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

Personal Protection Routine

As I’m sure I’ve mentioned before, I teach protection magick at the Grey School.  One of the things that I get questions about is what sorts of protection routines my students should practice.  The answer is: it depends.

I believe that anyone who practices magick needs some kind of personal protective routine.  People who practice magick tend to attract more metaphysical attention than non-magick users.  Using magick lights up your aura like a lighthouse in the fog – that light pierces the astral and draws the curiosity of the things that live there (friendly and unfriendly).  This increased attention makes a magick user a lot more likely to be plagued by unfriendly entities than non-magick users.  People that practice magick also tend to be more sensitive to ambient energy and the energies given off by other people.  Practicing magick teaches helps to develop people’s energetic senses.  On the plus side, being more sensitive to energy makes working with it easier, on the negative it makes unpleasant energy feel a lot worse than it did when the senses were less sharp.  These increased sensitivities can make dealing with negative energy (most often from other people) quite difficult.  A regular cleansing and protective routine can make dealing with these things much easier.

Here is the routine I recommend:

Monthly (or at least once every three months): A full house cleansing and warding

Weekly: A cleansing ritual bath (can be done more often)

Daily: A protective spell in the morning and another at night

As needed: smudging

I recommend doing a fully house cleansing and warding, like the strong house cleansing ritual in my book, roughly once a month.  This will clear out stagnant or negative energies in your surroundings and help keep you from getting bogged down in old energy or the negative energies of your neighbours and keep your protections fresh and strong.

A ritual bath is far and away my favourite way to do personal cleansing.  It can be as elaborate as a full bath with steeped herbs, essential oils, and salts, or as simple as taking a moment during your morning shower to envision negative energy and attachments flowing away from you with the water and going down the drain.

I have a very quick and simple blessing that I say every morning to protect and guide me through my day.  I feel a little lost if I don’t say it (yes, I know that’s totally OCD but it works for me).  I also have a fairly extensive nightly protection ritual that I’ve talked about before.  If such ceremony feels like too much, something as simple as pausing for a moment before you head out for the day and envisioning yourself protected by the energy of your own aura would be better than nothing – the mindfulness of protection is the real goal.

And last but not least, I smudge whenever I feel that my energy is a bit gunky.  I personally like the heavy, earthy feeling of white sage or dragon’s blood, but any smouldering herb or incense can be used as long as it feels cleansing and healthy to you.

Shadow Magick II - Self-Cleansing

Once you’ve seen yourself clearly you can study yourself and determine what traits you have that are not serving you, whether they be bits of personality, habits, communication styles, or something else entirely.  Traits that no longer serve are the bits of yourself that are working against your goals or are in some way delaying your accomplishment of goals for personal growth and transformation.  These are not necessarily “bad” traits.  We often develop traits, like not caring what other people think or eating quickly, in order to protect ourselves (mentally, physically, spiritually) and those traits are appropriate when we’re threatened in certain ways.  However, once the threat has passed those traits can become problematic and end up being counterproductive.  That’s when it’s time to sever them and move on.

You can find a plethora of personal cleansing techniques on the web and in various New Age/Metaphysical books and most of them will work for most people.  However, for those of us who do a lot of shadow work the gentle garden variety cleansing can be a bit too gentle.  There are many cleansings that go along the lines of “step into the shower and visualize the water washing away your negativity/stagnant energy/unwanted trait/etc. and the black ooze of this flowing off your body and down into the drain.”  For an everyday cleansing that sort of thing is great, but it isn’t always enough.  Those sorts of cleansings area bit like vacuuming the carpet – it takes care of dust and a bit of grit, but does nothing for set in stains.  That requires something a bit stronger.

I recently performed the Order of Scathach Armouring Ritual which included a self-cleansing.  In that ritual you write down a list of traits of which you would like to be freed and then burn the list to banish them.  Before performing that ritual you do about six months of work.  After six months of introspection I was pretty much rid of the surface level grit that such a simple cleansing could effectively get rid of.  So I had to ramp things up a bit in order to feel really cleansed.  In the ritual you need a physical fire to burn your paper and I did this as step one of the process.  Then I closed my eyes and went to my astral temple (a sacred space in the astral plane that I can go to mentally and energetically to do workings that I don’t want to do physically – very useful when your mental work would be dangerous if carried out physically).

At my astral temple I called the spirits of fire to be present and to aid me.  They showed up in the form of a large magickal bonfire directly in front of me.  I asked the spirits of the fire to help me burn out the things I was having the most trouble with (self-doubt and fear).  I then, astrally, stepped into the fire and let the flame burn.  As the flames burn my clothes and skin I visualized all of my ingrained fears and doubts burning away.  I stayed in the fire until it seared through my bones and reduced all but the best parts of me to ash.  All that was left was the etheric body in its purest form.  As I stepped out of the flames my physical body regenerated without the old patterns.  I thanked the fire for its help and watched it depart.  I then returned to my physical body and completed my ritual.

This type of intense visualization is a very effective way of giving magickal workings extra oomph.  It’s not the sort of thing that anyone in their right mind would ever do physically – it would kill you.  But doing this sort of thing mentally sends a definite message to your subconscious and will generate much more powerful energy than your average rite.  It’s not for everyone, most people don’t want to dig so deeply to root out the source of their problems – particularly when they are the problem.

This sort of work should only be done after months of prep, working through the cycle of cleansing and realization gradually.  Every time you cleanse yourself of one kind of negativity it allows you to see the negativity underneath, you get rid of that and see what was below that, and so on forever.  This sort of work is never finished, but as you do it the process becomes its own reward.  With each layer of myself that I cleanse and purify I find myself become a stronger, kinder, wiser person.  It can be really hard to look at the components that have caused me problems over the year and harder still to see what I did to make it worse, but facing it sets me free.  Self-examination is hard work, but we owe it to ourselves to undertake it and become the best we can be.