This series is about moving beyond visualization, to gain better control of your energy and learn new techniques by consciously guiding the energy.
We’ve covered step by step visualizations and feeling your energy as it moves. This post builds on those. (Part 1, Part 2)
In this step, we’re going to move from watching the energy, to feeling the energy from the inside. A proprioception of energy.
Proprioception: Feeling from the inside
Let’s talk about proprioception.
If you walk across the room, you’ll feel your feet touching the floor, your pants brushing your leg, if you’re fast you might even feel the air against your face. I’ll call these external sensations, mostly feelings of touch.
You’ll also feel internal sensations. How bent your knee is, the angle of your ankle, whether your spine is straight or bent. These are proprioception, the internal sense of how the body is positioned.
It’s the same with energy. There are external sensations of energy, such as tingling or heat or other sensations of energy. They feel the same whether the energy came from you or someone else, like in the energy game. These are like feeling the floor or the breeze.
Our goal is to develop the internal sense of energy. Feeling what it is to move the energy, rather than just feeling the energy moving inside you. We’re after the proprioception of moving your energy.
Feeling your energy proprioception
There’s no real technique to learning this, other than to slow down, try to do it, and practice. You already have an internal sense of moving your energy, it’s a matter of learning to listen to it.
As with the previous lesson, take a step-by-step visualization you know well, and practice it one step at a time.
Try to feel what happens to your energy all through each step. Feel what happens as you begin the visualization, before the energy has responded yet. Feel what happens as your energy begins to respond. Feel what happens leading up to the bodily sensations (the external sensations, equivalent to the floor or breeze). Just practice tuning in to all that.
Here’s an example. When I build energy in my chest and move it to my hand, here’s what I notice:
At the start, right before I feel the energy in my chest, there’s this tension in my energy in my chest. Not in my muscles, in my energy. There are ethereal structures that store the energy produced by my cells, these are what I feel tense briefly before releasing the energy into my chest.
Before the energy moves down my arm, I feel the pathways in my arm open to accept the energy, all the way down to my hand. And in my hand, these same pathways open to store the energy until I’m ready to use it again.
This is what I notice after decades of practice. I didn’t have that level of detail at first, and you don’t need that level of detail to become conscious of your energy. But I hope having that example will help you know the kind of sensations to look for, and how they’re different than the bodily sensations of energy.