By William R. Mistele. Water Exercise This meditation is a variation on Bardon’s water exercise in the first chapter of his book, Initiation into Hermetics. Place your hands in a bowl of cool water. Feel the water sensation on your skin. Sense the water in the bowl around your hands. You can notice the wetness, coolness, water pressure, slight motions in the water, etc. Now take the opposite perspective: Imagine you are the water surrounding your hands. Feel your hands from this other point of view—of the water. Go back and forth a few times sensing the water around your hands and again sensing your hands as if you are the water. Now sense both at the same time—the feeling of the water on your skin and imagining yourself as the water surrounding your hands. If you work at it you may also be able to sense a magnetic field within the water. For example, sense how the water molecules bind to each other; take away the water sensations and you are left with a feeling of a magnetic field. This is very similar to the magnetic field around a magnet that aligns for example iron particles. With water molecules, however, there is a hydrogen bond between molecules that gives water a high boiling point—in other words, the attractive force in water between the molecules is strong enough that a high level of heat is required to break that attraction and get the liquid to turn into a gas. Try to sense this magnetic attraction within the water. With your hands still in the water, imagine water around your entire body. Imagine that you are within a body of water such as a pool or small lake. Whatever you sense with your hands in the bowl of water is now also around your whole body—the coolness, the pressure, wetness, slight motions, etc. And again, imagine you are the water—the pool or lake. Take its perspective and feel your entire body from its point of view. Go back and forth a few times between feeling the water touching you and then being the water that surrounds your body. Sense too the magnetic field you sensed in the bowl of water. At this point, try to sense then both water surrounding your body and a magnetic field within the water. Imagine or take a few breaths and draw the water and magnetic field inside of your body as if your body is an open and empty container and it is now full inside with water. Bardon teaches a fire and light form of healing in his first book—you breathe in vitality form the air into your body so that eventually there is an accumulation of life force under pressure producing light and emitting a field of vitality around yourself. Bardon describes this accumulated life force in your body as being bright like the sun. Later on in Initiation into Hermetics Bardon introduces the magnetic fluid. He also mentions using the magnetic fluid to heal in this third book. The mermaid women who have strong ties to the realm of mermaids all heal using water energy. This water meditation here is the opposite kind of healing energy than what Bardon first introduces. Rather than intense pressure expanding outward with heat and light, this magnetic energy is cool and contracts. You do not command this light/vitality to heal someone. Instead, you flow into another and feel how to nurture, purify, and renew them from within. Obviously, an individual will eventually want to learn to use both methods. To get a sense of the possibilities, imagine another person is within the magnetic/watery field of energy surrounding your body. Imagine too that this individual is open and empty inside so that you can flow with the water around yourself through this person. This is the basic sea of love meditation I have already described in my on line course on mermaid empathy. Flowing through the other person, you are still the lake or pool of water. You are not disturbed or weaker because of flowing through another in this way. If you imagine yourself as the pool or lake of water, then whatever appears within it is in a sense within you and you are within it. The water/magnetism is an extension of your own aura. At this point we are ready to add an astral feeling to the more physical sensations of water and magnetism. Putting aside the exercise on water, grasp one of your wrists with your other hand. Notice the physical sensations of touch, weight, size, shape, pressure, heat, etc. Now add to this grasping of your wrist the feeling—“I love you with all my heart and soul.” Notice at this point the new sensations and feelings that are present in the touch. You have not changed the way you are grasping your wrist. You have simply added to the touch pure feeling. For example, with the love added you may sense increased warmth, a feeling of encompassing, a penetrating and an “inner” connection to the wrist. Now add this feeling to the watery pool or lake surrounding you, of “I love you with all my heart and soul” or something similar such as “I am one with you.” The mermaids in the ocean all do what human beings do not do—upon meeting each other in the ocean, they automatically, instinctively, without effort or thought connect with a feeling of “I am one with you as I am one with the sea, with life, with love, and with beauty.” Mermaid women each have a story to tell of how they have learned that this skill in flowing through another is something that is not to be shared with human beings—human beings simply do not understand or else instinctively try to abuse or vampirize the energy these mermaid women freely share. What we call “healing another” or “sending healing energy” they consider to be simply flowing and sharing energy. If you hang out with mermaid women and learn their ways, then sending healing energy to others every day feels completely natural. It is a way of being and feeling a part of life. Try this. Imagine the person in front of you in the water. Now add to the cool watery and magnetic sensations the feeling of being one with this person, of flowing with your love in and through the other, and of “healing” the other. Each mermaid woman flows or heals with a slightly different kind of watery or magnetic energy just as water appears in nature in many different forms—as a sea, an ocean bay, a lake, a river, a mountain pool or a falls, etc. By practicing such an exercise even on a daily basis, an individual develops the water element in his own soul and deepens his or her connection to water in nature. When you then meet a mermaid woman, you in effect already “speak” her own language—the language that is the very essence of their race—“A love that flows without ever being lost and gives all of itself in every moment.”