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Have you ever learned a new ritual or visualization, done each step correctly, but the result was so small, you weren’t sure it had worked at all?
Here’s the secret: Magick isn’t in the ritual. It’s in unconscious parts of your mind called “mental muscles.” The ritual just directs them. But magick only works if your mental muscles are paying attention.
Another secret: Once your mental muscles are paying attention, you can direct them in seconds with simple visualizations.
This post will show you how to engage your mental muscles at will, so you can:
- Replace time-consuming rituals with instant magick.
- Get your entire mind behind your magick for bigger, more noticeable results.
- Guide your mind through new techniques so they work the first time.
Before you begin, you should be able to maintain an energy meditation for 10 minutes.
By the way, I sometimes teach this as a class. The next one is Saturday April 30, 2011, at Blue Eagle in Albuquerque NM.
Step 1: Feeling Your Mental Muscles
Engaging your normal muscles controls your body’s posture. Similarly, engaging different parts of your mind controls your mental posture. We want a particular mental posture: The one where your mental muscles are engaged and alert. The first step is recognizing your mental posture by feeling your mental muscles.
The Exercise
First, make a simple visualization for your mental posture. Most people visualize different parts of their brain lighting up. (You can use any image that speaks to you. Visualizations just communicate your intent to your unconscious).
Relax your mind, and notice how your mind feels. Not your face, not your scalp, but your mind. Don’t force it, just let your mind relax and notice how it feels. Let your unconscious guide you through the details of the visualization: Visualize your brain, relax your mind, listen to your unconscious, and let it show you which parts light up.
Optionally, do some other task, like reading, and again notice how your mind feels.
Now you’re ready for the mental posture for doing magick. Do your energy meditation, and notice how your mind feels. Put the energy in your chest, not your head. (Otherwise you’ll notice the tingling of energy, rather than the mental posture). Visualize your brain, and let your unconscious show you which parts light up.
I doubt the areas you visualize would match what an MRI would show. That’s OK. You’re just trying to communicate the intent “engage my mental muscles” to your unconscious, not do neurology research.
Do this a few times until you’re comfortable noticing your mental posture. Then, watch your mental posture through a whole session, from relaxed to energy meditation and back again. Once you can watch your posture as you engage and relax your mind, you’re ready to move on.
Remember to release the energy (“ground”) after each energy meditation.
Step 2: Maintaining Your Mental Posture
It’s easier to maintain your mental posture than to change it. So before using your new visualization to engage your mental muscles, use it to keep them engaged after completing your energy meditation.
The Exercise
Do your energy meditation to engage your mental muscles, and notice your mental posture. Hold the mental posture visualization in your mind, alongside the energy meditation. Then ground to release the energy, still maintaining the mental posture visualization. Finally, stop thinking about grounding or energy, and just maintain the mental posture.
Most people can feel the mental posture, so they know right away if it worked. If you’re not sure, start another energy meditation. If you’ve maintained the mental posture, you should notice your energy responding instantly, instead of the normal several-second lag most people have between visualizing energy and feeling it.
Second Exercise
This is a half-step toward engaging the mental posture from rest. Repeat the previous exercise to maintain your mental posture, then rest (stop holding your mental posture) for a few seconds, then re-engage the mental posture visualization.
Practice this until maintaining and re-engaging your mental posture becomes easy.
Step 3: Engaging Your Mental Posture
This is the point of the class: Engaging your mental posture for magick anytime you want, for any visualization you want.
The Exercise
Using your posture visualization, engage your mental posture for doing magick. Don’t use any other visualization (like energy meditation). Once you’re in that posture, do any visualization you want. It should produce a bigger effect more quickly than normal.
Step 4: Make Sure It Works
Never believe magick techniques work until you can demonstrate them to yourself.
Test 1: Easy
Pick a new visualization for your energy meditation: White light, fire, stars, water, plants growing, or anything else that could mean “energy” to you. Use your posture visualization to engage your mental muscles, then try your new energy visualization, holding in your mind that “water = energy” (or whatever your visualization is). It should work roughly as well as your normal energy meditation.
Test 2: Hard
Pick a new skill you’ve never tried. One that’s about as difficult as things you can do, like energy healing, shielding, something like that. Not teleportation. Memorize the visualization, then engage your mental posture for magick and try it. Again, it should work the first time.
Using It
Before doing magick — a ritual, a visualization, giving an energy healing, asking your psychic source a question, etc — engage your mental muscles with this mental posture. The results should come more quickly, with less mental effort.
Next
If this is your first time on my blog, start with this series explaining everything about direct magick: What it is, how it works, and how it will help you become better at magick.
If you’re working through the step by step guide, click here to return to it.
Or check out my other classes.
Other posts in this series:- How To Prove Magick To Yourself In 90 Minutes (September 13, 2010)
- How To Create an Effective Magick Class (September 27, 2010)
- Bigger Results with Simpler Visualizations (February 3, 2011)
Tags: Classes, Mental Muscles, Quick Tips
For more tips on mental posture: https://magickofthought.com/2011/07/making-mental-posture-work/
Here are couple things that I’ve noticed. I’ll preface it with I’m a very kinesthetic person that feels and moves energy easily, but not Harry Potter boom zap easy.
When practicing certain energy feats, I start to feel pressure and pulsation in specific parts of my brain. When projecting energy I feel a pull at the top of my forehead, when drawing in energy I feel a pulling at the top of my head.
Will my direct magick become simply become instantly firing off a specific mental posture that uses energy in a specific way? Example – I engage the mental posture for projecting energy and wham I’m projecting energy. For me this is replicating the pulsation I get in my brain when I project energy.
One thing I noticed is that when I did a visualization for healing a family members cancer the part of my brain that pulsates when I’m drawing in energy started to become active. This was a red flag to me that most visualization people use are not accurately focused. Why would I want to draw in energy when trying to wipe out someone’s cancer? I quickly engaged the pulsations and mental posture I used to project energy and I experienced less dissonance. I also used an NLP concept called submodalities that is changing the size shape color distance etc. of our mental representations. I used this concept to tune down my visualization to a much smaller minor manageable size and used my mental posture for projecting energy.
Sorry for rambling!
Thanks Mike. That feedback is really helpful to debugging these exercises.
Lisa said this sounds like something she’s experienced. It’s hard for me to interpret feelings like this, because I didn’t do these exercises as a beginner — I created them in the last few years, so I can’t easily translate those feelings into my terminology. But she has an idea, and said she’d reply later in the week, and I’ll reply after that.
Update: My answer is here: https://magickofthought.com/2012/03/feeling-your-magick/
Thanks. It was kind of an aha moment for me!
I think I’ve managed to pick this up quite quickly. Before today I’d have to wait a few seconds before I would feel my energy, now I can get an instant reaction. It always starts at my feet and when I’m concentrating on my mental muscles its a pressure on my left temple and behind my right eye. Almost like I’m pulling a face (i have checked in the mirror while doing this exercise and the is no face pulling). Is it my mental muscles I’m feeling or ami concentrating on my face? Also, although this has nothing to do with this exercise, when moving my energy round I have strong feelings in my arms and legs but it is harder to detect in my torso. My arms and legs tingle, were as I feel full in my tummy and feel like I have pressure on my chest. Energy in my torso is very faint almost impossible to feel/sense unless I’m meditating. Any theories as to why? And how can improve it?
Hi Calum, that’s great. Instant results with energy is exactly what we’re looking for. If those sensations you’re experiencing are how energy normally feels to you, then yes, that’s probably energy. Otherwise, it might just be your focus on different parts of your body changing how you feel.
“Mental muscle” is strictly a metaphor: They are the parts of your mind that cause energy and magick to move, but are not actual muscles that would physically pull on anything. But the tingling you’re describing sounds like energy. Why is it more noticeable in your arms than your torso? No idea, but don’t worry about it. The important part is that you’re engaging your mental muscles and moving energy.
As for “what’s next,” for now I recommend my step by step guide:
https://magickofthought.com/2011/01/the-step-by-step-guide-to-learning-direct-magick/
And keep watching the new posts, since I’ll be covering a lot of beginner material in the next month or so as I write those chapters of my book.
And welcome to my blog, and to the community you’ll find in the comments.
Thanks for your help! I’ll continue with the step by step guide and look out for new posts.
Many thanks
Mike,
Thanks for writing such a detailed site – I know it’s a lot of work. I’m glad I found you.
I’ve been working on your muscle building exercises nightly for about a week and I get some vicious brain soreness for lack of a better description. I’m finding it hard to “see” with my connections where the energy needs to go I think. Am I trying to over-power this? I know it’s called ‘subtle’ energy for a reason. Also – I can’t find the “source” or trunk line you show in your diagrams. The only energy available is what i supply so I have to recharge. Any suggestions? I’ve gotten results already though with mental posture – scored unbelievably high on a remote viewing test.
Hi Zach, I’m having trouble guiding you because I’m not sure what exercises you’re doing.
If it’s the exercises on this post, you shouldn’t be using much energy at all. The point is just to engage the mental muscles that work with energy, not to build up lots of energy. So, I’d recommend that you use less energy, ground or otherwise release it when you’re done, and let me know how that goes.
But it sounds like maybe you’re working on the exercises to awaken your mental muscles, in this series:
https://magickofthought.com/2010/05/learn-magick-faster-by-practicing-smarter/
If that’s the case, I’ll have different advice. But I have a favor to ask: Please post your comment on the page with the exercise that’s giving you trouble. That way, I know what exercise isn’t working, and any future readers can see your question and my answer, too. Thanks!
Mike! You’re guiding me more than you know.
I posted here because the headache started with the above exercise. Twinges…
In the future I’ll post directly on the page. Sorry about that!
Re-posting my issue now for the benefit of others…
Glad I could help. So, were you doing the exercises to awaken your mental muscles, then doing these mental posture exercises, and got the headache during the posture exercise? That’s tricky — it’s probably that you’re overdoing something with posture, but it might be caused by how you awakened the mental muscles, and just took a while to show up.
Here’s what I’d recommend:
-First, just repeat the posture exercise with less energy, and ground after. If this fixes the problem, then we’re all set.
-If that doesn’t fix it, rest for 1-2 days, then try the mental posture exercise again. That rest should give enough time for the awakening to settle.
-If you still have a headache during that rest period, then it’s in how you did the mental activation, and we can debug that.
-If you didn’t get a headache while resting, but get one when you do the posture exercises after resting, that means it’s in the posture exercises, and we can debug that.
Does that help?
Yes! This looks to be working.
I took yesterday off – didn’t engage my mental posture. My brain was ringing like a bell. I did two short energy meditations (almost instant energy now… thanks to you…)
Today my head felt numb. Maybe an absence of sensation?
At lunch I engaged and then focused on the same mind/brain connection I used for my “test” case – the remote viewing test. This produced immediate sensation of fullness in those areas. Like having a swollen joint. I realize that I was pushing energy without understanding I was doing it so I almost PULLED on those areas and the feeling subsided. Then I was able to visualize and find exactly a particular squirrel that I saw last week. I actually got two locations when I visualized but the first was within 10 feet. There he was. Very interesting. (I know.. a squirrel… but it was all I could think of at the time.)
I had these headaches when I was young but they stopped coming when I was in my 20’s. That’s another data point…
Thanks again for your help.
That sounds great, Zach. Thanks for the updates. It sounds like mental posture is working for you now. Congratulations.
mike
cam you please tell me another way to conciusly engage my mental musle and posture
Check out the e-book, link in the banner at the top. Good luck!