Lately I have been doing the pathworkings from The Initiate's Book of Pathworkings by Dolores Ashcroft-Nowicki. I have done the first three of the Egyptian pathworkings. I can't say what effect they have had on me because of confounding factors. Namely, at the same time I have been doing the Qabalah pathworkings, and also exercises from The New Hermetics. So, I have had those epiphanies I just discussed in the previous post. I think I have reached a turning point in my spiritual development; instead of just meditating and doing pathworkings and observing whatever happens, I am now choosing what I want to change about myself and my experiences.
Twice I have done the "Reframing and Pain and Pleasure" exercise from The New Hermetics book, once a week over the last two weeks, and I have been pleased in the results. I think I will do one more since three is such a nice number. The exercise is for taking some undesirable painful reaction one has to something and reframing it as something pleasurable or neutral. For example, suppose you irrationally dislike someone, and being annoyed by them causes conflict and makes your life difficult. The exercise can be used to reframe the situation so that it can be positive, discover the root purpose/cause of the existing situation, and channel that purpose to be satisfied by a more desirable experience. The exercise is basically just about taking the time to sit and think about what we do not want to experience, why we experience it, and then visualizing what we want to happen instead. Also, it is important to connect with elemental Earth while doing this.
I experience the elemental earth plane as golden rolling farmlands. Everything is a little bit golden and faded, it feels like a nostalgic memory. The temple of Malkuth is there, but for this exercise I sit just outside it on a patio. I was met by a cute green anthropomorphic bug I afterwards decided to name "Herbie". I go through the book's instructions for the exercise while sitting there with him and talking to him. After I was done the first time, I was surprised to see the exercise caused a seed to appear on the table while I was not looking. I give the seed to Herbie and he crawls back into the fields and plants it for me, and it immediately and potently springs up into a green vine, that grows huge and high up into the sun and even attaches to it. I wondered at the meaning of this unexpected event, and then a disembodied voice told me that in doing these exercises, I would not just be creating experiences for myself and getting what I want, I would also strengthen the communication between myself and my higher self, making communicating my desires easier and more effective in the future. Come to think of it, that also means I would be more aware of what my Higher Self wants me to do or know. Come to think of it again, that disembodied voice must have been my Higher Self. The second time I did the exercise, more green vines grew, wrapping around the existing ones, making the channel a little bit thicker and stronger.
Although I have been pleased with the results I have gotten so far, I have been reminded of the common warnings about being careful what we wish for. So far it has worked much better than I expected, but never quite in the way I expected it to happen. The most interesting part was that during the process of going through the exercise, I spontaneously started visualizing in my active imagination being in a particular situation. This is not a strange situation, but it is something that has never happened in the way I visualized it... until a few days later that very week. So things happened both in a way I did not expect, and also just like I visualized in some respects. That specific situation just popped into my head, I did not plan it before sitting down to do the exercise, so it makes me wonder whether I had only predicted what was already going to happen, or did I make something happen. I think the truth is that there is not much of a difference between the two.
It looks like it takes a good three days or so for the results of such an exercise to manifest itself. And it's not all fun and games, the day before I started getting the desired results, I got into a bad mood and felt anxious and frustrated. But that was good, I think it was part of the process, because it made me think about relevant related problems, it uncovered more layers of neuroses in my mind I should to work on.
There is also an exercise on "Changing your beliefs". I'll have to try that one soon.
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