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Lately I’ve been doing some experimenting with how to extend the senses in spirit work. This experimentation has come about for a few reasons. I’m taking a course on scrying from Harper Feist, as well as doing more spirit work and because I’m teaching a course on my patreon about working with the psychic senses for the purposes of connecting with spirits. All of these things have been helpful for me, in terms of exploring the kind of spirit work I want to do, but also in terms of exploring how to better apply my sensorial awareness to the spirit work.
In the West, we are used to thinking of the senses in terms of sight, sound, touch, smell, and hearing, but these broad categories don’t encompass the subtleties of our sensorial awareness. These subtleties can be worked with in spirit work to lead us to a deeper connection with the spirits we’re working with. At the same time any sensorial awareness is to some degree subjective because its our senses making us aware of something. At the same time, our senses are limited and there’s a lot we don’t experience which is nonetheless happening around and to us.
Lately I’ve been doing some Jinn work and one of the things I’ve been paying close attention to is the sensorial awareness I have around that work. I’ll light a flame to work with the Jinn and afterwards I’ll snuff the flame and when I do this I pay attention to both the experience of looking at the flame and the experience of the after image that shows itself in the dark. When I look at the after image I pay attention to the way that after image shifts and changes, allowing that experience to flow into my mind and then being open to interpreting it or simply accepting it as it is.
When I go for a walk I pay attention not to just what I see or hear, but what smells come to me, as well as the tactile, temperature and kinisthetic awareness that presents itself to me during the walk. I am communing with the spirits during the walk and I open myself to the way they choose to communicate, which may not always be obvious in a way I might expect, but nonetheless can present itself through the sensorial awareness we have around the spirits.
Something else I’ve noticed is that sometimes we have to occupy one form of sensorial awareness in order to open ourselves to be more receptive to another form of sensorial awareness. For instance I might light a flame and look into it and not see something, but find that I am tuned into hearing the spirit because I’ve occupied a part of myself that would otherwise be distracting from connecting with the spirit.
All of this may seem evident to a reader who has a lot of experience working with magic, but I find that revisiting these kinds of details from time to time can be really helpful because it allows you to refine your knowledge and process for working with spirits as well as with magical work in general. I make it a point to revisit such things in my own practice and invariably I come away with new insights and realizations that help me take the work further because I’m open to revisiting what I think I know in favor of what I can discover.
