You found my old blog. Thanks for visiting! For my new writing, visit mikesententia.com.
How to remove connections from draining spirits.
HL asks:
When I am awake I’m able to hide or defense most times. But I have difficult to protect myself during sleep. I perform astral LBRP before sleep and I always hide before I sleep. I also use physical string to circle my bed, but somehow it doesn’t work.
This was a problem I had for years, too. Even after I could protect myself well during the day, I had nothing at night, and every morning I’d have to remove connections from draining spirits.
There are 3 parts to solving this problem:
- Cleanly removing connections from spirits.
- Closing potential connections while you’re awake.
- Keeping them closed while you’re asleep. (This will span 2 posts, for the simple and advanced methods).
Why start with protecting yourself while awake, when HL asked about protection while asleep? Well, when you’re bothered at night, often it’s because you didn’t remove the connections a spirit made during the day. You notice the drain the next morning, and think it’s a sleeping problem, when really it’s an awake-shielding problem. Since I don’t know which of those steps HL needs (and it could be more than one), we’ll cover all of them in this series.
Today: Removing connections cleanly during the day.
Removing Connections – The Plan
Connections carry energy (and do some other things). To drain you, a spirit makes a connection, and uses that to remove your energy. We want to remove the connection so the spirit can’t drain your energy.
“Hold on,” you say. “Can’t the spirit just make another connection and resume draining?”
Yes, it can. But if you consistently remove connections right away, before the spirit can drain you, then they’re not getting any benefit for their effort. It’s like ignoring a bully. They’ll move on to easier prey.
I walked a friend, V, through this process recently. She can feel energy, but doesn’t do a lot of magick. I’ll use my notes from that for this post.
Step 1: Finding Connections
Before you can remove the connections, you have to find them.
First, quiet your energy. Not so that you’re low energy, but so that your energy is steady. If you visualize energy as a white light, visualize the light staying a constant level, and think about wanting to keep your energy steady.
Look for anything inside yourself that’s not in your signature. Think about wanting to find other signatures, and let your mind guide you to where they are. (If you don’t quiet your energy, the noise it makes will make it hard to spot foreign signatures).
Like most people, V doesn’t clean herself out much, so she had a ton of structures with foreign signatures in her. I had her remove them. (Just think about pushing them outside you). Most will go easily, but any that are part of an active connection will resist you (“active” = someone is using that structure, like the draining spirit).
Grab those connections that are resisting. (Visualize grabbing them with your connection). Congratulations, you found the draining spirit’s connections.
Not sure how to visualize a connection? Take your visualization of energy, and visualize connections as something that naturally carries it. Wires for electricity, hoses for fluids, etc. Not sure why I don’t have a definitive visualization that everyone should use? See this series.
Step 2: Remove the Connections
Follow that connection outside of yourself. Just visualize your connection moving along the spirit’s connection until it’s outside you. (There’s a (somewhat advanced) technique to this. I’m fairly certain V doesn’t know it, so I’m not sure how far she followed the connection. If you can’t get all the way outside yourself, that’s OK, the plan will still work).
Your mental muscles know how to do a lot of things, but breaking a connection is usually not one of them. So we’ll need a 2-step visualization to guide them, using two steps your mental muscles already know how to do:
- First, visualize using your connections to enter theirs. This gives you better leverage.
- Then visualize using those connections (that are inside theirs) to break theirs apart.
Now, remove the part of their connection that’s inside you (like in step 1). It should be unsupported now, and come out easily. If it doesn’t, try breaking the connection again.
Step 3: Did They Reconnect?
Often, by the time you notice a connection, the spirit has already been draining you for a while. They’ve decided you’re a good target, and make another connection immediately. Use the same procedure to notice and remove that connection, before they get a chance to drain you, and they’ll probably decide you’re no longer a good target.
Sometimes they’re more persistent. So keep checking every minute for 5 minutes, then every 5 minutes for a half-hour, then every half-hour for the next 24 hours. (Not set in stone, just some good rules of thumbs). Remove any connections they make. Show that you’re a pain to drain, and not worth the effort.
Step 4: Restoring Your Signature
Do you feel better? If yes, skip this step. If no, then the spirit drained you long enough that your energy is in a weird signature. (Imagine signature as paint color. If you’re normally green, and the spirit drains all your yellow, then you wind up with blue energy, and feel weird).
First, go back through your head and body removing any foreign structures, like you did in step 1. Then, do an energy meditation to build energy in your normal signature. If you’re somewhere safe, where you don’t expect draining spirits to be around, grounding (releasing your energy to the area around you) can also help, but if you’re out in public, it can attract more draining spirits.
Step 5: Closing Potential Connections
This is how you prevent connections in the first place. Someone better at making connections than you are at preventing them can still connect, so you’ll still need to know how to remove them. But this will cut down on how many spirits can bother you.
I’ll cover this in the next post (see “Posts in This Series” below). Until then, see Shielding for Beginners to get started.
Other posts in this series:- Effective Magickal Shielding (Part 1 of 4) (October 13, 2011)
- Shielding: Closing Potential Connections (Part 2 of 4) (October 20, 2011)
- Shielding: Tips for Beginners (Part 3 of 4) (November 1, 2011)
- Shielding While Asleep (Part 4 of 4) (November 3, 2011)
Tags: Connections, Protection/Safety
These are all good points. The first piece of advice I would give HL is to do the LBRP physically instead of astrally. In my experience an astral LBRP is substantially less effective than a physical one that engages the Qi as well as the imagination. The other piece that I recommend is to follow your LBRP with some sort of an invocation. Most of the Golden Dawn groups teach that this is where you should use the Middle Pillar, which is quite workable. I’ve gotten excellent results with my LBRP/LIRH operant field combination as well in conjunction with the Middle Pillar or Elevenfold Seal.
A banishing followed by an invocation does two things. First, the banishing cuts connections made to your personal sphere that are out of harmony with your will. Second, the invocation builds up your natural magical power or energy or whatever you want to call it. The stronger a magician you become, the more resistant you will be to future attempts a hostile spirit might make to connect to you. It also means that when you go through the process outlined here of cutting the connections, they will be much more difficult for such spirits to restore.
Thanks Ananael.
Longtime readers know I defer to Ananael on ritual magick. So if you’re looking for a ritual solution, give that a try. HL, let us know what you wind up doing, and how it works.
One thing to add: I’d thought “astral LBRP” was a special form of the ritual, possibly a non-standard one. But from your comment, it sounds like “astral LBRP” means “do astral projection, then do the LBRP in the projection.” Which seems odd to me.
Astral projection seems to be a combination of internal visualization and images received from a system, similar to how some psychic systems send visions. Unless the Astral system knows the Hermetic system (think computers networked together), it won’t trigger the Hermetic system to respond to your visualized ritual. Without the Hermetic system, I would expect zero results. (Or possibly minor results if the Astral system responds to your intent).
If you do a standard (physical) LBRP every day, then you are probably familiar with the Hermetic system that responds to it. In that case, you should be able to just connect to that system, visualize the ritual and get good results. But in that case, you should also be able to connect to the system and simply focus on what you want it to do, and if you’re aligned and recognized by the system, it should respond the same as if you’ve done the ritual.
But I don’t use these particular systems much, so this is all speculation on my part. Ananael, does this align to your experiences with astral / visualized rituals?