Body Energy

Everything you sense comes in through the body. Another person's mood when they walk into the room. The feel of a house you have never been in before. The prickle at the back of your neck when someone is looking at you. None of that arrives in your head first. It arrives in your body, and your head catches up a moment later and tries to take the credit.

So before any of the other energy work, I want you to get to know the instrument. Everything else in this area assumes you have.

What body energy actually is

You are made of energy. That is physics, not mysticism. Every cell in you is vibrating, and the whole of you together carries a charge that other people can feel whether they know it or not. When you say someone has a lovely energy, or that a person drained you, you are describing something real that happened between two bodies.

The work here is to make that conscious. To feel your own energy on purpose, to notice when it rises and when it drops, and to keep it where it belongs, which is in you.

The first exercise: the big toes

This is the first thing I give every new student, and it sounds silly right up until you do it. I have watched people roll their eyes at it for forty years and I have watched the same people come back the following week wide eyed.

Sit comfortably with bare feet or socks on. No closed shoes.

Do a slow tension and release from your feet to your head. Tighten your feet for a breath, let them go. Calves, let go. Thighs, let go. All the way up to your face and scalp. This takes two or three minutes and it settles the body so it will listen.

Now bend down and gently scratch both big toes. That wakes up your awareness of them. Sit back, close your eyes, and begin your breathing meditation, and while you breathe, keep your attention on both big toes at the same time.

That is all. Hold it for as long as you can. When your mind wanders, and it will wander within about thirty seconds the first time, notice that it has gone and bring it back to the toes.

Do this every day for a week before you go any further.

What you are teaching yourself is how to put your attention in a chosen part of the body and keep it there. That is the entire foundation of energy control. If you cannot hold your attention in your own big toes, you cannot hold it in your hands for healing, or in your heart when someone needs you steady, or anywhere else. The toes are the training wheels.

The second exercise: the hands and feet

Once the toes are easy, and you will know when they are, add the hands.

Before you sit down, wash your hands and your feet in warm water. As the water runs over them, see healing energy and love soaking into the skin, and see anything heavy or negative you have picked up during the day washing away down the drain. A drop of scented oil in the water helps the picture. Pat them dry slowly.

Then do the tension and release, scratch the soles of both feet and the palms of both hands, and take that awareness of four points, two feet and two hands, into your meditation.

Your hands should come to feel warm and glowing. Your feet may tingle, or feel heavy in a pleasant way. That is your energy, and you are feeling it directly, probably for the first time in your life.

This exercise grounds you very strongly, and it wakes up your hands for the healing work that comes later.

The energy ball

Now the fun one, and the one that convinces the sceptics.

Get into a relaxed state. Cup your hands in front of you as if you are holding a ball about fifteen centimetres across. Gently and slowly bounce your hands toward each other and away again, a few centimetres each way. Keep going, slowly, with your attention in your palms.

At some point, usually within a minute or two, it starts to feel as though there is something between your hands. A ball of cotton wool, people say, or a balloon, something with a little give in it that pushes back very gently when you press in.

You have just made an energy ball.

Everybody can do it. I have never had a student who could not, once they stopped trying to think it into existence and just let their hands find it. Most people laugh out loud the first time, which is exactly the right response.

Play with it. Make it bigger. Make it smaller. Pass it from hand to hand. When you are done, either let it go into the ground or, better, place it over your own heart and let it soak in.

Stop giving it away

Now the part that matters most, and the reason I put this page first.

I hear from a lot of empaths, people who feel what others feel, who tell me they are drained all the time. They go to a family gathering and need two days to recover. They sit with a friend in trouble and come home empty. Nearly always the cause is the same. They are giving their own energy away. It leaks out of them to whoever is nearby, which makes those people feel better and leaves the empath with nothing.

The cruel part is that the people taking it usually feel wonderful around you and want more of you, so the pattern feeds itself.

Once you can feel your own energy in your hands and feet, you can also feel it leaving. You will notice the drop as it happens rather than discovering it in the car on the way home. That awareness is most of the cure. The rest is grounding, which is in the Meditation and Grounding area, and protection, which is in Healing, and both of those assume you have done the work on this page first.

The mistakes people make

Skipping the toes because they seem too basic. The toes are the whole point. Everyone who skips them comes back to them.

Trying too hard. Energy responds to relaxed attention, the way a cat does. Chase it and it leaves.

Doing it once and expecting it to stick. This is a daily practice. A week of ten minutes a day will do more than one heroic hour.

Treating the energy ball as a party trick. It is a diagnostic. If you can feel it clearly, your energy is up. If you cannot feel it one day, that is information about where you are, and the answer is usually rest and grounding.

Where this leads

Once you can feel your own energy and hold it, everything else in this area opens up. Earth energy shows you how to fill up. Water energy shows you how to clear. Sound energy and memory energy show you how to raise it on purpose. Projecting energy shows you how to send it, safely, to someone who needs it.

Learn the instrument first.