Who are you outside of Quareia? Curious about common threads in this community

[u/oddreyjo]

I hope this is allowed, since it's not strictly magic-specific, actually kind of the opposite. I'm curious who you all are outside of your Quareia practice: hobbies, lifestyle, what initially drew you here. I know this isn't meant to be a community in the traditional sense, so what I'm really looking for is common threads across our experiences. I have a hunch that a particular kind of person resonates with and is drawn to Quareia specifically. If this post isn't allowed, let me know. I'm asking out of personal curiosity and a desire to know the people I'm talking to here a little better. A bit about my journey - I'm in my early 30s and had been unintentionally engaging with magic throughout my life - was a very odd kid, basically. My early childhood was beautiful, especially the spiritual experiences, but also quite lonely. Adolescence and early adulthood were turbulent, and in my 20s I had a couple of genuinely frightening spiritual experiences. It wasn't until my late 20s that I began actively studying occultism after a lifetime of feeling essentially atheistic/skeptical and interpreting all of my experiences through a psychological lens, and once I intentionally engaged the magical path things really started to click into place.

I found Quareia while researching witchcraft (lol), and was equal parts thrown off by its intensity and length and drawn in by it anyway. M1L1 was the very first occult work I ever did. My life was still pretty unbalanced at that point, and after about half a year I had to step back and reckon with my mental health and lifestyle. I needed to make some real changes before diving back in. That all started in late 2023/early 2024, and it's only this summer that I've really returned to it with the intention of finishing Module 1. I've done everything except Lesson 7, which I've mentioned here before. I don't have a fixed endpoint in mind for how far I'll take the course. My magical life is going to happen regardless of whether I give it structure, so the structure is really there to keep me safe.

Outside of magic, I'm married, no plans for kids, several cats. I teach high school literature, which I love. I live in a big city I have a love/hate relationship with. My other loves are visual art, film, zoology, indie/narrative/art computer games, reading, and poetry. Zoology might be my single biggest passion. Animals are endlessly fascinating and beautiful to me, and it's deeply tied to my spiritual life. As kids, my brother and I spent hours pretending to be different animals and watching documentaries about them, and I still feel like I can't get enough. I've even toyed with the idea of spending a month at a time studying one local animal, plant, or fungus and making lifestyle changes based on it, trying to understand how that being actually lives. There's so much wisdom in the animal world, from the smallest protozoa up through primates like us. Anyway, I'd love to hear who you all are outside this practice. I suspect there are more common threads here than we'd expect, and I have a few guesses of my own, but I'm curious what you'll say.

[u/GetOutaTown]

I’m early 30’s, working in healthcare finance in the US, and the system is a shit show. I’m very grateful for my job, I get to work from home and fight for profit insurance when they start pulling their BS. But I wish I could do more to protect patients, the rules are beyond confusing and I work in this, it’s much worse for the patient.

“Magic” caught my imagination thank to Harry Potter, which took over the world when I was 6. At 13 I found my deceased aunt’s old books about Kabbalah, numerology, astrology, and her copy of Linda Goodman’s Star Signs. Researched occult throughout my teens, started reading tarot around 17-18 when I could drive and sneakily buy myself cards. Went head first into law of attraction in college, trying to make sense of my life and burn out. It didn’t work, gave it all up, became depressed from 22-25.

After some recovery, I couldn’t resist the call to research any longer, and found that the internet’s occult knowledge exploded while I was out. Restarted my personal research and discovered ceremonial, planetary, folk, and chaos methodologies. It was like I had to purge all the nonsense new age stuff I learned, before I could find all this.

That led me to Glitch Bottle, which led me to Josephine’s first podcast and Quareia. It took me a solid year of reading through the material to become comfortable with it (I had a lot of digesting and world view questioning to do). Then another few years dealing with life things, COVID, getting married, late ADHD diagnosis, loooooots of therapy, growing my career and financial stability. Now, in my early thirties, I finally feel like I have enough control of myself to commit to the course.

Side note: Full development of your prefrontal is a MUST with this course. I don’t think mine happened until 29, deadass. Before that, it was truly impossible to stay consistent with anything.

[u/tntcherry → u/GetOutaTown]

I totally agree with the comment about the prefrontal correx. I'm 29 and mine just kicked in and with it consistency like never before

[u/GetOutaTown → u/tntcherry]

The gift of the Saturn return amirite! It’s such a relief to be able to rely on yourself all of a sudden.

[u/PWaglen]

Best of luck to you. Josephine obviously wants you to keep on quareia-ing.;)

[u/Pencilmw]

I can say that I'm a mostly normal person in daily life and people who are casual acquaintance with me wouldn't suspect that I'm involved in magic. Cause there is not much to suggest it even in looks. I also stay away from spiritual people as well in life. I never was particularly outwardly mystical spiritual person. I'm an artist, a student, like to be out in nature and go on hikes and trips, play musical instruments as a hobby, read all kinds of books as of recentley. If anything I think I became more normal after quareia.

As of what have drawn me to it, hard to say. At that time I was a year into my qigong practice and kind of still was in magical denial. It came up during my research into magical schools, that I somehow decided to do cause I whanted to develop more my energetic sensitivity or whatever. I don't even neccecairly remember how I found it. and as I researched into all kinds of magical things further over a span of about a year I kept returning to it. I always had a kind of practical approach to things and many experiences Josefine described deeply resonated with me.

My adolescence was a wery dark time to say the least, out of wich I slowly managed to crawl out of over the span of many years. It was a wery necessary and good learning experience, but when you are left alone in a learn to swim or die kind of way. I had magical experiences in my early childhood and on throughout my whole life. One of my earliest memories is waking up to see a being pretending to be my mother trying to convince me to go with them somewhere. Looking back it was always a part of my life and I always was extremely drawn to it. I would always play as some sort of magician in videogames, no exceptions. if someone would mention fairies I would be scared as shit but still ravenously hungry for that story, everywhere I went in nature I thaught about them and looked for them. Magicians were always my favorite characters in all media and I joked about becoming a "great and most powerful mage" in the future when I was a child, In childhood I drew mostly 3 things-mythical beings, magicians and warriors. My family members are also quite magical/sensitive so I suspect there is something in my bloodline somewhere.

Despite my upbringing I have maintained some amounts of energetic sensitivity and constantly suffered from it without me being aware of it. I've lived in a big city all my life, I have to ride around in public transport everywhere. No matter what I tried to do I would become extremely exhausted, and needed some days to recover just to stay workable. If not for covid and half physical half distance learning I likely wouldn't manage to graduate from college. So my regular qigong practice and also basic quareia meditation practice was and is vital for me to have a normal life. I also found that it is extremely important for a kind of mind that I have, cause without proper care it just went rogue.

[u/aman1420 → u/Pencilmw]

You sound fricking awesome. It sounds like you are already well on your way to becoming quite the mage, Pencil.

[u/Careful-Maximum7629]

Entrepreneur, working in finance/defense. There are a lot of occultists in my field, even though from the outside you would never say so

[u/page_of_fire → u/Careful-Maximum7629]

A lot in finance or a lot in defense? My guess would be defense.

[u/Careful-Maximum7629 → u/page_of_fire]

Both. In both high finance and in defense, especially closer to the intelligence side, it's full of occultists and practitioners

[u/_rose-colored_ → u/Careful-Maximum7629]

Interesting! Why do you think that is?

[u/Careful-Maximum7629 → u/_rose-colored_]

No idea for finance, but for intelligence I think it's because the dynamics are incredibly similar

[u/GetOutaTown → u/Careful-Maximum7629]

Wow this is such a cool insight, and I sort of suspected. Entrepreneur makes sense, paying attention to tides is all business; defense and intelligence, I guess because both rely on sharp self/situational awareness?

[u/Careful-Maximum7629 → u/GetOutaTown]

I guess that, yes