Exercise as a meditative and magical state of being

exercise In the last month I've taken up Tae Bo as a cardio exercise. It's been a wonderful way to get my body into shape while losing weight, but it's also been useful as a way of exploring exercise to achieve a meditative state. While I am able to still my min through breathing techniques, I've also found that exercising really forces you to focus your mind, and in the process blocks out the chatter of the monkey mind.

I do some pushups and stomach crunches before doing my morning meditation and I reserve my evening for the Tai Bo exercise. It's a great way to ground myself at the end of the day and it becomes a meditation where I focus solely on my body and the movements. However this stillness of mind is also useful for magical purposes.

For the last couple of exercise sessions I have charged and fired sigils. I have visualized the sigils while exercising and used the movement to charge them. Every exercise movement becomes fuel for the sigil, and when I am finished with the exercise, I launch the sigil. It's not all that different from playing a video game and using it to launch a sigil.

Another way I've been using exercise for magic has actually been for the sculpting of my body. I was inspired to do this through the work that Zac Walters did with exercise magic. He talks about his work in the Magic on the Edge Anthology. I haven't applied his exact methodology to my own exercise work, but what I have done is visualized how I want my body to change as I exercise. When I am exercising I do this visualization where I sculpt my body, particularly the areas I want to change such as my belly and my face. I've noticed that the way my body appears is conforming more and more to the visualized body I have in place in my mind when I exercise.

Finally I've used the exercise to also get in touch with the consciousness of my body and work with it to enhance the metabolism and speed up the purging of toxins and bad fat from my body. I've noticed that I'm continuing to lose weight at a decent recent, in part thanks to the diet I am on and the exercise, but also because I am using the exercise to communicate with my body and help it purge the toxins. The result has been a sense of greater health and energy than I've had in a long while, as well as a closer connection to my body. There are probably other ways that exercise can be applied to magic, but these the ways I am currently using it for myself.