I’ve written previously about how meditation can be considered one of the fundamental pillars of esoteric practice. But meditation is a pretty broad category, covering a ton of different exercises. This week I wanted to walk through some of the most common forms of meditation encountered when getting started in occult training.
I consider these meditations to be foundational, rather than basic. The majority of them are fairly simple meditative exercises, but regular practice of them will pay enormous dividends in building a successful occult practice. These are all meditations that build the skills needed for more advanced magical work, and fluency with them can make a huge difference with how approachable practical magical operations feel. So rather than considering these to be “beginner exercises” to be rushed through, view them as what they are: fundamental esoteric skills. I would go so far as to say you can build a rich and engaging magical practice with nothing but the tools listed here.
Before we dive in, what is meditation? Meditation is simply the act of focusing the mind and attention to a particular task, ideally to the exclusion of everything else. It has several benefits. First, it conditions your mind to be better able to focus on a single thing; in a world where we are constantly over-stimulated, constantly bombarded with demands on our attention, being able to sustain focus on one thing is hugely helpful. Second, it teaches us to recognize the patterns of our own internal processes. When you inevitably fail at staying focused, you start to learn what your own internal dialog sounds like and how your mind moves from one topic to another. When you want to start teasing apart different sources of mental influence (say in mental spirit contact), having a clear idea of what your mind sounds like at rest is invaluable.
When people start meditating, they often get the impression that they’re bad at it, because they struggle so hard to focus. This impression misses the point. Everybody struggles to focus. People who have been meditating for decades struggle to focus. The struggle is where the value lies. You can’t be bad at meditation, because the goal is to gain more understanding of yourself. Any time you spend is a direct success.
So, that concern addressed, let’s look at some of the most common (and most useful) types of meditation. These are roughly ordered by difficulty, so starting at the beginning and working up to holding each for fifteen or twenty minutes is reasonable, but by no means required.
Stillness Meditation This type of meditation is often skipped over, and I think that’s a mistake. The goal is really simple: sit still. Find a comfortable place to sit, where your spine is straight and you’re holding yourself upright (rather than reclining or laying down). Close your eyes, close your mouth, and try not to speak or move for the duration of the meditation.
As soon as you give yourself the goal of not moving, your body immediately wants to move. You’ll suddenly feel itchy, or achy, or something. Being able to move, just a little bit to remove the immediate discomfort, sounds so good. Ignore this impulse. Trying to progress to any more advanced meditation while your body is constantly fidgeting makes everything way more challenging. So the first skill to master is just being still in your body. Sit down, shut up, and hold still.
Mindfulness Meditation Once you can sit still, the next step is to start observing your mental processes. Don’t try to direct them or control them in any particular way. Just observe where they go. At some point you will realize you’ve lost the thread, and have just been thinking things rather than observing yourself thinking things. That’s fine. Try to trace back the thread of associations to remember how you got to where you are now, then go back to observing your thoughts.
Discursive Meditation This is a practice I picked up from John Michael Greer’s work. It’s one of the first forms of meditation I did when starting to learn ritual magic, and it’s still one I find tremendously valuable. It’s very much like the previous Mindfulness Meditation, but you set some bounds on what you want to be thinking about. Perhaps you want to contemplate the symbolism of the four classical Elements. Let yourself free associate on this topic, and observe what connections you make and what insights you have. You’ll probably find that you have epiphanies about the topic on which you are meditating, make sure to write them down when you’re done. If you get distracted by something else, just calmly bring your mind back to the topic at hand.
One of my favorite applications of discursive meditation is to meditate on all the symbols in your preferred divination system. If you’re a tarot reader, spend some time meditating on each of the suits, on each card of the major arcana, on all the twos of the minors and how they relate to each other, etc. The more time you spend in contemplation of your meditative symbol set, the more fluently you’ll be able to read it.
Focus Meditation Focus meditation is where you start moving beyond observing your internal processes, and start directing them. In this exercise you choose a thing to focus on – your own breath being the classic starting point, but a candle flame or a small physical object works well too. Train your attention on that focus, and try to hold it there for the duration of your meditation. When you get distracted, let go and bring your attention back to your focus.
Visualization Practice Visualization is where you actively practice using your imagination. The goal isn’t to visualize anything in particular, it’s to build the skill of making clear images in your mind. Start with a small physical object, and spend some time with your eyes open noting as many details as you can about it. Then close your eyes and try to recreate all those details mentally. Don’t get fixated on what it looks like, include your other senses too: what does it sound like, what does it smell like, what does it feel like? When you can make clear images of static objects, start to picture dynamic objects. Visualize the roll of a die, the ignition of a match, or the ticking of a clock. Rotate objects around in space, mentally, to visualize what they might look like from other perspectives. Have fun with it.
Some subset of people can’t visualize. It’s not a matter of practice, their brains just don’t work that way. If you can’t make visual images in your mind, try working with other senses. If you can’t do any of them, move on; it may not be your thing and that’s fine.
Journeying/Pathworking Once you have solid visualization skills you can use them to navigate around visualized worlds. There are a whole range of terms for this, depending on where you are and what you’re doing. There are guided meditations in purely imagined settings. Astral projection and remote viewing where you’re navigating the real world. Shamanic journeying where you’re often starting in the real world and then transitioning to various otherworlds. Pathworking where you’re going on a symbolic journey using some esoteric framework. And on and on.
These are all skills in their own right that are worth delving into, but the common theme is that there will be some broad guidance about what you’re supposed to be seeing, and then your brain will fill in the details. Pay attention to any of those details that go beyond the basic instructions. At some point you may run across something in your visualized setting that surprises you, and that’s something to pay attention to.
Void Meditation This is often what people imagine when they think of meditation. It’s a meditation that strives to reduce mental chatter to the point where it stops entirely, allowing the practitioner to just exist in the current moment without categorization or judgement. It’s like a Focus Meditation, but focusing on nothing, rather than on something.
It’s also nearly impossible to maintain for more than a few seconds. If only because thoughts like “Hey, I’m doing it! This is great!” tend to sneak in immediately.
Portal Meditation I originally got this from Jason Miller, who calls it the Gate of Heka.1 It’s rapidly become one of my favorite forms of meditation. It flows back and forth between Focus Meditation and Void Meditation. When you are actively inhaling or exhaling, you focus on the breath. However, at that moment of stillness between each inhale or exhale, you dip into Void Meditation. You’re not holding your breath, just using the second or two of natural stillness as a trigger to touch the Void.
You’ll probably lose it after a moment, but that’s fine. The goal was never to hang out in Void Meditation, just to touch it. And you get to try again on your next breath, and the next, and the next. Over time, those moments of stillness seem to expand; I don’t think they actually get any longer, but they feel longer. They carry a weight of significance disproportionate to the physical time they take up.
As a newcomer to the esoteric, building a regular meditation practice often feels like work. It feels boring, and repetitive. To some extent it is. And to some extent that’s the point. But it’s not time wasted. Between the various meditative skills covered today, taking twenty or thirty minutes a day to meditate can start to feel vital and productive. A necessity, rather than a chore. Sometimes it will still feel like a chore, but you should do it anyway. It’s important.
- I assume it’s from a Tibetan tradition originally, rather than being something that originated with Jason. ↩︎