Part 1: Magic When You’re Exhausted: A Change in Spirit Governance

Can exhaustion be a helpful state for magic practice?

The assumption that magic relies on clarity and elevated mood is largely a Western inheritance, an artifact of the idea that power should be linear, solar, upward. But in animist and Daoist cosmologies, exhaustion and depression are not “blocks” or something “wrong”. They are transfers of jurisdiction. Your field is being resonating with a different set of custodians, entities or energies who specialize in depth, slowness, dark clarity, and the intelligence of submerged or subconscious-making.

To work magically in these seasons, you must work with the spirits, elements, and hexagrams that govern this terrain. Any other approach is simply the old problem: trying to perform Yang inside a Yin moment.

Low Mood as a Change in Cosmic Jurisdiction

There are phases when your rituals stop responding the way they did during your bright seasons. It’s not because the spirits “left,” and it’s not because your energy is “low vibration.” It’s because your field’s governance has shifted. (Arthur Edward Waite discusses the hierarchy and governance of spirits in The Occult Sciences).

In bright seasons, you’re under solar, upper-world or Yang influence: spirits of fire, breath, clarity, forward movement.

In depleted seasons, you fall under the care of Yin’s jurisdiction:

• underworld ancestors

• subterranean land spirits

• spirits of decay, rest, holding

• currents of riverbeds, bogs and marshes that require no visible action or performance

• the hidden I Ching hexagrams of 2, 29, 47, 48 (especially in their shadow forms)

These are not metaphorical categories. They are structural.

Just as tides shift during certain lunar phases, your metaphysical alliances shift during certain psychic ones. Magic will still work, but only if you call upon the beings designed to receive you in this state. Working with an exhausted body but insisting on bright spirits is like trying to call a Sun deity during the New Moon. Everything has a time and place.

Exhaustion as an Altered State of Divination

Bright clarity, what most people call intuition, relies on directional attention and a stable nervous system. In Daoist cosmology, there is a second form of perception: dark clarity (幽明, yōumíng). Dark clarity doesn’t sharpen edges, nor does it heighten focus. Instead, clarity within shadows is about changing the medium of perception entirely.

In a season of exhaustion or ‘stuckness’:

• Messages come from the side, not the front.

• Symbols build by accumulation, not by single shocks.

• The line between “my thought” and “an omen” blurs.

• Land-spirits speak through the qualities of the room or space.

• Bodily sensations have deeper meanings.

• The I Ching talks in patterns, not instructions. (Instead of one neat answer telling you what to do, you see the same hexagram repeat. The meaning is in the recurrence and the shape it traces, not in a single prescriptive line). This is also applicable with Tarot.

It wouldn’t be fair to say we don’t know anything while in a Yin cycle, it’s simply that we know differently. It is a time of an alternate epistemology. By alternate epistemology, those in the Yin season or cycle are operating inside a different mode of perception. It is a mode that is slower, more porous, less linear, less verbal, closer to dream logic than daylight logic, closer to water than fire, it’s the wisdom of caves not mountain tops. This is why when you feel uncertain, move like water.

Western esotericism treats exhaustion as a problem to fix before practice. Daoist and Wu traditions treat exhaustion as an altered state with its own sensory architecture. It isn’t accurate to say you lose magic when in a Yin season. You lose certain forms of magic and gain access to others.

Fatigue and Low Mood as Tests of Relational Ethics

Most people worry, “I’m too depleted to do magic.” Perhaps a more suitable question is: “What does this condition reveal about my relations with the spirits who care for me?”, “What does my reactions reveal about my relationship with extraction?”

If your spirit allies only respond when you’re bright, grateful, and productive, consider cultivating ones that dwell in the Yin. And as a prerequisite to this, consider if your own relationship with spirits is extractive. Do you only call of them when you need something? Where is the regular practice of devotion?

The Format of Magic Changes with Yin

When you slip into Yin’s jurisdiction, the entire format of magic changes.

• You move from casting to conducting, from petition to attunement.

• Rituals shrink into single gestures.

• Divination becomes orientation rather than instruction

• Offerings turn into acts of disclosure instead of exchange

• Protection relies on density (which becomes repulsive) rather than radiance.

• The body itself becomes the altar.

None of this is “doing less.” It is practicing in the grammar appropriate to the depth you are in. I explore these formats more fully in a companion piece: “Yin Magic: How Rituals, Divination, and Protection Change in a Yin Cycles.”

Yin as a Mode of Spirit Governance

Exhaustion is not a problem. It is a shift in the cosmology you inhabit, a descent into the Water and Earth hexagrams where the gestures are small, the currents slow, and the spirits older than language. Yin is not where magic stops. If you’re interested in exploring how Yin behaves on her own, and with Yang, consider studying the I Ching with me, via Finding I Ching Clarity, where we explore the Yin, the Yang, their interplay, and pattern recognition.

Following the spirits (and patterns),

Mimi
Spirit medium and occultist

PS. Join me for the Lunar New Year predictions via live-stream!