Posts Tagged ‘Energy Geek Meetup’

The Many Faces of Energy: How Understanding Them Leads to Stronger Energy

Monday, October 23rd, 2017

You found my old blog. Thanks for visiting! For my new writing, visit mikesententia.com.

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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Energy Everyone Can Feel: New Insights

Sunday, September 10th, 2017

You found my old blog. Thanks for visiting! For my new writing, visit mikesententia.com.

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.

If you liked this post, consider visiting my current blog at mikesententia.com.

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How I Create New Energy Techniques

Saturday, August 5th, 2017

You found my old blog. Thanks for visiting! For my new writing, visit mikesententia.com.

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.

If you liked this post, consider visiting my current blog at mikesententia.com.

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How Energy Teachers Create Resistance and Prevent Learning

Monday, May 1st, 2017

You found my old blog. Thanks for visiting! For my new writing, visit mikesententia.com.

Immediate feedback is the key to learning: Try a skill, see how you did, adjust and repeat. Without feedback, we can’t improve. And yet, energy exercises rarely invite feedback, and often cheat to ensure everyone succeeds. Why?

An example: Close your eyes. Breathe slowly and deeply. Imagine white light circling your body. Did you feel something?

Another example: Point your index finger at your head. Slowly bring it toward your forehead, between your eyebrows. Do you notice that tingling and pressure there?

In most classes, they’d say, “Awesome, that’s energy, great job!” And maybe it is, for some people, some of the time. But when I breathe slowly and deeply, the hyperventilation causes sensations, even without energy. And the sensation of almost being touched is called proprioception, and it’s unrelated to energy.

Those exercises set up conditions that always cause sensations, with or without energy, then told students, “Yay, you felt energy.” That’s what I mean by cheating.

Here’s why this matters: Energy is hard. It takes a great deal of skill to produce even the smallest results reliably. Whenever attempting a new technique, or even an old technique that hasn’t been thoroughly tested and mastered, it’s normal to get poor results. That’s a normal part of learning.

But when we give exercises that make energy seem easy, we create false expectations: That immediate success is normal. That being “good at energy” means having mastered every skill (and that mastery happens with a few weekend workshops). That, if we haven’t mastered every skill, we’ve failed, we’re bad at energy.

That’s not a great foundation for learning. And yet, everyone I know was taught energy with exercises set up for 100% success rates. I don’t think I’d truly appreciated that until now, three months into the Energy Geek Meetup.

(At the Energy Geek Meetup, we do energy exercises with placebo controls. The whole point is that you know if your technique succeeded, and you know if it didn’t, so you can improve. You can see examples here.)

I’m seeing how confronting it can be, especially for experienced energy workers, to learn that a technique isn’t working. At the meetup last week, a woman, very skilled at sending energy, was practicing receiving. She discovered that she felt the energy throughout her body, everywhere at once, and couldn’t identify where the sender was sending the energy. She sat down, we talked. It was very hard for her, even shameful. She expected 100% success, even though I’d opened the meetup by talking about learning, even though she’d seen me have techniques not work too. I’ve also felt that pressure to succeed. I think it’s tremendously common.

I’m seeing how we know, deep down, what results we’ll get, and how we avoid experiences that will challenge our self-image. Telling a friend about the meetup, I said, “It’s confronting for people, because energy is actually really hard.” Her reply: “Oh, it’s easy for me. I gaze into someone’s eyes and feel their energy.” I explained how eye gazing invites all these psychological processes, and how we do exercises that eliminate those psychological aids so we can focus on biofield energy, to learn to use it more reliably and effectively. After I said that, she still wanted to come to the meetup, but only to watch, not to try the exercises herself. (I understand that response too. For months, I had a post written about sigil tests I wanted to do, but never finished it. I loved the idea of testing, but actually doing it was too much for me.)

I’m seeing how people create stories to protect their self-image. One friend came to an Energy Geek Meetup, did the exercises, got no successes. We talked afterward, she said that the exercises were impossible, that energy simply didn’t work like that (even though we’d just seen other people succeed). A couple months later, I asked why she hadn’t come back. Her reply: “There were too many beginners. I want to practice with advanced energy workers.” (I can relate to this too. Too many times, when encountering someone more skilled than me at some aspect of energy, I rejected them instead of learning from them. I’d shift my focus to aspects of energy where I was the more skilled person, and choose to believe that those aspects were more important.)

These are very common, very human reactions. Millions of years of evolution shaped our brains to protect our status and self-image, to avoid situations where we might discover that we’re not as skillful as we thought (especially in public). My task now is to help people through those reactions, because that’s what it will take to build a community that practices energy the way I want to practice it.

(Friends, if you see yourself in these stories, know I love you, and that I understand how hard it is to test your techniques. Really, I do. I had months of resistance when I first tested my techniques, and I have nothing but love and support for you.)

At last week’s Energy Geek Meetup, I noticed that I’ve become truly comfortable with techniques not working. Not “bearably uncomfortable,” but actually not a big deal. This is new for me. I think I know what changed: In the past few months, I’ve been testing techniques, learning that quite a few aren’t working, and then fixing them. And that’s shifted how I see failure. When a technique doesn’t work now, I know that’s a temporary state, a necessary part of debugging, a step on the way to mastery. That sounds obvious, trite even, but the point isn’t to know it intellectually, it’s to feel it internally.

A friend suggested an opening circle, something to set the intention of the evening. I agree. I need to communicate that energy is hard, that most exercises cheat, and that part of achieving mastery is discovering that some techniques don’t work yet. I need to help people through that resistance, so we can build a community devoted to truly learning energy.

And I hope that you, dear reader, feel a little more comfortable testing your own techniques after reading this, too.

If you liked this post, consider visiting my current blog at mikesententia.com.

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Designing an Event for Science-Loving Energy Workers

Monday, April 24th, 2017

You found my old blog. Thanks for visiting! For my new writing, visit mikesententia.com.

“Ever learned an energy technique and wondered if the results were just in your head? I sure have. That’s why Energy Geeks do exercises with placebo controls, so we can get real-world feedback and improve our skills.”

That’s my new pitch for the Energy Geek Meetup. I made it after asking for feedback from attendees, and learning people are more interested in learning energy techniques than in proving to themselves that energy is real. This all has me thinking about what the Energy Geek Meetup is, what we do there, and why we do it, which is what I’m writing about today.

(This will be a meandering post about learning energy and the business side of Healing Lab. If you came for technical guides to energy and magick, maybe skip this one. Also, I’m not an expert at marketing, so much of this will probably be pretty basic.)

Let’s start with the business side. The Energy Geek Meetup is part of my marketing funnel. (That’s a series of steps where people try free and low-cost offerings, come to know and trust your work, and then purchase more expensive products. An article for energy healers recommended 4 stages: Free or $1, then $10-20, then $50-300, then $500+, which is the thing that pays the bills. No idea if this is optimal, but it seems like a reasonable starting point.)

But it’s not enough just to say that it’s part of my funnel — I’ll have at least 3 funnels, for different types of customers:

  • Online practitioner: Blog posts and free energy geek pamphlet, then an e-book, 1-day webinar, multi-month webinar.
  • Client (someone who wants healing sessions): Website (need publications and more testimonials), $10-20 energy assessment / consultation, one session, package of sessions. For in-person, there might be a talk as the first or second step.
  • In-person practitioner: Blog posts, e-book and meetup, 1-day class, multi-month class. (Same content as online — I’ll build them at the same time.)

(Much of this falls in the “coming next year” category. Also, today I’m putting on my marketing / business hat, but most days I wear a “get my ideas out there” hat, and even if you never do a webinar and only read my blog, I’m still excited to be connecting with you.)

Back to the marketing: The Energy Geek Meetup is the 2nd step for practitioners in the bay area, who might someday take a multi-month class to learn to use my techniques in their healing practice.

(Wow. Being new to marketing, I haven’t done a lot to define who my customers are, and I hadn’t intended to explore that in this post. But what I just wrote feels fairly good and precise. And making that unexpected progress has me feeling excited about marketing.)

What about people just starting out with energy? Are they my target customer? They aren’t practitioners yet, but someday might be. I think yes, that’s part of my market, but not the focus. I’d been planning to include a 10-15 minute intro at each meetup for people new to energy, along with a special beginner exercise. (That way beginners have something to do, they can learn together and join the community, but experienced folks don’t get stuck doing beginner exercises.)

I’ve also been thinking about the exercises. Do I want to have each event be a one-off, with a totally different exercise each time? That sounds… Like a lot of work, not that fulfilling, actually. I could never do anything besides beginner stuff, because I wouldn’t know that anyone knew the previous material.

Maybe a series of exercises, like I would have in an energy fundamentals class, that people can work through at their own pace. That way, everyone could find the right spot for themselves, and an experienced practitioner might run through the first few exercises quickly before finding something they can learn. And I could re-use that series of exercises in a class or webinar.

What would those exercises look like? I’ve discussed some before, and I’ll probably add exercises to feel the different energy signatures of different parts of the body (different tissues, organs, etc), and maybe more as we go.

This introduces a new problem: If different people are doing different exercises, how do I communicate the exercises? I don’t want to demo all 5-10 exercises every time, that would take a lot of time and be boring for regular attendees. What about a handout, like a little pamphlet? One exercise per page, essentially what’s already in my blog posts, plus a space to record results. Then I demo one exercise per meetup, rotate through them, and point everyone to the handouts. (Then I work with newcomers a bit.) And I can also use the pamphlet for my classes, and as something people can download from Healing Lab (with the option to sign up for a mailing list).

So this is really becoming a facilitated practice space, where attendees get to pick their exercises. Which feels like what this should be — a practice space, rather than a class.

I hope you enjoyed seeing how I think about marketing and events. Feedback (especially from experienced marketers) is welcome. And we’ll be back to “how to do energy” posts next week.

If you liked this post, consider visiting my current blog at mikesententia.com.

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Crystals and Energy: A Placebo-Controlled Exercise

Monday, March 6th, 2017

You found my old blog. Thanks for visiting! For my new writing, visit mikesententia.com.

Crystals are supposed to amplify energy. That’s what people say, anyway. But have you ever tested it? It’s easy. Here’s how. (And we’ll be doing this at the next Energy Geek Meetup, March 22.)

Here’s the claim: If you send energy into a crystal, the crystal multiplies that energy.

(To be more specific, based on my testing, the crystal changes the energy to make it easier to feel. It changes the energy’s signature (or type). Think of it like putting a colored gel over a flashlight — it doesn’t make the light brighter, but it makes it more noticeable.)

Most people have tried holding a crystal in their hands, feeling energy as it flows through the crystal. But… How do we know those feelings were caused by the crystal, and not simply my expectations affecting my own energy or affecting my perceptions? That’s where placebo and blinding come in.

I love testing energy techniques using placebo controls, blinding, and the other tools of science. When the test works, I can be confident it’s actually my energy, and not just luck or placebo. And when it doesn’t work, I know what to work on, what to improve, and I have a way to measure my improvement with energy.

Here’s how: Get 3 small boxes. Put a piece of quartz in one box, a piece of amethyst in another, and a metal weight in the third. (You can use any two types of crystal. The metal is the placebo, it shouldn’t affect energy like crystals do.)

Have a friend select a box. (They don’t tell you which one). They give you the box, you send energy into it and feel how the object inside the box affects the energy. Feel whether that’s the energy of quartz, the energy of amethyst, or unchanged energy (the placebo weight).

Do this a few times, track your results. Were you able to tell crystal from metal? Were you able to tell the two crystals apart?

A few notes:

  • Before doing this blind test, practice with each crystal. Learn how each energy feels so you can recognize them later.
  • If you shake the box, the metal weight may feel slightly different than the crystals. So have your friend place the box on your lap (or your torso if you’re lying down), rather than handing it to you, so you don’t accidentally (unconsciously) shake the box.
  • What if you can distinguish crystal from placebo, but can’t tell the crystals apart? That’s actually a success. It means you’re building, moving, and feeling energy. The next step is to practice listening to energy, by making your own energy steady and quiet, so you can feel the difference between different types of energy.

About the Meetup

The Energy Geek Meetup is for practitioners who want to take their energy skills and confidence to the next level. It’s the 4th Wednesday of every month, 7-9pm, at the Embodiment Arts Collective, 3490 20th Street, 3rd Floor, San Francisco (near 24th st BART). Suggested donation $5-10.

Please RSVP on Facebook or Meetup. (Popular events draw more people. RSVPing helps us grow. Thank you!)

If you liked this post, consider visiting my current blog at mikesententia.com.

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Scientific Energy Exercises with 14 Friends

Monday, February 27th, 2017

You found my old blog. Thanks for visiting! For my new writing, visit mikesententia.com.

At the first Energy Geek Meetup last week, 15 of us did energy exercises using the methods of science: Placebo controls, blinding, and the like. I’d been preparing for weeks, developing and testing my demo, but it was still confronting and scary, but ultimately amazing.

The exercise was simple: Send energy to a blindfolded partner, either to their head or their hips. The receiver says where they feel the energy. Repeat several times — like guessing a coin flip, you will sometimes get the right answer due to luck, but getting 10 correct in a row is less than 0.1% chance.

I’ve tested this with several people in the past. It’s harder than it sounds. Once the receiver can’t see you sending, once they don’t know what they should be feeling, they’re left with only the sensations produced by your energy. It takes skill, practice, and focus in both people. I knew that many attendees would discover that their partner wasn’t (yet) feeling their energy.

But I had a plan. I’d demo it first, show everyone that it was possible, give everyone confidence that energy really worked, that there was more to it than just placebo. I lined up a couple of assistants to help me demo, including an energy healer I’ve practiced with for several months. I was all set.

The day before the event, the energy healer texts me. She’s sick, can’t meet to practice the demo. The day of the event, she’s still sick. Then my other assistant texts, she’s running late, no practice time there either. I start to worry: What if I can’t make this work, and no one else can either? Will my event, designed to create confidence, instead inspire doubt?

I think through my: Social time, an intro talk, then normal energy practice (without blindfolds). Let everyone get to know one another, and let anyone new to energy work get comfortable building and sending energy, before we really test it. And (I realize) I can test the demo during that practice time. Maybe I can pull this off after all…

The meetup started at 7pm. There were 15 of us, some with years or decades of experience with energy, others attending their first energy event. (I wish my first encounter with energy had included scientific testing!) We share energy visualizations, discuss how energy feels. We partner up to practice, and the room gets loud, telling me that people are relaxed and having fun. Then the room gets quiet as people start to practice.

I grab my assistant and another friend. We test the demo, but neither feels much. At 8pm, everyone takes a break to get some water, and I grab another friend with decades of experience, but he doesn’t feel anything either. And that’s all the time I have — now it’s time for the scientific exercise, and my demo in front of everyone.

I calm myself, and speak what I know is true: “I’m going to demo this exercise. It’s not going to work — I’m in a teacher headspace right now, and I’m having trouble engaging my energy. But I’m going to demo it anyway, because the point of testing energy techniques isn’t to have a particular technique work on a particular day. The point is to get into the habit of testing energy. Sometimes it won’t work, and that’s OK. So now, I’m going to show you the procedure, and I’m going to show you it not working, so you can all see that that’s no big deal.”

And indeed, it didn’t work, and it wasn’t a big deal. Without planning for it, I’d stumbled onto just the right tone for the event. And everyone relaxed, tried the exercise, and had fun with it. I couldn’t ask for more.

About half the group got some results, and two attendees got stellar results: One woman sent to partners 15 times, and they felt the correct location 13 times, and one man felt the precise location of energy, not just hips vs head but where exactly on his back his partner was sending.

In the end, everyone had fun and increased their skill and confidence. Which was the whole point.

And after the exercises, someone asked about shielding, to block energy from other groups. (Shielding is like a wall, blocking energy from flowing.) And it hit me: I always have shielding up, to block energy from the crowds in San Francisco. Normally I open my shielding before doing these exercises. But I forgot today, with all the excitement of the event. So my shielding, which prevents energy from flowing into me, had also prevented my energy from flowing out to my partner. That might not be the only reason my demo didn’t work, but it’s certainly sufficient. Mystery solved.

Will you be in the bay area on March 22? RSVP for the next Energy Geek Meetup on facebook and meetup.

If you liked this post, consider visiting my current blog at mikesententia.com.

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