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When Psychic Attack Hits Home

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It was a normal morning at home. I was reading a book about Proto-Indo-Europeans while my dogs slept on the couch next to me, and my husband was off at our local metaphysical store, trading a psychic reading with an astrologer.

Admittedly, our “normal” is not really prime-time normal.

I looked up from what I was doing, and I saw my husband walking toward the house from his car with a horrible expression on his face. Agony, perhaps? Pain? He came in and I asked him what was wrong.

“Migraine. A terrible migraine.”

I ushered him to the bedroom, got him a rag for his head, and helped him lay down to try to sleep off the pain. He was out for almost an hour an a half, which is quite unusual for him, even in a situation like this.

When he rose, he told me that he believed that something was “on him,” but he didn’t really know what that meant. While he slept, he had a rather disturbing dream; one that woke him up with a fright. In meditation early that morning his guide said to be aware of someone or something coming after him. He didn’t know what to make of that message when it was given to him, but he was reminded of it now as we stood in the kitchen, his head still throbbing despite the nap.

“I’m thinking this might be… and I don’t really believe in this… psychic attack.”

My husband is a gifted channel and psychic reader, but he is also a very logical, skeptical thinker. It is common for him to encounter some widely accepted phenomena in the New Age world and have an immediate suspicion that it’s “just made up.” He also understands that psychic work is a balance of intuition and imagination, so one might say that what he does is also “just made up.” Nonetheless, he finds cause to question.

I think this kind of questioning is good among psychic folk and magick workers. We have to be observant of what our experience tells us, and if there is not yet an experience to inform what we know we are well served to be inquisitive. Blind acceptance leads to wishy-washiness, I think, and unreliable results.

But here we were, trying to sort through the cause of this unexpected pain, and psychic attack seemed to make the most sense. Neither of us had dealt with this before, but I, for one, was willing to accept that this was the cause and start searching for a remedy.

(Incidentally, if there is ever desire for proof that I possess a deep, ancient, earthy magic inside of me — something that my grandma has, and my mother as well — all you need to do is mess with someone I love. I guarantee you — you’ll feel it.)

I urged my husband to reach out to a fellow psychic and colleague of his, and while he did I called upon my Patron for Her aid in this matter. As I said, I don’t have experience at dealing with this type of situation, and I’m not completely sure what my beliefs are on the subject, either. So, it seemed best to place the whole thing at the feet of a Goddess.

My husband’s colleague confirmed his suspicion. It was, indeed, psychic attack. We went back to the metaphysical shop and reached out for help from our friend and in-house herb-worker, who made him a scrub and gave him a mantra to chant. We headed home, and by that time he was beginning to feel a little better. I, on the other hand, felt like my belly was on fire.

Something seems to have shifted now. His pain is gone, and there isn’t the sense of something heavy on him like there was before. I was able to work off the rest of my defensive anger at the gym before I did anything rash. It appears that the attack has passed.

Now, I’m left with questions.

What do you think psychic attack is? Do you understand it to be some form of malevolent magick, or do you think the whole idea is hogwash?

Have you ever been in a situation where psychic attack seemed like the obvious cause for a malady? Was your suspicion proven or disproven?

Even having had this experience, I feel the subject is worth some further exploration, and I’d love to know what you think and what similar (or vastly different) experiences you might have had.

Belief Is In The Doing

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The snow is falling outside my house. It doesn’t want to stop. It’s the light, lingering kind of snow, and it makes me feel a little bit slower than usual.

This morning, during my daily devotional, after my offerings had been made to the Kindred, I sat down to write a blog post. Sometimes writing seems like the natural form of meditative work to do. I started to write about an experience I had last night, during which I was approached by an acquaintance and asked if I would be interviewed about my religious beliefs. I politely declined, informing him that I was in the middle of a process, and that sometimes in order for a process to remain sacred, it has to be kept secret.

It may seem strange that I write on Bishop In The Grove about the desire to keep my beliefs private. This is a publicly viewable blog, after all. But, to the best of my knowledge he is unaware of the work I’m doing here.

What struck me as interesting about his request, and what sent me into a bit of a tailspin, was how he framed the proposed discussion. My beliefs were what mattered to him, not my practice. When I thought to myself, “What do I believe?” I was reminded of an earlier time in my life; a time when I could have told you exactly what I believed. I recited my beliefs quite clearly every Sunday morning.

As a child, I was indoctrinated into the Christian church, and by extension, the Christian worldview. This isn’t some deep, dark secret, nor was this morning the first time the thought had occurred to me. But, for whatever reason, today it felt like a revelation.

Indoctrination happens to the best of us. Most every child who grows up in a creedal church learns what they “believe” through the rote recitation of someone else’s words. Some grow up to continue to believe those words, to allow them to forever shape the way they see the world. And others, like me, grow up to discover that they are drawn to something different. The words become hollow. Mechanical. Devoid of any magic whatsoever.

ADF’s widely accepted beliefs, as explained by ADF’s founder, Isaac Bonewitz, make sense to me. I can accept them, at least as a starting point. But I am still a novice when it comes to talking about those beliefs as my own. In a way, they aren’t my own. They aren’t creedal, or doctrinal. They are descriptive, not prescriptive, if that makes sense. They describe the loosely held, collective beliefs of a body of people, to which I belong. They are not prescriptive of how I must believe in order to belong to that group.

I was made a Christian, and all of my “I Believe” statements were handed to me. I learned them, loved them at times, and was resistant to them at others. But, they were core to my experience of being a Christian. I was what I believed.

Now, I think I’m being called into a different process.

This is a process of discovery; a process that is all about the “doing”. In searching for a practice that is spiritually fulfilling, that, as my husband pointed out today, gets at the deep, deeper-than-Christian roots I’ve always been connected to, and in working with forces, movements of being, that are very old, (like, capital O, Old),  I will come to understand with great clarity what it is that I believe. I will be able to explain my beliefs, my worldview, to others, perhaps in a way that is universal, completely ecumenical. My beliefs will be a natural extension of my practice.

And, it will take time.

Patience is a virtue, the Christian adage goes. But, as you may know, patience isn’t on ADF’s list of virtues to study.

Perseverance is, though.

Perseverance, which I’ve not written about before, may be a current running beneath the surface of this post, and of my life as a whole. My vision may not be perfectly clear, and my path may be fog-dense at times, but the only way for any of that to change is by me continuing to do what I’m doing. Now may not be the best time to explain my beliefs, but if I persevere that time may soon come.