#practical guides

One of the most common questions I get is "Ash - how do you ACTUALLY, PRACTICALLY move, throw, and raise energy? A lot of those guides seem to be missing some key steps!" I hear you - and I'm here to break it down.

Below is my own method, slowed down piece by piece. Remember - raising and using energy is a personal matter/varies from person to person, so feel free to adjust, change, or discard any part of this guide to suit your practice!

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1. Raising Energy

With a combination of physical action, “psyching yourself up”, verbal action, or psychological methods, raise your adrenaline, emotional, or excitement levels in a way that gets more intense the more you do it. E.g., chanting until the words start to lose meaning or you get into a trance state, dancing around the circle until you get a runner’s high and start laughing/having fun and forgetting yourself, and then basically keep performing that action until your emotional/excitement/adrenaline reaches a breaking point. The best way to describe this is escalating excitement. If you’re into EDM, this is how it feels when a beat is about to drop and keeps escalating. This should feel physical and psychological - literally like hitting a runner’s high when you’re exercising, or getting so excited about a date you start to shake. The easiest way to do this is to raise energy with physical activity or chanting. You can enhance this action by doing it moving in a circle around the object you’re going to put energy into.

Many sources cite a series of ways traditionally used to raise energy, which are practical actions to be used in conjunction with the above, as a focus: Raising power with chanting (sub in your own belief system in what you choose for the chant), dance, or singing is common - you can stick with praying too, just be sure to raise and escalate, just to name a few.

2. When you’re sufficiently pumped, keep going. Now, let's THROW!

At this point, you have two options: Physically moving the “energy”, or achieving “gnosis”. (This is the beat drop.)

A) Gnosis

Gnosis is (oversimplifying) the moment when you fully forget yourself and the energy takes over. Basically, you lose sight of where you are and what you’re doing and there’s a moment where everything snaps into place. A real-world example would be, if you’re raising energy with sex magic, the moment of climax. A SFW example would be - this should feel like, when you’re staring at a magic eye painting, after a long while of staring it “clicks” to form an image. Physically IRL, this should feel like - for a split second, even - you do not have control over your energy or emotion. When achieving gnosis, look at (direct your attention to) the object you are raising energy for.

B) Moving or “throwing” the energy

Moving or Throwing is a little more abstract, but I’m going to guide you best as I can. By now, you’re buzzing with actual physical energy, like before a birthday party (nervous jitters OR excitement), or like when you’ve just finished a workout. Take a moment and feel the physical and mental effects of this. Do a body scan if helpful. (The reason why visualizing is helpful is that you can visualize this buzz as a physical thing, once you sense its effects with a body scan, for the next part.) You’ll now need to “direct” the energy. Try and physically move your body to “gather” all your energy up (moving your arms to see how far-reaching the effects of the buzz are, then experimenting by moving your body to see if it changes the scope of the buzz). Then, physically thrust your hands or arms (or your body parts of choice) at the object you’re directing energy to. Do this by performing a strong, firm, decisive physical action, and, if it helps, visualize the energy flowing from your body into the object like a giant blast of fire/light. If done correctly, YOU should no longer feel a buzz - the buzz should now be entirely within the object. If you still feel full of adrenaline, try again - perform a physical throwing movement or (sorry for the dumb example ahoy, it’s 9AM) Dragonball style kamehameha at it. You know how when you’re really upset or nervous, and you shake it off or primal scream and your energy dissipates? Do that, but this time, using a combo of physical actions (and if you wish) visualization, instead of shaking it off into the air, “shake it off” into the object. Try and repeat until you feel like you can appropriately “transfer” the energy using physical movement, and you are able to reliably A) create the physical emotional buzz, and B) use physical actions to move that buzz into something else, removing it from yourself.

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Over time, you’ll become adept at not only raising that energy, but physically sensing it and acknowledging it, and then you’ll get quite good at being able to move the energy around without using visualization at all, if you wish. It does take practice and it is rather abstract.

A great way to practice this sort of energy movement is (and I’ve seen folks bring this up on witchblr lately!) tai chi (with love, your favorite Cantonese witch). Your local park should have approximately 20 aunties doing this at any given Sunday morning.