Jedis, lightsabers and PTSD

My experience with PTSD is not unique, nor is the methodology in which I have chosen to handle this beastie. And trust me, it is a beastie, anyone who deals with it or has to watch a loved one wrangle with an episode knows this for certain. My mother has helped me a great deal by customizing a meditative technique using the Silva Method platform for this issue I face and she has encouraged me to share it here with you and your loved ones. This is a method that need maintenance. It is not a one time deal and certainly not an emergency handler, although during an episode, coupled with reiki from a partner, it helps significantly and will help bring you out of the episode within a few hours instead of a 24 hour- a week long dragged out hell. My mother reminds me to go 'clean out my brain' when she recognizes and episode setting in and this has been a genuine help for me. So with out further adou, I will walk you through the meditation for you to memorize and use or walk your loved one through.

We are going to count down from 3 to 1 and as you exhale,  see the number 3 three times and mentally say the number 3 three times in your mind.

take another deep  breath and as you exhale say the word 2 three times mentally and see the number 2 three times.

take another deep breath and as you exhale say the word 1 three times mentally and see the number 1 three times.

you are now at level one, you can use this level for any developmental work you wish. we are going to deepen this mind frame by counting back from 25- 1 as you breathe deeply and fully.

( count from 25 to 1)

Before you, you see an environmental bubble. It is filled with all that you need to travel comfortably into the outer dark of space. Step into this bubble and seal the hatch behind you. The bubble carries you up into the air, past the atmosphere and into the great outer dark where you are surrounded with stars, nebulae, and planets. Observe these bodies as you travel further still a place where only the black lives. Here is where your work will take place.

( 30 second pause)

On your shoulder you notice a miniaturized version of yourself in Jedi garb carrying a lightsaber. Your Jedi-self cuts into the back of your head and crawls in to take a look at your brain. Inside your brain there are neural connections each carrying messages from your brain to your body. While you are watching these connections, you begin to notice that there are two colors being shown as the energy of your thoughts and body functions are crossing your brain. One color indicates healthy connections that promote a healthy mind and body. The second color is clearly unhealthy and reacts in negative manners within your mind and body. These unhealthy connections are associated with PTSD. 

(30 second pause)

Ignite your lightsaber and begin to cut out the unhealthy PTSD connections. Pull them out of your brain and push them out the airlock into the deep of space to be transformed by the universe for something constructive and positive. As you pull each unhealthy connection out of your mind, see them float away from you where they can no longer harm you or anyone else. Look within the folds of you mind. Find all the connections you can see and remove them one at a time. When you are done, your Jedi-self steps out of your mind, seals the incision that you used to access your mind and reintegrates back into you as a part of your healing body. Allow yourself to enjoy the trip back into the Earth's atmosphere by watching the stars and planets pass. When you are back upon the earth and back into yourself, take a few deep breathes and observe the clearness of your mind.

( pause 30 seconds)

Count from 1 to 5 with each breath. You will open your eyes, feel refreshed and ready to move forward with your day. You will feel better and better.

( count slowly from 1-5)

This meditation should be practiced every few day to make sure the connections remain fewer and fewer with each session. I have noticed improvements with my PTSD symptoms from the first meditation session. I continue to use this as a means to keep the attack few and far between in conjunction with my counseling and acupuncture. I hope this helps you and your loved ones as much as it has been helping me.

Angry imps!

I like this discussion on the dark side of meditation and the issues that can occur. I view them of course not necessarily from a scientific or even scholastic perspective. I come to this discussion from personal experience ( which is king in my book) and a shamanic eye. It is necessary to have this discussion because these are real consequences of awakening a possible shaman without the lore/ guiding hand/ shamanic ethos and spirit contact. Meditation is not a practice of scientifically silencing the mind and it's voice, it is a conscious effort to connect yourself with the divine part of yourself and divinity as we are able to perceive and understand. This requires understanding of uncommon sense to be applied in a common sense world. Yes this is indeed a paradox, but if you are in the mirror's reflection, everything is backward, yet we still understand it.

 I agree with the Dalai Lama: you cannot have a Temple without a large library to support it. ( Library guides are also very much desired.) Libraries and library guides teach us that there are answers out there and if they are not direct answers, we are able to take the facts or read a pattern and bring it into focus to understand or at least come to terms with the strangenesses currently in play. Between libraries and meditation, shamans thrive; remove the libraries and the whole kit and caboodle is insanity in a crazy burlap bag of angry wet cats. Poor burlap bag. I believe that when you are centered within yourself while in meditation that what you have learned has the potential to become wisdom through right action.  I think we often forget that life is a mystery to experience not analyze.

I have had some very negative experiences in both meditation and trance. That does not make me unstable. It makes me pretty "normal." EEEEEKKKK When these disturbing things occur it is a cue for me not to run away, but to carefully inspect. I may be experiencing an angry shard of myself or even missing soul piece! That is not to be ignored or taken lightly in the shamanic world. ( it is also not red alert/ klaxon alarm/ panic button pushing event.) It could be causing illness, true indeed, even emotional disturbances. . . the good news is that you can fix it. In fact, when these things come up you are being invited to help heal the issue. Not just fix it; heal it, mend it, bring the tattered ends together for peace talks. These things, these dark frightening things that hide in our beings. . . they are us. And they want the same things we want: love and acceptance for who and what they are. Really it's like the soul shattered off and made all these little imp like shards and they come back to haunt us. The only truth we need to understand in these moments is this: It may be an imp, but it's my imp and I love it. Well loved imps are much better behaved than ignored, ostracized, and angry imps.

Thus the witch proverb:

Faithfully serve your imp, and S/He shall faithfully serve you.

A multi layered adjustment

It has been made very clear to me that things are not in balance with me in my life right now. I have spent the last few months with some sort of cootie or another and even as I type this, walking pneumonia seems to be the term docs are using for it. Oh yea! So, as the moon wanes I am working on digging into myself to help figure out and uncover the how's what's and why's of things and come up with something to restore that balance.

I think that all of this began with the move from the apartment to the house. I have been a non stop run, run, run and some of the things that I used to have time for have either gotten slashed in availability or has fallen off the radar completely. (BAD) I need to adjust things to a better balance and I think I need some other worldly help in tweeking it just right.

 I have dragged out my BOS and dug up some information that I gleaned from my tarot magic. I will be using Oleum of Isolde and my Thoth deck for this as I find that Hecate prefers it's sharpness and dark tones. I pulled out the Adjustment card, because that is precisely what I need to do. This card will become the center of my working.

Here are some things that I have found to work best as accents to using this card. I pass this on to you to use at your discretion as at one point in time or another we all find our selves a bit off kilter. I won't pass the specifics of my personal  ritual simply because it has significance to me because I wrote it. I suggest that you sit down with your self and discover your own idea of how your working should look. It will not only get the magic flowing, it will be most powerful for you.

Justice/ Adjustment: Balance
Incense: sage, copal, cedar
Oils: rosemary, clove, frankincense, rosewood, Oleum of Isolde
Stones: emerald, quartz, turquoise, black tourmaline, hematite
Candle colors: grey, white, sea green, blue


I include ritual in my personal healing for several reasons. I know healing to be something that is more than seeing a doc and taking medicine. True healing is something that happens between body and soul and it cannot be a complete process if you neglect to address all aspects of the illness including the aspects that is more often ignored: the energetic resonances of it. So it's time for this faery shaman to sit down with herself and work on herself even if it means that some things have got to be changed out and readjusted. I have sneaking hunches. It's time to verify them or find out what the real deal is.

Light Bringer

We do not teach history; we recreate the experience. We follow the chain of consequences -- the tracks of the beast in its forest. Look behind our words and you see the broad sweep of social behavior that no historian has ever touched.

Bene Gesserit Panoplia Propheticus

Chapterhouse: Dune

Meditation, trance and shamanic experiences

I tend to relate my subject matter from a personal experience format and my opinions are formed from these experiences. So when I tell you these things, keep in mind that your experiences in meditation and so forth are not wrong should they differ. More likely, you have different modes of perception and if they work for you then that is perfect. I tend to be a very visual person. I see things while I am in meditation and trances with pretty good clarity even if I don't always understand at the time what it is I am looking at.

Meditation practices are highly encouraged for it's calming and sorting effect on the mind's operation. You can either walk through a formulated pattern or your can go zen and allow the chains of the mind to loosen. I really have no preference for one over the other. I suppose, it would be more dependent on what my goal is for the meditation. I use formulated patterns for either stress relief accompanied by mudras or pathworkings when I wish to explore a specific aspect of my mind's inner workings. Trances I tend to use for interactions with divinity or my spirit guides.

The story I am about to relate to you happened many years ago and has had a very formative effect on my personal life. It's what lead me to trances in the first place and later to the tradition I now call home.

I was working on a pathworking excercise I had been trying to work for a couple of weeks with little success, something always interfered and I was beginning to become frustrated. I decided that I was going to continue practicing this pathworking until I got what I came for: an experience that would lead me to my seat of wisdom. It started just as it usually had, over the hill through the forest and on to the water in a swan boat through the mist. I usually got hung up on the mist. For whatever reason, my mind was having trouble parting it.

This time on the rocking boat, the mist parted and an island with a tower keep was revealed. I landed on shore and walked in. I started to feel things more deeply, things became very crisp and clear as I walk up the stairs toward the top of the tower. If this hadn't been my first experience with pathworkings slipping into trance I would have realized that things had shifted, but this was a new experience and I had no point of reference on the cues. I did think it funny at the time that everything had suddenly become more real for the lack of a better term.

As I walked into this huge library with books, scrolls and sheaves of paper scattered about, I immediately felt a buzzing sensation in my body as I laid my eyes upon a hooded man working arduously over a hand written work. He noticed my approach immediately and pointed to a seat that popped out of nowhere. He asked me a series of questions about my path including why I was on it and simply nodded. I was trying to see his face, the voice sounded familiar, but the shadows hid the features of his face very well.

I could tell that he was looking at me. It wasn't uncomfortable, it felt like someone who knew me just trying to understand why I was walking the path the way I was instead of following convention. He caught me off guard with a final question: who am I? Before I could even rationalize the question the answer flew out of my mouth as if I had known it all along: you are my Father's father. He removed his hood and a face similar to my father's smiled out at me. It wasn't a huge toothy radiant smile. It was one of cool, logical pleasure full of reserve and quiet pride.

Later, I described this experience to my mother who in turn responded it sounded like something my Grandfather would do. You see, I only met my Grandfather as an infant. He had passed the veil when I was very young. I have no memories of him on this plane. I came to realize after my conversation with my mother that something very odd had happened: my pathworking had shifted into a trance somewhere along the way and my Grandfather had arranged to have this conversation with me. It is possible that he was curious as to why I had made the decisions I had made about my spirituality. He was a philosopher in this life so I may have caught his attention.

After this occurred, other strange things would happen and continue to happen. I would meet people and beings that no one else could see, but they were there as plainly as any other person. I would have entire conversations with them that I can remember verbatim. Most recently was at a Samhain ritual I officiated in Tuscon. There was woman there who I was talking with. She commented on how much she enjoyed the ritual and was thanking me for coming all the way from Phoenix to do this for them. Other words were exchanged and later while speaking to my mother about this person and her curious words she developed a vexed look on her face. I described the woman three times to her and it was no one she knew or had invited. . . this was a by invitation only event. I spoke to my dad about this woman and he didn't recognize her either. I can only concluded that this woman was another one of my shamanic experiences.

I do have to wonder what the other people were thinking while I was having this conversation with the disappearing woman. I wonder if they perceived me as we perceived Giaus Baltar while he had his conversations with 6. You see, Six had always been invisible to everyone but Baltar and he was always left in these awkward situations because of these conversations. That must have been awful strange to them, if any of them were paying attention. It's not like the room was very large much less empty, so someone had to have seen something.

There is no right or wrong way to meditate. There is no defined amount of recommended time. I've know someone who manages to squeeze in only 10 minutes a day with a house full of kids and it helps her tremendously. I generally wait until kids are tucked in for either bed or a nap. I can range from ten minutes to almost an hour depending on what is going on in my life at the time and what it is I am seeking. Meditation is a practice. Even if in the beginning you are rubbish at it. . . keep trying. Your efforts will pay off, even if you are not trying to work up to jumping the hedge.

For information on the effects of time go to this post: Energetic Effects of Time