Anthony Rella

12/18/2025

Bus stop bunny has a command.

12/17/2025

This is an interesting article about the experiences of millennial and younger white men. It is about the experience of a generation being actively decentered while trying to establish your own career and dreams.

For fifteen years I’ve scalped tickets to pay the bills. But in January 2016 I almost managed a real career.

12/14/2025

So wild to be shelved next to Silver Ravenwolf! But her book is so huge it was like the elder tree preventing the young sapling from getting sunlight. I gave my book a little boost.

12/05/2025

T. Thorn Coyle hosted me as a guest on their podcast to discuss creativity, magic, and simple practices to support our mental health in the face of stressful and challenging times. Thorn is one of my favorite people and it was an honor to be a guest.

Episode 26In this conversation, author T. Thorn Coyle speaks with Anthony Rella, a magical worker and psychotherapist, about his journey as a writer, his cre...

12/03/2025

Over on Substack, I'm thinking about spiritual perspectives on desire, and how avoiding desire is not necessarily the way:

"When I turned forty, I felt curious to reread Ecclesiastes. I’d read it once or twice in my life, and had little appreciation for it, but this time I thought, “Wow, this guy really gets it!” You might read it as a profoundly cynical text that decries the emptiness of all pursuits in life, and yet it is also a deeply humbling and confronting wisdom about all we really have while we live. A younger me read books like this thinking the writer was encouraging one to renounce all pleasure and desire to become a spiritual person. These days, I find a different nuance. To get to that, first I want to offer my reading:

So my heart began to despair over all my toilsome labor under the sun. For a person may labor with wisdom, knowledge and skill, and then they must leave all they own to another who has not toiled for it. This too is meaningless and a great misfortune. What do people get for all the toil and anxious striving with which they labor under the sun? All their days their work is grief and pain; even at night their minds do not rest. This too is meaningless.

Ecclesiastes 2:20-23

There is a subtlety in this passage threaded throughout the book that suggests different possibilities. The refrain of meaninglessness (translated in some versions as “vanity”) here suggests that for all of one’s efforts and good works in life, eventually they are lost to us. In life, every effort to make something of ourselves, grow wealth, become wise or beautiful, eventually must be abandoned in death and accomplishes nothing for us in the end."

11/29/2025

Looking forward to exploring the magic of community together! Register at spiritnorthwest.com!

11/19/2025

A Swedish survey of 700 providers shows that biological and cognitive-behavioral models correlate with higher stigma, while social explanations appear protective.

11/19/2025

On Substack I tell a little story about something that happened today. Here's the punchline:

"What I love about this moment is that each of us took on as much as we could and made sure to communicate what was needed so the next person could help. Without both pieces, that man could have been sitting by himself bleeding, unsure if anyone was coming to help. His wife could have been sitting in her car, wondering when her husband would be done with his shower.

These days, this to me is community—being attentive to each other, doing what we can, communicating important information to the people who need to hear it, and connecting to those who can help the most. No one need be a savior, and no one need be a passive bystander."

Link in comments.

11/17/2025

The leading theories of memory describe it as being stored in the brain – similarly, some argue, to the way a computer stores memory.

But this assumption relies on materialist assumptions and problematically bypasses the hard problem of consciousness.

Memory is not stored in space, but in time, argues philosopher Victoria Trumbull.

"If we assume from the start that everything mental must be reducible to something physical, then we close the possibility of understanding the mind on its own terms," writes Trumball.

Tap the link now to read more: https://iai.tv/articles/memory-is-not-stored-in-the-brain-auid-3420

11/11/2025

11/11/2025

Coming up this weekend!

The second of three online classes I am offering through Morningstar Mystery School based on my book Slow Magic will be November 16th at 9am Pacific. We are asking for a sliding scale donation of $20-50.

In this class, we will explore our definitions of “will” and all the baggage that term carries, along with the myth of the unitary self. “True Will” is not a deep occult secret within the self that must be unearthed and obeyed so we can be ourselves.
Instead, through presence and listening, our will becomes true—the way a bike wheel runs true when it’s properly aligned. All of the parts of us that war within, with different desires and fears that fight over the next step have a role to play in making our wills true—by hearing their truths.

I believe these moments of massive change and collective upheaval call upon ourselves to settle and listen internally. There is not a truth “out there” that can tell us the answer to our collective crises, but listening inside allows an inner truth to emerge that is responsive to the moment and honoring of our wholeness.

That being said, we are not a unitary individual who is separate from all the beings around us, and their truths as well offer a piece of insight to help us clarify our own truth. What we seek to cultivate is a strong center that can give all these different parts an organizing principle, the way our sun holds the shape of our solar system and gives it direction. Without that center, all of our parts would be flailing about in space, colliding into each other or flying endlessly into emptiness.

https://www.morningstarmysteryschool.com/classes/when-will-feels-fragmented-calling-the-council/