The Four-Part Breath, also referred to as Square Breathing and Box Breathing, is a controlled breathing exercise wherein the duration of inhalations, pauses, and exhalations are equalized to a count of four seconds. The exercise is commonly employed to help reduce stress and anxiety, to affect near immediate relaxation, and to quiet the mind. It can be performed from nearly any position, be it seated, standing, or laying. Those with medical conditions that could be adversely affected by slowing their respiration or holding their breath should consult with a licensed medical professional first. A single cycle of the exercise is performed as follows:
When we dream, we have out-of-body experiences on the astral plane. Conscious astral projection involves getting into a meditative state, moving your astral body out of your physical body, and traveling around on the astral plane.
Astral Body
Between you as spirit and your physical body there is an intermediate body known as your astral body. It is lighter and more changeable than your physical body. But the astral body has more shape and density than pure spirit. Your astral body may often be recognizable as your human form, but it can also change appearance, shift shapes, and do fun things like moving through walls.
Astral Plane
The world between the physical and spiritual world is known as the astral plane, or the astral. While it is commonly referred to in the singular as the astral plane, there are actually many different levels of the astral, or astral planes. We move through these astral planes in our dreams.
Astral Travel
The astral world is much more fluid than the physical world. Astral travel is not bound by the limitations of time and space. You can visit different dimensions and travel to past or future experiences on the astral. For many people, it is also easier to connect with deceased loved ones on the astral.
Astral planes vary from the ordinary, to the phantasmagorical, to the divine. Defying easy definition, the astral planes intersect with both physical reality and the symbolic realms of the dream world. Astral travel can take you to dimensions beyond your imagination.
Astral Dream Experiences
Your astral body plays a key role in creating new developments which have not yet manifested in your physical life. The astral is like a giant laboratory in which you experiment with your life and your creations.
The astral can also offer great insight, as it allows you to come at things from a different angle. Astral dream experiences allow you to see things from a different perspective than your normal awareness. As a result, astral dreams can be especially useful for working on situations that–for one reason or another–may be difficult to face directly in daily life.
Astral Projection Meditation
Astral projection typically involves getting into a meditative state so you can consciously move your astral body out of your physical body. With practice, astral projection allows you to develop greater awareness of out-of-body and astral experiences.
These are simple directions for an astral meditation that is suitable for beginners…
ASTRAL PROJECTION EXERCISE:
Preparing the Space, Preparing Yourself…
Find a quiet, comfortable place for yourself–where you will not be disturbed. Create a relaxing atmosphere. You may want to light a candle, burn incense, or play some quiet, soothing music in the background. Begin to relax in general. Take some deep breaths and perhaps do some light stretching. Sit upright in a comfortable position with an open posture.
Part I: Aura Meditation
Get yourself centered and grounded by doing the Aura Meditation in How to Meditate. You will also need to repeat this after your astral projection meditation.
Notice how you experience yourself before doing the Astral Projection exercise. Then close your eyes and focus your attention inward…
Part II: Astral Projection Meditation
Be aware of your body. Notice how you experience the density of your physical body. Then be aware of your aura about an arm’s length all the way around your body. Notice how you experience the lightness of your spiritual energy. Then start to open up your awareness of an intermediate body between your physical body and you as spirit. Notice how you experience the vibration of your astral body.
Allow yourself to shift your awareness to your astral body. Be present in your astral body.
Float your astral body up to a corner of the room. Be present in your astral body in that upper corner of the room. From that upper corner of the room, be aware of your physical body down below you, sitting in the chair. Notice how you experience your physical body down below you.
Then float your astral body up through the ceiling and be on the roof of your building. Be aware of your astral body standing on the roof of your building. On the roof, move around a bit in your astral body. Notice how you experience being in your astral body. Be aware of the world around from the roof of your building. Notice how you experience the world from your astral body.
Then bring your astral body down through the roof and be in an upper corner of the room again. From the upper corner of the room, notice your physical body sitting in the chair below you.
Float your astral body above your physical body. Notice what it’s like to be above your physical body. Then gently lower yourself down into your physical body. First be aware of being in your astral body in your physical body. Then allow yourself to shift your awareness to your physical body itself. Allow yourself to come back fully into your physical body.
Part III: Repeat the Aura Meditation
Get yourself centered and grounded by doing the Aura Meditation in How to Meditate. Draw all of your energy back from above you. Feel your feet on the floor. Feel your legs, torso, arms, neck and head. Be aware of your aura an arm’s length around your body. Notice what it’s like to be grounded back in your body.
When you feel ready, take a few deep breaths, gently open your eyes, and slowly begin to move. Notice how you experience yourself after doing the Astral Projection exercise. Give yourself some time to integrate this experience and enjoy being relaxed before moving on to other activities. (Especially after you first start practicing this meditation–you may want to journal your experience, have a cup of tea, or go for a quiet walk.)
If you practice astral meditation on a regular basis, it will become easier to do and your out-of-body experiences will gradually become clearer. – Oakwulf
There’s plenty of resources out there available to you on Tumblr, you need only look. I’m sure there are plenty of energy work tags on plenty of blogs out there. The very basics of energy work is to learn how to ground, cleanse, and to sense it. I learned to ground from an old book for Wicca years ago. LOL
What is Energy Work?
To put it simply, energy work is working with unseen forces that’s generally labeled as energy. The concept of energy can take on many forms in both the physical and intangible. An object at rest can store up kinetic energy while the sun can emit solar energy. You have two sides to energy and that’s the scientific and then there’s energy work in witchcraft. Most practices utilizes some form of energy work guided by intention by the worker.
Centering yourself is the act of calming your mind and your emotions. It’s a kind of meditative state where you begin to feel more within and around you. The best way to learn to center is to learn to meditate. Meditation is the basic of most practices. You can reach a meditative state while walking, exercising, in the shower, reading, etc. You tend to focus your mind to the point where the rest of the world fades into the background. Active meditation aids you in keeping your body focused on a task that tends to be repetitive for your mind to become still. There are plenty of guided meditations you can try and search for on YouTube.
The basic idea was to sit down with your legs crossed and begin to meditate. You imagine yourself as a tree and set down roots where the base of your spine would be and the trunk being your spine, the sprouts above your head. The intention was to connect with the earth and then push out all your ‘bad’ energies into the earth and take within its energies to hold within yourself. Then release it and slowly come out of the meditative state by withdrawing your roots. I used this grounding method while starting out and it was a very common one to use. It didn’t work as well for me as my cosmic grounding method that I adjusted for the solar grounding within my post.
Typically, you should feel rejuvenated and relaxed when you ground. There’s plenty of guided meditation methods you can try. I even covered a few fire and solar grounding techniques within the post you commented on if you’d like to try those. Here’s plenty of links I have on hand with various grounding methods:
I learned to ground before I learned how to sense energy. Sensing energy involves a lot of patience, practice, and being patient with yourself. You don’t instantly become amazing at energy work. It takes you taking the time to repeatedly practice and push yourself. A good exercise to begin with is to start with your hands. Find a quiet place for yourself so you won’t be disturbed. Hold your hands, palms facing each other together. Now close your eyes and take deep breaths. (You don’t have to close your eyes yet I recommend it for the first time because removing the visual sense heightens your other senses.) Focus on the feel between your hands and gather your energy there. They should feel warm already just from having your hands together even before going into this with the intention of gathering energy from your body heat.
Next, slowly pull them apart and back together, not quite touching to focus on the feel against your palms. You should feel a slight push or pull. You can jiggle your hands a little side to side to get a feel for that sensation. The next step is to create a greater distance between your hands to work on sensing that energy between them. It can get weaker the further apart they are yet you’ll get better at it the more you play around with this. I used to play with this as a kid in school to make energy balls in my hands.
The next step up from working with your own energy is to work with plants. You hold your hands on either side of the plant with your palms pointing inward to each other. You concentrate on feeling for the plant’s energy, that slight push pulls against your hands. It’s important to take notes and keep track of how things feel for you because energy work will become subjective to you on your techniques over time. This method to feel a plant’s energy can be applied to rocks, objects, spirits, etc. Go nuts. I moved onto candles after plants when I started. You can figure out what energy you can feel and not feel.
Shielding is the act of using your energy or an outside source to create a protective shield around you. You can apply this as a personal shield around your body, an object, yourself, etc. This can range from protective wards to stopping others from intruding into your space. You can get creative as you’d like yet you’d have to tie the protective measure to an energy source to draw its power from. The most common forms of energy source to work with while beginning are the four basic elements (earth, air, fire, water), the moon, and the sun. You generally want to avoid using yourself as a source well as you have a finite amount of energy to provide and can tap yourself out by overworking yourself. There are physical objects you can use as protective measures or working with spirits yet I’m going to stick with the energy work focused for the purposes of this post.
The act of charging is using energy to fill up an object. It’s most commonly used with crystals. You often hear of people leaving various crystals or objects out in the sun or moon for awhile. This usually is to be filled with solar or lunar energies while at the same time become cleansed. You could charge water, candles, etc.
Programming is a continuation of charging and that is to give the object a purpose set through intention, sigils, spells, etc. The object itself has its own energy yet you can program it to act a certain way by specifying what for while charging the object. You can charge an object with your own energy, solar, lunar, fire, water, earth, air, whatever other energy sources you find or can think of. Setting the intention of the charging would create it’s programming which can be further enforced over using this object for its intended purpose. Repeatedly using it as such will cement in this programming.
Energy work isn’t a difficult thing to research at all. Before I discovered Tumblr, I learned everything from books and later Google when it was invented and computers became more mainstream. All it takes is for you to go out and look for the information because not everything is going to be handed to you. There’s so many 101 posts out there on Tumblr and now I’ve given you just one more to add to your arsenal.
Y’all people need to
meditate more. Meditating for 6 hours a day already? MOOOOAAAAAARRRREEEEE. No
but seriously, if you’re not doing this kind of meditation regularly, and your
spells aren’t working the way you want them to, then you might want to start. If
your spells are working, then this will supercharge them. Do you really want
your spells to be affected by your meandering thoughts? No? Then learn to stem
those thoughts girl.
It’ll also allow you
to be witchy on the fly. Walking down the street and want to cast a mini spell
for exam success? Done! Want to get people out of your way at the bar so you
can be served? Done!
Anyway, let’s get onto the
how-to:
1 Begin by
learning to meditate for 10 minutes per day.
The goal of this step is to acquire the
skill of being motionless and thoughtless in anticipation of beginning your
spell/visualisation. Focus on your breathing. You may well receive some
interesting visions at this stage when you get used to being in a thoughtless,
open state so keep a journal next to you to write in afterwards. Ideally you
want to be able to extend this time to 30 minutes however personally I believe
10 minutes can be enough to significantly improve your witchin’.
2 Distract your
mind.
The above step might take a while to fully master so if you’ve
got here, then go you! You’re doing pretty well. For this step you need to
learn to focus on an irrelevant object, without meandering thoughts or blurred
vision. When casting spells, this will come in useful, as it keeps your mind
away from the matter at hand (your mind can interfere by persuading you it won’t
work or generally causing shit) so that your will and desire can take the front
stage and make shit happen.
3 XTREME
Visualisation
Ok now you’re getting
the hang of what makes your magick boom, we’re going to start XTREME
visualisation. Kinda. Some witches might have this skill anyway so if you can
visualise clearly an object in front of you, then skip this step, you’re too
good 😉.
Begin by getting into the closed eye meditative state from step one, then visualise
something simple like a 2D shape to focus on for the duration of your
meditation. Focus on it clearly, suppress your thoughts, and don’t let the image
blur.
4 Project the
image onto a wall.
Open your eyes, find a blank wall and
repeat the meditation from step 3 but mapping the image onto the wall in front
of you.
5 Begin to make
your visualisations more detailed
i.e. a rose.
6 CAST YO SPELLS.
This should be enough to significantly increase
the effectiveness of your magick. Meditate for 5/10 minutes before your spell,
focusing on something relevant to your spell. Meditate again for 10/20 minutes
after your spell, focusing on something completely irrelevant to your spell
like a 2D triangle or that dust bunny on your book shelf.
When we dream, we have out-of-body experiences on the astral plane. Conscious astral projection involves getting into a meditative state, moving your astral body out of your physical body, and traveling around on the astral plane.
Astral Body
Between you as spirit and your physical body there is an intermediate body known as your astral body. It is lighter and more changeable than your physical body. But the astral body has more shape and density than pure spirit. Your astral body may often be recognizable as your human form, but it can also change appearance, shift shapes, and do fun things like moving through walls.
Astral Plane
The world between the physical and spiritual world is known as the astral plane, or the astral. While it is commonly referred to in the singular as the astral plane, there are actually many different levels of the astral, or astral planes. We move through these astral planes in our dreams.
Astral Travel
The astral world is much more fluid than the physical world. Astral travel is not bound by the limitations of time and space. You can visit different dimensions and travel to past or future experiences on the astral. For many people, it is also easier to connect with deceased loved ones on the astral.
Astral planes vary from the ordinary, to the phantasmagorical, to the divine. Defying easy definition, the astral planes intersect with both physical reality and the symbolic realms of the dream world. Astral travel can take you to dimensions beyond your imagination.
Astral Dream Experiences
Your astral body plays a key role in creating new developments which have not yet manifested in your physical life. The astral is like a giant laboratory in which you experiment with your life and your creations.
The astral can also offer great insight, as it allows you to come at things from a different angle. Astral dream experiences allow you to see things from a different perspective than your normal awareness. As a result, astral dreams can be especially useful for working on situations that–for one reason or another–may be difficult to face directly in daily life.
Astral Projection Meditation
Astral projection typically involves getting into a meditative state so you can consciously move your astral body out of your physical body. With practice, astral projection allows you to develop greater awareness of out-of-body and astral experiences.
These are simple directions for an astral meditation that is suitable for beginners…
ASTRAL PROJECTION EXERCISE:
Preparing the Space, Preparing Yourself…
Find a quiet, comfortable place for yourself–where you will not be disturbed. Create a relaxing atmosphere. You may want to light a candle, burn incense, or play some quiet, soothing music in the background. Begin to relax in general. Take some deep breaths and perhaps do some light stretching. Sit upright in a comfortable position with an open posture.
Part I: Aura Meditation
Get yourself centered and grounded by doing the Aura Meditation in How to Meditate. You will also need to repeat this after your astral projection meditation.
Notice how you experience yourself before doing the Astral Projection exercise. Then close your eyes and focus your attention inward…
Part II: Astral Projection Meditation
Be aware of your body. Notice how you experience the density of your physical body. Then be aware of your aura about an arm’s length all the way around your body. Notice how you experience the lightness of your spiritual energy. Then start to open up your awareness of an intermediate body between your physical body and you as spirit. Notice how you experience the vibration of your astral body.
Allow yourself to shift your awareness to your astral body. Be present in your astral body.
Float your astral body up to a corner of the room. Be present in your astral body in that upper corner of the room. From that upper corner of the room, be aware of your physical body down below you, sitting in the chair. Notice how you experience your physical body down below you.
Then float your astral body up through the ceiling and be on the roof of your building. Be aware of your astral body standing on the roof of your building. On the roof, move around a bit in your astral body. Notice how you experience being in your astral body. Be aware of the world around from the roof of your building. Notice how you experience the world from your astral body.
Then bring your astral body down through the roof and be in an upper corner of the room again. From the upper corner of the room, notice your physical body sitting in the chair below you.
Float your astral body above your physical body. Notice what it’s like to be above your physical body. Then gently lower yourself down into your physical body. First be aware of being in your astral body in your physical body. Then allow yourself to shift your awareness to your physical body itself. Allow yourself to come back fully into your physical body.
Part III: Repeat the Aura Meditation
Get yourself centered and grounded by doing the Aura Meditation in How to Meditate. Draw all of your energy back from above you. Feel your feet on the floor. Feel your legs, torso, arms, neck and head. Be aware of your aura an arm’s length around your body. Notice what it’s like to be grounded back in your body.
When you feel ready, take a few deep breaths, gently open your eyes, and slowly begin to move. Notice how you experience yourself after doing the Astral Projection exercise. Give yourself some time to integrate this experience and enjoy being relaxed before moving on to other activities. (Especially after you first start practicing this meditation–you may want to journal your experience, have a cup of tea, or go for a quiet walk.)
If you practice astral meditation on a regular basis, it will become easier to do and your out-of-body experiences will gradually become clearer. – Oakwulf
1. Rest – we aren’t robots, we need rest. Getting at least 6 hours of sleep each night promotes healthy brain function. Making time to do nothing each day can also make us more creative.
2. Creativity – let the imagination run wild. When weexplore the imagination through painting, drawing, singing, dancing or any other creative outlet we allow ourselves to express our true selves.
3. Meditation – hit the reset button. Our minds can become crowded with thoughts, memories and tasks throughout the day – meditation allows us to wipe the mental slate clean and drop the baggage weighing us down.
4. Exercise – working out our emotions. Emotions can become trapped in the body and manifest in poor mental and physical health – exercise is a great way to release the energy of these pent-up emotions.
5. Nature – peace & quiet. When we immerse ourselves in nature we are aligning ourselves with the natural vibration of the planet which cleanses us of the interference we can pick up in man-made environments.
6. Affirmations – reinforcing positive beliefs. Repeating positive affirmations such as “I am in the process of manifesting my dreams” can help us stay on track and persevere through tough times.
7. Self-talk – checking in with ourselves. Who else can we turn to when we need expert advice on ourselves? Only we will know exactly what we’ve experienced and how it’s affected us – this is why self-talk is a powerful form of self-love.
Occult Aspects 