Shielding

Shielding FAQ

What is a shield?

A psychic shield is a non material substance/force/power with which you surround yourself for protection. Many types of force can be called into play in its construction, and many forms can be used, all at your discretion. It's important that a friend, instructor or adept NOT do this work for you; your shield will be with you permanently, and you need to have the intimate connection that creating your own provides.

Why make a shield?

The best reason is for protection against psychic flak of all kinds, especially important when you are first starting down the Path, and aren't yet well-versed in defensive measures. It's protection from mind-games and psychic vampires (yes, they do exist), and a good shield helps you to separate mundane flak from psychic flak. It exercises the faculties of self-reliance and visualization. All told, it's one of the most essential tools of the working occultist.

What do I need to know about shields?

Your shield is your BASIC piece of protection/comfort/defense. It is a permanent part of you, and something like wearing a Circle like a second skin. It should be flexible and semi-permeable, moving and growing with you, and "breathing" with your energy usage. Be aware that what you visualize when you start out is what will be there, but that the shield will probably change of its own accord to keep up with your changing capabilities and needs.

Building the Shield

Preliminary Cleansing

When building your first shield, it seems rather ridiculous to lock in any negative energies you may be carrying with you currently. Therefore, a preliminary cleansing, as follows:

Stand in a quiet place and center your energies. Visualize a gleaming sharp sword in your hand. Use it joyously, vigorously slicing through the air close to your body on all sides, over your head and under your feet. As you slash, visualize all unfriendly or negative ties being severed and the ends shriveling away to nothing. Do not be specific -- "this tie, that tie" -- ALL unfriendly ties are being cut!! Note that friendly and unfriendly ties exist on different planes, so you can't damage the friendly ties -- although you may be surprised that ties you thought were friendly, aren't -- and vice versa. It isn't necessary to do this every time you work on your shields, although a once-a-year cleansing and general housecleaning couldn't hurt.

Other helpful rituals include: The Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram; the Middle Pillar; the Kabalistic Cross; any other cleansing/grounding rituals you may be aware of.

Visualizations

You have to decide every detail of the visualization of your shields. What shape will it take? What color (if any)? What materials? What appearance? These are the basics; we'll touch on the embellishments later.

Shapes - Round, spherical, cylindrical, square, cube, pentagon, pentagram, ovoid, and any other shape you like. If you can form and hold a duodecahedron in your mind's eye, go to it!!
Colors - Any color of the rainbow, and a few never seen on this plane are all acceptable. White is one commonly-used color, but if you want chartreuse, by all means go ahead! Try to avoid black; not for its effect on you, necessarily, but for not giving the wrong signals to the folks you might want to be working with.
Textures - Vary widely; from brick walls to energy cocoons, to steel spheres and laser force fields. Whatever your mind conceives of as protecting is what you use.

Warning - Leaving this construct semi-permeable is strongly advised. This leaves you open to receiving positive energies while still giving you protection, and allows the important vibrational interactions that lead to growth.

The Process

Once you've decided what you shield will be, sit quietly and begin to visualize it around you in the form you've chose. Take 10 or 15 minutes to get it solid and clear to your inner eyes, then quit for the day. Once a day for a week, re-visualize your shield and strengthen it. Then check your shield once a week for the next month, re-visualizing and strengthening as needed. After that, check on your shield as you feel it's needed, but at least once a year. Keep in mind that once your shield is well- established, it's basically self-sustaining and maintaining. Eventually, the only times you'll need to be aware of your shield is at its yearly housecleaning, when you think of an improvement, or when it's reacting to a threat.

Embellishments

Attach a vial of Essence of Poison Ivy, to react upon attack.
Silver-mirror the outer covering.
Add glue or rubber bands to the outside of your shield. Don't forget to clean more often if you use glue.
An automatic maintenance system.
A sorter. Friendly energy breezes in, unfriendly energy is repelled.
A detection device. Allows a thinner shield, which sounds an alarm when confronted with negativity.
A grounding device. This simply grounds negative energy it encounters.
A slingshot, to return negative energy to its source. Can be amplified to use the law of threefold return.
Any other embellishments you can justify in the name of defense.

Advanced Shielding Theory

Shielding, near as I can tell typically uses 3 different imagings. A common question is "Is what you imagine, the structure of it, important?". My answer is use what feels comfortable to you. These are simple and concrete. I normally use several more complex ones for other things, but not for basic empathic and/or societal defenses.

1) The arch. Imagine a while/silvery arch, like a rainbow, which stretches from the horizon on your left to the horizon on your right. When you do this, imagine it springing into being as a whole, don't "draw" it. At the head of the arch, part of the arch, a cross with 4 equal arms grows out of the top. Again, don't make it "grow", but imagine the whole thing as coming into being as a whole. The arch and the cross are not separate. They are one. The arch is made of no material you can recognize, but you cannot break it. It stands in front of you, and over you, and will protect you from anything you recognize as intrusive. You don't have to visualize it, unless and until you need it. It works instantly. Focus on the visualization whenever you feel the need, until you can see it clearly in your mind's eye. You don't have to close your eyes to do this, you don't have to tell anyone you are doing this, it's completely private.

2) The citadel. Do this when you have a little time to construct the citadel, I've known people to do it in a couple of minutes, and people to take a whole day, so do it at your own pace. Imagine your mind being located in a citadel on an infinite plain. Surrounding the infinite plain are mountains that, even at infinity, reach into the sky impossibly high. The ground is rusty-tan, the sky is midnight blue, the mountains are shadowy black.

Now you build your citadel. It's made to be inaccessible to hostile forces, so construct it as such. From the inside, you can percieve all that is out, but from without, there appears no way in, unless one is granted entrance by the inhabitant (that's you). Build it, out of whatever materials you are comfortable with. It is a place of strength and security. Within you can rest. Within, are all the things you need. Don't forget a garden which ever grows food, or a vending machine or something. ..don't forget water. .. Fill it up with whatever you need. But you are the only inhabitant. Place no guardians with this project.

When you are done, sit and meditate on it a few days, till you are comfortable with it. Change it whenever you like, but change it, don't build a new one. It will always be there, in the background. It is a static defense, but secure. You can retreat into it whenever you like, instantaneously. I do certain kinds of work in mine, when I have to be not distracted, or don't want to be distracted. Say I'm talking to you on a bus, then I could erect the citadel to allow me to keep an eye on the other folk on the bus, but keeping everyone but you out, so I don't really have to concentrate on them, or worry about them.

3) The Egg. This works well as a protection for place, particularly. Imagine a golden glowing egg, of a misty, opaque force, about the area you wish to cover. It generally takes more time to imagine over a larger area, probably because I think of it that way. It tends to start sort of fragile, but quickly solidifies into this shell. Over time, whenever you arrive, or leave, this area, if you go to sleep there, or wake up, whenever you start to do something significant or stop likewise, bring the egg back into your focus. As you do this, it will strengthen itself, and will get stronger over time.

As a slightly advanced method of this, start a "summon power" spell, link the output to the egg (from inside the shell), set it on low (like a motor on low, if you like), and just leave it. The egg will only get stronger over time. You don't have to turn it off, it won't hurt you, or drain from you, and it's safe. If you don't already know how do do what I just described above, then don't worry about it. If you ever figure it out, then go ahead.

The above listed methods cover a lot. Certainly more than whatever you'll need to deal with normal stuff, or magical stuff you're likely to run into. As I said before, this is only 3 possible out of what is probably a countable infinity of options. If you don't like what I described, think about it for a day or two, and make your own. It's not hard. The bottom line is what matters. Please note that imagining minefields will not have anything like the results you are presumably seeking -) .

T/K Shielding Techniques

It is important to point out that the visual methods are not the only methods. Unfortunately, they are the only ones anybody writes about. This is probably partly because they are much easier to describe, but there is an unfortuante prejudice toward sight in books on magic. Many of them state categorically that the skill you have to learn is visualisation. I have heard of a friend of a friend who has called down thunderstorms on a number of occasions, but was unable to visualise well enough to remember what her lover's face looked like. So much for the necessity of visualisation.

So, the next question is how can Tactile/Kinesthetic folk shield themselves? (I'll leave it for someone else to address Auditory-based shielding.) Tactile/ Kinesthetic persons perceive magical energy as sensations of heat, cold, pressure, movement, electrical charge, texture, resilience, etc.--all of the different senses of touch. Not all T/K persons will experience things in all of these ways. (I, for example, tend to be on the Kinesthetic end of the spectrum, rather than Tactile.) Each person who finds that T/K is the natural mode for hirself should take some time to think about *how s/he perceives energy*. When you have done that, think about what sorts of feelings you have in spaces which are safe and loving, and what you perceive in spaces where you are not comfortable. Also, take time to be aware of what gives you energy, and how it feels when you have it.

Once you've done the prep work, do whatever it is that puts you in high energy space, and draw lots of that energy into yourselves. Take that energy and attune it to the feelings of safety; surround yourself with that energy. Make sure you connect that energy with yourself (or the place, if that is your intent) so that it will stay where it is needed. As Eddie said, repeat this frequently to help it become very solid. This is, of necessity, a more vague description than Eddie's--we don't have detailed language for T/K perception. One general trait is that the "safety" energy generally feels warm, not cool or hot.

Auditory Shielding Techniques

Auditory shields are quite easy and fun to do, and very powerful for a lot of people, often more powerful than visual ones, surprisingly. Auditory shields are strongly related to rhythm and music. Neither has to be audible, just like you don't have to "see" a visual image. People who play musical instruments, sing, read music, or study music theory can quite quickly do some really neat music magic which is quite complex and useful.

Some easy shields:

Pick a piece of music, a phrase of music, preferably not with lyrics, something basic that you can remember easily. Listen to it over and over, just that phrase (drive your roomates and/or neighbors crazy), not the whole piece of music. The more definite the beginning and end, the easier to reimage later. example: Joni Mitchell, from the Court and Spark album, has an intro to a song which is the drums of Burundi. An exerpt and fairly short, it has remained with me as a basis for a shield.
Get a mantra ! -) "Oh!, How Money Makes Me Hum". Sure why Not. Use something which is meaningful to you. Mantra's have many uses, shields are one. The other examples are variants on mantras, basically.
There are several "middle pillar" exercises out there, and similar rituals which use the modulated tones from words as forces. You can do shields with this quite easily.
Talk, slowly at first, while imagining your actual words as taking form and shielding you. You MUST remember that you are doing this when you do it, otherwise you might start using talking as a means of cutting people off. Later, when dealing with someone difficult, (start with someone easy, like a waiter you don't like), do this imaging while you converse with them. This takes practice, but it can give you strength just at the moment you need it, when talking to that highway patrolman, or the angry mother who thinks you are the fiend who scared her baby, or . .....-) It will teach you confidence for awkward social situations in general, but you have to be able to turn it on and off.
Imagine frequencies of everything you hear, resonating to you, becoming in tune with parts of you, filtering your whole universe through these frequencies, purifying them, clearing them, bringing them into precise auditory focus, so that you can percieve the spark which is the essence of beingness in everything you encounter. An advanced shield that may not even seem like one to you at first. But you will find in this state, that very little can or will ever bother you, and you will simultaneously be more receptive, and relaxed, so you can hear what others are trying to communicate to you, and you will be less afraid to deal with them . ..better for all.

With all shields, it is necessary to remember that true sincerity and simple harmony with oneself is important in order not to appear that you are cutting people off, or being condescending. A pitfall of practicing these shields is that some folk develop an attitude that goes with them which can be picked up by others, which may not communicate itself well. Experienced individuals may also be able to tell when you are using a shield, and for what purpose. It can be gauche to do so around magically experienced folk. Good traditional manners are important in magick as much as at the formal dinner table. Sometimes you may find yourself using a shield for an inappropriate purpose cause you're lazy and don't want to listen, try to resist this.

Wrap-up and other ideas

In magic, a primary limitation is that you can only accomplish what you can conceptualize. After all, you can only do on purpose what you can hold in your mind in the first place. This implies, for example, that if the easiest way for you to conceptualize a ward is to think of a large brick wall, that's what you'll get. If, on the other hand, you can conceptualize it as a five dimensional metric tensor, that's what you'll get (this, by the way, is how I refuse to do it, after cramming my head full of math & physics in college). If on the third hand :), you find it easier to feel the weight of a physical shield on your arm, or "Armor of Light" surrounding your body, that'll work too. For that matter, you could think of your shields as an astral "missile command" video game. The sensory mode(s) and particular models you use are irrelevant; how well you can use them to focus your will and attention is what matters.

So, does anyone else out there use tensor calculus as a magical tool?

The music is Alone, by Heart

Page graphic from ClipArt Castle

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