5 Habits for the New Year New Year’s Clickbait. Duh!

Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.

It’s the new year! Welcome to 2025! I feel like it’s going to be a wild year no matter how it all shakes out. A lot of change happening around here. A lot is staying the same too. We’re two months in on the new puppy, and Atlas is settling in great. We needed another Huskey like we needed another hole in the head, and we seriously needed a boy-dog like, well, never. But here we are anyway.

Atlas is awesome and a marvelous addition to our pack. He’s goofy, and nuts, and loving, and loud, and active, and keeps all the girls on their toes. I’ve said this a couple of times to others: I don’t think we needed a new dog, but he needed a good family. I don’t know what idiots abandoned him at the pound, but he was already very well trained (even if not 100%), and is just an amazing dog. They were stupid. We lucked out with him.

Did you make any new resolutions? So many people do. I don’t. I never do. Though I seem to always make promises to myself that “this year will be the year I hit that weight goal!” Never do—though last year I got closer than ever! And this year, I am certain I will hit it! Right. (Actually, I am sure I’ll hit it since my “managed care” says I have to, or some shit like that. So you can cheer me on this year as I work on these last 13lbs17lbs before September! Damn Christmas cookies!)

But resolutions made at the beginning of the year tend to fall by the wayside. That’s the norm. The last time I checked, I think the average time most people lasted was something like two months at best. Most just lack the self-discipline to follow through.

In Magick Without Tears, Crowley wrote, “About 90% of Thelema, at a guess, is nothing but self-discipline.”¹Crowley, Aleister. 1994. “Morality (1).” In Magick Without Tears. New Falcon Publications, 423 (emphasis in original). Whether we like it or not, habits are about discipline. Good habits, I mean. And bad habits too, if we’re going to be frank about this. Bad habits also take discipline to form. That’s what makes them hard to break. We’ve spent the time and discipline to form those bad habits. We just don’t like to call them out for what they are.

Yet, over the last several years, I’ve spent a lot of time examining what good (or at least decent) habits have really formed the basis of my success in daily life and reinforcing those rather than “making new resolutions” each year.

This year, I decided to see how (if?) I want to switch things up a bit. Not a lot, actually. I think what I have going on is working well. But there are a couple of things I want to do differently. And it’s not so much about quitting bad habits or trying to “be healthy” or strange “good habits” like that as it is about switching some things around and going back to some habits that really made a difference for me in the past.

What’s Worked in The Past

1. Praeparatio

I teach students every semester about the basics of psychology. Every semester, we get to the module on consciousness, awareness, and sleep, and it is inevitable that someone wants to argue about their sleep habits.

We have lots of talk about “early birds” and “night owls.” I can tell you that people will absolutely get heated over which one they think they are and swear they can’t be anything else. But I could also sit here and give you study after study about how “early birds” have less depression, better grades, better physical and cognitive performance levels, more energy, and so on. It’s true, but there will always be those who will tell me I’m wrong. Do you.

I’ve been getting up before 5:30am for a really long time—like nearly two decades now (my alarm is officially set for 4:50am). I’ve worked from home a lot since 2010. I had early shifts. I just got in the habit of starting early. While I don’t work from home as much anymore these days, my schedule still hasn’t changed much. I’m still getting up just as early. It’s a habit I’ve kept.

Part of it is merely a personal routine. Part of it is the household routine (my spouse tends to work early morning shifts as well, so I might as well be up anyway, even if I didn’t have my own routine). But a lot of it is that I needed my space to be with the Silence before I could really be with the world. I needed to wake up fully before I could engage with anything else.

I read an article the other day that said consistency of sleep was part of the key, that you should always get up at the same time every day, even on the weekends. I agree with this. I mean, occasionally, I sleep in later for some specific reason or another, like if I’ve been traveling or when I’m sick (or stayed up until midnight on New Years Eve!). But that’s the rarity, though Saturdays are my standard “no alarm” mornings, and I’m still generally up by 5:50/6:00am anyway. And I say this after having experimented with all kinds of sleep patterns over the past couple of decades. I’ve done the monophasic, biphasic, and polyphasic patterns. Biphasic actually works best for me, but it’s hell on the family life. I am at my best when I get about five-and-a-half hours of sleep at night and then about two hours right before lunchtime.

And coffee. Lots of coffee. I tried tea one year. I may go back to that again if I can accomplish my goal of 2025 being “the year that slows down.”

2. Lectio

As with most academics, my year tends to be divided into three seasons: Fall, Spring, and Summer. During the Fall and Spring sessions, because of the way my classes are scheduled, I have zero personal time in the morning on Tuesdays and Thursdays, so I am limited to study time on Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays, and weekends. [I also see patients on Mondays and Wednesdays and the occasional Friday as needed.] Since I don’t teach in the Summer, this time is daily except on weekends. I just swap my time around.

I limit myself to two hours of reading and rabbit holes of research that come with that. Otherwise, I could spend all day lost meandering around the internet. What I don’t finish, I leave for the next study time. It’s useful to be methodical in study habits. Leaving something for the next day is just as important—for me—as finishing the project itself (when it comes to reading, not every project, I should be clear).

But it’s in the reading, I think, that’s the important part. Reading outside the echo chamber, for sure. I’m currently reading books that are inspiring me in no small part to branch into areas of theological perspective that I never thought to write before in Thelema.²And I assure you no one else is, at least not from any serious perspective; and certainly not any perspective that doesn’t reductively return to some ridiculous “Tree of Life” pigeonhole.

One of the keys to accomplishing any task is to do the small things first, to make small changes regularly rather than trying to “get it all done right now.” Aiming for the goal of 60 books a year is lofty and great. But it’s the commitment to ‘one page a day’ that will win the race because you will inevitably end up reading ten pages or twenty pages a day once you have the momentum.

3. Meditatio & Oratio

This was the year of walking. After having both hips replaced in the past five years, this has been tough. Lots of physical therapy to get back toward “running shape” (which I’m not, but I am walking, so it’s progress). I am back around my early 1990s (early 20s) weight and within reach of my primary weight goal after decades of struggling with post-drug addiction weight gain. But I credit getting up and moving, walking, and keeping active.

And—more importantly (to me)—it gives me time, disconnected, to think, mull over my thoughts, and commune with the world around me. The outdoors is great for this. When I was younger, a local Unitarian-Universalist church had a large labyrinth painted on its parking lot. My girlfriend at the time and I used to go down several mornings a week and walk, recite verses from the Book of the Law and the Torah (she was Jewish), and then go have breakfast after the sun came up.

It would appear that 2025 will be much of the same. Apparently, my classroom for the Spring semester is literally a quarter-mile from the front door to the classroom door.

4. Contemplatio

Again, this is a Monday, Wednesday, and Friday morning thing for me during the Fall and Spring. (Summer is daily.) I spend 30 minutes with the dogs. For the moment, my physical capability doesn’t allow me the stamina to walk with them for the distance and speed they deserve outside. Attempting to take three Huskies on a walk at the same time would be an idiot’s quest at best, even in the greatest of health. Granted, they’re always in and about my office when I’m working, but this is dedicated time for play. They think it’s for roughhousing, toy-tossing, and general mayhem. But it’s really for me. It’s the dopamine rush. It’s the serotonin boost. It’s the morning fix I need to push me over the edge into the rest of the day from meditative monkish mode to active working mode. You could say this is the time when I’m moving from active thought into active action.

5. Actio

And then I write (or go to work or both). Granted, 2024 allowed me to write a lot more than usual. 2025 may change that depending on a couple of forward career moves that may be happening soon. But that also means that I may have less time to write than I had before. We’ll just see how things shake out and adjust to the changes as needed. However, quite frankly, I’m never happier than when I’m writing, so there’s that … and I have some goals with both my fiction and non-fiction this coming year.

But the point here is that I don’t remain in my study mode. I take my time of meditation and contemplation and move to action. It’s all well and good to be an armchair magician—in fact, somewhere in my archives, I have a small essay, “In Defense of Armchair Magicians,” because we need more, not less, of those kinds of people, the kinds of people who figure out how to change the world, those who read, write, and motivate others to do the same. But the reality is the most effective people don’t stay in their armchairs. They move out into the world and practice what they preach.

What most people deride as ‘armchair magicians,’ aren’t so much dilettantes (which is what they’re trying to say derisively) as they are immature and unprepared. Sometimes they just lack the courage and the cooperation to be effective. Sure, some are just “showmen” and “grifters” who are just pushing New Age trash videos with misguided 19th-century New Thought pretending to be Thelema—and they should be called out. But many just need a bit of wisdom to take them by the hand and offer a kind word rather than continue to be arrogant and dismissive as so many in our community are wont to do (including me, if I’m going to be honest about this). We have lost the art of discernment and guidance.³However, please don’t mistake this as a call for a return of guruism.

And that was my short tangent of the moment I didn’t mean to go off there but I’m going to leave it in place anyway.

What I Want To Change In 2025

One of the other things I read the other day in the lead-up to the New Year advised that the best approach is to swap habits rather than try to quit them. I like that. As a psychologist, I approve of that message. I just don’t know that I have anything on my list that I want to swap. I do have two things that I want to add, but I can see where it might require that I swap out other habits in my life that aren’t on my list above.

Oratio Redux

I grew up Protestant, hence my lack of antagonism toward neo-protestant forms of religion within Thelemic spaces. However, I am strongly drawn to Orthodox and Coptic religious forms, such as spiritual formation, liturgical rituals, breviaries (fixed prayers), monastic lifestyles, etc. The idea of personal, random, spontaneous prayer and meditation is a very modern invention. And in the area of magick, it is utterly contemporary to the point that we might as well still call it “new.”

Nearly all of magic[k], historic and modern, is more about repeating what is written down to the point of rote regurgitation than being extemporaneous. So the idea of having a Daily Office of prewritten “prayers” or “meditations” of the day seems almost anticlimactic to me. The only objection I can see is from those who object to any and all “religion.” Yawn.

I know that I’m starting a Sunday cycle here on Integral Thelema in July. But I really want to start meditating through the daily cycle again. I began working that out a couple of decades ago and just gave up. Eshelman’s Thelemic Tephilah is neat, no doubt, but it doesn’t appear to follow any kind of actual meditational, cyclic, or mythic (i.e., useful, interior) pattern as does the Orthodox or Latin Daily Office.⁴Though, to be fair, I’d need to go back through it again to make sure. It’s been a while since I’ve examined it closely. But last I did, I didn’t find any patterns at the time. And, to be clear, I’m not knocking it. At least someone has provided a yearly reading schedule other than me—though mine included The Vision & The Voice and The Treasure-House of Imagesas well.

With this in mind, though—and I realize this feels random to say—I’ve started reading the Orthodox Daily Office. I want to get a better feel and see the mythical cycle so that I can work to feel our own mythical cycle. Maybe by 2026, I can start to work on a daily lectionary again for Thelema to reformulate the one I have now.⁵I’m happy to share the current version with those interested. I’m just not very happy with it as it stands because it doesn’t have an engrained meditational cycle. It’s just a straight daily read-through.

I’ve done this in the past with some minor success, but I found myself missing the mark. Over the last several months, I think I’ve discovered the source of that discontent and disconnect. And I’m sure I can overcome it.

In the end, I’m not so much swapping this one so much as modifying my meditation time to tease these apart and make the sense of “prayer” a separate time of its own.

I welcome any and all comments and thoughts in this direction.

As Thelemites, we can choose to believe in external anthropomorphized deities (I don’t) or pick and choose sets of Saints (I do, sorta, but not in any formal way), but ultimately, prayer of any kind should be about connecting to something interior (as opposed to internal) that works to make clear those veils of manifestation leading us to better see our way to an understanding of our Will.

A Thought About Saints

Just as an aside here: when it comes to the topic of Saints, specifically—however we define those of any religious tradition—I tend to think Collects and prayers are made to/for them in the commemorative sense of a golden thread that says, ‘I am a part of a larger assembly of those who have done the Work, have connected to that interior source and seed to the best of their own understanding, and have come away with a knowledge of the divine in some way’; and such prayers honor that tradition and those efforts as they inspire us to do the same for ourselves. Maybe that’s enough.

Colloquatio

As I’ve mentioned before, I used to regularly end up in a coffee shop with my best friend and talk about Thelema and life with him. I miss that time and him since we both moved to different places, states apart. It was challenging. It was life-changing. It was intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually maturing for me. It’s something I have lacked over the last decade. And I miss it desperately.⁶To a woefully inadequate extent, Conversation, Coffee & Communion has been my one-sided way of replacing that with you all here on Integral Thelema.

I’m not sure why so many in our community continue to fight this idea of community while still calling it a community if we’re not going to act like a community in any way. But part of community is longevity, quite frankly, and that can only happen when there is a sense of continuity that passes from generation to generation—and that happens through connections, through connecting. I think the younger, hipper, crowd likes to call it “networking,” but I think that depersonalizes it.

I would like to add mentor time back into my year. I’ll have to make time available in my schedule, and it’ll have to be intentional.

And I’ll have to find someone—maybe a few someones. And therein lies the rub. Not only do I feel like I’ve entered a wasteland around me, but I’ve become very used to being a hermit over the last near-decade-ish (it feels longer than that) as I finished grad school (twice) and then changed career fields (twice, sorta). I’m out of practice in my communing-with-others-in-person game. That needs to change. And it needs to change not because I have things I want or need to say. It needs to change because I need to learn to listen again. It’s one thing to “listen” online to people in a conversation. It’s an entirely different matter to shut your goddamn mouth and listen to someone speak when they’re sitting across the table from you.

I have often said that once you reach a certain age (about 35–40 years old), you should have two mentors: one older than you and one younger than you. One should offer the wisdom of past-present experience, and the other should offer the wisdom of future-present experience. One should teach you about stability, and the other should teach you about change. And you should listen to wisdom when it speaks.

I don’t know that it will be a regular event, like monthly, but at least something that happens. It always starts with two people coming together, and quite frankly, that’s all it takes to fan the flame.

Or find a UU Church where I could hang out? That could be fun. Maybe. Right?

What I Have To Do To Change

Disconnect

I’ve discussed in the past that I grew up without television because my dad bought into Bill Gothard’s “devil’s box” mentality in the 1970s and 1980s. I didn’t have a television again until I moved out when I was sixteen, and even then, it wasn’t until I was away at college in my twenties that I finally had a television of my own. It didn’t have much impact on me through my twenties and thirties.

In the last several years, I’ve found the television is always on in the background at night. I’m not really sure why that’s changed, but I think I need to go back to disconnecting from a lot of external media (television, internet, etc.). Social media has also been particularly pernicious in the last several years. It is also something that didn’t affect me much until recently. I’ve reduced my footprint dramatically. It’s just not social for me anymore.

I don’t think television or social media are inherently bad. I just think that if they take away from other pursuits, then they need to be adjusted. But for me, at least, I need to spend more time disconnected from the electronic tethers in my life.

Disengage

The irony of engagement is also the discernment from what to disengage. There was a time when I struggled with my involvement with O.T.O. and a dear Sister, some years before she died and many years after she had left the Order, took me aside and said, “I think you’ll find the moment you stop fighting to find your place in the Order, you’ll find the peace you’ve been seeking outside of it.” She was right. Knowing where, what, or with whom to engage is important. But knowing where, what, or with whom to disengage is just as important.

I am spending the first two weeks of 2025 evaluating my activities (people, places, activities), personally and professionally. This isn’t necessarily about my “occult” or even “spiritual” work but my life in general. I need to make room for some mutation in my habits and life patterns. I want to make sure that I don’t have any superfluous attachments that aren’t working toward my benefit (or just joy) this year. I want to fill that time with what brings me joy and benefits the goals⁷Praeparatio [Preparation], Lectio [Reading], Meditatio [Meditation], Oratio [Prayer], Contemplatio [Contemplation], Actio [Action], and Colloquatio [Conversation]. I’ve set for myself, personally and professionally, over the next several years. Writing brings me joy. And I want to spend a lot more time doing just that.

What About You?

What are some of the habits that have carried you through 2024? What are some of the new habits that you want to change in 2025? I’m interested in hearing from you!

Love is the law, love under will.