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Last week I shared the energy meditation I use in Energy Geek Playshops. Instead of telling students what to imagine, it guides listeners through developing their own visualization. This week, I want to share some of the ideas behind that meditation, why I did it this way, and how you can use this approach in your practice.
When I started Energy Geek, I’d imagined experienced energy workers testing out techniques. And it is that, in part. But it’s also beginners, new to energy, wanting to learn with a more scientific, results-focused approach. And those beginners need some help getting started.
(Also, I found that many experienced practitioners only learned to build and send energy, not how to quiet their energy and listen. So I realized the need to teach everyone the full set of fundamental energy skills.)
But there’s a problem: I don’t use visualization. I consciously engage my ethereal muscles, which I spent a decade awakening and strengthening, then guide them through a technique. You can read about how I improved the way I build and send energy, and it’s not remotely accessible to a beginner, or really anyone who doesn’t know the specific techniques I work with. I have plans to teach these techniques, but it’ll be a series of year-long classes. I can’t teach this in a 2-hour workshop.
I had an old energy meditation I learned in my 20s, that I got in some class or book or somewhere. It was OK, but I don’t like reusing a conventional, default solution — the whole point of understanding how energy works is to develop better solutions, and that’s what I wanted.
At June’s Energy Geek, one student, herself a teacher and practitioner for decades, suggested that each person think about how energy feels to them, then make a visualization that went with that feeling: Perhaps fire for heat, water for waves, and if your energy feels like a buzzing, maybe electricity, or perhaps bees. (I like the playfulness of visualizing bees.) It was fun, and I lead a meditation where we all created our own energy visualizations.
And that got me thinking: The whole point of a visualization is to communicate with one’s own unconscious. So let’s use the language that our unconscious already uses.
A little background: There are two ways we perceive sensations. First, if someone touches my hand, the nerves in my hand fire, send signals up my arm to my brain, and I feel something. Second, if I imagine a feather brushing my hand, I can feel it. This is used in hypnosis, and it happens entirely in the brain. It seems that energy in that second type of sensation — that’s why everyone perceives energy differently, and why untrained people often don’t feel energy, because they don’t have the ethereal muscles to notice energy and nudge their brain with that perception. (More testing of energy perceptions here.)
The sensation of energy is how my unconscious mind tells me, “There’s some energy in your arm.” So when I want to tell my unconscious, “I’d like to build some energy in my arm,” let’s use that same representation: Imagine the sensation. For people who prefer visual imagery, make a visual that goes with that sensation. Same for auditory. So now we have a visualization, covering the 3 senses most commonly used for learning and visualization, all built around the language the person’s unconscious already uses to represent energy.
Next time you take a class or read a book on energy, try this: Take their visualizations, think about what it’s trying to communicate, then think about what would most effectively communicate that to your own unconscious. Build your own visualization. Because once you can do that, you can start creating your own techniques and exploring energy more deeply, fully, and independently, exploring whatever makes you most curious.
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