Expectations influence experience. This is true for all senses, most famously for wine tasting, but also for energy. Expecting to feel energy can produce the tingling and heat and other sensations we associate with energy. That’s why we play blindfolded energy games in all my classes, to remove expectations and truly sense energy.
I’ve been practicing reading the energy of plants. They’re useful for practicing and testing. I found recently that a store-bought lime had very little energy, while a freshly cut leaf had an obvious energy signature.
While testing this with some other, fresher store-bought fruit, I had a wonderful experience getting beneath my expectations.
I quieted the energy in my hand, extended my awareness into the apple, and felt for the energy. It was very faint, closer to the lime than the freshly cut leaf.
As a control, I touched my shoulder and read the energy there, expecting a clear energy signature from my healthy shoulder. But I felt very little.
Slowing down, I felt for individual signatures and realized that I normally ignore my own energy signatures when reading energy. The thing is, whenever I touch a piece of fruit or a client’s joint or anything else, there’s a little bit of my energy there. But I only want to read the energy of whatever I’m touching, not my own, so I have learned to ignore my own energy.
With that insight, I was able to intentionally pay attention to my energy, and felt a full signature at my shoulder.
It got me wondering. My initial experience of the apple was similar to my initial experience of my shoulder. I wondered if my expectations were the only reason I didn’t notice much energy there.
Focusing on my expectations, I made myself expect to feel energy from the apple, as I have so many times in the past. Talk to myself into it. And I did feel a signature.
But then I felt into the signature more, feeling for details and sensations. They weren’t there. It was like a surface level experience, with nothing beneath it, none of the texture I normally associate with a signature.
Going back to my shoulder, I tried expecting to feel no signature. And I did! The normal sensation of a signature just wasn’t there. But then I felt beneath that experience, the subtle sensations and textures that come with reading a signature. All of those were there.
It was like my expectations influenced the initial sensation of a signature, but not the deeper experience. Like I was learning to feel beneath my expectations.
Will this work when I truly don’t know what to expect? When I genuinely expect the wrong thing, rather than talking myself into it? I don’t know yet. But it was interesting and illuminating, and something I want to explore more in the future.