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A couple of weeks ago, I started slipping into another depression after a girlfriend broke up with me. This time, recognized the symptoms before the depression could start affecting my judgement, and I got help from the spirits I work with — specifically, an expert in both mental effects and human brains, since many spirits I know are great with magick on spirits but a bit clueless about humans. He did a great job, and today, I want to share some notes on the healing session.
Normally, when I work with spirits, I ask them to teach me how to solve a problem myself. That’s how I learn. But this limits them: They often have to figure out a new, simpler technique that I can learn, rather than using all their tools to just solve the problem. And I just wanted my depression gone. So I asked them to just fix it, and not worry about whether I’d understand their technique. It was pretty awesome to see these spirits working at their best, but it also means I don’t understand half of what they did. Mea culpa.
The healing technique had four stages: Quieting the depression, consciousness integration, activating happiness, and experiencing healthy sadness. I’ll talk about each of them. Also, I think he was debugging the healing energy as he went, adjusting it based on my reactions, rather than executing a standard technique. Not that it really matters, but I like to think that he learned about depression and the human brain as he did this work, and that he got some benefit, too.
Stage 1: Quiet the Depression
We started by showing him how my brain changes from normal to depressed. I got myself into a good state, (like you can do temporarily even in depression), he looked at my brain, then I thought about the breakup, so he could see which areas of my mind had different signatures when I was normal or depressed.
He put several of those areas into the signature they have when they’re healthy, using a healing technique I know to keep them in that signature. (For anyone following the details: He didn’t extend the signature through physical gate and into the nerves, but he did use my own energy to power the new signature.) He did this on fairly small areas of my mind, so each one could get a precise signature, which is one of the identifying features of well-done direct magick.
Then he stayed connected to me as I let my mind wander for half an hour. When a song would come on and trigger some depressed thoughts, he’d find the part of my mind creating those thoughts and add it to the effect, pushing it into a healthy signature too. This shut down most of my depressed thoughts, but not all of them.
Stage 2: Consciousness Integration
Some parts of my mind just wouldn’t quiet down. Really, it was all of them, at least a little: I could feel some parts of my mind shifting, sneaking out of the way he’d set them into healthy signatures. The first stage was just a stopgap until he could do a better healing technique.
The second stage was consciousness integration. I’ve talked about it before, but it’s an advanced technique, beyond what I’ll even get to in the third book, so I can’t teach you to do it. But I can tell you about it: You take the semi-conscious* part of your mind that’s generating unhealthy thoughts, activate an energy channel with your conscious mind, support your conscious mind’s signature (so it doesn’t absorb the unhealthy thoughts), and let the two parts of your mind communicate. If you do it right, the semi-conscious part updates its worldview to the adult world.
(If the idea sounds familiar, it’s because the general concept is fairly wide-spread. Let the problem area out, talk to it, resolve the problem. This is just a way to enable that conversation that works much better for me and the handful of folks I’ve tried it with.)
*I use semi-conscious to refer to mostly-unconscious parts of the mind that sometimes bubble up into conscious thoughts. I reserve unconscious for things you’re genuinely not aware of, like the dilation of your pupils.
We integrated five or so parts, much more thoroughly than I could on my own. Afterward, I felt fixed — not just out of the current depression, but like he’d repaired things that I hadn’t realized were broken because they’d been broken for years. I felt like my mind was functioning properly again.
Stage 3: Turn on Happiness
After that healing technique, I stopped re-hashing the breakup and started thinking about things that make me happy: Projects with magick, upcoming events, that sort of thing. Just let my mind wander. But none of it made me excited.
I asked the spirit, and he said that’s normal, that my brain isn’t ready to experience happiness yet, and that we’d turn my happiness back on after the consciousness integration set in more. (And later, telling friends about this, they mentioned that happiness normally shuts off during depression, that your brain just won’t feel it. They aren’t neurologists, but it makes sense to me.)
Twenty minutes later, he did another energy shift. I don’t know the technique he used, but if I’m ever building this technique on my own, it’s worth knowing that turning happiness back on is a separate step.
Stage 4: Experience Healthy Sadness
Once all those changes were done, I started feeling a normal sadness. I say “normal” because depression feels empty and hopeless, while normal sadness feels, well, just sad. It’s the difference between the bad pain from an injury vs the good pain from stretching a tight hamstring.
I don’t know if the spirit did something to activate this or if my mind was just ready for it, but it was good. I let my mind wander, and after feeling sad for a few minutes, started thinking about ways to meet new people and activities I wanted to do, which are really good signs. Total time: 60-90 minutes of healing work, and around 6 hours after she broke up with me.
One More Bug
The next few mornings, I woke up depressed again, like the effect had stopped working when I slept. Each morning, I’d call the spirit and he’d fix it, but I wanted the healing technique to just work.
Eventually, we figured out the problem: He’d only affected the energy layer of my brain, not the deeper layers of the energy structure. (I used to call this energy layer, “thinking mind,” now I’m calling it “ethereal mind.” Its signature corresponds to neural activity as you think, and it’s central to magick communication. Your ethereal muscles connect to ethereal mind, which connects to brain.)
Basically, he forgot I have a brain made of nerves, because he mostly works with spirits, who don’t. When I’d sleep, my brain would loosen its connections to ethereal mind, and the healing technique on ethereal mind would stop affecting my brain. Note that this is how non-mages normally are: Changes to their brain seem to affect their ethereal mind, but their ethereal mind does not affect their brain, because they haven’t developed those connections by doing magick. This is one of the problems I’ll need to solve to develop better mental techniques for non-mages.
The solution was easy: We sunk the healing energy signature into the deeper energy structures of my brain using standard healing techniques, and I started wake up feeling good.
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