Muggledad in Partners1 offers a viable alternative.
What you will do for Occlumency is to cast a wordless, wandless, and most importantly, incantationless shield about your mind and thoughts. It is very difficult to do when one’s mind is cluttered with the humdrum of day to day life, so the calmness and unity of thought that is a byproduct of the Magicus Intimus is a vital first step.2
At first you will find it next to impossible to cast a shield while thinking about other things. At first it is thus necessary to practice occlumency, short term. But with practice, you can hold this shield while going about your normal life just like you walk and chew gum. You might, with practice, even be able to walk, chew gum, and catch a baseball, but you will have trouble chewing gum and taking a drink. So too, you can, with practice, hold that shield and do other things.
Here it gets messy. When Professor Snape is focusing on legilimency, which is closely related to occlumency, he is vulnerable to Harry reflecting the attack and breaking into his own mind.3 Is this because he used occlumency, or because the same would be true of mental shields?
Whichever he is doing, he feels the need to remove certain memories then because he, effectively, cannot chew gum and drink at the same time. He can do legilimency, or he can do <insert art here>, and he can even switch between them relatively fast, but not fast enough to feel confident about keeping all his most sensitive memories in his head. This is an explanation that makes sense, without going all crazy supper powered about the benefits of mental defences.
kb0 in Harry Potter: Choices uses a very similar concept,4 but does not explain it well, the whole thing is, for lack of a better word, magically intuitive to Harry once he is told what to do in Chapter 11.
muggledad. Partners Last Viewed 2025-04-08. Published: 2009-04-22. Updated: 2010-01-31.↩︎
muggledad. Partners Chapter 8. Last Viewed 2025-04-08. Published: 2009-04-22. Updated: 2010-01-31.↩︎
Mrs. J. K. Rowling. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. Better citation needed here.↩︎
kb0. Harry Potter: Choices Published: 2012-12-22. Updated: 2013-04-30. Last Viewed: 2022-07-29.↩︎