Daily Practice for Defensive Practitioners

Daily practice is exactly what it says on the tin: a set of magickal practices that you do every day.  For the defensive practitioner this means performing at least one quick and easy protective and/or cleansing practice a day, often more than one.  There are many benefits to maintaining a daily defensive practice that include better metaphysical hygiene, strengthening magickal foundations, and mental comfort.

Deliberately incorporating protective measures into your daily practice is important both for the immediate magickal benefits and their effect on your overall magickal fitness.  Like any other skill set, magick must be practiced in order for a practitioner to rise to their potential.  Just as a sprinter needs to constantly train in order to be as fast as they can be, a defensive practitioner needs to practice protective and defensive magicks on a regular basis in order to have such magicks at their fingertips at all times.  Since we don’t live in a world where we need to practice such magicks all the time (constant attack only happens in fiction or if you are really, really unfortunate), incorporating them into daily practice is the best way train your defensive magick muscles. 

Daily protective practices are also a wonderful mental touchstone for soothing jangled nerves.  After a certain amount of time being a magickal practitioner out and about in the world you begin to notice, for good or ill, more of the metaphysical world.  Realizing just how surrounded we are at all times by the unseen can be frightening and can lead to a fair amount of paranoia.  This is not necessarily a bad thing.  As Jim Butcher, says, “...just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face.”  A certain amount of healthy paranoia will give you incentive to actually perform your daily protection practices.  At the same time, your daily protection practices will calm your paranoia.  Do not underestimate the importance of daily practice’s ability to help calm and ground you.  A freaked out practitioner is rarely at the apex of their skill level.  A practice you do every day will come naturally and easily no matter how unsettled you are and will do wonders to bring down your blood pressure and put you back in control of your mind and body.  In a clinch this can be the difference between successful defense and much unpleasantness.

Unfortunately as important and helpful as it is, daily practice is one of the great bugbears of the magickal community.  Like getting regular exercise and eating well, we all know we should do it but many, if not most, of us struggle with actually making it happen.  Stress, fatigue, changes in our schedule, and boredom can all make doing our daily practices difficult.  The two greatest adversaries to successful daily practice are undoubtedly stress and boredom.  

When we’re stressed out and pressed for time it’s easy to let our daily practices slide in favor of dealing with our stressor or just plain freaking out.  It’s always a mistake to forego our daily practice when we’re stressed because that very practice can actually help us deal with that same stress.  Taking five or ten minutes to meditate or do a quick grounding exercise can clear our heads and make dealing with our stress easier.  Of course that’s easier said than done with stress hormones and adrenaline pumping through our veins.  Sadly, there’s no easy solution for gaining the strength of will to do what you ought in times of stress.  It’s just a matter of deciding to do your daily practices and actually doing them.  Don’t beat yourself up if it just doesn’t happen, just try again tomorrow.

Daily practice also faces the pitfall of becoming routine and losing its power, becoming boring.  Some people take great comfort in establishing a routine and performing it over and over again, exactly the same each time.  If you are one of them congratulations, you will really enjoy establishing daily protective practices.  If you’re like me, the idea of doing the exact same things over and over again every day for the rest of your life is about as appealing as eating wallpaper paste.  

Regular daily practice requires mindful performance to retain its magick, both figuratively and literally.  No matter how many times we do the same practice or ritual we must always actively infuse it with our energy and intent in order to actually make magick.  No purposeful intent, no magick.  Routine is a double edged sword when it comes to magickal practice.  It both creates a natural path for our magick to flow through, making it easier to work magick, and can dull our attention making us put in less effort to the point where we fail to push our energy into our routine practices at all.  Mindful attention is the only real solution to keeping routine practices fresh, which is easier or more difficult depending on the way your brain works.  The only other option is to change up your daily practices so that they don’t become routine in the first place.

There are many, many options to choose from when creating your own daily practices, but I particularly recommend self-cleansing and energy checks.  Daily self-cleansing, beyond the obvious benefits, will strengthen your ability to remove negative energy from people and places - possibly the most important magickal skill in the defensive practitioner’s arsenal (other than shielding).  Trust me, this is a skill you want to be able to use anytime, anywhere, at the drop of a hat.  Daily energy checks will strengthen your ability to sense the energies both within and around you - making it far easier for you to asses metaphysical situations when you find yourself in them.  You’ll be far more confident assessing if a place is haunted or if someone’s energy is off if you are accustomed to checking the energy of people and their surroundings.  Practice makes perfect.

I recommend doing at least one protective spell or ritual daily, either first thing in the morning or just before going to bed.  Of course, doing both would be best but there are only so many hours in a day.

This post was inspired by the following article: http://witchesandpagans.com/pagan-paths-blogs/to-be-a-witch/daily-practice-doing-that-one-thing-over-and-over-again.html

The Shadow of Music

Last Friday I had the pleasure of performing my absolute favorite shadow magick ritual.  I went to a Nine Inch Nails concert.  Oh yes, when approached with the proper mindset the right concert can absolutely be used to facilitate a deeply transformative magickal experience.

Unlike any other art, music has the ability to penetrate your entire being, particularly live music.  Music touches us not only emotionally and mentally, but physically as well.  There is nothing like the physical feeling of that first bass note thrumming through an arena; feeling your sternum vibrate and resonate with every single person both on stage and in the crowd.  When the musicians hit the stage the outpouring of energy back and forth between the band and the audience is visceral and intense.  Live music creates an energetic resonance between everyone who hears it, creating a circuit of movement and life.  A good concert raises is the finest ritual magick.

In order for a concert to facilitate shadow magick it needs a few things.  First, the music must speak to your shadow.  Second, you must feel safe enough in the venue to be open to your magick taking you somewhere unexpected.  Third, you need to be good enough (or have someone with you who is good enough) to shield what you're doing so it doesn't interfere with the people around you.  Fourth, you need to have a safe space afterwards for decompression and grounding.

The first thing you have to consider is the music itself.  The purpose of shadow magick is to open ourselves to our shadows, get to know them, and to play nice with them.  Happy, shiny, bubble gum pop is not going to help you work with your shadow.  You're going to need to go into the darker stuff: music that expresses pain, anger, sorrow, grief, helplessness, etc. - the emotions of the shadow.  Music is a wonderful way to safely integrate these shadows because it can be an intense emotional and energetic release that doesn't hurt anyone, regardless of how dark those shadows are.  (Yes, you can argue that some music fuels the shadow in a negative way - encouraging bad behavior like violence and misogyny.  It comes down to personal responsibility.  If you don't think you can loose yourself in the music without acting on its suggestions then you are probably not ready for shadow work.)  For me, Nine Inch Nails expresses my shadow just about perfectly; it's dark and intense and resonates with all the scary bits that live inside my head.

You'll need to take the concert venue into account before deciding to use the concert magickally.  Shadow magick, when done correctly, is very intense.  We're talking uncontrollably shaking or sobbing levels of intensity.  It's amazing, but intense.  The venue needs to be such that you're actually comfortable letting things potentially go that far.  If you know that freaking out it going to get you pummeled, perhaps you should just enjoy the show rather than trying to work it.  I only do shadow magick at concerts where I'm comfortable with the venue (and its security staff) and only when I've got a magickally skilled friend to act as a spotter.  I'm quite capable of shielding myself in a way that I can have a magickal meltdown and not get it on other people's shoes, and I can hold myself together through any level of shadow work that I would do in public.  However, I'm not so foolish as to think it impossible that something might happen that would be too much for me.  If you don't have a friend to spot you and you really want to work the concert then you'd better have some energetic backup plans in case something goes wonky.

If your concert's got all that going on, then you just have to make sure you have a place to decompress in afterwards.  This could be sitting in the venue for a little longer as you make your way out, it could be curled up in the back seat of the car on the drive home, a closed room at home, etc.  What you'll need will depend entirely on how intense an experience you let yourself have and how well you've grounded.  Don't leave the venue without grounding.  Concerts in general tend to energize the hell out of people, let alone to those doing magick during them.  If you're the designated driver then ground twice.  I mean it.  Ground, drink a glass of water, ground again, go to the bathroom, ground again, then get in the car.  Crashing your car helps no one.  Then get yourself to safe space and either talk out your experiences with a really understanding friend or write it out in your journal.  Shadow work is intense and you will need a record of what happened in order to look back at it objectively while you stew for the next week or so.  Trust me.

And now for the fun part: shadow magick in public. 

A good ritual warms you up, raises energy, does its work, and then brings you back down again.  A well thought-out concert does exactly the same thing.  The opening bands raise general energy levels and open you to the potential of the headliner.  A good set opens by raising energy, moves through different emotions and energy levels, peaks with songs you can get truly lost in, and then ends with tapering energy and satisfaction.  Really polished bands that work with dark energy (intentionally or not) tend to open with energetic songs, move to darker ones, and then end with cathartic songs - this is absolutely perfect for shadow magick.

The first thing I do when I get to my seat at a concert where I intend to do magick is to cast some very specific filters and shields.  First I put up an inside-out grounding shield: this is a shield designed to keep the energy I put out from getting all over the people around me.  I cast it at skin level and have it ground about 80% of what I output.  Then I put up a filter to dampen any negativity from the people around me - I'll have plenty of my own to deal with.  I also put up an aversion shield to keep drunk people away from me - basically it makes people not want to touch me and is designed to get stronger when I'm approached by folks who aren't sober.  Shadow work takes a lot of concentration and being slobbered on is not conducive to any working.  Once those shields and filters are up I'm ready to go.  I will actually lower a lot of my normal shields during a concert because I do want to allow the music to influence me more heavily than I usually allow any external energy to do.  I also want to benefit from the collective resonance of the crowd; there is nothing like the energy of a crowd of 10,000 people all singing the same song with the same emotions. 

Once the music starts it's just a matter of letting go.  For me that's the hardest part.  Let down your walls, let down your regular shields, stop trying to be cool, stop trying to bury your shadow, remove the stick from your ass and just let go.  Close your eyes and feel.  Feel the resonance of the music shaking your sternum.  Feel the energy of the music penetrating your normal barriers and let yourself resonate with it.  Allow the music to guide your energies.  Let your shadow sing and dance and release. 

Let the music guide your experience.  If you don't want to follow the energy of a certain song, just pull back a little and just listen.  When you're ready to dive back in just do so.  You are the only judge of your experience.  Some songs will resonate more than others.  You might find yourself crying during some songs, raging during others.  That's ok.  Let the energy out by singing or dancing.  You might have visions during your experience (no hallucinogens necessary or desired), that's normal.  You can learn startling things about yourself when you let your shadow out to play.  It may show you things about yourself you never knew or wanted to know, but that knowledge is important.  Just because it's a little dark and misshapen doesn't mean that your shadow isn't an important part of who you are.  Accept what your shadow has to show you, remember it, and then let the emotions attached to it release with the music.  Let your shadow take hold of your voice and let it sing out and let go for you. 

When the concert's over don't be surprised if you're a little shaky, especially if it's your first time doing this.  The combination of excitement and catharsis is a heady mix and it can leave you vibrating with energy or utterly drained.  It all depends on both the intensity of your experience and how well the last song brought down the energy of the crowd.  If you need to, just sit down and put your head between your knees and breathe.  Ground like you've never grounded before.  Eat something. (I like to keep a package of almonds or a granola bar in my bag for just such occasions.)
I tend to be a bit twitchy even after grounding after doing any intense working, so I like to take a walk or do something physical just to calm down and clear my head.  I will often do readings after a working like this to help wrap my head around the things that come up. 

All in all, workings like this are designed to help integrate the shadow by bringing it to the surface and letting it release.  It's amazing how good it feels to let that kind of energy go in a way that is safe and socially acceptable.  We all face huge amounts of pressure to conform in our daily lives, so indulging in the shadow is incredibly cathartic.  It's sort of like having a huge holiday meal after months of dieting: you can't really do it all the time, but damn it's awesome.

If you liked this post you should check out my previous post: Magick of Music

Negative Energy

At the moment I'm in the process of writing up the first of my courses on Magickal Defense and I've been thinking a lot about negative energy: what it is, why it's a problem, and what we can do about it.

It can be difficult to understand just what negative energy actually is.  I often find it easiest to think of negative energy as the residue of negative actions.  It is energy that holds the feelings of sadness, anger, pain, depression, destruction, etc.  You can think of it as being like the smell of burnt popcorn that lingers in your kitchen for hours, subtly making everything just a little bit gross, or the smoke of a forest fire that dims and besmirches everything it touches.  Negative thoughts and actions create negative energy.  In essence negative energy is the distilled power of unpleasantness, like a battery filled with ill feeling.

Magickal practitioners, particularly shadow workers or anyone that works with the dead, also tend to encounter magickal entities like ghosts, faeries, elementals, and the like.  These entities have very strong energetic fields that can be either positive or negative, depending on the entity.  Psychically, being in the presence of a negative entity, like a boggart or imp, feels a lot like being run over by a psychotic two year old on a bicycle - you’ll live, but you sure will be unhappy about it.  Of course, the stronger the negative entity the worse the effects.

One of the fundamental laws of magick is the principle of “like attracts like.”  That means that positive energy attracts more positive energy and conversely negative energy attracts more negative energy.  Think about the last time you had to take a bus or plane and you could tell the person sitting next to you was having a really bad day; how that person’s anger and stress vibrated off of them.  How did it make you feel?  Could you feel yourself getting stressed?  Your patience wearing thin?  That’s magick at work.

While generally uncomfortable to be around, negative energy wouldn’t be such a problem if it didn’t have so many ill effects.  We come into contact with negative energy every day and in limited amounts it’s not really a problem.  However, when we come into to contact with too much negative energy at once or a little bit for far too long it can have negative consequences.  Psychically, contact with negative energy can cause stress, the feeling of being watched, cause you to feel more anger and less patience than usual, make you snap at friends, or even encourage you towards dangerous behavior.  Physically, negative energy can cause muscle tension, headaches, a feeling of heaviness or lethargy, a prickling sensation in the spine or the palms of your hands, etc.  Negative energy is potentially very nasty stuff.

Of course, we also have to deal with our own negative energy.  I don't know about you folks, but on a bad day I can generate negative energy like it's going out of style.  Anyone who's ever suffered from depression knows exactly what I'm talking about.  All the shielding in the world won't help you if the negative energy that's bringing you down is being manufactured by your own brain. 


Coming in contact with negative energy, internal or external, is a lot like being hit by a wave while standing on the beach.  Depending on how prepared you are, it can either splash your feet and then harmlessly flow back out to sea or it can knock you on your ass and try to drag you back out with it.  External negative energy can be shielded against, filter out, transmuted, or grounded.  Internal negative energy can only be transmuted or grounded.

Going in depth on how to deal with negative energy would require a whole book, so for now here's are some links to other entries on shields and protection down below.
 
Previous entries on Shielding:
Nightly Protection Spell
Daily Protection



Anchored Shields

Pop Culture Magick for Geeks - A Wretched Hive of Scum and Villany

Some of my favorite characters in the geek universe aren't the clean cut heroes.  Everyone loves a good anti-hero and nobody tops are really compelling villain, but do you really want to work with them magickally?  Absolutely!  The energy stores available to a really amazing villain are incredible.  However, you need to be extremely careful about how you do it.

The whole point of working with pop culture characters in magick is to utilize the rapport you've already established with a character and to tap into the energy that you and every other fan has pumped into it.  The rapport you have with a character is the same whether it's a hero, villain, or something in between.  The energy surrounding a character, however, is extremely different when we're talking good guys and bad guys. 

Let's take a look at the energy of an anti-hero as opposed to a straight up good guy.  A black and white hero, Superman for example, embodies purely "positive" traits such as honesty, loyalty, compassion, etc. (Yes, yes, I know every hero has a dark side and that those are the best stories - just go with me on this.)  Such upstanding and forthright heroes tend to gather very strong positive energy and you can absolutely count on that energy to want to "do the right thing," making it pretty darn safe to work with.  A good anti-hero is a lot more complicated; they tend to have fairly obvious flaws (think Wolverine's anger management issues or Deadpool's insanity - seriously, I love the character but work with him at your own risk) and don't always stand on the moral high ground.  The energy surrounding an anti-hero is a lot less predictable than the energy of a more clear cut hero; sometimes it's extremely positive and other times it's quite negative, and that energy can change rapidly - particularly if the character is still evolving in the public consciousness.  That means you have to be even more careful than normal to be precise about which version of a character you want to work with (see my previous post for more info).  If the energy you want is from a character during a particular comic issue, television episode, or movie you need to explicitly say so and be totally sure of your intent before you start your working.

And then there's the true villains - The Joker, Darth Vader, Loki, Malificent.  I adore villains and I tend to work with them a lot.  Yes, I like to play with fire, but you should know that about me by now.  Working with villains is just like working with anti-heroes, but much much hairier.  Villains have baggage, lots and lots of baggage, and that carries over into the energy that's available surrounding them.  Their energy is strong, often stronger than that of the heroes that fight them, but it's often tainted.  It's the nature of a villain (in everything but horror movies) to ultimately lose the battle and that inevitable failure can, potentially, affect your working if you're not extremely careful.  When I work with villains I tend to utilize just one or two qualities that the villain embodies.  For example, utilizing Loki's ability to talk anyone into just about anything or the Joker's ability to disrupt established patterns (no matter what the cost or consequences).  Villains also tend to have more of a mind of their own, so you must be extremely precise when outlining your intent in using them.  Give the mind of a villain an inch and it will take ever so much more than a mile.  I mean it, be careful!


*Steps down from moral high ground* And sometimes you just need to do a working that requires more moral ambiguity than Captain America can provide.  We're all our own people and can do whatever we want as long as we're willing to accept the consequences of our actions.  If what you really want is to cause a little chaos, then working with a villain will do that.  There will be a price (there's always a price), but the work will get done.  I'll leave it at that.

Other Posts on Pop Culture Magick for Geeks
The Things With The Stuff - A basic introduction to using pop culture characters in magick
Who's Your Doctor? - Thoughts on determining version of a character you want to work with
Bag of Holding -  Tools, props, and altar swag

Pop Culture Magick for Geeks - Who's Your Doctor?

In my last post I talked about some of the general ideas involved in working with pop culture characters as part of your magickal practice.  Any level of thought can create a link between yourself and the astral version of a character, but it really helps to dig a little deeper.  Before you begin working with a character it's important to decide which version of the character you want to work with.

Say you want to work with The Doctor (like I do).  The first thing you have to ask yourself is which Doctor?  Not only are there thirteen different regenerations to choose from, you've also got to look at the different versions of the Doctor that you find in things like comics, novels, and video games.  No, fanfiction versions do not count - unless you're crazy - and it's totally cool if you are. The older and more popular the character the more versions you're likely to come across; how many versions of Batman can you think of off the top of your head? 
   
You also need to decide if you want to work with a living character or a static one.  When I say a living character I mean a character whose canon is still evolving - particularly characters in active series where new material is constantly being put out into the world.  Living characters are still evolving and changing, so you have to keep potential changes to their natures in mind when you work with them.  It's slightly easier to work with a static character, like one from a completed series or a standalone film or book.  The character of Gandalf isn't going to be changing much, if at all, (even with new movies being produced) because the canon of his character is firmly etched in the works of Tolkien.  You know exactly what you're getting with a static character, thus making it easier to know who they might behave magickally.  Either way, know the version of the character you want to work with as thoroughly as possible so you know what you're getting yourself into.

What about characters you've created yourself?  We're working with popular characters because of the enormous amounts of energy that have been poured into them over the years by thousands of fellow geeks.  However, working with a character that we've created ourselves is essentially working with a thought form we've created and endowed with extra personality.  Oh yes my friends, chances are your half-orc barbarian in a five year Dungeons & Dragons campaign has had more thought and energy put into it than your average servitor.  Gaming characters (particularly pen and paper RPGs) also have the added bonus of available, customizable, figurines that make great simulacrums.

Many of us have put more energy into our gaming personae's thoughts, abilities, and actions than the average person would strictly consider healthy. Like when World of Warcraft has to remind us to log off and talk to our families - you know what I'm talking about *gives you a good stare*.  Gaming characters have the advantage of being malleable; we can turn them into just about anything we want them to be.  This means that we can purposely create characters with the aim of eventually using them in magickal workings.  Need a familiar to help with healing magicks - create a healer character; need help with protection - how about building a paladin?  But, of course, working with gaming characters has a unique problem: they occasionally die.  This can put a damper on things.  It's not so bad with MMORPG characters, they're designed to be resurrected ad nauseum, but sometimes when a pen and paper RPG character dies they're pretty much gone forever.  There's no rule saying you can't still work with the astral energy of a "dead" character, but the energy is different.  Just something to think about.

Basically, know what you're getting yourself into before working with a character. It's the same rule as with working with any power outside yourself - if it's got the ability to think it's got the ability to do something unexpected, so do your homework and be prepared.

Prosperity Ritual

Last week I found out that my boss is moving on to another job at the end of the month.  This woman is quite possibly the best boss I have ever had.  She's been my partner in crime on a massive implementation project, a shield against the insanity of other managers, and a sympathetic ear when I've needed it most.  I'm kinda devastated that she's leaving. To add insult to injury, she's leaving the week before we roll out the implementation we've been working on for the last year and a half - so I get to do it by myself.  But wait, it gets worse.  She let me in on some confidential info that the firm is going to be shifting things somewhat in the very near future.  My job is secure, but it's likely that I'm going to get a lot more responsibility dumped on me with no extra recompense.  Lovely.  Just fricken lovely.  So I decided it was apropos to do a prosperity ritual as soon as possible.

The day after I found all this out I trucked on over to Edge of the Circle to stock up on some gold chime candles and some money drawing incense.  I figured that I needed to do something fast because my boss was trying to fast-track a raise for me before she left and I wanted to give that as much energy as I could as soon as humanly possible.  I also wandered into a cute little art shop in Ballard (whose name escape's me) and got some canvas artist trading cards to make a talisman for myself.  I have a pretty decent herb and oil stash at home, so I wasn't too worried about those ingredients.

I had planned on doing my ritual in the hour of Jupiter on Thursday, but life interfeared and it just didn't work out.  I didn't want to wait a week for another Jupiter-Jupiter hour, so I ended up doing it during the hour of Jupiter on Friday.  Not perfect timing, but at least the moon is waxing.  I set out all my ritual components on my altar and got down to business.

I normally cast my circles using a sword, but this time I felt compelled to use a pair of arnis sticks as giant dual wands.  Apparently prosperity magick calls for super phallic circle casting - figures.  I then called the elements and deities, citing the powers associated with them I most wanted to bring to the ritual (abundance, clarity of thought, force of will, happiness, etc.).  I gave special attention to calling Jupiter, as that was the power I was banking on.  Then I explained to all the lovely forces I'd drawn up just what I wanted and why (to be paid what I'm worth in a job that doesn't make me want to jump off a bridge - not so much to ask I feel).  I lit my prosperity incense as an offering.

Next I assembled a mojo bag using a cotton tea bag (yes, I know it should really have been a hand sewn red flannel bag but I didn't have time to hit the fabric store).  I used a good tablespoon or so of calamus root, one enormous high john root, and a tonka bean, and then dressed it with some bergamot and vetivert oil.  I tied the bag shut using three tripe knots.

Then, I dressed my gold candle with the bergamot and vetivert oils and charged it.  I raised the energy by stirring up all the elemental powers in the room with my wands (they're weapons; they want to be swung around aggressively - I saw no reason not to indulge them).

I lit the candle and used the first three drops of wax to seal the knots of the mojo bag.  No wealth spilling out for me thanks!

While my candle burned I took out one of my blank artist trading cards and my colored pencils.  I took some time to meditate and decided to draw a talisman based on the sigil of Jupiter in Jason Miller's Advanced Planetary Magick.  I drew the sigil in blue, filled in with gold.  I sat it on a bed of green, sinking into brown earth, sinking into rock and magma.  Prosperity is always a seed rooted in the earth, to the imagery seemed to work.  I then filled in the sky with fiery orange for action and movement, to symbolize the prosperity energy firing off into the world to do its work.

I then made an offering of my favorite elderberry mead.  I took three sips and pledged the rest to Jupiter.  After that I was pretty keyed up and took a little time to ground.  

I thanked and dismissed the deities and elements, and dispelled my circle.  Once everything was open I took my mead outside and poured it into the garden to finish the offering.  Then I went back into my temple to hang out while the gold candle burned all the way down (never leave candles unattended folks, especially if you have cats!).  I put my talisman in my wallet (in the clear plastic pocket where your ID goes), that way it will both be next to the symbols of my wealth and will always be on me. 

The mojo will go into a special pocket in my work bag or be carried in my pocket.

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*

The Phoenix Theater

Last Friday I had the opportunity to explore the haunted Phoenix Theater in Edmonds.  A friend of mine emailed me saying that she'd met some people who were part of the theater and they were interested in getting my take on what was going on metaphysically.  I love exploring haunted spaces of every ilk, but this one was rather special to me because of my history with the space.

The Phoenix Theater is in Firdale Village in Edmonds, not five minutes from the house where I grew up and where my parents still live.  In fact, the space that is now the theater used to be the Pioneer School, where I went to first grade.  After that it became a dance studio - where I took ballet for about a year.  Firdale Village is where I would walk as a child to spend my allowance.  I wish I could say the place was creepy even then, but it really wasn't.  However, I was quite intrigued to be able to find out what happened to the space I spent so much time in as a kid.

We got into the theater around 7:30pm and warmed frozen fingers in the lobby.  My friends wanted to get my take on the space before they told me anything about what folks had been experiencing, so we went straight back into the theater area to see what I would find. 

As soon as I walked in I felt an entity up in the light booth come out an hover in the upper seats.  I asked if people generally felt like there was somebody following them or watching them from the area just below the light booth.  Apparently this is the primary claim in the theater. 

 It seems there's a ghost that likes to watch what people are doing in that upper area.  He seemed harmless enough and I said so.  I got the impression this was a ghost who simply enjoyed the energy that buzzes around in an artistic environment.

 The next thing I felt was an oddity just off the stage.  I kept getting an image in my head of people tripping in a certain spot.  I went over to check it out an asked if people tripped or felt vertigo in the area.  According to the folks we were with, this is the only area in the entire theater where people tend to trip.  Score 2 for the witch ;)

I got the impression that this was an area where energy had a tendency to pool, rather than flowing naturally.  While not inherently a bad thing, stagnant energy is a lot like standing water - it has a tendency to rot the things around it and can attract nastiness.  I told them they needed to either find a way to improve the energy flow or to start grounding it on a regular basis.  I suggested setting a bowl of salt there every once in a while to help clean things out.

That was really all that was going on in there, but for such a small space it was enough to give the place interesting energy.  We spent the rest of the evening talking about ghosts, energy, and reading tarot.  It's quite nice to go blind into a space, say what you feel, and have it match what other people experience - quite validating.  As a bonus I got to show off my tarot skills ;) All in all a thoroughly enjoyable evening.  I can't wait to see a production there and get to know the ghost a little better.

Do Ghosts Eat?

I've seen ghosts for as long as I can remember.  When I was little they scared the hell out of me.  I was brought up to think that anything metaphysical was evil, and therefore ghosts must be out to get me.  As I got older my experience taught me differently, that ghosts were definitely something "else," but that they weren't generally all that bad.  As I got over the bone-breaking terror I started actually listening to the ghosts instead of covering my head with a pillow and hoping they would go away.  I learned that ghosts are actually pretty interesting and a lot of them are very nice, if a little morose - but hey, I'm a little morose so no harm there.  I've been actively working with ghosts for about fifteen years now and have had a lot of chances to observe and study them. 

One of the great mysteries of metaphysics is why ghosts do what they do.  Some ghosts hang out in the places where they lived, others follow people, yet others drift from place to place, etc.  One of the things I've noticed over the years is that certainly places are a lot more likely to have ghosts than others.  Any place that sees regular intense emotion is more likely to have a ghost in it than a place that doesn't often see people emoting.  Ever notice how places like schools, clubs, arenas, and parks are incredibly eerie when they're deserted?  It's not just that they're so different without people, it's that the energy of thousands of screaming people is soaked into the concrete, literally bouncing off the walls and flying through the air.  That amount of energy is quite palpable to anyone bothering to pay attention and it acts like a beacon to the metaphysical.

Places like that seem to swarm with metaphysical entities, particularly ghosts.  Why should that be?  I've noticed that a lot of the ghosts in places like that don't really seem to belong there.  Yeah, someone murdered right after going to a club might haunt the place, but what about ghosts flitting around an elementary school?  My theory is that places that are that flooded with energy are essentially a free buffet for spirits. 

Ghosts are made of energy.  They are, essentially, big blobs of a finite amount of energy vibrating at a particular frequency.  Just like the living, everything ghosts do expends energy (appearing, speaking, moving objects, etc.).  When people spend enough of their energy they eat food and turn that food into more energy.  Ghosts don't eat they way they we do, but they must replace the energy they spend somehow.  When ghosts are around it's quite common for people to experience a sudden drop in the temperature of the room, feel a bout of vertigo, etc., and it's theorized that this is the ghost feeding on the energy around them in order to manifest in some way.  Feeding on ambient energy in that way is a lot like gleaning for berries in the woods - it takes a fair amount of work to get enough to make a meal.  Places like sports arenas have so much extra energy just hanging around it's a lot more like sitting in a chair while your grandmother heaps your plate with more food than you could ever possibly consume - it's a hell of a lot less work.  If I was a ghost I'd probably make an occasional stop at the local energy smorgasbord when I was getting peckish. 

I think places that have been filled with intense emotions tend to be equally filled with ghosts because it's easy for ghosts to exist there with so much free energy floating around.  Why work for your meal if you don't have to?