Instructor: Wayfarer
Date: March 2, 2019 (Saturday)
Seminar: Topic: grounding, centering, and directing energy – Saturday, 2 March 2019 at 6:30pm/1830hr New York Time — text format in the PSC #lecture room (Discord) — Instructor: Wayfarer– Search LECTURE64
Wayfarer: Hello, greetings, Internet friends. Tonight we’re gonna cover some topics related to what we discussed last night. I’m gonna go pretty fast and free this evening. Feel free, as always, to toss a question out and I’ll try to hit it up.
Wayfarer: As a little context, this is part of a series of lectures I’m running essentially as practice, as a benefit to you and to me both, and as a gift to this community for something like 18 years of continual support for me and my work. Most of the content here is going to be part of a commercial course I hope to launch later this year.
dannerz: commercial course?
Froopy: Ooh that’s really cool. Hope you have luck with launching that.
Wayfarer: Thanks. Dannerz: I’ve spent the last year in grad school researching and developing a system of psi ability development that works more reliably than reading a bunch of articles on the Internet or even buying a book. It will include video lecture, reading material, and class based personal instruction. Because I can’t guarantee success to anyone, I also include a substantial amount of parapsychological education so that nobody leaves empty handed. But that’s not tonight.
Wayfarer: The organization of that is what my lecture sequence here since January has been based on.
Wayfarer: I appreciate your patience with the little commercial part there. If you’ll indulge me a little more, I also have a re-release of my current book with much additional material and refinement, as well as a new book on hauntings and working with spirits in a psychic paradigm. Look for these in the next few weeks. People who have previously bought Subtle Energy can message me and receive an electronic copy of the updated version.
Wayfarer: And that’s that part.
Wayfarer: So, speaking of the organization of that course, last week we talked about imprinting. We’re now a little of the way into what constitutes the second “course” of the broader program. Prior to this we’ve covered meditation in both calm-abiding and “just noticing” formats, note-taking, the energy body, and psychometry. Part two started with imprinting.
Wayfarer: Last week, we talked about visualization (extremely important stuff) and imprinting, which is putting our own “stuff” on energy.
Wayfarer: We talked about how we all do this unconsciously automatically because of the interaction of energy fields – the same interaction that enables psychometry. Essentially, we read impressions and create impressions through interacting with things via our energy field (and, by extension, our consciousness and so on)
Wayfarer: This week, we are talking about applications of that, and about directing energy. We’re going to be looking at grounding and centering as our primary topics. We’re not just going to use them as stand-alone “do it and forget it” stuff, however, and I’m also not including them as elements of a “energetic hygiene” section meant to be left alone.
Scelana: sorry that i’m late to the lecture, kinda had a late start today
Wayfarer: Grounding and centering are both foundational techniques for keeping our fields clean and health, yes. They’re also excellent things to practice, and something we can practice pretty often.
Wayfarer: Ultimately, moving energy around and shaping the intent of energy is a skill. We develop it not by reading about it, but by actually practicing it. And we don’t just want to practice it until we successfully do it once and then move on to something else.
Wayfarer: Grounding and centering help us not only get better at grounding and centering and keeping our field clean, they also help us with moving energy around inside our body, and importantly, they help us put our visualization practice into action.
Wayfarer: As I mentioned last week, visualization does not, in and of itself, move energy around. If we just visualize, we can get really good at visualization, but we might not be moving energy at all.
Wayfarer: The connection between visualization and moving energy is something we need to practice and build up. So, grounding and centering help us do that. Both grounding and centering are forms of directing energy, and since that’s one of our goals (it will open up a huge number of other possibilities), they’re something we really should be doing frequently.
Wayfarer: Questions before we tuck into the main course?
Rainsong: Not so far, here
Wayfarer: lmao well I wouldn’t figure
Rainsong: 😉
Desolus: :wave:
Wayfarer: …I can’t tell if you’re waving hi or if you have a question.
Desolus: just hi lmao
Wayfarer: lmao sick, hello. Also hello Scelana and anyone else rolling in late. 🙂
dannerz: Hi Desolus
Desolus: been a while
Wayfarer: So, grounding and centering. Both of these terms are kind of a jumble. Part of the benefit of these lectures vs. the actual program is I can throw shade because there are more veterans, so I’m gonna do that. My hot take is this:
Wayfarer: Grounding and centering were barebones basic health and welfare exercises from Back In The Day. They super far predate Pog or even New Age stuff or even Theosophy, though the terms themselves probably come to us from New Age usage in the 60s or so if I had to hazard an educated guess.
Wayfarer: We definitely had them on Pog though, and the places that Pog borrowed from. But the actual Pog Website never really did historical foundations or backgrounds and rarely went into deep theory. You got that stuff if you talked to some people in the chat, but for most people it was “you should ground and center because it’s good for your health”
Wayfarer: Over time, stuff like that kind of spread around but none of the reasons are there. And so people just make up some reasons for doing things, or they just say you should do them and they don’t worry about the reasons.
Wayfarer: Because nobody knew the actual reasons we were doing grounding and centering except for the reasons they back-engineered, the actual exercises themselves started getting weird. Couple that with a focus on “techniques” over theory, and you have a thousand websites saying “you ground by sending energy into the ground and you center by pulling your energy into your center, do this all the time!!” and that’s it.
Wayfarer: At their most fundamental, that’s…pretty accurate stuff, actually. I mean that’s what those things are. But I am super not into doing things out of tradition or because that’s how we did it on Pog or because we should do it because “it’s healthy” or whatever. So, grounding first:
Wayfarer: Grounding is creating more or less a circuit. You’re accomplishing several things at once. You’re stabilizing your field because you’re tethering it to a much larger, much more stable thing. You’re removing shitty stuff from your field because you’re prioritizing sending that first. You’re drawing up essentially “clean” energy, and we’ll talk about what that means in a bit.
Wayfarer: So, first, stabilizing your field: grounding accomplishes this because the earth is actually really big. Imprinting energy works by consciousness-interaction, as we’ve discussed. The imprint on a chair or a watch or a letter will be because people sit on the chair or wear the watch or write the letter. All of this stuff takes place on earth. We’re all interacting with basically the surface of the earth in small sections we can comprehend.
Wayfarer: But the earth itself is huge and has a huge energy field and the imprints on that energy field are essentially localized to where people are. They’re negligible. The earth itself has a field that is extraordinarily stable because it has a huge amount of inertia and isn’t usually interacted with on a large scale by consciousness-having beings that can move enough energy to imprint on it.
Wayfarer: So, the first thing grounding accomplishes is stabilizing our field. When we’re in a situation that is extremely chaotic, when we form a connection with earth–this big, stable, planetary field–we can inherit some of that protective stability.
Wayfarer: Second, we’re going to very deliberately send energetic garbage crap from our environment down the link. Earth doesn’t imprint well, and when we dump that stuff into the earth it’s not really going to have an impact. It will depatternize itself pretty quicklike and won’t have any enduring effect.
Wayfarer: Third, we’re going to be exchanging that energy for un-imprinted “fresh” earth energy. So there are essentially three components to grounding: 1) making a connection, 2) sending energy, 3) drawing energy.
Wayfarer: Making a connection in this case is basically free, if we’re not in an airplane or in space.
Wayfarer: Those of you who are tuning in from a space station or from an airplane and who haven’t done any practices other than the ones I’ve taught probably shouldn’t practice this until you land, just because I’m superstitious and don’t like to ground while in a plane.
Desolus: LMAO
Desolus: :airplane: :fire: :boom:
Wayfarer: I don’t think it will do anything most likely but you only really want to connect your airplane to the ground under very specific circumstances and it makes me nervous. I’ll let the pilot figure out when the plane should connect to the ground. I can wait.
Konii: Otherwise, the plane itself may “ground”..? Haha. Bad jokes galore. I’m jumping into the seminar here a bit late. Hello Wayfarer. We’re discussing centering/grounding tonight?
Wayfarer: That’s right Konii. I’m following a progression from the program I’ve discussed before, so if things seem out of order from normal things or they seem like I’m being too simplistic, that’s why. If you’re not keeping track reading the last few weeks lectures should clarify stuff.
Rainsong: To be fair, commercial airliners are designed to be able to withstand taking on lightning and grounding that electricity without anything serious happening to the aircraft
Wayfarer: If you’re on the earth, and not in a plane, UFO, space station, or so on, you’re connected to the earth directly. Last week I mentioned the heresy of saying that if you have physical contact with a thing, imprinting on it and psychometrizing it will be easier.
Wayfarer: I mentioned that if you can touch something physically, you’re in contact with it, so the imprinting is basically free. It’s inside your energy field and you have a direct connection via your etheric field. You can just generate the idea and it will imprint onto the thing (and vice versa). So if you’re on the earth, the same thing applies.
Wayfarer: Now, later on, probably in 2-3 weeks, we’ll talk about how you connect to things by just thinking about them. So if you’re sitting at home going “well you can just make a tendril and connect, or reach with your mind and phase through astral space……” then you’re missing the point that I’m going sequentially to help people who have never done any of this stuff before. So yes, of course you can do that, but if you have physical contact, you don’t have to.
Wayfarer: Part two is directing energy, and part three is drawing energy. And these are ones we’re going to need a bit of help with.
Wayfarer: So, visualization comes in two forms: symbolic visualization, where we use a symbol set, and directly visualizing something, where we picture it like it were happening. I believe I covered those both last week. Essentially, the thing we’re trying to establish is a connection in our head between what we visualize and what the energy actually does. And we accomplish this through, well, practice.
Wayfarer: We kind of have to try stuff until it clicks. But by this point, we already know through meditation what our energy body feels like normally, in a very literal sense. We’ve become aware of that and we’ve practiced noticing that and paying attention to that. And we’ve practiced imprinting. We know that we can generate an emotion, feeling, idea, or so on, and our energy body reflects that.
Wayfarer: So, what we need to do is use that concept in our heads to get the energy to move. That kind of connection will come very very easily to some people, and not so easily to others. But we want to try willing it. Visualization can help here. And one good thing about grounding is it has a very distinctive feeling.
Wayfarer: I can’t tell you what that feeling is for you, because (as we’ve covered) the way the physical body and energy body interact determines how stuff “feels” and that varies from person to person. But more or less once you get it, you’ll get it. And once you get it, what you want to do is draw energy in from the outside of your field towards the inside and push it down around the periphery of the body into the earth.
Wayfarer: At the same time, you want to draw energy up into the body. Personally, I like to make a circuit, with energy going down the left leg and coming up the right leg. That’s optional, that’s a visualization that works for me. I push energy down into the earth while exhaling, and I draw energy in while inhaling.
Wayfarer: That is something that just make sense. The words “inspiration” and “aspiration” both come from Latin “spiritus” which means “breathing” or “spirit.” Indian “prana” means “breath” as well as “energy” and the Tibetan word for energy is “lung,” which means “wind.” This is a very straightforward and obvious connection.
Wayfarer: If you’re trying to make a case for Jungian collective unconsciousness and symbols, you’d be hard pressed to find a better one. Inspiration is what we draw in, aspiration is what we push out.
Wayfarer: Now, the second part of this is centering. I’m going to cover this quickly then prompt for questions. But I want to cover them together because they go together.
Wayfarer: Centering is usually taught as drawing energy into or out of the center or focusing the mind at the center (and thereby directing energy there, because consciousness and energy are pretty strongly related). But here we’re going to link it as a second step in grounding.
Wayfarer: Because when we grounded, we brought a bunch of earth energy into our energy body. Now we have a lot of unimprinted stuff. If we just leave it, it’s going to be imprinted by us pretty quickly. There’s no problem here. And we can’t actually push out all of our energy, because it’s intrinsically connected to our actual physical body. If we could do, we’d die. In theory it’s possible to do, just like it’s possible to die of overexertion, but for the most part the body itself stops us before we can accomplish it. Kind of like holding your breath until you die. It doesn’t really work.
Wayfarer: But we brought a bunch of energy into our system. Now we want to shape it in some way, right? We can use a very generic “energy center” for this, which is roughly 4 finger widths beneath the navel, and it’s the center of energy in our body. If we want to use a strictly materialist model, this might relate to the huge network of ganglia that run our gut. If we use a chakra model, it’s the sacral chakra.
Wayfarer: (more on that in a minute, for the benefit of @Rose Cinderfall )
Wayfarer: So, we pull this energy from the earth and it’s just unpatterned stuff, as close to “generic energy” as we can get (probably impossible to get it there entirely because we’ve already interacted with it)
Wayfarer: Now, we want it to be our energy, part of our energy body. So we draw it into this center. We let it flow in, which quickly imprints it, and flow out. We can visualize this like a circulatory system, with our mind resting there and all of our energy flowing there and then radiating out naturally.
Wayfarer: What we’re doing here is, in effect, hitting the reset button on our energy body. We’re resetting to factory defaults. We’re making it how it “should” be.
Wayfarer: Let’s talk about this with a chakra model. Previously, I discussed how chakras are conceptual tools that represent functions of the energy body. They aren’t organs in the energy body, but they can be used to accomplish certain things. The root chakra represents the connection between the etheric body and the physical body, the sacral connects the emotional astral to the etheric, the third eye governs senses, and so on.
Wayfarer: So, we default to the sacral because it’s the most “potent.” It governs arousal and emotional-physical interactions and basically kicks over quick. But it might be that we want to center for a specific reason. Centering to the root or sacral chakra is the quickest way to reset the body to default. The root is specifically good for connecting the energy body to the physical body, in the event of etheric body harm.
Wayfarer: The sacral syncs the emotional body to the physical body, so it’s very good for calming us down, which is one of the more common uses. We’re basically modulating our physical arousal vs. our emotional arousal and trying to get those balanced and in a healthy place.
Wayfarer: But Rose had asked about being taught to use the solar plexus chakra, and that is super super common in the OEC. It’s so common, in fact, that many places teach that as the default.
Wayfarer: And those places are not trash.
Wayfarer: The solar plexus represents the astral body’s formations of will and identity. In Rudolf Steiner’s model, it is the seat of the “egoic body,” the “I.” The thing that we think of when we refer to ourselves.
Wayfarer: So, if we’re a telepath or empath, or if we’ve been dabbling in telepathy, empathy, clairvoyance. or generally making connections with others, meditating on, or centering, the solar plexus chakra is how we can reset our energy body with regard to our identity. The “me.”
Wayfarer: If you’re an empath and you’re overwhelmed with someone else’s emotions, centering on the solar plexus (that is, drawing energy into the solar plexus and letting it radiate back out to the field) will reset the identity.
Wayfarer: And we do this the same way as we did with grounding. Breathing in, we draw energy into the center. Breathing out, we push it back out all throughout the energy energy body. And, as before, we should feel something, physically, with our actual body.
Wayfarer: The visualization itself doesn’t do the thing alone. If you aren’t getting some kind of actual kinesthetic feedback from the exercise, you need to try subtly different stuff. And for most people that will come pretty naturally. You’re already imprinting energy with thought, so imprinting those movements and tethering them to physical movements (breathing) will probably get you there.
Wayfarer: The title here talked about directing energy. Well, that’s what you’re doing. Grounding and centering are the first exercises for learning to direct energy. Grounding directs energy to the earth and draws it from the earth. Centering directs energy to specific points in the physical body and to conceptual reference points within the astral body (which, as we’ve covered, isn’t really spatial per se).
Wayfarer: If you can do that, you can direct it to other places around the etheric body, other concepts in the astral body, and you can start directing it beyond those fields. We’ll talk about projecting energy out of the body and make our first constructs, the beloved psiball, next time I teach, either next Saturday or the Saturday after.
Wayfarer: Alright. Who has questions? Have at me!
Rainsong: Froody, here
Wayfarer: rip PSC, thought of a 15,000 word Keith lecture and died.
Scelana: I don’t have any atm If I end up having any I’ll make sure to post em
dannerz: I thought the stomach and brain are the two main seats of alchemy. The stomach processes food and the brain processes energy, and the breath goes into the stomach system too.
dannerz: so each one does vital transmutations
Froopy: No questions so far
Wayfarer: That is another fairly strong symbolic connection. There are a bunch of different models. Alchemical models are more typical in Rosicrucian systems these days. The system I am using is derived largely out of anthroposophy and Buddhist tantric stuff. I can’t speak to the Indian tantra as well, but then again, almost nobody can these days.
Wayfarer: I have ended up embracing a variation of the chakra model in the last few months because, well, it works really well. I just make a point to try to undo the damage that comes from the idea that these are actual anatomical structures in the energy body, because they are not.
Wayfarer: I covered the anatomy of the energy body a few weeks back, but because the astral body is non-spatial talking about it in strict anatomical terms is kind of silly. We can map things to places using a visual language though. This is what tantra does, and why chakras are a thing at all. It’s also why different tantric exercises will have 2, 3, 4, 7, 8, 64, 128… or more… chakras. They’re visualization tools, not anatomical things.
Wayfarer: You also see the energy center I advocate (sacral chakra) in traditional Chinese medicine. I tend to avoid using energy centers located in the brain for the same reason I avoid grounding in airplanes – I’m superstitious and the brain is a pretty delicate thing.
Desolus: lol
Desolus: not me… i have cyborg testicles
Wayfarer: But if you properly understand chakras as being conceptual things and not physical organs located physically within the body, you can start playing around with the third eye and it’s pretty safe that you won’t give yourself a seizure or whatever.
Wayfarer: Okay point of clarification: I do a lot of stupid dumb shit myself because death comes for us all and killing yourself psychically is extremely metal, but I don’t teach other people to do that :v
Desolus: ^
Desolus: lmao
Wayfarer: The chakra model is something I avoided entirely for like, 15 years but I’ve pivoted back to it during my last quarter when I was finally putting this stuff back together. In the last few weeks I was explaining something to Rose and actually just landed on “wow I keep saying ‘it’s chakras, but different!’ and that’s super dumb so fuck it all in on chakras.”
Desolus: well let’s face it, not everyone can get something that isn’t necessarily 3 dimensional… so chakras!
Wayfarer: I’m actually working it into the course somewhat because we can use different chakras as meditation aids and visualization points to achieve specific goals (why they existed in the first place). It helps some people do clairvoyance, for example, to rest the mind on the third eye.
Rainsong: They’re useful for all sorts of things. However, not believing in them as physical parts of the body will not – contrary to popular belief – prevent you from doing psionics, or pk specifically
Wayfarer: Just have to avoid stuff like “open yr third eye and unlock yr heart chakra” because that’s … just not how it works at all. It’s one of the (many) reasons I am not an anthroposophist or theosophist. Steiner talks about different chakras “being awake” representing spiritual achievement, but he’s really just talking about whether or not someone’s astral body is reflecting certain types of mental activity. Because he uses the chakra model, he sees it represented that way.
Wayfarer: That highlights the point that how we organize information will absolutely affect our energetic perceptions, which is yet another reason that super heavy reliance on other people scanning you is not ideal. One guy uses a chakra model, one guy doesn’t, and suddenly you’re getting told a bunch of weird stuff and they’re both telling you the other guy is a fraud and so on.
Wayfarer: When Steiner says something like “spiritual advancement leading to compassion and altruism unlocks the heart chakra” what’s happening is he’s organizing information from the energy field that is just raw, pre-conceptual information-stuff into something that makes sense in his brain. His brain does the heavy lifting and organizes the raw information into chakras, which make sense. Rainsong’s mental file cabinets accomplish the same thing a different way.
Wayfarer: Both are just ways we’re interacting with energetically encoded information stuff in a way that makes sense to our brain, which is given the unenviable task of translating psychic impressions into concepts we can make sense of, just like it translates a bunch of light into objects in 3d space.
Wayfarer: You don’t see objects, you see light. Your brain goes “oh shit there are objects in a 3d space all around me and those objects have names and functions and purposes” which is really shitty work, if you ask me.
Wayfarer: So tonight’s lesson has a moral and that moral is “take care of your brain, because it takes care of you.” Now you know, and knowing is half the battle. GI JOE! (Roll Credits)
Wayfarer: Thanks for coming out tonight everyone. We’ll update the schedule accordingly with when I’m up next, and it’ll be projecting energy and constructs.
Scelana: thxies for the lecture wayfarer!
Rainsong: Thanks for the seminar, Wayfarer. 🙂
dannerz: Thank you Wafer
Konii: Thank you.
Raggiedmon: Thank