Thanks to Sultitan_Itan for giving me a kick up the butt to post this:
One of the things I’ve been working on with my Personal Daemon is a form of “yoga” that’s NOT - this is important - about “Union with the Divine” aka Source, God, etc.; but which is rather about preparing mind and body, and especially the subconscious, to be a strong vessel/channel for the willed living Self-As-Goddess I wish to become - embodied, differentiated, and human in outward form.
(Yes, I just wrote that and no, I’m not joking.)
Short version:
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choose five qualities you’d like as the God King/Living Goddess you want to be (also applicable to help you bond with a patron/archetype should you prefer, so it’s not just for nutters like me);
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think carefully about emotions you’d have if you epitomised each one, and think of the body language you’d have from those emotions - e.g., someone sad slumps their shoulders, and someone happy throws their head back, etc. - you can make this as exaggerated as you like, maybe watch some old silent movies to see how they really went for expressing their emotions through body language;
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develop that into a uniquely personal “Yoga of the Self-As-God” in which you develop maybe 3 - 5 synchronous motions that include those postures related to You/your Patron’s qualities, and which calls forth in you the emotions of those states.
Kinda similar to smile therapy, only not yuppie bullshit.
If you’ve got no idea what qualities you want and don’t have an alliance with any spirits who can guide you, imagine the power postures from cartoon superheroes - shoulders back, legs spread confidently on the earth, hands on hips - try that out for 3 minutes yourself, and extrapolate from there.
To flesh that out a bit more, the purpose of this “yoga” is to train my bodymind by adopting a sequence of specific postures, which flow from beginning to end, which embody those characteristics, and which creat psychological, emotional, and neurochemical changes that further help to draw forth the powers of the Goddess I wish to become.
If you’re familiar with the symbolic mudras (hand gestures) of Hindu statues of their gods, you’ll have seen something not unlike this - for example, the Varada/boon-giving mudra:
I’ve compiled a short sequence of motions and gestures that embody the qualities I wish for my Godform self to have the greatest power over (at this stage, it’s still a work in progress), and I’ve been using some of these to effect changes in the world around me - and so far, it seems, with some success on people whose lives I’m working on.
Because I’m not even trying to become “as one” with the All in an undifferentiated manner, the motions I chose are intentionally not spanning the full range of possible emotions or feelings, symbols etc., but rather those specific to my own desired Divine future.
In fact, the exercise of simply asking, “IF I was a Living Goddess, what kind of Living Goddess would I want to be?” was in itself rewarding, enlightening, and a good place to start making this stuff condense from theory into manifestation - and, any initial stage that takes something from being just a thought into its first physical form (whether by writing a spell or making a poppet) is a key element in most forms of magick, to bring what is willed into earthly manifestation.
The ability to channel energy, power, protection etc., from a place of love is something I’ve already had a lot of experience with when I studied healing, especially Ingerman’s techniques in which you “transfigure” into the Divine (or Love, or The Light) in order to bring harmony and healing to someone, and I’m using these gestures as keys to transfigure into (and thereby command and channel) the forces (by no means all “loving” ones) I wish to see active on this planet, making the changes I find desirable.
A small sample of existing knowledge about the vital role bodily movement can make in changing your self-perception, mental state, and neurochemistry:
Dominant Body Postures Increase Circulating Testosterone, Decrease Stress Hormones
