Practical Magic for Beginners: Techniques & Rituals to Focus Magical Energy (Llewellyn's for Beginners) - Softcover

Buch 28 von 41: Llewellyn's For Beginners

Williams, Brandy

 
9780738706610: Practical Magic for Beginners: Techniques & Rituals to Focus Magical Energy (Llewellyn's for Beginners)
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0738706612 ISBN 13: 9780738706610
Verlag: LLEWELLYN PUB, 2004

Inhaltsangabe

Anyone can practice magic to improve their everyday lives. Practical Magic for Beginners is a straightforward introduction to magical practice for Christians, Pagans, Jews, atheists, and people of all religious traditions.

This comprehensive training course presents the foundations of spellcraft and ritual magic through short, simple exercises. Readers explore their energy and senses, and then move on to developing skills in extrasensory perception, divination, and introspection. Magical timing, magical processes, ritual space and tools, journaling, and dreamwork are explained and discussed in depth. This nondenominational guidebook also includes twenty rituals related to friendship, love, prosperity, health, and other common concerns.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Brandy Williams is a Wiccan high priestess, a Pagan Magician, and a Tantric yogini. She is an elder in Coven of the Mystical Merkabah, which was founded in 1984. She has worked with the Golden Dawn group Temple of Light and Darkness and with Ordo Templi Orientis. She meets regularly with the Theurgy Forum hosted by Hercules Invictus, which brings teachers of theurgy together in public conversation. Currently she studies Shri Vidya with a private teacher. She teaches at magical conferences in person around the country and virtually around the world. She is also a master gardener and lives with two partners, three cats, and a dog. Visit her online at www.BrandyWilliamsAuthor.com.

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one
Moving Energy
Every ritual-in fact, every magical act-we perform relies
on our ability to move energy through our bodies. Understanding
energy is the key to understanding how to work
magic. It's the word we hear most often when people talk
about magic, and it's the least well defined. Mostly we
learn what the word means from context-how people
talk about energy.

The word energy means something different to a scientist.
If you know the scientific definitions of the word,
it's very tempting to use them to explain magical energy,
so it's important to keep in mind that they're not the
same. The scientific understanding of energy is at best a
metaphor for magical energy; if you lean too much on
the hard science definitions, you run the risk of limiting
your understanding of how energy works in the occult
sciences.

In daily life we talk about the energy that makes electricity,
which runs the house at the flip of a switch. Companies
buy and sell this type of energy as a commodity.
We also talk about physical energy (our ability to move
around, whether we are tired or fresh and relaxed) and
emotional energy (whether we are depressed or excited
and raring to go!).

In magical terms, energy means something different
from all of these definitions. It is a power that we cannot
measure with an instrument. Magicians talk about an
energy body, which can circulate and store energy. There
is also the energy of the forces around us: the elements of
fire and wind and water, the planet earth, and the other
planets in our solar system.We understand the energy of
these forces and how they interlace within our world.

Energy constantly moves in your body. You can attract
energy from other sources, and circulate it inside yourself.
You can also use your body to move energy around in ritual
space. In this chapter we will be focusing on how your
personal energy interacts with the energy of your environment,
and how to control that interaction consciously.
The body comes equipped with its own human energy.
Martial artists sometimes call this energy chi or ki. You
can feel it very easily just by raising your hands.

Feeling Energy
Lift your arms to chest level and turn your hands so
that the palms face each other. Hold them there for
a moment or so. You have set up an energy connec-
tion between your hands.What do you experience?
Do you see the energy, or feel it? Give yourself a
moment to notice your reaction before you read on.
It's okay if you don't feel anything; it can take some
time to become aware of chi. People often describe the
feeling of energy flowing between their hands as tingly or
warm. You might have even found that your hands started
to heat up and felt a pressure against your palms. People
usually use physical analogues to describe energy: color or
brightness (red or yellow, dull or bright), texture or temperature
(smooth or rough, hot or cool), and pitch or volume
(high or low, loud or soft).

Just as the physical body has organs and blood vessels,
the energy body has chakras (centers of energy) and meridians
(channels of energy). The energy or subtle body also
has a skin: the aura. Energy is constantly circulating within
your energy body.We take it in and give it off, use it up in
activity and replenish it.

Health is essential to the practice of ritual magic. If the
physical body is trashed, the energy body is going to be
trashed too. That doesn't mean you can't do these exercises-
you can. Start circulating energy now, and that will
start to clear up the physical body too. Just follow up with
better health habits!

It is also important to pay attention to the health of the
energy body. You can damage your energy body just as
you can damage your physical body. Circulating energy
helps to keep the channels clear and flowing freely, and
protecting the chakras helps to keep them from knotting
up or losing energy.

Most energy work involves the central column. This is
a pathway through the center of the body from the head
to the feet. Centers of energy, or chakras, are located along
the central column. The energy body meridians extend
from the central column and branch out along your arms
and legs. There are also energy centers that give out and
take in energy in the palms of your hands and the soles of
your feet. (See Figure 2 in chapter 7.)

We don't normally notice the pumping of the heart,
and most of the time we aren't conscious of the process of
breathing. In the same way, the energy circulation in the
energy body goes on at a level below conscious awareness.
We can become conscious of energy, just as we can
become conscious of our heartbeat. In fact, noticing our
heartbeat and breathing is a good way to begin learning
about energy.

Conscious Breathing
Sit in a comfortable chair or cross-legged on the
floor. Find your pulse by touching your wrist or any
other place you can find a heartbeat.Now breathe in
for four heartbeats, hold your breath for two heartbeats,
breathe out for four heartbeats, and hold your
exhalation for two heartbeats. Do this four times.
This can feel pretty strange the first time you do it. You
might find that your heartbeat slows down. That's okay,
just keep on counting. You might find that you're breathing
very quickly or slowly, depending on how fast your
heart is beating. If you breathe slowly you take in a lot of
oxygen, which might cause a little dizziness. All of these
effects go away with practice.

Many ritual techniques assume that we are able to control
our own breathing. We can use our breath to pull a
particular kind of energy into the body. We might use
rhythmic breathing to time a given operation. As air is
vitally necessary to our continuing ability to walk around
on the planet, it can become a carrier for the more subtle
energies we will work with.

Our personal energy exists within the field of energy of
the earth and it interacts with the earth's energy. Just as we
are constantly taking in physical energy from the air we
breathe, the water we drink, the food we eat, and the sunshine
on our skin, so is our energy body constantly taking
in and giving out energy from the forces all around us.
The body's energy is especially linked to the energy of
the earth and the sun. All of us move around within the
energy field of the earth.We sometimes think of ourselves
as walking on the earth, but in truth we are walking
around inside the earth, as we are moving within an
atmosphere that extends many miles above us. The earth's
energy surrounds us-below, above, and all around-and
sustains us throughout our lives.

We can learn to consciously direct the energy of the
earth into our bodies. This serves as an immediate source
of energy when we're tired. Similarly, we can learn to take
excess energy from our bodies. Some people refer to this
exercise as grounding. The idea of grounding is to balance
the state of your energy body with the charge in the
earth's energy around you. If we're low on energy, we can
take some from the earth, and if we have a lot of energy
and it's making us jittery, we can put the extra back into
the ground.

Touching the Earth: The Mountain...

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Verlag
LLEWELLYN PUB
Erscheinungsdatum
2004
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0738706612
ISBN 13 
9780738706610
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
288
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