The 80/20 of occultism is a set of 3 practices for me:
§1. Frequent reminders of your own death. Typically, a morning ritual so that you may be focused throughout the day, and an evening ritual so that you can be grateful for the good things in life. Being in touch with your own mortality is incredibly effective to cut away the bullshit in your life
§2. Radical self-honesty. A journal is useful for that, but it is really your own mental process that needs to be as honest as you can be. Honesty is not the same thing as bullying yourself. Instead, it's about understanding why you do things, what you like, what you struggle with, that type of thing. Understanding is what matters, not putting on a performative display for others to see how much you enjoy beating yourself up
§3. Grounding yourself. A mix of (somatic) meditation and energy work is very good for the vast majority of people, because we live in such dissociated times. It doesn't matter how intelligent you are if you cannot remain present, because you fall back to how much discomfort you can tolerate. If you cannot remain present, you will turn to your mind for distraction, or you will turn to coping mechanisms whenever you're under stress, and you will never be satisfied in anything in life
The following are good to have, but they aren't as primary as the above 3, because they are in many ways the results of the practices I mentioned above.
§1. It is very good (and important) to clean up your habits, whether in terms of sleep, food, breathing, exercising, posture, social frequentations, media consumption, intellectual activity, emotional patterns, and especially addictions.
Getting rid of bad habits and adopting better ones tends to unfold naturally through the process of radical self-honesty, being in touch with death (which again, clears away a lot of bullshit in life), and having somatic capacity, which allows you to feel, and thus change, the situations which perpetuate your bad habits.
§2. It can be good to have goals, some short-term, some long-term, to keep yourself focused, because we live in a world filled to the brim with inane distractions and an apathetic drive to consume media. It is not so much that the goals are important in and of themselves, but they are good for allowing your focus to have an object and not fall down to the mediocrity (and again, apathy) of the world.
It's also good to not be too obsessive with them because there is much more to life than achieving things, but if you're someone who has chronically been bad at setting your mind on something concrete, then setting and accomplishing goals can be hugely transformative.
Avoid things like divination, astrology, ceremonial magic, communication with spirits, sigils, and other "woo" practices like those if you aren't very grounded, otherwise those are likely going to be avenues for bypassing and dissociation for you.
Some of them are also potentially quite dangerous too, such as ceremonial magic and communication with spirits, so beware of that as well.
Perhaps the immediate retort to my advice to avoid all of those practices is that I am not describing occultism at all but self-help. Fair enough. But the difference is that I am quite open to woo woo and spiritualist frames of Reality, as long as they are grounded in what matters.
Being wise means addressing the problems that are right in front of you, instead of running away from them, or looking for ways to bypass them. Most occultism strikes me as intellectual cope, a substitute for taking responsibility for your life. That doesn't mean that astrology, divination, sigils or ceremonial magic are useless or even that they don't work, it means that, in my opinion, people are engaging in those practices partly (or totally) out of a need to not face more direct issues, or simply because they're bored and want to feed their intellectual curiosity.
This guide is meant for people who are busy and have notable interests in life which don't have to do with spirituality or magic. If that's the only thing you want to do in life, then feel free to disagree, but realize also that you are an outlier.
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Occultism Selfhelp Minimalism Introspection
2026-05-03