What is Energy Work?

Witches manipulate our energy, and the energy of our environment, to bring about our will. Understanding how energy flows within your body can help you to be a better magic user, and a better human.

The Seven Chakras

One of the quickest ways to learn how to influence energy and manifest your desires is to understand how energy flows through your physical and spiritual body. The human body has seven chakras, or energy points, that overlay the physical body, and correspond to the seven main nerve ganglia along the spinal cord.

Chakra is the Sanskrit word for “wheel,” because chakras are often visualized as a spinning whirl of flowing energy. The chakras vibrate at different frequencies that align with a specific color in the spectrum, and correspond to various emotions and physical systems.

The chakra system is an Eastern philosophy that originated in India between 1500

Now let’s talk about auras. This is the energy field that envelops all living beings, including plants, animals, and humans. The chakras cycle energy through your energy field, and this is how your aura and your chakra system intertwine. Your aura attracts energy. When your aura becomes overloaded, the chakras slow down. This results in the presentation of physical symptoms and restricts your ability to manifest your desires.

Your aura, which is the radiance of your soul, is composed of white light and all the colors of the spectrum. Most auras have a dominant color that is consistent throughout what is called their auric field. This field represents a person’s overall personality and values. Your aura also changes color based on the health of your body, mind, and spirit, as well as the state of your emotional field.

Your aura consists of seven layers, or subtle bodies, that interact with the body, the chakra system, and your immediate environment. It is likely that there are more than seven layers, but in our current state of human evolution, we can interact with these seven. Your physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual condition, as well as your awareness, thoughts, feelings, experiences, and health, will be reflected in the layers of your aura.

THREE BASIC ENERGY WORK PRACTICES

If you ask me, meditative energy work is the single most important thing that a spiritual person can perform. It brings so much to the table, both in practical everyday matters and in the mystical and sacred stuff! 

I want to share with your three basic energy work practices now: grounding, centering and shielding. Each of these has its own specific purpose, and the combination of all three results in some serious power. These three basic disciplines enhance intuitive skills. By practicing them you will find you sleep better, remember your dreams more clearly, enter a meditative state more easily, and handle stress more effectively. 

1. Grounding

The first energy work practice I want to share with you is called grounding. The term grounding comes from the process of grounding an electrical circuit. On a basic level, if an object is negatively charged, grounding allows excess electrons to flow from the object into the earth, and if an object is positively charged, electrons flow from the earth into the object. In this way, grounding is a method of balancing the flow of energy and finding equilibrium.

Similarly, a witch can practice grounding as a way to balance their personal energy. It truly is a vital part of learning to practice magic safely. Throughout your day, your energies can become imbalanced for a variety of reasons both magical and mundane: emotional turmoil, divination, lucid dreaming, illness, spellwork, astral travel, and practically anything else you do. Your day-to-day activities can leave you in a state of too much or too little personal energy. 

Everything you do is magic and magic is energy. When you manipulate energy it pulls your own energy out of alignment.

When this happens, and your energy becomes unbalanced, you might experience dizziness, headaches, confusion, general unwellness, sensitivity to light or noise, clumsiness, or tiredness. The more out of alignment you are, the stronger you will experience these symptoms. 

Grounding is how you realign your energy through connecting in with your purpose. It helps you to get rid of excess or unhelpful energy, which reduces stress and anxiety and ultimately lifts your mood. It is very beneficial to practice grounding right when you wake up. If your schedule doesn’t allow that, try to practice it when you can during the day. 

When NOT To Ground

Grounding is certainly a wonderful technique to utilize in almost every situation, but there are certain times when grounding will actually restrict your magic. These include: spirit work, emotion-fueled spells, astral travel and other out of body practices, dream work, and divination. In these cases, you would do better to ground afterward to help you return to your mundane activities.

2. Centering

The next energy work practice is centering. Centering gives you perspective about your own energy by allowing you to differentiate between what is yours and what is in the environment around you. It helps you reinforce your connection to yourself by bringing your energy into focus and helping you feel balanced.

Think of centering like cleaning up your house after several weeks of not putting things away where they live. There are half-finished projects, maybe a couple dishes, you haven’t unpacked a shopping bag. All of those material possessions belong somewhere. It’s the same with your energy. 

Whenever you experience extreme emotions, spread your focus between too many responsibilities—children, pets, the bills, your work, errands, phone calls, emails, and on and on—and use your own energy to fuel your magic, little bits of your energy can become detached. 

When you are off center, you may experience nervous energy, inability to relax, restless dreams, overwhelming emotions and outbursts, self hatred, apathy, or unfocused.

Centering helps you to call back and reattach all your bits of energy and helps you feel whole again. When you center, you get in touch with your true self, your spirituality, your emotions, your thoughts, your creativity. You are able to better put things into perspective. If you don’t have any energy fragments scattered around, centering can simply gather and focus your energy so that it’s ready to work toward your next intention.

3. Shielding

The last energy work type I’ll discuss here is called shielding. In my opinion, this is the most important energy work practice that you can learn as an energy manipulator. If you can commit to starting a daily shielding practice and keeping it up, you are committing to keeping your energy safe and secure. 

Shielding is a way of protecting your energy. You can build a shield around anything you want to protect: your loved ones, children and pets, your home, your car, etc. You set up a barrier to separate the feelings, emotions and thoughts of others from your own space. It can prevent energy leeches from draining your energy, and it protects your energy from spirit attacks, and other unfriendly things. It’s a great way to help protect empaths from absorbing all of the negative emotions of other people as well. 

Shielding can be especially useful before going to areas with lots of people like a concert, convention or fair. These types of events have a lot of free-floating energy that can be overwhelming.