Posts Tagged ‘Protection/Safety’

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Grounding Method #3: Ethereal Software

Friday, April 12th, 2013

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I’m resuming the series on grounding. If you don’t remember the other three posts in the series, you might want to re-read them now.

I love when magick surprises me, because I almost always learn something.

A month or two ago, I set up shielding for a friend, who we’ll call E. We were experimenting with erotic energy, and wanted to leave some connections open overnight. I set up the shielding so I’d feel safe, using a technique I’ve done before to shield Lisa.

(The technique is to make a connection into the person you’re shielding, find all their open connections, and close them. (Anything they use, you would filter rather than close, but most open connections are just hanging open, unused.) It’s similar to this technique, just done on another person.)

E settled into bed, then complained that she couldn’t ground anymore. Specifically, she couldn’t feel the ground through her energy. She was surprised — I hadn’t expected this to happen, so I hadn’t talked about grounding. I don’t recall how surprised I was, but my first guess turned out to be right: Her grounding was based on ethereal software.

Here’s how I think it works: Grounding is really about resetting your energy to its normal signature. And, just like some ethereal software can provide energy for healing, this ethereal software would drain away unwanted energy and provide energy in a healthy signature for the person. Or something like that. The point is, any of the techniques in this series could be implemented in ethereal software, rather than done directly by the mage. You’d then ask the software to ground you.

But, back to debugging E’s grounding, and how I know it’s based on ethereal software. I made a guess: The problem is I blocked her connection to her ethereal software. So I asked her to try and ground, which engaged that connection. Then I traced the connection, found some non-threatening ethereal software. Then I opened the connection. Problem solved, right?

Wrong. When I asked E to ground, she had just grounded her chest — her heart chakra, if you like those terms. She didn’t think it would matter, since to her mind, grounding is grounding. I thought she’d engaged all her grounding connections — I didn’t realize it was just her chest, and I never checked what part of her body the connections went to. The result was, only the connection from her chest was active, and she could only ground there, not anywhere else in her body.

Attempt number two: I connected to her chest again, and followed her connections to the ethereal software. Then I turned around, and followed the software’s connections back to her, and un-blocked all those connections.

This one worked. E was able to ground again.

For me, there are three salient ideas here:

  • This sequence of events only makes sense if E was using ethereal software (or some other external, always-connected force) to handle her grounding. If she was grounding by opening her shielding, I wouldn’t have been able to find connections from her chest to the ethereal software, and I wouldn’t have been able to find connections from the software back to every point in her body for attempt number two.
  • Ethereal software can do grounding. It seems obvious now, but I’d never thought of that. I always assumed grounding was about the mage releasing the energy, not about the mage getting help to reset their energy signature.
  • We were surprised when her grounding turned off, and even more surprised when her grounding only turned back on in her chest. Being surprised by magick is fun. First, I usually learn something new (like I did here), and second, it’s always nice to have another reminder that the part of magick I’m working with is real and external, and not just me projecting my expectations. (Seeing what you expect rarely surprises you, after all.)
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Two Types of Binding

Monday, April 8th, 2013

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I’ve seen the word “binding” used in two different ways recently. And it’s worth sorting out.

The first is, “Let’s bind this person so they stop stalking my friend.” This is a form of manifesting: You’re trying to cause certain events to (not) happen, and to cause a person to choose not to do something they’re physically capable of doing.

The second way is, “Let’s bind this person so they can’t do magick anymore.” This is about actually preventing them from doing something, usually by disconnecting them from their ethereal software and damaging their mental muscles so they can no longer do magick.

Why does this matter? Well, if all you want to do is send instructions to ethereal software and let the software sort it out, I suppose it doesn’t. But if you want to do more, it matters in three ways:

  1. If you use multiple different pieces of ethereal software, one might be better for manifesting, and the other might be better for fighting. Choose your software based on which binding you’re doing.
  2. If you’re trying to develop techniques that don’t use ethereal software, (so you can understand how they work and build better techniques), you’ll want to practice each step of the technique before trying the whole thing. Which means you need to have some idea of how the technique operates, which means you need to know whether you’re talking about manifesting or about damaging connections and structures directly.
  3. And third, if you’re trying to un-bind someone, it’s helpful to know if you’re dealing with manifesting (in which case you want to do your own manifesting), or if you’re dealing with damage to their mental muscles (in which case you need to rebuild those structures.) I’ve dealt with both, by the way, and the solutions are quite different.
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Magickal Shielding for Physical Contact

Wednesday, October 24th, 2012

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Last month, in a discussion on shielding, Ananael said that, “Shields also don’t work well against hoodoo-style magick anchored to a substance like powder or oil that comes into direct contact with your body or clothing.”

I ran into this problem myself a few years ago. And I solved it. And now that I’m taking a break from consulting and not in the middle of a series, I want to return to shielding and share this with you.

To be perfectly clear: This post is about magick done via physical touch. It’s not about a magick shield that protects you from being punched. That only exists in movies.

Touch-Based Magick Defeats Shields

I’ve run into this twice. Neither was with a hoodoo practitioner, but both involved the same principle: Magick conveyed by physical touch, rather than a standard magick connection, bypasses standard shielding. Let me tell you about both experiences.

Energy Drain at a Dance

Commonly called a psychic vampire by people who enjoy making their world more theatrical, some people drain your energy when you’re around them. And, as Ananael points out, shields that work great over distance tend to fail when someone is physically touching you.

I go swing dancing about once a week. Part of the culture is that, when someone asks you to dance, it’s rude to decline. So, I wind up in socially-enforced physical contact with these drainers for 3-4 minutes at a time, once every few months. Which makes for excellent magick research time.

Now, I could simply resist the drain, either by holding my energy where it is, controlling my energy signature, or just producing extra energy to drown out the effects. But all of those are inelegant, and at the end of the day, teach me nothing. No, I had found a situation where my shielding didn’t work, and I wanted a proper fix to the shielding, not a workaround for the symptoms. (Which I’ll share in a minute.)

Skilled Mages

On the opposite end of the skill-spectrum, imagine a skilled mage is attacking you. You have shielding that makes it hard to make a normal magick connection to you. What would they do?

Well, there are a few options, but one of my favorites is to make a magick connection to the room you’re in (easy to do based on the magick connection that’s hitting your shield), transition from the magick domain to the physical domain once connected to that room, and then connect from the air in the room to your body. And, just like magick conveyed by physical contact with powder or oil, we now have a physical connection that bypasses normal shielding.

I’ve been on both sides of this technique. I’ve also taught friends to defend against it. The same technique I use vs a drainer at a dance works here. (I expected it would. That’s why I made a point of developing shielding for the dance.)

Note: I’ve only seen this technique from other direct magick practitioners. It takes some practice to transition from a magick-domain connection to a physical-domain connection, and the only reason to learn it is to do energy healing at distance without channeling ethereal software. So most mages never bother.

Defending Against Physical Connections

Just like you can transition a connection from the default magickal domain into the physical domain, you can transition a shield from magickal to physical domains.

Remember that a shield is really just finding connections and closing them. If you only use the mental muscles designed for shielding, you’ll only find connections in default magick domain. But if you also engage the mental muscles you use for direct physical effects (like energy healing), they will work with your shielding mental muscles to find connections in the physical domain. And once you’ve found them, you can close them the same way.

Note: If you do energy healing by channeling energy from ethereal software, that won’t awaken the mental muscles for direct physical effects that you need here. But if you work with your own energy, like Qi Gung, that might awaken those mental muscles. Your best bet, though, is to use direct magick to awaken your mental muscles.

This technique works against energy drains via physical contact, and also against advanced attacks coming from physical-domain connections. I haven’t tested it against hoodoo powders or oils, but I would expect it to work there, too.

Side-note: If the hoodoo attack is based on manifesting — that is, if it’s trying to give you bad luck or misfortune — then there’s a different set of protections I would recommend. But that’s for another post.

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How I Spot Serious Mages

Thursday, September 13th, 2012

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When you meet a new mage, how do you know if they’re serious about magick? You can’t just ask, “Are you a serious mage, or a fluffy one?”

I find it’s useful to mention protection. Even just listing topics: “I do energy healing, manifesting and shielding. What do you do?” Every serious mage I know does some protection, but few fluffy folks do. It’s good for sorting.

Why don’t fluffy folks shield? Well, it’s basically the definition: Being fluffy = Believing that everything is safe and happy and soft and, well, fluffy. After all, if you believe that whatever you expect to happen, will happen, then it makes sense to simply expect spirits to never bother you, rather than learning to shield. I think most people outgrow fluffydom when they realize that approach doesn’t actually work.

Hat tip to Magical Experiments for the recent post on shielding, which made me think of this.

Also, for my long-time readers: I wrote another chapter of the book this morning. It’s good to be back on that project.

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My Work This Week: Energy Healing for PTSD, Improving Psychic Intuitions

Sunday, September 9th, 2012

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Now that I’m back home and back to magick research, let’s resume the weekly posts about my work. This week, I did a healing session for a friend with PTSD, updated my settings with my psychic ethereal software, and helped a friend who was being drained by spirits.

Energy Healing for PTSD

A friend developed post-traumatic stress disorder after a traumatic event in April. I did two healing sessions for her this week, and the results look promising. Look for a full case study soon, once we’ve had time to watch the changes for a bit longer.

The healing technique is advanced. I can’t explain how to do it here, but I can give you the general idea: You separate the memories from their emotional charge. Inside the person’s thinking mind, you find the energy signature of the memories, find the paths from those memories to the person’s emotional areas, and disable those paths. The result is that the memories remain, but don’t trigger their emotions anymore. (Emotions can still be triggered normally by other memories, though.) I’d used this technique on myself earlier this year to get over a fight with a friend, but hadn’t used it for anyone with PTSD.

(Yes, it’s possible this was suggestion and placebo, not energy. But the results were pretty great.)

Like most of my techniques, there’s a gentle version and a more complete version. We started with the gentle version, where you just separate the energy signature of the memory from the emotion, but don’t do anything to prevent it from reconnecting. As expected, the memory became somewhat less emotional, but everything reconnected as my friend recalled the events throughout the day. She was still impressed with the results, though I considered it an (somewhat expected) failure. At least it gave us something of a control condition — this attempt should have gotten the full benefit of placebo, and it had no significant long-term results, so any long-term results we get later will probably be the result of the healing technique itself.

The second technique included a step to seal the energetic paths between the memory and the emotion, to prevent the connections from re-forming. It seems to be working, even a few days later. The immediate result was bigger than the first session:

  • Before the session, reading her recollection of the traumatic events made her nauseous. This was ongoing, and we verified this immediately before the session.
  • The session took about 5 minutes.
  • Immediately after the session, reading those same events no longer made her nauseous.

And it seems to be holding up, several days later. Look for a full write-up soon.

Updating My Psychic Settings

I discussed this work earlier this week. So far, I’ve updated my goals. Next, I’ll re-configure how the ethereal software connects to my mind, and specify the things I’d like it to advise me on. Expect more on this in next Sunday’s weekly summary.

Helping vs Draining Spirits

A friend, S, had severe headache and nausea. Connecting to her, it looked like a spirit had been draining one particular signature of her energy, and when you subtract one signature from a person, they wind up with an unbalanced, unhealthy signature, causing those sort of problems. She’s psychic but otherwise doesn’t know magick, so I helped out.

Normally, this wouldn’t even warrant a mention, except for one wrinkle: The spirits draining her are attached to the ethereal software S uses for psychic intuitions. They own that ethereal software. So, I can’t kick them out without disabling her psychic intuitions.

One option was to disconnect S from that ethereal software (and kick the spirits out), then connect her to some better ethereal software, like the one for my book. Once it set up (in 3-6 months*), she’d get even better intuitions. But S was worried about the delay.

*Why so long? Because she doesn’t know magick, the ethereal software has to handle 100% of the communication. Once you learn techniques to help out with the communication, you can connect to new ethereal software much quicker. But, unfortunately, it also takes a few months to learn those techniques.

The spirits seemed intelligent and generally friendly, and weren’t aware they were hurting people with these energy drains. So I brokered a deal: I got my trainers to show those spirits how to produce their own energy more efficiently, so they won’t have to drain people anymore. Those spirits agreed to stop draining people. It’s working well, S is recovering, I’m in touch with the spirits, and hopefully they’ll do something helpful and productive with their time now.

Detailed results: The problem initially started about 48 hours ago. It went unaddressed for about 24 hours from when S developed symptoms, to S asking for help, to me getting the email, to me trying to chase the spirits off a few times (short-term improvements, but no long-term change), to me figuring out about the ethereal software, to me seeing this solution. Within a few hours* of arranging that deal, S’s headache and nausea went from crippling to manageable, and her condition has continued to improve in the 24 hours since.

*Why a few hours to notice a change? The problem isn’t the drain itself, it’s the unhealthy energy signature, and it takes a while for your energy to return to normal. If you know how to reset your energy, you can reduce this to a few minutes, but S doesn’t know that technique yet, so a few hours is typical.

By the way, if you notice and address the problem faster, before your signature gets too unhealthy, you’ll have a much faster recovery.

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Coaching Lisa on Shielding

Tuesday, August 21st, 2012

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As you get better with magick, you’ll attract the attention of increasingly powerful spirits. Some will want to drain your energy, leaving you exhausted. Protecting yourself is an excellent way to develop your skills.

Yes, seriously: I used aggressive spirits as a metric for my own skills, and the people I train do, too. It forces you to learn good shielding, and good offense to chase them away, and how to sense and follow and remove connections, and a bunch of other skills that also help with energy healing, and psychic intuitions, and other constructive forms of magick.

I want to share a training I did with Lisa recently, helping her debug her shielding. It’ll show you how I approach these problems, along with a possibly-useful technique. And it’ll give you a sense of what it’s like to do direct magick, including some steps that I normally gloss over.

The training started with a social call over gmail chat. Lisa’s reply to, “How was your week?” ended with “I got drained by spirits twice.” She wasn’t upset or worried, just annoyed with herself for letting it happen.

“Can I help?” I asked. Here, “help” might be training, shielding her while she completes her workweek, or chasing these particular spirits away.

“No. I’ll just have to do better next time.” Lisa doesn’t like asking for help. I’ve learned not to accept her first no, though, and started helping her anyway.

First step: Assess the situation. I connected to her, verified that the spirits weren’t currently draining her, then just pretended she’d asked for training. I replied, “When I try to do better, there are usually two possibilities. If the spirits are getting in so fast that I can’t respond, then I need better defense. If they can’t get in easily, but I can’t do anything to chase them away, then I need better offense. Which is it for you?”

“They can’t get in during the day. It’s at night, when I’m asleep, that they drain me.”

“OK, so that’s a defense problem,” I replied. Lisa looked surprised, like she’d thought she should focus on offense, hitting them when she woke up so they wouldn’t come back the next night. The problem is, unless you can do truly exceptional damage, they’ll probably drain you again and take their lumps in the morning. You need enough shielding so they can’t get in, or at least so you wake up and defend yourself before they drain you.

I continued, “Go to the mental muscles that handle your shielding and ask them to set up your shield as a permanent structure that works passively, rather than something you have to actively maintain.” This is pretty typical of direct magick: You need to know the right command, and which mental muscles (or ethereal software) to send it to, but once you do, everything simply works. (Keep in mind that Lisa has been at this for several years, and has a bunch of mental muscles awake. I couldn’t give that kind of instruction to a novice.)

Lisa stared off into the distance for less than a minute. I’m the same way when I do magick: It’s obvious that I’m not focused on what’s going on, but I generally don’t close my eyes. Keeping them open looks less strange, plus it lets me continue simple tasks like walking or driving.

When she was done, Lisa said, “The muscles said, ‘So, you want us to set it up as a structure that will conduct those functions?'” She smiled as she said it. She usually finds these pedantic confirmations funny, since it’s obvious to her that the answer is yes. I sometimes remind her that this is a sign she’s not conveying her commands precisely enough, or perhaps not using quite the correct commands, but usually I just let her be amused. “I told them yes, and it’s done.”

And that was it. The whole session took probably two minutes, and her shielding should now hold up overnight just fine now. At least, until she attracts the attention of even better spirits.

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Disabling Malicious Spirits

Saturday, August 18th, 2012

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Today, I’ll answer Ananael’s question about disabling malicious spirits by disconnecting their mental muscles from their thinking mind.

To recap, in Don’t Mock Demons, I said that, to rid myself of a malicious spirit, “I would damage the connections between the spirit’s mental muscles and its thinking mind.” Ananael asked if spirits have mental muscles and thinking minds (answer: yes), and he also asked:

It’s not clear to me that there’s a “connection” between [the mental muscles and thinking mind of the spirit] that would be amenable to disruption. Or have you experimented with this method and found it to be effective in ridding yourself of spirits that are bothering you?

The short answer is: Yes, disrupting the connections between mental muscles and thinking mind is my default method for dealing with persistent malicious spirits. (If I don’t want to injure the spirit, I’ll temporarily disable its mental muscles instead.)

The technique takes me less than 5 seconds at this point. Immediately, I’ll feel the spirit’s connections go limp, whether they were pressing against my shields or had already penetrated into my mind and body. Within seconds, whatever they were doing will stop, and I’ll feel my mind shift back to its normal state. And as the spirit’s magick shuts down over the next 10 seconds or so, its shielding will drop, and it will be unable to resist anything else I do.

In short, disrupting a spirit’s mental muscles, or the connections between their mental muscles and thinking mind, ends the fight, and ends it quickly. Which makes me confident it was this technique, and not something else or some coincidence, that drove those results. I’ve verified this dozens of times over the past decade.

This Feels Different than Banishing

When I’ve seen spirits banished, it amounts to setting up a protected space, removing the spirit’s connections to that space, and erecting some sort of shield around the space.

I don’t like relying on banishing, because I’ve never seen a shield I couldn’t bypass. If I were in the role of the malicious spirit, and someone banished me, it would slow me down, and might even make me decide they weren’t worth the trouble, but it wouldn’t stop me. If I wanted in, I’d get in.

Shutting down a spirit’s mental muscles actually stops them. You can stay connected to them and see things shutting down, see their shielding drop, and see them unable to continue the fight. It doesn’t require the proper ritual for the spirit, either, it simply shuts them down and wins. I like that.

Remember when I talked about exploring the Goetia, and said that I could fight pretty well? This is the technique I would use in that fight, and I would expect it to win.

Incidentally, I don’t make this damage lasting unless I have to. In my first encounter with the spirit, I’ll temporarily disable their mental muscles, release the part of their mind that handles communication, then talk to them and release my hold on their mind. I only make the damage lasting if they come back for a second round.

Visualization Won’t Work

One more thing to mention: If you’re used to visualizations, you might want to imagine the spirit’s mental muscles, imagine some chords going to their mind, and imagine a knife severing the chords. That’s unlikely to work.

The reason is, the mental muscles that drive these techniques are built to awaken your mental muscles. They know how to turn mental muscles on, not how to turn them off. So, when you use that visualization, you’re asking your mental muscles to produce an outcome that they don’t know how to produce, and you get ineffective magick.

Instead, you need to step your mental muscles through the technique until they know how to do it. Which is one of the core skills of direct magick, and deserves a whole series of its own.

Comments / questions? You know what to do.

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Don’t Mock Demons

Tuesday, August 14th, 2012

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Great post from Ananael a few weeks back, discussing a paranormal investigator named Buell who claims to have been bothered by a Goetic demon for 4 years. Buell’s solution?

Buell claims to have dealt with the problem by mocking the entity regularly, referring to it as a “bunny”.

When a problem lasts for 4 years, your home remedy didn’t work. And yet, I see lots of people with home remedies based on the idea that, by simply not acknowledging the malicious spirit, it can’t harm you.

There is exactly one thing in this world which cares what you expect to happen, and that thing is the placebo effect. If your symptoms are just hypochondria, then by all means, laugh and mock them.

But we learn energy healing because it’s more than placebo. We learn manifesting because it’s more than positive thinking and hard work. We learn magick because it has a real, external existence separate from our expectations.

And remember: Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away. (Philip K. Dick.) If that real, external existence turns out to be malicious, it won’t stop being malicious just because you mock it or refuse to believe in it.

You have to actually do something to the external world to protect yourself. The methods will differ: Ananael would probably use some sort of protection or banishing ritual, while I would damage the connections between the spirit’s mental muscles and its thinking mind. But neither of us would just wish it away.

I think that’s Ananael’s point at the close of his article:

paranormal investigators don’t need psychics who give vague and impossible to verify information, they need magicians who can command spiritual forces when the need to do so arises. Those of us who study occultism work with these things all the time, and while it may seem unscientific to enlist our help, it still strikes me as wise.

Exactly.

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Shielding While Asleep (Part 4 of 4)

Thursday, November 3rd, 2011

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Advanced direct magick to protect yourself even while asleep.

HL’s original question was:

I have difficult to protect myself during sleep.

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

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

Why Shielding Fails

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

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

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

Solution: Structure-Based Closing

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

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

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

Working With Structures

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

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

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

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

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

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

Shielding With Structures

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

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

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

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

Allowing Friendly Connections

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

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

Advanced Shielding

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

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

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

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

Testing It

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

Questions

Got a question? Leave a comment below.

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Shielding: Tips for Beginners (Part 3 of 4)

Tuesday, November 1st, 2011

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Easy-to-use tips for better shielding.

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

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

You Aren’t Doing Anything Wrong

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

Remove Connections Quickly

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

Basic Hygiene

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

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

Use a System

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

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

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

Next

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

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