Posts Tagged ‘Energy’

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How Energy Teachers Create Resistance and Prevent Learning

Monday, May 1st, 2017

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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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Posted in Learning Magick | No Comments »

The 3 Main Techniques I Use to Feel Energy

Monday, April 3rd, 2017

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

When I first felt energy, it was a tingling, a pleasant pressure. I had a notion of different types of energy, which I call signatures and others call colors or frequencies, but I couldn’t feel the difference back then.

I think a lot of practitioners are in that situation, feeling energy intuitively, wanting to feel it more precisely but not knowing how. It didn’t come naturally to me — I had to figure it out over a couple of decades. If you’re in that situation, trying to figure out techniques to feel energy more precisely, here are the techniques that worked for me:

Single Intuitive Connection: This is where I started, connecting to objects (the body, a tree, a spirit) and feeling their energy, without thinking about what exactly I was feeling or how I was doing it.

(Terminology: “The thing I’m connected to” is too long. We’ll call that “the object,” understanding that it might not be a physical object you can pick up.)

Quieting My Energy: In my late teen years, I wondered what I was feeling when I felt energy. Was it just the object’s energy? Or was it some combination of its energy, my reaction, and unconscious changes to my own energy? After posing the question, it was obviously the combination. So I practiced quieting my energy, holding it steady and unchanging while I listened. That way, any changes I felt would come from the object, not from myself. I spent several years learning this, and still use it today. When you practice this, remember that the point isn’t to reduce your energy, just to steady it. If you think of your energy as a body of water, you want it to be calm, not empty.

Multiple Connections: Sometimes spirits would connect to me and drain my energy. To chase the spirit away, I needed to follow the spirit’s connection back to it. This was sometimes easy, but sometimes a more skillful spirit would use a complex connection that would shift its signature, and I had trouble following the connection through that shift. I needed a way to discern the new signature of the spirit’s connection. So I developed a technique: At the point where I lost the connection, I’d make many of my own connections, each with a different signature. Usually, one of my connections would match the new signature of the spirit’s connection, and I’d feel my connection touching the spirit’s connection. (If not, I’d make even more connections, in an even broader range of signatures.)

This became my technique for following all types of connections, not just from spirits, but also the connections from my own ethereal muscles to my mind, the connections that provide power to those ethereal muscles, and the connections of any other energetic structure I was trying to understand. As often happens, a technique I developed for one purpose (defense) wound up being far more useful elsewhere.

Splitting the Signature: This is going to be a bit technical. A connection has a signature. It only senses energy in that signature. If the connection’s signature matches the object’s signature, we say it is aligned, and I feel the object strongly. If the connection’s signature is similar to the object’s signature, but doesn’t match it well, we say it is partially aligned, and I feel the object weakly. The problem is, if I’m feeling a weak (partially-aligned) signature, I have to guess at what changes would make the signature more fully aligned, which is slow and often fails.

In my 20s, I developed a technique to solve this. Rather than using one connection that has the full signature, I break the signature down into its components, and make one connection per component. I align each component individually, then combine them into the full signature. This is more precise and reliable than trying to align the whole signature at once, and gives me a clearer view of the energy structures I’m working with.

By splitting those components into sub-components, I can get an even better-aligned signature, with an even clearer view. For the past decade or so, much of my work with sensory connections has focused on using smaller and smaller connections, with smaller and smaller sub-components of signatures. (I’ve previously talked about this as signature scales, from a large-scale full signature to small-scale sub-components.)

Summary: That was a quick overview of roughly two decades of work. For those of you developing sensory techniques yourself, I hope this gave you some ideas. And for everyone else, I hope you enjoyed seeing how I built the tools I use to explore energy.

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

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Posted in Fundamentals of Conscious Magick | 4 Comments »

What I’m Learning from Creating Sensations with Energy

Monday, March 13th, 2017

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

I’m developing energy techniques to create obvious sensations, both to demonstrate that energy is real (to clients, to skeptics, to myself), and as a measurable task to focus on as I develop my skills. This post is about that testing and what I learned last week as I tested variations of the technique.

I’m using the same exercise as at the Energy Geek Meetup last month: Blindfold your partner (or just have them face away from you), send energy to either their head or their hips, verify that they feel the energy where you were sending it. I lay out the details here.

For years, I’ve known I should test my techniques, make sure each is working so I can confidently build on it. But I’ve felt such resistance, such fear of failing, that I’ve rarely done good testing. But actually testing and improving my techniques feels amazing. (Most of this post is technical, not narrative, so the excitement probably doesn’t show all the time. But I’m quite excited.)

In this most recent testing last week, I varied two aspects of the technique: Where in my aura I built the energy, and how open my shields were. My notes are below.

Aura: Use Deeper Layers

The energy around the body isn’t one uniform thing. It has layers. You can think of them as going out from the body, though to really grasp these layers you need to think in 4 dimensions.

A great deal of my work in the past decade has focused on accessing deeper layers of the aura (or biofield). It seems that changes to the deeper layers are more powerful: When I do a healing session, the deeper I go in their energy field, the faster and more pronounced the results are. So these deeper layers are a prime candidate to test when developing any energy technique.

I tested building energy in two layers: One superficial, which is the default layer that engages when I think about building energy; and one deep, the layer I normally focus on in healing sessions, that requires extra effort to engage.

I tested the superficial energy first. Didn’t work. We tried it 2 times, the receiver got both wrong. I hadn’t expected the superficial energy to work, so I took that as confirmation and moved on. (I’m assuming the sensations were placebo.)

Then I tested deeper energy 8 times. The receiver got 6 correct, 1 incorrect, and 1 where she didn’t feel anything. She also felt the sensations much quicker, and somewhat more strongly, than with the superficial energy’s placebo sensations. Good results.

A little statistics: Let’s discard the time when the receiver didn’t feel anything, and just focus on correct vs incorrect. She was correct 6/7 times. Since each guess is 50/50, you’d expect her to get about half correct by random chance. To get 6 out of 7 correct is about a 10% chance (math below). That’s good enough for a psychology paper, and it’s good enough for me too (for now).

Math: Here’s how I ballpark the stats in my head: If she went 6/6, that would be a 1 in 64 chance (2^6 = 64). But she went 6/7. There are 7 possible ways to get 6/7 correct (any one of the trials could be incorrect), so doing that is a 7 in 64 chance, or about 10%. (If anyone has better math, please leave a comment.)

So that’s my first result: Superficial energy is relatively ineffective at producing sensations. Deeper energy is much more effective. (I’m meeting with another friend next week to replicate these results.)

Shielding: Fully Open

Shielding blocks energy. I normally have shielding up, so I don’t pick up energy from the people near me.

It turns out, shielding also blocks the energy I build in my body. That was the finding from the last Energy Geek Meetup, when I forgot to open my shielding and couldn’t get the demo to work.

For the testing above, I fully opened my shields, so my energy could flow out. But I had an idea: What if I shield my body, but open my shielding around my hand? Could that help my receiver be even more accurate, since they would only receive energy from my hand, and not get any ambient energy from the rest of my body?

To test it, I closed my shield, then connected to my right arm and focused on opening my shielding there. This was my first time doing this, shielding only part of my body, so it’s possible I made a mistake here, but my body’s shielding still felt closed even as my arm felt open.

Then I built energy throughout my body (using the deeper layer energy) and sent it to my hand. It felt odd, like my energy had to find new paths from my abdomen to my hand, like the paths it normally took were blocked. What gives? Shielding goes around my body, not inside it, so it shouldn’t block my own energy within my body.

I’m not sure what was happening. Maybe the energy takes a straight-line path through the air to my hand? Maybe it flows over the surface of my body, rather than inside it? I have more exploration to do, but this showed me there’s something I don’t understand about how energy flows from one part of the body to another.

We did 2 tests like this, with my shield only open near my right hand. She got both wrong. I took that to mean that partially opening shields doesn’t work. (Maybe I can solve this once I understand what happened, but it’s low priority.)

So that’s the second result: It seems to be necessary to fully open my shielding in order to send energy effectively.

Finding My Calling

Talking about this work feels different. Better. More concrete than other work I’ve done. I had expected it to be hard, but actually it was easy. The exercises in this post took about 15 minutes to do.

Now that I’m started testing techniques, I’m excited to test (and improve) sensory connections, communication with spirits, and all the other work I do.

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

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Posted in Advanced Conscious Magick | 1 Comment »

Crystals and Energy: A Placebo-Controlled Exercise

Monday, March 6th, 2017

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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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Posted in Learning Magick | 1 Comment »

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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Posted in Experiments | 1 Comment »

5-Minute Scientific Energy Exercises

Sunday, February 19th, 2017

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

The Energy Geek Meetup is this Wednesday. We’ll be doing energy exercises based on the methods used in modern science, to make sure we’re actually using energy (and not placebo). Here are three easy exercises you can try at home, no equipment required.

#1: Do You Feel Energy?

We’ve all sent energy to a partner, and had them feel it. Now let’s make that exercise more scientific.

(All of these exercises are for two people. One sends energy, the other receives.)

If the receiver knows what the sender is doing, the sensations might be caused by suggestion and placebo, rather than energy. So the receiver should wear a blindfold ($3 at Walgreens), or face away from the sender for the full 5 minutes of the exercie. Also, many people change their breathing when building energy, so the receiver should wear headphones (playing white noise) or earplugs. This applies for all these tests.

This test has five 1-minute rounds. Here’s how each round works:

  • Sender taps receiver’s shoulder and says, “Round X starting,” so the receiver knows.
  • Sender then flips a coin. Heads = Send energy, Tails = Do nothing. (Note: This needs to happen after the sender speaks — we don’t want them sounding different in the sending vs placebo conditions.)
  • Sender sends (or does nothing) for one minute. (Use a clock.) Hover your hand a few inches away from them, don’t touch them, and don’t say anything.
  • Receiver says what they feel, and says if they think they’re feeling energy. It’s fine if you feel things that aren’t energy, too, just try to give a clear yes / no on, “Do you think you’re feeling energy?” (Sender, don’t say or ask anything. If the receiver doesn’t say anything for the whole minute, that means they didn’t feel anything.)

Why do these 1-minute rounds? Because sometimes it takes a few moments to feel energy. Sure, if a person knows the energy is coming and they expect to feel it, then this combination of energy and placebo can produce instant results. But when a person isn’t sure that energy is coming, it often takes a few moments.

I tested this exercise last weekend, except I wasn’t doing 1-minute rounds. Instead, I just waited some amount of time, then sent energy, and waited for the receiver to feel it. But there was a delay in feeling sensations, so it wasn’t clear if the sensations were from my energy or not. Would they have felt those sensations anyway? Hard to say. That’s why I added the 1-minute rounds, so there’s a clear timeframe for when energy is happening.

If this doesn’t work: It’s easier to send energy via physical contact than through the air. Try touching the receiver to send energy. (Touch them without sending energy for the placebo.) This isn’t as solid as hovering your hand, but it’s still a good exercise, and still far better than an exercise with no placebo.

Note: If you haven’t practiced with this person before, first practice sending energy without any blindfold. Let the receiver learn what your energy feels like when they know it’s coming. This will help them distinguish the ordinary sensations in their body (that occur during placebo rounds) from the sensations caused by your energy.

#2: Where Do You Feel Energy?

This exercise is mostly for receivers. It’s about feeling energy in different locations in the body.

Some people always feel energy in their head, regardless of where the energy enters their body. (Or they always feel it in their chest, or some other single location.) So let’s practice feeling where the energy is in the body.

Identify four locations. For example, head, bicep, chest, and stomach. We’ll randomize the location using two different coins (like a penny and a nickel), so make a chart like this:

  • Penny – H, Nickel – H = Head
  • Penny – H, Nickel – T = Bicep
  • Penny – T, Nickel – H = Chest
  • Penny – T, Nickel – T = Stomach

As before, the receiver is blindfolded, and the sender announces 1-minute rounds. But now, the sender always sends, and randomly determines the location. (Hover your hand over that location, don’t touch the receiver.) The sender says where they feel energy. Repeat 5-10 times.

#3: Feeling Types of Energy

So far, we’ve been feeling the presence (or absence) of energy. But energy isn’t just one thing — there are many types of energy. For this exercise, pick 2 types of energy. For example, you can try:

  • Two emotions, such as excited and sad. When the sender builds energy, they should focus on a memory that brings up that emotion. (Pick two emotions that feel different in the body, like excited and sad, rather than two that feel similar, like excited and nervous.)
  • Energy for two different tasks, such as the energy used in a healing session and the energy used to help oneself focus. (Again, pick two very different energies — if you pick two energies used in healing sessions, they might feel similar.)

First practice without blinding, letting the receiver know which energy you’re sending. Receivers, try moving the energy into yourself then to different parts of your body, your head, chest, etc. See how it feels in each location, and see where the two energies feel the most distinct and identifiable. You’re learning to send and read these two types of energies.

Then add blinding, using the same procedures as above. Flip a coin to choose the type of energy. Let the receiver feel it, work with it, and identify it. Repeat 5-10 times.

How Did It Go?

What worked? What didn’t?

Some of these exercises might not work right away. That’s OK. In fact, that’s the point: To learn, we have to try things that are difficult, things that might fail. Only then can we grow our skills to rise to that challenge.

The Energy Geek Meetup

The Energy Geek Meetup is for practitioners who want to take their energy skills and confidence to the next level. We’ll do exercises just like these ones together, in a supportive community. 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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Building Confidence in Energy: How I Tested a Technique in 30 Minutes

Sunday, January 8th, 2017

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

Anecdotal evidence has never been enough for me. I doubt: Was the result just coincidence? Placebo? I’ve always wanted the certainty that comes from scientific testing, but that sounded so hard. Daunting. Maybe impossible.

Then I tested sending energy with a friend. It took 30 minutes. It was fun, and we both came away with more confidence. Here’s how I did it:

  • The test is to send and feel energy. One person sends, the other receives.
  • The receiver wears a blindfold and earphones with white noise, so they can’t see the sender or hear their footsteps or their breathing.
  • The sender chooses a region of the body (chest, stomach, shoulder, head, etc), hovers their hands about 6″ away from that part of the receiver’s body, and sends energy. There is no physical contact. The receiver says when and where they feel energy.

The results were great. Both of us consistently identified when energy was being sent, and where it was being sent, correctly. We came out of it much more confident in our practices.

I did a placebo control, hovering my hand without building energy. The receiver (correctly) didn’t feel anything when I didn’t build energy.

And my partner did a fun test. I was the receiver, standing up so my partner could get to my front and side. I felt energy in my chest, said so, and heard her voice to my left saying, “Correct.”

I replied, “But I felt it in my chest, and you’re standing to my left, so I guess that’s a miss.”

She explained, “No. My hand is by your chest. But I’m standing to your left, just in case you’re hearing my footsteps. You got it right.” It was clever and memorable, and increased our confidence in our energy techniques.

Experiences like this are what make me so passionate about testing energy techniques and about the Energy Geek Meetup.

About the Meetup

Note: I wrote this post and the next few posts in preparation for the Energy Geek Meetup. They’re all about testing energy techniques. The testing in this post is from 2014, I think, it was one of the first close-to-rigorous tests I did.

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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Overwhelmed by Crowds? Here’s How I Block Energy

Monday, September 12th, 2016

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Friends who feel energy sometimes complain about feeling overwhelmed or drained, particularly in crowds. I sometimes help by shielding them, closing them off from outside energy.

Today, I want to share some reasons to shield, the technique I use, and three side effects to watch out for (and how to handle them).

Why Block Energy

Occasionally I forget to close my shields, and I walk through San Francisco open to the energy around me. It’s fairly mild, but I feel more tired and less focused when I absorb that energy. Remember, it’s not the quantity of energy that matters, but rather the signature (or type) of energy, and absorbing the random energy around me shifts my body’s energy to a different signature than it usually is, making me feel odd and off.

Some energy-sensitive people can feel overwhelmed by crowds. Part of this is psychological, just feeling overwhelmed by the noise and interactions of a party or crowded street. But based on testing, part of it seems to be the actual biofield energy of all those people — I’ve set up shields for three friends, and all of them reported that, with the shield blocking the energy, the overwhelmed-ness significantly decreased.

Depending on your practice, you may also run into aggressive spirits that want to drain your energy or otherwise bother you. These shielding techniques are effective for that, too. (That’s what I developed them for, actually.)

How I Block Energy

Short answer: Find all the openings in my biofield (or aura), all the places where energy or connections could enter, and close them.

Start by thinking about the openings, where energy could enter your body. If you mostly use visualizations, you can picture this as pores around your energy body. Then picture them closing, either as a lid covering each of them, or as each pore clamping down, like a fist or sphincter closing.

If you pursue Direct Magick, you’ll learn sensory connections. We use them to feel ethereal and energetic structures, such as these open pores. To shield, I feel around, find a pore, and while feeling that pore with my sensory connections, I close it, either with the visualization above, or with other Direct Magick methods. Then I find the next pore, and repeat.

If we’re just closing the pore with the visualization, why bother with the sensory connection? Because shielding has two steps: Find the opening, and close it. We’re using sensory connections to make the “find the opening” step conscious, so we can step through it, find openings we might otherwise miss, and close them. With a few months of practice, this more thorough method of finding openings can become unconscious and automatic, and we can return to just a visualization (or other focused intent) and still get the more thorough shielding.

As you get better with sensory connections, you’ll be able to create smaller and smaller sensory connections to find smaller and smaller openings. This will let you close those smaller openings, creating a more effective, less-permeable shield.

Note that I’m not creating a big glow of energy around me. This isn’t about projecting my energy out, or creating a shell of energy. It’s about finding and closing the spots where energy or connections can enter me. More discussion here.

Handling Side Effects

Three stories here:

The first time I shielded a friend, I closed all her open connections as effectively as I could. But she used some ethereal software for psychic intuitions, and I closed her connections to that software too — there were too many connections to investigate each one, so I just closed everything. The result: Her psychic intuitions turned off. The solution was easy, I just re-opened those particular openings, her psychic software reconnected, then I partially closed those openings so they were only open enough for the psychic software’s connections, and nothing else.

The second friend I did this for, I knew to look for her ethereal software. But a week later, she texted me from a dance, “I can’t feel anyone.” She meant, she normally feels the energy of the people she’s dancing with — that’s her favorite part of the event. I connected to her and undid the shield, opening her up, and she felt the energy of the dance again. Long-term, she’ll need to learn to open and close her shields herself — I’ve set up some ethereal software to do that for her, but we haven’t gotten around to teaching her to use it, so I can’t say how it’s working yet. But if you learn to shield yourself, you’ll be able to open whenever you want, so just realize to open when you want to feel the energy of an event.

The third example is from myself, and long-time readers already know it. In my early 20s, I explored erotic energy with good results. Then I took a few months off, learned shielding (among other things), and the erotic energy stopped working. It wasn’t until years later, when I thought to open my shields, that erotic energy started working again. Easy to fix, but you need to know to do it.

Summary

That’s how and why I use shielding, and how to handle the side effects I’ve encountered.

If you have questions or other side-effects, leave a comment below.

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

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Posted in Beginning Conscious Magick | 4 Comments »

Beyond Tantra: Intermediate Erotic Energy Techniques (Class Notes)

Monday, August 1st, 2016

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I’m teaching a class on erotic energy techniques — ways to increase your pleasure, your partner’s pleasure, or the connection you two share. This post is my notes for the class.

If you’re in the San Francisco Bay Area, the class is Thursday Aug 11, 7-9pm at Wicked Grounds (8th and Folsom in SF). RSVP on Facebook. It’s free, just buy something from the cafe, and give me feedback to help improve the class.

What is Erotic Energy?

Even among energy healers and magick practitioners, “energy” has many meanings: Emotional state (“He’s so happy, his energy is really up”), social vibe (“This party has great energy”), or self-suggestions (“Visualize a successful business, put your energy into it”).

In this class, we’re talking exclusively about biofield energy, the sort of energy used in energy healing. If you’re thinking of a phenomenon and want to know if it’s biofield energy or another meaning, ask yourself, “If I couldn’t see or talk to the person, if our only interaction was the energy through a soundproof door, would this phenomenon still happen?”

Erotic energy is using biofield energy to enhance sexual experiences. It can be as simple as helping yourself or your partner relax and get more in the mood, to deepening connection by feeling one another’s energy, to creating energy orgasms. We’ll cover all that in this class.

Pre-Requesites: Building and Moving Energy

This class assumes you’re familiar with building energy in your body and moving it around. If you’re not, see this energy meditation. (We’ll quickly practice this in class.)

Easy Erotic Energy

Energy has different types. I call them “signatures,” other terms include “frequency” and “color.” Our goal is to build energy in an aroused, turned-on signature, and send that to our partner.

Here’s the easiest approach: Get turned on. Focus on how that feels in your body while building energy. This usually builds energy matching your turned-on state. Then visualize sending that energy into your partner.

Where to Send It?

When I first explored erotic energy, I expected to send the energy to my partner’s genitals. It turns out, this has only a small effect. Instead, based on my testing, sending energy to your partner’s head creates the strongest sensations. Try other places too, like their heart.

Visualizations

The point of a visualization is to communicate your intent to your unconscious mind. Visualizations are usually symbolic, rather than literal explanations of what the energy does. As far as biofield energy is concerned, we’re building energy in our body’s aroused signature, and any of these visualizations should do roughly the same thing. Use whatever visualization speaks to you.

Visualizations can also have an important psychological impact, and they can be fun to share with your partner.

A few suggestions:

  • Fire, red light, or anything that says “passion.”
  • Place your hands on different parts of your partner’s body, and visualize a flow of energy between them.
  • Suggestion from my LGBTQ friends: An energetic dick.

Summary

That’s the beginner portion of this class: Get turned on, build energy, send it to your partner.

Intermediate Techniques

Debugging: Open Your Shields

For a year in my early 20s, erotic energy just worked. Then I moved across the country, didn’t date for a few months, and did a lot of my own work around energy. When I had the chance to try erotic energy again, it didn’t work anymore. Years later, I figured out one of the main reasons: I had begun focusing on shielding, to block energy from flowing into my body (from other people, and occasionally from malicious people or spirits). My shielding also blocked my energy from flowing out to my partners.

If you do shielding, try reversing the visualization to open. If you don’t do shielding, you might want to start — most people find it helps them. Here’s a post on easy shielding techniques, and some more intermediate posts.

Note: Visualizing opening to your partner often has a strong psychological component as well. Most classes don’t distinguish between the psychological component vs the biofield component of this exercise.

Feeling Your Partner

Instead of building energy, quiet your energy. This doesn’t mean that you enter a low-energy state, it means you make your energy steady, so it’s not shifting. Now let your partner build their energy, and let it flow into you. Feel it. Because your energy is quiet, you’ll be able to notice their energy more clearly. Have them try exercises from this class.

Note: This is related to sensory connections, one of the foundational techniques of Direct Magick. More exercises here.

Energizing Sex Toys

Do you have an object that will enter someone’s body? Fill it with energy first. You can even do blind testing, where one partner energizes some toys then leaves the room, and the other partner feels each of them to see which is energized.

Energy Orgasms

I’ve had partners experience spontaneous orgasm just from energy. (They were dressed with no grinding or other genital stimulation.) I’ve experienced them too. I don’t have a reliable technique that works every time with every person, but energy orgasm seems to be related to an overwhelming amount of energy, and energy in the head seems to matter more than energy anywhere else. In men, energy orgasm doesn’t seem to cause ejaculation.

Different Types of Energy

Try feeling different types of arousal (or other states) in your body. Focus on those feelings while building energy. This should build a different type of energy.

Now, feel your partner while they do this exercise. Focus on how their energy feels.

Here’s where this becomes advanced: Instead of focusing on your own body’s turn-on, focus on the feeling of your partner’s energy (its signature). Build energy in that state, see how that feels in you, and how it feels to them.

If you can remember energy signatures from one day to the next, try building energy for the state you or they want to be in, rather than the state you’re currently in.

Another suggestion from LGBTQ friends: Now that you’re building energy in another person’s signature, try matching the signature of male-bodied and female-bodied people, and see how they feel different.

Attending the Class

If you’re in the San Francisco Bay Area, the class is Thursday Aug 11, 7-9pm at Wicked Grounds (8th and Folsom in SF). RSVP on Facebook. It’s free, just buy something from the cafe, and give me feedback to help improve the class.

Reminder: Double-Blind Test Still Going

Only 2 more weeks to participate in the double-blind sigil testing. It’s a great way to increase your confidence in your abilities.

If you tried one sigil, please try the other one too. The data is far more useful if we see how you respond to both sigils. Plus, once this ends, do you really want to have only tried the placebo?

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

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Posted in Energy Healing | 1 Comment »

What Is the Biofield?

Sunday, June 26th, 2016

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Energy healing acts on the biofield, using biofield energy. But what is the biofield?

Short answer: It’s the body’s natural energy field, produced by living cells. The term was coined in 1992 by researchers at an NIH conference. It refers to the “energy” of energy healing modalities such as Reiki, Therapeutic Touch, Chi Gung, and many more.

Long answer: That’s a definition, not an explanation. What is the biofield?

Before I start, let me say: All of this is speculative. It’s my current best understanding, but I’ve updated that understanding in the past, and probably will again in the future. None of this is established science, and other energy workers and researchers would probably disagree with some parts.

Cells seem to emit some sort of energy field. The signature of this energy (its state, sometimes called a “color” or “frequency”) seems to correspond to the state of the cells. That is, healthy cells emit a different signature of energy than inflamed cells, and both emit a different signature than cells under attack from an auto-immune disorder, and so on.

Some people ask, “Isn’t it possible that you already know the person’s condition, and are just feeling what you expect to feel in their energy?” And it’s hard to rule that out completely — in fact, our expectations influence all our senses. But like many energy workers, I’ve had the experience of feeling a person’s biofield, not knowing their condition, feeling an inflamed energy in their knee or other area, and having them confirm what I had sensed. That gives me confidence that something real is happening here.

Normally, energy flows from the cells to the biofield, and the state of the cells determines the state of the biofield. But it also works the other way: Altering the biofield seems to influence the state of those cells. When I’m developing new biofield techniques, I’ll usually start with the tissues involved in a condition, sense their biofields, then figure out what signature to set each of those biofields to. When I do that, I like to think of the biofield as inhibiting or promoting the cell’s processes. (Which process depends on the particular energy signature.) Is that how it actually works? I can’t say for certain, and I’d like to collaborate with biologists to verify that someday. But that model leads me to useful techniques, which is another way of saying that it makes non-obvious, useful predictions that turn out to be accurate.

What about the shape of the biofield? It’s easy to imagine it as just a cloud of energy. Part of the biofield is like that, but as I’ve explored it, I’ve found energetic pathways and structures beneath that shapeless energy, between the energy and the cells. When I adjust someone’s biofield (changing the signature of their energy), if I also sink those changes deeper into the pathways (closer to cells), I find it produces faster, stronger results.

So, those are the moving pieces: A cloud of energy and some energetic pathways to cells. Normally, the cells produce this energy, and it flows from cells through the pathways to the energy cloud. Energy workers change the signature of the cloud, which feeds back to influence cells. And by sinking those changes deeper into the pathways, we see a larger, faster influence.

OK, but what is the biofield, in terms of physics and biology? I have no idea. I don’t think today’s physics can explain the biofield, I think we’ll need new physics, and as a non-physicist, I’m going to stop there. A major part of Healing Lab’s mission is to demonstrate phenomena that will get physicists interested and open up collaborations to actually answer those questions. For more, see the vision.

As a closing thought, asking “what is the biofield” is a bit like asking “what is magnetism?” Here’s Richard Feynman explaining why he can’t answer that:

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

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Posted in Energy Healing | 11 Comments »

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