Magick of Thought

You found my old blog. Thanks for visiting! For my new writing, visit mikesententia.com.

This year, I’m teaching, founding a research company, and exploring intimidating work.

Presenting at Pantheacon

Pantheacon is a giant pagan conference in San Jose, CA. I’ll be attending for the first time this February. My goal is to connect with people to collaborate with, recruit for Healing Lab (see below), and practice healing techniques.

Readers: Will you be at Pantheacon? Let me know. I’ll arrange a Magick of Thought meetup!

I’m also teaching:

Hypnosis for Deeper Trance is on the official program. I’ve been practicing and teaching hypnosis for several years, just for fun (unrelated to Direct Magick), and I’ll be teaching hypnosis techniques you can use in rituals. Class description:

We use trance every day. From ritual to meditation, from daydreaming to getting into flow, a trance is any non-drug-induced altered state. It’s one way to separate the sacred from the profane, and it can open the doors to creativity. In this exercise-focused class, you’ll learn hypnosis and Neuro-Linguistic Programming techniques to create deeper trances during rituals. You’ll learn to use hypnotic suggestion to create visions and sensations during guided meditation. And you’ll get a few fun ideas for using hypnosis in the bedroom, too.

I’ll also be teaching in the Church of All Worlds suite. Maybe a class on manifesting, maybe a class discussing magick in a materialist paradigm, maybe something else. I’ll announce when I know.

I’ll also be performing healing sessions in the Church of All Worlds suite, as part of Healing Lab (below).

Pantheacon is February 13-16. Tickets are still available. http://pantheacon.com/wordpress/

Founding Healing Lab

Healing Lab’s mission is to combine biofield healing with Western medicine to heal all disease.

The company provides a container for my healing work, and a title for introductions. “Mike Sententia, founder of Healing Lab” feels different than “Mike Sententia, blogger on Magick of Thought,” particularly among researchers who aren’t themselves into magick.

I’ve been meaning to do this for a year. I’ve been intimidated. I’ve felt not ready. I still feel not ready, really, but if I wait until I’m ready I’ll never accomplish anything.

Active research projects:

Energy healing for chronic knee pain: I’ve done this dozens of times on several friends. I have the technique down. Now it’s time to work with 100-ish people so I know it works reliably on just about everyone. I’m hoping to practice this a lot at Pantheacon.

Energy healing for auto-immune diseases: I’ve had good results for my friend with chronic hives. Now, I’m working with a woman who has Multiple Sclerosis. Still in the initial development phase, but it’s fascinating, worthwhile work. Will post about it in the coming weeks.

Creating sensations: I’m continuing the work from last year around creating sensations in non-mages, aiming to collaborate with university researchers and publish the results.

More info on my website-in-progress

Rigorous Testing

Last post, we discussed how I value accurate beliefs, and how much I want to avoid claims that could be debunked by a fourth-grader.

But I haven’t been living up to those goals.

Sensory connections are one of the foundational techniques of Direct Magick. They’re how I look at ethereal structures. I use them for healing techniques, and I get good results, so I know that sensory connections more-or-less work too.

But… more or less? That’s not what I aspire to.

The poor testing impacts my work. I did a distance healing session for my friend with cancer, but wasn’t sure of what I was sensing, and couldn’t do everything I wanted.

It impacts how I explain magick. If I were fully confident in my sensory connections, I’d explain precisely what they do, how they work, and I’d invite a challenge rather than shying away from one.

Good testing leads to good debugging, leads to better results.

Why haven’t I tested? Well, I’ve said I’m focusing on other techniques, and that my sensory connections work well enough.

But if I’m feeling safe and honest, it’s because I’m afraid of finding my sensory connections don’t work as well as I think they do. I’m afraid of that ego hit. I’d rather believe I’m good, I don’t want to discover what I’m lacking and then work to fix it.

And having seen that, I can’t avoid that work anymore.

This year, I’m going to rigorously test my sensory connections, find out where they work and where they don’t, learn where I see accurately and where I’m influenced by my expectations like a sommelier fooled by cheap wine in an expensive bottle. It’ll be emotionally hard, but it’s the price of getting where I want to go.

If you liked this post, consider visiting my current blog at mikesententia.com.

Tags: Healing Lab, PersonalStory, Testing

This entry was posted on Monday, January 19th, 2015 at 10:15 PM and is filed under Advanced 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.