Why Magic Sometimes Fails | The Seven, Episode 8
In Episode 8 of The Seven: Living with the Planets, Lucy Baldwin explores a question almost everyone who practices magic eventually asks:
Why didn’t it work?
The answer is not that you did the ritual wrong.
It is not that magic is fake.
It is not that there is something wrong with you.
Magic works through the psyche. It speaks through symbols, ritual, intuition, desire, and the unconscious. So when magic seems to “fail,” it may actually be showing you something important: a division inside you.
Part of you wants the thing.
Another part may be more committed to the current reality.
That is not failure.
That is information.
Watch or listen to Episode 8 of The Seven here:
Key Takeaways
In this episode, Lucy explores:
why failed magic does not mean you did the ritual wrong
how magic works through the psyche and unconscious
why identity can block what you are trying to manifest
how judgment toward what you want can interfere with receiving it
why magic cannot bypass grief, fear, pain, or truth
the role of unconscious loyalty to old stories
compensatory desires and wanting things for validation
how shadow work helps resolve the inner division beneath failed manifestation
the questions to ask when your magic is not working
You Are Not Doing Magic Wrong
One of the most important things to understand about magic is that you are not going to mess it up.
You can become more skilled.
You can learn to choose symbols more intuitively.
You can build stronger ritual containers.
You can practice listening to your own inner knowing.
But magic is not a school exam.
It is not a fragile formula where one wrong candle color ruins everything.
Magic is communication with your unconscious.
So when a ritual does not produce the result you wanted, the first conclusion should not be:
I failed.
A better question is:
What is my psyche showing me?
Magic Works Through the Psyche
Magic is not separate from the person practicing it.
Your beliefs matter.
Your identities matter.
Your nervous system matters.
Your unconscious desires matter.
Your hidden fears matter.
Your shadow matters.
This is why magic sometimes appears not to work. The ritual may be clear at the surface, while the unconscious is organized around something else.
You may consciously say:
I want love.
I want money.
I want success.
I want change.
But another part of you may say:
No, that is not safe.
No, that would make me someone else.
No, that would cost too much.
No, that would require me to receive.
Magic reveals the division.
Reason One: The Desire Does Not Match Your Identity
Sometimes magic fails because the thing you want would require an identity shift you have not yet integrated.
If you identify as broke, it may be hard to hold money.
If you identify as single, it may be hard to receive love.
If you identify as invisible, it may be hard to become visible.
If you identify as someone who struggles, ease may feel threatening.
The issue is not that you are unworthy.
The issue is that your current identity may not have room for the thing you are calling in.
Magic can bring you to the threshold.
But you may still need to become the kind of person who can receive, hold, and live the result.
Reason Two: You Judge the Thing You Want
Another reason magic may not work is judgment.
If you want money but hate rich people, there is a conflict.
If you want love but resent couples, there is a conflict.
If you want visibility but judge people who are seen, there is a conflict.
Judgment often hides grief.
The resentment toward people who already have what you want may be the souring of unprocessed sadness.
The pain of not having.
The grief of feeling left out.
The fear that it may never be yours.
This is shadow material.
Not because judgment is bad.
Because judgment is revealing.
It shows where desire has become tangled with grief.
Reason Three: You Are Trying to Bypass Grief, Fear, or Pain
Magic is not a way to avoid reality.
It will not let you hide from yourself forever.
Sometimes people use ritual the way they use fantasy:
Please make this go away.
Please fix this so I do not have to feel it.
Please get me out of this without making me face the truth.
But magic is not avoidance.
Real magic brings you deeper into truth.
If there is grief, fear, pain, or loss that needs to be felt, the ritual may not erase it. It may bring it forward.
That does not mean the magic failed.
It may mean the magic is working at the level where the real blockage lives.
Reason Four: You Are Loyal to an Old Story
Sometimes the old story is painful.
But it is familiar.
You know how to be the person who never gets what they want.
You know how to be disappointed.
You know how to be overlooked.
You know how to be almost there.
Receiving something new may require losing the old identity.
That can feel like death to the nervous system.
This is sometimes called an upper limit problem, or a havingness issue. You may want something consciously, but not yet have the capacity to hold it.
Magic, manifestation, and shadow work all eventually ask:
Can you let the old story die?
Reason Five: You Are Not Being Honest With Reality
Sometimes the thing you think you want is not actually your true desire.
It may be a compensatory desire.
A compensatory desire is something you want because you believe it will give you something else:
approval
status
validation
safety
love
a sense of worth
You may think you want the title, the relationship, the achievement, the income, the recognition.
But underneath, what you really want is to feel loved.
Or safe.
Or successful.
Or wanted.
Or not like a failure.
Magic can be strangely merciful here. Sometimes it refuses to support the false desire because the deeper desire is still waiting to be named.
Failed Magic as a Form of Guidance
If a spell does not work, that does not mean nothing happened.
It may mean the ritual revealed the next layer.
The inner conflict.
The shadow.
The grief.
The identity that needs to change.
The desire that was never really yours.
This is why magic and shadow work belong together.
Magic shows you where energy wants to move.
Shadow work shows you what is blocking it.
Together, they help you become more congruent.
Questions to Ask When Magic Is Not Working
If you have been doing magic, praying, manifesting, or trying to create something in your life and it is not moving, try asking:
Who do I believe myself to be?
What do I truly want?
Why do I want this?
Would I have to change to receive it?
What do I believe about people who already have it?
What grief or fear am I trying not to feel?
What old story would I lose if this worked?
What deeper desire might be hiding underneath this desire?
These questions are not meant to shame you.
They are meant to bring you back into honesty.
Inner Conflict Is Normal
Human beings are made of parts.
One part wants expansion.
Another part wants safety.
One part wants love.
Another part wants protection.
One part wants change.
Another part wants the comfort of the old story.
This is normal.
The work is not to attack the blocking part.
The work is to listen.
All of your parts are trying to help you in some way, even if their strategies are outdated, inconvenient, or painful.
Magic becomes more powerful when you stop trying to override yourself and start integrating yourself.
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Lucy Baldwin (00:08.312)
Hello, welcome to another episode of The Seven. I'm Lucy Baldwin. And this episode is all about why magic sometimes doesn't work. And it's actually, okay, I'm scrambling.
Lucy Baldwin (00:27.918)
Hello, I'm Lucy Baldwin. Welcome to another episode of The Seven, Living with the Planets. This episode is all about why magic sometimes doesn't work. And the key thing that I wanna say here is that it's not because...
Lucy Baldwin (00:53.134)
Hello, I'm Lucy Baldwin. Welcome to another episode of The Seven Living with the Planets. This episode is all about why magic sometimes doesn't work. I actually have five reasons that I'm gonna go through on this episode. But the first thing that I wanna say is that it's not because you did it wrong. Okay? So most people think that either magic isn't real or that they didn't do it right and that...
It's them who sort of messed up. And I want to assure you that neither of those are true. So magic is something where you're communicating with your own unconscious. You're not going to mess it up. Okay. You're not going to do it wrong. You can get better and better at following your intuition, making really good symbols that sort of match what you're doing. You can get practice. You can
by using the same sort of like ritual container, like the same sort of ritual.
structure over and over, you might get better and better at interpreting those as rituals. But you're not going to do it wrong. You're not doing it wrong. There's nothing wrong with you. It's actually really normal that magic sometimes doesn't work just like anything else doesn't work. Just like the same reason why sometimes manifestation fails, prayer fails, therapy fails.
It's because on some level you're actually more committed, probably in your unconscious, to the current reality than the one that you're trying to create. So it's your shadow. It's what is happening in your unconscious that you're not aware of. And so I'm going to talk about a few different ways that can be sort of popping up in present for us. But just remember, magic works through your psyche.
Lucy Baldwin (03:01.908)
if you have identities or beliefs or things in your unconscious, that is what is gonna potentially interfere and give you different results from what you're hoping for. And you your nervous system, like it just might be that yes, you think that this is what you want, but your nervous system is like, uh-uh, uh-uh, we're not doing that.
So, and yeah, so we'll talk about this more. So I wanna get into the reasons. So number one is that you're trying to get something that doesn't match your identity. So it's like, you would have to believe yourself to be somebody else in order to get the thing you're trying to get. For example,
I have a tech startup. I am the CEO of that startup. And I have been resisting getting investment in that startup because my identity would have to change. And I'm in that identity change right now. And it's very intense. I have to become a tech CEO. I have to become a person who is good at business and understands. There's so much. I have to shift my own identity.
in order for that to work for me and in order to be able to actually manifest that investment. So this is just a really clear example to me because I'm going through it right now. But it can also be something very simple. Like if you have the identity of, I mean, you know, a single person, it's going to be really hard to find love, right? If you have the identity of being broke, it's going to be really hard to get
out to make a lot of money or to not spend that money in irresponsible ways. And you might find that if you have the identity of being broke, that you can make lots of money, but you can't hold on to it. And so there's an identity shift that is required in order for that magic to be able to work. Okay. So the next one, number two, is that
Lucy Baldwin (05:25.294)
you're asking for something that you actually have judgment about. Right? So like, if you want a lot of money, but you hate rich people, that's going to totally block your ability to get a lot of money. Right? If you want love, but you sort of don't, you're not willing to be intimate and you're grossed out by couples and you hate seeing PDA,
that's going to be hard for you to find that for yourself. if you're sort of like having a lot of judgments about the people who already have the thing that you want, that's something to look at and consider. And sometimes, you know, I just want that note, it's like, there's actually just some grief that needs to be processed. Like I would argue that that's grief.
that sort of judgment, that disconnect is sadness. It's like for the time that was lost or for not having the thing that you feel like you need. And so we sort of project that onto others and it can sour, right? That's where resentment comes from. It's like this sort of soured projection, but it's really about ourselves and it's really...
It's always grief underneath there, you know? Hate to say it. And fear, of course, fear of change, fear of things being different. So this leads really well into number three, which is using magic to try to bypass grief or fear or pain. So sometimes there's things that we don't want to face and we think we can like magic our way out of a situation.
But the truth is that you can't hide from yourself. can't actually use magic to like...
Lucy Baldwin (07:28.182)
like fix something or make something go away that you're not facing. like if you have grief, if you have had a loss or you have big feelings that you're trying to avoid, or you think that like, getting that thing will make those feelings kind of like go away and you're not thinking that, right? Nobody's actually thinking that consciously, but like that's kind of the strategy, then it's not going to work. you kind of have to, I would recommend, know, like looking at
What is, what am I avoiding feeling? What am I, what am I trying to not face with this? I mean, this is sort of just kind of saying all the other things, but the number four I have here is like, you basically have an unconscious loyalty to an old story. Another way of framing this is like, you have, you're comfortable.
You're comfortable in the old story. You're comfortable in the way of doing things, even though it's uncomfortable, and maybe it sucks. But it's like, there's a comfort in that discomfort, right? It's known. And so there's kind of, it can be hard to allow for change to actually happen. It can be hard to face the discomfort of change. This is also havingness, right? This is upper limit problem. It's like, we...
we're not ready to let go of the old story about ourselves. And we're not ready to step into that sort of like discomfort of actually receiving what it is that we want because it's uncomfortable and it's new and it's different. So that's another reason why magic might not be working or whatever it is that you're trying to get. And of course, I just want to say like all of these things that I'm mentioning,
can be resolved, of course, with magic, but also shadow work. And that's why I'm really big into shadow work and doing this sort of you know, this work of kind of breaking down the beliefs and identities and stories that we're carrying about ourselves so that we can transform and kind of like open ourselves up to the new possibilities that are available to us that we haven't even been able to see or
Lucy Baldwin (09:54.604)
or work with. And then number five is basically like, you're just not being honest with reality, right? Like you're not facing reality, you're not loving what is. You're trying to like avoid consequences or like do something that's out of truth, out of congruence, out of harmony with your actual truth.
So, and you know, like, for example, a lot of us have what are called compense.
Lucy Baldwin (10:36.526)
A lot of us have what are called compensatory desires. So these are things that we think we want, but it's actually things that we believe that we should want or we've been told that we should want, or other people have put those desires into us, but they're not like our true desires. So it's like...
I used to want to go to graduate school. I mean, I used to want to be a doctor and I was going to be a brain surgeon, but like I didn't want to be a brain surgeon. My dad wanted me to be a brain surgeon. You know what I mean? And I thought that I wanted that, but that was a desire to, that was put into me. It's also like sometimes we have things that we want because we're seeking validation for something else through achieving something. So it's like,
I want to be a doctor so that I can be appreciated or so that I can feel like not a failure so that I can be successful in the eyes of other people. It's like compensating for a lack of your own.
already accepting yourself, already believing you're worthy, already loving yourself and thinking that you're successful just by virtue of the fact that you exist. We're all worthy by virtue of the fact that we exist. And we all won the lottery just because we were born. Just having even been born is a miracle. And I think that it's so easy to get swept up in seeking validation and seeking
like some kind of approval or affirmation that we're worthwhile from outside things. And so that leads to us wanting things that aren't true, thinking that we want things that we don't want because we want them. We want them because we actually want something else, right? There's a deeper desire to feel worthy, to feel wanted, to feel loved, to feel connected, to feel successful.
Lucy Baldwin (12:48.174)
And so if we're seeking things that are not what we truly want, sometimes our magic won't work because it's trying to show us that that's not what we want. that's how magic is so profound and beautiful because sometimes we will get those things. And then we have to realize that that wasn't what we actually wanted. Sometimes we just won't. Like sometimes it will just be like, no, dude, this is wrong.
And so we can look at that and we can think about like, you know, I would say one of the first things to do is to think about what do I actually want? And, and I have a bunch of processes that I've taught over the years for how to deal with this, but a lot of it is just like asking, why do you want the things that you think that you want? And really getting to the bottom of the true desire that's underneath all of the other, all of the sort of superficial outward oriented desires. And then
It's like if you had that, if you felt worthy, if you felt loved, if you felt safe, if you felt secure, mean, safety doesn't exist, but that's for another episode. If you felt that kind of like security, then what would you want? What would you really want then? And this can just kind of help us clarify and figure out like what are our true desires versus the ones that have been sort of projected onto us.
and that we think will give us other things that we think will make us feel, you know, fill the sort of like things that we're trying to fill for ourselves and have that sense of like connection and love and worth and all of that. So, yeah, I would say the way to kind of figure out what's going on here is to, you have been doing magic and it's not working, or...
Even if it's not using the kind of magic that I teach, if you've been trying to get things in your life, you've been trying to create things or get out of a situation or get into a situation, and it hasn't been working, I would say it's one of these things is going on. what I would say, ask yourself,
Lucy Baldwin (15:10.712)
Who do I believe myself to be? What do I truly want? Investigating, what do I truly want? Who do I believe myself to be? Would I have to change to receive the things that I'm getting? What do I think about myself if I have these things that I'm trying to get? Would I be able to love myself if I had achieved those things? Would I have to be a different person to have what I think that I want?
These are kind of the questions to be asking and looking for if you're being honest with yourself, you know? yeah. And just remember like this work, just doing this magic, like it's not failing. It's just showing you that there's a division, you know, there's different parts of us. We all have different parts, right? And sometimes...
The different parts want different things and there's conflict and there's inner conflict and that's totally normal. And you can work with those parts and you can talk to them. I just recommend, please remember that all of your parts love you. All of your parts have your best interest at heart, even if they're not like, even if you think they're, a part is like blocking you from having something.
Maybe it is, but like is it trying to keep you safe? it is it trying to give you something? so just be mindful of that and Yeah I hope that this helped and I'm really big into shadow work and I have a whole course called shadow born and I basically to put shadow work is in like all of my programs that I teach so If you take any of my programs, you'll for sure learn about shadow work or at least be doing some
But yeah, I hope that this helps and thank you so much for watching this episode and I look forward to seeing you in the next episode. also I do wanna let you know that I have a free community called Inner Circle where you can join. You can just click the link and join. I do a ritual every month with usually a planet and I also...
Lucy Baldwin (17:31.566)
host free community connection calls, which are really wonderful and fun and playful. that actually is shadow work on those calls. And you can come on and you can ask questions and just connect with other people and have a really great time. So I will see you there. Thank you so much. I'll see you in the next one.
New to Lucy’s work?
Start with Lucy Baldwin’s complete overview of planetary magic here
This episode is part of The Seven: Living with the Planets, a podcast exploring planetary magic as a path of self-growth, ritual practice, desire, embodiment, and spiritual transformation.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why does magic sometimes fail?
Magic may appear to fail when your unconscious, identity, nervous system, or shadow is more committed to the current reality than the desired one.
Does failed magic mean I did the ritual wrong?
Usually, no. You can improve your ritual practice, but magic is not a fragile formula. Failed magic often reveals inner conflict or shadow material.
What is a compensatory desire?
A compensatory desire is something you think you want because you hope it will give you something deeper, such as love, worth, approval, validation, or safety.
Can shadow work help magic work better?
Yes. Shadow work helps identify the beliefs, identities, fears, grief, and unconscious loyalties that may be interfering with your ability to receive what you want.
What should I do when manifestation is not working?
Ask what the desire would require you to become, what you judge about the thing you want, what you are avoiding feeling, and whether the desire is truly yours.
Next Steps
If this episode resonated with you, continue exploring Lucy Baldwin’s work here:
You’ll find current offerings, free practices, podcast links, and ways to go deeper.
A good next step is the free guided Existential Kink practice available there, especially if you want to explore desire, shadow, receiving, and radical approval in a more embodied way.