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This week is about connections. Start with Direct Magick Fundamentals: Connections.
Consciously controlling connections is the best way I know to start with direct magick.
These exercises come from a 90-minute workshop I taught at the Occult Bookstore in Chicago. The workshop was on controlling your emotions by controlling the brain’s energy signature. We’ll cover that tomorrow.
Today is about making a quiet connection: a connection without energy flowing through it. They’re used to sense the energy signature and structure of people, systems, and whatever else you connect to.
Step 1: Build Energy in Your Body
Do an energy meditation. Try mine. Or google for one you like. The details don’t matter.
Step 2: Move Energy Through Touch
Touch your leg, or touch a partner. Visualize the energy moving from your chest or chakras down your arm, into your hand, and into whatever you’re touching. Again, the details don’t matter.
Step 3: Move Your Hand Away, Sustain the Energy
Breaking contact forces you to create a connection to send the energy through. You have to, or you can’t send the energy. Your unconscious knows this. So when your conscious mind says “keep sending the energy,” your unconscious will make a connection.
Move your hand away less than an inch. Just to where there’s no contact. You should still feel the energy flowing through your hand like normal. Practice this until it’s comfortable.
Slowly move your hand further away. At 2-3 inches, the physical connection* will drop, and the energy flow will stop. That’s OK. It’s supposed to happen.
*A physical connection is a connection to physical objects. It goes through physical space, so distance matters.
Try again. Focus on forcing the energy through your hand into your target. Imagine a path between them. The flowing energy will help sustain the connection. Practice this until you can comfortably sustain the connection and keep the energy flowing.
You should notice a change in the connection when your hand moves about 3 inches away, where the connection changes from a physical connection to a magickal connection*. Recognizing this change will help you later.
*When talking about types of connections, a magickal connection is a connection to magickal structures. Here, those magickal structures are the physical connections that go to your hand and to the target. Magickal connections are stable over long distances.
Step 4: Quiet Your Connection
When you force energy through a connection, you only feel your own energy and the target’s resistance to it. But there’s a lot more to see*, and seeing it will help you learn direct magick. The key is quieting your connection, so it’s stable but isn’t carrying energy.
*I don’t see magick. Not visually. Information moreso flows directly into my thoughts. The closest sense is feel. But I say “see” out of habit.
Quieting your energy is easy. Just visualize the energy not flowing down your arm anymore. Keep it in your chest.
Maintaining the connection is hard. The trick is to keep your awareness in the connection while the energy stops. Just focus your mind on the connection. Visualize the connection staying up while the energy flowing along it stops.
This was the hardest exercise for beginners in the Chicago workshop. They weren’t sure they were maintaining the connection, and couldn’t quite tell the difference between the connection and the energy flowing along it. If that’s where you are, don’t worry. Just work the exercises.
Tomorrow I’ll give you the exercise that let everyone in the workshop see they were doing direct magick right. But you need practice with connections before you can do it.
For now, go by feel. When I make a connection and move my hand away, I feel a tingling on both my hand and my leg (or wherever I touched to make the connection). It’s a mental pressure, not a push like a rubber band, but a strong desire to bring my hand to my leg. It’s similar to the feeling of someone staring at you*. Not the creepiness, but the tingle.
*I use that feeling to describe connections because, when you look at someone and focus on them, you unconsciously connect to them. The feeling of someone looking at you actually is a connection.
Making a Quiet Connection
Once you get the feel of quieting a connection that’s already established, try making a quiet connection. Use whatever visualization you use for staying aware of a connection. Start with touch, then move your hand away, sustaining the connection as you go.
Other posts in this series:- Connections: The Basis of Magick (April 22, 2010)
- Making a Magickal Connection (April 25, 2010)
- Sensing Emotional Energy Signatures (April 27, 2010)
- Influencing Emotions with Magick (May 4, 2010)
Tags: Connections
I remember that I had a hard time understanding how to quiet my connections. I could not measure whether or not I was doing it correctly, so I designed an exercise to practice quieter connections.
I went to the mall,sat on a bench and connected to people as they approached. I would do this without directly looking at them. At first, my connections were filled with too much energy. Most of the of the passersby would immediately turn and look at me or in my direction. I made a conscious effort to visualize smaller diameter, softer connections. As my connections became quieter, fewer people noticed them. After practicing for about 45 minutes, I was able to make quieter connections consistently. I recall that this exercise made me extremely tired and I had to go home and nap.
Thanks Lisa. By the way, getting tired after a new exercise is a good sign. It means the exercise is causing your brain, and the magickal structures that connect to it, to set up new areas and pathways. It’s exhausting, but it’s how to get better. Thanks for sharing the exercise!
Mike, this is a great explanation about how to teach yourself to quiet your connections. You really simplified the learning process.
Lisa, thank you for sharing how you practiced this technique. Your method is one of the best ways people can learn how to do this. I always tell people to do exactly what you did: go someplace where a lot of strangers are walking around (the mall, the beach, etc) and then sit quietly and start making connections. Everyone can learn much more quickly that way than if they only practice at home with one or two other people.