The Mastery
Technique
Again, the ritual elements that we have explored so far can be combined and recombined in an almost infinite number of ways. The Mastery Technique is an example of how your own feelings, memories, and behavioral tendencies can be used to create a complete and moderately complex magical ritual. The technique may be practiced daily, indefinitely, or until you are satisfied with the woohoo. Allow for a learning curve. The first time you attempt this it may require an hour or more to complete all the elements. You may also choose to practice it in increments, and build up your resources and abilities over a period of days until you are performing the entire operation. Whichever you choose, when you become proficient this may take no longer than 10 or 15 minutes to perform. It seems complex at first, but as you practice you’ll find it easier and easier to remember the various elements of the exercise.
Exercise 8.1A Developing Resources
1. Select six qualities or behaviors that are components of your highest aspiration. These may be chosen by an entity of your choice, or can be consciously decided upon. You may select qualities that you already have, strongly. You may select qualities that you are weak in and hope to develop. You may select qualities that you do not have and hope to acquire. These could be chosen from a field of qualities that includes, but is not limited to, confidence, compassion, strength, intelligence, decisiveness, motivation, joy, sexiness, directness, extroversion, introversion, creativity, passion, leadership, intuition, spirituality, and rapport. Select only qualities that contribute to your highest aspiration, to your ultimate purpose and function on Planet Earth. At this point, your highest aspiration may be something vague that you refer to as “highest aspiration;” or it may be something very well-defined that you refer to by a term you already know. For each of the six qualities that you have selected, develop a movement or gesture by the following process.
2. Sitting or standing, recall a time when you had a powerful experience of the chosen quality. If you are working with a quality with which you have limited or no direct experience, something you want to strengthen or acquire, then you may select another person that you know who has this quality at times and imagine what it would be like to be that person at those times.
3. Remember or imagine the visual components of this experience: what colors were in your field of vision, whether you could see movement or stillness, whether it was light or dark, and anything else you can recall.
4. As you notice what you saw, remember or imagine what you heard during this experience: sounds or silence, voices or tones, rhythms or noises, background sounds, and anything else you may have been able to hear.
5. As you notice what you saw and heard, remember or imagine what you felt during this experience: notice where in your body the feeling begins and where it moves to as the feeling develops. Notice what kind of feeling it may be, pressure, temperature, movement, texture, or whatever it was that you felt.
6. Give the feeling a color or colors. “If this feeling were a color, what would it be?” Apply the color to wherever you feel the feeling so that you end up with a colored map of the sensation in your body.
7. Make the color brighter, richer, more vibrant, or whatever also makes the feeling more intense. For most people and most feelings, making the color brighter or more vibrant will increase the feeling, although for some people and some feelings making the color more muted or dimmer will increase the feeling. Use what works for you. Intensify the experience to exhilaration.
8. Breathe deeply and make or imagine the color flowing through more and more of your body.
9. Feel how the feeling has intensified. Savor it.
10. Take a deep breath and then express the feeling as a gesture or movement. Take note of this movement in some form that will enable you to remember it later.
11. Repeat for each of your six chosen qualities so that you develop a catalog of six movements that you can use in part two (below). These same six movements will serve you through many repetitions of The Mastery Technique. If you ever decide that you want to change, tweak, or empower your work, you can return to this section and create new movements based on the same or alternative qualities.
Exercise 8.1B The Mastery Technique
1. Imagine a circle drawn on the floor around you. Make the circle about twice the diameter of your outstretched arms or as close to that size as space permits.
2. Perform at least three cycles of Expansion and Contraction Breathing in the circle.
3. In your mind, notice six points along the circumference of the circle, spaced equal distances apart.
4. Walk to the edge of your circle and pace around the circumference. As you get to each of the six points, perform one of the movements that you created in Developing Resources, as fully and completely as possible. Do this until you have performed all six of your movements, one at each of the six, equidistant points.
5. Return to the center of the circle.
6. Face one of the six points. Imagine seeing yourself standing at the circumference of the circle, performing the movement that you performed there.
7. Take a Full Breath. As you exhale, using the entire breath, say the name of the quality that applies to the movement and point you are looking at. At the same time, imagine that a color or energy or vibration or sound or feeling is emanating from that image of you. Allow that color or whatever to fill the entire circle.
8. Take a moment to experience what that color or energy feels like as you stand in a circle full of it.
9. Repeat for each of the six points/
movements.
10. Take a moment to see all the self-images and movements at the same time, along the circumference of the circle.
11. Take a large step backward.
12. Imagine the six movement-images of yourself, either one at a time or all at once, whichever is easiest for you, moving into the center of the circle, just in front of you.
13. Allow them to combine in whatever way they seem predisposed to. They may take a definite shape or become amorphous. They may still be recognizable as images of you, or they may not. However it happens is fine.
14. Take Full Breaths and use your exhalations to send attention and energy into the shape for at least one minute.
15. Optional: In your mind you may now communicate with this shape/entity. Ask it what it would like to be called and how to call it back again faster and more powerfully. Ask it what you can learn from it concerning your highest aspirations in life or what it can tell you about changes, additions, and deletions in your behavior and life in general that can bring you closer to your goals. And anything else that might occur to you to ask it, as long as you remain focused on your highest aspirations and goals.
16. Step forward, into the shape/entity.
17. Take a moment to appreciate and enjoy the experience. Notice how you feel, what you hear, what you see, and anything else that presents itself to consciousness.
18. Breathe and absorb all your imaginings back into you, except the circle.
19. Take at least three Expansion and Contraction Breaths.
20. Absorb the circle back into you.
21. Be open to thoughts, epiphanies, and suggestions from your unconscious mind that may occur throughout the day as a result of this practice.