Lesson 1

 

CONNECTION

 

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 In this lesson, you will take steps toward an unforced, natural connection with your own energy system, one that allows you to be drawn consciously into its activity. This is the art of using energy-active positions on your body as pathways into meditation and expanded consciousness.

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Getting Started: An Experiment in Using Attention
Your most important tool in practices that link you consciously with your energy field is your ability to use your attention. When you take it down to its essential ingredients, attention is made of feeling, awareness, and energy. When you use your attention in a purposeful way, you are using this most basic bundle of elements, and you might be surprised at what your attention is capable of with just a little schooling.

Lesson 1 — Exercise 1: Introduction and Warm Up

Let’s start with a short experiment to see how you are using this bundle of feeling, awareness, and energy that we call attention. This begins the process of working with the three main elements of energetic connection: 

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• Making a feeling, or kinesthetic connection; 

• Relaxing your attention;

• Going into a neutral state of mind in which you are not trying to make anything happen and not trying to keep anything from happening,

 

Let me walk you through it, using a simple example:

 

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Lesson 1—Exercise 2: A Journey Through Your Body

The small skill set you used in our little experiment is a simple key to energy connection. It’s going to require some practice, so let’s see what happens if you apply this approach to your whole body. There will be plenty of time later in our course to go into how this works, but for now, let’s get some experience under our belts.

 

 

When you are finished with this journey through your body, take some time to recall a few things: 

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• How easily were you able to move your awareness from place to place in your body? 

• Where in your body did you have an easy connection? 

• Where was it difficult or impossible to make a connection? 

• Did you fall asleep? 

• How do you feel now? 

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Homework: Take an Energywork Inventory
Consider this: you are probably already doing some form of energywork, maybe without even thinking of it in those terms. Take a little inventory of things you do that have a subtle energetic component:

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• Include all hands-on and hands-off energywork modalities like Therapeutic Touch, Reiki, Polarity Therapy; 

• List subtle energy therapies like acupuncture and homeopathy;

• Include all spiritually oriented practices like meditation, prayer, chakra exercises, toning, breathing exercises, chanting, singing hymns, and overtone singing;

• Don’t leave out practices that slow down and intensify your perception of the energy movement in your body and around it, such as yoga, t’ai chi, and qi gong; 

• Add to these all forms of spiritual ritual you might be involved with, such as sweat lodges, vision quests, ritual movement, sacred dance and walk;

• And don’t forget massage, which often helps you shift into deep relaxation, essentially an altered state of consciousness. 

What all of these practices have in common—and the reason they have the potential to stimulate spiritual process—is that each of them steps up the interaction between your energy field and your body. They enliven the interplay between your conscious and subconscious processes. The same goes for the practices you are learning in this course. 

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Our Next Lesson: Balance and Diving Deeper

In the next lesson, we will explore what happens when we come into more energetic balance. There will also be a review of the major elements of connection-making, as well as new exercises that deal with the issue of energetic polarities and balance.

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When you're ready for Lesson #2,  click here.