This post is about a rarely-taught beginner skill that’s critical to success with energy: Mental Posture.
Why Mental Posture
Ethereal muscles are the parts of your mind that move energy. Think about it this way: The difference between imagining walking and actually walking is engaging your leg muscles. The difference between imagining energy and actually using energy is engaging your ethereal muscles.
If you’ve practiced an energy technique, you will naturally engage your ethereal muscles.
But when learning a new energy technique, your ethereal muscles might not engage. If this happens, you’re left imagining energy without actually moving energy, and nothing works.
To solve this, I teach students to consciously engage their ethereal muscles, so they respond to your visualization.
This skill is called mental posture.
Feeling Your Mental Posture
I taught mental posture in my year-long class this month. At first, no one understood it. So we did an exercise, which I recommend you try now:
Notice how your mind feels right now, reading this. Are you relaxed? Focused? At all fuzzy? Get a sense of what’s happening in your mind, even if you can’t put it into words.
Now say out loud the prime numbers between 1 and 25. Or if that’s easy, do the Fibonacci sequence up to 50. Whatever math is mildly challenging for you.
Now, once again, notice how your mind feels. What’s different? Even if you can’t put it into words, notice how it feels.
This is what I mean by mental posture. The parts of your mind that are engaged, and the way they are engaged. Relaxed reading is one posture. Analytical math is another.
The human mind has a huge (unlimited?) number of mental postures.
We’re interested in the mental posture for engaging our energy.
Finding Your Mental Posture for Energy
If you use energy, you already have this mental posture. It’s what your mind does when you do an energy meditation, channel healing energy, or whatever else you do with energy.
We’re going to learn to consciously, intentionally engage that mental posture.
(If you don’t use energy yet, start with the Step-by-Step Energy Basics.)
Start by noticing how your mind feels right now. Get a sense of it, like you did earlier with the math.
Do your normal energy practice, such as building and moving energy.
(Note: Don’t build energy in your head. If you do, you’ll notice the energy, not the mental posture.)
Once your energy is engaged, notice how your mind feels. Notice what’s different from earlier. This is your mental posture for energy.
Decide how you want to engage this mental posture. Some people like to make a visualization to represent this state. Others like to recall how their mind feels, and find visualizations unnecessary. Some people might have other methods. There’s no right or wrong here, it all comes down to what feels most natural to you.
Once you have your method for engaging this mental posture, try engaging it. Don’t build or move energy, just engage the posture. Notice how that feels.
Whenever I say to engage your mental posture, just use the method you’ve selected.
Using Mental Posture
The short answer: Before doing any energy work, engage your mental posture. Do your energy work normally, maintaining the posture as you go.
The long answer:
Your ethereal muscles move your energy, similar to how your normal muscles move your body.
To successfully move energy, you need your ethereal muscles engaged so they respond to your visualization and intent. If they’re not engaged, you can imagine pictures all you want, but you won’t get any energy.
Mental posture is how we engage ethereal muscles.
For energy techniques you’ve already mastered, your mental posture happens naturally and automatically.
For new energy techniques (even semi-new techniques), we need to consciously engage the ethereal muscles. That’s the technique you developed in the previous section.
With practice, your mental posture will become automatic for that new technique, as well.
Here’s how to do it:
- Engage your mental posture.
- Split your attention between your mental posture and your intent, to help your ethereal muscles receive your intent.
- Let your ethereal muscles move your energy.
Students noticed how much easier this made their new techniques:
Without mental posture, they felt like they were mentally tense as they focused on their intent, and on the whole they were working too hard mentally.
With mental posture, rather than trying to force a change in the world, they could feel themselves applying their will to their ethereal muscles. They were able to relax, and everything became easier.
Even for energy techniques they’ve been using for months, mental posture still made it easier and more relaxed.
So try mental posture next time you’re practicing energy, especially if it’s for a new technique.