Posts Tagged ‘Protection/Safety’

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Energy Shielding: Keeping the Third Eye Closed

Sunday, December 4th, 2016

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“On my way here, my third eye was forced open,” a friend said at a recent event. “I was driving, it was distracting. I hate it when that happens.”

The phrase, “my third eye was forced open,” didn’t mean anything to me. I asked how it felt, to see if I’d experienced the same phenomenon and called it a different name. She described a pressure in her forehead and her perception shifting sideways.

That’s what I experienced years ago when spirits would forcefully create a connection to me.

“I think I know what it is. If you’re willing, I’d like to try opening your third eye, and if that works I can show you how to keep it closed.”

I connected to her, built energy, pushed on the connection. It worked, she felt that same shift. Hypothesis confirmed.

After I disconnected, she kept experiencing that perception shift, and it kept growing. I guessed that she was making her own connections, now that she was opening. “Find the connections from you to the area around you, and close them,” I told her. After a few seconds, she said the shifting sensation stopped, and that her third eye was closed again.

Next, we practiced stopping the process, so she could prevent her third eye from opening, prevent that shift in perception. I connected to her again, and had her feel those connections. “Notice the pressure, feel the connections, feel where they’re entering your field. Squeeze down on the connections, like tightening a fist or squeezing a sphincter. Close the pathways they’re entering through.”

She did. I felt the connections shut. She didn’t experience the shift in perception, and her third eye stayed closed. Success.

And a note for anyone teaching this: I got a bit of a headache after. I felt into my connections, and noticed some of them still in her field, crushed in her closed pathways. I’d withdrawn my connections before, but like a leg that fell asleep, the crushed parts didn’t move well, and didn’t withdraw properly. They also didn’t have much feeling, so I hadn’t realized they were still there. The headache abated when I slowly, consciously engaged the connections and withdrew them.

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Posted in Intermediate Conscious Magick | 9 Comments »

Safety for Energy Healers: How to Avoid Absorbing Ailments

Sunday, November 27th, 2016

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Ruthie asks:

Good morning Mike. I’m a body worker and lately I have had a spirit wanting to take over and help. So occasionally I let him. The good is that he does a great job. The client is always happy. The bad is that ultimately I take on some of the clients ailments. How can I better protect myself?… Or is that possible?

The first step to solving a problem is understanding why it’s occurring. So I want to rephrase your question to just describe the experience, without guessing at why:

The good is that I do a great job when channeling this spirit. The client is always happy. The bad is that I feel lousy after, often with symptoms similar to the client’s.

Why did I rephrase it? Because illness isn’t like poison. You can’t suck it out, you can’t take it on yourself. If a person’s immune system is attacking their skin, you can’t absorb their immune system. And if a person has an infection, getting infected yourself doesn’t help them. It’s tempting to think of illness as a pool of black badness that you can drain, but that’s not how the body works. And having an accurate model of what’s going on is key to fixing it.

If you’re not actually taking on your client’s ailment, what’s going on? Here’s my best guess: The spirit may be sending the same healing energy to both you and your client, or through your body on the way to the client.

This sounds good, right? Who doesn’t want healing energy? But think of energy healing like mixing paint, trying to find a healthy green color. If your client’s energy is yellow, and you add blue, they’ll feel pretty good. But if your energy is already a healthy green, and you add that same blue, you’ll wind up feeling lousy.

But wouldn’t that suggest you’d feel the opposite symptoms? Why do your symptoms mirror your client’s? Because energy can target particular organs or systems of the body. For example, if the client has a stomach issue, you’ll be working with stomach-targeting energy, and your own stomach will wind up feeling pretty lousy. That’s how we get mirrored symptoms, even though the energy shift is more or less the opposite.

(Another possible explanation: The spirit might be draining your energy, a sort of fee for helping. But this would most likely have you just feel drained, and doesn’t match with the symptom mirroring.)

How to fix it? Talk with the spirit, without a client there. Explain what’s been happening, ask him if he knows why. Then suggest this as a possibility, see if it makes sense to him, and ask him to be more careful in targeting only the client with the healing energy. And after a session, try channeling him and asking him to reset your energy, so even if you pick up some healing energy it gets fixed right away.

And please report back and let us know how it turns out.

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Posted in Energy Healing | 6 Comments »

Overwhelmed by Crowds? Here’s How I Block Energy

Monday, September 12th, 2016

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Friends who feel energy sometimes complain about feeling overwhelmed or drained, particularly in crowds. I sometimes help by shielding them, closing them off from outside energy.

Today, I want to share some reasons to shield, the technique I use, and three side effects to watch out for (and how to handle them).

Why Block Energy

Occasionally I forget to close my shields, and I walk through San Francisco open to the energy around me. It’s fairly mild, but I feel more tired and less focused when I absorb that energy. Remember, it’s not the quantity of energy that matters, but rather the signature (or type) of energy, and absorbing the random energy around me shifts my body’s energy to a different signature than it usually is, making me feel odd and off.

Some energy-sensitive people can feel overwhelmed by crowds. Part of this is psychological, just feeling overwhelmed by the noise and interactions of a party or crowded street. But based on testing, part of it seems to be the actual biofield energy of all those people — I’ve set up shields for three friends, and all of them reported that, with the shield blocking the energy, the overwhelmed-ness significantly decreased.

Depending on your practice, you may also run into aggressive spirits that want to drain your energy or otherwise bother you. These shielding techniques are effective for that, too. (That’s what I developed them for, actually.)

How I Block Energy

Short answer: Find all the openings in my biofield (or aura), all the places where energy or connections could enter, and close them.

Start by thinking about the openings, where energy could enter your body. If you mostly use visualizations, you can picture this as pores around your energy body. Then picture them closing, either as a lid covering each of them, or as each pore clamping down, like a fist or sphincter closing.

If you pursue Direct Magick, you’ll learn sensory connections. We use them to feel ethereal and energetic structures, such as these open pores. To shield, I feel around, find a pore, and while feeling that pore with my sensory connections, I close it, either with the visualization above, or with other Direct Magick methods. Then I find the next pore, and repeat.

If we’re just closing the pore with the visualization, why bother with the sensory connection? Because shielding has two steps: Find the opening, and close it. We’re using sensory connections to make the “find the opening” step conscious, so we can step through it, find openings we might otherwise miss, and close them. With a few months of practice, this more thorough method of finding openings can become unconscious and automatic, and we can return to just a visualization (or other focused intent) and still get the more thorough shielding.

As you get better with sensory connections, you’ll be able to create smaller and smaller sensory connections to find smaller and smaller openings. This will let you close those smaller openings, creating a more effective, less-permeable shield.

Note that I’m not creating a big glow of energy around me. This isn’t about projecting my energy out, or creating a shell of energy. It’s about finding and closing the spots where energy or connections can enter me. More discussion here.

Handling Side Effects

Three stories here:

The first time I shielded a friend, I closed all her open connections as effectively as I could. But she used some ethereal software for psychic intuitions, and I closed her connections to that software too — there were too many connections to investigate each one, so I just closed everything. The result: Her psychic intuitions turned off. The solution was easy, I just re-opened those particular openings, her psychic software reconnected, then I partially closed those openings so they were only open enough for the psychic software’s connections, and nothing else.

The second friend I did this for, I knew to look for her ethereal software. But a week later, she texted me from a dance, “I can’t feel anyone.” She meant, she normally feels the energy of the people she’s dancing with — that’s her favorite part of the event. I connected to her and undid the shield, opening her up, and she felt the energy of the dance again. Long-term, she’ll need to learn to open and close her shields herself — I’ve set up some ethereal software to do that for her, but we haven’t gotten around to teaching her to use it, so I can’t say how it’s working yet. But if you learn to shield yourself, you’ll be able to open whenever you want, so just realize to open when you want to feel the energy of an event.

The third example is from myself, and long-time readers already know it. In my early 20s, I explored erotic energy with good results. Then I took a few months off, learned shielding (among other things), and the erotic energy stopped working. It wasn’t until years later, when I thought to open my shields, that erotic energy started working again. Easy to fix, but you need to know to do it.

Summary

That’s how and why I use shielding, and how to handle the side effects I’ve encountered.

If you have questions or other side-effects, leave a comment below.

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Posted in Beginning Conscious Magick | 4 Comments »

Best Exercises for Learning Energy?

Sunday, March 27th, 2016

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I’m consulting in Singapore this month, and just had lunch with a reader. It was great connecting. Here are my answers to some of his questions:

Is magick dangerous?

When I first started magick, I’d often get headaches and feel like my energy was off. I think this is pretty common. Some of those experiences were probably from spirits draining me, some of them were from me messing up my own energy. But I definitely support people learning protection.

But is it dangerous? Not really. Side effects of magick are usually limited to headache, nausea, and mild disorientation — the same sort of issues as a night of drinking. So get out there, try stuff, but just accept that you might have a hangover the next day.

When trying to learn magick, which exercises are most effective? How should I focus my time?

We don’t know yet. That’s a great question to answer with scientific research, but we don’t have it yet. Here’s what we do know:

Feedback matters. Mastery doesn’t come from repeatedly doing the same thing. It comes from trying something, getting feedback, then adjusting before the next try. That’s the 10,000 hour rule: It’s 10,000 hours of practicing with feedback, not 10,000 hours of repetition. Or put another way, there’s a huge difference between one year of experience repeated 10 times, vs 10 years of experience.

So, when you practice, practice something with concrete results. Track if you get those results.

Really, my magick took off when I developed sensory connections, a set of techniques to watch ethereal structures move as I do magick. That’s the immediate feedback I needed.

Second response: Different exercises probably work best for different people. So share your experiences. Try different exercises, blog about them, let people know what worked for you and what didn’t. That’s a case study, and it’s the first step in developing a science around how to learn magick. We need your experiences.

Also: This stuff is hard. Don’t expect it to be easy. If it were easy to get concrete, obvious results, magick would be taught in schools and researched by mainstream scientists. If it were easy, it would have been done already. That’s why anything worth doing is hard.

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Posted in Learning Magick | 2 Comments »

A Common (But Useless) Safety Measure

Sunday, September 6th, 2015

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Prav asks:

I am using your sigil from here:

Help Beta Test My Ethereal Software

I have to know if the software has any name and what spirits it uses. I don’t work with things I don’t know about…

I’ve talked about safety before. Repeatedly. And not just defense, because sometimes a spirit won’t leave you alone until you bother it right back. What I’m saying is, I’m serious about safety.

But I haven’t discussed names. Why?

Before I answer that, let me share a story.

When I worked in India a few years ago, I got lots of safety advice. Wear mosquito repellent (they carry terrible diseases). Only drink bottled water, and check if the bottle has been re-sealed by melting it. Haggle for everything (it’s fun!)

One tip I didn’t get? “Only trust street vendors with friendly-sounding names like Deepak.”

Because a person’s name doesn’t tell you if they’re safe, right? Same with the names of spirits and ethereal software.

Names are for marketing. They’re the brand. They’re how we appeal to a particular audience. I could call the software Holy Light, made by the Holy Order. Or I could call it The Corruption Vault, made by Skarnax, Devourer of Worlds. Or The Universe, made by The Ancients.

Names don’t get you safety. Names are just words.

So if not names, what should we do? The same as you’d do in business or sales or relationships: Talk with the person (me, in this case, by reading my blog), see what you think of them, and decide if you think they know what they’re doing and if it’s important to them to keep you safe. (I do, and it is, but you shouldn’t take my word for it, you should read me over time and make up your own mind.)

And long term, follow those links and learn to protect yourself. If you know you can keep yourself safe even if the spirit is hostile, you can explore so much more.

That said, I should probably name my software and spirits for branding purposes. Thoughts? Leave a comment. Thanks!

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Posted in Intermediate Conscious Magick | 7 Comments »

Spirits, Safety, & Reader Questions

Sunday, March 15th, 2015

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Today, I’m answering questions I normally don’t consider from a reader new to Direct Magick:

1) What is the difference between spirits and ghost and is it safe to communicate with them?? because what if they are malevolent??

I work with spirits: Ethereal intelligences that never had a body. I think of them as an artificial intelligence, made of ethereal connections and energy, rather than transistors.

Ghosts are disembodied dead people. Or that’s the notion, anyway. Ghosts seem like a rather unlikely hypothesis to me.

To be fair, spirits are a rather unlikely hypothesis, too. But I include spirits in my work because they’ve repeatedly helped me develop effective techniques. In other words, I consider both unlikely, but I have evidence for spirits, while I have no evidence for ghosts.

(To everyone who has experiences with ghosts: I believe your experiences. I believe they are real, and outside contemporary science. I do energy healing that’s outside contemporary science, after all. I just think there’s an explanation that doesn’t involve a person’s mind floating through the world after their brain dies.)

On safety, I see people go to extremes. There’s the view that everything is safe, that nothing can affect you unless you give it permission. This seems like wishful thinking to me. “Permission” is a property of human minds, not of physics, and physics doesn’t distinguish between helpful and harmful events. Anything powerful enough to make a useful change can also harm.

The other extreme is: “Spirits are dangerous. Some are demons. They create madness and illness and misfortune. Be careful, learn the historically-trusted methods, and don’t go wandering in the woods.” It’s too far, and it reminds me of mistaking cynicism for maturity. (Although historically, it may come from poor models of disease, where we mistook bacteria and viruses for diseases.)

So, what’s my take? I’ve experienced many spirits who drain energy. Some drain it quite aggressively, resulting in headaches, disorientation, even nausea. These are unpleasant, and are worth learning to protect against, both defensively and offensively.

But remember: Those symptoms are on the order of a hangover. Unpleasant, not life-threatening. Worth avoiding, but not fretting about. Be aware, do magick responsibly (learn protection), and enjoy exploring.

(The worst attack I’ve seen caused nerve pain in a friend’s ear. It came from a (human) mage. Nothing to do with spirits, everything to do with human pettiness. I was glad for the protection experience I had, along with the healing techniques to fix it.)

2) Also what is the disadvantage of using direct magick if there is any??

Originally, Direct Magick was about using connections and energy directly, to do healing techniques without channeling ethereal software. That takes much longer to learn the channeling-based energy healing. It also didn’t include manifesting.

These days, I’ve added ethereal software to help you get started. I hope you’ll outgrow that software eventually. The point is still to do magick directly, using energy and connections yourself. But I wanted to offer a gentler start, which requires channeling.

Also, if you enjoy the theater of ritual, we don’t have any of that. Sorry.

3)Can direct magick help me learn those ancient magick that was not pass down or lost in time??

My question is, why do you want to learn about ancient magick?

I see 3 possible answers. First, love of history. If you’re a historian looking for ancient Egyptian fertility rites, that sounds awesome, but sorry, Direct Magick doesn’t have that.

Second, you might hope to glean some clues from systems of healing developed over hundreds of years. After all, Western medicine has developed drugs by looking at traditional herbal medicine. (I think aspirin came from investigating herbal medicine, and it’s pretty great.) I see some potential here, and Direct Magick has some useful tools for separating the wheat from the chaff in these investigations.

Third, there’s a notion that ancient magick was more powerful, calling down plagues and reviving the dead, creating objects out of thing air, smiting your enemies. Most people who ask for ancient magick are after power.

Here’s the thing: In ancient times, they didn’t distinguish between biofield healing vs (herbal) drugs and placebo, or even slight of hand, and they didn’t understand confirmation bias — heck, much of ancient history was oral traditions, shifting and embellishing with each retelling. So those powerful lost ancient magicks? They were probably illusionists, herbs, and other non-magickal phenomena.

But if you’re after powerful magick, I do have a path for you: Understand the underlying mechanisms behind magick. Harness them to create better techniques that solve new problems. Build magick into a respected science, one with thousands of researchers worldwide, connected to medicine and physics and the rest of human knowledge. That’s the path to more powerful magick.

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Posted in Beginning Conscious Magick | 3 Comments »

Do Negative Thoughts Affect Manifesting?

Monday, March 3rd, 2014

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Does your overall outlook on life influence magick?

John has been asking about this, relating to expectations of poverty and abundance. If ethereal software stays connected to you and reads your thoughts, could your expectations be sending it instructions?

My answer: I don’t know. This isn’t something I normally think about, because I consciously package up my messages to ethereal software, then disconnect. Stray thoughts don’t enter into the equation. Even with psychic information, which is always connected to me, it only feeds me information based on passing thoughts — for influencing events, it requires an explicit request.

But what about novices? Is this a real concern? I asked the ethereal software I use for psychic info about the safeguards. Its reply:

Yes, there are safeguards. First, we distinguish between requests and fears, so we won’t manifest something you’re thinking negatively about. Second, we look for a request to “make something happen.” That is, just because you’re thinking about a thing, that doesn’t mean it’s a request, and we know that. We only manifest things you ask for, not random passing thoughts.

Other settings may change this. In particular, if the user doesn’t know how to make explicit requests, we do more guessing. But still, the rule is to look for something they really hope will happen.

The ethereal software for my book says:

We have two safeguards. First, we only treat explicit requests for events as manifesting. Thinking about an event doesn’t result in a request, only saying, “Make this happen,” or something similar, counts. Second, we do a quick evaluation to see if this request will likely be positive for the requester. This can be over-ridden, but by default (unless the user explicitly says, “I know this is predicted to be bad, but do it anyway,” or an equivalent phrase), we won’t execute requests that are bad for the asker. (This can also be disabled in user settings, where a user can request that this check be disabled by default for them, but only if they are a senior user or higher.)

Those sound like good answers to me.

Now, that’s two pieces of ethereal software, made by one group of spirits. I can’t know how others behave. But that certainly seems like a good solution to this problem, and one I would expect most groups to adopt.

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Posted in Psychic | No Comments »

4 Questions on Demons

Monday, October 7th, 2013

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Responding to Don’t Mock Demons, Ola Olu asks four questions. I’ll answer each in turn.

Protecting Siblings

Q: if i can call an angel from mars to protect a family member with ritual magick, how would you protect your siblings from demon that seek revenge on you though could not get through you?

Ah, the basic question: How do I stop malicious spirit X from doing undesirable thing Y?

Some systems of magick have many answers. For this spirit, invoke this angel. For that spirit, use this ritual. Different ways of handling each spirit.

But I like answers based on basic principles. So, let’s go basic: The malicious spirit needs ethereal muscles to do magick. If you disable his ethereal muscles, the spirit can’t do magick anymore. Then you win.

(How do you do that? Disable the connections between its ethereal muscles and the rest of its mind. For more, follow that link, which is from when I used the term mental muscles instead of my current ethereal muscles .)

So, my answer to you is: I would ignore the angel, connect to the malicious spirit, disable its mind, win, and then eat some pizza. Because pizza is awesome.

(Your magick will still work without the pizza, though.)

Banishing Ashtaroth

Q: i was once troubled by a DEMON and later i called archangel MICHAEL to banish it from my room. I want to know how to banish ASHTAROTH without the aid of holy GOD and the service of strong ANGELS.

Connect to whatever you want to get rid of. Damage the connections between its ethereal muscles and the rest of its mind. Then, pizza.

Although I should note, in my experience, these impressively-named entities are often ethereal software, used by a variety of spirits. So, if one of those spirits is bothering you, the answer is:

Trace the connections back to the ethereal software. Hack it. Remove that spirit’s privelages with the software. If the spirit continues bothering you, see above.

(That link is from even longer ago, when I used the term system for what I now call ethereal software.)

Circles of Protection

Q: Can you create a sacred circle of protection with this new system of magick and you are sure of 100% safty from the venom of BAAL, LILITH, MOLOCH just to name a few.

100% safety? Does not exist. Any shield can be bypassed. The point of shields in serious fights is to delay an attacker, not to stop them. The only way to win is through offense.

Stealing Souls

Q: Direct magick would fuel its energy from the soul, and these demons have their tricks to buying even the souls of humans. I would wait to see direct magick do better than the ritual of solomonic magick.

I think this is a terms problem:

Direct magick clearly draws its power from somewhere inside the mage. And we can call that a soul, or a source, or a giant pizza, because, well, we can point to a thing and assign it a name, that’s how names work.

And the whole definition of demon is that there’s this thing humans have called a soul, which isn’t a physical thing we can photograph or measure or anything, but that demons can steal it.

So, if you pick a spirit and choose to call it a “demon,” and you point to the source of a magick inside a mage and choose to call it a “soul,” it becomes natural to ask, “Can the demon steal your soul, and thereby steal your magick?”

But there’s no reason to think that calling a spirit a demon actually gives it the power to steal your anything, and there’s no reason to think that the thing demonologists call a soul corresponds to the thing we chose to call a soul. After all, we just kind of picked a word for that source of power. Let’s try picking a different term:

Can that malicious spirit steal a mage’s giant pizza?

Honestly, I have no idea. But I doubt it. First, spirits don’t like pizza — never had my leftovers stolen by Baal, after all. But second, a mage’s source of power is heavily integrated into their ethereal muscles, which connect to their brain. So a power source not the kind of thing you “steal.” And what would that even mean? That the power source powers your ethereal muscles? That it stops powering theirs? I can’t even see what it would mean to steal a thing without a physical location.

That’s why I think this question has more to do with terms, and with assuming that the thing I call soul is the same thing another guy calls soul, and then trying to use my meaning and his meaning interchangeably.

Probably not the answers you expected, but I hope they gave you some food for thought.

My favorite food for thought is pizza.

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Posted in Ritual Magick | 3 Comments »

Mystery Solved (Book’s Ethereal Software)

Saturday, August 10th, 2013

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If you’ve followed the comments on the old post about beta testing the ethereal software for my book, you know there was a mystery recently. Today, I solved it. And, as is often the case, the answer is less of a deep revelation, and more of a simple technique I was doing wrong.

A little background: To teach readers magick, I had some spirits I work with make some ethereal software. I tied the software to a sigil, so readers can access it. And I posted the sigil, to verify that readers would, in fact, get the connections.

A week or two ago, a reader said she didn’t notice anything while looking at the sigil. That’s common enough, since non-mages generally don’t notice connections, but in writing my reply, I looked at the sigil too, and didn’t notice any connections myself. Odd, but I tied the software to the sigil over a year ago, and I’m no expert at that. Maybe it wore off?

Then another reader tested it out again. (This is one of the reasons I love blogging: Getting this kind of feedback and help from readers. Thanks, guys!) He found that everything was working. So I tested it again, and again found nothing. My guess was that his mind was used to contacting the software, and looking at the sigil simply reminded his unconscious of the software, and it made the connection based on his memory of the software’s signature, without actually using the sigil itself.

A few days later, another reader tested it, and also found it was working. Which makes it less likely that the sigil has faded. I tested it again, and again found nothing. But I kept at it, and noticed a very light connection being blocked by my shielding.

Yup, that’s the software’s connection. Once I let it in, everything’s working again. And once I told my ethereal muscles to trust that connection from the software, the sigil works again for me, quite quickly.

Here’s what happened: I hadn’t used that software in a year or more, and my ethereal muscles forgot to trust it. Like if you don’t visit a website for a year, and then you stumble on it again, and you’re not sure if you recognize it. Since they didn’t trust it, my shielding wasn’t allowing its connections in. A simple error on my part, and a nice reminder that magick is really complicated.

And once again, thank you to Grab, Nikki, and all my readers who’ve helped me with this testing.

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Posted in Intermediate Conscious Magick | 5 Comments »

Overcoming Procrastination

Wednesday, June 26th, 2013

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Responding to my post about depression, John asks me to:

Write something about finding one’s motivations, passions and interests in order to maximize one’s ability to drive himself towards his goals.

That isn’t really my expertise, but it makes me think of overcoming procrastination, which I do know about. For me, there are two kinds of procrastination: Laziness and doubt. Laziness is relatively easy to handle, doubt is much harder, (for me, at least). Let’s talk about each.

Laziness

This is what I normally think of as procrastination. Magick is hard, writing is hard, neither is as immediately rewarding as video games or eating or sex, so I don’t do the work. I think we all know how to handle laziness, but a couple of tips:

  • If the work I’m doing now has no immediate practical use, I like to focus on something awesome it will eventually let me do. I do this at the start of a practice session (to motivate myself) and at the end of one (to reward myself).
  • Sometimes, I need to sneak up on the work: Decide, “I won’t actually do a full practice session, but what if I just engage the right ethereal muscles, just so I know I could do a full practice session if I wanted to.” Then, once those muscles are engaged, I wind up doing some real practice, too.

Doubt

Doubt is less common, but much harder. I first saw this type of doubt being explicitly explained over at Study Hacks:

Procrastination, in my experience, is not a character flaw, but instead evidence that you don’t have a believable plan for succeeding at what you’re trying to do.

(Here, I mean “doubt about your plan to learn magick,” not “doubt about magick in general,” though doubt about magick in general certainly would lead to this type of procrastination.)

I encountered doubt-procrastination earlier this year. The spirits I train with had a plan: I’d learn each domain of magick to a fairly high level, and only then learn how the domains interact. (Examples of domains: Communication, used for manifesting and training; effects, used for energy healing, influencing emotions, and erotic energy; mental activation, used for awakening ethereal muscles; and so on. There were around 10 domains on my list.)

I was happy with their plan for a while, learning a few domains to a high level, a few to a mid level, and starting on the rest. Then deep procrastination set in. I couldn’t bring myself to train more, or even to practice much. I’d use techniques I already knew to solve problems, but that was it.

I tried the tricks for laziness, and with effort I could do a single practice session, but I wasn’t learning much. The problem was simple: I didn’t really buy the plan.

See, to do anything useful, you need to combine domains. Example: For communication, you need to place the spirit’s message in your brain. The ethereal muscles for communication can do this, but the muscles for nerve effects are vastly better at it. You really want to use both sets of muscles, letting each set of muscles do what it’s best at, and letting them communicate with each other to make it all work. Once you do, it’s faster and clearer than using the muscles for communication alone. (I know because that’s how I do communication today.)

There are tons of situations like this, where one set of muscles can do a skill at a basic level, but you need 2-3 sets of muscles to do the skill well. Since I was only learning one muscle at a time, I wasn’t seeing much improvement in my results. Sure, I believed the spirits that I’d eventually learn what I wanted to learn, and that their plan was the fastest path to those advanced techniques. But it turns out, “eventually” is a long time to wait for the payoff.

(I also don’t like learning magick I don’t really understand. If I can’t see where I’m going, my curiosity doesn’t drive me, and I worry that I’m missing out on important connections between ideas that could be useful later.)

I explained all this to my mentor. My proposition was to focus on communication, and for each communication technique, learn whatever other domains I’d need to do that technique properly. He signed off, I became excited and I got back to work. Success… until that focused work lead to the brain fatigue and depression I wrote about last post.

But I did overcome the doubt-procrastination (doubtrastination?), and now that I know to exercise regularly (at least when I’m learning a lot of new magick techniques), I’ll hopefully be able to keep up that pace and stay healthy, too.

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

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