Shielding While Asleep (Part 4 of 4)

Thursday, November 3rd, 2011

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Advanced direct magick to protect yourself even while asleep.

HL’s original question was:

I have difficult to protect myself during sleep.

So far, we’ve focused on handling draining spirits while awake and alert, because those skills make the building blocks of the technique in this post, for setting up semi-permanent shielding that will protect you even while asleep.

If you haven’t read the rest of this series, start with the first post.

Why Shielding Fails

When you sleep, your brain relaxes, and your mental muscles do, too, including the ones holding your potential connections closed. So your potential connections open, and it becomes easy for draining spirits (or anyone else) to connect to you.

Most mages use systems (the forces you channel, that respond to rituals) to protect them while asleep. But relying on outside forces means you never learn how the magick actually works (you learn to command that force, but not the steps it takes to execute those commands), which keeps you from improving on it later.

So here’s the direct magick solution, doing all the steps yourself, using your own mental muscles.

Solution: Structure-Based Closing

Think of structures as solid energy. If energy flows like water, a structure is solid like ice (but not cold). The pathways that energy follows are magickal structures. So are systems, your mental muscles, and basically anything else in magick that’s lasting and solid.

We’re going to use structures to hold those potential connections closed, so they stay closed even when you’re not holding them. The structures don’t have to last forever, just overnight. Then you can reset them as part of your evening routine.

I’d already been working with structures for a few years when I started working on shielding at night. If you haven’t worked with structures yet, then your first step is activating the mental muscles responsible for that. Here’s how:

Working With Structures

To find the mental muscles for structures, try to do something they know how to do. Then other mental muscles will ask them to do it, waking them up.

The simplest skill your structure-controlling mental muscles handle is making a stable, lasting connection:

  • Make a connection. (“Handling Connections,” halfway down that post).
  • Think about stabilizing it so it lasts even when you’re not thinking about it.
  • The mental muscles that make the connection should wake up the mental muscles that stabilize it. It may take a few tries before they wake up enough for you to work with.

Once you’ve found them, you’ll want to get them fully awake and engaged. Here’s how:

  • Follow this series to wake them up fully. (It has a basic version and an advanced version, you only need one).
  • Practice your mental posture to keep these new mental muscles engaged. (It will be a slightly different posture than you were using before, due to the new mental muscles).

The rest of this post assumes you’ve done that and are comfortable working with magickal structures.

Shielding With Structures

Once you have the right mental muscles paying attention, it’s just a matter of telling them what you want. Here’s how I did it:

  • Engage the mental muscles for closing connections, plus the mental muscles for controlling structures. (This should be easy. If it’s not, practice this mental posture first).
  • Close one potential connection, like we did earlier in this series.
  • Using the mental muscles for working with structures, think about creating a structure to hold it closed.

Practice that a few times, until the structure-controlling mental muscle gets used to that particular structure. Same idea as practicing a dance step before trying to learn an entire song. Once that’s comfortable, engage both those mental muscles again (for closing potential connections and for working with structures) and tell them to work together close all the potential connections and create structures to keep them closed.

When I do this, I use words, but you could use visualizations. Whatever feels natural to you to communicate your intent to those mental muscles. Remember, magick isn’t in the particular visualization, it’s in having the right mental muscles awake and engaged. Once they are, any visualization will work. Use whatever speaks to you, and makes sense given how you visualize energy, connections, etc.

Allowing Friendly Connections

You might want to allow some connections in, like from a friend, or from a psychic system you work with. Here’s how:

  • Find that connection. Either do this before closing all your connections, or consciously make a new connection to your friend / the system.
  • Engage the same mental muscles we’ve been using for this shielding.
  • Tell them you want to allow this connection through. They will set up your potential connections to do that. (This seems to be one of their basic functions that they automatically know how to do).

Advanced Shielding

Those connections you’re allowing in, like from a psychic system, are a hole in your shielding. You should shield them, as well. Here’s how:

Connect to them, and look for other potential connections going out of those actual connection. Close those potential connections in the same way, so the connection is protected, and can’t be easily used to access you.

One note: Don’t think of this as extending your shield around that connection. That results in a shield in your signature, which is easy to notice. Instead, you want to work in the connection’s signature when you close its potential connections, so you wind up with a a non-obvious shielded connection.

That was more advanced than the rest of this post, so if you didn’t follow it, don’t worry. It was prompted by a question from someone I work with.

Testing It

Your potential connections should stay closed even when you’re distracted. Have a friend try to connect to you. If you don’t have a magickally-skilled friend handy, connect to the room you’re in, then from there back to yourself. Either way, they / you should notice the shielding. It should be obvious that the connections are blocked.

Questions

Got a question? Leave a comment below.

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Shielding: Tips for Beginners (Part 3 of 4)

Tuesday, November 1st, 2011

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Easy-to-use tips for better shielding.

This series is about shielding while you sleep. So far, I’ve shown you how to remove connections and close potential connections while you’re awake. Next post, I’ll show you the technique I use to shield while asleep. But there’s a catch: I developed that technique sometime around 2005, using everything I’d learned in my ~14 years practicing magick. It’s somewhat advanced.

So first, I want to share some tips from Lisa, who’s been practicing direct magick for about 6 years and remembers being a beginner better than I do.

You Aren’t Doing Anything Wrong

Don’t worry that you’re getting bothered by spirits. It doesn’t indicate a flaw in your magick. As you get better, and work with more energy and do more interesting magick, you’ll become interesting to more-capable spirits. Just goes with the territory. So continuing to get drained doesn’t mean you’re not learning. In fact, if you set up a defense and never need to improve it, that’s the sign you’re not learning.

Remove Connections Quickly

A lot of avoiding drains while you’re asleep is noticing them during the day. Remove the connection immediately, so they don’t get any drain in, and they’ll often move on and not bother you at night in the first place. But if they get a half hour of draining in, they have every reason to come back.

Basic Hygiene

Before going to bed, renew your shielding: Remove any connections from spirits, close your potential connections. Make it your evening ritual. And tell those mental muscles “Wake me up if I’m bothered.” Interrupted sleep makes you tired, but sleeping through a night of draining makes you exhausted.

(Note from Mike: Remember, just thinking “Do good shielding now” doesn’t result in good shielding. You need to train your mental muscles. See the rest of this series, plus these two posts).

Use a System

None of that working for you? Using a system is always an option. (“System” = My term for the forces that mages, psychics, and energy healers channel). You give the system an instruction, and it does the work for you.

Most systems include some form of shielding. Casting a circle comes to mind. Try this on your bedroom, with the intent that the shield stay up once you’re done. (Remember, systems read instructions from your thoughts, so it should pick up your intent).

Note from Mike: Any ritual-based shielding is driven by systems. See Ananael’s comment for some recommendations.

Next

Got all that? Next I’ll show you the full technique for shielding at night.

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

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Shielding: Closing Potential Connections (Part 2 of 4)

Thursday, October 20th, 2011

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How to close holes in your shielding before spirits use them to drain you.

Last post was about removing connections from spirits who might drain your energy. But wouldn’t it be better to prevent them from connecting in the first place? That’s what this post is about.

You could think of a shield as a wall, or a bubble, or a moat. But what does that mean? If connections don’t travel through physical space, (and they don’t, that’s why you can connect to someone across the world), then what does it mean to put something between you and the other person?

I didn’t understand that for a long time. I still don’t, not really. But simply explaining how connections behave let me shield myself, even as I scratch my head about why it works that way. Maybe it’s like how no one truly understands quantum physics, not even Richard Feynman. Or maybe it’s that I just haven’t spent enough time exploring it. But either way, let me explain how connections behave, and how to prevent them, so you can start shielding and exploring, too.

Potential Connections

It seems as though connections follow paths. Not physical space, not a path like you’d walk from one room to another, but there are some set routes they can occupy. I call these “potential connections,” and when I need to make a distinction, the I’ll use “active connections” for the normal connections that you use normally.

Just like connections carry energy, potential connections carry connections. Is there something that carries potential connections? A potential-potential-connection? I don’t know. I’ve only done one level of recursion.

There are a limited number of potential connections*. Once you block them all, no one can make connections to you unless they force it open. Which is possible, but (1) it’s too much work for an ordinary energy drain, and (2) forcing it open is fairly obvious, giving you time to respond.

*I don’t know if that number is stable over your lifetime. (I doubt it is). But it’s stable over the course of a day, and probably a week, which is good enough for our purposes.

Here’s how you find and close your potential connections.

Finding Potential Connections

Remember how your mental muscles know how to do some tasks already, but they need training for others? The mental muscles that trace connections also know how to see potential connections, if you only know how to ask.

Tip: If you’re having trouble with this section, read the series on tracing connections, make sure those mental muscles are awake, then come back to this.

I figured out potential connections around 2005. I was trying to understand how connections entered me through my shielding, and why shielding didn’t work while I slept. I’d quieted my energy so I could watch myself removing connections, thinking about how they traveled through my shielding. And, since the mental muscle for tracing connections was already engaged, it picked up on what I was looking for and showed me the potential connections.

At the time, I didn’t know you could simply ask mental muscles to do things. I thought about them more like your arm muscles — You’d never say, “Hello arm, please explain how you throw a ball,” and I didn’t know that you could do that with mental muscles. So it was just luck that I found them.

But you know that. So you can look at a connection, and ask the mental muscles doing the looking to show you the potential connections. The key is, you don’t ask with the words, you ask with the concept. If you don’t know what potential connections are, thinking the words “Show me the potential connections” won’t do anything. But once you have the concept of “pathways that connections follow,” you could name that anything, and your mental muscles would understand.

How do I know all that? Well, now that I know to ask my mental muscles for instructions, I asked the connection-handling one how to get it to show me the potential connections. That’s where the answers in this section came from (with elaborations added in).

Closing Potential Connections

Once you’ve spotted potential connections, closing them is easy. Just connect to them, then visualize them closing*, using whatever visualization feels natural for you. (Remember, visualizations just instruct your mental muscles).

*Connecting before closing seems to work better than simply visualizing them closing. I think it helps the mental muscle know which potential connections you’re referring to.

As long as you don’t have any active connections using them, (which you don’t, right, because you did the previous post’s exercises before this one?), they should close without any trouble.

In the fourth post in this series, I’ll walk you through the technique I developed to hold the potential connections closed. But for now, just tell the mental muscle that handles connections that you’d like to keep all those potential connections closed, even when you’re distracted / asleep / otherwise not paying attention. It should know what you want, though you might need the details in the 4th post to help it implement that goal.

Space

Some of you may be familiar with my term “space,” as in “physical space” or “mental space.” More or less, a space is the set of potential connections in a certain domain (physical domain, mental domain, etc).

If you’re not familiar with my use of “space,” don’t worry, it’s not necessary for this series or pretty much anything else on this blog.

Next

Before the full technique, I have some tips on making sure your shielding is thorough, and on what to do if some of these steps don’t work for you yet. That’s next.

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

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Effective Magickal Shielding (Part 1 of 4)

Thursday, October 13th, 2011

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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.

Click for more on grounding.

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.

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

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