Exploring energy starts with observing energy. This month, my year-long class focused on the first technique for observing energy: Making a single sensory connection.
What’s a sensory connection? A connection carries energy. A sensory connection carries a tiny amount of energy from whatever it connects to, like how a thermometer absorbs a tiny amount of heat to measure temperature. The sensory connection allows us to read the energy of different tissues in the body for healing work, and otherwise observe and explore energy.
I’ve written about how to make a sensory connection, but so many great questions came up in this month’s class that I had to revisit the topic. This post builds on that one, so if you haven’t already, read how to make a sensory connection, practice those techniques, then come back.)
As with learning any technique, some of the steps may be new to you. Don’t try to learn them all at once. Instead, take the first step that’s new to you, practice it until it’s comfortable (often for a few days or a week), then continue. If steps 2 and 3 are new, you’d practice steps 1-2 for a week, then when that becomes comfortable, practice 1-3 until it’s comfortable, then practice the whole technique.
1. Make a Connection
Last post, we learned to make a sensory connection by first sending energy, which would cause our unconscious mind to make a connection. Then we visualized a conduit to let us notice the connection that was already there. Finally, we quieted that connection to make it into a sensory connection.
In practice, I don’t send energy first — if I do, then all I feel is that energy I just sent. Instead, I simply make a connection.
To do this: Place your hand on your leg. Create a connection by visualizing the conduit extending from your hand into your leg. Don’t send any energy, just create the connection. Then move your hand 1-3 inches away, maintaining the connection by visualizing the conduit extending.
2. Make a Quiet Connection
Think about a pipe carrying hot water. Even after we turn off the water, the pipe will still be hot. Similarly, a connection that isn’t carrying energy can still have its own energy. To make a sensory connection, we need to quiet that energy.
Quieting the connection’s energy is the same as quieting the energy of your body. Recall your visualization for quieting energy, and how that feels in your body. Start with the energy in your body and extend that sensation down your arm to your hand, then move inch by inch down your connection, quieting it as well.
Once you can comfortably extend a connection and quiet it, try extending an already-quiet connection: Quiet the energy in your hand and create a connection that is already quiet. This saves a step, letting you use sensory connections more quickly once you learn how.
3. Bring Your Awareness into the Sensory Connection
As you quiet the energy in your connection, bring your awareness to the tip of the connection. Right now, that’s inside your leg. Later, we’ll use these same techniques with partners and clients, and the connection will be inside them.
Try moving some energy from your torso into your leg. Use your sensory connection to listen, and notice how that feels in your sensory connection. The sensation won’t be in your palm or your leg — it will be in your sensory connection. Some students think of the sensory connection as a phantom limb, or think of it like a cat’s whiskers, extending your awareness.
What’s actually going on? When you touch an object normally, a signal originates in the nerves of your hand, travels up your arm, and reaches your brain. But if you imagine a feather brushing against your palm, you’ll also likely feel something. That sensation originates in the brain. Similarly, the sensation of energy originates in the brain. Your unconscious mind represents energy as sensations. And as you bring your awareness to the tip of the sensory connection, your unconscious will create sensations to represent that energy to you, as well.
Do this much, and you will be ready to play energy games with sensory connections.