Psychic Self-Defense

So, you've learned to play The Pretend Game, you've gotten in contact with your spirit guide, and you've found a new fascination with metaphysical concepts. “This is easy,” you say, “Why didn't I think of this before?”

Whoa, slow down for a second.

Yes, it's easy once you get the hang of it, but just the one article doesn't tell you everything you need to know, and it definitely doesn't warn you about any of the potential pitfalls you might stumble across on your way.

Unfortunately, very few books or blogs cover how to protect yourself or put yourself back together if you fall apart, and they definitely don't mention it early on if they cover it at all. This is a mistake, as anyone who tries the techniques offered in the blog could run into trouble at some point, and without knowing how to take care of the problem, one might throw his or her hands up in frustration.

It may be a little unconventional, but I'm going to teach this stuff up front. I'm not one of those “fluffy bunny” people who teach that nothing ever goes wrong, though I'm not one of the doomsayers either. As with just about any other subject you can study, I believe there are practical applications of metaphysics in day-to-day life, and some which should be approached with caution.

Now let's get down to business. I'm going to explain here about psychic self defense, this article covering grounding, shielding, and basic energy manipulation. This won't cover everything there is to know about defending yourself, but it will tell you the most important things for a beginner in metaphysics to know. Let's get started.

Grounding

Grounding, the way I see it, is similar to reeling a kite in (without crashing it). Your spirit stays firmly inside your body where it belongs, ensuring greater safety and ability on your part.

Being ungrounded is like sitting on top of your car and steering it by pulling strings that come out of the sunroof. It's imprecise, and someone could just climb into your car and take over the steering wheel, and there'd be nothing you could do about it unless you were to push that person out and take back your rightful place behind the steering wheel instead of on the top of the car.

So many people out there are driving from the roofs of their cars, unaware they could have a much more fulfilling life experience if they would just get down into their car, sit behind the steering wheel, and drive it properly. Learning to ground does this for you.

Before I get to the exercises, I'd like to explain just how big a difference this one simple process can make in a person's life by telling my experience with it. As a child, I'd always had a hard time keeping up with the other kids, and I hated P.E. class or anything that required any kind of physical demonstration. It had taken me years to get off of training wheels and months after that to learn how to ride a bike, finally succeeding when I was ten years old.

This behavior didn't go unnoticed by my family, but they weren't sure what to do about it. Finally, when I was about nine or ten, my coordination problems got so severe that I began to have random dizzy spells, which caused my parents to get even more concerned, so they took me to the doctor.

I went through a number of tests which took several hours a day for several days, but at the end of the tests, the doctor was just as confused as my parents. There didn't seem to be anything wrong with me, even though I clearly had a problem.

I went back to school and tried to live my life normally, even though my dizzy spells grew worse with each passing year. I looked into everything I could think of as a source of blame: potassium deficiency, minor brain damage from all the drugs administered to my mom at my birth, having my tonsils removed at a young age, even dyslexia, but nothing helped the situation, even though they all claimed to be causes of dizzy spells and poor coordination.

In my early twenties, I moved out of my parents' house and began to study things I had not been permitted to in my childhood. Long story short, I found a copy of a book called Psychic Protection by William Bloom, and it turned my world upside down. For the first time, I was able to go through the day without sudden dizzy spells hitting me at inopportune moments. Just like that, I went from the girl who couldn't twirl once while dancing to a song without toppling over to the girl who goes chasing after a purse thief and manages to get her purse back.

All from learning how to ground myself.

How how does one do it, you ask? It's not as difficult as I've probably made it seem from all my talk. I was merely trying to drive the importance of this simple task into your mind so you wouldn't dismiss it as nothing since it's “so easy”. Yes, it's easy, but it works.

Borrowing the idea from the previous article, in order to interact with the spiritual realm, you must “pretend”, use your imagination. There are so many different ways one can ground themselves, and you can find a lot of other websites and blogs that will tell you various complicated ways to do so, but you don't need to do anything complicated. Just pick the way that feels most comfortable to you and that you're willing to do regularly.

Some simple ways to ground:

• Imagine your spirit is a kite, and your body holds the string, and your body is reeling your spirit back down into your body.


• Picture a strong cord or pole going from the top of your head down into the ground, holding you firmly to it.


• Hum the musical scale to yourself. When I did this, I sang it backwards and pictured my spirit integrating with my body more with each note until I reached the final “Do” where I was perfectly integrated. The musical scale backwards is: Do, Ti, La, So, Fa, Mi, Re, Do.


• When you wake up in the morning, imagine securing a net around yourself or tying your spirit to your body with strong spiritual rope. When you go to bed that night, untie the rope or release the net. I got some incredible dreams while doing this, since it gave my spirit the freedom to fly off all it wanted during the nighttime. I'll cover astral projection in a future article.


• Bless a stone of your choice and wear it as a pendant or carry it with you in a pocket or purse and use it for the purpose of grounding. Again, imagination is key here, and there is no wrong way to do this. I did this once and first imagined it being cleaned of whatever energies it had accumulated before it came into my possession, then mentally asked its permission to use it as a grounding stone. That might sound silly to some of you, but asking permission of things opens up your mind and heart in ways you couldn't otherwise. You can use any stone to do this, but the most common choices are clear quartz crystal and brown or black stones. The stone I used? A tiger's eye.

There are many more ways to ground yourself. Just use your imagination and come up with creative ways to do it until you find the best way or ways for yourself. Everyone is different, so experiment until you find something you're comfortable with.

Shielding

Just as important as grounding is shielding. This is like locking your car so no one tries to break in, but those with a key can still get in. The nice thing about shielding is that since you create the shield, you can make it do whatever you need it to do.

Again, as with grounding and communicating with your spirit guides, imagination is key. Picture the shield around you and it will be there. Picture it vividly and it will be strong. You can visualize it however you wish--I picture mine as a bubble of light surrounding my body—and you can designate it for any purpose a shield can logically have.

So do you want to keep other spirits from messing with your body? Designate your shield for that. Want to keep other people's negative emotions out? Designate it for that. Want to allow certain people into your aura (like your spirit guide) and keep everyone else out? Designate it for that. Want to do all three? Designate it for that. Your shield is only limited by your imagination. It isn't hard. If you can daydream, you can shield, and really should shield, particularly if you're going to tap into metaphysics.

A favorite shielding technique of mine is to picture myself being surrounded by love. You can decide what love looks like for yourself, whether it's made out of light, or particles, or has a certain shape or substance or color, but as long as it means “love” to you, it counts. This may seem cliché, but it really makes a lot of sense. If you surround yourself with a strong shield of love, no one who doesn't love you, living or in the spirit realm, will be able to stand being close to you. They'll feel an instant repulsion and leave the first chance they get.

Love is light the light, and hatred is like the darkness, and when you flip on the light switch, the light fills the room, driving the darkness away. Hate and love cannot exist together in the same place, for one fills every container it possibly can, while the other is empty, like a vacuum. Since nature abhors a vacuum, hate that comes into contact with love will soon cease to exist if it doesn't leave first, so it usually leaves. This is what King Solomon meant when he spoke of loving your enemies as “heaping coals of fire on their head”. In the presence of love, hatred cannot exist.

Basic Energy Manipulation

This could get quite detailed, but I will not go into such detail today, as it would get a bit too complex for a beginner's article. I'll have more complicated articles on this subject at some point in the future.

All the other things I have discussed thus far do manipulate energy to some extent, and so does every form of magick, but deliberately manipulating energy is a special art form in and of itself, and deserves to be looked at. As it is similar to the preceding two subsections, I figured it was suitable to place in this article.

Before we go on, let me clarify that “magick” with a k is generally more accepted in metaphysical circles than “magic” without one, as it differentiates actual magical practice from the art of illusion. Common sense dictated I spell it the normal way in the title to help people get here, but in this blog, the form “magick” will be used most often.

Find yourself a quiet, dark room and place your hands about six inches (about fifteen centimeters) in front of your face, palms facing toward each other. Once again using your imagination, picture and feel energy moving through your body. It might help to imagine pulling it from the ground, up through your feet, into your body, then into your arms and hands, as this helps one to feel more energized rather than tired from having spent their own energy, but do what feels right to you.

Channel the energy through your hands and out your fingertips. Open your mind and heart, and imagine you're forming a ball of energy between your hands, and that you can see it forming. It doesn't matter if you don't see it with your eyes, so long as you can see it with your mind.

A variation of this exercise is to touch your fingertips together, run the energy between both hands, and then to pull the hands apart suddenly. If your heart and mind art sufficiently open, you may be able to see a little light from your aura lingering in the spot your hands had been, especially if you're practicing in a room where the lights are out.

Back to the energy ball, once you've created it, what do you do with it? The most common thing to do is to simply absorb it back the way it came, and you do that however feels right to you. I press my hands over it so I feel like I'm squishing the ball, therefore forcing the energy to go somewhere, then I pull the energy back into my hands and drain it into the ground. (It might be tempting to keep that extra energy, but unless you're energy deprived, I recommend against it. It may unground you.)

If you created the ball out of positive energy and love, you could even send it off to a friend as a sort of love note. Picture the ball of energy floating up and out through the ceiling and entering the house of the person you're sending it to. It doesn't matter where they live, as Spirit knows no difference in time and space, so they could be living on the other side of the world and it'd get there in the same amount of time. You don't even need to know if the friend is where you imagine them to be at the moment, as merely picturing your friend connects you to their energy, and your message will get there regardless.

A variation of this is to imagine a cord of energy connected between your heart and your friend's heart, and you're sending loving energy to your friend. This can be quite draining, so if you do this, make sure to draw up energy from the earth or out of the sky or wherever feels comfortable to you so you don't exhaust yourself. Also make sure to sever the connection as soon as you've sent them enough energy or it could keep running for quite some time and drain you anyway. Energy is very obedient; it does what you tell it to, but it doesn't think for you. You must tell it every little thing: start, stop, come, go, flow, retreat. Remember to exercise your will, because the energy itself doesn't have it. It is like water that flows wherever there is the least resistance, and you must change its course if you want it to change.

Is this the limit of what you can do with energy? No, not in the least. If you really want something, send out some positive energy in the direction of the thing you want to come into your life. It's even stronger if you imagine that thing sending positive energy back at you.

My brother gave me a great exercise the other day: pretend the energy you're sending out is an e-mail, and you send it to the thing you want. You wait a bit, and you get a response from what you want, so you send a response back to it. The catch is that you have to copy and paste their response into your new response, and their response includes your original e-mail, so you're basically sending out three letters in one. Once you send it out, wait for their response again. Now you have the equivalent of four letters in one e-mail. Copy and paste that whole thing into another e-mail and send again. Back and forth, back and forth, again and again and again. The letter gets huge, as does the energy it represents. You feel so joyous about this thing you want and resonate with it to the degree that you know you will be able to have it sometime in the near future. And you will.

One can do many more things with energy, many of which I will cover soon, but this article has covered the basics of psychic self-defense and I don't want it to get too heady for a beginner's article. There are still more ways to deal with the negative influences you might encounter in your life, but that is beyond the scope of a beginner. You need to fortify the fortress before you send out the warriors to drive out the invaders.

Don't let your own body be your weak spot. Make it your strength.