you play with this, at a certain point in your experimentation, you will feel done or else drawn to another tool. Keep tuning in to the body part to see how it is feeling and what it wants. The goal is not necessarily to fix the problem but to respond to it, to open to what your body is communicating and dialogue lovingly with it using the language of energy.
PRACTICE TIPS
The language of energy is not a foreign language, though it might seem that way at first, if you are used to thinking about your body in chemical, biological terms. Since it is our first language, learning it is a combination of awakening to what you already do to communicate with yourself energetically and of building on that situationally, the way an infant learns language.
•Track all the ways your body communicates with you throughout a twenty-four-hour period. Does it signal with aches or pains? Does it send sensations of hunger or fatigue, aversion or attraction? Do you feel like it pulls the plug or puts you into overdrive to get your conscious attention? Does it fidget or tighten muscles? Does it stumble, drop things, shift your mood, play movies in your head? Like getting acquainted with an infant, explore how your physical self signals desires and needs.
•When stress shows up in your mind or body, take a few minutes to respond with direct energetic communication: tapping, stroking, crooning, or bathing in a soothing color, sound, shape, gesture, or smell. What consolation can you bring it, as you would a screaming infant?
•Several times a day, drop into a sensorimotor experience of the world. Tune in to see, feel, hear, smell, and taste what is unfolding in your now. Turn off thoughts and just focus on direct encounter.
•Spend a few moments describing your parents, grandparents (and even great-grandparents, if you can). What descriptors best fit each of them and their energy? Was Grandma tense and controlling? Was Grandpa expansive and invasive? How do those energetic qualities play out in or influence you?
•Make a list of what gratifies you. Then sort the items into three groups: (1) objects, people, or actions that gratify you through direct experience; (2) ideas that gratify you; and (3) gratification that comes as a result of achieving a goal or aspiration. Notice where most of your gratification comes from. Make an effort to find more moments of direct gratification throughout your day: Taste your food, sink into the comfort of a nap, play with your dog or child with undivided attention. Notice what happens to your sense of connection and gratification when you are multitasking or delaying gratification to power through the moment.
My clients have been all over the map with how they perceive energies. I’ve worked with confirmed skeptics who could feel into their subtle energies with beautiful precision, and I’ve worked with fervent believers who were pretty much tone-deaf to their own inner communications. But with practice, and perhaps some guidance on how to proceed, almost everyone can develop a working ability to perceive energies.
The jumping-off place to learn to perceive subtle energies is to understand that you are already doing it! Your body reacts to danger before your conscious mind has parsed the situation and decided it is dangerous. Your ears pick up vibration and tone of voice and interpret it as attitude when someone is speaking. You know, when someone says, “That’s sick,” whether they mean something is unhealthy or extremely positive (using slang). You can usually tell when someone’s touch is friendly or controlling, reassuring or threatening.
Sensing subtle energies has often been linked to being psychic. But it is more akin to our everyday perceptions. If I can perceive that a washcloth is wet, and easily distinguish between that and a dry one, why wouldn’t I be able to transfer that skill and recognize water element in someone’s being (which I explain in chapter 9) and distinguish dampness or dryness as qualities of someone’s energies?
• • • PLAY WITH IT • • •
Think of five people you know well. Using your instincts and overall impressions, rank them on a range from dry to wet. Who is the driest of the five? Then list the next driest, the one in the middle range, and the two who are most wet.
Try this ranking with other qualities. Among those five people, who is the most contracted and who is more relaxed? Who is the most expansive? Is the most expansive person also the biggest in physical size? Ranking energies and qualities is not based on physical traits alone, but on our sense of someone’s spirit, personality, or energy style.
Who is the most energetic, and how do you rank the five people on a scale from most energetic to the least energetic? You may or may not know why you rank each person the way you do. Are you using active, explicit criteria or pure instinct? Both are valid.
Whenever you notice a trait in someone, explore it in others. Someone may say to you, “Annette lives a very small life.” What does that feel like? Who do you know who lives a bigger life? What do you base that sense on?
We often mix our subjective and objective observations. We mix our perceptions of energies with assessments of behaviors (which are energetic expressions), and we base our perceptions on language as well. It is not cheating to mix and match these.
For example, when I think of a certain friend, the word that comes to mind is steadfast. How would I rank my other friends and acquaintances on that scale of steadfast to unreliable (which describes a certain quality of energy)? When I think about those other friends who are not quite as steadfast, what words characterize their energies most accurately?
EXPLORING SUBTLE ENERGIES: YOUR SENSES
To begin exploring subtle energies more consciously, tune in to your body to sense what is going on energetically. You can use the perceptions of your everyday senses as an entry point: seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and feeling. You may perceive a literal, physical sensation, such as, say, a sudden sensation of cold that makes you shiver, or your perception may be more internal: seeing in your mind’s eye, hearing a sound or voice in your head, feeling a sensation you can recognize but that is not quite physical, tasting something in your mouth or smelling something that you know is not literally there.
You may already have a pretty nuanced ability to perceive using your senses and inner senses. For example, can you see something yellow and recognize whether it is sunshine yellow or sickly yellow? Can you hear a tune in your head and recognize the mood of it? No matter what your starting point, the more you tune in to your perceptions and investigate them, the more nuance you will come to recognize.
Seeing
I am not particularly visual in my seeing. I know what the color is in my mind, but I don’t usually visualize it strongly. My artist friends often see color on an inner canvas, and for them it rarely limits itself to just color: It takes on form, patterns, and dimension.
However, whether a sense is strong or weak for you, consider the quality of it. When you see a color, what do you see about it? Is it bright or dark? Is it still or moving? And if it is moving, how is it moving? Is it a healthy form of that color or one that your mind finds unsettling in some way? Ask similar questions
