Introduction
Hello, and welcome to the second lesson in the Live Your Magic workshop. Today we’re going to focus on your mind and intellect. The topics of this lesson are meditation, visualization, mindfulness, and rituals.
Meditation
We start with meditation as it is one of those practices that can elevate your everyday life in a multitude of ways. Meditation has several scientifically proven benefits including boosting one’s mood, reducing anxiety and managing stress. Magically, meditation helps us work on our visualization abilities, and it helps us to concentrate, both important tools in spell casting. Meditation can be used to dive deeper into ourselves, connect with the divine, helper spirits, and do shadow work, among other things. It is a powerful technique to enchanting our lives.
Meditation can take on many different forms. You shouldn’t feel like you have to meditate a certain way for it to work. Finding a form of meditation and sticking to it will do more for you than trying to force yourself into a form of meditation that you struggle with. So try several different types of meditation to find one that works for you.
Some forms of meditation include breathing, guided and walking meditations.
Breathing meditations are where you focus on your breathing. This type of meditation is good for people who don’t have as hard a time keeping their mind from wandering. It is also good for building those mindfulness muscles. (We’ll talk about mindfulness in a minute). And it helps one get used to concentrating on one thing for a longer period of time.
Guided meditations range from just leading you through breathing exercises to full on meditations to meet various spirits and deities, to past life regression, etc. These are good for people who have a hard time keeping their mind from wandering, and for meditations where you are trying to accomplish something.
Walking meditations are performed when you are walking, they tend to be more of mindfulness meditations where you are taking note of what is going on around you.
A daily meditation practice is going to benefit you greatly. Choose a time in your daily schedule when you can dedicate ten minutes or so to meditation. You can also meditate for specific purposes, like when reaching out to a spirit helper or to a deity, or when you are doing shadow work. Daily meditation, however, is where you should start as it will help you build your meditation muscles for those other, specific instances.
Meditation Playlist
Included in the resources for this module is a link to a Youtube playlist of several short meditation videos for beginners. Each video is around ten minutes long and range from breathing exercises to guided meditations. You should choose one of the meditations to use every day for the next month.
Visualization
Moving on from meditation we get to visualization. There is a tendency to think of visualization as being merely visual in nature. However, while we often use the term “the inner eye”, visualization isn’t limited to just the sense of sight. If you don’t relate to the world around you as much with your eyes, you might find it hard to “see” your magic. Try this instead: what do you smell, hear, or feel when you visualize? Focus on those senses that come more naturally to you.
Visualization is the key to magic. Added to intent you have everything you need to cast spells and to live magically. But visualization is like a muscle, you need to practice it to keep it useful.
Visualization Exercise
We’re going to go through an exercise to help you build those visualization muscles. You can practice this exercise whenever you want, either with the help of my voice or on your own. Eventually you should be able to run through the exercise on your own without any outside help.
Start by closing your eyes. It’s often easier to visualize with your eyes closed, especially when you are first starting out. Now picture yourself as you are. Build a picture of yourself in your mind. If you aren’t a visual person, build a profile from what it feels like to be you emotionally, or what do you sound like? Smell like? And if you are a visual person, don’t just stick with an image, but add on those other senses as well. View yourself from a bit of a distance. Now change your appearance to your ideal, magical self. What are you wearing? What does your hair look like? Are you wearing makeup? What kind? What does it feel like to be this magical version of yourself? Work on this image until you are happy with it. Now erase that image. Clear your mind for a good five to ten seconds. Now bring that image back to mind. Shore it up, filling in the missing details. Practice this visualization exercise several times during the course of the next week. Keep working until you can bring the image to mind easily and quickly.
By doing this visualization often you’ll be building that magical muscle. You can use visualization in a multitude of ways to live magically. You can use it to imagine what rituals and spellcasting will look like before you do them. It will help you to work with divination techniques as you are able to then “see” what it is that your divination is trying to tell you. And you’ll be able to plan out what this magical life of yours is going to look like.
Mindfulness
While meditation and visualization help with your inner magic, mindfulness relates to your outer experience of the world. With mindfulness you are making an inner monologue of what you are doing, what is happening around you, and how that affects you.
An example of mindfulness would be internally narrating an activity that you are doing, say, getting breakfast. You would then tell yourself what you are doing in each action: “I am getting down my bowl. I am choosing this cereal because that is what I feel like eating today. I am pouring the cereal into the bowl. I am adding milk to the bowl. I am getting a spoon.” etc. The point is to notice and fully engage in each action rather than running on autopilot with your mind racing ahead of your body to what the day holds.
Engaging in mindfulness gets you in the habit of noticing what is going on around you. When you notice what is going on you can be aware of when you can add a magical touch to what you are doing. It slows you down, giving you room to incorporate meaning and ritual into your day to day life. So, if we take breakfast for example, you can add mindfulness to your routine, which then brings your mind to the magical implications of what you are doing. Maybe you start adding cinnamon to your coffee to add success or protection energies to it. You then drink and eat slowly and carefully, taking time to have gratitude for the food you are ingesting and how it fuels your body.
Find ways to fit mindfulness into your daily routine. Start with activities you engage in every day: eating, getting ready for the day, your nighttime routine. Do this for the next seven days and see how your consciousness shifts after just a few times of doing it.
Rituals
All of the previous topics in this lesson–the mediation, the visualization, the mindfulness–are tools we can use to create rituals in our daily lives.
At its most basic, a ritual is a series of actions done in a prescribed order. That’s just a fancy way of saying doing things a certain way every time. Ritual is the core to enchanting your life. You are incorporating magical actions into your mundane day to day. In order to do that, you need to have taken the time to build up your mental and intellectual muscles to identify where you can create ritual, what it will look like, and then implement it.
To start with, think of areas of your life that feel just a little too banal. Things like getting ready for bed: when you brush your teeth and wash your face. Or when you are setting your dinner table. Next, think about how you can make it magical: For example, can you add affirmations to your teeth brushing? Can you add rosewater to bring beauty energy to your night time facial routine? Can you add a sigil to your mail when you send it out? When you set the table, can you invite abundance and health to sit with you while you eat?
As an example of how I add ritual to an everyday, mundane action, let’s look at how I leave and enter my home. I have a wreath on my front door. When I am leaving the house, I touch it and take with me the love and protection that I imbued into it when I made the wreath. And when I come home, I touch it to disperse any negativity or malicious energy that might have attached itself to me before I enter the house. It is the magical equivalent to wiping my feet before I come indoors.
Adding ritual to your life simply requires intention. Take the time to look at your life and see where you could easily slip in magic and ritual. It doesn’t have to be a big, dramatic act. In fact, smaller, personal acts will stick around longer and be easier to incorporate into your routine. Take your time on this part of the lesson, use your mindfulness and meditation practices to identify where you can add ritual to your life. Use your visualization to see what the ritual would look like before you enact it.
In Conclusion
Remember, living a magical life requires intention on our parts. We have to take stock of where our lives feel too mundane and we need to make plans to enchant.
Meditation and Visualization are techniques that will help us to center ourselves so that we can see our lives clearly how they are right now and how we want them to be.
Creating rituals around our daily routines helps to enchant our lives.
Put in the time over the next week to find a meditation practice that works for you, to get your visualization and mindfulness muscles into shape. And then find one place in your life where you can create a ritual to enchant it. Don’t forget to complete the self-assessment exercise for this module as well.
I’ll see you in the next lesson.
Now that you have gone through the lesson in this module it is time to work on your self-assessment work. The questions in this exercise are meant to get you thinking about how you can put the information in the lesson to work in your own life.
Turn to a blank page and answer the following questions as thoroughly as you are able. Take at least five minutes to answer each question. Don’t feel like you have to limit yourself to writing, either. You can doodle, color, sketch, and even collage and stamp your answer to the questions. Do what feels right and makes sense to you. Just make sure that you will be able to understand your entries later.
You can also print out the attached PDF document and write your answers there, if you want.
Go ahead and answer the following questions:
- What form of meditation feels right for you? When can you incorporate a regular meditation practice into your life?
- How does your visualization manifest? Is it visual? Are you more comfortable with using scent, touch or hearing as your visualization sense?
- What comes to mind when you think of mindfulness? Would it be easy or difficult for you to incorporate mindfulness into your day to day life?
- What are some rituals or ceremonies that can bring more magic into your life?
A Day of Mindfulness
Mindfulness doesn’t come naturally to people. It is a practice you need to cultivate in order for it to become second nature. To that end, this hands-on exercise involves you starting to spend your time more mindfully.
Spend a day running your inner monologue of your actions. Narrate what you are doing, how you are doing it, and what you are feeling when you do it. Be as detailed as you can be, especially when it comes to how you feel about what you are doing.
Take time to view your actions through a cinematic lens. As you do this, note activities where you could add magical intention and thought.
If you can’t do a whole day choose a couple of activities throughout the day, say when making breakfast or dinner or when washing the dishes or engaging in a chore.
Or, you can take a walk and start the monologue as you go. Notice what is going on outside of you.
Starting and maintaining a meditation practice can be hard. To help you out in this area, I have put together a Youtube video playlist of several short guided meditations. These are all around ten minutes long.
Listen through the playlist and choose a video, or pick on at random. Set this is your meditation video for the next week. Change it up if you find yourself bored with the video you chose. The important thing is that you are going to meditate once a day for ten minutes. Practicing with these videos for thirty days will not only teach you the basics of meditation, but will get you into the habit of meditating.
Choose a time during the day when you know you’ll have ten minutes of uninterrupted time. If you don’t have a regular time in your daily routine, make it. Tell your familiy that this is your time, and they shouldn’t interrupt. I find that either first thing in the morning or last thing at night lend themselves well to a meditation practice. But go with what time works for you. Consistency is the key.
If you miss a day (or three) just come back to it. Don’t get down on yourself. You are making your life magic and that requires a lot of grace and kindness to yourself.
Click on this link to get to the playlist.