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 Before
you meditate, or do other spiritual work such as energy healings,
divination or magick, you should prepare and protect yourself. You do
this by grounding yourself, centering your energies, and shielding
yourself from unwanted influences.
Centering:
Centering is simply returning all of your scattered energies to home
base. Usually throughout the day, you have little energy tendrils out
doing things while you are attending to business. Perhaps you are
writing a report, but one 'eye' is on the clock, because you have a
meeting coming up, and a fragment of your attention is thinking about
your children, since one was sniffling this morning, and you also have
a fraction of your mind drafting a letter of resignation you know
you'll never send.
To center yourself, call in all your scattered bits of attention and
focus, and bring them into your body's space. You are mentally
compacting yourself around your mental or 'spiritual center of
gravity'. People have different concepts of where their spiritual
center physically is - one woman told me hers was behind her
bellybutton. Some people locate it at their heart chakra or their solar
plexus chakra. Pull your energies into a tight ball at the location
where they seem to want to be at rest - if you aren't centered, you
might feel 'psychically top-heavy', as if you were prone to topple over.
Pay attention to your breathing while you call in all your forces;
imagine yourself inhaling white cleansing energy and exhaling dark,
dusty 'busy-ness' and futile wheel-spinning. This process can take
10-15 minutes while you're first learning it, but once you learn the
'centered' feeling, you can center yourself with a few breaths at any
time, even while driving your car or walking into that important
meeting.
Grounding:
Grounding connects you to the energy of the earth, and is important in
healing and magickal works since it prevents you from depleting your
own body's energy. Simply put, you connect to the earth by imagining
you are connected to the earth. Sounds silly, but it works. Here's how
you do it:
Imagine you are standing in your bare feet on the ground. (It doesn't
matter if you're in your cubicle in a high rise or even flying
somewhere on a plane.) Your feet are planted firmly on the bare earth,
and by an exercise of your will, you send roots into the earth. As you
inhale, you draw energy up through your new 'roots', and as you exhale,
you send your roots even further into the earth. Do this for several
minutes - you should definitely feel a change in the state of your
feeling of 'aliveness'.
Shielding:
Shielding is the process of protecting yourself from the energetic
influences around you, and is something you can do independent of
grounding, centering, meditating or anything else.
Have you ever experienced a day when you were full of vague,
directionless anger? or a strange hope inappropriate to your current
circumstances? Before you schedule an appointment with a psychiatrist,
see if shielding makes these intrusive emotions cease - you may be
taking on the energies of people around you, complete with their own
imprimature of hope, fear, anger or whatnot.
Shielding is a skill that you can use independent of grounding and
centering, and when you are going into highly charged situations (a
court room, a job review or interview, a family argument), shielding is
a vital step in keeping your energies separate from all the swirling
energies around you.
Shielding, like grounding and centering, is a visualizing process, and
everyone evolves their own special shielding ritual. While grounded,
draw up energy into your being. Use this energy to form a protective
barrier between yourself and the negative vibes of those around you, or
random free-floating energies. You can visualize a transparent
plexi-glass egg around you - the good intentions and friendly emotions
around you are free to pass through your shield, but all bad stuff gets
deflected. Some people make shields that reflect negativity back to the
source, but this, while perhaps satisfying to one's sense of fair play,
still leaves too much negative energy in the atmosphere. Set your
shields to 'ground out' any negative energy that impinges on it, and
let it flow harmlessly into the earth, where it can be neutralized and
recycled into good energy. |
