You found my old blog. Thanks for visiting! For my new writing, visit mikesententia.com.
Yesterday was about making quiet connections: Connections without energy flowing through them, so you can see* what you’re connected to more clearly. Today is part 2 of the workshop I taught in Chicago, including the exercise that let all the beginners see they were doing direct magick right.
*Not literally see. But there’s no word for “magickally getting information into your thoughts.”
You’ll need a partner for this exercise. It will help if your partner is also practicing magick, or at least does energy meditations. If they don’t do magick, just say you want to feel the energy signature of various emotions. It’s more approachable that way.
Step 1: Connect
Connect to your partner’s head. If you know them well, placing your palm on their temple is ideal. In the Chicago class, we made contact where the shoulder meets the neck. Maintain contact through the whole exercise, at least the first time.
Make a quiet connection, and relax. Have your partner do an energy meditation, move the energy to their head. Let their energy enter your hand, then move it up your arm into your head. Use the visualizations you normally use to move energy. Do this until it becomes comfortable. We practiced for about 5 minutes with several partners in the workshop.
Step 2: Sense Emotions
This is the exercise that made everyone in my workshop sure they were doing it right.
Have your partner recall a memory that triggers an emotion. A specific time they were cheated, or something recent that made them happy. The goal is to enter that emotional state. A specific memory works better than thinking “I’m happy.”
While they focus on that memory, have them build energy in their head. Bring it up your arm and into your head. Notice how the energy feels in your body, and how you feel absorbing it. Have them tell you the emotion, so you can learn the name for that feeling.
Have them pick a very different emotion, and a memory to go with it. Make the new emotion very different. Go from angry to happy. Don’t go from angry to frustrated, or happy to excited, since those are too similar. Repeat the exercise with this new emotion.
The difference between emotions was so obvious in the workshop that novices who had only done energy meditations became sure they were using connections right. It took about 10 minutes of practice for everyone to become comfortable with this.
Step 3: Test It
Close your eyes (so you don’t just see their facial expression as they remember the event). Have them pick either emotion and build the energy. Tell them what emotion they picked.
Intermediate Magick: Setting Your Emotions
You can set your emotional state by building energy with that emotion’s signature. You can also learn more about close friends by using their emotional signature, rather than yours. I’ll cover that in the next part of the series.
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, Energy
Mike, do you have any suggestions for how to modify this exercise if you’re practicing with someone who doesn’t feel comfortable with physical contact? I’ve been in a couple of classes where some of the participants didn’t want anyone else touching them, even when it only involved resting a hand or a finger lightly on their arm.
Hi Kristen, tough question. Once you have the skill down, you can do it at distance, but it’s hard to start that way.
First, to keep the workshop running, I’d have people who would allow touching partner with each other, so the non-touchers don’t slow everyone else down. I’d target the workshop to the touchers, and tell the non-touchers to try it at distance but explain that it’s harder and might not work for them in the time we have for the workshop.
Ideally, the non-touchers would allow almost touching. If you’re within 2 inches, you can usually make a physical connection. If they are OK with that, I’d have them practice making a physical connection at 2 inches on themselves (hold your hand 2 inches away from your leg and send energy through the connection), then try it on their partner, and continue with the exercise as normal.
If almost touching is also a problem, I’d have the non-touchers practice making a longer-distance connection on themselves. The connection would transition from a physical connection to a magickal connection and back to a physical connection. At this point, it’s really intermediate magick, and I wouldn’t expect beginners to get it during the workshop. My goal would be to get them the principles and exercises to try it at home, while keeping the workshop running for the majority that’s OK with touching.
Hello Mike
I have 2 questions, and I realise that this post is a couple of years old, but I am finding it difficult to find answers anywhere.
First, its about seeing/feeling/sensing energy. If I close my eyes, and focus on the ‘feeling’ of another person, I can know how they are, or what they are doing, or going to do…usually if there is a strong emotion attached to those things. What is this? Is it clairaudience, or psychic-ness, is there a name for this so I can learn about it? It feels like looking through haze, or a fog. I can’t ‘see’ very far, but I have a torch, and when I catch a glimpse of something/someone in the distance, I can shine the torch on it and sometimes see who is there. That’s the best analogy I can think of.
Also, with energy, I can ‘see/feel’ it sometimes, as a line. It will move from a location, say in front of me and down, to up in a loop, and then into me, or I can feel it jumping from another person into me, and I can’t stop it, or I try to send it back by visualising the opposite movement. But I don’t know what that energy is. Do you have any suggestions?
Thankyou very much
C
Hi C, yes, that knowing you describe sounds like a psychic intuition. Here are all my posts tagged “Psychic”:
https://magickofthought.com/tag/psychic/
In terms of “knowing what that energy is,” I’d say it’s what we call magickal energy. Sorry, I know that’s not very helpful, but it’s actually quite hard to answer, “What is X?” It’s like saying “What is gravity?” — really hard to give an answer except to describe how it behaves. I normally focus on “How do I do X?” or “How does X behave?” But if you’re trying to get your head around what “magickal energy” is, you might find this post interesting:
https://magickofthought.com/2012/02/understanding-energy-healing-are-you-making-this-error/
Thank you for your reply.
I enjoyed the posts that your links lead me to. I appreciate the logical element that you bring to magick, and I think that scoping is great for defining things more accurately.
I have always been a little wary of this [fast moving, visually bright, non-solid, seen with the ‘mind’s eye’] substance that in my last comment I called energy, and so have not really explored it, but after reading more of your website, which I think is wonderful, I think I would like to. It is very fast, so unlike the thing I do where I close my eyes and ‘see/feel’ where I pick up on different peoples’/events’/organisations’ signatures (thank-you for introducing me to that term), I haven’t really picked up on any signatures from this substance, but I think it may have different ones, i.e. not be the same substance all of the time.
I enjoy your website because it takes a scientific approach, and you have written a lot of interesting things that I have not yet had time to read, but plan on doing so over the next few weeks. Thank-you very much for taking the time to answer my question.
I have another question that I have not yet found an answer for. I can see (in real time, just like I can see people, or a table etc) minute (pinhead or smaller) ‘dots’ of bright light everywhere. There are millions of them, and they appear to vibrate, and sometimes move as a coherent unit, like water flowing, at different speeds. I think they are many different colours, but there actual colours are hard to see because of their movements. Also, I discovered that when I was a child, I could make them move. If I sat quietly, and concentrated, I could get them all to flow in a certain direction, then halt them and make them flow in the other direction. When I close my eyes I can still see them, but they are a different colour (kind of like when you look at an object, then you close your eyes and you can see a residual image of a different colour, briefly). They are easier to see in bright sunlight, and appear to be more energetic then, as they move quicker and more erratically. Do you have any idea what I am talking about?
These ‘dots’ are different from the ones that I see very occasionally that are singular, larger, and appear for >1 second, which may be of different colours, but most usually blue, purple red or white, and usually accompany a particular thought I am having, so I associate them with my thinking/personal development.
P.S. Have you written your book yet? I would be interested in buying it.
Hi C, thanks, I’m glad you’re enjoying my posts and that they’re helping you explore energy and magick. Excellent.
On the dots: I can’t really say what they are. It could be your mind’s representation of energy or connections or some other part of magick. It could be something like synesthesia, a somewhat common and completely harmless quirk where your brain maps one sense to another, such as turning sound into colors. It could be something like psychic visions (which, themselves, are rather similar to synesthesia). Or it could be something else.
My advice is, learn enough magick, and you’ll eventually figure it out.
And I’m glad you want my book, too. I’d hoped to have it out by now, but between consulting and some other projects, that hasn’t happened yet. But the first few chapters are up:
https://magickofthought.com/an-initiation-into-direct-magick-book-1/
And I’ll be posting more chapters as I write them.