Basic Energy Work, Step by Step

What constitutes basic energy work varies from the place to place, person to person. There are wide-ranging opinions on what magical energy is let alone when and where it’s needed, and how to “raise” or access it, etc. Rather than try to address them all, the following examples will suffice as a starting point for defining what magical energy is in the context of these exercises. 

20th Century Examples

Paul Huson, in his one-time influential work, Mastering Witchcraft, described a variety of magical operations, such as exorcism by salt and water, and consecrating magical tools. In each case at some point, Huson advises holding ones hands over an object while visualizing a “a dim bluish light” hovering over it.” In other places the term is “strange bluish light” or “purifying light,” etc. Donald Michael Kraig in his influential work Modern Magick evokes the same bluish light, this time eminating from the tip of the dagger while tracing the pentagrams of the Golden Dawn-style Pentagram rituals in the air, leaving a blue-flame pentagram hovering at each quarter of the circle. 

Another place 20th Century seekers might have encountered the concept of magical energy was the Cone of Power exercise (or meditation), famously described by Starhawk in her important work heading into the 1980’s, The Spiral Dance. It’s something of a group meditation with many variants, often included in group circle castings or practical workings. In every case I’ve encountered, the Cone of Power was classified as “energy raising” process.  In the variant I practiced with one group, everyone stood in a circle and held hands to start. A leader spoke out a guided meditation that included everyone imagining we had roots stretching to an infinite pool of energy deep within the earth. On cue, we drew the energy up to ground level and up into our bodies. Then we spun the energy around the circle to eventually form an upward-pointing cone, and on from there.   

A Common Problem

Aside from the concept of “energy,” the thing all of these examples of have in common is a demand to visualize or imagine the energy. There was and is a common fake-it-till-you-make-it principle at work for many. I heard it many times in different settings through the 80’s and 90’s: If you believe in it and act as if it’s real, one day you’ll find that it has become real to you. It’s commonality speaks to its effectiveness for many. 

However, the act as if approach doesn’t work for everyone. One reason may be that some people aren’t natural visualizers. A condition known as aphantasia is commonly thought of as a kind of mind-blindness, typically defined by the inability to form mental imagery. It’s important to note that the ability to form mental images probably isn’t a simple yes/no issue. Rather, we’re all somewhere along a continuum, where true aphantasics are at one extreme and super-visualizers are on the other. Most of us, however, are somewhere between the two. 

The following instructions were developed to provide a process by which people on the lower end of that spectrum can develop the ability to sense and control (to a degree) the sensations of magical energy, not as an imagined phenomenon, but as a real sensory process. As might be expected, there are no instructions to visualize anything,

The Perceptual Experience of Magic Energy

Leaving the theory aside for present purposes, these instructions assume that the experience of magical energy is a real (not in any way imaginary) perceptual experience of peripersonal space, the area immediately around the body. Given that we do so much of our interacting with the world in that space, it shouldn’t be a surprise that we have specialized perceptual systems for it. It’s how we hit the mark when reaching out to shake someone’s hand, for example, seat a screw on a screwdriver, or parallel park a car. 

Starting from technical knowledge of peripersonal space perception, an insight developed (for me) that the key to sensing magical energy isn’t visualization at all. Rather, it stems from focusing attention on the area where the energy was supposed to be. That is, after all, with good visualizers are doing when they visualize magical energy: placing it in space. So instead of asking people to visualize, my instructions ask the aspirant to focus their attention, something most aphantasics can do without difficulty. This innovation has proven useful for many who have been frustrated by the more common instructions available. 

It would be unfair to not mention Serge Kahili King‘s Urban Shaman at this point. If not for my exposure to that book, the insight that attention was the key factor may not have dawned. The first steps of the Basic Energy Work sequence are in fact nearly identical to an “energy” exercises described in Urban Shaman. 

There are, of course, people who have attention deficits, which may make the current instructions untenable. To date I have nothing to offer in that regard. None the less, the following instructions can be expected to work for many of those who’ve struggled with many other instructions.