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Seth is starting to work with energy and grounding. He asks:
I was reading the grounding [post], and how do I know what type of signature of energy I’m building up? You said if its your body’s normal signature, you’ll just feel alert (in the grounding series). For a novice, what sort of signature of energy would be building up by visualizing the mist, would it be the same as the body’s?
This is one of the hardest things I write about: How does energy feel, and how do I know what signature I’m building.
We want to talk about the signature, or type, of energy. Except that energy signature is like color: Almost impossible to describe without referencing another color. Sure, you can say that purple is between blue and red, but if someone is blind, how do you explain color in the first place?
So, the first step is to become non-blind. Start working with energy, start noticing it in the trees and people and everything else around you. Then, when I say, “The signature of inflamed tendons,” you’ll know what that means, just like you know what blue means because you’ve seen it before.
As for what type of energy you would build from visualizing a white mist, it’ll be different for everyone, but if you feel it, it’s not your body’s normal signature, because your body’s normal signature just feels normal.
Why will it be different for everyone? Well, a visualization is way to communicate your intent to your mental muscles, but how they interpret that intent is anyone’s guess. They might make a normal default energy because you think of white as an empty color, or they might make a clean alert energy because you associate white light with daytime and work. Or maybe you associate white with healing, except your mental muscles don’t know what energy does healing, so they make something else. Especially when you’re starting out, it’s hard to know exactly how your mental muscles will respond to any particular visualization, especially one someone else made, since some aspects of it might speak to your unconscious mind, and some aspects might not.
I wish I had simple answers. “Just imagine X and you’ll do Y” is much more palatable than “Look at energy every day, and in a few months, you’ll start to recognize different energies, and then you can learn useful techniques.” But the truth is, magick is an art, and the first step is merely learning to see.
If you liked this post, consider visiting my current blog at mikesententia.com.See this post for the basics on sensing energy, and this series for a more advanced technique I’ll rewrite and simplify in my book. And for more energy visualizations, including another one from Seth, see this comment thread.
Tags: Energy, Signatures
I have a question involving energy signature. When you sense your bodies energy signature (as a non-novice mage), what are you actually sensing? Do you make sensory connections to a specific part of your body, or is it just an overall sense (sort of like if you feel healthy, you might have an overall sense of well-being, except of course you are describing it in terms of energy instead of words) ?
Also, it seems when I try meditation and different visualizations, my state of mind (relaxed, nervous) changes to sort of match the visualization. This makes it appear to me that my energy meditation is changing the state of my mind, instead of actually building energy in my chest so i can feel it. This relates back to the previous question: does building energy effect the whole body and mind, even if I imagine it just building in just a certain part?
Related, is there a difference between building energy in just the mind vs the body?
Hi Seth, good questions. Answer is here: https://magickofthought.com/2013/05/energy-in-the-body-vs-energy-in-the-mind/
When feeling energy, I use to focus on my hands as practiced sensory connections with my fingers, that works for me, but don’t think there’s a problem on using the mind, I think the key aspect is you can tell the difference between one and other, not specifically the sensations or where it feels.