Shielding

Some basic stuff about creating and maintaining shields for Dakman and anyone else who's interested!

Shields are generated out of energy- usually your own. It is possible to use energy from your environment to create them, but this has a fairly sizable downside- a shield won’t protect you from itself, so if you want to defend yourself from a traumatic situation, using energy generated from said situation is pointless. You can always clean and filter the energy to purify it, but that takes time and is trickier- it’s a good skill to develop but using one’s own energy is definitely the best place to start.
Start by creating a ball of energy within yourself. I found it useful to visualise it as having colour although this isn’t vital- it just makes it easier to ‘see’ it.
Imbue this ball of energy with the qualities you want it to have as a shield- do you want it to reflect away anything coming at you, or absorb energies without going through, or hide you?
Next, expand it so that it fills your entire body- and then keep on expanding it outwards beyond the edge of your body until it surrounds you entirely. As a visual aid to help you ‘see’ this, try looking up some old ‘Readybrek’ adverts on YouTube, which depicted children with golden glows all around them to show how good for them the cereal was! (Can’t find a link at the moment, I’m afraid- access to YouTube from this computer has been disabled.)
With practice, you’ll find that this process gets faster and faster, but in the first instance take your time and concentrate on quality rather than speed.
A few further points-
The stronger the shield, the more energy it uses up. If the shield is totally impermeable then you won’t be able to pick up any more energy from around you, resulting in your energy being drained- and worst case scenario is that it collapses in as in a vacuum, crushing you. Not nice. Make sure that you define what it is you want the shield to deflect, and build in an override to allow you to deliberately absorb energy that you do want. I often use Reiki as a power source- none of my shields block that sort of energy.
Let the shield have a bit of give- if it’s too rigid when something hits it hard it might crack and break, but if it’s more flexible things will bounce off more easily.
You could also cover both of the above bases by setting the shield to ‘absorb’. Have the inner layer of the shield be your own energy, and use the unwanted energies to create an outer shell. That way, the more unwanted energy around, the stronger the shield becomes! Also, you’ll use up less of your own energy in the first place.