strengthens the neural pathways associated with your desired outcome that allows for the mystic and the psychological to come together.
Future pacing is a fundamental technique in therapeutic approaches like Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) and future pacing helps you mentally experience positive outcomes before they actually occur. This technique creates positive expectations and plays a crucial role in solution-oriented counselling approaches, and is used by athletes, successful actors, and other high performers all over the world.
Combining these complementary approaches of visualisation and therapeutic future pacing tap into your brain’s neuroplasticity. This is your brain’s ability to create new neural pathways based on sensory stimulation and new information. It helps you to mentally rehearse goal achievement to identify any blocks to your success and it helps prime your subconscious to notice opportunities and find resources aligned with your intentions.
With visualisation and future pacing, therapy and magick are essentially speaking the same language and combining these two approaches allows you to become goal focused and yet remain true to your spiritual needs.
Therapeutic Journalling
Therapeutic journalling is our final hidden link between therapeutic interventions and magick. Psychologically speaking journalling is a scientifically-backed tool for emotional healing that can have measurable benefits for physical health as well as mental health. Therapists will often suggest their clients take up journalling to complement the sessions as another safe outlet for confronting and expressing challenging thoughts and emotions.
Many magickal practitioners keep journals as a place to document their magickal work and their outcomes for reference and for personal growth or spiritual tracking purposes. In magick these journals serve to help practitioners record and understand their spiritual journey, which might include tarot readings, moon phase rituals, dreams, and other intuitive insights. These journals are often surface level, operational tools that record certain actions occurring on specific days.
There are some obvious barriers between spiritual and therapeutic journalling that can easily be bridged. For example, therapeutic journalling helps you to process how your thoughts, emotions, and behaviours all fit together. These insights can easily be overlaid with documented magickal work so that you can create your desired outcomes by identifying your blocks to success, your blind spots but equally what is working well. When combined in this way “magick” and “wellbeing techniques” need not be separated when aiming for meaningful, intended change that takes place in the real world.
For magickal practise to be truly effective, you need to be at the heart of your own transformation. When you become the agent of change, then ‘the self’ becomes the primary catalyst to shape your experiences, including magickal experiences. Without the detailed introspection of therapeutic journalling you may be left feeling frustrated by your magickal workings.
Making Sense of It All
What we’ve explored here isn’t really about choosing between conventional therapy and magickal practises, it’s about recognising that healing rarely fits into neat categories and we should probably stop forcing it to. These five connections between magick and counselling offer something that purely analytical approaches sometimes miss: they speak to the parts of us that understand through symbol, metaphor, and felt experience.
The symbolic rituals create containers for emotions that feel too big for words. Tarot reflects back what we already know but haven’t quite admitted to ourselves. Affirmations help us practise new ways of thinking, whilst visualisation lets us rehearse being the people we want to become. Journalling? It simply gives us an extra cognitive resource whilst our hearts process what they need to.
Perhaps the most striking thing about these approaches is how they bypass our usual mental defences. You know that inner critic that dismisses insights in traditional therapy sessions? It’s often quieter when you’re focused on lighting a candle or interpreting a tarot card spread. Something about the symbolic nature creates space for authentic discovery.
We’re proud to say that we’ve seen people make breakthroughs using these methods when conventional approaches felt stuck. This doesn’t make them better than traditional therapy, and we wouldn’t suggest magick as a substitute for therapy either, they simply offer additional pathways for those who need them. Some minds simply work better with metaphor than with direct analysis.
What might this mean for your own healing journey? You don’t need to overhaul everything you’re currently doing. Start with what speaks to you, where is your frustration? Is it with the process of analytical counselling or the quick-fix, little result of magick? Perhaps integrate one daily tarot card for reflection rather than reading it as what the day is going to bring you, or try a simple candle ritual with mindfulness when you’re feeling overwhelmed. These practises have a way of finding their own integrated place in your life if you let them.
The beautiful thing about combining rational understanding with symbolic meaning is how it honours the full complexity of being human. We are logical creatures, yes, but we’re also beings who find meaning in stories, rituals, and symbols. Effective healing often requires speaking to both aspects of ourselves and this is what we are so passionate about.
Ultimately, the connection between magick and counselling reminds us that there are many valid paths to understanding ourselves and creating change. The most important thing isn’t which approach you choose, but that you find one that genuinely resonates with who you are and where you are in your journey.
References
Credit where credit is due, we aim to cite our sources because we value truthful content. 3 sources were referenced during research to write this content, but you are encouraged to follow our links as well.
- Brooks, Alison Wood, Julianna Schroeder, Jane Risen, Francesca Gino, Adam D. Galinsky, Michael I. Norton, and Maurice Schweitzer. “Don’t Stop Believing: Rituals Improve Performance by Decreasing Anxiety.” Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 137 (November 2016): 71–85
- Conversano C, Rotondo A, Lensi E, Della Vista O, Arpone F, Reda MA. Optimism and its impact on mental and physical well-being. Clin Pract Epidemiol Ment Health. 2010 May 14;6:25-9. doi: 10.2174/1745017901006010025. PMID: 20592964; PMCID: PMC2894461.
- https://www.apa.org/monitor/jun02/writing
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