How Do You Sense Energy?

In our post, The World of Human Energy, we describe several common ways that people sense energy. We tend to use the senses that are most comfortable to us, our preferred energy senses. Just like some people are more aware of sounds and music, while others are more visually oriented, so our energy preferences tend to follow a similar bias. So, visual people are more likely to see energy than people who are more sound- or touch-oriented.

Probably, for most people, the easiest way to sense energy is kinaesthetically—through touch, warmth or vibration— because that is the sense we developed first as embryos in the womb, before our eyes and ears were formed.

Want to find out how you personally sense energy? Here’s an exercise you can try:

Sensing Energy with Your Hands

(Click here for an audio recording of this exercise.)

1. Sit in a comfortable position and bring both of your hands together in front of you, palm touching palm and fingers touching fingers.
2. Rub your hands together until they become hot from the friction. This charges your hands.
3. Then, allow your hands to float gently apart to wherever they want to be. Stop there and simply sense your hands. What is the energy like between them?
4. Move your hands toward each other. What do you sense? Then, let your hands float apart to where they want to be.
5. Move your hands farther apart from each other. What do you sense? Then, let your hands float back to the neutral position.
6. Experiment with moving your hands back and forth to sense how the energy changes.
7. When finished, drop your hands and rest comfortably.

What did you notice?

When doing this exercise, people often report experiencing the energy between their hands as:

• warmth
• tingling or vibration
• density or viscosity – like a cushion of air
• a faint glowing haze around and between the hands
• a humming noise
• smoke-like threads between the fingers and hands

What about you? And what happened when you moved your hands closer or further apart from each other? Did your experience change?

Didn’t notice or sense anything?

Don’t worry. It happens to all of us sometimes. Here are some reasons it may not have worked for you this time:

• It takes energy to sense energy. If you were tired, hungry, sick, high or drunk, or otherwise depleted, it can make it difficult to open up to this subtle information. Try the exercise again later when you are rested and relaxed.
• Your hands might have not been fully charged. Did you rub your hands together until they were really hot? If they were not fully energized, it would be harder to sense the energy between them.
• You feeling anxious or competitive. If you were doing this with others and comparing your results, you might have been afraid that you wouldn’t get anything. Fear, performance anxiety or tension can close your energy senses.  So play with it on your own a bit first, so you can learn at a relaxed pace. Once you start to get a sense of it, then you can invite others to play with energy with you.
• You were distracted. If you were trying this in a room with people talking, TV or loud music playing, or kids making demands, chances are that all these stimuli were competing for your attention, interfering with your focus on the energy sensations.
• Your brain ignored it. Energy is awareness is subtle.  If you haven’t sensed energy before, it is likely that the brain has been filtering out this information for so long that you’ll need to retrain it to notice. You can do this by practicing the exercise, which will help the brain to grow the necessary neural pathways to process information from your energy senses.

Practice to expand your energy senses

Like many other worthwhile skills, the fastest way to develop your energy awareness is through practice. Try repeating this exercise for a week or two and see what happens. Take some notes and compare your later experiences with the first ones. Here are some ways that you can make practice fun:

• Sense someone else’s hands. Practice exploring energy with your kids or partner. See Exercise 1-2: Sensing a Partner’s Hands in the Free Resources section of the website.
• Experiment in different settings. Try the exercise in different rooms or places; the less distracted the better. For example:
  • plain walls
  • quiet (No TV, loud music or fighting neighbors)
  • in Nature
• Stay relaxed – don’t overdo it. The key to success is to just practice a short while each day, say five minutes, just so long as it is still fun. Then stop for the day. And repeat the next day.

For more energy awareness exercise ideas, check out Chapter 1 of our book, Energy Is Real!  For a free book preview, click here. Also check out the audio recordings available in the Free Resources section of this website.

So, How Do YOU Sense Energy?

What did you learn about your preferred energy sense? Go ahead and share your experiences in the comments below. I’d love to hear about them!