Today was the first day I managed to get to the malls and enjoy in the holiday spirit. Yeah, right. It was more like 'Red alert, full shields activated'.
It's been a year since I had to mix with holiday crowds, and when I walked in to the first store, my shields came up. The problem was that I had not used my shields in this manner in a while, and they didn't want to sty up under automatic. At least they didn't want to stay up enough. I was starting to get a headache.
I re-worked the vision so that I saw energy coming in through my hands supplying power to the shields, pushing them out far enough (a few inches) so that I wasn't getting a headache. I had to think on this from time to time, but they stayed up fine.
I was lucky as they malls could have been much more crowded. Of course I tend to think with more people there, automatic mode would have worked fine because there was so much to fight off. Oh well, time to review shielding exercises 101. The harder thing was getting them down after I was out of there. It always seems to take a while to reach the calm point that they will come down easily.
If you are foolish enough to go to the stores this season, do all your preparation before you go in.