Utiseta and Faring Forth:
The Path of Meditation

The night is quiet, and the woods are full of the smell of leaf-mold and pine as she makes her way to her favorite tree. It's the great-grandfather oak a good way off of the path - empty at this time of night, all travelers sleeping - with a trunk so huge that she can't fit her arms halfway around it. Her staff leans up against the tree; cut from one of its branches, it is like coming home. On one side, she leaves an offering for the landvaettir; on the other side, she seats herself. She settles down in the hollow between its two largest roots, composes herself, pulls the hood of her cloak down over her head, says a prayer to her patron under her breath, and then begins to Breathe.

First, the Breath, in and out, no more than that. With each in-breath, notice the sounds and scents of the forest - the leaves, the pines surrounding this old oak, the stillness and rustling, the rough bark at her back - and breathe them in. Then hold them for the same count, savor them. Then with each out-breath, let them go. Let them all go, breathe out all the way to the bottom, to nothing. Let go of the senses, the day's work, the buzzing thoughts that swarm in her mind. All gone. Empty. Well, not quite empty, not on the first out-breath, but with each breathing cycle she grows emptier. Sense the outside, then no-sensing. Eventually all that she breathes in is the forest; her ordinary life is fallen away entirely. This forest is all that is, and beyond that, nothingness. She does not know how long it takes to get to that point, how many breaths. It doesn't matter. What matters is that she knows the way, and her breaths are the footprints on that now-familiar road.

Next, the Landvaettir. As her awareness of herself fades and only the surroundings matter, and even they only matter on the in-breath, she slowly becomes aware of its presence, there to greet her. It knows her; they go this dance of touch-and-greeting, of offering and hospitality, at least once a week. Its touch is friendly, but somewhat impersonal; she is not bonded to this land, but it is her old friend. It is pleased with the offering, and with her unfailing courtesy towards it. The bargain - you feed me, you hold my Thread, I feed you, I hold your memory - is reaffirmed with that swift touch, and it is enough.

Then she sinks deeper into darkness, and begins to shut off the outside stimuli. Her breathing slows, and the in-breaths no longer breathe in the forest, but only the night - and then not even that, simply darkness. She floats in darkness, in trance, and then extends herself Beyond. It is a slow process for her, and perhaps it always will be. Some can tear themselves Out with only a few minutes of breathing, but she needs to walk all the way there and back, one Breath at a time. And, perhaps, the slowest way might also be the surest. There is no need to hurry. She has all night. Sometimes the breathing alone is not enough, and then she sings or chants for a time, giving her breath-steps power of voice and ond, pushing them further, holding the notes until there is nothing left in her but vibration.

There is green light above and to the west, or to the direction that she thinks of as West. That is her destination. It is springtime in Vanaheim, and the Lady that she serves will be there, flowers uncurling in Her footsteps. During the day she is clad in pale green, awakening the fields to their springtime glory, coaxing the shoots from the ground. At night, she will hold court in a hall with no name save Hers, where the women gather to sing and chant magic. It is there that her breath-steps will take her, to Freya's secret hall of seidhr, where the golden Lady wears her witchiest face. There is a question that must be asked, people with worried faces wondering what will be...and there is training that she must have, teachings she has oathed herself to go through. The green light grows stronger as she moves forward, staff in hand...for the staff too has a soul that fares forth with her. Springtime in Vanaheim, and the grass feels soft beneath her feet, the torchlight of the hall ahead of her. They know her there, and will welcome her in yet again.

The first road of the Eightfold Path, and the one that is the simplest, the most popular, and the mainstay of nearly every spirit-worker is the Path of Meditation. It is traditionally also called the Path of Breath, as breathing and oxygen control are important elements in mastering this path. In the northern tradition, we call it Utiseta, which literally means "sitting-out". This gives us the traditional image of the spirit-worker going to a quiet and lonely place, usually far from habitation, and meditating in order to commune with Gods and wights, or do magical work on a nonphysical plane.

Utiseta can, in some cases, become "faring forth", or "journeying", which are both northern-tradition terms for what is modernly referred to as "astral projection". This occurs when a specific part of the soul leaves the body and travels to Otherworlds (or to other places in this world) while still being connected to the physical form. Journeying, and how to do it, is covered fairly thoroughly in Pathwalker's Guide To The Nine Worlds, the second book in the Northern-Tradition Shamanism series, so it's wise for the would-be journeyer to pick that one up. First, though, we will concentrate on how to do utiseta itself, and its manifold uses, in the words of various spirit-workers.

Utiseta, Breath, and Mound-Sitting
by Lydia Helasdottir

The best beginner's technique is the basic four-fold breath: you breathe in for a count of four, you hold for four, you breathe out for four, you wait for four, and you just do that. It helps your body not to freak out when your consciousness leaves, because it's used to doing this automatic breathing. Just sit and do that for a while. If you are working on ascending, going up through the Tree, then it's better not to lie down while doing this. It works better for your energy body anyway, if you want to be moving Kundalini, for your spine to be in a vertical position, so you should sit upright in a chair. But in terms of actually getting out and traveling, it doesn't make any difference whether I'm curled up in a ball or lying down or sitting against a tree or in the train or whatever.

The trick of doing the four-fold breathing thing is to actually extend yourself at the times when you're holding the breath out. You breathe out for four counts, and then you slip further out during the counts before you breathe in again. I've done that so long that sometimes even now, if I do it, I lose all feeling of the body; the body just doesn't exist. It's a really simple thing that I learned so many years ago, and it still does the right stuff for me. It works. I also meditate and travel when I'm running, but that's a slightly different deal. That's about 80% in the body and 20% out. Particularly if I'm having a hard time, I'll just go away and talk to whatever wights or boggarts are in the forest that I'm running through, and whine at them about how hard it is, and they kind of commiserate, and after about ten minutes it feels better.

The first couple of times that I did that for work, it was very much “Oh, I don't know if I can really do this!” And you just have to use your mind to say, “Well, what if it is all in my imagination? If I were to be able to do this, what might it look like?” It does work. Then, eventually you'll feel a sensation that there's really something there.

We do moundsitting, ordinary utiseta, and going under the cloak, and sensory deprivation stuff like cat's cradle and such things. Ordinary utiseta we like to do overnight, not just for a couple of hours. You go through the stage of “What the fuck am I doing here? This is really silly.” It seems to be needful sometimes to just go through that. We start with the following exercise: Start with experiencing yourself, and that which is around you. Place your attention on the trees and the rocks, the root that I'm sitting on, the wind in the trees, the smells. We do this whole thing of “I can see one thing, I can hear one thing, I can smell one thing, I can taste one thing, I can feel one thing.” Then you go to two things, then to five things. Getting to the point of smelling five different things is quite difficult, especially if you haven't moved your position, but it's a good thing. So the first point is to be really aware of you and the things around you. Do that with your deep breathing.

Then you contract you attention inside yourself. If you're wearing a cloak, at this point you put the hood over yourself. Contract your attention so that you're not noticing anything from the outside, and you're just trying to find the core of the center of your being, all the way down. Really compress it so that it's just you. It might take ten or fifteen minutes for you to even get there, and then you do that for an hour or so. Then you expand your attention outwards, but you go past the boundary of your body, so now you're experiencing all that stuff that's around you, but not as separate from you any more. And at that point, often it's easier to commune with the wights and the dead people and whatever else. And you do five or six or twelve or so cycles of that during the night. That's pretty potent stuff. You can get people who are relative brickheads - thick people who can't see things or hear things - to at least have an unusual experience in doing that....if only because when you pull your cloak over your head it changes the oxygen content of your breathing, It's the “holotropic breath” of Stanislav Grof, this particular hallucinogenic ratio between carbon dioxide and oxygen. You can get it by hyperventilating, too, and it's just as potent as LSD. It's quite remarkable stuff.

So if you do this thing on a mound, or inside of a faery hill, then you're likely to talk to them. If you don't have mounds around, ancestor graves might work. We live in Europe, where there are plenty of mounds and faery hills, but it's different in the New World. But you have to have a reason to actually talk to them, anyway. Not just to have them show up because it's cool; they'll ask, “What are you going to do for me?”

How Faery-mounds work: You just go for a doze on some welcome-looking rock on some wild and green hill, and if you're near a faery place they'll suck you in. Of course, whether or not that's good rather depends on the situation. If you have a particular reason for dealing with them, then you can put your “I am here and would like to talk to you” hat on; you can sort of put that flag up and then go to sleep, and they'll come and talk to you if they want you. If on the other hand you don't want to talk to the Fey, but you need to have a sleep somewhere on the mountain which is Fey-haunted, I would just advocate drinking some fucking coffee and moving on. If you feel the strange desire to go lie down and sleep somewhere in the hills of Ireland, better be sure that you know what you're getting into. “But it's so nice and warm there, and everywhere else is cold and rainy...” They don't like cold iron, either, so you can do a certain amount of protective stuff with wearing cast iron jewelry or horseshoe nails.

The deal with sitting out is that you actually need to have a purpose. “Why am I doing this?” Just to see what's out there and talk to something cool is not a purpose. “I have a question that I can't get an answer to, and I need to talk to my ancestors.” Or “There's a part of me that I don't understand, and I need to get some clarity.” Or “Someone has come to me with a problem that they need help on and I don't get it.” Or “The land is really sick and I need to understand what to do about it.” These are all good reasons, but not “Hey, maybe something cool is out there and I can talk to it.” No. You might even get fed on, so be careful.

Breath is the source of life. In Old Norse, the word ond, meaning breath, stood for a concept that we can recognize in the eastern terms of ki, ch'i, prana, etc. In myth, Odin breathed the life into Ask and Embla, the first people of Midgard, and thus gave them the gift of ond. When there is no more breath, there is no more life force. When you control the breath, you affect the life force. Controlling your breathing can change your mood, reduce anxieties, clear your mind of annoying spinning thoughts, and make you more aware or less aware of your body, depending on how you do it.

The Northern Tradition does not have specific breathing exercises, such as the Yoga practices of India, or even Buddhist chanting meditation. In my youth, I did learn Pranayama breathing (the basic technique of which is simply a rather intense and lengthened version of the four-fold breath in Lydia's piece above) largely from living in a houseful of hippie roommates, but I didn't relate it to my magical or spiritual practices until I found myself combining controlled breathing with another skill I'd been trained in - singing. Somewhere along the line I discovered that the breathing techniques learned for voice training and the breathing techniques taught by yogic practitioners were not all that different, and could be combined with a form of magic that I later learned was a form of galdr - singing your intent out with your breath. While simple breathing is the tool of the mystic, singing is the breath-tool of the shaman. Remember again the difference between the shaman and the mystic? If you've ever heard any recordings of shamans around the world singing, you'll know that it's not that their voices are so wonderful. It's that something about their singing is so very powerful...and that is a technique well-known in the northern tradition.

Even if your voice is as croaky as a frog, it might be worth it to take lessons in voice training, if only to get the breathing part right. The usefulness of the four-fold breath, as described by the yogis, is to put someone into a state of mild trance, largely from the extra-long periods between the inhalations and exhalations. In general, when people breathe, they don't spend a very long time with the lungs full or the lungs completely empty, and it's this concentration on the "liminal states" of breathing, expanding them to the same length as the inhalation and exhalation, that creates the trance state. If you look at singing-breath in this way, the first thing to do would be to find - or create - a song that allowed the breathing to proceed in a way that mimicked the four-fold breath, or perhaps some other pattern of breathing that you figure out on your own. Putting yourself in that state with song makes it easier to gather, aim, and fire the energy of the song/spell. The power song is one fork in the Path of Breath, the controlling of ond in order to create something and move it out of you. Life force rides on the breath; remember that. If you need help loosening that up, drawing Ansuz on your throat chakra may help with that.

Another fork in the path is journeying, which is usually done silently. Here we're back to utiseta again. Once you've managed to put yourself into trance through breath and concentration, it's a matter of knowing where to go. My first suggestion to the beginning spirit-worker is to go inside yourself, because knowing yourself and all your secrets, and not having anything hiding in there that you've denied or locked in a mental oubliette to forget about, will be one of the most important ongoing jobs that you can do. Everything in your psyche that you're not aware of is a weakness when it comes to journeying. Every part of yourself that you deny is a potential saboteur to your spirit-work, an Achilles heel to leap out when you least expect it, a possible back door for nasty entities to get in. Besides, if you're frightened by the dark alleys and passageways in your own head, you're never going to make it through the worlds outside of this one. So start with You, your Self, and your Breath.

One possible meditation is simply to visualize a series of doors in a hallway, in your inner house. Some open onto rooms, some stairways. Every night, open one door and see what's in it. Don't try to control the meditation; let it flow. If there are stairs upward or downward, follow them and see what doors you come upon, but stick to one door a night unless you've put aside a whole day just to wander through your inner self. If you get a feeling of apprehension or straight-out fear, or even a feeling of "Oh, this isn't a good idea, I think I'll go back now," or keep getting distracted or popping out of trance while approaching a particular door, you've hit something important that your mind is trying to keep from you. Don't let it happen; pursue it. Even horrid memories that you hate to look at should be dealt with; better you deal with them now in safety than deal with them when they sabotage you during future work.

The other part, which is discussed in detail in Pathwalker's Guide, is that you need to be able to ground, center, and shield. You should be able to create shields that will go with your hame when it leaves your body. You should also have a good relationship with a land-wight, if possible, because they're good for holding your thread when you go out. While spirits that go with you and guide you are great, there's nothing like a spirit that will bring you back home safely.

Once you've spent enough time working on your inner mind - and "enough" is a variable time that can only be guessed at - you will want to attempt to move outward instead of inward, and journey out of the body to another place. Some folks create an astral safe spot, sort of your own personal equivalent of the Disney ride, to use as a starting point in beginning work. There is also a general agreement that the first ride out of the body should ideally be done with another spirit-worker present, monitoring you, and able to step in should there be an emergency. The problem is that for most beginning spirit-workers, especially in this tradition - there are still so few of us - there isn't anyone around to help when you begin this. I started alone, as did most of the northern-tradition shamans and spirit-workers that I know.

So I will say up front that you are taking your life and sanity into your own hands, and the best thing to do is to wait until A) your patron deity tells you to do it, or B) you can get a deity or major wight to motor you through it, or C) you can get another spirit-worker to come out and help you do it. Start out with the spirits that will come to you, and graduate (with their help) to the ones that will guide you outward. If no spirits are coming to you, pray to the Gods to send you some, or to come themselves. If no one comes at all, perhaps you're not meant to do this work. (We'll assume in that case that you haven't actually been chosen by any Gods or wights, but are just hoping that you will be.) In that case, you have my sympathies, but there's not much that you can do. Try again in a few years and see if the situation has changed.

In a breath-trance, you can be better aware of the voices of the wights, and your signal clarity is stronger. If you practice enough, you should eventually be able to achieve a light trance with only a few breaths...and then you should be able to go deeper. While journeying is a tricky and dangerous thing, the simpler forms of the Path of Breath are the easiest parts of the Eightfold Path, and are much more difficult to harm one's self with. You only need your body, your mind, your breath, and your will, and you have the first three in abundance and the fourth can be honed and trained. That's why this path is also called the Path of Will.

Journeying Tips From A Cosmic Diplomat
by Lydia Helasdottir

Leaving my body started with a strange experience I had during a progressive body relaxation thing. I was doing the classic Monroe Institute thing - “The toes, the toes are relaxed, I relax the toes. The feet, the feet are relaxed, I relax the feet.” I got up to the throat and suddenly I couldn't breathe any more, and I got this really weird sensation, so I stopped doing it. I went back to it, and it happened again. This was very early on - age 15 or 16 or so. So what I actually learned to do was to travel out of the body. I think people misunderstand this part of it; they think that they have to feel their vehicle literally leaving their body, seeing themselves under themselves and floating through the room and all that stuff. Well, that's handy and all, but it isn't actually necessary for doing it, I don't find. And it's really unhelpful if you're traveling in a car and trying to do that at the same time.

For me, I have a variety of levels, from 90% here and 10% journeying, to 10% here and 90% journeying. I sit down, I punch in the coordinates of where I want to go on my intergalactic navigating machine, and press “Go!” That's something that many of us do, making the interface look like technology we're familiar with. I started traveling a lot with the twelve directional kings. I had to figure out how to go and meet them; my teachers were saying, “You have to go see this King and talk to him.” Well, how do I do that, then? She said, “Well, just intend to meet him, and go, and the rest will get taken care of.” So I closed my eyes and intended to meet him, and suddenly I was face to face with this ebony-skinned man on a blasted desert landscape.

Some people can speak or communicate while they're away; their mouth will move and words will come out and describe what's going on, to whoever is there or onto a tape. That works for me sometimes, and sometimes I have to go through the whole experience and remember it all when I come back. Or I might bop in and out and back and forth. How do you know if it's real? If it's really important stuff, we have a three-level verification. First you test them. You say, “Who are you?” and they'll say something or other, and then you can test them further. Working in the northern tradition, I would tend to do an Os at them, or Isa, or Ken. You can do that with Ogham as well.

The second level is to check with divination. Is this what I really thought it was? Do the divvy. Did we get all the information we needed to get? Did we ask all the questions that we were supposed to ask? Is there anything that we need to be worried about? Is it all right? We always do a divination session after being sent to talk to things, just to be sure. If it's something really important, then we want two confirmations. We call on somebody else in our network to confirm it without us telling them what we were doing, and then we also ask for some sort of physical manifestation. For instance, let's say we got some information from some bogey about something or other. Then your mother-in-law starts telling you about some sort of strange dream that she had and this stuff comes up, and you go to the store and some truck drives past you that says “Welcome to Bogeyville” or whatever. You ask for a physical, non-journeying, non-suggestion thing to show up in the physical world. Like an omen. We always ask for that if it's something really serious, like “You should sell the house and move to Kamchatka,” or some such thing of great import.

The other thing that you need to take into account is speed. Sometimes you have to really slow yourself down a lot to talk to certain entities. Things like boggarts and tree spirits don't have the same time cycles. I expect that our speech sounds to them something like “blblbllbl”, and we have to really slow down to communicate with them. We can do full-on 90% out of the body journeying, but I don't find that it's all that necessary. It's a lot more dangerous and tiring. Once you get used to traveling places, you can travel with more and more of you here.

How not to get in trouble while journeying: Research beforehand. Always know exactly where you're going. What is the person that you're meeting supposed to look like? Have we met them before? And if you can't find it in the lore anywhere, or in faery tales, do divinations. You can ask people who have been there or done that - “So what does this look like, then?” - but if you can't even find that, then knowing that you have some reason for being there, you can ask the source of the information that said you had to be there - what are they supposed to look like, and how to get there safely.

When it comes to someone who's read in a book that So-and-so helps with something, and might be a good person to ask about a question...Do 20 questions with your divination method - if I knew more about him, what would he look like? You can move fairly smoothly from meditation to journeying. Meditate on his being and presence, and why exactly you think that he might have a good answer for you. But the next question is why he would bother, though. There has to be something in it for him. Go bearing gifts. The best gift is to be willing to pick up tasks that they can't do down here.

Afterwards, do a divination to see if it was really them, if you got there. We like to be sure that we know what the space is like, and is it near something that we already know. Are there landmarks? We'll ask divination beforehand to find out if there are particular dangers in going to meet this entity; if so, what is the nature of that; can we do anything to allay those dangers; if so, what; and so forth. But it's invariably worth it to not go in like a complete idiot. The entity will be pleased to know that you've taken the time to read the guidebook and learn a few phrases and see the map. Even though it's obvious that you're a tourist, you're not a complete schmuck. You've at least tried a little bit.

There's also that people can mimic deities on the subtle plane if they're powerful enough. You can test them all you like, and it won't help. That's why the divinations afterwards are important. Of course, if you've worked with a particular deity enough, you can just sort of know if it's not them. Them acting in uncharacteristic ways is a tipoff.

There are certain spaces that are time-sensitive, and if you go into them, going back into your body can be a bit weird. Most of the time when one journeys out, when you come back your subtle body juts fits right back into your physical vehicle, but if you visit places that are quite close to the manifested plane, then the movement of the earth affects your subtle body still, because you're quite close to it and its influence, so when you come back after 20 minutes or whatever, your body is slightly rotated from where your subtle body was, and you can come in feeling funky. In the beginning, I would come in and feel like “Eew! Something feels really gross and wrong and out of place and twitchy.” I would have to go out of the body again and realign and come back in again. You can definitely have a bad landing.

Then I was taught to immediately write down everything, and make sure you're thoroughly back in your body - especially before you have to go and drive or something, and make sure to close the door after you, because things will want to come in after you, into the material plane. Things will attach themselves to you, or wander in after you - just little bottom feeders, usually, but occasionally something bigger. I imagine the biofilter that they use in Star Trek when they teleport people, to make sure that nothing comes in that shouldn't be there. Remember that Chi follows Zi - energy follows intentions, so you can use that to make a little magical tool. You put it around your physical body when you leave, like a little glowing mesh, and it filters out anything that wasn't supposed to be there. And if you end up feeling kind of flu-like for a couple of days after traveling it could be that you've caught something. That's something that they don't talk about - the bugs. You can burn them off doing a chi exercise of something pantheon-appropriate. Some kind of “light from the Source burning out stupid beasties that came through the portal with me and shouldn't be here.” Or you can ask one of the deities to burn them off for you. Just being alert that it can happen at all is more than most people ever do. Most people don't contemplate such things.

You can come back from these things very much out of sorts, and then you have to spend a lot of time doing elemental rebalancing stuff, or purifying baths or whatever exercise it is that you do to have a physical or mental or emotional reboot. If I have to go places that are really harsh, I just don't put as much of me there. I only send maybe ten or fifteen percent. I don't generally pathwalk, because it's harder on the body, but sometimes you have to go fully there. Also, it's harder to get fooled when you're fully there. A lot harder to get fooled. And it's harder to get lost.

Getting lost: I got lost in the space between here and the directional kings. How did I get back? “Mommeee!” Which is very embarrassing. You can take a rock in your hand, or something else that you can home back in on. This sort of “GPS thinking” goes like this: Here's the waypoint, the blinking beacon, the homing beacon. There seems to be a kind of “idiot's autopilot” that brings you back safely, but also limits where you can go, and it's like a locking collar, and until you've logged a certain number of hours of journeying successfully without getting lost, and without having to use the blinking light or the return button or what-have-you, you have to wear the collar. And it also tells boogies to “hands-off”. So people start thinking that they are invulnerable, because nothing bad ever happens to them and they can always find their way back... until you pass certain ring-pass-nots in your magical attainment, and then that doesn't work any more, and you really can get lost or burnt to a crisp by the radiation.

But when I get lost I tend to just cry for Mommy, meaning Hela, and She'll drag me back and berate me, and I feel really ill and get a migraine for five or six days. That's so humiliating. And, even if you don't have a patron deity, there's always a Mom there, a Mother Goddess of some sort who will help you when you yell. The Universal Distress Beacon, like the toddler in the supermarket. If not your mom, some nice lady will come by and help you out.

But to avoid getting lost in the first place, really good knowledge of where you're going is important, and don't be going into places where you're not planning to go, and don't travel to places you don't know yet, then. Get a tour guide, or stick to places that do have a lot of lore written about them while you learn your navigational skills. It's like mountaineering - you first go to mountains that have marked trails, and then you go to the mountains that might not have marked trails but there's written guidebooks and maps, and then you go to the mountains that have no guidebooks but you go with a local guide, and then - and only then - do you go exploring into remote aspects of the Urals that nobody's ever been to before, that aren't even on the map. To go there by helicopter and decide to walk around is just dumb.

The Disney ride - the archetypal veil - is a good way to get an idea of what the place you're going looks like. The only unsafe thing about the Disney ride is that you can believe that the real thing is that safe. On the Disney ride, you can throw popcorn at the video Gods and all that happens is that you get ejected. In real life, one of ‘em will tear your liver out. “Mommee! He tore my liver out!” And She says, “Uh-huh. That's because you pestered him. Don't do that, then.”

First, before you even think about traveling in Otherworlds, I would try to build up your astral stamina. Our people take six to nine months of building up their astral vehicles with breathing and meditative exercises to the point where they are actually quite strong. In the northern tradition, such exercises might be sitting with the trees and breathing up and down them and generating a heartwood and really firm bark, if you're a tree kind of person; meditating upon and working with Thorn and Nyth...but especially breathing and guiding energy around your system so that it becomes strong, so that you subtle body is full and strong and powerful and solid, and that you can move around without leaking everywhere. Then we test them - we feed on them, and batter them around, and see if they're still set up. So spend a good couple of months doing really basic grounding and purification exercises.

Then, when traveling, making sure that you have got some armor, or at least protective clothing before you go. But make sure that any armor and weapons are hidden, so that you look harmless. Armor does not necessarily mean “armed”; it means appropriately dressed for the conditions. So if you're going into a high-radiation environment, you need to wear a rad suit. If you're going to go into a very cold place, you need to wear something, or else go in a bubble, or a magicked-up robe that you always wear when you're doing something like this. It could be just a lightly-flowing-outward expression of energy all the time, a slight positive pressure from your being floating outwards, so that the little sucking bottom-feeding things won't latch onto you so easily.

And if you're traveling to places where you're likely to get hit heavily, wear armor, even if you wear it under your T-shirt so that it doesn't show. You can wear armor that doesn't show up. It doesn't have to be big aggressive “I Am Looking For A Fight” armor. You should not overdo the heroic knight valiant thing. Even in “Lord of the Rings”, consider Aragorn in his traveling gear versus Aragorn in his battle gear. It's very different, being a Ranger versus being a Paladin.

But being wounded....mostly for beginners it's just bottom feeders that have suckered onto them. "Boogies", as we call them; undifferentiated beings sort of swooping around. They will come and feed on your energy. If those things attach themselves to you....whenever you come back, just check. We refer to it as putting the scanning goggles on and scanning your body for parasites. Then take them off, or burn them up, and put some energy into your hand and just patch the hole, or take some healing herbs, or go talk to a tree, or whatever it is you do. You can also travel in other forms - something that's less likely to get damaged. So for example, maybe you decide to travel as a tortoise or something.

Sometimes I've been damaged by other people who were territorial about the fact that I was there, or just didn't like me. You don't always know that you've been hit when you're still traveling, assuming that you didn't actually go into battle and take damage that you couldn't see, so you might come back and feel a bit weird or logy or headachey or tired inexplicably for days. You might not be able to get rid of a cold, or whatever. In this case, it's quite likely that you did take some damage out there. You can either do some divination to find out if that's the case, and if so what to do about it; or you can go to your local friendly neighborhood shaman and ask them to have a look at you. You can go to standard energy-ish healers with a great deal of care, and say, “I'm feeling a bit tired and ill; maybe you can just rebalance everything and make sure that it's OK.” They'll do a standard cleansing reboot program, which may interfere with modifications, but if you're just a beginner you won't have too many mods anyway. Go to an acupuncturist or something and just get fixed. Eat lots of really healthy food, and take cleansing baths, and such. It'll fix itself, generally. If you've gotten into a fight with something that's gotten you and it doesn't heal, you need to talk to somebody who handles serious spirit-work and have them fix you up.

Raven Kaldera
cauldronfarm@hotmail.com

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