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When I first felt energy, it was a tingling, a pleasant pressure. I had a notion of different types of energy, which I call signatures and others call colors or frequencies, but I couldn’t feel the difference back then.
I think a lot of practitioners are in that situation, feeling energy intuitively, wanting to feel it more precisely but not knowing how. It didn’t come naturally to me — I had to figure it out over a couple of decades. If you’re in that situation, trying to figure out techniques to feel energy more precisely, here are the techniques that worked for me:
Single Intuitive Connection: This is where I started, connecting to objects (the body, a tree, a spirit) and feeling their energy, without thinking about what exactly I was feeling or how I was doing it.
(Terminology: “The thing I’m connected to” is too long. We’ll call that “the object,” understanding that it might not be a physical object you can pick up.)
Quieting My Energy: In my late teen years, I wondered what I was feeling when I felt energy. Was it just the object’s energy? Or was it some combination of its energy, my reaction, and unconscious changes to my own energy? After posing the question, it was obviously the combination. So I practiced quieting my energy, holding it steady and unchanging while I listened. That way, any changes I felt would come from the object, not from myself. I spent several years learning this, and still use it today. When you practice this, remember that the point isn’t to reduce your energy, just to steady it. If you think of your energy as a body of water, you want it to be calm, not empty.
Multiple Connections: Sometimes spirits would connect to me and drain my energy. To chase the spirit away, I needed to follow the spirit’s connection back to it. This was sometimes easy, but sometimes a more skillful spirit would use a complex connection that would shift its signature, and I had trouble following the connection through that shift. I needed a way to discern the new signature of the spirit’s connection. So I developed a technique: At the point where I lost the connection, I’d make many of my own connections, each with a different signature. Usually, one of my connections would match the new signature of the spirit’s connection, and I’d feel my connection touching the spirit’s connection. (If not, I’d make even more connections, in an even broader range of signatures.)
This became my technique for following all types of connections, not just from spirits, but also the connections from my own ethereal muscles to my mind, the connections that provide power to those ethereal muscles, and the connections of any other energetic structure I was trying to understand. As often happens, a technique I developed for one purpose (defense) wound up being far more useful elsewhere.
Splitting the Signature: This is going to be a bit technical. A connection has a signature. It only senses energy in that signature. If the connection’s signature matches the object’s signature, we say it is aligned, and I feel the object strongly. If the connection’s signature is similar to the object’s signature, but doesn’t match it well, we say it is partially aligned, and I feel the object weakly. The problem is, if I’m feeling a weak (partially-aligned) signature, I have to guess at what changes would make the signature more fully aligned, which is slow and often fails.
In my 20s, I developed a technique to solve this. Rather than using one connection that has the full signature, I break the signature down into its components, and make one connection per component. I align each component individually, then combine them into the full signature. This is more precise and reliable than trying to align the whole signature at once, and gives me a clearer view of the energy structures I’m working with.
By splitting those components into sub-components, I can get an even better-aligned signature, with an even clearer view. For the past decade or so, much of my work with sensory connections has focused on using smaller and smaller connections, with smaller and smaller sub-components of signatures. (I’ve previously talked about this as signature scales, from a large-scale full signature to small-scale sub-components.)
Summary: That was a quick overview of roughly two decades of work. For those of you developing sensory techniques yourself, I hope this gave you some ideas. And for everyone else, I hope you enjoyed seeing how I built the tools I use to explore energy.
If you liked this post, consider visiting my current blog at mikesententia.com.Tags: Energy, Learning Magick, Sensory connections
I live in Germany and I think your structured way to work on this is very valuable. Often when I read your articles I wished them to be translated. There is no overall existent system that teaches people how to work with their energy and many questions come up when working that way. While this may be good, I believe your way to structure Questions and review it is very helpful. Sometimes working with energy just leaves one wondering what was happening. Maybe there are cultures who have more insight then western countries. Anyhow to me it seems there is a big gap of reliable knowledge. We could have more on this, if it were overall more looked at, known and shared.
Thank you for the energy you put into this!
Thank you for taking the time to write! I’m so happy you’re enjoying my work.
“So I practiced quieting my energy, holding it steady and unchanging while I listened. That way, any changes I felt would come from the object, not from myself. I spent several years learning this, and still use it today. ”
If you spent years doing this, you may have developed techniques which become unconscious over time, and which may be more essential to your techniques than you realize. Any tips?
Good question. There’s certainly a skill or art to quieting one’s energy. It’s easy to quiet energy only in part of the body, and miss other parts. But it’s not a complex process requiring a multi-step technique. Rather, it’s a mostly straight-forward skill that must be practiced in order to do it well.
As with throwing a baseball well, there are probably techniques to it that we’ll work out some day. But at the moment, I can’t articulate what those techniques are. Try to get the entire body, though — I guess that’s my tip.