harmony

Our body/mind/spirit is maintained by a delicate and unique balance of forces; too little is just as bad as too much, and one imbalance leads to another. While this is a philosophy I gleaned from the notion of lüng (rlung) in Tibetan Buddhism I find it applies to other forces in our lives.
This philosophy bleeds a lot into my magickal work, which led me to “create” a ritual of Planetary Balancing, which is really just a sequence of existing planetary rituals for a specific end. I just sent this over to a friend who needed it and decided I’d post about it here. Our psyche and our lives are composed of a balancing act of planetary forces, we might not be aware of it all the time, but it’s always at play. The problem is –like the lüng in Tibetan Buddhism– these forces can become unbalanced, too much Saturn, not enough Venus, and this spirals your internal and external world out of control. It may start with one force, but it spreads, too little of one force leaves an “energy surplus” that has to then go elsewhere, then you continue trying to compensate for having too much or too little in certain areas and it just gets worse. It seems everything starts going wrong; your desires/impulses seem off, your focus is wrong, and the world around you just doesn’t want to cooperate, it has the same appearance as bad luck or a curse in many cases. This ritual is relatively easy to perform requiring time and a willingness to wake up early more than anything. It’s nothing star-shattering, but it’s useful.
Now I suppose if you were focused and astute you could simply work on the specific problem force, but I find most of the time if it is getting bad it is best to start fresh. Sometimes when your diet is out of whack and your body isn’t reacting well and it can be tricky to get your diet and body back to normal while your body is still struggling with whatever is wrong. What do you do? You fast, you detox. Eliminate everything, and slowly reintroduce it back into your life. This is the basic idea behind my Planetary Balancing. In regards to the process of the various rituals of the pentagrams and hexagrams I won’t give instructions on them, if you don’t know them, they’re everywhere online and in books.
I personally start this ritual on Saturday. Any day of the week would work, but I find the order of Saturn – Sun – Moon very effective to get things moving, this is related to my personal symbol set of the layers of Self. Dawn brings about the same planetary hour as the force of the day, in this case Day of Saturn, Hour of Saturn. At dawn perform the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram and then the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Hexagram for the force of the day. The LBRP helps clear you out internally while the LBRH clears out the force of Saturn (in this case) in your life. The idea is to remove your internal mental/magickal detritus and the planetary detritus from you and your sphere/life. You’re flushing yourself and your world of these forces that may be unbalanced. Repeat this process for the entire week, obviously changing the planetary attribute with the day.
On the following Saturday (or whatever date you started on) wake up well before dawn and perform, in the same order as the week, all seven LBRP/LBRH. I haven’t tested this part to see if it is strictly necessary (which is unlike me I admit), but logistically to me it makes sense. Over the course of the week even though you’ve banished a force parts of it can begin to flow into your life again (nature abhors a vacuum), and the balance/compensation issues appear again. So I feel it is wise to give yourself and your sphere one final banishing of all the planetary forces.
Once dawn has arrived perform the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram followed by the appropriate Lesser Invoking Ritual of the Hexagram. I tested this and feel this is a better combination than two invoking rituals; the focus should be on invoking and reuniting with the planetary forces so the only invocation should be regarding these attributes. Again the LBRP clears out your internal detritus and establishes a baseline, a blank slate, or a vacuum even. Then you invoke the appropriate planetary force and since you are blank there is nothing to interfere with it flowing into you properly, nothing to disturb it or set it out of balance. Repeat this process for the entire week, again obviously changing the planetary attribute with the day.
On the following Saturday (or whenever) wake up for dawn and perform all seven LBRP/LIRH. Same as before, haven’t tried the ritual without it, but it makes logical sense to me. A week, in my experience, isn’t enough to totally unbalance a force, so your Saturn won’t be off-kilter by Sunday, but it is enough that things can warp a little and a little warp down the line can lead to a bigger instability. I think it’s helpful to give the planetary forces one last boost to balance them all out.
So over the course of two weeks you zero-out the planetary influences and slowly reintroduce them into your life, bringing them into balance. Now I’m sure you could achieve all this in less than two weeks, so why do I do it this way? For me at least, it is intense. I can’t say why it’s not like this when I do either LBRP-LBRH or LBRP-LIRH for other purposes, but this hits my life hard. Counter-intuitively the days I banish a planetary force are filled with those influences in positive active ways. I think it is as though my life is “using up” that last little bit of planetary fuel to clear it out. On the other hand the days I invoke a planetary force are filled with all sorts of little annoying mishaps related to the influences, like a series of retrogrades, even though the Sun and Moon don’t have retrogrades. It is as though the forces are kind of “clunky” when restarting from scratch. So you could try shortening it, but I find two weeks is a good processing period and spreads out the highs and lows that accompany this for me.
Flush out all the imbalanced forces introduce them back without the imbalance and instability and your mind and your life tend to reorganize. Personally I don’t do this often, maybe once a year, twice at absolute most, when I feel things are going wrong and there is no reason I can find for it. I perform this and by the end my life is back on track.