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How can you practice magick daily without attracting attention, particularly if you don’t live alone?
You could meditate. Perhaps even visualize the rituals. But you probably thought of that already. What else?
Here are three Direct Magick techniques you can do while meditating to improve your fundamental magick skills. They should help with any system you study.
(The 2nd one is new, even for longtime readers of this blog.)
Mental Posture
Different parts of your mind do different things. There are parts for understanding spoken language, other parts for planning your day, still others for controlling your legs as you walk. And there are parts for doing magick. In Direct Magick, we call these magick-driving parts your ethereal muscles.
Which parts are active right now? Think about it for a second, see how your mind feels. (Though, in thinking, different parts will become active). It feels different to read a blog than to work out or prepare for a job interview, right? In Direct Magick, we call this your mental posture: The parts of your mind engaged at any moment.
You have a lot of mental postures. One for problem solving, another for telling funny stories, lots of them. But the one we’re interested in is the mental posture for magick, with your ethereal muscles engaged and ready to work. Learning the mental posture for magick lets you engage your mind to do magick whenever you want.
Here are exercises for mental posture, plus some tips.
(Note: In some old posts, I called them “mental muscles” instead of “ethereal muscles.”)
Exploring Your Ethereal Muscles
While engaging your mental posture, think about the different types of magick you do. Different rituals, healing techniques, whatever you do. Notice which parts of your mind engage a little more or a little less, depending on the magick you’re thinking about.
Those are your different ethereal muscles. (Or groups of muscles.)
Name each of them. I use communication, for talking with spirits and ethereal software; access, for handling connections; effects, for energy healing and working with energy; and mental activation, for working with my ethereal muscles. But you might have different groupings and different names for yours.
Learn the feel of each muscle. Learn to engage each one separately, so you develop a posture for each type of magick you do. This should also teach your mind to communicate intent to specific muscles, instead of sending your intent to your unconscious as a whole.
Now comes the exercise: Engage two ethereal muscles at the same time. For example, I might do communication and effects. Think about how they might collaborate, where they might help each other, what messages they might send. For example, when I do communication, the muscles for effects help read the energy signatures from my brain as I think, and help put their reply into my brain as I read it.
For me, engaging two ethereal muscles and thinking about how they collaborate causes them to network together, creating lasting connections that help them collaborate more easily. It’s an exercise I did often while initially awakening my ethereal muscles, and it’s something I returned to as I’ve re-awakened them after several months off.
Energizing Your Ethereal Muscles
In people who don’t practice magick, their ethereal muscles are usually asleep and atrophied. If you’ve been practicing magick a while, you probably have many ethereal muscles awake and strong, but there are probably also some you haven’t found yet, that are still asleep.
Ethereal muscles awaken slowly as you practice magick. But you can also use magick — the ability to manipulate energy and ethereal structures — to awaken your ethereal muscles more quickly.
The first exercise for awakening ethereal muscles is to build energy, then instead of moving it around your body, move it into your ethereal muscles, holding it there for a while before releasing it. This will help more muscles wake up. Note that it is tiring to have new ethereal muscles awaken — unlike most magick, fatigue here is a sign you did it right.
This series covers exercises for energizing your ethereal muscles. (List of posts in the series is on the left.)
More
If you liked these exercises, check out Direct Magick. It’s done by engaging ethereal muscles, guiding them through techniques, feeling how the world responds to them. From the outside, Direct Magick looks like meditation, or just like being lost in thought.
If you’d like to learn Direct Magick, check out the free book-in-progress, and the older but more complete step-by-step guide.
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Podcast! Join me this Monday, July 6 at 6pm Pacific. I’ll be interviewed by Taylor Ellwood on his radio show, Magical Experiments. Taylor is managing editor at Immanion Press and has written a slew of books on magick. I had dinner with him at Pantheacon, he’s a really bright, insightful guy, and I’m looking forward to talking with him about Direct Magick, science, ethereal software, my forthcoming book, my healing work and how I’m refining it through experimentation. View the interview here.
If you liked this post, consider visiting my current blog at mikesententia.com.Tags: Learning Magick
Thank you! That was a very helpful description. I found myself tuning in to the muscles while reading. :-)