If we don’t practice from a good place then our practices often fail to bare fruit.
If you practice because you believe that there is something wrong with you and you are attempting to attain to that then you push yourself to grow without enjoying the state you have achieved and you don’t firmly using your current form to launch your grow off of. This is like growing without setting down the root deeply. This also makes us view the practice more and more as a tough work and not as something we might enjoy. This is the place from which I so often practice. I rarely stop to enjoy the present moment. It is as if I believe I do not deserve pleasure and must always strive. This is inconsistent with Daoist anti-striving views.
To relieve this you should take some time where your practice is simply to remain still and remind yourself you do need to do anything to earn any self worth because human beings all have an intrinsic self worth which cannot be improved upon. This is often a big fight I have inside me when I attempt to do the Asanas laid out in Crowley’s Liber ABA and Liber E vel Exicitiorum (book 9). Sitting still and not doing anything should help eliminate these issues or at least make you aware of them.
The Tantrik Institute teaches that we can practise from a place of loving who we are at present and feeling that because he are a lovely person we are giving ourselves the practice because it is a joyous thing. By repeating this idea in a form of prayer on a regular basis we can relieve these motivations and replace them with a purer motivation. They cover this in more detail in their course Foundations of Tantrik Yoga.
We can also approach something seeking thrills and then we will miss the point. People interested in yoga and New Age philosophy seek higher and higher states of ecstasy and experience, but fail to understand them. I remember the big difference between my New Age learning and my Thelemite learning. In the New Age teaching they were trying to achieve higher and higher vibrations and frequencies. We just learned how to send our adrenal glands into overdrive, but we did not see any change in our spiritual power, our awareness or our adjusted state. In Thelema however I often had to compare my spiritual experiences to texts written by magicians who went before to see where I was on my spiritual path. Suddenly a new text began to have far more meaning to me and I realised I had reached a new grade. Also I frequently find myself required to take what I have learned and apply it to my studies of philosophy and metaphysics. In doing so I began to learn the vocabulary to explain my world view that met with academics.
We can sort this out by considering the situation of a mad man who is happy in his padded cell. He doesn’t experience the cell, he is lost in fantasy and therefore is happy. He is so lost in his fantasy that he does not know when there is a toilet and when there is not so he defecates himself and must wear a nappy and be changed. He also does not know when there is a meal so he has to be fed by nurses. Secondly there is another man. He can take care of himself, but is not as happy because he faces reality and not his own fantasy. Now you should consider which you would rather be? Deluded and happy, but a drain on other people or awake, aware and in control of all your own faculties. If you have chosen the second then you are seeking truth not pleasure. As mentioned before this taken to the extreme is also not great.
A regular frustration of mine is that many people do not want the truth. They espouse views that try to accommodate others out of niceness. While it is arrogant to believe in your own view is more correct than the views of others, coming to the conclusion that everyone’s view, no matter how unconsidered or uneducated is equal, results in the potential for total idiocy or ridicule. Often people like to surround themselves with “everyone is equal and valid” because it allows them to feel good about their own view point without the effort of educating themselves. So it becomes clear just because something feels good does not mean it is true or that one is right. Remember not everything that feels good is true. Ignoring all the painful and difficult things in the world might feel nice, but it gives us a half-view. The New Age community often lives in this place with its “Love and Light brigade”, as a friend calls it.
Another poor motivator that I am also guilty of is the spiritual materialism motivator. This is where you are constantly trying to acquire spiritual growth in the same way a person might try to acquire wealth. You do it, to try to develop power or the respect of others. Often this misleads your practice and you miss the point. It leads people to focus on Siddhis (or powers) rather than spiritual development. It also means people acquire knowledge, but do not put it into practice. A friend of mine often comments on people seeking badges to try and fill a hole. The badges are like grades in Occult orders. Something that ends up being useless if you haven’t learned from the grade.
I deal with this issue by trying my best not to mention my spiritual practice to other people. I have withdrawn from a lot of the occult community and I surround myself with people with whom I cannot speak about my practices. This is one of the biggest benefits I have noticed from the Power of the Sphynx known as “Tacere” or “To keep silent”. Also I have a regular practice of analyzing my life experiences and spiritual experiences in line with my philosophical views, questioning my views and in line with any initiation I am taking. This deepens the practice and removes some of the materialistic value.
If you put in effort to deal with the reasons why you are approaching your study of magic then you have the potential to do it from a more genuine place. This will allow for a better, deeper and more profound spiritual experience. It will give you better stamina for continuing the practice. It will push you to grow more. So it is worth considering all of these things and regularly.