Posts Tagged ‘Classes’

Techniques for Energetic Fitness

Sunday, October 30th, 2016

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

Being an experienced practitioner is more than knowing rituals or having attunements and certifications. It’s about having a mind that’s in good shape for energy / magick / this-practice-has-many-names.

That energetic fitness is called inner work. It’s a combination of mental skills like focus and visualization, and energetic skills like engaging the energy-driving parts of the mind. In most people, those energy-driving parts are dormant, and they must be awakened before a person can achieve success in their practice. This happens naturally through practice, a little at a time, and after years of steady practice one may have many fully-awake energetic muscles.

(Outer work is the rituals, certifications, etc.)

This post is about speeding that process up. It covers techniques for awakening those energy-driving parts of the mind, not by using them, but by finding and energizing them directly. It also includes a technique for engaging them to your will. These techniques will help you achieve greater energetic fitness more quickly.

I’m teaching this material at the OTO temple in Oakland, CA on Tuesday Nov 1. If you can attend, please RSVP on Facebook. If not, I’ll post the video of the class when it’s up in a few weeks.

Note: These techniques are equally applicable whether you call your practice “magick,” “energy healing,” or something else. Because the OTO calls it “magick,” I’ll mostly use that term throughout this post.

Mental Posture

Physical posture is about engaging the body’s muscles, so one’s body is in a good position for the task at hand. Mental posture is about engaging the mind’s muscles. For magick, we want to engage the parts of the mind that drive magick.

Think about doing your practice (ritual, visualizing energy, etc). You know that mental shift that happens when you feel the energy or forces you’re using? That’s the mental posture. Most practitioners can engage their mental posture with time (in a long ritual or other session), and experienced practitioners can engage their mental posture quickly. And by teaching mental posture as an explicit technique, we can help everyone learn to engage it quickly, at will, so even short sessions can be effective.

To learn mental posture:

  • Do your usual practice, such as a ritual or energy work. Do a full session, until you feel the energy or forces you’re using. That’s how you’ll know you’re in the mental posture for magick.
  • Notice how your mind feels. That’s your mental posture for magick. If you like visualizations, associate a visualization with this mental posture.
  • End the ritual and enter a silent meditation. Maintain the mental posture for magick.
  • Practice those steps until it’s comfortable. Once it is, add this one: Do a mental ritual (visualize the ritual), while maintaining the mental posture. (Or do whatever other practice you do.) If done correctly, you should feel the energy and forces immediately, because your mind is already engaged.
  • Once you can sustain your mental posture easily, try engaging it just through silent meditation, without doing your normal ritual or other practice. This may be slow at first, but with practice it will become fast, and you’ll be able to quickly drop into a mental state for doing magick.

For more on mental posture, see these posts.

Ethereal Muscles

It’s clunky to talk about the “magick-driving parts of the mind.” We need a term, and the term I use is ethereal muscles.

Think about it this way: The difference between a daydream and a magick visualization lies in engaging your ethereal muscles, like the difference between imagining walking vs moving across the room lies in engaging your leg muscles.

Everyone has ethereal muscles. If a person doesn’t use magick or energy, their ethereal muscles are usually dormant and atrophied.

Like the rest of the mind, ethereal muscles seem to be special-purpose. Some are used for communicating with spirits and other forces, others are used for creating connections and shielding, and others for altering energy signatures like in energy healing. There are even ethereal muscles devoted to awakening other ethereal muscles.

The rest of this post focuses on awakening ethereal muscles.

We can awaken our ethereal muscles through practice. In most people who practice magick or use energy, some ethereal muscles are fully awake (the ones they use often), some are partially awake (the ones they use rarely), and others are fully asleep.

Awakening one’s ethereal muscles makes everything a little easier. When I was trying to get better at sensing ethereal structures, I awakened more ethereal muscles related to that, and I improved at that skill much more quickly than I had been through practice alone.

Realize there’s no ethereal muscle for throwing fireballs, or teleporting, or other movie special effects. Awakening ethereal muscles doesn’t instantly make one an experienced practitioner.

Awakening ethereal muscles makes everything a little easier, so you can progress more quickly. But you still need to practice.

(Awakening enough ethereal muscles also seems to open up new avenues for exploring magick. More on that later.)

Awakening New Ethereal Muscles

Different magickal practices use different parts of the mind. (So Golden Dawn rituals will use a different set of ethereal muscles than, say, energy healing.) When one learns a new practice, new ethereal muscles will awaken. This is especially true for learning one’s first practice, when all the general-purpose ethereal muscles must also awaken.

Simply practicing will awaken those ethereal muscles, but with the right techniques, we can accelerate the process. Here’s the first technique for awakening ethereal muscles more quickly:

  • Find and connect to the ethereal muscles that are awakening. (Details below.)
  • Build energy in your body and send it to those ethereal muscles. Not just into your head or brain, but into those ethereal muscles.
  • When you build that energy, think about the energy signature of the ethereal muscles that are awakening, and try to match that signature.
  • Hold the energy in your ethereal muscles for a few minutes, then exercise the muscles by doing your magickal or energetic practice.

Remember to release the energy after you’re done (ground).

Options for finding your ethereal muscles:

  • As with mental posture, do your practice and notice how your mind feels. In particular, pay attention for the parts that get tired or won’t quite engage. Those are the new ethereal muscles. Learn them by feel, or create a visualization if you like.
  • When I first found my ethereal muscles, I’d already learned to use sensory connections to feel and follow other ethereal structures. Here’s how I did that: I made a connection to a person or something, it’s not important where. Then I made another connection to that first connection, so I could feel it and follow where it goes. I followed it back to myself, into my mind, and found the ethereal structures that created it. Those were my ethereal muscles. I explored them for a while, and after I would practice, I could see that some were stressed, tired, under-powered, or otherwise odd.

The second method seems more reliable, but it requires sensory connections. So I offer the first method for anyone who doesn’t know sensory connections yet.

Note: When I did this in the early 2000s, I used a slightly different approach. I would practice, fatigue my ethereal muscles, then find the tired ones and bathe them in energy. But I think it will work better to bathe them in energy first, and then practice. Try both and see what works for you (and tell us in the comments).

Powering New Ethereal Muscles

As I awakened more ethereal muscles, all of my ethereal muscles became sluggish, difficult to engage and focus. I forget how long it took me to realize the problem, but they were under-powered. This is the first technique for increasing the power to one’s ethereal muscles.

(This is an intermediate techniques, and requires one to be able to sense connections and other ethereal structures.)

First, find the pathways that carry that power: Connect to one of your ethereal muscles, find the connections leading away from it, see where they go. You should find three sets of connections:

  • Connections to your brain’s energy layer. Recognize these by their signature, which transitions to the signature of the brain’s energy layer.
  • Connections to other ethereal muscles. These will keep the same signature, more or less.
  • Connections that provide power to the ethereal muscle. These will be the same signature, but a smaller scale. (Details on signature scale.)

We’re after the third set. I call them core paths, and they provide power to our ethereal muscles. I imagine them going up from the ethereal muscles, though it’s probably more accurate to imagine them inside the muscles.

They’re laid out somewhat like the circulatory system: Near ethereal muscles, there are a great number of small capillaries carrying power to each piece of the ethereal muscles. As we go up (away from the ethereal muscles), those capillaries join into larger and larger vessels. If we turn around and go back down, those larger vessels split into many capillaries, supplying many ethereal muscles.

The core paths near your ethereal muscles will likely be under-powered. That’s OK. Follow them up, and eventually you’ll find vessels that are fully powered. Draw that power along your under-powered core paths, energizing and opening them up.

When I did this, I would be exhausted and hungry afterward, especially for protein. Be aware of this, and do it at a time when you can eat and rest.

As one goes farther into core paths, the signature of the paths gets smaller and smaller scale. When I was doing this work, I also spent a lot of time working to accurately sense smaller and smaller scale signatures.

The Four Ethereal Muscles

Until now, we’ve been practicing new techniques, seeing what ethereal muscles started to awaken, and helping them along. But we’re about to reverse that order: We’re going to explore core paths, find new ethereal muscles, awaken them and then figure out what they do. But first: What do these ethereal muscles do?

I’ve found four sets of ethereal muscles:

Communication, devoted to sending thoughts to spirits and forces, and receiving their replies. Awakening more of these ethereal muscles tends to make communication faster and clearer, which helps with channeling energy, spirits, and anything else.

Access, devoted to creating connections and sensing ethereal structures. Awakening more of these ethereal muscles leads to more accurate sensory techniques involving smaller, more precise connections and signatures.

Effects, devoted to recognizing and manipulating energy signature. I use these for energy healing, shielding, and some steps in awakening dormant ethereal muscles. Awakening more of these ethereal muscles helps shift energy signatures more precisely.

Mental activation, devoted to awakening ethereal muscles. Awakening more of these helps with all the things we’re discussing in this class.

Each of those major muscles is made of dozens or hundreds of modules. I don’t know what each module does, I just know how to engage and direct the major muscle. (Kind of like how we’re not aware of individual muscle fibers of our legs as we walk.)

I expect that these four sets of ethereal muscles are common, but not 100% universal. I expect that some people lack one or more, and some people have other ethereal muscles I haven’t encountered yet.

Awakening Fully Dormant Ethereal Muscles

As I became more comfortable exploring my ethereal muscles and the core paths that power them, I began finding fully-dormant ethereal muscles, with no power or activity. They weren’t connected to the other parts of my mind, and I couldn’t engage them by intending to or visualizing really hard because they were fully dormant, and weren’t paying attention to my intent or visualization or other practice. But I’d already had great results from awakening other ethereal muscles, so I wanted to awaken these dormant ones too.

These techniques require solid skills in sensory connections. They’re more advanced than I typically teach or write about. But I want to sketch them out, to give you some ideas if you’re ready to explore them:

Remember that core paths combine as you go higher (away from ethereal muscles), and split as you go down (toward ethereal muscles). To find new ethereal muscles, follow the core paths as far up as you can, then follow them back down, looking for under-powered or fully-dormant pathways as you go. Open power to these pathways, and awaken those ethereal muscles. Note: Finding fully-dormant pathways requires more sensitive sensory connections.

After awakening new ethereal muscles, make sure to connect them to your thinking mind (my term for the ethereal structure that sits between the brain’s energy layer and the ethereal muscles, acting as an interface). The ethereal muscle will know where it wants to connect, but it’s important to deactivate that part of thinking mind while the ethereal muscle connects, or it won’t connect properly. (Reactivate it after.) Most of my issues at this step happened when I didn’t deactivate the area of thinking mind.

As I traced further into core, I found ethereal structures that limited the amount of the power flowing through those core paths. I call them throttles. They are important for ensuring your ethereal muscles receive power in the right signature — do not open them fully, or you will get a massive headache and your ethereal muscles will become extremely difficult to use. But by carefully opening throttles, it’s possible to awaken new ethereal muscles en masse, opening up more capabilities and possibilities for exploring magick and energy.

Summary

Those techniques represents roughly a decade of work.

That work was iterative: I would awaken more ethereal muscles, which improved my ability to sense smaller signatures, which allowed me to go further into core, which allowed me to find and awaken more ethereal muscles, and so on in a spiral. It ended when I learned to open throttles, awakening all the ethereal muscles I could find.

Remember that awakening ethereal muscles doesn’t give you Hollywood-type magick. You won’t levitate or throw fireballs.

What you will find is that you’re more able to sense and manipulate ethereal structures, communicate with spirits more clearly, or do some other aspect of your practice more easily. And as more and more skills become easier, it’ll become possible to tackle projects that used to be too large, and you’ll be able to explore new aspects of magick and energy.

That’s the point of inner work.

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

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Posted in Beginning Conscious Magick | 2 Comments »

Beyond Tantra: Intermediate Erotic Energy Techniques (Class Notes)

Monday, August 1st, 2016

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I’m teaching a class on erotic energy techniques — ways to increase your pleasure, your partner’s pleasure, or the connection you two share. This post is my notes for the class.

If you’re in the San Francisco Bay Area, the class is Thursday Aug 11, 7-9pm at Wicked Grounds (8th and Folsom in SF). RSVP on Facebook. It’s free, just buy something from the cafe, and give me feedback to help improve the class.

What is Erotic Energy?

Even among energy healers and magick practitioners, “energy” has many meanings: Emotional state (“He’s so happy, his energy is really up”), social vibe (“This party has great energy”), or self-suggestions (“Visualize a successful business, put your energy into it”).

In this class, we’re talking exclusively about biofield energy, the sort of energy used in energy healing. If you’re thinking of a phenomenon and want to know if it’s biofield energy or another meaning, ask yourself, “If I couldn’t see or talk to the person, if our only interaction was the energy through a soundproof door, would this phenomenon still happen?”

Erotic energy is using biofield energy to enhance sexual experiences. It can be as simple as helping yourself or your partner relax and get more in the mood, to deepening connection by feeling one another’s energy, to creating energy orgasms. We’ll cover all that in this class.

Pre-Requesites: Building and Moving Energy

This class assumes you’re familiar with building energy in your body and moving it around. If you’re not, see this energy meditation. (We’ll quickly practice this in class.)

Easy Erotic Energy

Energy has different types. I call them “signatures,” other terms include “frequency” and “color.” Our goal is to build energy in an aroused, turned-on signature, and send that to our partner.

Here’s the easiest approach: Get turned on. Focus on how that feels in your body while building energy. This usually builds energy matching your turned-on state. Then visualize sending that energy into your partner.

Where to Send It?

When I first explored erotic energy, I expected to send the energy to my partner’s genitals. It turns out, this has only a small effect. Instead, based on my testing, sending energy to your partner’s head creates the strongest sensations. Try other places too, like their heart.

Visualizations

The point of a visualization is to communicate your intent to your unconscious mind. Visualizations are usually symbolic, rather than literal explanations of what the energy does. As far as biofield energy is concerned, we’re building energy in our body’s aroused signature, and any of these visualizations should do roughly the same thing. Use whatever visualization speaks to you.

Visualizations can also have an important psychological impact, and they can be fun to share with your partner.

A few suggestions:

  • Fire, red light, or anything that says “passion.”
  • Place your hands on different parts of your partner’s body, and visualize a flow of energy between them.
  • Suggestion from my LGBTQ friends: An energetic dick.

Summary

That’s the beginner portion of this class: Get turned on, build energy, send it to your partner.

Intermediate Techniques

Debugging: Open Your Shields

For a year in my early 20s, erotic energy just worked. Then I moved across the country, didn’t date for a few months, and did a lot of my own work around energy. When I had the chance to try erotic energy again, it didn’t work anymore. Years later, I figured out one of the main reasons: I had begun focusing on shielding, to block energy from flowing into my body (from other people, and occasionally from malicious people or spirits). My shielding also blocked my energy from flowing out to my partners.

If you do shielding, try reversing the visualization to open. If you don’t do shielding, you might want to start — most people find it helps them. Here’s a post on easy shielding techniques, and some more intermediate posts.

Note: Visualizing opening to your partner often has a strong psychological component as well. Most classes don’t distinguish between the psychological component vs the biofield component of this exercise.

Feeling Your Partner

Instead of building energy, quiet your energy. This doesn’t mean that you enter a low-energy state, it means you make your energy steady, so it’s not shifting. Now let your partner build their energy, and let it flow into you. Feel it. Because your energy is quiet, you’ll be able to notice their energy more clearly. Have them try exercises from this class.

Note: This is related to sensory connections, one of the foundational techniques of Direct Magick. More exercises here.

Energizing Sex Toys

Do you have an object that will enter someone’s body? Fill it with energy first. You can even do blind testing, where one partner energizes some toys then leaves the room, and the other partner feels each of them to see which is energized.

Energy Orgasms

I’ve had partners experience spontaneous orgasm just from energy. (They were dressed with no grinding or other genital stimulation.) I’ve experienced them too. I don’t have a reliable technique that works every time with every person, but energy orgasm seems to be related to an overwhelming amount of energy, and energy in the head seems to matter more than energy anywhere else. In men, energy orgasm doesn’t seem to cause ejaculation.

Different Types of Energy

Try feeling different types of arousal (or other states) in your body. Focus on those feelings while building energy. This should build a different type of energy.

Now, feel your partner while they do this exercise. Focus on how their energy feels.

Here’s where this becomes advanced: Instead of focusing on your own body’s turn-on, focus on the feeling of your partner’s energy (its signature). Build energy in that state, see how that feels in you, and how it feels to them.

If you can remember energy signatures from one day to the next, try building energy for the state you or they want to be in, rather than the state you’re currently in.

Another suggestion from LGBTQ friends: Now that you’re building energy in another person’s signature, try matching the signature of male-bodied and female-bodied people, and see how they feel different.

Attending the Class

If you’re in the San Francisco Bay Area, the class is Thursday Aug 11, 7-9pm at Wicked Grounds (8th and Folsom in SF). RSVP on Facebook. It’s free, just buy something from the cafe, and give me feedback to help improve the class.

Reminder: Double-Blind Test Still Going

Only 2 more weeks to participate in the double-blind sigil testing. It’s a great way to increase your confidence in your abilities.

If you tried one sigil, please try the other one too. The data is far more useful if we see how you respond to both sigils. Plus, once this ends, do you really want to have only tried the placebo?

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

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Posted in Energy Healing | 1 Comment »

Divination & Manifesting (Notes for Upcoming Class)

Sunday, May 1st, 2016

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Tarot. Astrology. Magick for wealth, love, and success. Divination (predicting the future) and manifesting (creating luck) are cornerstones of most magickal practice.

This post is my notes for a new class I’m creating. It covers:

  • How to choose good divination questions and manifesting intents
  • Techniques for sending out those questions / intents
  • Techniques for hearing the answers
  • How to use this magick in healthy and safe ways.

I’m teaching this class Thursday May 12, 7-9PM at Wicked Grounds in San Francisco. It’s free — both to support my friends who run the cafe, and to test out the class in a more informal setting. If you’re in the bay area, I hope you’ll attend. RSVP here (facebook).

Choosing Good Questions & Intents

Here’s an example good request: Cause me to find a job that I’ll be happy with, and that will leave me the time and energy to study magick.

Let’s talk about some ways that it’s good, and some traps to avoid:

Make it general. I’m not asking for a specific job, I’m asking for any job with these properties. A few reasons for this. First, whatever is guiding this success knows more about the paths of fate than I do, so I don’t want to overconstrain the request and possibly wind up in a job I thought I’d like but that is actually bad. Second, manifesting seems to create lucky breaks. If I ask for a specific job and there’s path where I get it, the manifesting simply fails. We don’t want that.

Specify what “good” means. I find that if I ask for a “good job,” that’s too vague. Does good mean stable? Interesting? Has the chance of finding a good romantic relationship? The forces we’re channeling don’t seem to think quite like humans do, so it’s best to specify clear success criteria.

Make it positive. Think about making your request over a bad cell connection, dropping every other word. “Find job happy” is probably ok. But if you ask, “Find me a job that won’t exhaust me, and that won’t interfere with my relationship,” and some of the words don’t transmit properly, you could wind up with something terrible.

Time frame. Some people like to specify that it should happen within a certain time frame. I prefer to avoid specifying the time frame (what if I specify 3 months, and the perfect job would take 4). I trust the force I’m channeling to understand that sooner is better than later. But different people channel different forces, so this may have to do with the specific force I use — try both ways, see what works for you.

Sending Out Those Requests

Main goal is to engage the parts of your mind that drive energy and magick (your “ethereal muscles”), contact a force to channel (some “ethereal software”), and get your intent to that force. Many ways to do this.

By default, most people’s ethereal muscles are unconscious. So most systems of magick focus on getting the intent into the unconscious. Visualizations, rituals, sigils, etc all do this. Note: Even without a force to channel, getting your unconscious aligned with your intent will probably help you notice opportunities and execute on your goals.

The other half is having a force to channel. Usually not explicitly discussed. People are often connected to these forces during initiations. Forces can also be bound to rituals and sigils, so doing the ritual / focusing on the sigil will get the force to connect to the person. This only works for already-established rituals and sigils, not one you just made up.

Simplest method: Focus on the sigil in this post. (It also discusses testing we’ve done on this blog.) Focus on your intent, repeat it several times. The force is programmed to read and act on your intent. For more details, see this book-in-progress.

Hearing the Answers

This is the main difference between manifesting and divination (or psychic intuitions). Manifesting is usually send-and-forget, while divination is about getting info back.

But getting info back with manifesting is useful too. Find out whether the request was accepted, if there are reasonable paths to success, etc.

Responses can be hard to hear, like talking over bad cell connection. Yes / No is easier to understand than a sentence. This is useful: Turn an open-ended question into a series of multiple choice questions, then feel into each choice and try to notice the “Yes.” Systems that use this include tarot (where each card has multiple conflicting meanings, and the reader selects the “correct” one for this reading) and some systems of astrology (the reader selects which planets and meanings “matter most.”)

Some forces can create lasting connections to a person’s mind, improving the communication over months. The sources for psychic intuitions usually do this. There are also techniques in Direct Magick to create a clearer communication channel as needed.

Try using manifesting to guide decisions. “Cause me to create a good plan for…” (then spell out your goal and what “good” means.) Then sit down and plan your next steps, paying attention to feelings that the option you’re considering is good or bad. This makes it easy for the force to influence your decisions, ensures you’re paying attention to these intuitions when they come (much easier than listening all day, through conversations and other projects), and is super ethical.

Staying Healthy and Safe

Avoid goals that require specific people to take specific actions, both for ethics and for higher success rates. “Cause me to find a healthy, supportive relationship,” not “Cause me to date this specific person.”

Consider: Would you do this if everyone involved knew about it? If not, that’s a strong sign it’s unethical.

Some people are concerned about influencing others in any way. Remember, we influence others every day, both consciously and unconsciously, in how we dress, speak, and everything else we do. To have any impact on the world, we need to influence others. If you would work toward your goal through ordinary means, it’s probably ethical to manifest for it too.

A technique I use all the time: “Cause me to make good decisions for…” (then spell out your goal.) Restrict your manifesting to only influencing yourself.

Don’t blindly trust divination. A lot has to go right for it to work: Phrasing the question properly, sending and receiving the message, and the force has to see the future properly. None of this is 100%. If you think the path laid out is a bad idea, or feel a sense of dread about it, listen to yourself. (At the very least, try at least 3 other ways of asking the question.)

Come to the Class

I’m teaching this class Thursday May 12, 7-9PM at Wicked Grounds in San Francisco. It’s free — both to support my friends who run the cafe, and to test out the class in a more informal setting. If you’re in the bay area, I hope you’ll attend. RSVP here (facebook).

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

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Posted in Beginning Conscious Magick | 1 Comment »

Bigger Results with Simpler Visualizations

Thursday, February 3rd, 2011

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

Have you ever learned a new ritual or visualization, done each step correctly, but the result was so small, you weren’t sure it had worked at all?

Here’s the secret: Magick isn’t in the ritual. It’s in unconscious parts of your mind called “mental muscles.” The ritual just directs them. But magick only works if your mental muscles are paying attention.

Another secret: Once your mental muscles are paying attention, you can direct them in seconds with simple visualizations.

This post will show you how to engage your mental muscles at will, so you can:

  • Replace time-consuming rituals with instant magick.
  • Get your entire mind behind your magick for bigger, more noticeable results.
  • Guide your mind through new techniques so they work the first time.

Before you begin, you should be able to maintain an energy meditation for 10 minutes.

By the way, I sometimes teach this as a class. The next one is Saturday April 30, 2011, at Blue Eagle in Albuquerque NM.

Step 1: Feeling Your Mental Muscles

Engaging your normal muscles controls your body’s posture. Similarly, engaging different parts of your mind controls your mental posture. We want a particular mental posture: The one where your mental muscles are engaged and alert. The first step is recognizing your mental posture by feeling your mental muscles.

The Exercise

First, make a simple visualization for your mental posture. Most people visualize different parts of their brain lighting up. (You can use any image that speaks to you. Visualizations just communicate your intent to your unconscious).

Relax your mind, and notice how your mind feels. Not your face, not your scalp, but your mind. Don’t force it, just let your mind relax and notice how it feels. Let your unconscious guide you through the details of the visualization: Visualize your brain, relax your mind, listen to your unconscious, and let it show you which parts light up.

Optionally, do some other task, like reading, and again notice how your mind feels.

Now you’re ready for the mental posture for doing magick. Do your energy meditation, and notice how your mind feels. Put the energy in your chest, not your head. (Otherwise you’ll notice the tingling of energy, rather than the mental posture). Visualize your brain, and let your unconscious show you which parts light up.

I doubt the areas you visualize would match what an MRI would show. That’s OK. You’re just trying to communicate the intent “engage my mental muscles” to your unconscious, not do neurology research.

Do this a few times until you’re comfortable noticing your mental posture. Then, watch your mental posture through a whole session, from relaxed to energy meditation and back again. Once you can watch your posture as you engage and relax your mind, you’re ready to move on.

Remember to release the energy (“ground”) after each energy meditation.

Step 2: Maintaining Your Mental Posture

It’s easier to maintain your mental posture than to change it. So before using your new visualization to engage your mental muscles, use it to keep them engaged after completing your energy meditation.

The Exercise

Do your energy meditation to engage your mental muscles, and notice your mental posture. Hold the mental posture visualization in your mind, alongside the energy meditation. Then ground to release the energy, still maintaining the mental posture visualization. Finally, stop thinking about grounding or energy, and just maintain the mental posture.

Most people can feel the mental posture, so they know right away if it worked. If you’re not sure, start another energy meditation. If you’ve maintained the mental posture, you should notice your energy responding instantly, instead of the normal several-second lag most people have between visualizing energy and feeling it.

Second Exercise

This is a half-step toward engaging the mental posture from rest. Repeat the previous exercise to maintain your mental posture, then rest (stop holding your mental posture) for a few seconds, then re-engage the mental posture visualization.

Practice this until maintaining and re-engaging your mental posture becomes easy.

Step 3: Engaging Your Mental Posture

This is the point of the class: Engaging your mental posture for magick anytime you want, for any visualization you want.

The Exercise

Using your posture visualization, engage your mental posture for doing magick. Don’t use any other visualization (like energy meditation). Once you’re in that posture, do any visualization you want. It should produce a bigger effect more quickly than normal.

Step 4: Make Sure It Works

Never believe magick techniques work until you can demonstrate them to yourself.

Test 1: Easy

Pick a new visualization for your energy meditation: White light, fire, stars, water, plants growing, or anything else that could mean “energy” to you. Use your posture visualization to engage your mental muscles, then try your new energy visualization, holding in your mind that “water = energy” (or whatever your visualization is). It should work roughly as well as your normal energy meditation.

Test 2: Hard

Pick a new skill you’ve never tried. One that’s about as difficult as things you can do, like energy healing, shielding, something like that. Not teleportation. Memorize the visualization, then engage your mental posture for magick and try it. Again, it should work the first time.

Using It

Before doing magick — a ritual, a visualization, giving an energy healing, asking your psychic source a question, etc — engage your mental muscles with this mental posture. The results should come more quickly, with less mental effort.

Next

If this is your first time on my blog, start with this series explaining everything about direct magick: What it is, how it works, and how it will help you become better at magick.

If you’re working through the step by step guide, click here to return to it.

Or check out my other classes.

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

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How To Create an Effective Magick Class

Monday, September 27th, 2010

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

In this post:

  • Why effective classes use exercises.
  • How to build a bridge from what students can do and what they want to do.
  • How to lead exercises like a pro.

Intro

I’ve taught professionally for over 10 years. Martial arts in high school, metal working in college, computer security after graduation, and magick classes along the way.

The best classes focus on exercises — on students doing something — rather than lecture. Here’s why, how to design a good class, and how to assess it afterward. It applies to magick classes, but also everything else you might teach.

Classes Teach Skills

Ask a novice teacher what students should get from a class, and they usually focus on concepts students should understand. Then they lecture on those topics.

Ask an experienced teacher the same thing, and they’ll usually focus on things students should be able to do. Then they get students doing that in the class.

No one goes to a class to understand something. They go because they want to do something. Sure, understanding is part of that, but the best understanding comes from doing something yourself, not from listening to a teacher.

The Benefits of Exercises

1. Exercises produce mastery in the class. Once students do something, instead of just hearing about it, they understand it much more completely. This cements the concepts and skills, so you can build on them later in the class.

2.  Exercises reveal gaps in understanding. When you lecture, everyone will nod and say “that makes sense,” even if it didn’t. They won’t realize the gaps until they try to use that knowledge. By putting exercises in class, you immediately see what works and what doesn’t, and you can fix it right away.

How To Build Good Exercises

Exercises should build on something students can already do, and teach exactly one thing.

If you need to teach students to do 2 new things at the same time, that’s 3 exercises:

  1. Teach the first thing in isolation.
  2. Teach the second in isolation.
  3. Combine the 2 new skills.

You’ll be tempted to put more into exercises. Don’t. Paradoxically, those 3 exercises will go much faster than 1 exercise teaching both skills at once, because students will succeed the first time at each simple skill. You get three 1-minute exercises where students succeed, instead of one 10-minute struggle.

It will feel like the steps are excruciatingly small. But that’s only because you already know how to do them. Sure, some students could take larger steps, but they’ll forgive you as long as they learn something by the end. And most students will love you for going at their pace.

For an example, see this post on my magick connections class.

Leading Exercises

Here’s the pattern I use for leading exercises:

  • Explain the big picture: What they’ll learn, what they’ll do, etc.
  • Demonstrate the exercise, explain the visualization, etc. Students just watch and listen, so they can focus on the ideas, not on implementing them.
  • Repeat the demo, slowly, with students copying you each step. Verify everyone was successful.
  • Have students do a very similar task on their own.

This last step is the most important. Students must use the technique on their own, or they won’t retain it.

If you drive with a GPS, you know what I mean. You can drive all over, and as long as someone walks you through each turn, you never learn to navigate yourself.

Also, applying the technique to a new situation helps ensure students master the technique. Often, students can copy you, but don’t know what each step does, so they can’t apply the technique to new problems. You want to uncover that before you move on.

Summary

Effective classes ensure students learn skills by taking small steps. Only add 1 new skill per exercise, and slowly build from demonstrating the skill to letting students do it on their own. This lets you cover each step quickly, allowing you to get through more material in your class than if you had fewer, larger exercises.

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

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How To Prove Magick To Yourself In 90 Minutes

Monday, September 13th, 2010

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

This post outlines a 90-minute class I’ve taught in Chicago and Albuquerque. It will show you how to:

  • Sense other peoples’ energy with a magickal connection.
  • Determine a person’s emotions based on their energy.
  • Prove to yourself that you’re really doing magick.

Before taking this class, you should be able to:

  • Build energy in your body (using an energy meditation).
  • Move energy around your body.

Intro

The class is a series of exercises.  For each exercise, I explain what it is and why we’re doing it.

You can use this for your own practice, to review after taking the class, or to teach the class yourself (send students to this page afterward, it’s like their notes).

Warm Ups

It takes time to leave the stresses of your day behind and focus on magick.  Start with some warm ups to help transition, and to make sure everyone knows the pre-reqs.

Warm up 1: Energy Meditation

I explain a simple energy meditation, and why it works, in this post.

Warm up 2: Move the Energy

Move the energy around your body.  Touch your leg (or arm, shoulder, etc) and move energy through your arm and into your leg.

Suggest a visualization, but don’t lead the meditation.  Students will need to handle their own visualizations soon, and you want to see if anyone has trouble with that.

Handling Connections

These exercises teach students how to make connections to sense energy.  They will be new for most students.

Sustain a Connection

The Exercise

Start by moving energy through your arm into your leg.  Sustain this energy flow as you slowly move your hand a few inches away.  You’ll make a magickal connection.

What You Learn

How to make a connection.

You’re telling your unconscious to keep the energy flowing.  Your unconscious knows that the only way to do that is by making a connection, so it does.

Make a Sensory Connection

The Exercise

Make a connection again (the previous exercise), then visualize the connection as something separate from the energy.  A hose, glass tube, etc. work well.  Stop the flow of energy, but sustain the connection.  Then release the energy from your body, so you’re not full of energy, but sustain the connection.

What You Learn

How to make a sensory connection.

If your connection is full of your energy, you can’t sense with it.  All you see is your own energy.

By sustaining the connection while quieting your energy, you can sense the energy of whatever you’re connecting to.

Connect to a Partner

The Exercise

Work with a partner.  Touch their shoulder (or their temple if you know them well), make a quiet connection (as in the previous exercise), then have them make energy.  Draw the energy into you (visualize the energy in them flowing up your connection and into you).

What You Learn

How to work with other peoples’ energy.

You’ll need this to sense their emotions based on their energy, and for a lot of other magick.

Reading Emotions By Energy

These exercises will teach students to sense the energy a person produces, and how that changes with different emotions.

Recognize Emotions

The Exercise

Connect to your partner as in the previous exercise.  Have them focus on a memory that triggers an emotion, then make energy.  Their energy will have a signature (or type) matching that emotion.  Have them tell you the emotion, so you learn what the signature means.

Repeat this with several different emotions (go for opposites like happy and sad, not similar ones like angry and nervous).

What You Learn

You learn the feeling of the energy corresponding to different emotions.

When I last taught the class, this was the point where all the beginners could feel the difference between different energies and knew they were doing everything right.

Identify Emotions

The Exercise

Same as above, but your partner doesn’t tell you the emotion.  Instead, you tell them, based on the energy.  Close your eyes so you don’t read their facial expression.

It’s easiest to do this with a partner you just practiced with, so you know their exact signatures.  For added challenge, do this with a new partner, without the Recognize Emotions exercise.

What You Learn

This step isn’t about learning, it’s about demonstrating a skill, and proving to yourself that you’re doing magick.

Want More?

For more details, more exercises, and some advanced techniques that build on these skills, see this series.

FAQ

Can You Sense Emotions At Distance?

Yes.  But that requires making those connections without touch, and probably being able to sense a person’s normal energy, without them building it up.

Most experienced mages can do that, but it’s more than I can teach in a 60-90 minute class for people who’ve only done energy meditations.

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

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