Magick of Thought

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I first learned grounding the way most people do: By visualizing energy flowing out my feet and into the earth. At the time, I didn’t know how to watch my mental muscles work, so I assumed the visualization was literal, and that the energy actually was flowing out my feet and into the earth.

To write this series, I went back to that technique to see what my mental muscles really do. I built energy in my body, then visualized it flowing into the earth, watching everything with sensory connections. Rather than flowing into the earth, my mental muscles released the energy into the area around me — some out my feet, some into the chair I’m sitting on, some air in front of me. It just released the energy.

But that’s how my mental muscles turn that visualization into change in the world. One of the challenges of writing about magick is that I don’t know how your mental muscles will respond to a visualization. One of my friends uses a similar visualization, but her mental muscles use ethereal software to drain her excess energy — that’s method 2 in this series. And I could imagine a person who spends more time moving energy through their body using this visualization and sending the energy out only their feet, instead of into the area around them. That’s why I rarely talk about visualizations — it’s hard to know what actual magick is created by the visualization.

My advice to you: Read all the posts in this series, see which resonates with your experience. Try some of the tips, see what works. That should give you some idea of how your mental muscles implement the visualization to ground.

(Note: This grounding method is particularly simple, so I expect it’s a common way for mental muscles to implement the intent. That’s why it’s method #1 in this series. And minor refinements, like sending the energy out only your feet, probably won’t affect the overall results.)

But back to this method: I tested it several times, with varying quantities of energy, and with various signatures, some pleasant, some less so. The grounding method isn’t terribly effective: Each time, the excess energy left my body, but the energy that remained in my body was still in an altered signature.

Remember last post, where we discussed how the real point isn’t to eliminate excess energy, but rather to return your energy signature to normal? Well, this technique fails at that goal.

The technique isn’t entirely ineffective: It does reduce your overall energy level, which lets your body start returning to a normal signature. But that takes a while. Half an hour, maybe? Hard to say how long, and probably varies from person to person, but if you often feel a bit of a buzz even after grounding, this is probably what’s going on.

Let’s return to the model of grounding I described last post, and see if we can debug this technique. Remember how I talked about your energy being blue, then you absorb yellow energy and wind up with green? And how, if you just add more blue energy, it takes a long time to dilute the green and return to normal? Well, what if we add more blue (normal) energy while we ground, flushing out the pool of green energy in the body?

I tested it several times, with several different energies, just like before. Each time, I built energy in my normal signature while grounding, and each time, I felt almost entirely back to normal afterward. Much more effective than simply releasing my energy. I’ll call this technique “energy flushing,” and it would become my standard grounding technique if I didn’t already have methods 3 and 4 in my tool box. (Coming up later in this series.)

Related Thoughts and Tips

• If you think of grounding as getting rid of excess energy, it seems dumb to build energy while you ground. At best, it’s useless, and at worst, it’s counter-productive. That’s one of the reasons I’m confident in this model of grounding based on signature, rather than quantity: That model suggests a technique I’d never think of with a quantity-based model, and the technique is quite effective. To put it another way, the model makes a prediction — which the other main model disagrees with — and the prediction turns out to be correct. That’s how I test my models.
• As a debugging note, if you’ve been in an unusual signature for a long time — several hours, say — it will take your body a few minutes to return to normal, even after you return your energy to normal. I don’t have a technique to fix that — the solution is to not stay in an unusual signature for extended periods. But just a heads up on a somewhat-common complication.
• Not sure how to find your normal energy signature? Get yourself to a normal, peaceful, calm mental state, then note the signature of energy in your body. Engage the mental muscles that work with energy, and think (or say), “When I ask for energy in my normal signature, this is what I mean.” Maybe phrase it in a way that feels more natural to you — the point is, get into a normal state, then name that state for your mental muscles.
• Before grounding, it’s a good idea to remove any connections you might have open to other people, places or spirits. See this series for details.

Other posts in this series:

• Grounding Method #3: Ethereal Software (April 12, 2013)
• Advanced Grounding (Technique #4) (May 10, 2013)
• 4 Techniques for Grounding: Conclusion (May 15, 2013)
• 4 Methods of Grounding -- Intro (January 30, 2013)
• Grounding Method 1: Expel the Energy (February 6, 2013)
• Grounding #2, and Why I Don't Trust Visualizations (February 13, 2013)

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Tags: Energy, Grounding

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 6th, 2013 at 4:44 PM and is filed under Beginning Conscious Magick. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.