There are three core concepts to the magickal path that I teach. Everything beyond that is simply technique, philosophy and theology.
In our initial exercise, when we spent fifteen minutes a day outside, learning to listen, we approached the first of these concepts, the ability to look beyond ourselves and the limitations that keep our potential and power in check. It may not have seemed like much, simply spending each day observing the world around us, but the concepts the lesson holds are like seeds. Held in our hand, they don't seem like much. Even when we act upon their potential and place them in the earth, it's hard to imagine them growing into a mighty evergreen tree. But that seed is the first step in a process, much as our first exercise was the beginning of something larger than we can currently perceive. In the months ahead, we will continue to revisit the concept of learning to see, of learning to listen. At its very core this is not just the ability to perceive the world around us, but the ability to perceive what awaits beyond the veil of our self-imposed limitations.
The second concept we will begin working with is that everything is energy. Absolutely everything. The world around us, the spirits we work with, the passion we feel, the magick we wield, the sound of laughter, the flame of a candle - it's all energy. In our introductory material, we considered the concept that everything in all of reality is composed of spirit. One of the levels where we can apply this concept is by thinking of spirit as energy. It's a concept that we'll return to over and over again and will explore in much greater depth a bit later on in this course. Over the course of this journey together, we will learn to perceive energy, interact with it, direct it, and bend it to our will.
The third concept is that just as everything is composed of energy, every interaction is ritual. At the very core of ritual is the understanding that ritual is a transition of energy, either from one entity to another or from one energy state to another. As human beings, we learn how to positively interact with one another and with the physical environment in which we live. It's a simple process to take those same concepts and apply them to working with the spirit world, magickal energy, and the weave of reality.
So we learn to perceive what awaits beyond the boundaries that we've inadvertently set for ourselves. And then we learn to interact with what we perceive in a conscious, intentional, and appropriate manner. It's a path that not only connects us to the spirit world, but greatly empowers our magick and strengthens the relationships we forge, regardless of whether those relationships are with another person, a spirit, an animal or familiar, or a sacred site that we adopt and maintain.
Everyone has a different response to the first exercise, "Learning to Listen." Some people find themselves considering the relationships between themselves and the world around them. Others may sense, feel, hear or see the energy in the plants, animals, water, earth or sky. There isn't a correct outcome and both of these examples simply illustrate different concepts. If you found yourself considering the relationships around you, whether they were between those who inhabited the space where you did your exercise or between yourself and the environment you were in, you found yourself considering the seeds of ritual, something we'll look at in much more depth in the following lesson. If your daily exercise time was a period that found you perceiving the energy around you, then you're already beginning to explore the concepts in this lesson.
Sensing Your Own Energy
Most people find it easiest to connect with the energy of a physical object or entity, rather than from some of the more ethereal sources that we'll cover later in this course. While there are methods to direct energy using various tools, I like to start students off by learning to experience, absorb, direct and project energy using their hands.
The easiest way to do this is to hold your hands in front of you, about shoulder-width apart, with your palms facing each other. Slowly move your hands toward each other, paying careful attention to the sensations you're experiencing with your palms. At some point before they touch, you should feel a slight resistance between them, almost as if you were pressing against a very fragile, poorly inflated warm balloon. Rather than simply feeling body heat as you would if you held your hand over any heat source, you should actually feel a slight resistance, as if you were applying a very small amount of pressure to an unseen force between your hands. This is similar to the sensation you experience when you push two magnets toward each other and their magnetic fields keep them from touching.
That resistance that you're feeling between your palms? It's a form of energy. Your body naturally manifests it and projects it. This is the stuff that we use in magick and you naturally create it. All you have to do is learn how to use it and supplement it with energy from additional sources.
What's interesting about this exercise is how your experience changes when you repeat it. If you start from scratch, moving your hands away from each other until they're once more shoulder-width apart, you'll typically find that you feel the sensation of squeezing a warm balloon when your hands are farther apart than before. There are a handful of theories as to why this occurs. Some say that you're essentially warming up your energy centers and, as you do so, your own energy flows more readily and is therefore easier for you to feel or detect. Others believe that the energy itself doesn't change, but that as you tune in to it, you become more open to perceiving the energy, even though it's part of your own being. While I can't give you a definitive answer as to why things function in this way, I have done a vast amount of trial and error and can give you tried and true methods for using that energy.
If you have difficulty experiencing this energy, there can be numerous reasons why you're not experiencing the flow or even why the energy doesn't seem to be flowing for you. You could simply be tired, a state that many of us refer to as having low or little energy. Any number of ailments, such as a bad cold, that impact your physical body can also impair your ability to experience the flow of energy, especially the energy you manifest in your own body. There are also a wide variety of personal issues, those sorts of things that we describe as resulting in us "putting up walls," that also limit our ability to work with energy.
As you can imagine, when we begin opening up on a magickal level, there are numerous parallels that require us to address our personal issues and open up on emotional and intimate levels as well. This is frequently a very personal, very emotional path that brings about a tremendous amount of personal transformation and requires us to release the fears and negativity that we subconsciously harbor. I know that it was for me. Each level of our being is intimately connected with all of the others. Difficulties in one area of our world can easily impact those in other areas, just as finding joy and peace on an inner level can open us to the point that our magickal energy freely flows without any resistance. We'll begin looking at how to consciously guide this process in lesson ten.
There are a handful of things that you can easily do to improve your ability to perceive and work with energy.
First of all, pay attention to your diet. It may seem like a simple thing, but when I was in my shamanic training, I had extremely strict dietary requirements that I had to honor for up to 72 hours before I did any work with the spirit world. As part of that process, on the day of the working, I would typically have to fast until after the ritual was completed. While I can see some value in that approach, and certainly have nothing but honor and respect for my teacher and the tradition that she represents, I don't ask students to follow the same guidelines. Common sense usually works wonders in this area. Don't overeat. Avoid foods that artificially raise your energy and then send you crashing on the other side. If something makes you feel "heavy" or "weighted down," steer away from it.
People often ask me about drugs and alcohol and how they impact our energy states. Having lived a drug-free life and being a person that rarely drinks, I don't feel qualified to provide a first-hand answer. I know of a coven that recommends a glass of wine before a person acts as the vessel for a drawing down the moon ceremony and the groups that I lead tend to share wine and break bread together, but we usually do it near the end of the rite, rather than at the beginning. I worked for a time with an old crone who swore that the only reason that she smoked cigarettes was to keep grounded, so on her advice I'd steer away from them during any energy work.
The key is really remembering that it's all interconnected. Your body, mind, and spirit, if you prefer to use those divisions, work as a whole. What impacts one of them will inevitably impact the other. To have any one of them function at a reasonably high level requires that you take responsibility for all of them. You don't have to go overboard. Remember to enjoy life, play, have fun, and occasionally be safely irresponsible. It's all about balance. Just as you should pay attention to your spirit, you also need to feed, develop, and play with your body and mind.
Second, remember that because it's all interconnected, there are endless parallels between how you can move and influence energy outside of your body and how you can influence your body's own ability to direct and experience that energy.
For instance, I had a teacher that encouraged her students to treat their hands like portals whenever they went to do energy work. She directed us to take the index and middle finger of the opposite hand and draw a clockwise circle, three times, on the palm of the hand or hands we were going to use for our energy work. It was her belief that there were energy centers in the hands that should be opened before energy could properly flow through them. To close the energy centers, you simply drew the circle three times in the opposite direction and then rubbed your palms vigorously on a coarse fabric such as the carpet or the legs of your jeans.
The point being, almost any of the concepts that you can apply outside of your body can be applied to your body itself. Magick is an endless series of parallels and synchronicity. There are magickal traditions who cast a clockwise circle three times to begin doing ritual work and then close it by going in the opposite direction. My teacher simply took the concept and applied it to the energy centers in her hands.
However, not all of the energy we use in magick comes from within ourselves. In fact, especially when you're just starting out, it's really easy to completely drain yourself to the point of exhaustion if you use your own energy for your ritual work. To avoid such a state, it becomes necessary to draw energy from a secondary source.
When I teach, I like to start students off with a concept and then slowly move them farther away from their comfort zone, step by step, until they are working with a great deal of freedom and have a wide range of tools at their disposal. Since we began with feeling the energy of our hands, lets move on to another physical energy source that we can concretely feel.
Working with Stones
If you have a metaphysical bookstore in your area or, at the very least, a store that sells stones and crystals, this exercise is very straightforward. If you don't, you'll need to move on to the next exercise in this lesson.
Go down to the store with a little bit of cash in your pocket. Usually these stores will sell smaller stones at surprising low or at the very least, very reasonable prices. Wander around and look at what they offer. Feel free to be drawn to the shapes, the colors, or even the name of the stone. What's important is that something about the stones, especially a collection of the same kind of stone, intrigues or calls to you, not the method behind the calling. Go over to the stone or stones (generally they'll be in a basket, although some stores keep them inside a glass case and will have to pull them out for you), and simply pass your hand, palm down, over them. Move your hand slowly a few inches above the stones and focus on the sensation of your palm as you employ the same technique you used when you were trying to sense your own personal energy.
Typically speaking, as you move your hands over the stones, you'll feel one or more that seem to radiate a kind of heat and stand out from the rest of the stones. Sometime one basket of stones won't do a thing for you, but you'll find several in the next whose energy you can feel. I've been known to dig through a basket, looking for a specific warm stone, plucking them out one at a time, setting them on the counter and passing my hand over them, looking for the one that I could feel through the others.
Don't worry. If the store employees know their stuff, they've seen plenty of other customers do the same thing. Just make sure not to be a nuisance, put the stones back neatly in their containers, and use the cash that you brought along to buy at least one of the stones that felt warm to your hovering palm.
I use the same technique when I'm purchasing larger stones, the kind that are usually kept in the case. Most stores will either hand them to you or lay down a cloth and place them on the counter. If you're handed the stone, simply hold it in your non-dominant (non-writing) hand and pass your dominant (writing) hand slowly over the stone. You may receive a variety of reactions from the stone, depending on how it interacts with your energy. Once you're accustomed to sensing energy, there are stones that you will feel the instant you hold them and others that seem to radiate so strongly that you only have to be near them to sense their energy and might be tempted to try and tune them out as their energy can be distracting or overwhelming. If you don't mesh well with the particular stone, it will simply be a rock to you. You won't get any sort of sensation at all.
Sensing Energy in Nature
The same concept will work with any object, especially those that are part of nature. It can be applied to rocks, trees, pieces of wood, a candle flame, or bodies of water. Simply approach the object and slowly move your hands, palms forward, toward the things you're trying to sense. There's an entire world of energy out there for you to interact with it. Some of it you'll connect with immediately, some you won't connect with at all.
Take some time and explore your immediate surroundings. Go back to the places where you did the exercise from the first lesson (Learning to Listen) and experiment with the area where you spent your solitary time outdoors. Feel the trees; the earth; raise your palms to the sky. Interact with your surroundings and see how they respond to you, especially since you've spent some time with them.
Working with Energy
It's one thing to find a physical source of energy that you can feel and with which you can connect. It's another to actually use that energy. Part of the ability to absorb, project and direct energy involves developing an additional set of muscles. An additional portion of the technique requires you to develop new tools that you can apply to interacting with the world.
The first technique is pretty simple to do once you get the idea and quite difficult to explain if you've never experienced it. Sit or stand quietly next to one of the energy sources that you were able to connect with. For this exercise it doesn't matter if that source is a stone, a tree, or something else altogether. Using the same technique we applied earlier in this lesson, move your palm toward the object until you can feel it's energy, regardless of whether it's the feeling of the "fragile balloon" or simply the sensation of heat.
Now pull that energy inside of you.
There are two different techniques that come into play for you to do this. Some people rely exclusively on one or the other, but most combine the two at some point in their practice. The first is sometimes a little harder to do but, in my opinion, is much for effective in the long run. While the second is certainly a valuable tool, I generally apply the technique in other areas of my practice.
Move your hand to a point where you can feel the energy of the object. Take a moment and realize that even though you're not physically touching the object, you can still feel it. Think about that for a moment. You can feel the energy, but you're not physically in contact with object. None of your nerve endings are touching the object, you can't feel its surface, can't tell by closing your eyes if it's rough or smooth, and in the case of stones, should you pick it up, it may feel quite cool to the touch even though you feel its energy as heat.
If you aren't touching it with your physical body but can still feel it, there must be another process at work within you, a naturally occurring system that allows you to interact with the energy before you. There is just such a system in place and it can do much more than simply feel the energy.
Focus on the feeling of the energy. Shift your awareness so that you're paying close attention to how and where you "touch" the warmth of the energy. Everyone experiences this differently, but it's not unusual to realize that you "touch" the energy at a spot a short distance above the actual surface of your skin. Keeping your awareness focused on where you can feel the energy, simply will this portion of your "body" to pull the energy that you're sensing from the object into your physical body. Some people will experience this process as the sensation of merging with the energy so that it flows inside of them while they lose awareness of where they stop and the energy begins. Others will experience it as a channel opening in their "subtle body" and the energy flowing into their physical body or they may experience the sensation as this "subtle body" actually withdrawing inside their physical body and pulling the energy along with it. Still others will feel the energy actually filling them as they pull it deeper within their body.
Whatever approach you're ultimately successful with, stop for just a moment and consider what you've just accomplished. You connected with the energy of an object that you did not physically touch. Using a portion of your own self that you may not even been aware existed, you pulled that energy inside of your body, merging it with yourself.
Two thoughts immediately come to mind.
Wow.
And what else can we do?
The answer to the second question is, "There is very little that we can't do." But to begin developing a full compliment of tools to employ, there's another technique that we need to add to our tool box. This is also the second approach to working with energy and, if you didn't have success with the previous technique, this one should work for you. Don't worry about the fact that you were unsuccessful with the first technique. Most people find that they have natural aptitude in one area that exceeds their abilities in another area. I had to practice to develop many of these abilities that now come as naturally to me as physically walking across the room. If I can find success through patience and perseverance, so can you.
Once again, object with your palm facing the object, move your hand toward the item until you can feel the object's energy. Now close your eyes. Just as we did in the previous technique, focus on that point where you can feel the energy of the object. Now imagine that the energy of the object is touching the energy of your own body where you can sense the connection in the palm of your hand. With your eyes closed, imagine that the energy of the object enters your body at that point, floating up your arm, to your shoulder, spilling into your chest and filling your body completely. You can imagine that it flows on its accord, that you have to pull it within you, or that it slowly fills you in time with your breathing or the beating of you heart. If it helps, imagine that the energy is a certain color or bright white light. Once your body is completely full, or as full as you can make it through this technique, open your eyes.
The technique that you just used is called visualization. It's the cornerstone of many kinds of magick. In fact, if you can successfully employ both of the techniques we use to work with energy, pulling it inside of you and visualizing the same process, then you already have two of the most important tools at your disposal that we use in magickal workings.
In my experience, pulling energy within you and visualizing energy coming into you happen on two slightly different levels. Pulling energy is accompanied by a pretty definite sensation; visualizing the energy coming into you can be completed from start to finish without feeling a thing. Deeper magick often requires an integration of these techniques to be fully effective. Both have similar results, even though they work on different levels and are both useful techniques to employ in magick. It's not really important at this point if one works better for you than another, just that you practice them from time to time in order to develop your abilities and proficiency with each.
Grounding
As we continue through this course, we'll look at numerous ways to use the energy that you just connected with. Just as you pulled the energy inside of you, you can project it, direct it, alter it, and apply it in endless ways. But for now, we're going to focus one something that you should do every time that you've completed a session of working with energy.
It's called grounding.
Think about it this way. When you connected with the energy, you did so by focusing your awareness to a different level of reality. I tend to refer to this level by using the word "subtle" to define it. For instance, when I described the process of working with energy, I referred to your subtle body. When we begin shamanic journeying, projecting your consciousness into a different level of reality than that which we physically perceive, I refer to that place as the subtle realms. Most of the definitions that you'll find in various books and magickal teachings are simply philosophy or theology. We have no way of actually determining and defining the levels of reality that we interact with and, as we've touched on several times so far, in the bigger scheme of things, it's all one energy. When working with students, I tend to steer away from concrete distinctions as, in the long run, I've found that they do more harm than good. Whenever you do work on a subtle level, you shift your awareness away from your physical body. Later in your practice this isn't such a critical concept, but early on, if you fail to ground, it can leave you light headed, dizzy, unable to focus, or physically exhausted. To prevent any of these symptoms, you need to ground yourself. In other words, you need to refocus your awareness and energy on the physical realm.
There are two essential ways to ground your energy. The good news? Both of them are very easy.
The first method, and by far the one that I use with the most frequency, is to simply stomp your feet. That's it. Just stomp. I have yet to find any method that grounds your energy faster and more completely than simply stomping your feet.
The second method, also quite easy, is to eat a substantial meal, something with some weight to it. Meat is especially effective (beef, chicken, and fish in descending order of effectiveness), but a good chunk of hearty whole grain bread will also work. Fruits and vegetables, unfortunately, have very little value in this technique. I can speak from first hand experience as I was a strict vegetarian for almost five years.
In the first technique, we essentially transferred our energy to the earth. A good stomp and we're no longer filled with the energy. In the second, we transferred a physical energy inside of us, turning our focus to our physical, rather than subtle, body.
Finally, whenever you work with energy outside of yourself, be sure to give thanks much as you thanked the energy after your solitary time in the first lesson. Once again, it doesn't have to be complicated. It's totally appropriate for your thanks to mirror the words you used to thank the world around you when you completed the exercise in the previous lesson.