galchemy

How to Breathe

A great place to get started is learning how to breathe.

As someone who relies on breathing on a pretty regular basis for survival this topic has always been of great importance to me.

Improved breathing has been scientifically correlated with a range of physical and mental health benefits. Various breathing techniques have been identified with reduced depression, anxiety, pain, PTSD symptoms, chances of stroke and with increased focus, concentration, immunity, recovery time, energy levels and the list goes on extensively. Conveniently, since we literally have to breathe at all times anyway, we also have the ability to take this practice with us anywhere we go and which requires zero expense or equipment.

As magico-spiritual practitioners we should all be interested in any technique which would help us to maintain our physical and mental health, but breathwork is truly the trifecta in that it also works on a spiritual level. But before we get too far down the rabbit hole of theory, let’s practice.

Practitioners who are just starting out tend sometimes have the notion that meditation is all about sitting still and controlling your thoughts. If we address this practice purely on a cerebral level, as Westerners we are likely dooming ourselves to an uphill struggle. Contrary to the idea that you’re supposed to somehow ‘leave your body behind’ while in meditation, my own experience has been that meditation needs to be a full body experience coordinating the mind, body and breath. Before we worry about visuals, we have to learn to breathe.

We have a tendency to breathe upward through the shoulders rather than the proper way which is outward through the belly. The tummy should be relaxed and expand bottom to top on the inhalation. To practice this, lie flat in a comfortable place and rest both hands lightly on your belly. Many of us hold our bellies taut all day for fear of the dreaded muffin top- this is the time to let that belly go!

Start a slow count of “4” in your head (1..2..3..4..1..2..3..4..). After you’ve given yourself a moment to relax, begin to sync your breathe so that you’re breathing in for four, out for four, and repeat. Start by breathing through your mouth and/or your nose, whichever is most comfortable to you. As you breathe, note how your inhalation should make your tummy and hands rise. This should feel like a natural and relaxed motion, a natural extension of filling the lungs from the bottom up, and not like you’re forcing the abdomen in way.

Even though it will likely feel unnatural to be syncing your breath to the ‘beat’, try to adjust your counting such that the breaths feel relatively normal and relaxing to you. As you begin to feel more comfortable, try to slow the count down a little to settle your breathing into a more relaxed, meditative pace.

If you want you can stop your practice here and simply relax and breath for a time, or you can try a slightly more challenging technique:

Experiment with alternating your breath so that you inhale through your nose and exhale noisily through the mouth. You can feel free to make a little pressured stream of air through your lips or try a breathy “haaaa” sound like you’re fogging a mirror. Feel those exhalations remove your tension. As you inhale, experiment with slightly contracting the muscles toward the back of your throat and nasal passages such that the air makes a slight “rushing noise” as you inhale and then keep those muscles contracted while you exhale. This cycle that you’re doing, the contracted inhalation through the nose and the breathy stream out the mouth, is called Ujjayi breathing, a Hatha yoga technique which is incredibly useful for almost every spiritual or magical practice I could name.

If you wish, from here you could certainly go into a variety of other visualizations and so forth, but if you’re starting out my suggestion is just to let your thoughts naturally do their thing while you continue to just cycle the breath and breathing properly.

I’ll add here that typically lying down wouldn’t be my top position for a starter meditation exercise due to concerns about the practitioner falling asleep. In this instance I think the most useful way to connect with the belly and breath is to allow the body to relax to encourage the best possible breathing technique (just maybe don’t do this when you’re exhausted… or DO and maybe sleep great). This can of course absolutely be done kneeling, sitting, or standing, with the best positions for meditation purposes being that in which the body is upright with good posture and evenly balanced. If one is sitting on the floor put a bolster under your bum to help lift yourself into the correct posture. Chairs are ideally fairly rigid (like a dining chair) and without arms. Standing this technique can be done simply upright.

For different effects, Ujjayi can also be done while practicing Yoga, giving massage/pranic work and so forth to keep the prana strong but balanced. Also great for keeping your cool during rough days at work and visits the in-laws. Simply learning to breathe properly, and the basic practice of being able to collect yourself into that state of composure and connection, will benefit your health and practice in myriad ways.

Getting Started

I’ve been having fun topic-hopping over these past few introductory posts, but maybe it’s time to try for something more chronological if not actually more coherent. Let’s talk about getting started with a magico-spiritual practice. Before we dive in here, this post and frankly anything written anywhere in this blog is just my viewpoint and there are about as many perspectives on this topic as there are practitioners. You should question everything, including my suggestion to question everything, just to be safe.

When I use the term magico-spiritual practice, I am usually referring to one of several belief systems/magical paths commonly practiced in the West today, including Witchcraft, Wicca, Neo-Paganism, Western Occultism/Western Mystery Traditions, modernist magical practice and some New Age schools among others. We are such a diverse and loosely knit community that there isn’t really a comprehensive name to describe all of us. I favor “magico-spiritual practitioner”, implying a few commonly held beliefs and practices: (1) ‘fringe’ spiritual beliefs such as Pagan deities or notions of Divinity that differ from most standard beliefs today, (2) belief that humans can directly communicate with their notion of Divinity and/or aspire to become more Divine, (3) the concept that humans can alter their reality either with their own conscious or via the assistance of Divine or other beings with effects of those workings ranging from the mundane to the transcendent.

Really central to this idea is the thought that reality is something that we can effect in other ways than just our words and actions (although these certainly play a vital part). We are conscious players in our own realities through the manipulation of symbols. The question to keep in mind is, if you’re taking an active role in your reality, where are you going to take it and why?

Humankind has been engaged in this behavior for literally tens of thousands of years– first with nature entities and Shamans, developing in the Western world into the (mostly) Pagan civilizations of antiquity, rising through the Christian and Judaic mystery traditions and Hermetic revival, hidden in soup pots and behind curtains, thinly veiled behind acceptable iconography, all the way through the more recent occult revival and now the massive surge in New Age/Witchcraft in particular today. Though this path has been maligned and misunderstood, it is our human birthright to continue to apply ourselves to the pursuit of the Mystery.

Along the way it can be easy to get tangled up in this school of thought or that, and caught up in the tapestry of personalities that make up today’s community of practitioners. A couple suggestions to help you stay on track:

DO: Start where you are. There is no need to go out and purchase an entire occult store (although the owner will certainly thank you and will be sure to do that Jupiter working again sometime). Begin with a simple meditation practice, ten minutes a day. More thoughts on that later.
DON’T feel pressured to identify as any particular thing, or to identify as any one thing
DO: Hold the attainment of balance and wisdom in the highest regard to help guide your decision-making; do be honest with yourself and record your experiences
DO: Think critically about everything you hear, ask questions, politely call bullsh*t when you hear it.
DO your homework, preferably from credible sources
DO NOT lose your sense of humor

Up next, Meditation and Breath.

Magic Like Jazz

Last weekend I had the opportunity to join a longtime friend leading the opening ritual to a nearby Pagan Pride festival. This was my first time in a public working in quite some time and it felt really great to “get back out there” again performing an Autumn Inundation rite to Isis. Back behind the altar with an audience again, I was reminded of how complex it can be to pull off even a basic ritual for the public but also of how helpful it can be to develop this skillset for ourselves and to further our understanding the function and mechanisms of ritual within a wider context.

Although a lot can be said about spontaneity, ecstasy and improvisation, ritual also has its place in your magical toolbox and implies the notion of a series of actions performed with some degree or organization. The steps and words will vary depending on your individual practice, with certain steps commonly overlapping among the various western-influenced traditions. For a newcomer this can all sound esoteric pretty quick, but as a trained music teacher and one time theater kid here are some interesting analogies:

In my experience, the most effective rituals work like jazz, with just enough structure to keep it sounding good and prevent the thing from falling apart. As the instruments have to be in tune, the practitioners need to be physically, emotionally and spiritually ‘in shape’ and prepared. The players need to be in the same key and playing the same song, and likewise all practitioners should understand the purpose of the working (many systems would attribute the purpose of the working to a planetary correspondence– and since planets were and still are believed to correspond to the music scale this analogy is especially apropos but that’s a topic for another post).

There are several areas that differentiate jazz from earlier forms of Western music, one of them being the structure of the song. Western music is typically written down, all the parts detailed from start to finish. Everyone knows their role and exactly what they’re supposed to play. In jazz the structure is much looser: if players have any sheet music in front of them its typically just the melody and chords. Although the chords are complex vs. prior western musical forms the structure is super simple because the simplicity of the structure allows the players to do more within it. The group goes through the ‘head’ (recognizable melody) a couple times and then opens up to improvisation, with players taking turns creating their own statements while others maintain the chords and beat to keep the song together.

Although there are times when pure improvisation or absolute planning are the best options, I mostly favor rituals that work like jazz. We need familiar elements to get our bearings, a few rules to create the right headspace and hold the thing together. We need a comprehensive understanding of the underpinnings of the harmonies. If joined by others, we start together as a group, but once the tune is rolling we open up the stage for play and becoming lost in the moment because that is where the magic happens. Within a group, this takes practice, trust and a mutual understanding of the working and of one another. For someone with a couple of years of music training it is relatively easy to sit down and play through a piece of Western music in a large group of people. Playing jazz within a small group takes a whole other skill set, paramount of which is a ton communication between players that borders almost on intuition. Even playing alone with recorded chords, the moment of improv can be extremely challenging- remembering the structure and timing of the chords, thinking quickly enough to weave a melody between those changing harmonies that actually sounds good- those skills take practice but can also reward the player with an opportunity for a unique sort of transformative expression that’s a little different from one’s experience playing more rigid structures.

As magico-spiritual practitioners we need to strike a balance on the role of structure, routine and ritual in our approach to our workings and can extrapolate this idea into the concept of rigidity in ideas or beliefs. I’ve commonly seen it said in Wiccan circles that “if I wanted structure, I would still be in church”. Great abstract painters should still learn realism first. I’d encourage anyone looking to go deeper to establish at least a couple of core ritual elements for themselves to make a part of your regular workings– and after that, lead plenty of space for play.

“I had spent many years pursuing excellence, because that is what classical music is all about… Now it was dedicated to freedom, and that was far more important.”

-Nina Simone

On Memes

I recently joined several popular Pagan/magical groups on social media. After a long hiatus from most communities, it’s been fascinating to re-enter the conversation today and see what people are saying and what the strange, hodge podge state of magic is in the Western world today. Engagement with these groups has gotten me thinking about the means by which ideas spread within closed communities (and WHICH ideas are most prone to spread) as well as how people learn to posture for one another based on the accepted practices of the group.

Before social media was really a thing, I first heard the word “meme” in a 1993 Terence McKenna recording: “The English biologist, Dawkins, invented the word meme. Do you know what a meme is? It’s the smallest unit of an idea. It’s like what a gene is to biology, a meme is to ideology. Our task is to create memes.”

Our task is to create memes.
Terence McKenna

Appropriately, today’s memes owe part of their popularity to their ability to quickly and concisely convey an idea- often a joke- in a brief pairing of words/images.

Scrolling through the newsfeed I see a lot of memes that are more directly aligned with the idea of concisely conveying an ideology- in this case a Pagan/magical topic, sometimes meant to educate, often meant to empower or merely drive home a certain idea that unifies the group. I found a few to be useful/educational but many to be just familiar pings in the echo chamber, and worse yet a few were downright factually incorrect.

If we’re going to be engaging with these digital formats, my suggestion would be to not underestimate the ability of these types of visuals to have an effect on you one way or another and to prepare your own sets of mental checks and balances to weigh and filter this input instead of just unconsciously accepting what you see. That includes just having a good BS meter for anything that’s just verifiably incorrect. As magical practitioners we adopt paradigms with some pretty “out there” belief systems by the Western standard, but knowingly expanding our notion of the nature of things should not be mistaken with gullibility, nor for willingness to accept the ideological conclusions of another practitioner just because they posted it over a generic digital picture of a woman in a cape.

On the other hand, if “our task is to create memes”, what will our message be to the world? What message, idea or even joke do we want to share with the world and can we do it effectively? What’s the most concise and compelling means to do so which will appeal to the correct audience?

Preparing the Temple

The past few weeks have involved a flurry of preparatory work on several levels. Practically speaking I’ve been preparing the tools and gaining a few new skillsets needed to start creating the types of content and resources I hope to be able to provide. On the magical level I’ve still been actively studying and practicing– I’m finishing up a streak of evenings spent up-too-late leveraging Monday morning’s full moon and then Wednesday’s Equinox/Libra transition. At this point my eye is twitching a little but I’m due for one more late evening while multitasking on an overseas business call after already being at the office all day.

Thursday.

Preparing the temple isn’t always a glamorous process but it’s a vital one, it can have notable results in of itself letalone the benefits of preparation to the steps that follow. With the building of the temple comes the interesting creative choices as well- how does the physical and mental space we’re creating help to support our work? How does it reflect our worldview? As I set out to try to put my thoughts into motion on these topics I’m immediately confronted with the challenge of trying to define myself and the subject matter, what this should and should not be, and my own self-doubts about doing so. These challenges are of course part of why I want to do this, knowing full well that teaching is the best way to learn.

As we transition through the Autumn Equinox and the nights get longer this is an excellent time to be “going within” and preparing our physical, mental and energetic temples for the aspirations that are important to us. Consider utilizing this timeframe for three month devotional commitments or other inward workings to be completed at Solstice when they can manifest (Merry Christmas!). Alternately, if seeking guidance on a decision or deeper knowledge/understanding we can meditate during this timeframe to to be ‘enlightened’ later on with the rebirth of the Sun.

Use Libra’s influence during this timeframe to harness beauty and aesthetic effect for magical means (and if a bubble bath happens in there, too, so be it). This can apply to the decor of mental or physical temples/altars or our own personal attire. Those who keep goddess statues on an altar might consider decorating them with fine fabrics, perfumes, oils, soft feathers etc. Likewise, how can our own clothes and appearance be leveraged for magical means? The adage “dress for the job you want” doesn’t only apply to our careers.

Over the Trees

My hope us to be able to eventually devote many posts to laying out “the basics” for beginner practitioners or casual readers who are just interested to know more. But, for the benefit of anyone reading this blog from the beginning forward it seems wise to establish a few basic assumptions, with much information to follow on further detail and how we got here.

The practices and belief systems that will be discussed here have many distinct differences, but speaking in the broadest terms most share a few basic tenets:

Belief that humankind has the ability to develop a direct relationship with Divinity(s) and other spiritual beings and that we can improve our lives on multiple levels through development of those relationships
They share having a less traditional understanding of Divinity(s), sometimes with a focus more on individual godforms borrowing mostly from the deities popular in antiquity (i.e. Neo-Paganism), or with a more generalized idea of a God and a Goddess (Wicca), sometimes with a focus on a higher, often gender neutral, Deity who can be thought of in which can be viewed through the lens of individual godforms which can be easier to “get our heads around”. A common notion is that a Feminine Divine is needed to help ‘rebalance’ modern practices and the incorporation of this feminine element takes many different faces depending on the practice.
Belief that humankind can attain various ‘natural’ and ‘supernatural’ attainments through the practice of direction of intention, initiatory practices, raising energy and building relationships with spiritual entities via practices like ritual, dancing, chanting, and other practices to help focus energy and reach liminal states

To approach this in terms of both study and practice we should strive to:

Take care of your physical life. Eat right. Get sleep. Pay your bills. Clean your house. These practices have a funny way of quickly prying open whatever’s amiss in your life to force you to fix it, so just start now. Also, you’ll find any practice is enhanced by a basic clean working space and taking better care of yourself.
Study the history and ideas around your system, including as much primary source material as you can get your hands on—since most of these systems are linked this is a wild ride that might take you a couple of lifetimes so god(s) speed. We are so fortunate to live in a time now where we all have the whole world’s knowledge at our fingertips at all times—use it!
Practice meditation and energy work, honor Deity(s) in your own way, acknowledge and celebrate the movement of the stars and planets and the change of the seasons
Incorporate ritual and symbolism into your daily life
Keep your heart and mind open and your ego and imagination under control
Don’t be a jerk

Word!

About 12 years back I found myself managing a massive Witchcraft shop in a historic building in a bustling downtown tourist town, as you do. It was an amazing experience, and even though it eventually ended like many occult experiments in an explosion of metaphoric flames rivaling the Hindenburg, I wouldn’t have traded it for the world. At that twenty-something era of my life I had already been a lover of ESP, UFO’s, magic, ghosts, paganism and more since I was 10. In the shop I was in paradise– we had an active initiatory Witch coven running out of the place, moon and sabbath rituals, we did readings and healings, made spells, disposed of Ouija boards, brought in authors, traveled to festivals, you named it.

But as I devoured all the standard Witch/Pagan material it soon became apparent to me that, although there were many things of value there, those paths were not fully equipped to help me with the really challenging questions. I needed a deeper understanding of what all of this meant in the far wider scheme of things and where it really came from. That ultimately led me to an interest in areas like Hermetics, Isis, Western occultism, Eastern energy practices/Reiki, modern magical practices and more. I began teaching on what topics I was able to with an emphasis on citation, a sense of humor and my sometimes off-the-wall learning aids. As my understanding grew the success of my practices and ensuing results closely followed.

Life has taken some twists and turns since then and after stepping away for a while it seems it’s time now to continue. I humbly offer my thoughts here with the hopes it may help others on a similar path, and to help me continue my own understanding.

And that being said….