Momentum is building in the resistance to Trump, Musk and the MAGA movement. Now it's time to get out into the streets. Massive protests are planned for April 5th in Washington DC and in cities all over the country.
I plan to attend and I hope you do too. Bring a friend! It's always good to have a buddy, someone who will look out for you and notice if you disappear. Better yet, bring a group. Invite some of your friends, your book club, or your neighbors. People are far more likely to go to a protest if they can go with people they know and trust.
Maybe some of you have been going to protests for years or decades. Maybe for some of you this will be the very first time. I've been to hundreds, probably thousands of marches in my day, and I have trained activists in nonviolent direct action for almost half a century. I’ve also been writing about and teaching earth-based spirituality, ritual and magic for even longer, and I especially like to combine the two.
Occultist Dion fortune once defined magic as “the art of changing consciousness at will”. I've always felt that’s also a good definition for making political change. My spirituality is rooted in love for the earth, for the cycles of nature, and for human beings as manifestations of the divine. (All right, some of them make that quite a challenge!) If you believe nature is sacred and all human beings are interconnected and interdependent, taking action for justice is a sacred activity.
So here are nine simple practices that can be helpful in marches and demonstrations! There will be a lot of them in the coming months—I hope!
1. Grounding:
Grounding means bringing yourself into a state where you can be both calm and alert at the same time. When you're grounded, your energy is connected to the earth. You're able to be present, to take in what's happening around you, to avoid panic and to act instead of reacting.
There are many forms of grounding meditations, but the very simplest is this: Take a deep breath, and feel your feet on the ground. Continue breathing slowly and deeply, and feel your contact with the earth.
You can do this quickly, anywhere, anytime, (unless you are actually being tear gassed or pepper sprayed, in which case, omit the deep breath!)
Once you’re grounded, practice moving while staying in a grounded state. Imagine that each time your foot touches the ground, it reestablishes that contact and energy flow.
Do this often, not just in protests. It makes a really good daily meditation. You can also practice it whenever you are going into a stressful situation.
Want more practice, and a more involved meditation? Here’s a link:
2. Grounding those around you:
If you ground yourself well, you'll exert a grounding influence on everyone around you. If necessary, you can amplify this by saying something as simple as “Hey, let's stop for a moment, take a deep breath, and feel our feet on the ground. Let’s bring ourselves into a state where we can make conscious choices, and act, not simply react.”
If a group of you grounds in the midst of a crowd, you will exert a calming and grounding influence on those around you.
3. Grounding With the Five Senses:
Another way to ground is by consciously focusing on each of your five physical senses in turn. How is your body feeling? What is the temperature of the air on your skin? The texture of your clothing? What do you smell around you? Taste? Is there still some morning coffee lingering on your tongue? What do you hear? See?
This exercise is also extremely helpful in overcoming fear, especially the prolonged anxiety when you are forced to wait in a stressful situation. Instead of running scenarios of doom through your mind, focus your eyes on the texture of your skin or the pattern in your clothing. Notice all the small sounds around you. Imagine you were a dog and could smell thirty thousand times as much as your human nose can.
Then take a breath, and let the anxiety go.
4. Wide awareness:
I learned this skill from Jon Young and the spiritual tracking movement. But I also find it especially helpful in protests and demonstrations.
Begin by grounding, then move around while remaining in a grounded state. Stop for a moment; extend your hands out as wide as they can go, while fixing your eyes on a point straight ahead. Then wiggle your thumbs and slowly move your hands inwards till you find the edge of your peripheral vision, that place where you just begin to notice the movement. Find that edge above you and below you as well as to both sides. Imagine you can keep your field of awareness extended out to the very edges of your peripheral vision. Young calls this “owl eyes”.
In a march or rally, often danger comes from the edges. It can be easy, when you're meeting old friends or focusing on a speaker, to lose your awareness of what's going on in the distance. Practicing wide awareness can help you keep that peripheral vision active to alert you if some danger is moving in.
5. Protection:
Once you're grounded, visualize a circle of protection around yourself. You can use a circle of light, of any color that feels right to you. You can also extend this circle to protect a buddy, friends, others in your affinity group, or anyone who might be especially at risk.
6. Staying Connected:
If there’s someone you want to stay connected to in a crowd, take a moment, stand together, and visualize an energetic cord linking you. Find that place that is the center of your deep intuition, located about two inches below your navel. Imagine a cord of light connecting the two of you. Or, if there’s more than two, extend it into a web. Hold the intention that, even if you are not together physically, you will remain aware of each other or able to find each other if you get lost.
Don’t forget, at the end of the day, to come back together and dissolve the cord.
7. Sensing energy:
We all sense energy, but Witches, folks who practice magic, as well as people who meditate, group leaders, therapists, public speakers, stand-up comics and preachers learn to ‘read the room’ with heightened sensitivity. What I mean by ‘sensing energy’ is a combined awareness of your internal feelings and of the feeling/emotionall/energetic state of those around you. You can hone this skill by, in meetings, gatherings, even family dinners, staying aware of how enlivened you and others feel, whether you feel bored and exhausted or alert and energized, noticing whether there's a joyful energy in the room or whether the energy is ragged, angry and edgy. As you watch various politicians or speakers, notice the quality, level and tone of the energy they project. Try asking, “If the energy here were a color, what would it be? A song? An animal?
You can also do this in the midst of a demonstration. Honing this awareness will tell you when it might be time to shift the energy, or when it might be wise to leave!
8. Projecting Energy:
When you can sense energy, you can also learn to project it, and with it, different qualities and intentions—for example, healing or compassion. But to project a quality, you need to feel it emotionally. Energy and emotion are closely related. If you want to beam positive, supportive energy to someone, imagine you are silently cheering for them as if they were your favorite sports team. If you want to project healing, think of a time when you’ve recovered from an illness or healed a wound, feel that sense of joy and renewal, and imagine it as a color or a stream of water you can direct.
Beware of projecting negative energies, such as hatred or malice, richly though some folks might deserve them. Because you have to feel the emotions to send them out, they tend to do nasty things to you. Hatred is not the same as anger. We can be angry without dehumanizing others. Anger is a life-force emotion, arising when we are threatened in some way. It can be powerful, but tends to burn us out if we run on it. So giving it a clear, directed focus can help us channel that power into making the changes we need.
If you’re feeling anger—and who isn’t, these days?—you can direct it into positive change with a visualization. I often use the torch of the Statue of Liberty, imagining my rage feeding the flame so it becomes a beacon of truth, shooting out laser beams that cut through lies.
9. Shifting and Focusing Energy:
Once you can sense energy and project energy, you can also work on shifting the energies around you. In a protest or a crowd, this is best done with support—at least one other person, but better with a small, coherent group.
Ultimately, the purpose of a march or demonstration is, at least in part, to shift the energy of those in the crowd from Impotent rage, frustration and feelings of isolation to feeling connected, supported, part of something larger and more powerful than oneself and with that anger voiced and focused to stop oppression. Activists and organizers use chants, banners, flags, speeches, marching, songs, drums, music and many other means to raise the energy of the crowd and create a sense of connection. They don't know that they are doing magic, defined as changing consciousness. But they are.
We can use the same tools with conscious intention to bring a chaotic energy into coherence, or shift panic into determination and calm, or powerlessness into empowerment.
Often the energy raised in a protest is strong, but not necessarily focused. To focus the energy, you need to find an image that represents the result you're aiming for. Your intention must be in alignment with the purpose of the march. Not only would it be unethical to try to subvert the energy for other purposes, but it wouldn't work. Think of it as directing a powerful stream of water. You could channel it and direct its course, or narrow its channel to increase its pressure. But you can't suddenly make it flow backwards or make a right angle turn. It will simply overflow and cause erosion.
Magical energy must be directed with positive images, with what we want not what we don't want. That's because our deep mind doesn't really get negation. If we're chanting “No war! No war!” the image in our minds is war. It's that image that directs the energy.
So find an image that represents a positive intention in alignment with the values of your movement. Focus on the result, not the process. Don't visualize jail doors opening and asylum seekers released: that keeps the jail formost in your mind. Instead, visualize families reunited, hugging and laughing with joy. Even better, find a symbol, something clear and simple you can hold in your mind. We often use that image of the torch of Liberty burning bright with the flame of truth and justice. It makes a clear focus for strong energies.
If it feels needed, start a chant, a song, or a drumbeat. We’ve done spiral dances in the midst of a march to bring the energy into alignment.
When the chants are rising and the mood it's hot, ground yourself. Sense the energy around you. Know what you want to shift it into, and find an image or visualization that represents your intention. Hold that visualization. if you do this together, it will create a more coherent energetic field, and transform the demonstration to a powerful spell for change.
This post is dedicated to Andy Paik, who was often my street buddy in demonstrations. I’ll never forget being with him in a march in Cancun in 2003, protesting the WTO. Thousands of Mexican campesinos, students and internationals had gathered to contest the meetings, and on the first morning of actions, a Korean activist committed ritual suicide at the barricades to protest the global wave of farmer suicides from despair caused by trade policies promoted by the wealthy nations.
The crowd marched to the barricades, angry but nonviolent. We faced lines of riot cops, with a reputation for brutality. Behind us, provocateurs from a splinter group were throwing rocks over our heads, trying to provoke the cops.
“How do you want to work the energy here?” Andy asked me in a calm, quiet voice.
I looked around at the chaos, and gulped. “Why don’t we start by grounding?” I suggested. We wormed our way into the center of the melée, and grounded ourselves.
Suddenly, out of nowhere, a juggler appeared. The crowd parted and he moved into the center, tossing a stream of balls up and around. The flying rocks seemed to turn into juggling balls, and then stopped flying. The crowd calmed, and the cops seemed to be trying not to smile. No one got bashed or arrested. And by the end of the week of actions, both outside the conference and inside, delegates from the global south had walked out of the talks, and they collapsed.
If we want to preserve our democracy, protect the earth and defend targeted groups, we'll need to be out in the streets a lot in the coming months. Think of each march as a moving meditation, each protest as a sacred act. In the words of the Street Activists’ Blessing: “May you be in the right place, at the right time, in the right way, with the health, the protection, the support, the wisdom, the information, the companions, and the luck you need to do the work. See you in the streets!
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This post has been syndicated from Starhawk’s Substack, where it was published under this address.