Unintended Consequences

Earlier this week was the Grey School’s Pacific Northwest Urban Conclave.  This was a three day event held here in Seattle, which my friend Rae and I organized.  (It was totally awesome by the way.)  During Conclave we went out on the town, took in some local sights, did a lot of magickal work, a few exercises involving magickal perception, had a ghost tour and a ghost hunt, and one rather kick-ass community building ritual (hooray collaborative ritual development!).  Since a lot of our activities were actually done at my house, I spent a goodly chunk of the week holding magickal space for the group (holding protections, grounding flares, keeping energy levels even, etc.).  As you might imagine, this was rather tiring.  When the event was over I crashed pretty hard.  I expected that.  What I did not expect was that the whole thing seems to have sensitized all of my magickal perceptions.

Sapphire Soleil sensing energies at the Phoenix Theater

Normally I shield pretty hard, so the everyday energy bumps and dips of those around me don't affect me much.  However, after spending a very intense three days paying much more attention to my magickal senses, I'm finding that the energies around me are affecting me much more strongly than normal.  For example, a rather depressive co-worker just walked into my cube and it felt like someone let all the air out of one tire on a car (everything went wonky).  In order to hold space during Conclave I had to open myself enough to constantly feel the energy of the group and respond when it needed tweaking.  It seems that the openness I cultivated is still active.

While not exactly comfortable, I don’t really see this as a bad thing.  As a rather paranoid person, I tend to over shield – not to the point where I don’t feel anything, but to the point where I just don’t pay much attention unless something trips one of my alarms (which is rare).  It’s a lot like having energetic tunnel vision.  While there’s nothing inherently bad about it, as a witch I feel that I really should pay more attention to what’s going on around me so I can be more proactive about how I interact with it. 

This renewed awareness is going to be interesting to deal with.  Now I just have to make sure I don’t accidentally turn it off again when I have an off day or get too lazy to deal with things.  It’s so much easier to just let things slide, but that’s not the shadow magick way.  *sigh*