Of course I’ll find new possibilities the day after I say I’m not likely to find new revelations for a while.
After Taiji (Form, Golden Coins, Pieces of Silk) this morning, I noticed two muscles that hurt after doing form work. One was in my lower abdomen — ok, in my large overhanging belly — and the other is in my left hip. The left hip is where I got hit by the car three decades and more ago. It hurts particularly when I’m doing deep-knee bends or postures like “snake creeps down”. The lower abdominal muscle is the one which, when it’s tight, causes me to breathe properly, but also just wants to relax.
I’ve made no secret of the fact that I’m doing Rufus Opus‘s course on Hermetics, and part of this work involves summoning spirits, talking to them, and getting insights from what they say back. (I’m also using Jason Miller’s course on strategic sorcery, but that’s for another day. That’s about figuring out what you want, and going for it using all the means at your disposal, both mundane and magical.) Let me just say, out and in front, that it feels ridiculous to read a bunch of words on a page, play some music, and then act as though the spirit of Kammael the Angel of the planet Mars is present. That is, it feels ridiculous to write that down, and tell my readers.
On the other hand, actually making the equipment to call up spirits, and then saying the words, and then waving a wand around like you’re Harry Potter, and all… well, you have to pretend the spirit is really there, when you’re doing it. Even if you don’t quite believe it. Acting as if the spirit ISN’T there is a bad idea, or stuff gets really messy, really fast. So I call up Kammael, as I said, and I ask him about these two muscles, the one in my gut and the one in my hip. And Kammael basically says, “yeah, if you fix those two, your taiji practice is really going to take off. So work on those two. And really work. None of this namby-pamby ‘it hurts’ stuff.” And then, when I asked, Kammael agreed to assist these two areas in healing. And they both immediately felt better.
If you think about this from a different perspective, I’d like you to consider what I did without adding in all the mystical woo-woo of summoning an angel. I sat and meditated while looking at a candle flame through a crystal, and considered the problem of these two pains in my body. And a part of my brain was able to ‘read’ the pain, and self-assess, and determine that the two actions that were causing the pain — a lazy abdominal muscle and an old injury — both need healing work, and of different kinds. The hip muscle needs to relax and let go; the abdominal muscle needs greater tension. And, having determined what the problem is, my body, in conversation with itself, figured out what to do.
My decades-old injury is relaxed right now. A belly muscle is tight, and I’m breathing correctly. Is it the work of my mind, or of an angel? Is it the revelation of eighty days of practice? Is it simply a coincidence?
These are complex questions, and they’re not easily answered. Especially when I should be grading papers.
