It’s been like this for a while, but I want to say it really started after I worked pretty intensively with the angels over a several month period. I was doing like three rituals a day, at least two of which were fairly involved and lengthy. My focus was inner alchemy, along with some very long-term outer results. It was more-or-less a “magickal retreat” like what you can find for meditation. I like to think of it as that time when I climbed to the top of the proverbial mountain and came back a little more enlightened.
I can’t really speak to the various yogic systems that center around the chakras, but if you find that work appealing I would imagine that best results would come from working with a guru (or book by a good teacher) experienced with kundalini and who goes into great depth about each chakra, its associations, spirits connected to each, basically much more than just “move energy around the colorful balls until something happens and also here’s a mantra.”
Vipassana meditation is effective, but generally it is known as being much slower than the methods of Vajrayana Buddhism, which is essentially Buddhist magick. Vipassana has its advantages too, but speed and manifestation are not among them. It’s just a lot harder to go crazy with vipassana since it’s more gradual (from what I know, at least, I’m probably over-generalizing).
If you’re curious about specifics for the work I did, I was primarily using four books - Archangels of Magick, The 72 Angels of Magick, and Angels of Alchemy all by Damon Brand, and The 72 Sigils of Power by Zanna Blaise. There are also three very important rituals on the Gallery’s website - The Identity Ritual, which is what really got things moving (and how I concluded the work), The Ritual for Greater Magick Power, and The Unfreezing Ritual, which I performed directly after the Identity Ritual, targeting my self (which I only recommend if you are really serious about the work and can give a lot of your time to it, and can stomach the side-effects of destroying your sense of self).
If you seek to go through such a journey, you should know that most of the time will likely be spent without “tangible” results in the material world. The magick will immediately and continually have an effect on your mind, and by the end of the process you will have been completely transformed, in both a mundane personality sense and a more mystical sense, but while you are in the midst of things it can be difficult to realize what is happening and to see the bigger picture that the angels see. Like I said, vipassana may be slower, but the chances of going a little crazy (or a lot crazy) tend to be much greater with magick, especially with this kind of work. If you can stomach the risk, though, the rewards are just as if not so much greater.
