Monthly Columns

Spiritual First Aid

Magick for Dealing with the Holidays

Last time I went over what to do in one of the many different spiritual emergencies you may find yourself dealing with. In this installment, I want to talk more about how to use magick to deal with the craziness that life throws at you. Since this is the Yule issue, I am going to do a deep dive into how to use magick to cope with what can be the most emotionally charged time of the year- the holidays.

Holidays are usually joyous occasions marked by joy, frivolity, and feasting, but for many others the holidays can be extremely emotionally triggering or overloading. For me, when I was young, I used to love the holidays- especially Christmas. Our small family always seemed to rally together in a spirit of love and togetherness and most of my memories from that time were quite pleasant. As I grew older, and people in my family either grew apart or passed on to join the ancestors, and the holidays became a source of loneliness and depression. I envied people that had large families to spend the holidays with, and the holiday times just became something I dreaded. I have developed a few tools over the years to deal with this.

One thing I do is I share the holidays with my ancestors. I used to only honor the beloved dead at Samhain. I had the realization that while many of my family have passed on (both sets of grandparents and both my mother and father are gone), I did not have to stop sharing the holidays with them. When I make sumptuous food at Thanksgiving and Yule, I will make a plate for the ancestors as well. Just because someone is gone, it does not mean that the love is. By making a little bit of an offering to my family, I connect with them and welcome them to share in the holidays with me. On a similar note, I have had a permanent ancestor altar set up for quite some time and feeling my family close to me has made me feel more of a sense of home as time goes on.

I want to shift focus a little bit, and move onto the opposite scenario. What if you have a ton of living family that you are obligated to be with? You might run into family relations that are not just annoying, but downright toxic. Here is where more classical magickal techniques really come into play. First off, it is useful to make sure you are “ready for battle”. Do the mundane stuff of getting enough rest, but also replenish yourself spiritually. Ground and center and connect to the Earth before you go to a gathering. Grounding is not just about feeling the gravitational pull of the earth on your energetic body and letting any excess or unwanted energy be recycled by the planet, it is also about feeling your connection to Gaia and letting yourself be nurtured and replenished. There is more than enough energy in Earth and Heavens to feed and nourish you, so tap into that connection as much as you need.

Secondly, get your energetic body in good working order. Scan your aura for any deficiencies or damage. My favorite exercise to do this is a simple one. I close my eyes and visualize my energetic body as something made of white light. I see this energetic double in the same place as my physical body. Sometimes, I will look at my physical body and then close my eyes to see my energetic double and go back and forth until my awareness is synched with both my physical and energetic body. After I have that synergy, I will pay attention to where there are any dark spots, tears, etc in my energetic body. These are usually places of deficiencies or damage. To heal myself, I will cycle energy from the Earth (and/or the Heavens as well) and see and feel the energy I harness as filling in the etheric gaps with white light. A point of caution, you do not want to just focus on the “dark” spots. Focusing on those deficiencies will make them worse and not heal them. In fact, this is one of four major ways you can kill someone with magick without using tools. If you focus on those deficiencies, they gain power and can actually make emotional and physical maladies manifest that can ultimately prove fatal (I promise to write an installment in my column about the other three major ways when I talk about defense against death magick). After you have worked on your main energetic body, feel and visualize your aura and work to heal that as well. For your aura, I have found it to be much simpler to envision that as white light as well and use that as the launch pad to healing work. If you are comfortable with it, feel free to see and work with the colors of our aura. I would only caution that you have a good grasp of what symbol set (chakras, seven rays, etc) you are using when doing color work.

Lastly, do some work on your shielding. A simple shielding technique, I still use is to take time to mediate (an easy state of mediation where you just take some deep breaths and try to relax and let each breath sink you deeper and deeper into a state of relaxation and gradual peace- in silence or with some light music) and your awareness shifts think of feeling safe and protected. As you feel safer with each breath, think of a color that is protective or comforting. Imagine that color filling your aura and shielding you. When you feel as protected and safe as possible and you have a color in mind, then think of a single word (or a simple phrase) that ties into what you are feeling. For example, one could cultivate a feeling of warmth and almost womb-like protection with a nice 2nd chakra shade of orange and key that shield into the word “mother”. When you need to use that shield, simply think of the color and the word(s) and you can access that shield instantly. You can actually create an arsenal of shields for a variety of purposes. For example, I used to use a black shield with the trigger word of “go away”. Imagine you are at a family gathering, and you feel overwhelmed by there being too many people and there is a wide array of chaotic energies and you cannot remove yourself fast enough. You can empower yourself by using your shield to not only shield, but to reset your energy to something more controlled.

Shielding is a great tool and something that every practitioner should master, but let us go to another situation. I argue very strongly that anyone can do magick and to go a step further, there are more untrained practitioners than trained ones and everyone is doing magick whether they know it or not. The most pertinent magickal talent that comes to mind is that of empathy. While empathy is famous as the ability to feel another’s emotions or pain- it is a double sided coin. Empathy is both receptive and projective. You know those people that can light up a room? They are typically using projective empathy to affect the mode of the people in their environs. Imagine you are at a gathering with someone like that, but they had a bad day and you feel yourself being brought to what they are dealing with emotionally and energetically. Shielding is one thing, but let us talk more about mastering energy instead of being a victim of it.

Just as everyone can do magick, everyone can tap into the power of empathy. In situations where I am being brought down by a projective empath, I do a bit of energetic alchemy. I will make my shield into a screen and filter out the un-constructive or un-useful energies and feel the more positive ones. Emotions rarely are experienced as a single one, but as a mix of many complex feelings. Emotions like sadness or depression are often mixed with several other ones. For example, sometimes with anger- we may feel rage, but also betrayal, love (where betrayal is usually only felt if there was love of some sort in the first place), or even empowerment. The method to screen emotions that I have employed is to see and feel my aura like a window screen and focusing on the constructive emotions as much as possible. Once you feel those emotions, you can employ the properties of your own projective empathy and “feed” the positive parts of the emotions back to them. This should create a positive feedback loop that will either improve or defuse the situation. If that is not happening the way you like, you may have to do some more energetic alchemy by employing at least a four step process of Alchemy to transmute the emotions step-by-step (the scope of a much longer piece, but one I cover in my book). A simpler option is grounding the energies of the other person out. One method is to make a shield that grounds out energy in general. When I do that, I may use a round shield tied to my aura, but I have also found it useful to make a more flat surfaced shield that almost acts as a lightning rod and takes the unwanted energies directly to the Earth. If you want to go a step beyond that, and you are pretty savvy with projective empathy on your own, then you can ground and project that sense of grounding to the other person and force them to ground. I have used this technique mostly to ground people overwhelmed after ritual or heavy magickal work, but it works surprisingly well in social situations.

Just as there trained and untrained empaths everywhere, there are also psychic vampires. Sometimes there are psychic vampires that are empaths (actually, I would argue almost all are). An unethical (an ethical psychic vampire will ask for permission or enter into transparent relationships where they can “feed”) or untrained psychic vampire will classically do something to garner your attention. Energy follows attention as much as it does intention. When we pay attention to something, we are giving it our energy. To that end, a psychic vampire may use anything from getting you to notice them through glamor, tell interesting stories while being very charismatic or seductive, or even talking about things that are depressing or boring. While the best way to deal with any of this, is to simply walk away, if you must be in these situations- you might as well take control and practice your magick.

For psychic vampires, you can energetically beat them at their own game by telling yourself something along the lines of “energy taken, is energy returned”. I like to chant something like that in my mind while I see, feel, and take back any energy taken from me vampirically. If you want something a little more hands on and witchy, you can make an herbal charm to take with you. I like to fill a cloth tea bag with a tablespoon of angelica root (very banishing of negative influences) with a sprinkle of black walnut hulls (which are good for getting rid of parasites in the mundane world, so why not employ those properties into the magical one). I will hold the charm in my hand while charging it with banishing thoughts and energy, and then I will carry that with me (arguably the best banishing substance other than stuff in Hoodoo, is really anything with a strong smell (think garlic as in the stories about vampires). That brings to mind a random fun fact- in the Biblical Book of Tobit one of the ways the archangel Raphael banishes the demon Asmodeus is to make an incense out of fish liver. While I have not used dried fish liver incense to ward off psychic vampires, I am sure it would be useful in banishing anything- especially people with the ability to smell!

One last topic to touch on in regards to empathy and the holidays, is that you can always tap into your own projective empathy to create a mood of festivity. Why wait for someone not aware of magick to set the energy, when you can do it with more purpose and finesse? Most people are already conditioned to feel the “holiday spirit”, so by working with a mass emotional state that is already there, instead of working against it, you can enhance your ability to shape the energies around you.

I hope the holiday season from Samhain to Yule blesses you with joy, peace, and love. Also, the holidays can still be rough when you use magick to cope, so reach out to your support networks, mental health professionals, or whoever else you need to get you through things. I promise, you are never really or truly alone. Until next time, may the gods and ancestors guide and shine upon you. Blessings.

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About the Author:

Mark NeCamp, Jr. is a healer, author, poet, teacher, spiritual alchemist, and modern day student and practitioner of the Art. He teaches classes using magick as a tool for personal growth. He is passionate for how we each can, through the alchemical process, turn our spiritual lead into gold as individuals and as a global community. He has led many community groups in the Midwest; and taught at events such as Pagan Unity Festival, ConVocation, Starwood, Paganicon and many others. He is the author of the upcoming work Energy Magick, by Moon Books Publishing, and is available for pre-order through Amazon and Barnes & Noble. He can be contacted through his website www.marknecampjr.com.