Quieting your energy is the first step to observing energy in a client’s body, in your own body, or anywhere else. That’s why we talk so much about quieting energy.
But last week, I was teaching my partner Sophia about quieting her energy, and she asked me questions that pushed me to explore more deeply and understand quieting more precisely.
I want to share those new insights with you today.
How I normally explain quieting
Here’s how I normally explain quieting: It’s making your energy slow and steady, like a placid lake, flat on top but still full of water (or energy).
But that explanation wasn’t working for her. She was pulling her energy back into her body, which isn’t quieting and doesn’t help to observe a client’s energy. And she was making her energy tense, trying to hold it perfectly still, which it turns out prevents you from sensing energy.
The problem was, that explanation focused on the intent and the feeling of quieting. But Sophia wanted to know what was actually happening under the hood, so to speak, so that she could develop her own visualization.
That’s exactly what I tell students to do: Understand what’s happening and make your own visualization. Later, after you discard visualizations, you can use that understanding to develop whole new movements with energy.
That’s what I’ve done dozens of times. It’s how I developed the techniques that I use today. It’s something I should have encouraged. But I noticed myself resisting her question, wanting to give the same standard answers I give in all my classes.
Then I realized why: I didn’t know the answer. I’ve quieted my energy perhaps a million times by now, but I developed the technique before I had the level of understanding I do today. And it worked for me, so I never went back and figured out the details. That was about to change.
What quieting my energy actually does
I carefully watched my energy body as I quieted the energy of my hand several times. Here’s what I noticed:
When I quiet the energy, I’m acting on the energy inside my hand, produced by the bones and tendons and nerves and muscles of my hand.
My energy body extends outside my hand. But these emanations are not as solid as the energy body in my hand. Think of the emanations like hair, rather than the main energy body.
When I quiet my energy, I’m focusing on my main energy body, not the emanations. By making the energy body of my hand quiet, the emanations that extend out from my hand become quiet too. But if I just quiet the emanations without quieting the energy body of my hand, it feels weird and bad. I can’t say for certain what happens there, or that there is no utility to exploring that, but I’ve learned to mostly trust it when things feel weird and bad unless I have a reason to believe otherwise.
Before quieting my energy, the energy body of my hand has a bunch of different energy in different signatures. The different signatures come from different tissues. Think of it like a pot of soup, if you’ve just poured in a bunch of different vegetables but haven’t stirred it up yet. There are clumps of energy from my bones, areas with mostly energy from muscles, some spots with more energy from nerves, and so on, partially mixed together but not at all smooth.
If I receive energy into this rough mixture, it will be hard to notice the details of the energy I receive, because everything is already so rough and uneven.
When I quiet the energy, those signatures all become even. My best guess is that they are mixing together, though if I focus on mixing them that means I’m focusing on the action of stirring, not on smoothing. So the sense I get is that I want to focus on making all that energy smooth, and let a tiny bit of stirring happen unconsciously.
My best guess is that, in addition to mixing the signatures, there’s also a little bit of additional energy that gets applied to smooth everything out. Like icing to smooth the top of a cake.
In terms of layers of the energy body, quieting happens both at the superficial layer where energy flows, and in the deeper layers where there are more structural components to the energy body. It seems to primarily happen at the superficial flowing layer and the structure layers that are right next to it, but when I watch the deeper layers, there is a slight shift there too.
I’m curious about quieting those deeper layers and seeing what happens. but working with those deeper layers is an advanced technique, not something I would teach to beginners, and I haven’t gotten around to exploring it myself yet.
As I explored all this and answered Sophia’s questions, she came to understand quieting too. She’s pondering her visualizations and her practice. And I saw how helpful these answers are, even to people just starting to explore how to quiet their energy, and will be adding them to my classes and books.
Ask questions Sunday on the live stream
Every weekend on Facebook, I geek out about energy on my live stream, Ask an Energy Scientist.
This weekend, I’ll be covering what it really means to quiet your energy. I know some of this is advanced, and I’ll go through it again on the live stream, answering your questions as I go.
That’s this Sunday at 11:00 a.m. Pacific. To join, first sign up for my Facebook group, Healing Lab Energy Dojo.
Looking forward to talking with you!