Throughout the Quareia course you will find references to meditating in stillness and silence. Such a thing sounds simple but it very hard and takes a lot of practice. In the first apprentice module you will find various techniques that teach you how to focus upon one thing and to stop your mind from wandering.
As you progress in your meditation exercises, learning to focus upon one thing, be it a shape, a word, or a sentence, teaches your mind to settle, still itself and focus upon the task at hand. Once you have become used to working with the basic meditation techniques, and can focus, the magician can then progress onto using a sentence or word like a mantra, and also like self hypnosis: repeating the phrase ‘stillness and silence’ in your mind, while focusing upon a shape like a triangle, slowly starts to put you into a place of stillness.
From feedback I have been getting, it would seem that many people are struggling to silence their mind or focus it for any length of time, which is no wonder in the crazy world we live in. So I will prepare some audio recordings that help the apprentice achieve a sense of stillness while training their minds with key words that will shift them into a more focused place.
These recordings will not be replacements for meditation, but will be tools to help the magician in the early phases of training. There may be recordings from others who are trained hypnotists: we are constantly looking for ways to facilitate the apprentice without short circuiting the necessary process of development.
Josephine McCarthy