You found my old blog. Thanks for visiting! For my new writing, visit mikesententia.com.
I’m resuming the series on grounding. If you don’t remember the other three posts in the series, you might want to re-read them now.
I love when magick surprises me, because I almost always learn something.
A month or two ago, I set up shielding for a friend, who we’ll call E. We were experimenting with erotic energy, and wanted to leave some connections open overnight. I set up the shielding so I’d feel safe, using a technique I’ve done before to shield Lisa.
(The technique is to make a connection into the person you’re shielding, find all their open connections, and close them. (Anything they use, you would filter rather than close, but most open connections are just hanging open, unused.) It’s similar to this technique, just done on another person.)
E settled into bed, then complained that she couldn’t ground anymore. Specifically, she couldn’t feel the ground through her energy. She was surprised — I hadn’t expected this to happen, so I hadn’t talked about grounding. I don’t recall how surprised I was, but my first guess turned out to be right: Her grounding was based on ethereal software.
Here’s how I think it works: Grounding is really about resetting your energy to its normal signature. And, just like some ethereal software can provide energy for healing, this ethereal software would drain away unwanted energy and provide energy in a healthy signature for the person. Or something like that. The point is, any of the techniques in this series could be implemented in ethereal software, rather than done directly by the mage. You’d then ask the software to ground you.
But, back to debugging E’s grounding, and how I know it’s based on ethereal software. I made a guess: The problem is I blocked her connection to her ethereal software. So I asked her to try and ground, which engaged that connection. Then I traced the connection, found some non-threatening ethereal software. Then I opened the connection. Problem solved, right?
Wrong. When I asked E to ground, she had just grounded her chest — her heart chakra, if you like those terms. She didn’t think it would matter, since to her mind, grounding is grounding. I thought she’d engaged all her grounding connections — I didn’t realize it was just her chest, and I never checked what part of her body the connections went to. The result was, only the connection from her chest was active, and she could only ground there, not anywhere else in her body.
Attempt number two: I connected to her chest again, and followed her connections to the ethereal software. Then I turned around, and followed the software’s connections back to her, and un-blocked all those connections.
This one worked. E was able to ground again.
For me, there are three salient ideas here:
- This sequence of events only makes sense if E was using ethereal software (or some other external, always-connected force) to handle her grounding. If she was grounding by opening her shielding, I wouldn’t have been able to find connections from her chest to the ethereal software, and I wouldn’t have been able to find connections from the software back to every point in her body for attempt number two.
- Ethereal software can do grounding. It seems obvious now, but I’d never thought of that. I always assumed grounding was about the mage releasing the energy, not about the mage getting help to reset their energy signature.
- We were surprised when her grounding turned off, and even more surprised when her grounding only turned back on in her chest. Being surprised by magick is fun. First, I usually learn something new (like I did here), and second, it’s always nice to have another reminder that the part of magick I’m working with is real and external, and not just me projecting my expectations. (Seeing what you expect rarely surprises you, after all.)
- 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)