Subtle Energy Work

1. Energy Follows Thought Follows Energy.

The first half of this says that, where our will, attention and visualization are focused, energy will follow. If we expect success or failure, health or illness, improvement or worsening, we'll tend to get it. Our most powerful, expectations, of course, are often unconscious! This is what 'channeling healing' is about - energy tends to flow where we imagine it flowing.

The other half is that thought follows energy: our ideas and feelings tend to flow with our energy; so that if this is concentrated around our head, say, or blocked at our heart, we will tend to be correspondingly 'heady' or 'cold-hearted.

The combination of these two makes, not a vicious circle, but a spiral of hope and growth - we have the opportunity at any point to leave the cycle of suffering, since every positive move is amplified by feedback.

2. Energy Isn't Good or Bad, It Just Is.

Energy is natural. Some people think of 'natural' as 'good', which certainly makes more sense than thinking of it as 'bad', but really it's just natural. Illness/unhappiness is not 'bad energy' that has to be 'got rid of'; but it may be energy that is standing still and needs to move again.

3. Energy Moves.

Its playful, passionate pushiness is constantly washing away our walls, erupting under our floorboards, poking us in the bum...In our culture, many people have spent a lot of their lives trying to keep things still, to control this scary spontaneity: if you have a bad time in childhood, often the only salvation seems to lie in immobility and as low an energy level as possible. So symptoms are simultaneously the block to energy, and the energy bursting through.

4. Energy is Infinite.

Living in a scarcity culture, the basic rule says there isn't enough to go round. This is only true of cultural artifacts like money which have scarcity built in. It's not even true of food, only of its distribution; and it's not remotely true of love, breath or energy. Working with energy we are working with ABUNDANCE, with PLENTY - which is itself a powerful healing message. To 'give energy' to someone is not to impoverish ourselves; if we can overcome our fear, we are an open channel, letting energy flow through us from the six directions, absorbing what we need as it flows.

5 .Energy is both/and.

You've already implied this: energy can't be stuffed into rational either/or models of reality - good/bad, plus/minus, this/that. Like the unconscious, it's bigger than us: what Buddhists call Big Mind (and Body and Spirit). Nor is energy a component of our make-up, with feelings, thoughts and physiology as other components. These categories are different ways of looking at a single process; one or another or more of them will be most helpful in a given situation, but that's all.

We can see the four as corresponding to the four elements: Earth for physiology, Air for thought, Water for feeling, Fire for energy. Some will find this useful, some not; there are a great many ways to look through the four element system, and again it's a question of Both/And....

6 .Energy systems are acts, not facts.

For practical healing purposes, this point is the key one. Since energy follows thought, it will follow whatever laws we think apply to it. Which is the essential reason why different people describe different energy structures in the body - chakras, auras, meridians etc. Very few of us are capable of simply perceiving without expectation, even unconscious expectation; and even then, as soon as we reach for words-or symbols to describe what we perceive, we are starting to alter it.

Yet again, though, thought follows energy; our processes of perception and symbolization are essentially natural, since we are part of nature. These are the places to seek a healing system.