Depressed & Desperate: How I Used a Ceremonial Magick Practice to Reclaim My Mind
What if the problem isn't your thoughts, but the structure that keeps producing them?
For years, I tried to think my way out of depression and anxiety. I read philosophy, went to therapy, took medication, experimented with lifestyle changes, searched for better explanations, and chased the idea that if I could just understand my mind well enough, I could finally escape it.
I couldn't.
The same patterns kept returning.
Eventually, I stopped asking why I felt the way I did and started asking a different question: What kind of system keeps generating these mental states in the first place?
That question led me somewhere I never expected: ceremonial magick.
Not because I suddenly became religious or abandoned science, but because I discovered that ritual could be understood as a structured way of working with attention, the body, and repetitive patterns of thought. Approached this way, the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram becomes far more than an occult exercise; it becomes a practical method for interrupting rumination, reducing mental noise, and creating enough internal space for deliberate action to become possible again.
This is not a book about convincing you that magick is real.
It is a book about exploring why structured symbolic practices can have powerful psychological effects, how they relate to what we already know about attention, habit formation, embodied cognition, and behavioural change, and how one simple daily ritual gradually helped me reclaim a mind that had spent years trapped in recursive loops.
Whether you approach the LBRP as a spiritual practice, a psychological experiment, or simply an exercise in disciplined attention, this book offers a practical framework for understanding what it might actually be doing-and why it can continue working even if belief never arrives.
If you've ever felt trapped inside your own mind, perhaps the answer isn't another explanation.
Perhaps it's a different way of interacting with the system itself.
