Posts Tagged ‘Mental Effects’

Energy Healing for Depression

Monday, July 22nd, 2013

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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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Case Study: Energy for Happiness

Wednesday, June 27th, 2012

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I want to share another new technique I’m excited about. Like heating myself, this simply worked my first try, and it’s pretty useful.

This technique makes me happy. Literally, that’s what it does: I was feeling kind of down for a few days, so I used magick to make myself happy. I can’t teach you the technique because it involves a lot of things we haven’t discussed yet, but I can tell you the gist of it, and the results.

The Details

I was in a funk for a few days. Not a serious depression, but definitely going in that direction: I was unhappy for no particular reason, didn’t want to work, just stayed home most of the time. And as you know, thinking, “I’m going to be happy now” doesn’t help.

I was thinking about the mental posture work I was doing: I’d connect to areas of my mind, adjust their state, then get comfortable holding my mind in that new state. Could I do something similar to the parts of my mind causing the depression, to put them into a new state?

It turns out, you can. And I did. I connected to those areas causing the depression and turned off that mental process (using the same mental muscles I’d been using to learn the mental postures). I felt non-unhappy within seconds. I was surprised that I didn’t actually feel happy, but it makes sense: I’d only disabled the things causing the unhappiness, but hadn’t yet enabled anything to actually cause happiness.

So I asked those mental muscles to put those areas into a happy state, and it worked again. I got cheerful, but that wasn’t all. I’d only expected to be more cheerful as I thought the same thoughts, but instead, my whole perspective changed. I focused on different things (opportunities and potential connections to new friends, rather than my worries from before). And when I thought about the same events, I interpreted them differently — the friend who cancelled lunch isn’t avoiding me, she’s just busy and needs support. I wasn’t thinking or trying to change my perspective like this, it just happened on its own, but it was dramatic, and reminded me of how some people describe their first days on antidepressants.

An hour later, I’d become accustomed to the new happy state. In my notes, I describe myself as “still non-unhappy, a bit happy even,” but not “actively happy.” So I tested it: I turned off the effect, and within seconds, my funk started to return. Then I quickly turned the effect back on, and felt happy again. (By the way, this is how they verify that psychiatric drugs are working when they can’t do a proper placebo control: They verify that the patient’s mood goes up and down as they administer or remove the treatment.)

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How I Developed a Still Mind in an Afternoon

Tuesday, May 29th, 2012

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I want to share a technique I just learned: How to develop a still mind in a few hours.

Like most techniques I learn these days, it’s fairly advanced direct magick. You won’t go from no magick to still mind in a day. But I want to show you what I’m working on, and it might help give you some ideas for new techniques for yourself.

I learned this technique to make my magickal senses more accurate, so I could look around without letting my expectations muddy what I’m seeing. But it seems broadly applicable to quieting any part of the mind.

Here’s the technique:

First, find the areas of the mind you want to make still. I went to the mental muscles that handle sensory connections and asked for their connections to my thinking mind. I think that meditaters want to make their conscious mind still, so if I were trying for that, I’d just make connections throughout my conscious mind.

Mental muscles are part of me, so when I say that they showed me, I’m speaking metaphorically, in the same way you might say that your unconscious sent you a message in a dream. “Thinking mind” denotes the part of your mind used for thinking, as opposed to the part of your mind used for moving magickal energies and forms.

Then, I engaged the mental muscles for working with the mind (they’re near the mental muscles for energy healing), showed them the connections I just made to thinking mind, and had the mental muscles hold those areas of thinking mind in a quiet state. At this point, my mental muscles simply know how to “hold these areas in a quiet state,” like how a ballerina might simply know how to do a pirouette without really thinking about each movement individually. As a result, I can simply focus on my intent, and the magick works. But it only works because I’ve already practiced setting a new signature into an area 100 times or so. The technique is a combination of calming someone with energy, and setting the signature into the deeper layers I discuss here.

Like I said, this is an advanced technique. You can’t create a still mind in a day without first learning advanced magick for several years. It’s an alternate route, not a shortcut. Sorry.

Then, I practiced my mental posture while holding my mind in that quiet state. I did this 4 times:

  • First session, I just got used to the feel of a still mind.
  • Second session, I adjusted the surrounding areas of thinking mind, so they felt natural and in alignment with the areas I’d quieted.
  • Third session, I got into that good mental posture, then stopped using my mental muscles to hold it, and just kept my mind in that state for a minute.
  • Fourth session, I got into that state without using my mental muscles (though I did use my mental muscles to watch and see which areas of thinking mind I’d missed).

Each session was a few minutes of work, then an hour of rest, doing non-magickal tasks. I did it yesterday afternoon. By the end of it, the still mind mental posture was coming pretty easily. And today, I’m going to practice that posture while I look around the magickal forms of my mind and body.

How useful is this technique if you can’t use mental muscles to quiet areas of thinking mind? Not very. But hopefully you enjoyed seeing what I’m working on these days, and maybe it’ll give you some ideas for new techniques for yourself, too.

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