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This was my blog from 2010-2017. It will stay up indefinitely as an archive. (Here’s why I chose to rename my blog.)
Please enjoy the resources here, and visit mikesententia.com for my latest work.
If you liked this post, consider visiting my current blog at mikesententia.com.You found my old blog. Thanks for visiting! For my new writing, visit mikesententia.com.
Last year, I made a conscious choice to use the term energy instead of magick.
Why? Among magick practitioners, it’s clearer. When I said magick, I always meant, “techniques using energy.” But other people use magick to mean, “Acting on one’s true Will,” “Mystical experiences,” “Anything not currently understood by science,” and more. It was simply to easy to believe we were talking about the same concept, when in fact we were merely using the same words. I’ve found it clearer to just say energy.
Among energy practitioners, the benefit is obvious: They already accept and value energy, and mean roughly what I do by the term.
Even among laypeople who dismiss energy as woo, at least they know some people who have had good results (if only, they believe, from placebo). Magick sounds like it came from Harry Potter.
And in a way, the term did. When I was 11, a friend who loved fantasy novels told me that he felt energy from trees. I tried, and felt a warm tingling. I have no idea if it was energy or just imagination, but that’s where it started. And, drawing from his young adult fiction, he called this experience magic, and I followed him.
I explored energy every day, but (partly because of the stigma associated with the term) I rarely spoke about it. In my late 20s, when I began blogging, I still called my explorations magic. I added the k to help Google understand that I was talking about energy, not slight of hand, and started writing.
For some time now, magick has felt off-brand, even awkward. I’ve dropped the word from my speech, and it’s time to drop it from my website, too. Moving forward, I’ll be writing on mikesententia.com. Check it out and let me know what you think, especially Home and About.
(I’ve migrated all email subscribers over, you’ll still get posts by email. I can’t migrate RSS subscribers, but you can sign up here. Twitter followers, my new account is here.)
Magick of Thought will stay up indefinitely, so you’ll still have access to all the content here. Thank you to all my readers, I’ve enjoyed talking magick with you, and I’m looking forward to talking energy with you too.
See you next week at mikesententia.com
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We often speak as if energy is synonymous with chi. But really, energy refers to many different phenomena, and becoming aware of this helps us develop stronger energy skills.
“What a crazy day at work! My energy was pulled in so many directions.” I’m talking about my attention and mental focus.
“His words were friendly, but he had an angry energy.” I’m talking about an intuition about the person, a facility of my limbic system noticing incongruities between his words, tone, and body language.
“For this healing technique, I’ll adjust the energy of your knee.” Here, I’m talking about a force that exists outside the mind. In the East, it’s called chi or prana. I’m a Western scientist, so I call it biofield energy. This type of energy is my focus, and it’s usually what I mean by energy.
There are other meanings, as well. And that’s fine — many words have multiple meanings. But when we learn energy, it helps to be aware of the different skills we’re using.
Most energy techniques use multiple skills. If I gaze into a partner’s eyes and feel their energy, I’ll tune in to my intuition about their body language, I’ll notice how my limbic system responds to them, and I might allow their biofield energy to enter my body and notice how it feels. The more of those facilities I can engage, the better my results.
Here’s the thing: Most of us never learned to use biofield energy as kids. It’s just not something that’s taught in our culture. Then as adults, we learn these energy techniques, like visualizing and eye gazing, that use many different forms of energy. And it’s natural to use the skills we’re good at, like attention and emotional intuition, rather than the skills we’re weaker at. But the result is that we never really develop our biofield energy.
How can we develop our biofield energy / chi / prana? Let me first answer in an analogy: To strengthen their muscles, athletes use muscle isolations. If they don’t — if they just play their sport — it’s easy for their stronger muscles to compensate for their weaker ones. So they’ll use muscle isolations, doing an exercise that only engages their quads, another that only engages their calves, and so on, strengthening each muscle individually to ensure that all their muscles get a full workout. It’s not that they’re unable to run without this, but to reach peak performance, they want all their muscles to be as strong as possible.
And that’s what we do at Energy Geek: Strengthen our biofield energy using games and exercises that only use biofield energy. We wear blindfolds, or otherwise block ourselves from using our emotional intuition, expectations, and other facilities, so we’re only engaging our biofield energy. It’s like muscle isolations for your energy. And it works: Energy Geek regulars are showing clear, measurable improvements, and getting up to 90% accuracy.
With energy, as with everything else, the key to peak performance is to find the weakest skills, and focus on those.
(Here are some energy games you can play at home.)
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A week ago at Energy Geek, I realized that about half the class wasn’t getting it.
What weren’t they getting? They got the energy exercises and games. They could follow each technique. But they didn’t see why we were doing it. They didn’t get the impact.
Which means I wasn’t explaining it.
For the past year, I’ve been teaching myself to speak: How to explain my work to someone unfamiliar with it. And as I started thinking about how to explain Energy Geek, I recalled a concept that helped it all make sense: Inferential distance.
One inferential step is anything a person can figure out right now, based on what they know, in a single insight. For someone who knows nothing about energy healing, for example, a single inferential step might be, “Living cells seem to emit this biofield energy. Depending on the state of the cells (healthy, inflamed, infected, etc), they seem to emit a different type of biofield energy.”
Anything one inferential step away will be easy to understand. The person might not agree with the statement, but they won’t be confused by it.
A concept that’s two inferential steps away can still be understood. They require the listener to figure out the intermediate step, which takes effort but is usually doable. With a single step, it’s often possible to work backwards and figure out the missing insight. If you’ve ever encountered ideas that were challenging but ultimately graspable, they were probably two inferential steps away for you.
Once a concept is three or more inferential steps away, it becomes inaccessible. The listener can’t work backwards, because there’s more than one insight between what they know and what I said. It just doesn’t work.
The problem is, my concept of energy is several inferential steps away for many energy workers. Here’s why:
When I say “energy,” I mean biofield energy, also called chi or prana, a thing emitted by cells that exists out in the world whether a person is aware of it or not. But most classes teach energy as a combination of attention, emotional intuition, and biofield energy, using all those meanings interchangeably, without even mentioning that they’re different phenomena. It’s all just “energy.”
Exercises where you stare into your partner’s eyes to “feel their energy”? That’s emotional intuition. (I’ve now spent a year exploring how to feel a partner’s biofield energy without seeing their eyes and face, and it’s a thoroughly different, much more difficult exercise.)
Meditations where you visualize distractions, then send them away? That’s attention. (For the past year, I’ve used biofield energy to help friends focus. Again, it’s a thoroughly different, much more difficult technique.)
(All of that seems simple enough, right? But look at the steps: First I explained what “biofield energy” is. Then I explained that the word “energy” often refers to a combination of phenomena. Then I gave examples, and explained my relevant experiences. Skip any of those steps, and people get lost.)
I’m realizing, the word energy means something different to me than it does to many students. From the very start of the conversation, we are too many inferential steps apart to communicate easily.
And understanding that, I feel I’m already halfway to a solution.
(I’m actually partway through listing and organizing all the inferential steps I’ll need to explain. I’m a bit exhausted, but I’m also hopeful at the progress I’m making.)
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It starts with intent… But it doesn’t end there.
When I drive a car and want to turn, I just intend to turn. My eyes know where to look, my arms know how to move, and the steering column and tires do what they’re designed to do. But I’m not aware of any of that, at least not consciously. I’m simply intending to turn.
A teacher might reasonably say, “Don’t think about the drive shaft or tires, or how the muscles in your arms create motion. Just think about where you want the car to go. Just think about your intent.”
But…
If the car stops working, we take it to an expert who understands the drive shaft, tires, and all the other components.
(Similarly, if my arms stop working, I go to an expert who understands the muscles, nerves, and other parts of my body.)
When Toyota wants a better car, they go to an expert who understands all those systems even more deeply.
And a race car driver? Understanding how the car works helps them position for a faster turn, select the right tires for the race, and so on.
For normal operation, intent is what matters, most of the time. But for repairs and improvements and pushing the limits of what you can do, a deeper knowledge is necessary.
In energy healing, those engineers are usually spirits, making the forces (“ethereal software”) that we, the users of those forces, channel.
Much of my practice focuses on the engineering. Lately, I’ve been working with spirits to design my healing techniques. It’s been amazing.
We discuss which signature of energy to use, and why. On simple cases, like a runner with inflamed knees, we usually agree on the energy to use. But on complex cases, like a person with autoimmune disorders, we often have different ideas. We discuss. We build on one another’s insights. And we wind up with an energy technique far better than any of us could have created on our own.
It starts with intent. But it doesn’t end there.
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“I tried using your ethereal software for manifesting, but how do I know if I’m doing it right?” Jill asked me.
(Ethereal software is my system’s term for the forces we channel. Other terms for those forces include egregores, matrices, and The Universe.)
Jill studies a system of energy healing that uses rituals to engage their forces. I’m teaching her to use ethereal software by sending messages directly, without the ritual. It’s faster and more flexible, but it takes some adjusting.
I had several answers for her:
First, it occurs to me that manifesting might not be the best skill to start with. Any single case is ambiguous — would that luck have happened anyway? And there’s a delay, often days or weeks, between requesting an event and having it materialize. The key to learning is immediate, clear feedback, and manifesting offers neither.
Second, we want to find some skill so useful that you want to use it every day, so you practice without needing to force yourself to practice. I’m realizing that, rather than asking someone what they want to learn, I should offer them a list of easy, useful energy techniques, and ask them which one they would use daily. For Jill, there’s an energy I’ve used to help her relax and focus that she likes, so I programmed that energy into the ethereal software and taught her to use that.
Healing techniques like this also give immediate feedback — she either feels more calm and focused, or she doesn’t.
At this point, Jill asked, “But how can I know that feeling is the result of energy, not placebo?”
That brings me to my third answer: It’s OK to trust how energy feels. Sure, there’s no way to be certain it’s not just your imagination, but that’s why once a month you come to Energy Geek and play energy games with other people, verify that they can locate your energy blindfolded, recognize the energy of different people without seeing or hearing them, and all the other games we play. That’s important, but it’s hard to do solo. So let your daily practice be based on feeling energy, and let those games be a special thing you do once a month.
Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Just find some energy work you want to do daily, and do it. Feel the results. Do it for three months, get those 100 repetitions in, and then think about how to improve it. But get started. That’s the key.
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Because you want to help people you love to heal.
Because you want to help people you don’t know to heal.
Because you feel something and must understand it.
Because you want to understand a mystical experience.
Because you want to create pleasure.
Because you want power. (It won’t work.)
Because you want to share your experiences with the world.
Because you want to discover something new.
Because you can’t stop asking, “How does this work?”
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This week I discussed erotic energy techniques with some friends. Here are a couple tips that came from that, starting with the easier one to learn:
In my 20s, I happened to build a type of energy that was well-suited to erotic energy. While making out with a partner, usually while clothed, I would build energy in my body, move it into my hands, then send it into my partner. Depending on how much energy I used, and how long I sustained it, results ranged from arousal to energy orgasms.
Being a man in his 20s, I assumed I should send energy to my partner’s pelvis. That turned out to be mostly useless.
What worked well? Sending energy to their head would reliably produce arousal and energy orgasms. (Once I was sending energy to their head, adding some to the pelvis, chest, or elsewhere could enhance it. But only a slight improvement, maybe 10% (if there were some way to measure it), not anything remarkable.)
A few follow-up questions from friends:
Did I try different regions of the brain, or the difference between the forehead and crown chakras? No, I haven’t yet. Targeting different regions of the brain is difficult, so I probably won’t for quite a while. But testing different chakras sounds interesting. In practice, I usually touch the side or back of the head, not the forehead — you know, the normal places you touch while kissing a partner. And to make a few guesses: The forehead chakra probably corresponds to the frontal lobe, where conscious thought occurs, while the top of the head corresponds to the parietal lobe, which processes touch, among other things. So I would expect that the top or sides of the head would be most effective, though I haven’t tested it, in part because of the second tip below.
What about Tantric practices where a person focuses their own energy in their chest, pelvis, etc? I asked my friend for more detail about these practices, and she described focusing her awareness in her body, how becoming aware of the sensations in her body can heighten them, and that her teacher often used “energy” and “awareness” interchangeably. And that is true: Quite often, we are not fully aware of the sensations in our bodies, or of exactly what we’re feeling. The limbic system (in the brain) doesn’t communicate emotions directly to the conscious mind; instead, it creates tension or relaxation or other somatic sensations in the body, which the conscious mind interprets as emotions. And there are a lot of great practices to tune into those sensations and become more aware of what’s driving our emotions.
But I’m talking specifically about sending energy to a partner — that is, energy as an external phenomenon out in the world, not energy as a synonym for awareness. And when we’re sending energy to a partner, it turns out to be far more effective to send it to the brain, and let the person’s brain create whatever bodily sensations are needed.
This tip is from exploration I did this year. It involves how to send the energy.
You’ve probably sent energy to a partner through the air. When I do that, and slow it down to watch each step, I find that I first send out a stable pathway that the energy then follows. And, noticing that, I learned to consciously create that pathway, so I could test it in other situations.
I tried using that pathway with erotic energy. While touching the back of my partner’s head, I projected that pathway through her head, then sent my energy along it. This way, instead of just sending the energy into the part of her head I was touching, I could energize her whole head. And it produced stronger, more pleasurable sensations for her.
If you aren’t to the point of consciously stepping through techniques like this, just think about sending your energy to the far side of your partner’s head. And if you want to practice sending energy like this, practice sending energy through a foot or so of air to a friend — that’s the same skill we’re using.
Troubleshooting:
I usually leave erotic energy in my partner. If she wants, she can ground (or ask me to ground her), but remember that grounding is about resetting one’s energy signature. We both prefer to just let our energies slowly reset on their own, rather than forcing our energy back to normal. So after this session, I just removed my hand from her head and left my energy where it was.
Ten minutes or so later, when she got up, she said she felt odd, similar to being aroused but not quite right. She grounded, but it didn’t work. I offered to help, but she wanted to do it on her own. Two tries later, without success, she let me help. Those pathways I had created were still in her head, still tuned to the signature of (aroused) energy I was using. Pathways are sturdier than energy (that’s the whole point of pathways, to be stable so they can carry energy), so pathways don’t dissipate like energy does. I withdrew and dissolved the pathways, and then she grounded herself successfully. So remember: When you’re projecting energy through your partner, especially with a partner less experienced than you are, be sure to withdraw the pathways afterward. (But leave the energy, so your partner can come down gradually.)
I hope this gives you some ideas for exploring erotic energy yourself. Got an interesting result, or a question? Leave a comment below.
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For several years, I’ve been exploring how to create sensations with energy. I want an energy technique that creates sensations in most people, so reasonable skeptics can feel energy for themselves, become curious, then explore energy themselves. I also want energy that’s easier for beginners to feel, so they can feel when they’ve done an exercise or technique correctly, and have more confidence it’s not just their imagination.
At last week’s Energy Geek, I got a new insight that’s giving me promising results.
Here’s the summary: There seem to be two sets of energy signatures that flow out of nerves. One of them seems to be better for most healing techniques, while the other seems to be better for creating sensations. As I’ve explored energy healing, my energy has moved in the direction of the signature for healing techniques, and (without my realizing it) away from the signature for creating sensations. That’s (part of) why I’ve had difficulties with sensations and erotic energy, and also points the way toward reliable, effective techniques in those domains.
(The rest of this post covers my current work. It’s somewhat technical and written for experienced practitioners, or at least those familiar with my work.)
A little background:
When I connect to muscle, tendon, or most tissue, I see only one pathway from the cells to the energy layer. Much of my work involves going further down this pathway, closer to cells, which tends to produce larger, faster results from energy healing.
When I connect to nerves, I see two sets of pathways. One of them seems to correspond to cell state (inflammation, hormones, other things that affect the nerve cells over hours and days). I use those pathways in most healing techniques, such as when someone has nerve inflammation due to a bulged disk or auto-immune disorder.
The other set of pathways seems to correspond to neural activity, the second-by-second changing state of nerves. I use these pathways for communicating my thoughts with spirits and ethereal software.
When I’m connecting to a person’s body, including my own, I’m usually focused on the signatures for cell state, not neural activity. And over time, it’s become my default to only look at the signatures for cell state, and ignore the ones for neural activity, whether I’m sensing or building energy. It wasn’t a conscious choice, just the natural result of focusing on one side all the time.
At last week’s Energy Geek, I partnered with an experienced practitioner who is especially good at creating energy that people can feel. She’s one of the people I recommend for beginners who are having difficulty feeling energy. I used my new techniques to sense energy in my body more precisely, and watched her energy. And it turns out, her energy focuses on the signatures for neural activity, and largely ignores the signatures for cell state.
I explored this more at home. Building energy in my body that matched only the signatures for cell state, I got the same result as before: Mild tingling and pressure, but mostly felt as an awareness of energy in my mind, not a physical sensation in my body. Kind of like imagining a feather brushing against my arm: I feel something, but it’s different than feeling an actual feather.
Then I built energy that matched the signatures for neural activity. I wasn’t sure what part of them to match exactly, so I just aimed to excite the whole set of signatures. And within seconds, I had a shaking, shuddering sensation, like an energy orgasm but lacking most of the pleasure. It was pronounced and obvious. I felt it bodily, not mentally. As a first version of energy that creates sensations, this is exactly the sort of thing I’m looking for.
I tried a combination of the two energies, activating pathways for both cell state and neural activity. I expected it to create even more sensation, but surprisingly I felt it less than when I only activated the signatures for neural activity. It was far more pleasant, though. Perhaps the energy is more dilute, doing less to the pathways for neural activity? Or perhaps activating the pathways for cell state somehow causes the nerves to accept more energy in general, reducing the impact of the signatures for neural activity. More exploration is needed. But being able to make a pleasant version is important, so this result is promising as well.
These findings also solve a mystery: In my early 20s, erotic energy came easily to me, and partners would experience energy orgasms. As I’ve gotten better with energy, I’ve had less and less success with erotic energy, except for a few sessions in recent years as I’ve consciously explored it. But why? So many energy techniques were a struggle in my 20s, but come to me easily today. I’m far better with energy now than in my 20s. Why has erotic energy gone backward?
Here’s why: As I’ve increased skill, I’ve learned to align my energy more precisely with whatever I’m working with. But for close to two decades, I’ve primarily worked with the signatures for cell state (used for energy healing). And the more I align my energy with cell state, the less my energy interacts with other signatures — that’s the whole point of aligning energy. Which means that, as I’ve been improving my energy skills, I’ve also been (unintentionally) decreasing how strongly my energy creates sensations, including erotic ones.
And now that I understand all that, I can begin engineering techniques that are even more effective than what I did in my 20s, along with (non-erotic) energy that’s especially easy for beginners and laypeople to feel.
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Lord Kelvin, the 19th century physicist who formulated the first two laws of thermodynamics, thought that science would never understand how human intent causes muscles to move: “The influence of animal or vegetable life on matter is infinitely beyond the range of any scientific inquiry hitherto entered on.”
It wasn’t merely “not yet understood.” It was “infinitely beyond.”
(“Hitherto” gives some wiggle room, but by his time scientists were already exploring nerves, the brain, and electricity.)
Friends who work with energy (or ritual magick) sometimes say that we’ll never understand why human intent causes energy to move, that energy is immune to scientific inquiry.
Like Lord Kelvin, they’ve thought about the phenomenon, considered at a few ways to explore it, and realized those paths won’t work. Usually, they’ve thought about placebo-controlled energy healing studies (to see which conditions benefit from which systems of healing), or testing which rituals produce better results. They’ve noticed how little that research would tell us about what energy is at a fundamental level. And they’re correct: Existing paths are unlikely to lead to a deep understanding of energy.
The mistake, of course, is to stop after examining those existing paths, rather than searching for new paths forward (like the sensory connections I use to watch energy structures as you work). And yet, I understand the impulse: Considering existing paths takes effort. In school, writing a paper on why the existing paths won’t work earns a good grade. That’s all you’re asked to do. And discovering a new solution isn’t just a little harder, it’s orders of magnitude harder.
Part of this, I think, is in how we teach science: As a series of successes, without any of the struggle or false turns. We forget that, from the dawn of human history up until the point we understood it, every phenomenon was a mystery, and the path to understanding was equally mysterious. We teach with the clarity of hindsight, and students learn to expect that clarity when facing new problems. Then, when we encounter our first truly new phenomenon, we have no tools or no frame of reference for exploring it, and we quickly conclude it’s impossible.
Next time exploring feels impossible, remember: Most of what we know today seemed impossible right up until it was understood.
Keep exploring.
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