Resistance, Belief, and Honesty

August 20th, 2017

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So often, there’s a gap between our conscious beliefs and our true beliefs. Resistance oozes from this gap.

Conscious beliefs are what we say we believe, to ourselves and others. True beliefs are our true model of the world, what we unconsciously expect to see.

A fun example: I often tell energy workers about Energy Geek Games, using this example, “Blindfold your partner and send energy to one of their hands. Don’t tell them which one, and don’t touch them. Using only your energy, try to get them to feel it.” The people I’m talking to are trained in energy, and they’ll tell you that energy is real, they feel it, it’s obvious. But when I tell them people are getting up to 90% accuracy, they’re surprised.

Why? If energy is obvious, shouldn’t 90% accuracy be easy? Yes, it should, but “energy is obvious” is only their conscious belief. They’re surprised because their true belief — their true expectation of how the world behaves — says that energy is only felt when the person knows what to feel, that maybe isn’t real in the same way that gravity and magnetism are. I never make a big deal of it, but it’s fun to see people bumping into their true beliefs.

That’s a fun example, but it’s not always painless. Resistance — that fatigue and distraction when we try to do something physically easy but emotionally difficult — comes from those doubts, from that space between our conscious beliefs and our true beliefs. From not wanting to do the test that, deep down, we expect might show us that our conscious beliefs are wrong.

This was the source of all my resistance around testing my techniques: That I told myself these techniques would definitely work, but truly I had the same doubts as those surprised energy workers.

But as I’ve tested techniques, some successfully, some not, I’ve brought my conscious beliefs more in line with my true expectations, and brought my true expectations more in line with the world. And I’ve learned how freeing it is to do the work that I’m resisting.

This week, when a healing technique didn’t work for a client, I encountered more doubt and resistance. But it was smaller than before. I acknowledged my doubts, listened to that part of myself, and moved through it. By making my true doubts conscious, I was more able to release them.

We have two paths. We can protect our conscious beliefs, or we can explore our true beliefs. Here’s what I’ve learned: That exploration is hard at first, but it gets easier every day we do it, and it leads to a peace I never experienced while hiding from doubts.

The true beliefs don’t have to be about energy. They can be about a business succeeding, about people liking us, or pretty much anything.

What are you resisting?

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Beyond the Material? Why Energy is like Gravity and Magnetism

August 13th, 2017

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Jill posted on Facebook: “How do you describe the beyond-material: Spiritual? Etheric? Metaphysical?”

I pondered for a day. I know what she’s asking, and the easy answer is, “energy and ethereal.” But there’s something deeper here.

Years ago, a physicist friend asked about my work. At the time, I was describing energy and connections as “non-physical stuff.”

“What does non-physical stuff mean? Your whole premise is that this is real and out there, right?” she asked.

Yes, I said, but you can’t reach out and touch it, it doesn’t interact with ordinary atom-based matter except in a few limited ways.

She explained, “Dark matter is the same, it only interacts in limited ways, through gravity but nothing else, but it’s still physical.”

She explained that, to a physicist, “physical” means “real,” out there in reality rather than an idea in the mind. Saying something was real but non-physical simply didn’t make sense. What I was describing was non-ordinary physical matter.

That conversation holds the deeper answer to Jill’s question:

Energy isn’t beyond material any more than gravity or magnetism are. None of those phenomena are solid, atom-based matter, but all three produce observable, measurable results.

“But gravity and magnetism are part of modern physics, and biofield energy isn’t (yet),” you might point out. And I think that’s part of the implicit distinction my friend’s question was making.

But here’s the thing: That’s a statement about human knowledge, not about the phenomenon itself. When Newton discovered gravity in 1665, that changed human knowledge, but it didn’t change gravity itself. When we say that a phenomenon is mysterious, we really mean that it’s mysterious to us, that it’s not understood by us yet. It’s a statement about us, not about the phenomenon.

So, what’s beyond-material? Imagination, social constructs like ownership and capitalism, and other things that exist only in human mind. But not energy. That’s part of material reality, just like magnetism and gravity, and it’s only a matter of time before we understand it.

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How I Create New Energy Techniques

August 5th, 2017

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I often talk about engineering energy techniques. But what does that mean? How is that different than practicing, or creating new visualizations? Today I want to share some of my recent work on becoming more aware of exactly which signatures of energy are in my body, and where.

At last month’s Energy Geek, I met a person who was more in tune with the energy in their body than I was. And I got competitive. I gave myself 4 weeks to catch up.

Here’s what happened: We were playing a new game with two senders and one receiver. One sender (randomly selected) would send, and the receiver would identify the energy and say who was sending. I demoed the game with two volunteers, M and T. First I got a feel for each of their energies: M’s felt like pressure on my back and T’s like a gentler pressure in my forehead. Then we did it for real, with me facing away so I didn’t know who was sending. I narrated what I felt, “A stronger pressure in my forehead, so that must be T.” I turned around, and M had been sending. Then she explained that she had changed her energy to match T’s energy, just to see what would happen.

Later in the class, when M was receiving, one of her senders tried to do the same thing, matching the other sender’s energy. But M wasn’t fooled. She explained how, yes, the superficial layers of the sender’s signature had changed, but that the deeper layers of the signature stay the same. Which is exactly how I explain signature scale.

And I realized: When I’m making connections outside myself, to a healing client or a spirit or anything else, I have a fine awareness of the deeper layers of signature. But I haven’t developed that same awareness for energy inside my body.

I set about developing that awareness. One approach would have been to meditate on my energy, feeling it, practicing until I could discern the deeper layers of the signature. And there’s nothing wrong with that. But because I’ve already done the work to become consciously aware of my ethereal muscles (the parts of my mind that drive energy), I can take a more conscious, faster path.

My plan: To sense energy outside myself, I create a network of sensory connections. Let’s make one of those networks inside my body, in all the different energy structures and pathways I use in my practice. And let’s make that network stable, so it’s just always there, and I don’t have to create it again every time, and so it’s worthwhile to make it really good.

To create that network of sensory connections, I engaged three ethereal muscles: One that actually creates sensory connections, and two that work with energy in my body. In the past, I would have had to guide the actual creation of that network, feeling each location I wanted a sensory connection and guiding it to be placed. But after two decades of that, my ethereal muscles just know how to do it, and I was able to tell the connection-creating muscle, “Make a network of sensory connections in every structure handled by these other two muscles.”

(I also specified that the network should sense a broad range of signatures, not just my own.)

It took several hours to set up the network, then I let it rest overnight to become more stable. The next day, I started looking around the energy in my body, using another ethereal muscle designed for communicating this sort of information to my mind. And I ran into my first problem: In becoming aware of all the different structures and layers of my energy field, I was trying to sense far too many different things at once, and my ethereal muscles couldn’t process all that data.

Again, I had a few options: Practice, and let my ethereal muscles slowly learn the task. (Reasonable, but slow.) Simplify the network of sensory connections, getting less detail, though still probably more detail than someone who hasn’t consciously created a sensory network. (A reasonable backup.) Instead of either of those, I decided to upgrade my ethereal muscles, working with the spirits who upgraded my ethereal muscles earlier this year.

I asked about upgrades to view large amounts of data, and they came through. It took two days to install and power all the new modules, another day of slowly using the ethereal muscles before I was able to even start viewing a single layer of my energy body. Then for the next week or so, I would pick one layer of my energy body per day, practice looking around it, and feel my ethereal muscles stretch as they worked to interpret all the signatures I was sensing. Each day, this started out exhausting, and by the end of each day, my ethereal muscles had come to recognize the signatures in that layer of my energy body and could display it to me, not easily, but without too much difficulty.

I ran into another bump after writing this: Each ethereal muscle has a set of connections to my brain’s energy layer that it uses to communicate with me. The ethereal muscle that synthesizes all that data and displays it to my mind, which I call my “view muscle,” had too much data to send to my brain, and too few connections to send it along. It took two days to fix this, first learning how to find the correct areas in my brain’s energy layer to connect it to, then creating the new connections and ensuring they’re all powered properly.

Looking back on all this, what stands out to me is how each step of this process — creating the sensory network, upgrading the ethereal muscle for viewing the data, and adding bandwidth for it to send that information to my brain — each of those steps took me months or years to learn. And each of those techniques, in turn, were based on other techniques I’d developed earlier. That’s the essence of engineering: Building a technique, then using it as a step in building a larger, more complex technique. It makes my work today hard to explain, and I’ve been thinking about how to teach all of the techniques that go into work like this.

What do you think? Do you want more posts like this, on the techniques I’m developing today? Do you want more posts with practical advice and exercises for people new to my work? Something else? Let me know in the comments.

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How I Mis-Marketed My Energy Class

July 30th, 2017

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My hypothetical friend Rob wants personal growth and counseling skills, so he signs up for a class. One of exercises involves visualizing energy in his body, shifting it from an agitated red to a calm green, and noticing his body becoming calm. When talking with another person, he visualizes that energy floating to them, and they become more calm too.

He doesn’t ever wonder whether the visualizations work by self-suggestion, adjusting his limbic system, posture, and tone, or whether they operate by some real energy that exists outside his mind. He doesn’t have any interest in testing or refining these energy techniques, because it doesn’t matter to him how they work, and they’re not central enough to his life to devote significant time to improving the results. He wanted an easy-to-learn tool to help calm him and his clients, and he got it.

I’m thinking about why people explore energy, so I can improve Energy Geek, both the content and the marketing. I’m seeing two main motivators: Results and curiosity. Rob is motivated by results.

I’m motivated by curiosity. When I was 11, a friend who loved fantasy novels talked about feeling energy from trees. I tried, and I felt a warm tingling. Was that energy or imagination? I have no idea. But I started exploring, stumbled onto a handful of real results, and have been driven to understand energy ever since. I care about results, but I specifically want to understand this thing I’ve been experiencing, what it is and how it works, and I trust that will lead to something useful. Often, when I get a successful result, my main excitement is knowing that I’m on the right track in understanding energy — the specific result is secondary.

Rob wants effective tools for calming himself and his clients. If you have a non-energy-related technique that works better or is easier to learn, awesome, he’ll take it.

I want to understand energy, which hopefully leads to something useful. If you have a non-energy-related technique, I don’t really care, because it doesn’t help me understand energy.

I’ve been viewing my unique quality as a focus on results. After all, concrete, measurable results show me I’m on the right track in understanding energy, so I care a great deal about getting concrete, measurable results. And Rob? He’s totally uninterested in seeing what his energy visualizations actually do. Does he even care about his results?

But I’m realizing: Rob cares about results as much or more than I do. Just different results. And, when every class offers “better results” (from something), that becomes a generic platitude rather than a real differentiator.

Curiosity is the real reason I explore energy. It’s the reason to test specific techniques, to separate out what’s energy and what’s imagination. I need to start from curiosity, and let results be the guidepost, not the destination.

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Why My Students Create Their Own Visualizations

July 17th, 2017

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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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How to Build, Move, and Feel Energy

July 10th, 2017

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This is a step-by-step guide to creating your own energy meditation, customized to how you feel and conceptualize energy. It covers the basics (building, moving, and releasing energy), along with a technique I consider fundamental but that’s rarely taught: How to quiet your own energy so you can listen to someone else’s energy, whether for healing, erotic energy / tantra, recognizing and listening to a spirit, or just connecting to a person. I developed this meditation for my Energy Geek Playshops, and I hope you find it useful.

Take a breath and notice how your body feels. If you’d like to close your eyes on any step, feel free. If you’d prefer to keep them open, that’s fine too.

The point of a visualization is to communicate your intent to your unconscious mind. Since everyone’s mind is different, the visualizations that work for me might not be the best for you — there’s no one right visualization. So I’m going to guide you through creating your own visualization, which will also include tactile and auditory components.

Think about how energy feels in your body. If you haven’t felt energy, think about how you expect it to feel. It often feels like a tingling, buzzing, pleasant pressure, heat, or cool. How does it feel for you?

Think of a visual that matches that sensation. Tingling might be represented by static electricity hopping around your skin. Pressure might go with a glowing light filling your body and pressing out, or a light outside your body pressing against your skin. Heat might be a red glow, or it might be fire. Those are just examples — there’s no one right visual, so create your own, whatever feels most natural to you. You can always change it later.

Now think about how that might sound. The crackling of static electricity, a hum from the glowing light, the sounds of a fire. Or perhaps your energy is silent. Again, do whatever feels most natural to you.

Now that you have your energy visualization, use it to build energy in your torso. Visualize the energy there. (Remember to include tactile and auditory in your visualization.) You might visualize drawing the energy up from the earth, down from the sky, in from the air around you, or simply having the energy grow inside your own body — remember, we’re just communicating our intent to the unconscious, asking it to build energy in our body, so none of those options is better than any other.

As the energy builds, notice how it feels in your torso.

Visualize the energy moving around your body: Up to your head, out your arms or legs, back to your torso. Practice moving it around, using the visualization you made.

We’ve been focusing on building and moving energy, which you’ll use to send energy. But there’s another side: How to listen when you receive energy, whether in an exercise, in a healing session, or with a partner practicing tantra or erotic energy. This next part is about listening to energy, and it’s a skill that’s rarely discussed or taught.

When you feel energy, what you’re really feeling is a change in the energy in your body. If your body’s energy is changing all on its own, it’s hard to recognize the changes coming from your partner, hard to tell which changes come from them and which come from you. So we want to hold our energy steady and unchanging, so we know that any change came from our partner.

Remember: The goal isn’t to eliminate or expel our energy, it’s just to hold it steady. Think of a placid lake, still full of water but flat, waveless, steady. Or think of holding your breath, and the stillness that creates — we’re essentially holding our breath with our energy.

With that in mind, think about your energy visualization, and how it would look and feel to make that energy steady, paused, and quiet. Maybe the glow would stop changing and moving. Maybe the electricity or fire would pause, like a still picture instead of a video. Or maybe you just want to feel your energy and think about holding your breath, or even hold your breath for just a second to feel that stillness. (Don’t hold your breath the whole time — later, you’ll want to hold your energy quiet for minutes at a time, and you’ll still want to breathe.)

Feel that quiet, listening state of your energy for a minute, then let it move again.

Once you’re done, it’s best to release the energy. This is often called “grounding,” with a visualization of sending the energy back to the earth, but remember, visualizations just communicate intent to the unconscious, saying, “Release the energy in my body.” You can visualize the energy going back into the earth, the sky, the air around you, or simply fading inside your body, whatever feels most natural to you.

(If you don’t release the energy, you may get a headache. If this happens, engage your energy again, release it, then build some fresh energy to flush that old energy out, and release that fresh energy too.)

A natural question is: How can I know if I’m really using energy, or just imagining it? And the answer is simple: Play with energy with a friend, and make sure they’re actually feeling it. Here are some exercises, or come to the Energy Geek Playshop and explore energy with me and an awesome group of energy healers, tantra practitioners, and other energy workers.

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Energy Healing Culture: How We’re Holding Ourselves Back

July 3rd, 2017

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How does it feel to be wrong? Scary, dumb, shameful?

Actually, being wrong feels the same as being right. What feels bad is realizing we’re wrong.

Our brains encourage seeking behavior with dopamine. If we’re searching for food, and we see an apple tree in the distance, we get a little dopamine. We get closer and see ripe apples, we get a little more dopamine. When we reach the tree, you guessed it, even more dopamine.

But seeking out places where we’re wrong? No dopamine, serotonin, or happy neurotransmitters of any kind. There’s no innate drive to seek out places we’re wrong, because our brains didn’t evolve to seek truth, they evolved to keep us alive, create offspring, and seek social status.

Seeking our errors is something that must be taught through culture. And most cultures don’t.

This came up last week, talking with a friend about testing energy techniques. I told her about a class I took years ago, taught by a nurse for medical professionals to learn energy healing for patients in hospitals. Exactly the sort of teacher you’d expect to test their exercises.

Here’s the first exercise she gave: With the index finger of your right hand, almost touch the palm of your left hand. Notice the tingling. That’s energy.

I did feel tingling. I had a friend almost touch my palm, and felt tingling again. Then I asked that friend to either almost touch me or not, while I closed my eyes. I felt nothing, until I opened my eyes and saw they were already almost touching me, when I felt tingling. Which tells me: This sensation is caused by knowing I’m about to be touched, not by feeling the energy radiating off someone’s body. (The term, by the way, is proprioception.)

And the shame is, this teacher had techniques that really do help people. She was doing a lot of good, and could do even more good if her more mainstream peers would take energy healing seriously. But when the very first claim is so easy to test, and so clearly incorrect, it makes all of her work so easy to dismiss.

Telling this story to my friend, she said, “Yeah, some teachers are so lazy.” And that’s a nice fantasy: People get things wrong because they’re lazy, and as long as I’m not lazy, I won’t have to worry about overlooking my own false beliefs.

Only, it doesn’t work like that. This teacher worked as a nurse in a hospital. She is not lazy. And her error is far more pervasive, and far harder to avoid.

Our brains are wired to confirm our beliefs, not test them. Our broader culture doesn’t teach us to test beliefs, either. And the only tests I’ve ever seen in energy classes were rigged so students would succeed whether they were using real energy or not.

I want to learn how energy truly works. I want to develop techniques and demos that win over mainstream society. And to do that, we need a culture that encourages real testing.

I hope you’ll join me in creating that. There’s a lot to do, but a good first step is to blindfold a friend and play with energy. Then talk about it, write about it, and invite energy workers and teachers to explore real energy with you.

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Advanced Energy Basics (Part 2)

June 27th, 2017

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“That’s the first time I’ve really felt energy,” my friend told me after helping me test my updated energy techniques techniques. She’s taken energy classes for years, but never felt much. Practicing with me this week, she felt something clear, obvious, and discernible.

This month I’m exploring advanced techniques to build, move, and project energy — techniques that are more effective than the basics we all learn when starting with energy. My goal is to produce obvious, reliable results that aren’t based on the receiver knowing what to expect.

Last week I discussed new techniques for storing and building energy. This week is about moving and projecting energy.

This is the second half of a 2-part post. Start with part 1 here.

Step 3: Moving and Projecting Energy

I slowly built and moved energy, watching the ethereal structures that shepherded it through my body. I expected the energy to move through the same structures I use for energy healing. Instead, I found another set of ethereal structures that push the energy around my body by squeezing it, similar to how the throat and other tubes in the body move food and fluids with rhythmic squeezes.

At this point I want to orient you to the ethereal structures I’m working with:

  • Structures that store energy produced by cells. This seems to be the default place where energy workers store energy. It has a limited capacity, which may be why we’re taught to channel energy instead of using our own.
  • Last week, I told you about new, upgraded energy storage structures. These upgraded storage structures are located inside the default energy storage structures, and release energy into the default storage structures. If I just say “energy storage structures,” I’m talking about the upgraded ones.
  • From the default storage structures, the energy flows into the ethereal structures I use for energy healing. Based on testing in myself and friends, the deeper (closer to cells) the energy is in these healing structures, the stronger the sensations.
  • As those healing structures fill with energy, excess energy flows into the structures that squeeze and move energy. This post is about those energy squeezing / moving structures.

I also watched as I projected energy out of my left hand and into my right. Before the energy flowed I was (automatically, unconsciously) creating a pathway for it to flow on, like a broad, sturdy connection.

I called the spirits who had made the ethereal muscle I was using and asked them to upgrade the pathway (making it thicker and more stable) and the energy squeezing structures (making each one smaller, so they’re less prone to missing energy).

Often, upgrading the ethereal muscle makes a huge difference, but this time it didn’t. I’m not sure those upgrades were even necessary. This time, the biggest improvement came from learning how those structures work (for building, moving, and projecting energy), and finding improvements in how I was using them. Then, like a person slowly learning the proper finger placement for typing or playing the guitar, I would consciously, slowly step through that better procedure, until it became automatic and unconscious. (I’m still practicing all this, but it’s becoming easier.)

The rest of this post is about what I’ve learned about how these structures work and how to use them.

For moving energy around my body, I’ve found that it’s best to focus on where the energy currently is, and on the energy squeezing structures there. At first, I would try to engage them as firmly as possible, squeezing all the energy to the new location. Then I let my ethereal muscle do it automatically, and watched that default behavior: It makes many little squeezes, moving a little energy at a time, over and over, in a ripple. This ripple works better than my single large squeeze.

But that doesn’t mean we’re done. Just because my first idea wasn’t right, doesn’t mean I give up. After seeing this ripple, I used that as my starting point in developing a better version. And I found that, instead of a ripple of extremely weak squeezes, I can make a ripple of medium-strength squeezes that moves a lot more energy. That’s the technique I used when my friend felt energy for the first time.

I had a similar experience with projecting the energy through the air. I was practicing on myself, sending energy from my left hand to my right through 2-3 feet of air. I moved energy to my left hand, thought about projecting it into my other hand, and I felt a little something in the right hand. But it was so faint — it reminded me of what I’d feel when working with energy 10 or 20 years ago, much weaker than the energy I’m using today. What was going wrong?

Then I realized: I was creating the pathway to send energy along, but I wasn’t actually sending the energy. I had to engage the energy squeezing structures in my left hand and push the energy onto the pathway. Once I did that, I felt the energy strong and clear in my right hand. A small change, a single step fixed, and suddenly it works — this is a common experience for me with debugging energy techniques.

One more interesting experience with all this: I start each practice session by engaging all these structures for building and moving energy. And even before I build energy, even before I move anything, I feel a sensation in my body, and it feels very similar to how energy felt in my body 10-20 years ago. And I wonder: Back then, was I feeling actual energy, or was I just feeling those energy-handling structures? Might my students be feeling their ethereal structures engaging, rather than feeling actual energy? Understanding this may help me teach energy more effectively, particularly when I’m troubleshooting for students.

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How I’m Creating Advanced Versions of Basic Energy Techniques

June 19th, 2017

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I’m exploring techniques to build, move, and project energy that other practitioners can feel.

“Hold on,” you say. “Aren’t those the basics of energy work? Don’t you already know all that?”

I do. But I want a better version: More reliable, less tiring, capable of creating exactly the energy signature I need (so I can explore different signatures and find the most useful ones). I want to understand exactly how each step works, then I want to improve them. So I’m using all the advanced tools I have to redesign this basic technique.

Step 1: New Ethereal Muscles

The spirits I work with rarely work with humans. And, like all spirits, they don’t have bodies. The result is, they didn’t have an ethereal muscle designed for using to energy in one’s body. (This may be why I haven’t gone very far with embodied energy until now.)

My first step was to get a dedicated ethereal muscle. But that’s not something I can do myself — ethereal muscles are complicated, and intending to make one doesn’t help. This was almost entirely on the spirits I work with, and my main contribution was asking the right questions and finding spirits who found this project interesting. They took it from there, talking with other spirits who do work with humans, getting a bunch of ethereal muscles for working with energy in the body, then synthesizing the insights from all those ethereal muscles into one new muscle for me. That’s what I’m working with today.

(I also did some work with powering the new ethereal muscle and connecting it to my brain. Some details here and here.)

Step 2: Enhanced Energy Storage

Here’s how most of those ethereal muscles work: They store energy created by the cells of one’s body, then release that stored energy when it’s needed. It’s a good solution, but it only provides a limited amount and intensity of energy. As I practiced with this energy, I’d get exhausted quickly, and need to wait until the next day for these reserves to recharge. (This may be why practitioners are so often warned to not use their own energy for healing techniques.)

I wanted more power. And I already have a power source, provided by the spirits I work with, that powers my ethereal muscles and some energy structures in my body. Could we use that?

We started with a simple solution: Create structures to store this power from the power source. Release it when I want to use energy, and convert* that power to energy. I used this for a couple of months, and it was good enough.

*What does it mean to convert power to energy? Recall that energy has a signature, and the signature has different scales. If we think of an energy signature as a painting, then you can zoom in on one color of paint, and zoom in more to the molecules that make up that paint color, and zoom in more to the atoms that make up those molecules. Power is what happens when you keep zooming in. It’s like energy without the signature. To convert power to energy means to give that power a signature. I’ve discussed this some here.

But even with a power source, if I used this energy for a half-hour or more, I’d still run out and have to wait for the power to recharge. I wrote in my notes, “Something must be wrong. People build and use energy all the time, and they would have a fraction of the power reserves I have now. I must be wasting the stored power somehow.”

I stepped through the technique, watched each step, and found the problem: I was releasing the stored power into my body, then converting it to energy. But there was a lag, and most of the power was dissipating into my body, unused, with no signature to cause any sensations or other results. I needed a way to capture all the power and give it a signature before releasing it.

Talking with my spirits again, we wound up with a two-chamber structure to store the power. The first chamber is the same as before, it stores power. Then when I want to turn that power into energy energy, the first chamber releases a small amount of power into the second chamber, where it’s contained, turned into energy, then released into my body. After designing this solution, they updated my ethereal muscle to know how to create and use these two-chamber structures, and my ethereal muscle set it all up more-or-less automatically while I rested. Since then, I haven’t come close to running out of power, and I have much better control of how much energy I create and how quickly I release it into my body.

One thing to watch out for: Last weekend, I built energy like this, didn’t use all of it, and got distracted. A few hours later, I was feeling pretty lousy. The energy in that second chamber had gone bad — I think the signature had degraded, leaving me with energy in a signature that wasn’t healthy for my body. After I flushed out those energy storage structures, I felt much better. It’s a similar concept to grounding, but a different spot to do it.

Note: Flushing those structures is important, even if you don’t bother with grounding. For years, I’ve built energy that matches my body’s signature well enough that there’s no need to release / eliminate / ground the energy. But even still, unused energy that’s stored, not in the body, can degrade and cause problems.

This seems like a good length for a post. Next week, I’ll talk about upgrades to moving and projecting energy, how I overloaded my ethereal muscle and how I fixed it.

Update: Part 2 is here.

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The Energy of Consecrated Oil: Oil of Abramelin Ritual

June 4th, 2017

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What happens when oil gets consecrated? That was my question at the Oil of Abramelin ritual at the Blazing Star OTO.

This was a public ritual to create consecrated oil for use in other rituals, including the temple’s Gnostic Mass. About 20 people attended, most participated but a handful (including myself) chose to watch. If you want to know more about the ritual, there are plenty of resources online, so I’m going to talk about the steps I found particularly interesting in terms of energy:

The ritual opened with a Star Ruby. I believe this is a banishing. I had expected banishings to remove and block connections from spirits, but it doesn’t do that — I was connected to a spirit I often work with, and during the ritual we talked with a couple other spirits too, and none of them were affected. I also did some psychic intuitions, and my connection that that ethereal software was unaffected as well. So, banishing does not remove connections from spirits, at least the type of connections and spirits I work with.

So what did it do? It set an energy signature for the room, like a field of energy. This was done with some force, which would wipe out any existing energy signatures for anyone not shielded against it. So I’m now thinking of banishing as banishing the old energy, rather than banishing connections.

While this was happening, I connected to the energy field that was being set, then to the structures that were setting it, which I expected to be ethereal software. It was not. Here’s how I know: There’s a type of connection that’s universally recognized as requesting communication, used by every spirit and ethereal software I work with. I tried making one of these “communication connections,” and the energy-field-setting structure ignored it. This structure seemed to be entirely devoted to delivering energy to set a field for the room.

I felt my way around that structure, past it, and found the ethereal software that created it. This software responded to my communication, and explained some of what it does (essentially, associates energy effects with rituals — this would be one component of a larger system of ethereal software). But it took some effort to find this ethereal software, it’s clearly not intended for the ritual participants to use directly. So if you do a Star Ruby (or other Thelemic ritual) and go looking for the ethereal software, be aware that it may be hidden.

The next few steps of the ritual involved mixing some oil, I didn’t notice much interesting energy stuff. The next part involved two bottles of oil, one that was just mixed in this ritual, the other from a previous year’s ritual. Each participant came up to the altar, filled a small flask with this year’s oil, then added a drop of the previous year’s already-consecrated oil. And adding the drop of already-consecrated oil triggered a large energy shift. Whatever just happened, that’s probably the energy-level implementation of consecration.

After the ritual, a friend let me examine his flask. (I had the option to make my own, but there were limited slots for participants, and I figured other members would benefit more.) I saw an energy structure attached to the oil, low-energy and mostly inactive, but stable, almost crystalline. I’m calling it a “matrix.” I was surprised to see that no ethereal software was connected to this matrix — it’s apparently stable enough to just last on its own.

At the start of the ritual, my spirits had said that the consecrated oil would be marked energetically. In future rituals, when the ethereal software connected to the oil, it would see the marking and know it was consecrated. Essentially, that the consecration is a tag placed on the oil, rather than a structural change to the oil itself. And this matrix certainly fits the bill.

There was one more item of interest during the ritual: Participants were supposed to have a conversation with their Holy Guardian Angel (a term from Abramelin’s 14th-century manuscript) and focus on their aspiration while charging their oil. I’d encountered this term in my teens, reading about Crowley on the early internet, and I had a question: Is the HGA an internal part of their mind, or an external spirit / force? There doesn’t seem to be much agreement on this, or much of a clear answer on what an HGA is in general. So I looked for external connections when two experienced participants were doing that part of the ritual. One had no external connections, the other was connected to the ethereal software that was engaged during the Star Ruby. Neither had connections to spirits or other ethereal software, which leads me to believe that the HGA is an internal part of the mind.

In all, I very much enjoyed this ritual. The energy was fascinating. Next year, I intend to return and make a flask for myself to explore that matrix and understand how to make that sort of stable structures.

(Ananael or other Thelemic practitoners, please feel free to add or correct me on the ritual. Also, note that this ritual was open to the public and thoroughly non-secret.)

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