Valley Wands

Whilst Hywel has been writing the blogs up till now, I had a message from someone on Myspace to ask about writing a blog on negative and positive energies, so I thought - 'I'll have a go at that'.  So here are my musings over energy and protection.

We are all subject to countless impressions from morning till night, and while we sleep, many positive thoughts and emotions come to us from our fruitful interactions with others, and from the thoughts, words and dreams of family and friends or a lover far away. However, less loving feelings can also invade our waking subconscious or sleeping mind; these may be deliberately malevolent, but it is perhaps even more likely that unconscious negative energies may be directed towards us. Someone may be sitting brooding in the daytime or lying awake at night seething with resentment against us because it appears that our partner is more desirable (and undeserved), our children healthier or more intelligent, our home more comfortable or our career more successful than their own. Then there is pollution – both actual noise and environmental disturbances – for we live in a frantic world of traffic fumes, faxes, phone calls and e-mails that intrude upon our consciousness both day and night. In these ways our minds and souls can become overwhelmed and the effects manifest as stress, an inability to concentrate, a series of minor accidents or a general lack of energy. You may suffer from insomnia, nightmares, stress-related illnesses, or infections that are slow to clear.

Moreover, certain people you encounter either at work, at home or socially whether a depressed colleague, a critical relative or an intrusive neighbour may mean you no harm but nonetheless seem to leave you feeling drained and make your nerves jagged. While they are not exactly psychic vampires, nevertheless such emotional leeches can regularly and routinely deplete your energy stores and offload their negativity on to you. Just think for a moment how different you feel after a lively encounter with a good friend, compared with the feelings you bring away from a stressful meeting with your least favourite colleague, and you will see exactly what I mean.

Some buildings, too, can make you feel tired or uninspired, especially tower blocks, warehouses and shopping centres that lack natural light and ventilation or are built around a metal structure. Dowsers would say that there are black streams running beneath them, and I shall examine this theory later. Certainly, there are workplaces where there is constant conflict and a lot of stress related illness. In the same way, certain houses can be dark and gloomy even in summer; in particular rooms you may experience a sense of malevolence that is frequently interpreted as a ghost but may, in fact, be due to the darker energies of the land on which the house is built.

Such harmful influences may be caused by negative thoughts, deliberate spite or very occasionally spirit attack (ironically, this may well often be brought on by dabbling with ouija boards or calling up spirits for fun, by the untrained) – but they can all be replaced with positive energies. This actual transformation of negative into positive is crucial for psychic protection, for if you simply do away with the negative and do not replace it with anything else, you are leaving a void for doubts and fears to return and the job is not complete. Working with energy is all about balance, and you need to maintain both positive and negative to keep that balance.

Our early ancestors understood this principle instinctively and chose symbols that represented power and the light to protect them from darkness and danger. They wove protective knots and made Mother Earth figures and spiral horns of plenty from the last sheaf of corn cut down at the first harvest at the end of July, known as Lammas or Lughnasadh in the Celtic tradition. These potent but benign corn dollies, or spirits, were preserved in homes until the spring equinox, when they were buried in the fields to bring fertility to the land, animals and people.

It is impossible to date the start of this practise as the evidence was ritually destroyed each year, but as the corn figures resemble early Mother Goddess motifs it is probable that it began with Neolithic farmers in Northern and Western Europe. What is most significant here is that we can see protection and fertility have always been recognised as two sides of the same coin – as are destruction and creation. Throughout the history of many cultures, the tradition has continued that the most powerfully protective amulets and charms also have life-giving qualities.

Banishing negative energies

There are three main and established ways of dealing with negative and draining energies, which are ultimately interwoven: you can block them, or counter the negativity with even stronger positive energies (the strongest energy of all is love), or in the very rare case of deliberate, malicious and unprovoked attack, return the energies to the sender.

Of course it doesn’t matter how careful you are, or how paranoid, you still have to live your life in the normal world. You have to take the children to school, or go to work, you have to go to the pub and generally mix and integrate with society. Direct attacks are thankfully very, very rare, and you should only ever consider the possibility after careful and painstakingly removing every other option. More common are what I prefer to call the ‘wild cards’. We’ve all been there – sitting in a pub and in walks the chap with the car you’ve always wanted or someone with the girl/boyfriend you’ve always longed to know better. Minor jealousy and thoughts of coveting someone else’s lifestyle are the most common cause of unintentional psychic attack. This of course is just as likely to be happening to you, as you are to be delivering the thoughts. It is vitally important then to have a regime of cleansing your spiritual body and aura as you would your physical body, as you can attract any amount of minor negative energies just living your daily life.

An excellent example of how to cleanse your aura and the Chakras is given below:

• Sitting quietly and comfortably in meditation, relax yourself down beginning at the top of your head and tensing all the muscles before letting each section of body relax. For example:

The scalp

The face

The neck and throat

The shoulders and upper back

The arms

The hands and wrists

The torso

The tummy and hips

The buttocks

The thighs

The calves

The feet

• Do not move onto the next area of the body until the previous one is nice and relaxed.

• Then visualise a beam of white light, brilliant and pure, and draw it down from above your head until it reaches the crown chakra. As you visualise the light touching the crown chakra, visualise the chakra opening like a flower or lily by turning deosil. When the chakra is fully opened feel the white light enter, and clearing out any black debris from inside the chakra.

• Now feel the light moving down inside the body to the third eye. It warms, soothes and heals everything it touches.

• The third eye chakra now starts to open, until finally the white light bursts through from the inside to out, clearing out the debris which you should carefully visualise forming a small pile at your feet. (This is very important to keep all the debris in one place to be dealt with later).

• Move down through all the chakras opening them and visualising the white light bursting through. When you finally reach the root chakra you should then visualise the beam of white light expanding around you like a bubble, completely encasing your entire body. The white light is pure and good and will act as a powerful protective shield.

• Before completing the meditation it is important to deal with any debris that may have been removed from the chakras. Turn your attention to the debris and visualise it being burnt in a flame of silver and violet. This flame will transmute all negative energy to positive, making the debris harmless.

Over the next few weeks I’ll be writing blogs on protecting both you, your home and the workplace. I will try and go through a number of ways and systems, each as good as the next, but some will sit better with you than others. Always remember, take that which sits easy with you, and discard that which doesn’t.

BB

Sian