Wicca for Beginners (6 page)

Here are some tricks you can try to improve your ability to visualize. When you’re trying these, it helps to start in a quiet place where you can work undisturbed, as you did with the energy-sensing exercises. Over time, you’ll get better and better at visualizing until you can do it anywhere, even amidst distractions. But when you are just starting to hone this skill, it’s better to give yourself some peace and quiet.

exercise 3: everyday things

Pick up a smallish object that you see every day, such as your alarm clock, a shoe, your car keys, or a can opener. Spend five minutes examining the item. Turn it over in your hands. Feel it. Smell it (even if it’s your shoe). Notice its weight, its tiny details. Once you’ve examined the object, put it down, close your eyes, and visualize it. Picture it as a whole, and also picture all of the details you found. See if you can re-create the item in your mind. Once you have done this, hold the picture in your mind for several seconds or as long as you can. When you can no longer hold on to the image, open your eyes. Try this exercise several times with the object in front of you. Then practice doing it without looking at the object first. Pick up the object afterward and see if there are any details you missed.

Once you’ve had success working with a household object, try working with a houseplant. The trick with this is that the plant will change slightly every day. See if you can notice the differences from day to day, and shift yesterday’s picture to reflect today’s changes. Then try it with a pet or a friend’s face. It’s important to be able to visualize your loved ones if you think you might want to do healing magic for them in the future, and it’s also great practice.

exercise 4: the birthday party game

We call this exercise the Birthday Party Game because we always played it at birthday parties when we were kids. You may have too.

Ask a friend to gather about ten small household objects and lay them on a table in front of you. Ask him or her to time you as you look at the objects for thirty seconds, and then to cover up the objects with a blanket. During your thirty seconds, examine the objects as carefully as you can. Once they are covered up, see if you can remember what and where all of them were, and picture them in your mind. Take another thirty-second look if necessary. Once you know the items and their layout, have your friend rearrange them, and try again. The point is not to memorize the objects as you would for a test; it’s to be able to conjure the image of the pile of objects in your mind.

exercise 5: location, location, location

Sit in a chair in your living room, close your eyes, and visualize the room. Try to see as much detail as you can in your mind. Open your eyes, and notice what you missed. Close them again and see if you can enhance your mental picture with the new details. When you’re good at visualizing one room, move to another room, or try this at work, on the bus, or in the grocery aisle—anyplace where you can close your eyes for a moment without bumping into someone or causing a car accident.

Don’t stop practicing visualization, even after you become proficient. Keeping your visualization skills honed is like working out at the gym; you have to keep doing it to maintain the highest level of ability. Actually, practicing at the gym when you’re working on a repetitive, boring cardio machine isn’t a bad idea. Practice recalling details about the people and things around you instead of watching TV or surfing the Internet. Whether you do it at the gym or not, however, if you begin doing ritual and energy work, you’re going to get lots of practice.

Two Vital Skills:
Grounding and Shielding

Before you explore energy work further, it’s important that you put your newly polished visualization skills to work to help you learn two core energy techniques: grounding and shielding. These techniques will allow you to have more control in your energy work by giving you ways to get rid of excess energy and protect yourself from unwanted energy.

Grounding

Perhaps the most vital skill a Wiccan can learn is called “grounding,” or “grounding and centering.” The earth is one of our greatest sources of energy. Since it is alive, it radiates energy all the time. It can also store and neutralize energy. When Wiccans do magic, they usually do not use their personal body energy (what Cunningham called “personal power”) because they need that for everyday life. Instead, they draw energy from the earth (earth power) through their bodies. Likewise, when Wiccans have too much energy, such as when they haven’t been able to use all the energy they raised in a powerful ritual, or when they’ve picked up “bad” energy in an argument, they return the excess energy to the earth. This is what grounding is. Think of how we ground electrical outlets, and you’ve got the idea.

Many Wiccans begin every ritual or magical act by grounding. They cast off unwanted “vibes” from their day, like the tension left over from a stressful meeting at work or road rage from nasty traffic. By grounding, they also connect to mother earth, from whom the energy for the ritual will come. If you are grounding in order to “shake off” your day before ritual, don’t worry about sending “negative” or “bad” energy into the earth. Like I said, the earth neutralizes energy. Anything you send to it will be transformed and will manifest in other ways.

It is vital to be able to ground before you move on to raising and working with energy.
There is an old, old rule in magic that you should never call up anything that you don’t know how to banish. The magician who came up with that was referring to spirits, demons, or other scary-but-useful entities from the medieval magical grimoires, but when I say it here, I mean that before you raise energy, you should know how to get rid of it. If you carry it around in your body, or allow it to zip around your home without direction or purpose, it can have all sorts of weird effects, not the least of which is that you will feel out of whack until it dissipates or you manage to ground it out.

How do you know when you have too much energy, need to ground, or both? You may feel lightheaded, dizzy, or “out of it.” You may feel a little queasy. You may feel wound up, nervous, or angry. Some people even feel a little bit drunk. None of these conditions are suitable for ritual or magic, but you don’t have to reserve grounding for Wiccan or magical purposes. You can ground anytime you need to, for any reason. I’ve even done it before job interviews.

There are as many ways to ground as there are Wiccans. The one that I teach my students follows. We do this technique as a meditation, so it is a bit repetitive. It was designed that way on purpose because repetition helps you relax, and when you’re relaxed, it’s easier to visualize and imprint images on your subconscious. You may wish to read this exercise into a tape recorder and play it back for yourself when you practice. I’ve put pauses in the meditation in case you wish to record it. “Pause” means to pause the reading, not the activity.

exercise 6: the taproot

As you did with the previous exercises, find a quiet place where you can work undisturbed. You do not have to be outside, but you should be able to visualize or sense the earth beneath you. Sit comfortably and relax. Take a few deep breaths. When you are calm and relaxed, imagine that there is a thick, golden, glowing taproot that extends from the base of your spine all the way down into the center of the earth. It is vibrant, and it draws its energy from the earth’s molten core. See it and feel it in your mind as strongly as you can. Know that it connects you to the earth, the Mother Goddess, and the web of life. Pause.

When you can see the taproot in your mind’s eye and you “know” its reality within you, gently draw warm energy up from the earth through it. Feel and/or see the energy flow up the taproot to the base of your spine. Pause. Imagine that the energy branches from the top of the taproot, and some of it flows down each of your legs and into each foot. Feel the energy moving gently into your legs and feet. Pause. Then imagine that the energy runs from the taproot all the way up your spine. Feel the energy move gently up your spine. Pause. Then imagine that the energy splits from the top of the spine and runs down each arm and into your hands. Feel the energy move gently down your arms and into your hands. Pause. Finally, imagine that the energy moves from the top of your spine to the top of your head. Feel your whole body full of glowing earth energy. Know that you are connected to the earth and the web of all life. Pause.

Once you have visualized the energy filling your body, imagine gently pushing the excess energy out of your head, arms, legs, and spine back down into the taproot, and from there into the earth. Keep your body energy, but see any energy that you do not want flowing down through the taproot and neutralizing in the earth. Feel it leave your body.
You are not drained because you are not pushing out your own energy.

It is helpful for some people to “collect” the energy at the top of the taproot before pushing it out, while others like to push it down from all parts of the body at the same time. Whichever way is easiest for you is the best way.

If you do this exercise enough times, the taproot will become real. I knew that the meditation was working with my students when I took them to a big, open public ritual, and the ritual leader asked everyone to ground beforehand by extending a root into the earth. We were standing in a circle with a lot of other people, and the moment the leader said that, I could feel the “taproots” of all of my students shoot into the ground one after the other around the circle. It was a little bit like dominoes falling in a row. I knew that some of the other ritual participants who were not in our group could feel it too by the funny looks they gave us.

Whenever you need to ground, you can push excess energy out of your body through your taproot. Practice taking up and returning energy to the earth many times before you attempt to do any additional energy or spell work. By repeating the exercise, you are “burning” the image of the taproot into your mind and making it more and more real to your subconscious.