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If you’ve ever tried to convince somebody to like you or to love you, then you may have discovered how that road can lead some unpleasant places. Today I want to share a couple fascinating experiences and some lessons I’ve learned on this front.
A strange spell
The story I want to share happened when I was about 20 or 21 years old. At the time I had just gotten out of a very passionate and intense relationship with a young woman, and then right on the heels of that - almost overlapping with it - I met somebody new and got into something immediately.
The person that I met worked at a health food store that I would go into regularly - she started working there probably right on the heels of this breakup. One day she introduced and asked me what I was doing, because her shift was about to end and she wondered if I would want to go for a walk.
I thought to myself: This is amazing! My relationship is ending, and look - there’s this beautiful woman who wants to hang out. So we ended up going for a walk, and we shared some common interests. And very quickly we started hanging out regularly. In retrospect, I started connecting with someone insanely fast after a break up. Like way, way, way too fast. But at the time I was basically a kid, I was just a young man going with the flow of life. And going with the flow in this case resulted in very rapidly getting into something with a new person. And in some ways it started kind of slow, but it also happened like dizzyingly fast.
She was quite a few years older than me - she would’ve been in her mid or late 20s at the time, and that along with several other factors made it feel like a disorienting connection. It didn’t last very long, but for the time that we were together it felt like I really didn’t know this person, but had rapidly jumped into the role of acting like I was very close to her.
The spell wears off
About a month after we started hanging out, we went on a camping trip together where everything fell apart. I think it was probably the first evening of this camping trip - we were in a pretty wild, remote area, and she went for a walk in the woods. I went down to the ocean by myself and I remember having this profound moment - and I’m going to try to describe it in a very unfiltered uncensored way: Basically what I felt was that I had been in a trance for the past month, and all of a sudden it was like that wore off. It’s like I had been drunk or stoned, or my awareness hadn’t really been present in some way, and all of a sudden it was. I came back to myself, I sobered up, and I was just like: “Holy crap what’s going on? Who is this person that I’m connecting with? What’s going on here because it doesn’t feel like my life - nothing about this feels right. How the heck did I get into the situation that feels so not right, and how did I not know to stop it before it got to this point?”
I felt this bizarre sense of dislocation or unfamiliarity with this moment that I had created or stepped into in my life. I walked back to the campsite and I probably looked like I had seen a ghost. I was like sullen, distant, and quiet. My face was probably pale white because I was so confused and disoriented with what was going on in me, and in this connection.
My companion saw what was going on very quickly. She could see how distant, checked out and numb I was. She asked what was up, and eventually I shared, explaining that I didn’t know what was going on, but all of a sudden I had this surge of very unsettling feelings.
After I shared all of this, she had a fascinating reaction. She started berating herself, saying: “Dammit, I knew this wasn’t gonna work - I knew I shouldn’t have done it!”
And suddenly, as I was listening to her response and feeling when I was feeling, some things started to click in my head. One of my companions interests or passions was witchcraft. I had no interest in witchcraft, no understanding of it, and I never really talked to her about it. But I knew that it was a significant part of her life. She engaged in ceremonies and rituals regularly I never really asked questions about them.
But in this moment I thought to myself: “Wait a minute, did she cast a spell on me?”
So I asked her, and she said yes, she had a cast a spell on me - and then continued berating herself saying: “I cast a spell on you and I knew it wasn’t gonna work, but I couldn’t help myself. I knew that you were too young, I knew you had too much wild energy that wanted to go out and experience different things in life. Dammit I shouldn’t have, I knew better and I shouldn’t have done this.
It was a bizarre, fascinating situation, especially given my experience of a trance lifting off of me - I actually felt like a spell had just worn off.
The rest of that camping trip was quite stilted and awkward. We slept beside each other, but there was a distance between us physically and emotionally because I was completely confused. A part of me was caught in the question: Whose life am I in right now? Cause this doesn’t feel right to me.
I still liked this person, I still cared about her feelings, and she was definitely beautiful - but I didn’t feel drawn to her. I didn’t feel a desire to be with her, and it just was really awkward for rest of that trip. When we finished that excursion, that was it for us. Something in me kind of broke open or a trance/spell wore off- and that was the end of that connection.
That other spell…
I actually have one other time that a spell was cast on me in this context. It was a couple years before the story I just told. I was seeing somebody, and while hanging out in her bedroom, we found a stack of books in the closet. I was looking through them to see if there was anything good to read, and I found this one book on witchcraft and spellcasting. As I was looking through it I noticed a section on spells or to attract a partner, and I thought - I just like a gut sense that got activated - did she cast a spell on me?
I casually asked her: “Hey, what’s this book?”
And she responded: “Oh yeah, I got that book right before we started hanging out.”
I continued: “Did you use it to cast a spell on me?”
And she very sheepishly admitted: “Yeah I did.”
But she didn’t really think anything of it. She wasn’t an avid practitioner of witchcraft, she was just a person who had this book and happened to play with it in this context. Because of that, we never talked about it further - though I never forgot.
Both of those connections stand out because they’re two of the only romantic connections I’ve had in my life that I didn’t really feel passionately driven towards. And it feels bad to say that, but it’s just the truth. And in both cases I liked the people - they were really awesome nice people, and they were physically beautiful, but I didn’t actually feel a kind of resonance, chemistry, or mutual desire for them. And that makes for a very weird connection. It’s not with anybody really wants for themselves. People want to be wanted, it feels good when you desire somebody and they desire you back. But when you have someone kind of just going along with you - that is almost worse than rejection. It’s kind of an ongoing rejection at a deep level.
It’s very interesting that these connections also involved revelations of some kind of spell being cast - some kind of manipulation of the other person. I don’t have any superstitious moral baggage around any of this - to me it’s fascinating - especially the first story recounted. I wasn’t upset at that person, and I don’t think anything badly about the experience itself.
Perhaps she had felt a desire for somebody, and then allowed that desire to obscure her better judgement. Maybe she let that desire make her want to convince that person to like her back, instead of just feeling the desire and trusting life and trusting love - and not trying to manipulate for somebody else’s attention or reciprocation. It’s a very sketchy thing - at least in my experience - to try to grasp at love, to try to grasp at somebody else’s attention or affection. Because I know that for me, it’s almost like it’s baked into the recipe of life that if I grasp for love, if I try to catch it and seize upon it - especially when it’s looking like it’s not there - then the love pulls away further. It’s as though life sees what I’m doing and says: “Oh, you feel like you need to betray yourself for love? Well OK, I guess we’ll pull it back further from you - you need to learn this lesson. You don’t need to chase love down - it’s yours. Maybe not in the place you’re currently looking or through the person you’re fixated on, but love is definitely yours.”
A part of me, an innocent and insecure part, has an idea that love is a limited resource but it needs to feverishly rush at and grasp. It’s a misconception. That’s what I’ve learned at least. And when I let myself walk down that anxious path it leads pretty dismal places.
Desire is intoxicating
The experience that I just shared of that spell casting feels kind of like a very clear manifestation of a pattern that comes up so often when we desire people. That desire can be intoxicating, and it can make us lose our self-respect. It can make us lose our sense of self love, and it can make us really want to grab onto the bright shiny light that the person we’re desiring seems to represent, and then hold on to them. And that can scare them away - it can suffocate them.
And on the other side of that, to be desired - to feel somebody’s desire coming toward us - that can be intoxicating too. I am sure many of you have had the experience of knowing somebody or meeting somebody and not really feeling drawn to them, but all of a sudden when you start feeling their desire coming at you, it feels pretty good. It can feel so good that it’s confusing to your sense of your own direction. It’s like: “Oh my gosh this being desired, being wanted, it makes me feel special to somebody and well, what do I want?”
It’s kind of it’s kind of disorienting and discombobulating to feel the extraordinary energy of having someone desire us and feel attracted to us. One of my lessons in life has been to learn how to stay grounded while feeling that. To be able to experience it and sometimes be able to like look in that doorway and say: “Wow this feels really good. It’s making me second-guess what I thought I wanted and who I thought I was, so let me take one step down this path and see if this feels right.”
And sometimes there’s there’s actually a surprise there, something that does actually feel right. Other times, it’s just that desire is intoxicating, and being desired is intoxicating. It has been a fascinating lesson for me.
It’s a lesson that I continue to learn - it’s such am important one and sometimes an incredibly difficult one: To not try to convince anybody to love me or to like me. Because often the more desperately I try to convince, the more I push others away or make them feel strangled by my desperation. And the more I let go - the more I don’t care and I just get into my own life and my own zone - well that tends to be seen as attractive by people. It actually makes people feel: “Hey, I can breathe. You mean you don’t care about feeling rejected by me? That makes me feel free around you, that makes me feel like I can relax.” And that tends to be a much more safe, comforting, and healthy energy for others to be around.
It’s a big lesson, and I think that is all I have to share on it today. I hope you enjoyed this, if you did you can let me know in the comments you can like this video you can subscribe if you haven’t already and if you wanna check out my book and you haven’t already it’s called How To Open The Heart: An Incredible Journey Into Vulnerability Empathy And The Transformation Of Consciousness. Until next time, I hope that you have a beautiful day.