By Terry Lynn Pellegrini
There has been a lot of talk and hype about bindings lately. With the craziness in the world and some of the lunatics who are parading through it right now, there are many reasons to want to bind. As a community we often feel helpless, outraged, or just plain pissed off and want to do something about it. But a binding? This is heavy duty magick (despite what Hollywood might say), and a life changer for anyone who does so. Yes, I can understand why you would want to bind a person or persons from causing great bodily or psychological trauma, but I am not an advocate of binding. Cue the gasps and horrified looks. But you are a witch, they say. Don’t all witches bind?
No, not all Witches do and when they do it’s often because they have run out of other options. If you feel you or your loved ones are being harmed and need to protect yourself, I will encourage you, as I do my own students, to first try other less volatile options. Give the mundane tactics a go first. Have a heart to heart talk with the individual. Explain why their actions are harming you or others. Be calm and rational even if they aren’t. If the individual is acting unstable or becomes violent, remove yourself immediately from the situation and involve law enforcement. File a complaint, get a restraining order. If this fails, then bring out the magickal arsenal. Freeze out the individual or action. Put up extra wards and shields around yourself, home, and family. Pay a visit to your elders, High Priestess, Arch Druid or magickal teacher and pick their brain for ways to handle the situation. Try it all before you go for the big guns, the binding.
Why go to all that trouble, you say. Why not do the binding and be done with it? Let me explain my reasoning on this. As I tell my own students, when I am instructing them on the “how to” of bindings, I always preface those teachings with why I consider a binding the absolute last thing you ever wish to perform. When you work a binding spell you are binding something, or someone’s, energies to you. You are taking responsibility for that action or energy and attaching it to your own life by means of that binding. In simpler terms, you now have that being (or beings) on a leash which is held tightly in your hands. As with all leashes you must keep a firm grip or it will slip through your fingers, allowing the energy to escape your grasp. Then where will you be? Right back in the same place, the same situation, you were trying to keep away from you in the first place. Oftentimes this bound energy has grown exponentially, fed by your own energy that trickled through your metaphorical fingers. Trickier than you thought, isn’t it?
Take a moment to ponder that last paragraph. In binding you are creating an attachment to you. Do you truly want that person to be a continual part of your life, connected to your energy field, until such time as you wish to release that binding or you drop your guard and let it loose? Think of who that energy came from, what it was doing. Makes your skin crawl, doesn’t it? Yep. I know it does mine.
Now, perhaps, you can understand why when I hear a discussion or a new spell on line with regards to binding a person or persons, I hit the delete button. While there are alternatives to what could be considered the “Hollywood standard binding” that is a discussion best left for a class with a skilled instructor at the helm. Till the time when that lesson becomes available to you, I encourage you to save the binding for only the most extreme cases and instead dedicate yourself to using your energy and time to find alternative ways to combat the World’s ogres. We are going to need it.
Blessings!
