Upcoming classes and events: "Living More Magically", Sun, November 6, 2-5pm, on-line or in person in Catonsville. Friday Nov 24, 4-5pm, "Black Friday" meditation, Revolve Wellness Studios in Catonsville. Contact me to register or for more information.
Magic is about making change by directing energy. Just as working with the power of fire requires fire safety precautions, or working with electrical energy requires precautions against being shocked, there are safety rules for magical work.
“Boundaries are the most important of things.” – Augustus Caesar, in Neil Gaiman’s Sandman story “August”
When we practice magic, we work in liminal space, in the boundary regions outside of normal space and time. We open and expand ourselves in order to accomplish the work.
Some forms of magic involve invoking the power of some “other”, a deity or spirit, and letting it work through you; others involve evoking potentials and parts of ourselves different then we usually use. (Some would say these are merely two ways of describing the same thing.)
So it is vital that we are comfortable with our own personal boundaries and able to clearly state them. Only when we know our own boundaries can we deliberately decide to open them.
Magical shielding is a symbolic way to establish those boundaries. We envision the boundary and see unwanted energies failing to pass through. One teacher I know visualizes that boundary/shield like an internet firewall, only letting through the desired connections. I like to invoke what I call “duck mode”: whatever energies come my way that I don’t want, simply roll off my boundary like water off a duck’s back.
“Invoke often” is an important magical principle. Whatever influences or powers you wish to have present in your life, call on them frequently. Put reminders of them – images, statues, or pieces of writing – in your space.
But it is even more foundational to “banish often”. Whatever influences or powers you do not wish to have present in your life, remove them symbolically from your workings before you begin.
If there is an ex-lover whose memory disturbs you, don’t merely tuck their photo in a drawer. Burn it or bury it, or at the very least put it in a container you secure with wards. If your job is a source of stress and strife for you and you want to leave it behind for something better, do not wear your work uniform – or even have it in the room – while working magic. (On the other hand, if you want to work magic to improve something about your job, your uniform may be a useful magical tool.)
Related to banishing is invoking protective forces. For example in the “Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram” found in occult traditions deriving from the Golden Dawn, the magician invokes the archangels Raphael, Gabriel, Micheal, and Auriel to stand before, behind, and at their right and left side.
A simpler operation, used by many energy workers, is to invoke (by focused visualization) a sphere of clear white light to surround, purify, and protect the space in which the work is to be done.
In the classic film Monty Python and the Holy Grail, King Arthur and his knights must cross the Bridge of Death, but can only do so after answering three questions posed by the bridge-keeper – and if they fail, they will be cast into the Gorge of Eternal Peril.
When Sir Galahad is asked his favorite color, he answers “Blue,” then starts to change his answer to “No, yellow,” and is thrown over the side of the bridge into the gorge by unseen magical forces.
It is good to consider and deliberate, and to change one’s mind about things. But once embarked on a working, do not hesitate.
If doubt arises, promise it that you will address it later but dismiss it for now. If you make a mistake, continue with such confidence that any onlookers (physical or non-corporeal) assume that it is what you intended to do. Fake it till you make it.
In his book Stolen Lightening, Daniel Lawrence O’Keefe suggests that magic often consists in “speaking with the voice of management before one is part of the management.” Be bold.
According to the mythology of Buddhism, when the Prince Siddhartha, the Buddha-to-be, sat in mediation under the Bodhi Tree he was confronted and tempted by the demon Mara, the lord of illusion.
When Siddhartha failed to respond to Mara’s threats and temptations, Mara tried one last tack. He claimed that the great hordes of his demon followers bore witness to the fact that it was he had earned enlightenment, while Siddhartha had no one to bear him witness.
The story says that Siddhartha reached down and touched the ground, and the Goddess of the Earth arose out of the ground, saying “I bear you witness, Prince Siddhartha.”
In his moment of doubt, the Buddha did not appeal to any heavenly power. He grounded. He reached for the support of the solid and accepting Earth.
Magical grounding is like grounding an electrical circuit. It allows excess or unwanted energy to drain away in a harmless manner.
It is also an orientation. When you know where the ground is, you also know which way is up.
And grounding is also a matter of rooting, of drawing support and sustenance from the earth.
It may be the most fundamental magic operation. Reach down and touch the ground with your hand. You might take off your shoes to make more contact, or even sit or lie down. If you are inside, touch the floor, and see in your mind how the floor connects to the earth. (Even in a multistory building, it does!)
If you are feeling over-charged, or that you picked up some undesired residual energy, in your mind’s eye, your heart’s vision, see that charge as a light or a color and watch it drain away into the earth. You can also draw the earth’s energy, the sacred waters that flow under the world, into yourself: see them flowing up into your body, to your heart and to the top of your head.
Centering is related to grounding, but while grounding is about getting the proper energy within you (by releasing excess into the ground, or drawing support from the Earth to remedy deficiency), centering is about focusing the energy you have, getting it flowing without hindrance.
We do this naturally just by slowing our breath. A few slow, deep, intentional breaths are a fine way to center.
A bit more involved is the “microcosmic orbit” from Taoist qi gong. In “traditional”* Chinese Medicine, two important channels, the Ren Mai and Du Mai or “Conception Vessel” and “Governing Vessel” run along the centerline of the body, the Conception Vessel on the front and the Governing Vessel on the back.
There are several variations on this exercise but here’s a simple one. Imagine your energy, your qi, as a light pooled in your belly, a little below the navel. Touch your tongue to the roof of your mouth. As you breathe in slowly and fully, let that light circulate down, around the bottom of your torso, and up your spine to your head. The feeling is almost as if your inhalation were a suction circulating the energy upward. (It is best to keep some tension in the pelvic floor muscles as you inhale.) As you exhale slowly and fully, relax the suction and let the energy flow down the front of the body, back to where we started.
Note that there are other energy flows in the body
– if a different one grabs your attention at any given time, don’t
be afraid that your energy is “flowing backward”. Just notice
what you feel and how it interacts with your breathing.
For
those of a more intellectual bent, centering can be accomplished by
using a “mantra of mundanity.” If you find yourself disturbed
or overexcited, recite multiplication tables, or the powers of 2, or
Maxwell’s equations, or Latin declensions and conjugations.
Nanzenji is one of the most famous Zen Buddhist temples in Japan. It’s origins go back to the 1260s, when the Emperor Kameyama went into semi-retirement and built a villa on the outskirts of Kyoto.
But his villa developed a ghost problem. There were poltergeist manifestations: doors reportedly opened by themselves and members of the royal family felt the touch of ghosts on their bodies.
Kameyama asked priests from several Buddhist sects to exorcise the ghosts. They prayed, they chanted, they burned incense to try to smoke out the poltergeist, but they all failed.
Finally Kameyama invited the Zen priest Fumon to take a crack at it. Zen Buddhism was new to Japan, so the Emperor had to be getting a little desperate to turn to these upstarts.
Rather than chanting or using some ritual to dispel the haunting, Fumon and his disciples sat in silent zazen meditation.
The ghosts disappeared.
So if there is something haunting you and you can’t seem to shake it, if the more you try to fight and exorcise that demon the stronger it seems to get, if the cliche “that which you resist persists” seems to fit your situation, I suggest you try Fumon’s solution: just sit.
There are many styles of meditation, but the shikantaza, “just sitting”, mediation of the Soto school of Zen is perhaps the most “punk” in the sense of being stripped down, and the most useful for a magician to learn.
And it’s best to practice it at least a little before you find yourself the target of a haunting. All you need to is the ability to breathe, and a few minutes of relative quiet without interruption.†
The advice we give here for posture and breathing can also be applied to magical workings in general.
You can do sitting meditation in one of the cross-legged positions, in the kneeling-like seiza position, or even sitting on a chair. Whichever is used, the posture must be stable and balanced, so that muscular tension is not needed to stay upright. It must allow for proper breathing, with the belly able to move in and out. And it must not tend to put the mediator to sleep!
The stability and balance of a posture comes from the alignment of the pelvis and spine. Many of us have a tendency to tilt the pelvis forward or backward – imagine it as a bowl, in which the intestines and other organs sit. Don’t tilt the bowl backward or forward.
From the pelvis, the bones of the spine must be stacked, leaning neither to the side, front, nor back. But the spine has a natural S-curve when viewed from the side; don’t try to make it straight. Think of making the spine long. Imagine yourself in a low room, and push up slightly with the crown of your head to touch the ceiling.
The ears should be in line with the shoulders. Most of us will need to draw the chin slightly in, so that the head rests aligned on the top of the spine. Let the shoulders expand to the sides and hang down off of the framework of the spine, and let the arms be slightly away from the body: imagine that you have eggs under each arm, and don’t break them!
In formal practice the hands are placed in the “cosmic mudra”, “ho-in” in Japanese: the hands cupped, palm up, left resting in the right and thumbs lightly touching, and held against the lower abdomen. The hands are below the navel, with the thumbs at navel height. But you can also just rest your hands on your thighs.
Place the tip of tongue against the roof of the mouth, just behind the back teeth. In the energetics of Chinese Medicine, this connects the Governing and Conception channels; more practically, it helps keep saliva from building up in the mouth.
Let your gaze rest on the floor a few feet in front of you, and close them halfway. Do not close the eyes completely – Zen style mediation is not about withdrawing awareness from the outside world.
Focus your attention on the belly. When the diaphragm pulls down to expand the lungs, the belly naturally pushes out. Did you ever stand in front of a mirror as a kid and puff your belly out, pretending to be fat? Same thing!
So imagine that your belly is a water balloon. As you slowly breathe in through the nose, allow belly balloon to fill from the bottom up, naturally expanding to the front, back, and sides. As you exhale, gently squeeze the balloon starting from the bottom, allowing the belly to move inwards so that all the air is expelled.
However, the practice of meditation is not about controlling the breath, but about watching it, being aware of it. How you are breathing when you sit is how you are breathing in that moment! Don’t feel that you’re “doing it wrong” if your breathing is shallow.
In some forms of meditation, the objective is to remove awareness from the external world and to focus entirely on mental constructions. But this is not the way of Zen.
To do zazen is to watch the mind at work as it creates the reality we experience. Ideally, we can view and accept whatever sensations or thoughts arise without clinging to any of them, viewing them from a safe detachment as if they were images on a movie screen. We “just sit”, and like muddy water allowed to sit will eventually become clear as the silt settles out, so our mind will clear on it own when left undisturbed.
But we’re good at disturbing our own minds! Because our natural interest in “just being with reality”, as Zen teacher Charlotte Joko Beck calls it, is low, sometimes we need a trick to keep us on task, so that meditation time doesn’t become daydreaming time.
The most common such trick is to count the breaths. Count each exhalation: one, two, three, up to eight, then start again at one. If you lose track, or count past eight, or find that you’ve gone off into distraction, let go of whatever thought you have grabbed on to and start over at one.
It’s important to be clear that the goal of meditation is not counting the breaths; it’s the letting go of thoughts that’s important, the counting just helps us spot when we’ve gotten stuck on a thought. To put it another way, breath counting is just a bone we throw to part of the brain to leave us alone for a while.
How do we let go of thoughts that arise? We don’t want to attempt to suppress them – that is just another form of attachment. The thing that you refuse to look at, binds you just as much as the thing you can’t tear your eyes away from.
Instead we want to acknowledge that any thought that arises is a part of us, and welcome it without shame or pride. Perhaps an angry thought comes up. We might say, “Ah, anger. Anger is a very important energy, that can motivate us to action. But I am being angry about something in the past, and I am focusing on being in the present. Thank you for your advice, anger. But now is not the time for action on that, so we will let that rest for now.” And then return to the breath.
Emotional pain can come up while sitting. We sometimes armor ourselves against emotional pain by shunting it aside, storing it in the muscles as tension. When we sit and become aware of it, that tension will often release – and the delayed emotional pain will come up.
This is part of the process, don’t fear it. Identify the pain, remind yourself that its cause is in the past, not in the present, and return to your breath in the present moment.
That is the wonderful, powerful thing about the breath: it is always in the present tense. Thinking about past breaths, or speculating about future ones, will leave us suffocating. We have to breathe in the now.
Some days your breath count may never make it past two or three, before you become distracted. That’s fine. That’s where you are that day. Don’t feel you are “doing it wrong” if you are distracted – if you note “ah, I am distracted today”, you have seen something true.
Many years ago, my karate program held a beach training event. After an evening workout, we had a meditation class, and our sensei had us lie in the wet sand and listen to all the sounds we could hear.
At first, I couldn’t hear much. I was distracted by being cold and wet and having gritty sand everywhere. But as that settled, I heard the breakers crashing on the shore. Then I could hear some people down the beach a bit, talking. Then the person next to me, moving slightly and rustling in the sand. Then the traffic up on Coastal Highway, maybe 200 yards away.
After perhaps ten minutes, near the end of the meditation, I finally became quiet enough in my own mind to become aware of a marvelous sound that had been there the whole time: the small soft sound of the breeze whistling against my own ears.
When we continually hear a sound, our mind filters it out. The same applies to other sensations. It makes sense, from an evolutionary perspective. The things that stay the same are probably safe, things that are new and might be dangerous get the attention of our survival mind.
But this filtering is a distortion of reality. Deep listening shows us this filtering in action, as we become aware of sounds that have been present but blocked from our consciousness. Where using the breath puts us more in touch with our bodies, listening meditation pulls us out into the world.
And it’s not just a form of meditation that can help us center: deep listening takes us to a whole other part of magic, what I like to call “the quiet side of magic”.
