Leading Energy Geek has given me a unique perspective on teaching energy, especially to beginners.
The whole point of Energy Geek is learn energy that gets results, and make sure those results are from energy not imagination. For example: Blindfold your partner and send energy to one of their hands. Don’t tell them which one, and don’t touch them. Using only your energy, get them to feel it. By blindfolding the receiver and relying only on energy (not imagination or expectations), we get the real-world feedback we need to improve.
I hadn’t realized: This also gives me feedback as a teacher. Each month, I teach energy novices to build, move, and feel energy, then they play these games and we see what’s working. I field questions, help them debug their techniques, and then we see the results. It’s great for students, but it’s also been amazing for me as a teacher, to see which lessons work often and which don’t.
Here are a few of the things I’ve learned:
Most people have the capacity to learn energy, even people with no prior experience. It often happens within a single two-hour lesson, but it seems fairly reliable that, when a person comes back for several months, they get 80% or higher success with at least some partners. I’d say that it takes 2-10 hours of experience for most people to learn energy.
Visualizations matter, but not the way you might think. There’s no single correct visualization, but there might be a correct visualization for you. An example: When a student has never felt energy, I ask them to imagine how it might feel, and I give them options (like tingling, heat, pleasant pressure). One student picked tingles, and made a visualization around tingling static electricity. She felt sensations in her body, but didn’t get any success with the games — she was imagining tingling, not engaging energy. But when she was in the receiver role, feeling the other person’s energy, so got fairly high accuracy (meaning she was feeling energy, not imagining it), and she felt the energy as heat (not tingles). She went on like this for around half an hour, succeeding at feeling energy but not making any of her own. Then I had her revise her visualization to represent energy as heat (the way she felt it) rather than tingles. Right away, she started succeeding at sending energy. What happened? It’s not that heat is right and tingles are wrong, it’s that we had to adopt a visualization that spoke to her unconscious mind, which represented energy as heat. It’s not that heat is the one right way to visualize energy, but it was the right way for her. (This type of experience has happened several times, but this was the most striking.)
Often, people who have taken other energy classes get no results when playing games. This tells me that those classes have taught them to focus their attention and tune in to their emotions, but not to engage their chi (which, as a western scientist, I call biofield energy.) With a few hours of training, though, I can usually teach them to get results from biofield energy, too.
Related to that: Exercises that create sensations in one’s own body are often unrelated to energy. So many classes teach people to alter their breathing and focus on part of their body — this is a hypnotic technique that reliably produces odd sensations, with or without energy. I don’t think the teachers realize these sensations don’t correspond to energy — I didn’t fully realize it until I started seeing the results of these games.
Another common exercise unrelated to energy: Use your index finger to almost touch your palms, forehead, or other body part. You’ll feel an odd sensation, called proprioception, which is how the unconscious mind alerts us when it knows we’re about to be touched. It’s even more obvious if a friend almost touches you. But try this: Close your eyes, and tell your friend to pick a part of your body and almost touch it, but don’t tell you where or when, just like we do at Energy Geek. If you don’t already know they’re almost touching you, you won’t feel anything, because the sensations are proprioception, not energy.
(And really, after playing Energy Geek games for a few hours, it’s obvious that creating sensations with energy requires much more than almost touching the person.)
Many exercises are a combination of those two phenomena. For example, almost touch your palms together and focus on the space between them, and you’ll feel an odd tingling. It’s a combination of attention and proprioception, and is also unrelated to energy.
So we have all these classes teaching exercises that aren’t particularly related to energy. And a significant portion of those students are learning to engage their attention, emotional intuition, and other skills, but not biofield energy. Again, I don’t think the teachers realize, it’s probably how they were taught as well.
But a large portion of those students are using energy successfully, despite only having those rigged exercises. They succeed at Energy Geek games right away, at least with some partners. It really is possible, common even, to learn energy by “fake it ’til you make it.”
I’m realizing, energy isn’t hard. It’s not easy — those rigged exercises give the impression that you can learn one visualization and have immediate success at creating sensations with energy, which is simply not the case. But it’s not hard either. It seems to take 10 hours or less for most people to start getting results. Without my guidance it would take longer, and without the feedback from the games it might not happen at all, but really, 10 hours of effort isn’t that much, compared with playing a guitar, riding a bike, or any other skill people routinely learn.
But I’ve also realized how much those rigged exercises do to give people hope and confidence that energy is real and they’re doing it. Which is the next step for me: When immediate success isn’t an option, how can I give students hope and confidence?
Did I share something about energy you hadn’t heard before? Or do you have ideas for instilling hope and confidence? Share in the comments.