When I offered my post on seeing ‘energy,’ one reader told me she would like me to write about how to feel it.   This is my answer to her request

‘Energy’ is the word for something that many people can see and feel.  A skeptical friend of mine said that it could not be energy because energy is defined by its ability to do work.  ‘Energy” in my experience is essentially an equivalent word for ‘qi,’ ‘chi,’ or ‘prana.’ I answered him that it is used in healing, and so does work of a nature.  More important, we need to be careful about trying to squeeze all phenomena into categories devised by people who did not know of such phenomena.  Maybe it fits an existing category, maybe not.  If this is a stumbling bloc, call it Qi, Chi, Prana, or X.

That behind us, let’s look at how to feel it.  Many Tai-chi and Qi-gong exercises are great for this.  But my suggestions will be separate from these, at least in their origin.

Sit quietly, with a clear relaxed mind.  No alcohol or other substances.  Good but relaxed posture is important.  Once you are comfortable, with an erect but not military-stiff spine, breathe in, visualizing a clear blue light going through your nostrils into your heart.  Do this for a while until the visualization is pretty solid in your heart or center of your chest. It helps if you visualize it as having qualities of peace, harmony, even love.

Then, as you exhale, visualize the energy spreading from your heart down your arms.  Breath in – being in the blue light to your heart.  Breathe out, and as you do, send it down your arms.  Slowly.

When you feel it in the palms of your hands, usually as warmth or tingling, perhaps even an involuntary moving of your fingers, let them cross over one another, palm in front of palm,  maybe 3 or 4 inches apart.  See whether you can feel when they cross.  If you feel nothing, rub your palms together briskly, to stimulate and enliven them, and repeat this exercise.

Try it in different directions and at gradually increasing distances, to try and get a sense of how this is not simply body heat.

After you have had a fairly strong feeling, ask a friend to sit in a chair.  Stand behind them and raise your palms until they are a foot or two above your partner’s head.

Now sweep your palm, palm down, slowly over the top of your partner’s head.  See whether you feel a distinct difference when it crosses directly over their crown.  You might also ask your partner to close his or her eyes, and see whether they can tell when your hand has passed over the crown of their head.  In my experience many people cam, but many cannot.

If you can see the energy, as I described it in my earlier post, allow the fields to touch one another, one from each hand.  See whether you can feel when that happens.  Finger tips are good for this because they minimize ‘noise’ from body heat.  Of course the skeptic will say if you feel something it is suggestion, and in some cases it might be.  But that is why I suggested the hand-over-head exercise.  The change in feel is quite abrupt, and even better, often the person sitting down can tell when you pass your hand over their head, a foot or two above it and their eyes are closed.

As with seeing, there is much more, but this is a start.

In my experience it is harder to feel this energy in plants, let alone rocks, which is why I focused solely in seeing energy rather than feeling it in my Earth Day post. But you can feel it.

The point of all this as well as the post on seeing is to try and introduce people to the idea that we are immersed in fields of awareness, that we are not isolated individuals in amny sense, and that this statement is experientially based.  Once we are aware of this immersion, the secular modern ideal of isolated individuals engaged in a promethean quest to impose their vision and meaning on a neutrak world can begin to dissolve, not through argument, but through experience.

Raising a cone of power that the High Priestess of a coven then uses to send to someone for healing makes use of the same kind of energy but in a different context.