ATTENTION
 Simply sit in meditation and notice where your point of attention is, i.e. thinking about something, how your feeling etc. Then very consciously extract your attention from what ever its focused on, literally unhook it  and instead bring your full attention to the palm of your left hand. Sink all your attention firmly into your left hand, allowing all other senses , thoughts and feelings to dissolve, as your attention sinks more and more into the palm of your left hand.
Just do this for 5 or 10 mins, use all the will and focus you have, to focus on just that point, if you notice your attention drift to something else, immediately extract it and bring it back to the palm of your hand.
Once you've tried your best for the allocated time, then stop focusing and allow yourself to deeply relax and expand your point of attention to normal waking consciousness and the everyday things of life.
Do this for 1 week, then go onto the next task.

ATTENTION II
 This week continue with the same simple concept.
You may have noticed that when you bring your full attention, in the previous task, to your left hand that a certain weight, or gravitas of energy will naturally build at the point of attention i.e. the palm of your left hand. Its important to notice this and bring your full attention to it whilst using your breath to stabilize the small bundle of power that formulates around your focus.
Now this week is very similar, start by bringing all your attention to the palm of your left hand, till all else dissolves, notice the weight of your attention brings and then when your ready simply lift your attention and bundle of power from your left to your right hand and sink your attention as deeply as you can into your right hand and hold it there, using your breath to stabilize your focus and energy. Do this until your ready to stop and then simply relax your attention back into general awareness
As stated before there is a far greater wisdom to these tasks, than the simple tasks i am asking you to explore through this MAGIKALOATH series of experiments. The question being how do you propose to work any kind of magic if you cant focus your attention and its accompanying power.
​Do this also for one week

ATTENTION III
This week we will extend it a little further.
So far you have learnt to focus all your attention in both left and right hands separately, trying your best to block out all other outside perceptions except where your attention is focused.
This week sit comfortably and once again notice where your attention is focused, unhook it and now place it into both of your hands, slightly separated in front of you. Maintain this focus using your breath to stabilize your attention.
Next contemplate a quality of character i.e. Joy, Peace, Energy, Enthusiasm etc. As you do this bring your attention fully to it, breathing into it, until it so expands as to be held in both of your hands, like a bundle of power, of whatever quality you are focused on.
Do this for 5 or 10 Minutes, then slowly relax your attention back to normal consciousness.
Do this also for one week

ATTENTION IV
Ok so here is the fourth and last post on the subject of focused attention.
Hopefully some of you have experimented with your attention following from last previous post's. This week we will culminate both the practice of Attention and Resonance combined
As before sit comfortably and once again notice where your attention is focused, unhook it and now place it into both of your hands, slightly separated in front of you. Maintain this focus using your breath to stabilize your attention.
Next contemplate a quality of character or intention as before i.e. Joy, Peace, Energy, Enthusiasm etc. As you do this bring your attention fully to it, breathing into it, but this time add a resonant tone, to the now building bundle of power, until it so expands as to be vibrating with resonance whilst held in both of your hands.
Then whilst breathing steadily and intoning direct the bundle of power to your preferred target i.e., a Talisman, a person, yourself,  a situation, a past or future event etc
Do this for 5 or 10 Minutes, then slowly relax your attention, disperse the bundle of power and come back to normal consciousness.

Bless

I recently read for a client at her vegetarian Café here in Nice and a very powerful spirit of a Tibetan monk came and blessed her space offering much guidance, advising her to place the symbol of a windhorse above the entrance to the Café, saying that around every full moon, when the moon is waxing, to light incense, invoke the blessings of Buddha and to recite the windhorse prayer that would bring much good fortune to her and her establishment.

I previously had no idea what a windhorse was or what the prayers were that this spirit was referring to.

Two days later I awoke early in the morning with the presence of the same Tibetan monk in my room and felt immediately guided to go online and type into Google windhorse and windhorse prayers.

What I found was complete evidencia on my reading for the Cafe, even  mentioning that the prayers need to be done on a waxing moon.

Tibetan Buddhism incorporates quite a lot from Bon shamanism and when viewed from a shamanic perspective its power and presence within the Tibetan traditions makes much sense.

I share this article with you not so much that you can follow and do this ritual { which of course you may } but because in all my years of reciting various prayers and casting intentional spells, the prayer to the windhorse is one of the most all-encompassing, fierce and powerful spells I have ever come across.

May its power and presence bring blessings to all sentient beings.

You will simply need an image of the Windhorse and some Tibetan incense to perform this working.

First sit silently and meditate then begin reciting the prayers below, firstly taking refuge and generating Bodhicita...

Taking Refuge

SANG.GYEY CHÖ DANG TSOG.KYI CHOG NAM.LA
JANG.CHUB BAR.DU DAG.NI KYAB.SU.CHI
DAG.GI JIN.SOG GYI.PEY SO.NAM KYI
DRO.LA PEN.CHIR SANG.GYEY DRUB.PAR.SHOG
[3x]

NAMO GURUBYE
NAMO BUDDHAYA
NAMO DHARMAYA
NAMO SANGHAYA
[3x]

Taking Refuge And Generating Bodhichitta

I take refuge in the Buddha, the Dharma, and the supreme Sangha, until I attain Enlightenment.
By the merit I accumulate from practicing generosity and the other perfections,
May I attain Enlightenment in order to benefit all living beings.
[3x]

Cultivating Four Immeasurable Attitudes

May all beings have happiness and its causes,
(Love)
May all beings be freed from suffering and its causes;
(Compassion)
May all beings constantly dwell in Joy transcending sorrow;
(Joy)
May all beings dwell in equal love for those both close and distant.
 
The Seven Limbed Prayer

With my body, speech, and mind, humbly I prostrate.
I make offerings both set out and imagined.
I declare every unwholesome action I have ever committed.
I rejoice in the virtues of all beings.
Please stay until samsara ends,
And please turn the Wheel of Dharma for us.

I dedicate all these virtues to the great Enlightenment.

 PRAYERS FOR INCREASING WIND HORSE  (GOOD FORTUNE)

Light incense offerings, then recite;

The pure incense offerings become great nectar clouds of sense pleasures (through the power of visualization).

OM AH HUNG
(By this mantra the clouds increase; all of samsara and nirvana are filled.}

I make this prosperous, gracious and glorious incense offering
To the Buddha, the Dharma and the Sangha.
To the Lama, the Yidam and the Dakini.
To the Dharma protectors, gods of wealth, treasure holders and so forth.
To all those who guard and protect me, accept this incense offering.
Please help to increase my good fortune.

Face East; offering incense and reciting prayers

To the god abiding in the eastern direction.
The god who subdues malevolent forces and increases good fortune;
The conch snow lion with turquoise dreadlocks,
Displayer of great bravery, subduer of life’s struggles, accept this incense offering.
Increase my good fortune!
Raise up my diminished good fortune!

Face South; offering incense and reciting prayers

To the god who abides in the southern direction,
The god who subdues malevolent forces and increases good fortune;
The turquoise dragon with copper tusks
And a might roar; accept this incense offering.
Increase my good fortune!
Raise up my diminished good fortune!

Face West; offering incense and reciting prayers

To the god who abides in the western direction
The god who subdues malevolent forces and increases good fortune;
Great tiger with vermilion stripes,
Courageous and terrifying, subduer of life’s struggles; accept this incense offering.
Increase my good fortune!
Raise up my diminished good fortune!

Face North; offering incense and reciting prayers

To the god abiding in the northern direction,
The god who subdues malevolent forces and increases good fortune;
Great Garuda with the jewelled crest, possessing great strength and power,
Subduer of life’s struggles, accept this incense offering.
Increase my good fortune!
Raise up my diminished good fortune!

Face Centre; offering incense and reciting prayers

To the gods who abide in the four cardinal and eight intermediate directions,
To all gods of the five elements; accept this incense offering.
Increase the elements of good fortune!
Raise up my diminished fortune!

To the gods of the eight astrological crosses, accept this incense offering.
Increase my good fortune!
Raise up my diminished good fortune!

To all gods of the nine astrological marks, accept this incense offering.
Increase my good fortune!
Raise up my diminished good fortune!

To all the gods of the hours, the days, the months and the years, accept this incense offering.
Increase my good fortune!
Raise up my diminished good fortune!

To the five superior demigods and the guardians,
To the gods of our fathers, mothers and uncles,
To all the gods of the body, and the gods who awaken knowledge in us; accept this incense offering.
Increase my good fortune!
Raise up my diminished good fortune!

May good fortune increase more and more!
Increase the magnificent strength in my body.
Increase the power of truth in my speech.
Increase the profound meditation of truth in my mind.
Pacify the causes of obstacles and disease.
Increase and extend life, luck, strength and prosperity.
Grant me power over the phenomenal world.
Eliminated obstacles and malevolent forces.
Display the victory banner, victorious in all directions!
May all wishes be fulfilled!
Victorious, victorious, gods, victorious,
May all our gods be victorious!
Eliminate the dark side, the lineage of the maras.
Accomplish these activities that we request.
Fulfil all desires, subdue malevolent forces, most powerful one.

Great Lion King (Gesar), emanation of Padma Sambhava of three lineages,
Precious Jewel, conqueror of obstacles, with all your forces and emissaries,
Through this request and offering may our wishes by fulfilled.

Now sit and chant the Mantra OM:

To the Buddha, the Dharma, the Sangha, the Lamas, Yidams and Dakinis sitting in the ten directions.
To all the gods of wealth, the treasure holders, the oath bound ones, and the landlords:

The sponsor whose age symbol is the Windhorse respectfully prostrates.

May the life, body, power, luck and good fortune
Prosper like the greatest ones in existence: the tiger, the snow lion, the garuda and the dragon.
May whatever we wish for be instantly accomplished, like precious possessions of a great king.
With the help of the goddesses of the five elements who accompany me,
May my good fortune eternally spread and flourish in all directions.
Return to the malevolent forces all causes of damaged and diminished good fortune.

I dedicate all these prayers to the great Enlightenment of all sentient beings.

Now sit and gently chant the Mantra OM, until silent and fully present.

Howling Wolf Moon; Anytime before sunrise tomorrow on june 23rd 2013  call on wolf to track and find lost aspects of soul for you.. Drum and meditate and ask that she hunt down all parts of you that has been lost to negative circumstance in your life, to any trauma's, to any loses of loved ones or love itself. Journey with her, forgive yourself and others for any misgivings or misunderstandings with those from your past and fully reclaim your part in all these things. Gather yourself upon her back and when all has been remembered, released and redone. Return home to yourself, breath soul back into yourself, accumulate and consolidate your power, your life force. 
May you be blessed with acceptance and enchantment, power and fulfillment on this Howling Wolf Moon. 

It must have been twenty years ago now when I first tried to meditate seriously. I came to it with a sense of austerity and severity. I had read a few books on the subject and had sat with some Buddhist teachers, listening intently to what I believed to be words of wisdom.

The basic premise that I took from these varied but limited sources of information was basically that the mind was a movie-making machine, an illusion factory. That the world and its many forms were nothing more than maya that needed to be witnessed, simply observed with the intention of deeper and deeper detachment from the senses and the world, until finally the true nature of reality revealed itself in pristine clarity, this of course being the desirable state - nirvana, enlightenment.

At the time of this initial escapade into the so called spiritual life, I had just come off of a very severe alcohol and drug addiction, which I will not go into at any great depth here but needless to say the peak of this metaphorical mountain I proposed to climb was high, high above the clouds and seemed a very daunting task.

I would sit on a small cushion facing a white wall, cross-legged, light a small stick of incense, close my eyes and begin to focus on my breath. Whenever my mind wandered from this simple task I ordered it back to the simple act of observation. I treated any thought other than my focus as the enemy and was determined to sharpen my will of intention and slaughter this monkey mind.

The hour or so I would try and meditate everyday was, to put it bluntly, shear agony. My mind raced, my body ached, my breath faulted. No matter how hard I tried I could not free myself from myself and simply observe my breath. After a very short time I began to feel like I was going to war every time I would sit to meditate. At no point was there a sense of serenity, an illuminated light of awareness, a surrender into some longed for nirvanic state. Instead there was hours upon hours of saturated self, severe discomfort, and ultimately, frustration.

I would return to the Buddhist centre and ask the teachers there various questions about my meditative dilemma. They would always laugh, generally in a group, whereby I felt everyone was laughing at me rather than with me. They would offer some ‘words of wisdom’, which instead of enlightening me would leave me feeling like they had just looked down from their condescending spiritual mountain at this useless, now-ex-junkie wannabe.

Time after time I would sit, sure in the fact that at some point I would acquire the knack of stillness but instead all that happened was a deeper and deeper loathing for this thing called myself, and a depressive sense that I would never rid myself of this flawed human condition.

So for the next few years I would swing from periods of devote austerity, intent on denying my humanity, then the pendulum would swing to intense periods of sensual saturation with food, sex, violence and any other forms of extreme behaviour - apart from the dreaded drink and drugs of course.

These pendulum swings would set themselves up into a pattern after a while and I would binge in one extreme for a month or so before then swinging and spiralling off into its polar opposite. A very unsatisfactory state of being began to pervade with a deepening sense of duality and almost psychosis.

Then a couple of things happened to me that changed my life forever.

Up to this point all of my spiritual reference points were from eastern philosophies - various Buddhists sects and Indian gurus etc. Then I began to deepen my interest in shamanism and more western magickal traditions. The constructs and explanations of the relevance between material and spiritual life through these traditions felt much more relevant to my way of being. Instead of the inner and outer worlds being illusions that must somehow be transcended, they were instead described as part of a cosmic whole; an eternal linked web, emanating forth from the great mystery that in itself was conscious, and through various techniques could be communed and communicated with, even coerced and subtly manipulated, into an ever deepening conversation with inner and outer reality. The classic tales of the hero’s quest, or the stories of shamanic death rang true to my ears. If withdrawing from heroin is not a shamanic death and a returning from the underworld then I don't know what is. At the time of these intense withdrawals I was torn multiple times limb from limb by demonic forces that coaxed and prodded me with their spiteful talons, devouring and regurgitating my very soul in an attempt to keep me in their hellish realms, rather than allow me return through this inferno, healed and transformed.

The whole philosophy and anarchisticly independent shamanic world-view seemed to fit me to perfection.

So there I was already mastered in the arts of internal journeying through years of drug use and withdrawal, now fighting my way through upper, middle and lower worlds; shot forth into the inner realms, not on a handful of LSD, or a heroin filled syringe, but on the rhythm of my breath to the beat of a shamanic drum.

The second thing that happened occurred as I sat meditating one day in a small apartment I was renting in northern Arizona. In a vision a small boy, dressed as a Buddhist monk walked up to me. In the past I would have struggled to ignore this, but now from a shamanic perspective, I decided to observe and even communicate with him as I would with any other allie in the spirit world.

He was beautiful, dressed in the deep burgundy of a Tibetan Buddhist. He simply stood there for a while, his hands gently clasp in front of him. Then he began to chant a three-syllabled mantra. As the sounds emanated from his lips it impacted directly into my consciousness and my whole body began to vibrate with the transmission of this mantric vibration. I too began chanting as my body filled with its resonance. After a while he stopped - the transmission complete - raised his hands in prayer to me, bowed and dissolved back into the darkness.

I have never shared that mantra with anyone, nor will I. It was a gift given to me and I have chanted it now for the past twenty years. It has completely transformed my attitude to meditation and has brought me to many a peak and, dare I say, enlightened moments. The irony of a Buddhist monk from the spirit world transmitting a chant to me - and its subsequent revelations - considering my previous experience at the Buddhist centre, is not lost on me. I now consider this chant my calling song to the universe. Whenever I am stressed, in pain, or even when I am asleep and having a nightmare, my consciousness returns to this mantra and it carries and protects me through whatever situation I find myself in.

As I said before these two experiences changed my entire attitude to the way I come to my meditative practice.

Recently a client came to me for a consulta and a very similar thing happened through me for them. A monk appeared in the spirit world and asked me to pass on the transmission of a mantra to my client. It was only later when the same client emailed me saying they were having very similar problems with this new mantra in their meditative practice, that I was reminded of my initial experiences and prompted to write this short article articulating my experiences.

For a long time now I have dropped all previous teachings on how to meditate and just considered how I would approach meditation if I had no preconceived ideas of how it ‘should’ be done. I figured that this would be a more authentic engagement with a truthful and honest experience of myself and the universe. Dropping all notions that I had previously been taught - that somehow my mind was bad, that the world was illusion and that my desires and dreams were the cause of my suffering - I would instead enter every meditation from a more shamanic viewpoint to converse with myself, and see how deep into my internal reality I could wander, exploring whatever I discovered there.

Nowadays my life’s work is spirit; I'm either working with people in one-to-one sessions or in a group setting. I continually journey and work with my Allies, trying to maintain the tender balance between the three worlds, and I meditate for only for 20 minutes a day. I simply sit, breath, gently chant and allow whatever needs to be there, completely uncensored.

The funny thing is now I allow everything, the all of who I am, in a true shamanic sense I journey beyond myself, into the fundamental floor of being, and consistently dissolve into an ever pervading blue light, pure awareness.

It’s so simple, all of itself becomes silent with an empty fullness. I reach the distant shore that the Buddhists were trying to tell me when I first started but not through ascetic denial but from shamanic embrace until even the chant disappears into everything.

This is what I wrote to my client after their initial difficulty with using the mantra they had been given.

Maybe I can explain a little easier and it may help you...

I understand that it can be confusing at first, so bless you with your meditations...

When you sit for say 10 to 20 minutes, just be there, with everything that's going on for you. Don't try and stop your thoughts, or stop anything. If you can just breathe into whatever you are feeling or thinking, just get into it. In other words simply learn to be present with however you are in that moment. Forget about anything you may have read or learnt about meditation, just really be with yourself.

Let your mind wonder, go with it, breathe into it. Let yourself feel, feel it, go into it. Let yourself think about past, present or future, be with it.

Come to your seat with the attitude of exploration and adventure instead of austerity and measure. So for 20 minutes, simply learn how to be with yourself with whatever’s going on. Now, while being with Self, every now and then (and only when you can remember, or feel to do it) begin the chant. Not so you must follow it or strictly adhere to it but rather simply enjoy it.

As your thoughts, feelings or even a quiet centeredness may arise, stop chanting and go deeply into that, with no pressure to return to the chant. Just breathe deeply into what ever arises, get really into yourself. Then when you again feel 'oh yes, it would be nice to chant now', begin the chant for as long as it arises.

Learn to more and more uncensor yourself and simply go with what is, and definitely don't try to stop the mind chattering - you'll loose every time!

So this is what in turn may occur after a while of experimenting...

More and more you'll accept and simply enjoy yourself, be that the pain or the pleasure.

More and more the simple joy of chanting will arise and you'll get more into it.

After a time even the chanting may stop by itself and you'll be left simply in the all loving presence of yourself, in which case just go with that.

After a while longer the thoughts and feelings of Self will even begin to dissolve

And ultimately… Well, that's for you to discover!

I know consider the simple art of meditation an essential tool in my spiritual framework and would highly suggest to anyone working shamanically or magickally, to find the road to silence that works for them, and use it as a daily practice. Without it, the Self begins to take itself a little too seriously and forgets that it is the channel for the divine forces and not the creator of them.

Bless you, may this inspire your presence in each moment!