Wicca for Beginners (5 page)

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Fundamental Wiccan Tools:

Energy, Visualization,
Grounding, and Shielding

If you’ve read this
far (instead of just skipping to this page), you’ve taken in a lot of philosophical stuff about what Wicca is and what Wiccans believe. Understanding that information is essential to understanding Wicca, but it’s also important to remember that Wicca is a hands-on religion. Wiccans don’t just follow their religion; they explore it, participate in it, live it.

Actively participating in Wicca requires a few basic tools, or skills. The most fundamental tool you have as a Wiccan—or just as a person, for that matter—is your mind. This chapter and the next will focus on the mind in order to lay the groundwork for you to learn about ritual and magic. A lot of Wiccan practice is centered around training your mind and using it in new ways. Perhaps the most essential, basic mental practices in Wicca are visualization, grounding, and shielding. Before you dive into those, however, it’s important to understand a little bit about energy.

What Is Energy?

All life is infused with energy. As Obi Wan Kenobi says of the “Force” in the 1977 movie
Star Wars
, “It’s an energy field created by all living things. It surrounds us and penetrates us. It binds the galaxy together.” He could be describing what Wiccans call “energy” just as easily. For some Wiccans, energy and what I’ve been calling deity are the same thing: the life force. For others, deity is sentient and energy is not. Still others think that energy emanates from deity, or comes from the Goddess. In several of his books, Scott Cunningham, a famous Wiccan author, stated that he felt there were three types of energy, which he called power. The first is personal power, the energy that resides and is generated by your own body. The second is divine power, the energy that comes from the gods. The third is earth power, the energy that infuses and is generated by the earth. This is a useful way to think about energy in Wicca, as long as you remember that ultimately all three types of energy are the same thing, despite the fact that they “reside” and are generated from different sources. Whichever viewpoint they subscribe to, most Wiccans believe that everything contains some sort of energy.

Energy is important in Wicca. Wiccans hone their ability to feel and “read” it in order to understand the cycles of nature better, to tune in to their surroundings, and to get psychic information. Wiccans also believe that they can bend and use energy to bring about change, which is what magic is all about.

As with so many things in Wicca, you must either believe that energy exists in all things or at least have an open mind about it if you really want to learn to feel and use it. It’s true that you might feel energy “by accident,” whether you believe in it or not. If you’ve ever walked into a party and felt the vibe of the group, or stood in a very old church and sensed the gentle hum of the power that has collected there during years of worship, you’ve felt energy. It’s a heck of a lot easier if you relax, turn off your inner Mr. Spock, and allow yourself to feel it. Here are some basic exercises to get you started.

exercise 1: hand to hand

This is a tried-and-true “first energy experience” technique. Nearly every Wiccan I know has used this trick at least once. Find a place where you can sit quietly and undisturbed for a while. It can be on the floor, in a chair, outside, or whatever is comfortable for you. It’s important that you be able to relax. Sit up straight if you can do so while you are still relaxed. I’ve found that my ability to do energy work is enhanced when my spine is straight. Sitting up straight may or may not work for you, so experiment with your posture.

Once you’re comfy, rub your hands together gently for several seconds until you feel warmth between them. Then hold your hands together in front of you as if you were a child saying a bedtime prayer, and slowly move them apart a few inches. As you move them apart, see if you can feel the energy that you just raised zip between your palms or fingers (and I’m talking energy here, not warmth!). For some people the energy feels, or even looks, a bit like you are playing cat’s cradle with string between your hands. Don’t expect a lightning strike here; this energy is subtle and tingly. I tend to feel it emanating from the center of my palms; others feel it from their fingers.

Next try moving your hands gently and slowly back together. As you do this, see if you can feel any resistance between your hands. For some people, this feels like the push that happens when you put the wrong ends of two magnets together and they repel each other. Don’t be discouraged if you don’t feel anything the first time you try this. If you practice this exercise, you will feel it eventually.

A variation on this technique is to work with a partner. Sit facing your partner, rub your own hands together like you did when you were alone, and have your partner do the same. Then touch your hands to your partner’s as if you were both pushing opposite sides of a door or playing patty-cake. Try pulling your hands away from each other slowly and see if you can feel the energy between you. Then try to feel the resistance as you push your hands back up to your partner’s.

Some Wiccans believe that they have a “receptive” and an “active” hand. The receptive hand is better at feeling energy, and the active hand is better at directing it. Most Wiccans who believe this say that their dominant hand is the active one, so if you are right-handed, it would be best to try this energy-feeling exercise with your left. Personally, I’ve never felt that one of my hands is receptive and one active—they both work for both things—but there are people in my coven who swear by the “receptive hand” theory. This is another one of those points that you can experiment with to find which way works best for you. Maybe your feet are better than either of your hands!

exercise 2: stones and sticks

Once you have felt the energy in your hands, try to feel energy in a crystal or stone. Hint: crystals are natural batteries, so their energy tends to be easy to feel. Sit comfortably, relax, and pick up the stone or crystal in your hand. Hold it gently, and see what you feel. You may not feel anything with your hand at all, but rather “feel” the sensation in your head. You may get a mental image instead of a physical sensation. Or you may just feel the crystal zinging in your palm. Try a variety of different stones. Is their energy different? If so, how? Are some easier to sense than others? If you find a particular stone that “sings” to you, you may want to keep it for magical work.

Next, see if you can feel the energy in plants or trees. Again, find a place where you can relax and work undisturbed, this time outside. Sit or stand near a plant or tree, and hold your hands a couple of inches away from it. Yes, you may feel silly doing this. Your neighbors will think you are weird if they see you doing it in your yard. So what? It’s all in the name of experimentation and spiritual growth, right? Shut your eyes, and try to feel the difference in the energy as you move your hands slowly toward the plant. You should not need to touch the plant to feel its energy “signature,” but touch it if you can’t feel anything without doing so. This might be easier with a smaller plant than a tree. Trees are big, and they have wonderful, strong energy signatures, but they’re not as zippy, for lack of a better word, as, for example, the oregano plant in your garden. If the tree is a bass, the herb is a soprano.

When you have felt the energy of stones and plants, try working with household objects. They have energy signatures too. Try to feel the energy of a block of wood or a plastic toy. The vibe may not be as strong as it is with plants and crystals, but it should still be there. Wiccans who become adept at feeling energy in inanimate objects often try their hands at psychometry. Psychometry is the ability to touch something and get information about its past from its vibration; for example, picking up an old photograph and learning something about the people pictured. Don’t feel that you are not a good Wiccan if you can’t do full-blown psychometry, though. Many, many Wiccans can’t do it either! The important thing is to keep practicing and trying to feel energy.

Energy Follows Thought: Visualization

Once you’ve felt energy, you can begin to learn how to work with it to do ritual, become more familiar with deity, work magic, and make positive changes in your life. The first step in doing this is to learn about visualization. Wiccans use visualization constantly in magic and energy work. In Wicca, visualization means creating a picture in your mind’s eye of what you want to happen. There is a magical idea that “energy follows thought.” What that means is that if you create and see something in your mind, that image attracts energy, and whatever you’re picturing begins to become a reality.

This is not the same as the crazy “new age” idea that if we all got together and held hands and visualized world peace, the armies of the world would lay down their weapons, all borders would vanish, and everyone would get along. Visualization is more like using affirmations. Affirmations are positive statements that you repeat over and over to yourself to impress them on your subconscious—that deep, mysterious part of your brain that operates below the level of your conscious mind. If you can imprint a concept on your subconscious mind, the subconscious works to make the idea a reality. Unlike your conscious mind, which is tied more closely to your everyday life and probably has a healthy dose of skepticism, your subconscious mind believes everything it’s told. It’s very literal. When you look in the mirror and say, “I’m going to lose five pounds,” your subconscious mind says, “I’m going to lose five pounds.” Your conscious mind says, “It’ll only work if I cut out the Ho Hos.” It’s not that the conscious doesn’t believe you, but rather that it doesn’t accept your statement as truth without question. The subconscious has no such analytical barriers.

But the subconscious—enigmatic thing that it is—works better with pictures than it does with words. So if you can learn to visualize what you want to happen, it will be easier for your mind to grasp what you’re aiming for than if you just say it out loud. When you form an image in your mind—even your conscious mind—it begins to become a reality for you. The more often you visualize something, the more real it becomes in your mind. And the more real it becomes in your mind, the more real it is elsewhere too.