Meditation, Mai decided, was amazing.
She wished she had known about Meditation years ago.
It calmed her down, made her relaxed, and as she progressed, Mai discovered that part of the reason she came across as spacy and inattentive was due to her Spirit Energy's wild untrained state. Her Energy was an intimate part of her and its agitated flailing state, its inability to sit still made Mai agitated and unable to focus.
This also explained why, when on jobs with SPR Mai actually could focus and actively do and remember things. Her Spirit Energy was actually getting used when she was out with Naru and the others giving the Energy something to focus on and settled it. In her untrained state, Mai was actually using much more then she would have otherwise and as a result exercised and flexed her Spirit Energy stores unknowingly causing her stores to grow and expand on her focusing problem when she wasn't using her Energy.
Meditation helped her fix that. It settled her Energy, her mind and her emotions. For the first time she could remember Mai felt calm, focused and relaxed.
It blew her mind.
She hadn't realized how bad it was until she experienced what it felt like when her Energy was controlled and focused, and so she was calm and focused.
She actually almost knocked Satoru over when she hugged him after that first successful experience.
After Meditation was progressed enough, Satoru started Mai on control exercises. She needed to learn to pull on and shape her Spirit Energy at will before she would be able to do anything with it.
She started with finding her Energy, finding her core, and pulling the Energy out. She nearly blinded herself that first time when she pulled the Energy up to her skin and started glowing. From there she learned to dim the glow by pulling out less Energy, controlling the flow to her skin so instead of a walking sun, Mai looked like the moon, and then stars, and then a subtle kind of shimmer that wasn't really noticeable unless you were looking for it.
Getting to that point was difficult, and it took her near a month and a half of nothing else. Satoru told her it was to be expected. Most Shamans were raised learning these things, and started with much smaller Spirit Energy stores as a result, while she had never guided her Spirit Energy in any kind of deliberate way and was starting with much larger reserves then most other Shamans had in the first place.
Spirit Energy was like finding a wild mustang and getting it to trust you.
Shamans couldn't 'break' Spirit Energy. They had to coax and coach it, learn how it felt, how it wanted to move. The Energy could be given it a goal, but every Shaman's Energy was different and so the Energy 'walked' a different path to get to its goal for each Shaman.
The Shaman had to learn how his or her Spirit Energy worked. Some Shamans would be more predisposed to one thing or another because of their Energy. Since Mai was learning so late about her powers she had a harder time getting it to do what she liked since it had been 'wild' for so long, allowed to grow and stretch however it wanted.
Fortunately for Mai her Energy seemed to want to be used, it was just that her Energy was an eager, hyper puppy with ADD that didn't know what it was doing and was trying to play with the big dogs anyway, making a bit of a mess on the way.
She could shape it, and guide it she just had to work harder at it.
Once the puppy 'learned a new trick' though, it remembered and it was much easier to repeat.
Mai was determined to learn everything Satoru could teach her, not only because she wanted to know the things her family had learned, but because she knew how useful some of the things she was learning could be, had seen exactly where one skill or another could have saved the SPR crew some problems.
Sometimes Mai woke in the morning and was sure everything had been a dream, everything she had learned, everything she has seen and been showed hadn't actually happened, but then Satoru would speak up and she would realize she hadn't dreamed the entire scenario.
It was still hard sometimes, to swallow what she was being told, and sometimes Satoru would casually mention something she would be learning in the future and Mai would be hit all over again by how unbelievable everything she was learning and everything that was happening to her actually was but it was starting to sink on that she could do this.
She may struggle and stagger some of the way, but she could do this.