Melatonin always appears as a dark skinned woman. she’s the polar opposite of serotonin, but also  does similar activities in terms of balancing the neurochemistry of the body as well as a person’s emotional moods. She’s also helpful in cases of insomnia.

She and serotonin can be worked with simultaneously in order to help with situations such as insomnia, where there might be too much serotonin and not enough melatonin or in cases of waking up, where serotonin can be upped while melatonin is decreased.

Tryptophan appears to me as a pregnant sleeping Empress. She aids in Digestion and is consequently a force for change in neurochemistry. People may wish to work with her to get help with digestion issues or sleep issues.

Book Review: The Sorcerer’s Secrets by Jason Miller

In this book, the author presents practical ideas and strategies for people who are just starting out in their magical practice. This isn’t a 101 book, but its safe to say it’s a 102 book that also offers some insights to magicians with more experience. What I appreciate the most is that the author takes the time to focus on considerations such as finances and explains that while magic can help, it’s also important to learn practical mundane skills.

I also appreciate the author’s choice to draw on a wide variety of sources that fall outside the traditional bibliography usually found in books. The author illustrates the importance of developing a well-rounded strategy by exposing readers to alternative sources.

There are two reasons this book gets a four instead of a five, however. One reason is because the author doesn’t address the value of doing internal work as a practical and strategic solution. while knowing how to do practical magic to solve a problem is important, being able to identify your participation in the problem and making changes is even more important, and more practical. The other reason is that while the author does draw on non-traditional sources, he doesn’t address the topic of innovation and how it can be used to develop practical magic.

All that said, this is an excellent book to read, and one I’d recommend to someone just starting out.

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Understanding the relationship of the body with the communication with the subconscious is important to realizing how the body can be worked with successfully. Learning how to embody an emotion or concept can be a useful way to understand the effect the emotion or concept has on your life.

When I first learned about the paratheatre technique, one problem I had with it was that I felt there was something missing from the explanation of the embodied space. Well more than something…a number of things actually.

First what was missing was a concrete explanation of how we move through space. It seems to me that most people take movement for granted and consequently move in a very unconscious manner. I’ve observed as well that people, in American culture move in a very linear line like manner, 2D movement really. We aren’t taught to recognize how our bodies could move. I had to turn to Laban’s work on movement to find a comprehensive manual that explored movement and showed possible ways to move that I hadn’t considered before. Learning this kind of movement has proven useful for fully doing internal work with my body as an active component of that internal work (i.e. dance and performance art movements).

Second what was missing was understanding space from a social perspective. In general when the word space is brought up it usually makes one think of the darkness of space. But anthropologist Edward T. Hall explored the concept of social spaces and how people interact in them with each other and with objects in the room. As a result of reading his work I came to really understand how much we even embody objects with personification as a way of filling up space. The way a given culture sets up a physical space is indicative of how that culture processes space from an emotional/intellectual perspective, and also how people define themselves within given spaces.

With these two considerations of space in hand, it’s been much easier to integrate paratheatre to my meditation work, because I now can consider how I move and how that movement expresses and changes an embodied space I’ve created, while also recognizing the cultural influences that shape my understanding of that space. Finally, and perhaps most important, I can be much more aware of how my body feels when I move, how it expresses the concept I’m working with through movement, and how that concept is or isn’t expressed in my environment everyday.

Doing this work is creating some interesting realizations. I like where its taking me, as well as what I can learn about my body and the relationship I have with it and the environment around me, and how my body expresses the subconscious with its movement and interaction with space.

A while back I’d written about some of my experiences with Laban, a form of physical movement. My main purpose for studying Laban was to learn more about the spatial realities of the body as well as how it moves through space, something I considered essential for really getting the methodology of paratheatre, which Antero Alli writes about quite a bit. Since I don’t have access to Mr. Alli’s classes on paratheatre, utilizing Laban, which admittedly provides a much better explanation of physical movement through space, proved essential for being able to integrate paratheatre into my magical practice.

Recently I decided to try out my first paratheatre ritual. I’ve recently been doing some internal work around intimacy and my issues with being intimate and also being in relationships (friendship or otherwise) where there wasn’t much intimacy. I thought it might be useful to embody intimacy or at least try to, using paratheatre. I felt that integrating my body fully into the embodiment was essential for really communicating with my subconscious about intimacy and the issues surrounding it.

I felt very vulnerable when I invoked intimacy into my state of no-form and began to move. In a sense I felt like a child, innocent and unsure of myself, experiencing something for myself that I wasn’t really certain of. Intimacy for me involved opening up and so I initially started out very shielded in how I positioned my arms and legs and gradually I began to loosen them and from that loosened my body up further, gradually allowing myself to feel a state of what I would consider to be gentle warmth. Sometimes I would hug myself or gently touch my shoulder or leg. I wasn’t striving to be sensual, and I didn’t feel that way. But I did feel intimate with myself in a manner that invited myself to be gentle and loving.

As I experienced this feeling of intimacy I paid attention to thoughts, feelings, and whatever else came to my experience that would help me communicate with my issues around intimacy. I learned quite a bit about how I sometimes make it hard to accept what someone wants to give, but also how much I’ve picked relationships with people (friends and lovers) that didn’t necessarily invite intimacy into my life.

When I was ready, I put myself back into no-form and grounded the sensation and feeling of intimacy…but after the working I also felt more comfortable when my partner offered it to me, and also was more aware of what has informed my tendency to fantasize about intimacy. I’ll definitely be using paratheatre in the future for some of my internal work, and I have to say that learning about Laban really did help with integrating paratheatre into my magical practice.

One the issues that comes up in mediation is what Buddhists call Monkey Mind. It’s that troublesome voice that starts saying random messages to you and distracts you from meditating. For people who are trying to achieve a state of no mind, the monkey mind is particularly troublesome because its a reminder that your mind isn’t in a place of no-mind. What sometimes occur is that people will attempt to repress the monkey mind, but this usually makes it come back swinging. There’s a reason for that: It’s trying to tell you something.

Instead of repressing the monkey mind, which is ultimately a futile effort, it’s better to work with it. And by that I mean it’s better to start a dialogue with it. When it brings up a random issue, ask it why it brought up and start exploring it mentally. You’ll usually find that it leads you to a source of stress and concern in your life. So you can continue to try and ignore that source of stress or you can work with the monkey mind to resolve the source of stress. Mind you, the monkey mind will raise lots of questions and concerns, but that’s why it’s there. It’s a filter, an agitator, and it won’t go away until you’ve addressed its concerns.

When I work with my monkey mind, I use it as a detector of issues that are bothering me. Sometimes its helped me discover some really deep issues, such as my fear of emptiness and most recently a tendency to fantasize in order to fulfill intimacy needs. And that’s what makes the monkey mind so useful. It challenges me to be aware of my issues instead of trying to ignore them.  I like that because then I can proactively work on those issues via meditation instead of letting them build up and be acted out in my life. So the monkey mind is actually your friend, not your enemy. Make friends with it and find out what it can teach you.

In developing a system of magic that is focused specifically on the body, one of the challenges has always been how do you actually communicate with the medium you are working with. Since the human body is the medium, it’s not enough to recognize you have a body, which anyone can do. To work with the medium of the body necessarily involves first being able to experience it on all the levels of the medium and second being able to communicate on all the levels.

In Hands of Light, by Barbara Ann Brennan, she presents a technique where you can experience your body on a cellular level. You meditate and narrow your consciousness down to the level of a cell and then travel throughout the body as the cell, experiencing the different organs of the body as a result. The process works and its a useful way to experience the body.

The next level then is to actually communicate with the body. There are some Taoist breathing techniques that focus on helping a person remove negative emotional energy from organs. That’s a step toward communication, but still not quite what we want.

My own approach toward this particular issue has involved syncing with the bio-photonic energy emitted by a cell and then using that sync to communicate with other cells. I’m not communicating with words, or even emotions. I’m communicating with impressions, specifically impressions that the cells are providing to me. It’s not the same as verbal communication…it’s much more subtle, and yet it can tell you a lot about your body. For example, what you might learn is not just where emotional tension is, but also if there are physical health issues (usually the two are linked). Consequently using these impressions can help you deal with health situations preemptively. The trick is to actually trust the impressions enough to get them checked on (via medical services), as well as developing processes (magical) that allow you to go in and begin healing yourself. The impressions you receive can also be used to help you do preventative health measures.

Seems to me that communication with the body is one of the frontiers that we still have, one that’s mostly ignored because humans take it for granted that having a body is enough, and yet there are so many processes that for the most part remain unknown. To me, communicating with the body, with the cellsi n the body is the first step to exploring that frontier.

I’ve been teaching my student about working with the cells of the body and also with the organs of the body. And as the teacher teaches, so too should s/he be learning and revising what s/he is doing. Because I’m working with her, it’s allowing me to revisit these techniques in more depth. It also tells me that perhaps I should take students on more often, if only as a means of getting myself more involved in my own work past the experimentation stage. It’s not that I don’t continue to use the methods, but I don’t use them as much, because I’m onto the next experiment.

With the cell work, the focus has been on helping her learn to communicate with her body. Some of this has focused on communicating with different organs, but of late we’ve focused on communicating with a cell and our next step will be to use that cell to communicate with other ones. The benefit of this work is severalfold. For one thing you get in much better touch with your body, and what it needs, something people ignore all too often. The second benefit is in terms of healing, both yourself and other people, because you can learn quite a bit about the body’s natural healing systems and then use those systems consciously to heal yourself faster. You also can help other people with their healing efforts, if you know what to boost when healing them.

To me that’s the entire point of learning to work with your body consciously. How better than to improve your health and help other people. I don’t, admittedly, think its replacement for getting medical services if you need them, but there’s something to be said for learning to work with your body and learning to live with it a lot more consciously than I think most people do. Your entire body is a living being, not just the mind that happens to direct some of the activity.

I’ve been doing a lot of research and practical applications of meditation from various spiritual systems, and the one thing I find consistent is that for meditation to really work, there must be some interaction with the body. The body is the gateway to experiencing meditation, which makes sense as a meditation is really an altered state of physiological consciousness. I put it that way, because it seems to me that there is a tendency to discuss and conceptualize meditation as a state of mind or consciousness that is separate from the experience of the body.

But you really can’t separate the body from meditation, because you are rooting yourself in the experience of changing your physiology to accomplish an altered state of consciousness. This is why breath plays such a role in meditation. Breath is the key to accessing the body and bringing it into a state of physiological receptivity for an altered state of consciousness. By focusing awareness on the breath a person becomes aware of the body and can slow it down enough to enter into an altered state. Or alternately a person can do some kind of excitatory activity to achieve the same level of awareness. In either case, the body is the foundational core by which meditation is achieved. It’s worth remembering that if you want to make meditation a part of your tool set.

I’ve been continuing to integrate Laban into my morning daily moving meditation. The body movements take up the focus of the thoughts, and a rhythm is created, out of time, out of the tightly monitored world, into a place where all that matters is the rhythm of movement and the stretching of the body. My spatial and kinesthetic awareness of my body and how it moves has changed in what I would consider to be subtle ways. There’s more awareness of my core and how each movement comes from the core than there was before. The benefit, beyond feeling healthier, is a sense of being more in touch with my body, and more able to connect with it for that deeper meditative work.

I’ve also been continuing to work with the time strand editing technique, using it edit different connections to places, people, and situations and I’m seeing some changes in that direction, with the connections I have. I haven’t applied it as much as I could to business interactions, but I will give it a try and see what happens.

Review of Magical Techniques by Draja Mickaharic

I just discovered this author’s works recently and already I’m impressed by the depth and breadth of his writing as well as his attention to detail. Magical Techniques provides information on lesser known magical practices and tools that can be used by the magician to aid and enhance his/her workings. From his chapter on how to make chalk, to how to use feathers, to magic with orgone accumulators, there’s something for everyone. He also provides some good anecdotes, both his own and of other people and how they used the different tools he discussed. This book is a definite must for the practical magician.

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5 out of 5

Last night I got into a conversation with a friend of mine who does a fair amount of work in the sacred sexuality scene. We discussed, among other things, a tendency for many sex magic workers to not use proper grounding or shielding because they wanted to let all the sensations in. We noted, in the end, that it seemed more about the sex and less about the magic. Today a post I read prompted me to think how easy it is to separate sex from actually sitting with the body, and why that in itself may also be an issue for ungroundedness and too much focus on sensation. I find with sex magic that there is a very real difference between sex magic and sex.

I’ll be the first to admit I love sex. I enjoy sex for the sensations and pleasure and the opportunity to please someone. And sex for sensation’s sake is great. I love having great sex and focusing on the sensation.

Sex magic, OTOH, is different. It’s a deliberate choice to raise spiritual energies, work with entities, do energy work with partner(s), and do a variety of other activities that ultimately are focused on some kind of magical work. And while there are many sensations to be experienced, focusing on the sensations is actually a distraction from the magic. I find that sex magic practitioners that focus on the sensation generally tend to be very scattered. I probably wouldn’t work with them precisely because of that.

This isn’t to say that sensation can’t be used as a tool for sex magic, for it certainly can. I find BDSM useful for that reason, because I can actually have the person I’m topping take all those sensations and focus them into a journey/experience that produces the desired change. And even plain ol’ vanilla sex sensations can be used for the same purposes, provided the people understand that it’s not so much about feeling the sensation as it is about directing it.

When sensation becomes the reason to do sex magic, it isn’t sex magic. It’s just sex with a superficial layer of spirituality dashed on top as a way of adding a spiritual dimension to it. There have been and are plenty of gurus who in fact have done just that in order to get laid.

When I go into a sex magic situation, while I may enjoy the sex, it isn’t the primary reason for being in that situation. The primary reason is to raise energy using sex and do something transformative with it. At the same time, I know that at some point the magic will finish up and I need to ground myself. Also throughout the experience, I need to use the appropriate shielding and energy work techniques to not only focus what I’m doing, but not introduce any undesirable energy into the working, no matter how good it might feel at the time.

Now let’s bring this back to the body. Another I’ve noted is that many people use sex to escape sitting with the body. The sensations experienced during sex don’t necessarily put you in touch with your body, so much as allow you to escape from really being with it. Why? Because sex is really about experiencing an altered state of mind and body. While the pleasure and sensations can actually be used to put you in touch with your body, they can also be used to as a distraction from your body.

I find that the body, when it comes to sex magic, and even sex in general, is both one of the greatest distractions, in terms of sensation, and also one of the greatest tools for grounding yourself. Using breath work during sex, for example, can help you focus on the magical work, but can also help you get rooted in your body so that you fully feel it, both during and after sex.

Sex alone won’t help you feel comfortable with your body, though it may help some. Ultimately what helps for embracing the body is learning to sit with it and experience all of it, the pains and pleasures, the changes that result as you age, and also getting into some kind of physical activity, besides sex, that gets you out of your head and into your body. I’ve found that becoming comfortable with your body really enhances everything you do, because you are intimately aware of how your body responds to your surroundings. It grounds you and makes you more aware of the present.

Review of Cosmic Fusion by Mantak Chia

I found this book to be useful in terms of understanding Chia’s approach to Taoist inner alchemy work and integrating more of the practices into my own work. At the same time, it seemed like this was just a much more convoluted version of the Fusion of the five element techniques, with a lot of extra and somewhat unnecessary steps included. I found that I needed to boil away a lot of the extra steps and once I did so still was able to achieve the desired and expected results for doing this practice. I’m not sure the material presented in this book warranted an entirely new book. It’s still useful material and worth learning in order to refine your inner alchemical work.

3.5 out of 5

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