{"id":925,"date":"2012-10-07T07:00:00","date_gmt":"2012-10-07T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.wordpress.com\/?p=925"},"modified":"2012-10-07T07:00:00","modified_gmt":"2012-10-07T12:00:00","slug":"shaping-and-shielding-ii-learning-curve","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/2012\/10\/07\/shaping-and-shielding-ii-learning-curve\/","title":{"rendered":"Shaping and Shielding II: Learning Curve"},"content":{"rendered":"

My career with the KU Cauldron started almost a decade ago, now.\u00a0 Back in those days, I thought I was hot shit.\u00a0 I had a lot of raw talent, had seen and done a whole bunch of strange shit, and was generally more well-read than almost anyone there.\u00a0 (The fact that I had mostly read Scott Cunningham, and Amber K, and DJ Conway, and a fuck-ton of weird shit on the internet makes that really fucking sad<\/em>.)<\/p>\n

My main problem with shielding had (and has always) been that I tend to build walls I can\u2019t see out of without taking them down, and this was particularly true then.\u00a0 So, increasingly, I didn\u2019t bother: I was confident in my ability to detect and deal with threats.\u00a0 When I did, though, I was always experimenting with textures and structures.<\/p>\n

I tried great spheres of \u201cglass\u201d with windows that could be opened and closed at will; these worked very well, but still kept things out even when I wanted to let them in.\u00a0 I tried textured cloaks to draw or distract attention from myself; these worked fabulously, particularly the latter, which could and often did render me near-invisible.\u00a0 I turned my aura inside-out, squeezed it to a thin plane and turned it \u201csideways\u201d, which was also produced an effect of near-invisibility\u2014obviously, not literally invisible in either case, but pointedly unnoticed.\u00a0 Most often, though, I would simply draw my aura back, condensing it until it fit well within my body, leaving only a \u201ccorona\u201d at the original edge, which I would use as a shield.<\/p>\n

It was during this period that I was really able to test my theories of energetic layers or frequencies of reality, slipping in and out of others awareness and around their shields during games of \u201ctag\u201d.\u00a0 I cast circles by spinning webs of light into my Pentagram Ward<\/a>, the likes of which they had never seen.\u00a0 I was still going through my antagonistic agnostic phase, but I was able to conjure more energy and cast bigger circles by my will alone than they could with elemental and divine invocations.<\/p>\n

In general, I postured and strutted about like you\u2019d expect from a dude in his late teens and early twenties who went, basically overnight, from being a social pariah to being someone that others looked up to.\u00a0 I got cocky and arrogant \u2026 and increasingly emotionally erratic.\u00a0 I had only had two lovers at that point in my life: the first, a one-night-stand, \u201cleft\u201d me for someone that would go on to abuse her; the second was also a singular arrangement, and though we became dear friends, she lived quite a ways away and we would not be lovers again for some years.\u00a0 I was just coming out of the closet as bisexual, and being consistently rejected by everyone I took an interest in.\u00a0 I had more friends and respect than I\u2019d ever had before \u2026 but I was constantly thwarted in the one thing I wanted most.<\/p>\n

To add injury to insult, these were also the days when the Cauldron\u2019s resident vampire<\/a> was starting to emerge.\u00a0 In retrospect, I wonder how she contributed to the other problems: if, even when I was<\/em> shielding, she could pierce and\/or exhaust my defenses for longer than I\u2019ve ever realized.\u00a0 I\u2019ve seen the wreckage left by vampire attacks.\u00a0 That period of my life matches the profile.<\/p>\n

All this drama culminated about the time that I started experiencing my first migraines.\u00a0 When I recovered from all that<\/a> madness, I really didn\u2019t have any faith left in personal shields as method of defense, at least not from spiritual threats, and it would be years before I was tuned in enough again that I was even certain that my memories of psychic empathy weren\u2019t the delusions of a lonely youth.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My career with the KU Cauldron started almost a decade ago, now.\u00a0 Back in those days, I thought I was hot shit.\u00a0 I had a lot of raw talent, had seen and done a whole bunch of strange shit, and was generally more well-read than almost anyone there.\u00a0 (The fact that I had mostly read … Read More<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[5],"tags":[212,258],"class_list":["post-925","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-witchcraft","tag-psychic","tag-stories"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8kUcm-eV","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/925","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=925"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/925\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=925"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=925"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journeythroughtheobsidiandream.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=925"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}