Combat and Healing

A few specialties of psionic practices that I've noticed: extra-sensory perception (which includes but isn't limited to empathy, telepathy, precognition, retrocognition, psychometry, and scanning for psi constructs); dream and/or astral exploration; psi constructs; and psychokinesis.

To specialize in any of these, I understood, focused on developing skills and results and recording effects to show that these exist at all.

Two more common specialties that I've seen categorized in psionics, struck me as having much more to do with the practitioner's attitude towards psi phenomena, than psi itself. These categories are combat, and healing. Both of which I avoided for those reasons, and... both of which I found very practical to apply, very recently.

On Combat

The way I understood from osmosis in a few psionic forums, was that psions believe in a metaphysical force that responds to thoughts, feelings, and desires: psi. Most beginner psions would practice making psi constructs to learn to sense psi as well as learn to manipulate psi. They would be taught to think of a ball that's not yet between their hands, and to hold it until they feel that it's there. That would make a psi ball. After that, it wasn't only beginner psionic combatants who would be encouraged to move on to constructs such as, a bubble shield around oneself.

Mine weren't very good. I could feel my intention like a cocoon around me, and I called it psi... and then I would start physically walking, and I could feel that psi being left behind in the location that I did the exercise. Generally, a shield is supposed to follow the moving body of its creator around.

Once I figured out how to take my shield around with me, I wanted to make my shield invisible to others with psi-sensing abilities. Mahadevi pointed out that, because I was thinking very hard about making my shield invisible while I was making it, I was in fact being very loud to his psi-sensitive self.

And then some more advanced psi practitioners went on about how while we can work with psi, a metaphysical force, on the level of merely overlaid on the very physical world... It doesn't have to be. There was a higher level of reality, far removed from the physical world's geometric laws, and anybody who really wants to harm you can easily surpass your bubble-shields, by teleporting inside the bubble from that higher level-- so it was pointless. Unless your telepathy or empathy was on overdrive, and even in that case, learning to rein that in was a more valuable development of the same skill than skipping over to another skill. So, I joyfully gave up on ever bothering with shielding because it was too much trouble for me to take, for... the prevention of too little trouble that I was actually getting.

That was a few years back. Three months ago or so, I found a sword in my dreams that followed me into meditations, and spontaneously made some pretty good bubble shields. It seemed to shut out a lot of subtle background noise, that I would attribute to ambient, free-flowing psi. Two weeks ago or so, I used it against someone.


Sibling and I hadn't seen or spoken to each other for months: my choice, for reasons I think would be better not to elaborate on LOL my wrath and bitterness. Skip ahead.

For Thanksgiving dinner with the extended family, Sibling didn't say anything that renewed my trauma or even offended me, and I didn't hallucinate lizard-angel-bishounen so that I could stand to be near her. I mention this in order to present conditions wherein I am perfectly sane and fine, in Sibling's presence! Unlike other times, when... lizard angel anime rock star hallucination, because I can't bear to be anywhere near Sibling otherwise.

So, this was odd that less than two weeks later, the extended family then invited both of us to a casual dinner.

When we all sat down, I sensed a dark stormcloud that rolled and billowed around Sibling, and it extended towards me, to hover above and then around me.

I want to clarify that I have developed some mundane ways to sense and resolve conflict. I can make a note of muscle tension, and physical pains, in my own body and interpret it as the effects of cortisol. Small massages, and deep breathing, can alleviate this conflict. I can hear words and interpret concepts, and then talk it out with other people with a sentence constructed like so: "When you X, I feel Y because Z." This is supposed to break down many interpersonal communication barriers. Additionally, I can interpret my dreams as a collection of symbols for my inner state in the face of waking life conflicts, and sort it out in myself rather that outside...

This wasn't a dream. I could interpret it as such, because it was a very strange thing to witness while awake. And, there are reasons for it not to be there: Sibling isn't an extensive practitioner, to my knowledge as Sibling's own sibling. Mahadevi had taught Sibling some visualizations, so that somebody else could help prevent my going out-of-body, and neither of them told me more than that, but that was a few years back and I doubted that Mahadevi would mentor Sibling much more than that. Yet, this stormcloud behaved... very... skillfully.

I didn't confront Sibling about it afterwards, because... on the social level, I very much dislike any and all interactions with her, and one component to our estrangement was Sibling's dishonesty (and mine-- that was ultimately in reaction to Sibling's dishonesty, and mine actually brought about some change in life instead of sticking to a habitual cycle of abuse and excuses that Sibling was doing, about physical violence and alcoholism and who controlled the inheritance money, and who "has real problems" about people not going along on a beach trip, versus my depression and anorexia being "a luxury to whine about when it's your choice to be that way", and if I should be "allowed" to have a job and when and what kind of job and what to study and when to study and what to wear, and what not to eat because she'd slap my face over the mere suspicion of having taken more than my share of a bag of crisps, and whose spiritual practice made a better person and Sibling said that mine made me a shit person but NO SIBLING WAS THE DESPICABLE PIECE OF SHIT ALL ALONG! I wish that my Sibling would die young, in a painful and undignified way. It has just been so difficult to accept that somebody so evil and toxic could possibly exist.)

...and I wouldn't have trusted any answer that I got from Sibling. I just feel quite convinced that it didn't come from me.

Where was I? Oh, yeah... a stormcloud tried to eat me, and I believed that it came from Sibling and not from my imagination of what Sibling can throw at me, even if it very much sounds like something that I would merely imagine Sibling throwing at me, because Issues. Aaand, I had a sword... that, if you stick it in the ground, it grows a bubble-shield that feels far more effective than anything I ever consciously made. It was a sword that I dreamed about, and I when I would actively imagine having it-- what I like to think I was doing, was recalling it from my subconscious-- and found it works well on what feels like psi-level. I keep saying that imagination and psychism are different, but at times like these I can testify to overlap.

So, even if I wasn't doing much more than hallucinating, at least I could hallucinate a solution. That would be my point, except at this point in the story, I would speak too soon. There was something about my astral/imaginary sword-generated psionic bubble shield, that indicated to me that it wouldn't hold up effectively-- or wasn't completely holding up effectively-- against Sibling's cloud. So, I visualized pulling my sword out, diffusing the shields, and tried something else.

The following, while it has its typos and word choice betrays how it rather coasts on an agreement in the paranormal community about psychic vampires being abusers on a metaphysical plane (as well as a mundane plane) it was written by a practitioner whose techniques I respected immensely, because I recalled them from having read them years prior to now.

If the attack is of a directly draining nature [...] the simplest way to deal with it is to ground the feed conection. A psi vamp feed has two main components, one is an extension of their will and psi energy out to you, this is an intrusive force, and the other is a strong draining force applied to your energy.

To ground out such an attack, you will try to push where the psi vamp is pulling. Now you are not pushing into the vacume that is their feeding, that would only aid their feeding. You are pushing on the intrusion of their mind energy which is extended out to you. Think of a vacume hose coming at you, you push it away by pushing on the hose, not by pushing into the opening. You are pushing as an extension of will, affecting the other person's energy rather than your own. depending on the relative skill levels, you will likely not be able to push on the feeding intrusion very far, since the owner of energy has a slight advantage in manipluating it. And a psi vamp is usually fairly adept at moving energy about. Despite this, you should be able to push it out to arms length or more, away from the core of your energy. Keep pushing it outward untill the draining element is mostly disconected from your energy.

Now that you've got it disconected from yourself, push the feeding intrusion down to the ground. Dont push it straight down, just angle your outward pushing slightly and let the intrusive force of their feed attempt move the intrusion downwards. In the paradigm you're using for this visual, the ground is full of earth energy. There is quite an amazing lot of this energy in the ground. The effect of grounding a drain is not unlike dipping a vacume cleaner hose into a swimming pool. When the feed reaches the ground the psi vamp will get a jolt of earth energy, and the feed intrusion will dissapear while the psi vamp gets a sudden mouthfull of something unexpected. It may even be moderately painfull, like an electric shock to their subtle body.

An unconcious psi vamp (yes there are psi vamps who are unaware of their energy habbits), or an immature psi vamp, (both of which would be the most common sort to go around attacking people) will probably leave you alone if you do this to their feeding efforts. And they will likely not understand what ocurred. Even a tallented psi vamp will be at least somewhat discouraged. You can repeat the technique over and over, but eventually a persistent skilled drain attempt will latch onto you too strongly to pry loose. But unless they have something to prove, you will have made yourself a very poor target choice.

The cloud wasn't necessarily sapping away some vital and personal force, so much as-- I felt-- actively attempting to include me in its dark world, and "burst my bubble" (break down my bubble shield) if that's what it took... to flood me with energy that I refused to take, and I basically took it as a threat to my person.

While it seemed to be trying to eat something, anyway, I thought that it could eat dirt.

But, it wouldn't. I had broken down the forces in my mind, to the link-as-extension between myself and Sibling, and the quality of the stormcloud that was going "OM NOM NOM"... and, the link just curved back up at me, om-nom-nomming away at something it could just almost reach.

Begin by drawing up some of the ground energy imediately undernearth you. Don't pull it completely lose from the ground, just stretch it upwards. Pull it up all around you, all the way over your head. Surround yourself with the earth energy till you are completely encased under an umbrella of earth energy. Now the earth energy should be fairly fluid in nature. You are pulling it all around you, without changing its nature in any way. You're causing the earth's energy to bulge upward in a mound around you, and you in a hollow bubble inside the rise of earth energy. The earth energy is not going to stop intrusions, but will offer a basic barrier to basic energy interactions and simple feeding attempts on your energy. If 'earth energy' is an uncomfortable paradigm for you, then replace that with 'baseline' energy, or veil energy, or whatever you consider to be the pervasive source of ambient energy accessible from any point except within an elaborate shield.

What you've done is expanded on the 'Grounding A Drain' technique above. If anything this technique is somewhat more vulnerable than the pushing technique above. But it requires almost no effort and almost no concentration at all once you learn to successfully pull on earth energy. And it can serve to hide your energy somewhat. This also offers very complete coverage, especially if you are having trouble with creating a shield with no gaps. This technique should help introduce you to using outside energy sources.

I changed tracks and attempted the above method-- Immediately, I ceased to suffer. I didn't feel put upon by any cloud. I no longer could see any cloud. I still felt on edge, but that was emotional rather than intuitive. Sibling appeared to be as fine as she was on Thanksgiving. Nothing was pulling my attention to the otherworld, and I couldn't even see the earth-shield (because I'm only in the habit of taking to those active visualizations, for purposes of counteracting halluci-- I don't know what's a better word... "passive visualizations"?) but I could sort of feel it, overlaid on the physical reality, and having the effect of being able to be fully in the physical reality.

What on earth just happened? I wondered.

The answer that I gave myself was: I just took to psi combat. I never thought I would. I hope to never have to, ever again.

And yet, this seemed to be a fairly sophisticated attack coming from an attacker who might have been completely ignorant of what they were actually doing. Maybe I've just been so psionically lucky all these shield-free years.

On Healing

I've been suspicious of spiritual traditions when it comes to describing the nature of the metaphysical body. See, I do chakra meditations and then get surprised by the results, and then start waffling about whether that necessarily means that chakras exist... I mean, interpreting the metaphysical body as a balance of elements sounds equally valid, but as recently as the 18th century in some parts of the Western world, this paradigm led to the practice of bleeding people, some of whom probably would have benefitted more from blood transfusions. Or even something else that didn't fit in the paradigm of melancholic, phlematic, choleric, and sanguine humors and temperaments.

Basically, when health is the point of action, physical or nonphysical health, well... it's just that it can be a very very high stake to have and then find out that you got something wrong somewhere.

Mahadevi told me once that he saw the metaphysical version of each physical person as unique to them. He said that by his experience, some metaphysical bodies are duplicates of corresponding physical bodies, some are balls of light, some are tangles of leylines, some are animals or have animal parts, and some look like parts of buildings.

I loathe to admit it, because I don't like Mahadevi anymore, but what he said really helped me to break down the information I had, to more basic ideas of "how to heal".


About six years ago, as I developed my extra-sensory perception, I began to notice an area on my upper back that... had something wrong with it. It wasn't physically my back, as far as I could tell, because it wasn't pain. It was just this sense that something was wrong, there. The closest I could get to describing it, was that it seemed to be perpetually deflating.

So, I thought it was a wound or a hole in the balloon-like boundary of my own metaphysical body. If I was bleeding out, then, it goes to reason that the best thing for it was to get a transfusion. To my understanding, psi could be generated (for lack of a better term) by sunshine and the earth, so I thought to use those forces to reverse the flowing out of whatever I was losing. I did feel positive effects from that everywhere else except for the area to which I directed that psi.

So, I thought, I was meta-somatizing a psychological conflict. If the problematic area was my back, then it might correspond to some subconscious-or-other. Again, I delved into dream interpretation, and psychological shadow-processing, and identified stressors on my psyche that I could either remove or remove myself from. So, that was good... except that spot on my back that still felt like it had something wrong with it, and it was like all of that shadow-work wasn't even approaching what I thought would be "the big shadow" causing that problem on my back.

And then I left it alone, figuring that health is... something that a metaphysical body would tend towards, and if I just generally kept taking care of myself, then whatever felt wrong would sort itself out and I'd just notice one day that it's not there anymore.


A few days ago, I read a blog entry by a psychic healer, about basically ripping the pain right out of the metaphysical body. That caught my interest. All this time I thought that pain was a symptom, and that just removing the symptom was not real healing and could be confused for it-- another danger. But, it made sense to think that as much damage can be caused by a presence of something that shouldn't be there, compared to something that should be there and stay there but is slipping away.

The thing was, if I look at a bleeding, open wound-- then, my first worry would be blood loss. With no further information, I didn't consider that... it might be a bullet or arrowhead stuck in there, metaphorically. "Pain itself" could be that arrowhead.

Sooo... out of curiosity, I gave it a go, just a few days ago, on what's been a problematic area for a long time.


The method I used follows: I put my hand behind my back, the back of my hand pressed against that problem spot, because to press the palm of my hand to my own back would take a dexterity that I just do not have.

What I did next was that, I attempted to replicate the feeling of an out-of-body-experience-- except, isolated to that limb. I flexed my "astral hand" backwards into the wound, reached around for "stuff" that felt wrong, found it, grabbed a hold, grabbed again for something that was both wrong and grabbable-holdable, found it, and then... sort of... pulled out.

It felt like a ball of... just gross stuff. I examined it to the best of my psi-senses, and it remained simply uncomplicatedly gross. I couldn't glean if it was a part of me that malfunctioned like a scab under the skin or an ingrown hair, or if it was a waste product like metaphysical pus from maybe a psionic infection that I picked up from somewhere else, or maybe it was the infection itself-- a mild curse or mild psi-blast attack, how that is "metabolized" so to speak in the metaphysical body. Or if it's something really important to my energy body that I should have kept in there but it just doesn't look or feel pretty (like a gallbladder, or the heart's pericardium,) or what. I don't know. It's just gross. I repeated the process of scooping out the gross clumps, and each clump removed left me feeling better and better.

The feeling of my back not being stopped up by all that muck for once, is very pleasant. So, I'm enjoying this before either the muck builds up again, or I find out that muck was important, or my hands become the problematic areas instead because I can't get the muck off, or something. (I can't get the muck off, no matter what "psi washes" I give it. This does kind of match up with my previous attempts at psi-washing it out that didn't work.)

I've made the following notes to myself, when looking to heal (now that I'm convinced that it can happen, in a metaphysical approach):

First, to examine what the sickening metaphysical body looks like. I hadn't considered an exploded posterior node of my anahata chakra as cause for my back pain, but if I had then it still might not have done anything. I'm glad to say that with this metaphysical injury, I took it for what it was (although, I'm not glad that I kept on taking it, and only took it out out of curiosity, like, "Ooh, interesting thing I read online. Hey! This injury is here anyway, why don't I...")

Then, to wonder what it should look like. I'm just euphoric that my back feels normal again, even if injured had become "normal" for a while. Penultimately: Is there something that should be there that isn't? Finally: Is there something there that shouldn't be?

...That's really just about as far as I've gotten, with healing. Respite from a six-year long burden? Pretty good, in my opinion. Unlike with combat, I would like to go further with this.


Recommended links:

Shielding 101, by Kathrynck

Healing, by SpilledChemicals
Psychic Surgery and Shamanic Healing by DuskenPath