The key to learning energy is simple. It’s the same as the key to learning most skills: Practice every day.
Fifteen minutes a day is better than two hours, once a week. But we’re all busy. No one will notice if we skip a day, then another, then another. So how can you design an energy practice you’ll actually follow?
Here’s how I practice, that’s been working for me for more than a decade.
Daily Baseline
Here’s only recipe I’ve found for practicing during busy periods of my life: Find something useful to do with energy. Something that gives a good result for the effort, that solves a problem you want to solve.
This list will grow over time. For me, it includes helping when I or friends have pain, nausea, insomnia, a cold, anxiety, along with making just about any decision (manifesting and psychic intuitions).
For someone starting out, it might just include times you want to become calmer and more relaxed. But the principle is the same: Figure out the situations where you want to use energy, learn to notice when they arise, and use your energy techniques to help.
Stretching and Growing
When I learn (or develop) a new energy technique, it’s often a stretch for me to do it. It’s too much effort for me to want to use to solve a problem. It’s not ready for the daily baseline yet.
I typically have one technique I’m working on that’s challenging and tiring, but that I can do successfully with focus. This is my growth edge.
At the start of this year, my growth edge was a technique to see deeper into a person’s energy field. I practiced looking at my own energy field with it every day or two. After a month, I got good enough with the technique to use it in healing sessions, slowly and deliberately. After another month, it became comfortable to use in healing sessions. At that point, it stopped being my growth edge, and became something I use for practical purposes during my day, and I picked another technique to practice as my growth edge.
What if you’re new to energy? It may be that everything is your growth edge. Go through the energy meditation, and notice which steps feel comfortable and which are a stretch. Maybe you can build energy, but moving it is slow, and you can only quiet it with complete focus — so moving and quieting are your growth edges. Pick one of them, practice it every day until it becomes comfortable, then start practicing the other one.
A few notes:
How long should you practice? Until you feel mentally tired, like after taking a test or completing a complex project. I often practice to the point of exhaustion, but I’ve been doing this for years and know my limits. Like physical exercise, look for fatigue, but don’t push your limits until you have some experience.
Also like physical exercise: If you skip a day or even a week, that’s OK. The point isn’t to be perfect in doing it every day. The point is to resume practicing as soon as you can, so you keep improving.
Make all the decisions now: What technique do you want to practice? When will you practice it? For me right now, I practice on my morning walk from the train to the office. But decide in advance. Don’t rely on yourself to just pick a time that day.
If you learn a technique with multiple new steps, like sensory connections, start by practicing just the first step. It’ll be hard, but practice it 3 or 10 or 100 times and it’ll become easy. Then add the second step, practice until it becomes easy, then add the third, and so on. It can feel like slow progress each day, but keep notes and include the date, and after a few months you’ll see the tremendous progress you’ve made.
(Want to try all the steps right away? That’s fine, it won’t hurt anything. I encourage you to discover your limits for yourself, instead of taking my word for it.)
As you practice a new technique, new ethereal muscles will awaken. Later, we’ll learn techniques to awaken them faster, which will reduce the number of repetitions before a technique becomes comfortable.
Energy Games: Discover Your Strengths and Weaknesses
This is a new addition in the past couple of years. It’s been an amazing boost to my rate of learning.
The goal is to know what’s working reliably, what’s working sometimes, and what’s not working, so you can focus your practice where it will matter the most.
Get together with a friend, play some energy games. Record your results, but have fun with it — the point is to learn, like soccor practice, not the SATs.
Let the results guide your other practice. For example: If you’re great at sending energy but have difficulty discerning energy, then focus your practice on techniques that help with discerning energy: Quieting your energy, and later, sensory connections.
(I’ll be posting more games as we play them in my year-long energy class.)
Try to do this every week. Definitely do it every month. There’s no substitute for objective data.
What if your friends don’t practice energy? Teach them. Start with this meditation for building, moving, and quieting energy. Then play this game.