As those of you who were around last article know, yours truly went through a very difficult patch in life. The effects of this still linger today, and I have never fully recovered from it. I still live with the paranoia and the partial insanity, and I still have to deal with my mental processes being unbearably fast  and being unable to stop four different trains of thought from running all at once. However, as compared to what I used to be, I think I can live with that.

  Speaking of what I used to be, I’ve never been quite all there, but this point was a new low for me. For three days, I had been staggering around my house, half on the road to death and half on the path to full insanity. I was going nowhere fast and I needed some help, quickly. None came, and none would because my parents saw nothing wrong beyond my normal scope of wrongness. I was forced to retreat into my own mind and fix everything that had been broken, piece by piece.

  To do this, I used the concepts of a branch of magic in the Harry Potterworld called Occlumency. Occlumency, for those who don’t remember, is the protection of the mind by the building of mental defenses and lots of visualization. I blended this with some very intense meditation practices I worked out for myself, and threw myself fully into the project.

   There are somewhere between three and seven parts of this process, depending on how adept your mental control is at the time. Mine was really loose, so I had to use more than someone who would attempt a full mental retreat just for the sake of fun or meditation rather than actual need. I will be doing a full-blown series of articles on this, since I don’t really feel like subjecting anyone to a single article the size of a small novel, and breaking off in the middle of a thought just because my word count was too high would be a little annoying to everyone, so I’ve divvied it up by part in the process instead of what’s best for word count. The first article in the series will describe my retreat and what I found, the next will describe the clearing process and the beginning of the rebuilding, and so on until I’m finished. I’m anticipating perhaps three to four more parts total.

   The process began with something called The Descent Into Hell. How Occlumency Saved My Sanity- Part II Pt II will have that.