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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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