Posts Tagged ‘Energy’

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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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Why Explore Energy

Sunday, September 24th, 2017

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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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Erotic Energy Tips

Sunday, September 17th, 2017

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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:

Head, Not Pelvis

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.

Projecting Energy Through Their Head

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.)

Exploring Erotic Energy

I hope this gives you some ideas for exploring erotic energy yourself. Got an interesting result, or a question? Leave a comment below.

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

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Posted in Intermediate Conscious Magick | No Comments »

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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Posted in Advanced Conscious Magick | 2 Comments »

How I Mis-Marketed My Energy Class

Sunday, 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.

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

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How to Build, Move, and Feel Energy

Monday, July 10th, 2017

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

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.

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

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Advanced Energy Basics (Part 2)

Tuesday, June 27th, 2017

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

“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

Monday, 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

Sunday, 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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