Empowering Your Rituals

I consider activating the energies within me before performing most of my rituals essential. Most of the authors that I've been recommending in this blog usually will tell you you don't need to, and that's true, but in practice my rituals always work better when I do something to activate and strengthen energy.
Since I was really young I've been practicing energy manipulation and nowadays I like to toy with it from time to time. I learned to pay close attention to it while not trying to consciously control it, but observing it perform my will. Like with your hands, you don't consciously will it to move, but you know it will when you want it to. And like you won't be able to play guitar unless you took the time to learn it, you won't be able to move objects with your energy unless you practice. But that's not what I want to talk about today.

Before any magickal practice I will raise awareness of my energy, toy with if somehow, or do whatever I want, but I always expand it just a little and create some sort of movement.
After that a may choose to follow none, or all of the following steps in the order I feel like:

• I remember how it's such a privilege to have acquired the knowledge of all this and to be able to access such powerful forces and use it to benefit me and my loved ones and feel happy to perform the ritual I'm going to, then do a prayer to a chosen deity.

• I use the 24th God name from Zanna Blaise's The 72 sigils of Power. She calls it Chaho and, in this case, it's meant to connect me with magick and allow me to create a new reality. Her method of chanting the name while scanning the letters is nice, but I mix it with Baal Kadmon's method in The 72 Names of God, which involves more visualizations. His use for the same names are mostly different from Zanna's, but I resonate with her's more. This process puts me in a desired state of mind. You might want to research more about names of god since there's so much about it on books and online.

• Next I do a Middle Pillar Ritual and the Circulation Ritual from New Avatar Power. It's great to keep your energy in movement. Practicing it will give you great control over your energy over time. If you're more into the oriental practices, you could use some sort of chakric activation and still do some kind of circulation ritual after that.

• The Qabalistic Cross is almost always included in my rituals. Donald Michael Kraig has a great blog post explaining it in detail. When you read it you will understand why I like it soo much.

• Banishing. It's been years since I last did the LBRP, I do the one from Damon's Magickal Protection. It's really to the point and effective. In the few occasions where I felt I needed a banishing during or after a ritual this worked wonders.

• If you know planetary the references to what you're doing or the entities you're working with and can work on the correct moon cycles, do it. You will notice the difference in the energy and, most importantly, in the results. Not caring for it won't usually screw up your ritual, but won't add anything to it. Even when you're just meditating or doing creative visualization, it will help. Anytime you're working with energy it's a good idea to take these things into consideration.
  There's this site to calculate planetary hours according to your location. If you want to delve into planetary magick, I highly recommend David Rankine and Sorita d'Este's Practical Planetary Magick and Melita Denning and Osborne Philips' Planetary Magick. I consult these two a lot.

When I start the ritual itself, I'm already in an altered state of consciousness and have my astral senses open and active. It's good to add a more emotional, and a meditative and relaxing step to your ritual.

I hope you find this post useful and apply some or all of it to your practices.