To see or not to see, that is the question.

 Blessings Darlings!

I am not a visually-oriented person.  Ask me to 'visualize' something and I'm going to have a very hard time with it.  Or fail.  Ask me to describe something I saw, I'm likely to fail.  This extends to my use of makeup (I don't use it), my taste in museums (I focus on reading the information more than looking at the actual objects), the type of meditations I find the most 'to my tastes'.  As a result of this, while I'm old and have been doing all sorts of metaphysical stuff for a long long time now - 'visual' stuff is not something that is usually part of my practice.

Today while meditating, I kinda got a breakthru' of sorts.  I was sitting there, doing the mantra I learned 40+ years ago when I took a Transcendental Meditation class.  The mantra is the beginning of a prayer or invocation to a Hindu Goddess, but I don't know the prayer/invocation or recall who the Goddess is.  And I'm not going to claim that I'm consistent about meditation, or of even doing mantra meditation every time, or THIS mantra meditation when I do mantra meditation.

Yeah, I'm a Bad Witch.

Anyway, suddenly I realized I could 'send' and 'see' the energy from the mantra going thru' my body.  And I could change where they mantra was centered and sending that energy from - it DIDN'T have to be from my throat.  It could centered in any of the major chakras (It's not like I tried centering it on my thumb, or my shoulder, but I didn't think of centering it from my feet.)  Hey, , afor ME this is a breakthru', and one that I've gotten in my mid 60's.  I'm extremely chuffed!

I did a quick practice of doing it in all the levels of my auras, using Ivo Dominguez, Jr.'s  "Emerald Heart" exercise, which rocked.

The point here is less the 'technique' or 'visualization', and more that we all have things that we suck at, visualization being one of mine.  And that it's okay to not be good at some stuff.  Find your best ways of working, and rely on those for the most part.  BUT - keep practicing at the stuff you suck at, too.  Because you may or may not get better or get breakthru's, but then again you just might.  I'm here to give you hope that someday you might suck less at it, just like me.

Frondly, Fern

Picture attributions!

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Start Menu - Part 3 - Energy Work for Beginners

Blessings Darlings!

In preparing to write this segment, I pulled more than a dozen books off my bookshelves to see what THEY said about beginning energy work.  The books, none aimed at  adepts or masters or anything, ranged from Women's Spirituality to Qabala to Ceremonial Magic and beyond, and since I couldn't find my copy of The Spiral Dance yet I looked at the index of that one online.





Only three of those books addressed energy work at all.  A fact that drives me a little crazy (or crazier, depending on your frame of reference).  That's because, for me, being able to sense and direct energy is one of those fundamentally important things in both  magic and spirituality.  Directing energy because you are going to use it to make magic circles, to power your magic, to send offerings/etc to the God/dess/es, and so on, and sensing energy because you'll want to do divination, to sense the return of what you send out, to actually know if a God/dess is responding, and so on.

Interestingly, all three authors have strong Wiccan roots.  The authors and books are Scott Cunningham in "Wicca, A guide for the solitary practitioner", Starhawk in "The Spiral Dance", and Ivo Dominguez, Jr. in "Casting Sacred Space: The Core of All Magickal Work" as well as in his book "Spirit Speak:  Knowing and Understanding Spirit Guides, Ancestors, Ghosts, Angels, and the Divine." [Disclosure - Ivo is one of the elders of the Assembly of the Sacred Wheel, and I'm a member of the Assembly.  I also consider him to be a good friend.  Still, I claim to be unbiased in these book recommendations] [and I paid for almost all my copies of these books, except for one of my copies of "Castings" which I won from Weiser books - and that was an updated version of the book, after I already bought and loved the original version]

Everyone 'feels'/'senses' magical/spiritual/psychic energies differently.  To some it feels electrical, others hot/cold, others get visual cues, some smell things, some hear it, some get odd body feelings, etc.  You'll figure out over time what cues you into it in the general world around you.

For today, I'm going to talk about first steps in feeling and shaping energy.  Yes, fans, we're talking about psi balls! 

Here's a nice online tutorial: http://www.wikihow.com/Make-a-Psi-Ball. 

It would be especially good if you can practice that with a partner, but the #1 point is just to practice.

Frondly, Fern

Working It

Blessings, Darlings!

Now comes the nitty-gritty of working the 'no more accumulation' challenge. Working the stuff I've not sufficiently worked before.

I'm starting with a Ivo Dominguez, Jr.'s book "Spirit Speak: Knowing and Understanding Spirit Guides, Ancestors, Ghosts...".  Wisely, he has his main preparations work chapter early in the book, so you can start work right away before you're too tempted to do anything else!  But, as in all good books - there are so many exercises!  The Emerald Heart (to be one only once every week or so), chakra exercises, and such that can be done daily.  And stuff that is best to work to memorize - chakras and their locations and associations, etc. 

How long will it take for me to really have worked these things?

I'm figuring a month for daily workings, hopefully only two weeks to memorize associations.  But doing the Emerald Heart (which I will NOT be posting - it would not only be another 'info dump' into your overcrowded piles, but would also tend to deprive an author another eventual sale) once every week or so means that mastery of that is going to take .... well into reading another book!  And this is even with me  having been exposed to all of this before, since I've been attending Ivo's workshops for well over a decade, been attending Assembly of the Sacred Wheel events for a decade, and been a MEMBER of the Assembly for over 5 years.

If I was re-working Ivo's "Castings" book, and giving each of the 6 castings alone a month of practice each (and those aren't the only things to practice in the book) it would take me half a year to work it. 

Clearly, really working the books/etc. that we Pagans accumulate would slow down our Pagan reading ... and slow our accumulation!  Not the best thing for our already under royaltied Pagan Authors, but a better thing for the spiritual/magical growth of our community.

So, while slowing our reading of Pagan books, what do we do with that reading time freed up, even after we add working?

Read deep background books/magazines!

Deep background includes at least popular publications on science, history, primary sources (well, okay, translated) of paleopagan mythos, following the daily national/world news, etc.  Most of these are at your library, BTW - you can read 'em without buying them!  Don't have time to read every story on the cover of the NYT? Read the front page of USA Today! 

Anyway - so far today (1 pm yesterday  now, I'm playing catch-up on blogging) I've read a few chapters, done two exercises, and did some note-taking to help me memorize associations.  And this while sitting in the food court of a grocery store as a friend does tarot readings at another table, kids are loud healthy kids, the PA system makes announcements, and there are general 'busy grocery store' noises going on.  I'll save the Emerald Heart for when I DO have quiet space!

But I DO give thanks for the distractions - for if I can hone my focus under these circumstances, then I should be able to have really great focus in rituals/magical situations where I have built a better/quieter/less distracting more focused environment.

I give Thanks!

Frondly, Fern

Do You Need To Cast A Circle To Do Magic?

Blessings, Darlings!

In my sometimes-desperate searches for blog topics, I've seen a lot of 'experts on magic' say that you should never do magic unless you do it within a cast circle.  I rather disagree on this point, and feel that for thaumaturgical magic - magic aimed at 'miracle working' - circles are totally optional.  For theurgical workings it IS useful to create some sort of sacred space, circles being one common way of creating that.  (Ivo Dominguez, Jr., goes into lots of ways to cast sacred space for Wiccan rituals in his book "Castings", if you want to look at those).  Goetia, clearly, needs circles and triangles and probably demon-extinguishers, and Ceremonial Magick is, well, fully into ceremony. 

That said, you might have notices that in both of my recent blog posts on doing magic The Healing Cauldron and Steak Sans Sizzle no circles were involved.  In the case of 'steak', casting a circle would have taken away from the magic in several ways - first by drawing attention/odd energy from the rest of the folks in the store, second by being repeatedly violated by children running in and out of it.  For my Cauldron work ... well, let's just say that I know myself.  I'm FAR less likely to do daily work there if I add circle casting to the working, and I don't think that creation of sacred space would add much if anything to the work.

Tomorrow - what ARE circles and other forms of created sacred space good for?

Frondly, Fern

Sabbat Energies

I'm still running-off-at-the-mind over Beltane, dates for Pagan High Days, and ideas about 'what and who) rituals are for'. I'm going to try to limit this post to most of the 'dates for High Days' issue

Unintended Consequences of My Ritual Date Setting
There is at least one unintended consequence of using local conditions as the basis for neoPagan High Day rituals. It will affect the amount of energy/unity on this plane for that ritual.

[Oh, Gods, this might expand to a discussion of raising energy vs tapping energy, too. Let us all hope I don't run-off-at-the-mind THAT much!]

Ever spend a season to a year making sure that you are deep in meditation at the EXACT TIME that the moon goes full and dark? Some of my friends and I have, and we've uniformly been able to tell the exact time of the shift in energies. The same ort of enery is available for the solar quarters (with quirks thrown in due to northern vs southern hemisphere issues). Astrological and astronomical based energies are strong and time-specific. OTOH, even with their strength they still are shaped by where you are on the earth - thus the strong Equinox energy is going to manifest totally differently north and south of the equator.

I'm not convinced that the astrological or astronomical energies are available for the cross quarters at all - I think that those high days work on a different power-grid.

But doing things based on local conditions means that the group mind and intent is lower due to just plain lower numbers of humans doing ritual and lighting up 'intention beacons' in the Other Worlds. If EVERY NeoPagan did their Samhain ritual the same night, at the same time, that would be some kick-ass energy. But we neopagans are a contentuous and squabbling lot, and we do most group celebrations at a time and date that is most convenient for most members of our groups - and most folks in the southern hemisphere are going to celebrate Beltane at that time. So at the VERY least Samhain gets celebrated over a 24 hour period - and really, it gets celebrated by small groups over a two-week period. That two week period is WITHOUT most neopagans celebrating it based on local conditions!

The Other Worlds don't have linear time as we do, so I'm not sure of the level of impact on THAT side. Ideally we're tapping into energy from the ancestors for our High Days and that energy has left huge trails on the Other Sides, so once there maybe we just travel down the well-worn way.

That said, I'm in a Wiccan tradition where at least one of our Elders (Ivo Dominguez, Jr) times rituals very carefully in accordance to astrological movements. When the coven I am in was having it's formal creation ritual we had an 8 minute window of opportunity to start the ritual in, between ... I THINK it was the end of a Mercury Retro and ... something else. I'd have to look it all up in the journal for that year, and I'm not doing that right now. But since we were manifesting something on THIS plane that was new to ALL the plane, and we were only the 5th or 6th coven in the Assembly of the Sacred Wheel, we weren't treading a very well-worn path. In cases like that trying to tie more things together, from all sources, is a Good Thing.

Buzzing on....
Okay, I AM going to go on a bit on Beltane and this Southern/Northern hemisphere thing. IF we decide dates of things by the calendar, AND we stay earth-focused, then the fact that it's Samhain in one hemisphere when it's Beltane in the other is enough to convince me that Beltane is 'another new year' day, AND that the veils MUST be thin then, too. I just can't see spiritual veils being thin ONLY in ONE hemisphere.

So, would Beltane be a good time to scry and see what we've planted will bring? Dunno! What say ye?

Catch you later!


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