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Do not attempt to evoke or invoke spirits if you don’t have a solid foundation.

If your psychic and astral senses are at least partially open and you feel a calling toward a specific spirit, that’s one thing.

If you listen to an enn or summoning chant on YouTube and you feel very little or nothing, calling spirits is a waste of time. By all means – use things like enns and chants to attune yourself to a spirit’s energies, but don’t go into spirit work expecting to receive revelations or have full-blown conversations with them without a solid foundation.

If you attempt to do so, you will frustrate yourself and the spirit because the things they try to tell you will not get through. If you’re lucky, nothing will happen. If you’re not, they’ll get annoyed and try to scare you off – assuming you manage to reach the spirit you mean to call.

Spirit work tends to be made out to be more dangerous than it is, but it doesn’t mean there aren’t pitfalls – especially for the uninitiated.

Begin With Mastery of Self

No – I am not saying you need to be perfect in your discipline before you attempt to call a spirit.

I’m saying you need some self-control. The ability to focus on one thing for several minutes at a time at least. The ability to think even when your emotions are running high. The ability to consider your words before you speak.

When you are doing spirit work, you are consciously connecting to those parts of yourself which are typically unconscious. You are thinning the veil and opening yourself as a portal to what lies beyond it. This is true regardless of whether you are invoking or evoking a spirit. Your energies must collide on some level for you to perceive them at all.

And if your consciousness is firmly rooted in the mundane world, your first experiences with spirits will shake you. Intellectually you may believe there’s more to life than what your eyes see and your senses convey. This is but a mere thought – the experience is something else entirely. The experience turns a thought or daydream into something tangible.

Think of horror movies – how spectators will sit back and criticize the dumb decisions of the characters in the film. “If it were me, I would do this or that…”

No you wouldn’t.

If it were you, your body would be flooded with adrenaline. Your heart would be pounding and your mind would be racing. Your thoughts would shoot in a thousand different directions at once and you’d have to figure out which impulse to listen to when you cannot hesitate and one mistake could be fatal.

You do not know who you are until you are tested. Keep that in mind when you begin working with spirits.

Meditation is the Foundation

Mind you – I’m not necessarily talking about sitting in lotus position and focusing on your breathing.

I think everyone should incorporate that into their practice. Breath control is a hack for one’s mind and body – if you can take control of your breathing you gain more control over your thoughts, your moods, your impulses, etc.

But meditation comes in many forms. To begin, pick the one that works for you.

All forms of meditation involve entering a flow state and maintaining it as best as you can. This means letting the mind go quiet, or flow where it wills without resistance – merely observing, not becoming attached to any thoughts or feelings that pass through.

A half an hour walk in nature beats an hour spent sitting in lotus position for most people – especially considering most people will have difficulty sitting still for ten minutes. The latter is a discipline in itself, but –

Human bodies are made for motion. In the developed world, we’ve become much less active than our ancestors. We end up with a lot of nervous energy we never work off. Personally, I believe that meditation which involves sitting in complete stillness is only of value when your energies are already being put to good use. If you exercise very little, if you drink a lot of coffee or energy drinks, beginning with a kind of meditation that involves moving and spending time in nature will likely get you further in the beginning than trying to sit in stillness.

And – if you’re not used to taking regular walks or spending time in nature, the change in scenery will prepare your consciousness for something new. It primes you to step out of your mundane reality into something less familiar. Small shifts in your habits can open you in ways you would never expect.

Connecting to Your Body and the Earth

Time outdoors – breathing fresh air – is grounding, too. I would never tell someone they have to meditate in the way most people think of it in order to be capable magicians because the fact is I know several people who are extremely powerful who never do.

But – all of them ground. All of them know how to center their energy and cleanse themselves. If they use things to change their body chemistry, they’re aware of how their body and mind interacts with those substances and when to use them and in what doses.

I’d never advise using stimulants or psychedelics in spirit work, especially starting out. Not because they’re ineffective but because they are TOO effective and can open you up further than you’re ready for. It’s a personal decision whether you use them in your practice or not, and you alone will know the ramifications. For me personally, nicotine puts me in a very calm and clear state of mind that’s perfect for spirit work, but it messes with my body chemistry in detrimental ways so I mostly avoid it. Caffeine tends to focus and calm my mind, and I have a relatively high tolerance for it so sometimes I will consciously use it in my practice.

I’ve never tried marijuana or mushrooms. I’ve seen magicians who are perfectly balanced that use them in their practice and people who use them as a crutch and end up going off the deep end because they had no psychic barrier between themselves and the spirit world.

Starting Out, I’d Advise:

1. Take time to connect with nature. Even a few minutes spent on your back porch with your phone and all other distractions left inside will help you attune to the natural world as well as the deeper parts of yourself. It’s also a simple way to ground. (And if you’re not familiar with that – think of grounding as becoming fully embodied and rooted within your flesh. Trees draw carbon dioxide from the air, but they can only use it because their roots reach deep into the Earth. We are like that – connecting with the spiritual side of life will offer little benefit to you if you can’t draw it down into your mundane existence.)
2. Get off any stimulants or recreational drugs for at least 30 days, the exception being things necessary for your health. By gods keep up your medications – don’t dump your pills because they have caffeine in them or stop using weed that’s meant to treat your PTSD. Stuff you need to keep you sane, centered and alive aren’t going to destroy your ability to develop spiritually and use your gifts. Never let perfect be the enemy of good.
3. Maintain this for at least 30 days – long enough to become a habit. You need the ability to adopt and sustain practices to get anywhere in your spiritual development. Even if you’re able to reach out and make contact with spirits easily, the spirits won’t do all the work for you. Far from it – they’ll make you work harder than you ever have to achieve your desires. If making and sustaining relatively minor changes to your habits is an issue, focus on that before trying to communicate with spirits.

Now – if getting outside regularly is an issue, you can always join a gym or look up home workouts. Anything that helps you exhaust some energy. One, this is good for entering a flow state, but two – if you have trouble with meditating in stillness, physical activity will help. You don’t have to exhaust yourself completely. Look up a low-impact 20 minute cardio video on YouTube and then sit down to meditate. I guarantee if you have issues getting into the right frame of mind for meditation, burning some energy will help. (As will stretching and releasing tension within your muscles. If all forms of regular meditation don’t work for you, stretching exercises or yoga is an excellent substitute.)

Grounding Visualizations

If you live in a city and can’t ground by touching grass or walking through the woods, visualizations will do. You’ll want to learn them anyway. These are two of exercises I use:

• Envision an orb between your feet that connects to you with an energetic cord. I see it as a deep green – the color doesn’t really matter; however it appears to you, let it be that. Take several deep breaths, then envision it tunneling into the Earth and shooting out strands in all directions like the roots of a tree, and feel your connection to the Earth growing firmer. See it going deep deep deep into the womb of the Earth. Feel the energy moving up through your body, starting in your legs, into your torso, etc. Now – you probably won’t feel much – if anything – to start, so visualize and think about what it would feel like as best as you can, and be confident that you have indeed grounded after you’ve done this for several minutes.
• Envision a giant tree. Now picture yourself at the center of that tree. See yourself as part of it. Feel the nutrients being drawn up by its roots into you. Or – see yourself sitting in an open field and envision this tree growing around you and encasing you inside of it. Either way will work. The point of the exercise is to feel at peace within your body and to feel connected to the Earth.

There are many, many other grounding exercises. By all means research them and choose what feels best to you. Just remember to show gratitude to the Earth itself whenever you do them; “grounding” is a key word here – you should feel more connected to your body and to the Earth itself every time you do this. If you use a method for several weeks and don’t experience this to any degree, that’s when you want to change things up.

Learn Everything You Can About The Spirits You Want to Connect With

Offerings don’t have to be complicated. Understand that spending time studying the spirits is an offering in itself, and it will make it easier for you to tap into their energies and connect with them.

Let’s say you want to connect with Odin or Freyja. Studying the Eddas would be a good first step. Of course you can look up sources online or books written by contemporary authors, but texts closest to the source are always preferable to works that commentate or build upon them. When you can, give yourself a solid foundation from which to consider the things the author is telling you.

In other words – put yourself in the driver’s seat of your own practice. Yes, others will know more than you starting out, but it’s vital you come with enough information to ask the right questions (and sniff for bullshit) when someone is offering you a means of connecting to spirits and deities.

And the effort will be noticed. The more time you spend taking in information about a spirit and asking yourself questions about the stories, the myths, the symbols the easier and more deeply you will be able to connect to those energies. (Did these stories really happen? How is this spirit similar to others? How is this spirit different from others? What do the symbols mean, and how do they correlate to other systems and disciplines?) You are also more likely to be approached by the spirit in a gentle manner that will make you aware of their presence but not risk frightening you.

Spirits, generally speaking, have very little patience for people who waste their time.

You waste a spirit’s time when you expect them to answer all of your questions when you’ve had plenty of time and resources to research and read books. You waste a spirit’s time when you ask for help in love but you have spent no time working on your physical fitness or learning about body language or otherwise improving any aspect of yourself that could make you more attractive to the kind of person you want in your life.

I could go on, but all you need to keep in mind is this – spirits notice when you put in legwork. If you won’t do anything on the mundane level to learn about them or to alter circumstances in your own life, don’t expect them to readily answer your call. Angel, demon, Aesir, fae, giant – it doesn’t matter. If you aren’t seeking knowledge and you aren’t putting work into yourself, they won’t come to you. Something probably will, but not anything you’d want to work with.

As above, so below – if it’s too good to be true, it is. A spirit that offers something for free will make you pay a much greater price than you’d ever willingly pay. You can’t sell your soul, but you can give pieces of it away until you wish you had. There are entities that will take so much you will feel hollow and you will never see the riches they promise.

If you’re looking for the easy path, working with spirits isn’t for you.

As for specific offerings – that’s partly what the research is for. You will not be asked to slaughter an animal by any spirit worth working with. In most cases you will find that even when such offerings were made to goddesses like Hecate in ancient times, there was a very specific protocol for it as the animals that were sacrificed were sacred to her, and based on my own experiences with her I don’t believe it’s something she ever wanted so much as it reflects the culture of the time.

For Norse gods a lot of people recommend offering mead. Wine is a good offering for many spirits. Branches that have fallen from trees make good offerings for gods with a link to nature like Freyja. Poetry and stories you’ve written in their honor can be read aloud as an offering.

This is not about prostrating yourself before them but offering great respect as you would to an individual that inspires awe in you and embodies something you wish to cultivate in yourself. Dispose of the Christian “I am a worm” mindset when devoting yourself to this work. You are not a roach – you’re rising in your own divinity and through the lens of your divine spark you are recognizing the divinity of the gods and spirits you revere and the bounty they bestow upon you.

Chakra Work

You may want to start chakra work immediately; you may want to wait until you’ve made a habit out of grounding, meditation, or whatever discipline helps you connect with your body and with the Earth.

Chakra work is very simple – to begin, all you need to do is learn where the chakras are located within your body and focus your attention on them. Placing your awareness on them for a minute or two at a time will in itself cleanse and strengthen them.

All seven chakras are vital to spiritual pursuits. Everyone’s so worried about opening the third eye – “opening” the third eye won’t do shit if your lower three chakras are damaged and out of balance, and “opening” is the wrong way to frame it.

Your energy centers are all present and active already. The question is how aware of them you are and how easily you can tap into their currents. The seven major chakras are not isolated – they form a holistic system, and the heart chakra does not function well apart from the root chakra any better than your kidneys function when your liver is failing.

All of your energy centers require attention and care to properly attune your physical senses. If all you focus on is the third eye or crown chakra, you will start feeling floaty and become prone to delusion. If all you focus on is the lower chakras, you will become aggressive and materialistic.

If you ignore the heart, you will lack the ability to circulate energy between the higher and lower aspects of yourself, and your ability to intuit and feel your way through the spirit world will be impeded. The heart chakra is the energetic representation of the crossroads within your being – where spirit meets matter. If the heart is damaged, unbalanced, or ignored, everything else will be thrown into chaos.

There are other chakras beyond the seven everyone knows about, including many minor chakras within the body and chakras that extend into the Earth and above the head into the sky. Keep things simple when you’re starting – focus on the seven and research the others as you become comfortable.

And also bear in mind – you will hear different opinions concerning which way chakras should spin, what color and shape they are, and so on. Don’t make it complicated. Just focus on becoming aware of them when you are starting. Take your time researching them. The only thing you are attempting to do at the start is become aware enough of the spirit world to establish communication with the spirits you want to reach out to. Awareness is enough to kickstart that process. There is much you will have to learn and figure out as you go.

Build experience first and then look for ways to refine your practice – don’t seek an ideal practice before you’ve gotten started. You have nothing to contrast against when you lack experience, hence no means of judging or testing what you hear and read.

All roads should lead you back into your self and your own innate sense of knowing – which is based in your experience. Seek refinement and correction, but never give your power to gurus, groups, authors, etc.

One final note on the chakras – not everyone resonates with the seven chakra model. I myself merged my chakras together into one giant energetic center; this is a service I can perform, but it’s not necessary to jump straight to that. If you work directly with kundalini you will gain many of the same benefits as you would through traditional chakra work, and in fact that might be better for you if you are the type of person that has a hard time meditating in stillness. Most kundalini breathwork or meditations involve movement.

I’ve come to believe the chakras and the kundalini force are one in the same – that the chakras more-or-less serve as thresholds or valves that the serpents move through. You will want to work with your kundalini somewhere; starting with kundalini work is valid, just take it slow if you’re doing it on your own without guidance. What they call kundalini awakenings are not actually awakenings but the kundalini getting stronger and hitting blocks as it flows.

Grounding and cleansing is vital in large part because of that. The more you clear blocks within your field and your body the less jarring it will be as your kundalini strengthens. You will almost assuredly hit a point where the energies moving through you are intense enough to give you a bad time, but it will pass, and it’ll pass far more easily if you’re on the ball with your foundational practices and you take it slow as you begin working with your kundalini.

Devotionals

One final note – you do not have to communicate with a spirit to begin dedicating time to them and offering them gratitude and energy.

When I use the word “devotional” I want to stress again that I’m not speaking of prostrating yourself before a spirit as we in the west are trained to do with the demiurgic asshole. Think of it as earnest praise offered to a good friend or family member, or a petition made with reverence and respect to someone in a higher station than you.

You can ask for help and guidance in connecting with them and opening your senses if you are coming with a sincere desire for knowledge of them and to bond with them. Your earnestness and your time is an offering in itself – and you are not coming into it without ability to hear, see or otherwise sense spirits expecting them to suddenly appear to you and reveal the mysteries of the universe. What you are asking for is a nudge in the right direction via your intuition as you open yourself to the spirit world.

One word of caution – you’ll only want to do this with spirits universally regarded as beginner friendly and good to work with. Ganesh in the Hindu pantheon is an excellent example. Lucifer among the infernals; he is the “opener of paths” and he is known for spontaneously opening one’s spiritual senses. Michael is a good place to start for working with angels, and really, he’s a good spirit for anyone to work with regardless of their path.

For the Norse gods – devotionals and dedications toward Odin, Freyja, Thor and any of the major figures within that system should prove acceptable. See who draws your attention. Note that for them material offerings are strongly recommended and even vital to presencing them in some cases. Mead, various meats, berries and leaves (picked fresh if you’re able) placed upon the spot you have designated as an altar when you address them. Frejya is a goddess of love, so playing love songs when thinking about her or reaching out to her is an acceptable offering.

It goes back to doing your research. You can write a petition or prayer right away if you wish, but I’d strongly recommend developing some knowledge of the spirit before you do, and that you re-write and adjust as you go. You typically won’t offend a spirit for errors made due to misunderstandings or a bit of misinformation you’ve picked up from somewhere, but you will if you don’t care enough to keep researching and correct those misunderstandings.

Keep things simple. Refine and discipline yourself. Demonstrate over and over again that you’re willing to do the work BY doing the work. Seek knowledge and approach with respect.

And always keep yourself in the driver’s seat of your own ascent. It’s the same with spirits as it is with people – if you go looking to give your power away, something will answer that call. When you’re beginning your absolute obedience or adherence to a particular set of restrictions should not be required of you to open your senses and establish a connection with a spirit. That would be like marrying someone within minutes of meeting them. Some spirits are very harsh and very strict, but you should never approach them first unless you have an undeniable calling to do so.

Stay grounded and keep your wits about you. Do this, and you will safely establish contact with spirits willing to work with you.

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