Post by Icarus on Feb 1, 2007 9:05:40 GMT -5
Originally posted by Jinsei***
This exercise is best done with a partner, although the partner is not crucial to the mechanics of the exercise. You can feel and perceive energy any moment of any day, no matter where you are. As a matter of fact, you are feeling and perceiving energy all the time - you're just not consciously aware of it. This exercise is designed to bring your subtle perceptions into the conscious part of your mind, so that you can experiment with sensations and learn to identify different impressions. It will also help you learn how to distinguish real perceptions from false ones, as all of us can have moments when our imaginations get the best of us.
Especially if you're very new to this, having a partner present can be very helpful. In my experience, the biggest problem people have with subtle perceptions is self-doubt. Because we feel and sense these things all the time and we simply don't recognize it, when we do start trying to pay attention to our energy perceptions, we are already in the habit of discounting what we feel and explaining it away. The partner is there so you can get some feedback on your perceptions. It really reinforces your sensation if you have a partner who can attest to seeing and feeling the same thing as you. Also, if you are prone to elaborating on your experiences with your active imagination, your partner can help keep this propensity in check by letting you know when something you're describing sounds a little off. Finally, by comparing experiences with your partner to see how your individual perceptions differ, you can begin learning the unique language in which the subtle reality speaks to you.
This exercise is best done in a room with very low lighting. I prefer candlelight myself, but this is not always feasible. Direct lighting can interfere with your perception of the energy, as the light radiation created by the bulbs can compete with and often outshine the more muted glow of energy. Indirect lighting, such as a lamp shining in from another room, is the best alternative to candlelight, or you can make due with a very low watt bulb shining in a far corner of the room. You may also wish to have soft music playing in the background. This should be something that you and your partner find relaxing and conducive to a very open and receptive mood. It would not hurt to meditate a little just before starting the exercise just to get your personal energy balanced and in tune. Wear comfortable clothes for this exercise, and remove any rings, bracelets, or watches. Some people find that having objects, especially metal objects, on the hands obstructs the flow of energy. Some people work just fine around such obstructions, but for your first few times, its best to create the most conducive environment possible for your experiences.
Feeling Energy
Sit cross-legged on the floor across from you partner. Your partner should hold his hands out toward you, palms up. Hold your own hands out over his, palms down. Your right hand should be over his left hand, and your left hand should be over his right hand. You both should cup your palms slightly, as if your were gently trapping a bubble between both sets of your hands.
Focus your attention inward for a moment and try to feel that light energy coursing through you that we addressed in the first exercise. Get a good sense of this energy, and then try to direct some of it toward your hands. Your partner should do the same. It's okay to talk as you're doing this, but it's best to keep hushed tones so you don't break one another's concentration.
You and your partner's hands should begin to grow warm and tingle. When you start to feel this tingling sensation, press down a little on the "bubble" between your hands. You should feel a slight resistance, very subtle, like the water tension on the surface of a pond. If you apply too much pressure, you will easily break through, and the sensation will be lost, so concentrate on delicately exploring the limits of the tension. How much pressure can you apply before you loose the sensation? How solid does the "bubble" feel when you just press against its surface? Is it warm? Is it cold? Does it give you the impression of another sensation? With your hands still cupping the bubbles together, discuss and compare your different sensations with your partner.
Seeing Energy
Now, coordinating it so you both do this at the same time, you and your partner should rotate your hands slightly toward one another. Instead of cupping one bubble between each of your hands, you and your partner should pivot your hands together so there is only one bubble between all four of your hands. Imagine that the energy which makes up the two bubbles is a very viscous liquid, and you are pouring the two bubbles together to make one big bubble. If you were holding your fingers together for the two smaller bubbles, relax them and separate them a little. You should feel like you are lightly pressing against the delicate skin of this larger bubble, and the shape of your hands are helping it to retain its own mostly spherical shape.
There should be a some space between you and your partner's hands, at least a foot in diameter. Keeping your fingers slightly separated, look into the space between you and your partner's hands. Does anything look different about the air inside you "bubble" compared to the air outside of your hands? If you can't see a difference inside the "bubble", look very closely at the space around and between your fingers. What you are looking for is a slight misty look to the air around your fingers. It will look almost like oil on water, and it may have a white, grey, or even a very pale lavender color to it.
Now, it will not look as if someone had taken a crayon and drawn this color into the air around your fingers. Nor will it look like any of those light-beam special effects they drawn on film for the movies. The actual color will be very subtle and very hard to see. Sometimes focusing your eyes too intently on it will make it go away, so if you still can't see it, try looking at the space between your partner's fingers through the bubble you're both holding. It's very likely that you'll see the energy that way, out of the corner of your eye, and once you've seen it, you will be able to play around with your perception until you can see it even when you're looking at it directly.
Take a moment to compare what you're seeing with your partner. Different people often see different "colors" of energy, although to describe it as a color is rather misleading. You're not exactly seeing the energy with your eyes, although it will seem that way. You're simply processing your perception through the closest sense it approximates: sight. For this reason, don't feel like you've failed at this exercise if you don't see distinct colors. Some people can only get a slight impression that energy is there, and sometimes they don't even process that as something they're seeing. Everyone's perceptions work differently for them, and the value of this exercise is it allows you to learn just exactly how you perceive energy so you'll know when you encounter it in future experiences.
Manipulating Energy
Once you and your partner have explored the feel and look of the energy between your hands to your mutual satisfaction, split the big bubble back into two smaller pieces, only this time, separate the energy into a bubble that you hold between your two hands and a bubble that your partner can take away into his. Take some time for each of you to play with your individual energy balls. Cup the energy between your hands, press it, stretch it, get a feel for how it flows and stretches. Energy is not exactly a fluid, nor is exactly a solid. The ancient alchemists used to compare it to the element mercury. Mercury is a silver metal that looks like a liquid but which tends to retain a spherical shape when outside a container. When you try to grab a sphere of mercury, the pressure of your finger will either push it away as fast as you try to touch it, or it will split the mercury into manner smaller spheres.
Energy is very much like mercury. It is fluid, yet it retains its shape to a point. It can be stretched and shaped in your hand, although its natural shape tends toward something spherical. If you are able to perceive energy, it even looks a little like mercury, having that misty, greyish color described above. Most energy is also heavy like mercury, so if you hold some of it in your hand, its best to keep your hand cupped, or else the energy will spill out and disperse. It tends to not have a lot of permanent cohesion, and so if you make an energy ball and set it down somewhere, after a few moments, the energy will have spread out and dispersed among all the other currents of energy moving through the subtle reality.
The best way to keep energy from dispersing is to absorb it into something. With this in mind, take the energy ball you have cupped in your hands and try to absorb it back into you. The ball is just neutral energy generated by you and your partner for the purpose of this exercise, so its perfectly safe. Just concentrate on your hands again until you get that tingly feeling (assuming the tingly feeling ever went away - most people get this feeling whenever they are working closely with energy), but instead of pushing the energy out of your hands, pull it back in. It will feel a little like your hands were just splashed with warm water. And you can test yourself to see if you actually absorbed the energy ball by asking your partner if he can see it in your hands anymore.
You and your partner can continue to work with energy balls until you feel comfortable in your ability to generate, perceive, and re-absorb the energy. When you are finished with the exercise, you should each take a moment to get back in touch with your own distinct energies, going back to the subtle body exercise at the beginning of this book and getting a firm sense of the energy moving within you and gathering at your center. Touch both your hands to the ground and allow any excess energy that might cause an imbalance in you to flow out into the earth. When you feel relaxed and in tune with yourself again, you are ready to put the lights back on, discuss your experiences with your partner, and maybe record some of your perceptions in your journal.
Conclusion and Application
Learning how to make an energy ball is the first fundamental lesson in learning how to work with energy. By experimenting with an energy ball, you learn how to perceive energy, how to shape it, how to generate it, and how to absorb it into yourself. Once you've mastered the technique of sending energy to your hands and generating it outward, you can apply this to energy healing. Reiki, one of the most popular energy healing techniques in the West today, is nothing more than the focusing of a particular sort of healing energy through the hands and to the person to be healed. By learning how to perceive energy, you can later apply this perception to people's auras. By learning how to generate and focus your own energy, you can apply this to creating personal shields, to protect you from harmful energies that might unbalance your system. And by learning how to absorb energy into yourself, you learn how to more efficiently interact with the universal sources that sustain every one of us.
From www.kheperu.org/articles/ball.html
This exercise is best done with a partner, although the partner is not crucial to the mechanics of the exercise. You can feel and perceive energy any moment of any day, no matter where you are. As a matter of fact, you are feeling and perceiving energy all the time - you're just not consciously aware of it. This exercise is designed to bring your subtle perceptions into the conscious part of your mind, so that you can experiment with sensations and learn to identify different impressions. It will also help you learn how to distinguish real perceptions from false ones, as all of us can have moments when our imaginations get the best of us.
Especially if you're very new to this, having a partner present can be very helpful. In my experience, the biggest problem people have with subtle perceptions is self-doubt. Because we feel and sense these things all the time and we simply don't recognize it, when we do start trying to pay attention to our energy perceptions, we are already in the habit of discounting what we feel and explaining it away. The partner is there so you can get some feedback on your perceptions. It really reinforces your sensation if you have a partner who can attest to seeing and feeling the same thing as you. Also, if you are prone to elaborating on your experiences with your active imagination, your partner can help keep this propensity in check by letting you know when something you're describing sounds a little off. Finally, by comparing experiences with your partner to see how your individual perceptions differ, you can begin learning the unique language in which the subtle reality speaks to you.
This exercise is best done in a room with very low lighting. I prefer candlelight myself, but this is not always feasible. Direct lighting can interfere with your perception of the energy, as the light radiation created by the bulbs can compete with and often outshine the more muted glow of energy. Indirect lighting, such as a lamp shining in from another room, is the best alternative to candlelight, or you can make due with a very low watt bulb shining in a far corner of the room. You may also wish to have soft music playing in the background. This should be something that you and your partner find relaxing and conducive to a very open and receptive mood. It would not hurt to meditate a little just before starting the exercise just to get your personal energy balanced and in tune. Wear comfortable clothes for this exercise, and remove any rings, bracelets, or watches. Some people find that having objects, especially metal objects, on the hands obstructs the flow of energy. Some people work just fine around such obstructions, but for your first few times, its best to create the most conducive environment possible for your experiences.
Feeling Energy
Sit cross-legged on the floor across from you partner. Your partner should hold his hands out toward you, palms up. Hold your own hands out over his, palms down. Your right hand should be over his left hand, and your left hand should be over his right hand. You both should cup your palms slightly, as if your were gently trapping a bubble between both sets of your hands.
Focus your attention inward for a moment and try to feel that light energy coursing through you that we addressed in the first exercise. Get a good sense of this energy, and then try to direct some of it toward your hands. Your partner should do the same. It's okay to talk as you're doing this, but it's best to keep hushed tones so you don't break one another's concentration.
You and your partner's hands should begin to grow warm and tingle. When you start to feel this tingling sensation, press down a little on the "bubble" between your hands. You should feel a slight resistance, very subtle, like the water tension on the surface of a pond. If you apply too much pressure, you will easily break through, and the sensation will be lost, so concentrate on delicately exploring the limits of the tension. How much pressure can you apply before you loose the sensation? How solid does the "bubble" feel when you just press against its surface? Is it warm? Is it cold? Does it give you the impression of another sensation? With your hands still cupping the bubbles together, discuss and compare your different sensations with your partner.
Seeing Energy
Now, coordinating it so you both do this at the same time, you and your partner should rotate your hands slightly toward one another. Instead of cupping one bubble between each of your hands, you and your partner should pivot your hands together so there is only one bubble between all four of your hands. Imagine that the energy which makes up the two bubbles is a very viscous liquid, and you are pouring the two bubbles together to make one big bubble. If you were holding your fingers together for the two smaller bubbles, relax them and separate them a little. You should feel like you are lightly pressing against the delicate skin of this larger bubble, and the shape of your hands are helping it to retain its own mostly spherical shape.
There should be a some space between you and your partner's hands, at least a foot in diameter. Keeping your fingers slightly separated, look into the space between you and your partner's hands. Does anything look different about the air inside you "bubble" compared to the air outside of your hands? If you can't see a difference inside the "bubble", look very closely at the space around and between your fingers. What you are looking for is a slight misty look to the air around your fingers. It will look almost like oil on water, and it may have a white, grey, or even a very pale lavender color to it.
Now, it will not look as if someone had taken a crayon and drawn this color into the air around your fingers. Nor will it look like any of those light-beam special effects they drawn on film for the movies. The actual color will be very subtle and very hard to see. Sometimes focusing your eyes too intently on it will make it go away, so if you still can't see it, try looking at the space between your partner's fingers through the bubble you're both holding. It's very likely that you'll see the energy that way, out of the corner of your eye, and once you've seen it, you will be able to play around with your perception until you can see it even when you're looking at it directly.
Take a moment to compare what you're seeing with your partner. Different people often see different "colors" of energy, although to describe it as a color is rather misleading. You're not exactly seeing the energy with your eyes, although it will seem that way. You're simply processing your perception through the closest sense it approximates: sight. For this reason, don't feel like you've failed at this exercise if you don't see distinct colors. Some people can only get a slight impression that energy is there, and sometimes they don't even process that as something they're seeing. Everyone's perceptions work differently for them, and the value of this exercise is it allows you to learn just exactly how you perceive energy so you'll know when you encounter it in future experiences.
Manipulating Energy
Once you and your partner have explored the feel and look of the energy between your hands to your mutual satisfaction, split the big bubble back into two smaller pieces, only this time, separate the energy into a bubble that you hold between your two hands and a bubble that your partner can take away into his. Take some time for each of you to play with your individual energy balls. Cup the energy between your hands, press it, stretch it, get a feel for how it flows and stretches. Energy is not exactly a fluid, nor is exactly a solid. The ancient alchemists used to compare it to the element mercury. Mercury is a silver metal that looks like a liquid but which tends to retain a spherical shape when outside a container. When you try to grab a sphere of mercury, the pressure of your finger will either push it away as fast as you try to touch it, or it will split the mercury into manner smaller spheres.
Energy is very much like mercury. It is fluid, yet it retains its shape to a point. It can be stretched and shaped in your hand, although its natural shape tends toward something spherical. If you are able to perceive energy, it even looks a little like mercury, having that misty, greyish color described above. Most energy is also heavy like mercury, so if you hold some of it in your hand, its best to keep your hand cupped, or else the energy will spill out and disperse. It tends to not have a lot of permanent cohesion, and so if you make an energy ball and set it down somewhere, after a few moments, the energy will have spread out and dispersed among all the other currents of energy moving through the subtle reality.
The best way to keep energy from dispersing is to absorb it into something. With this in mind, take the energy ball you have cupped in your hands and try to absorb it back into you. The ball is just neutral energy generated by you and your partner for the purpose of this exercise, so its perfectly safe. Just concentrate on your hands again until you get that tingly feeling (assuming the tingly feeling ever went away - most people get this feeling whenever they are working closely with energy), but instead of pushing the energy out of your hands, pull it back in. It will feel a little like your hands were just splashed with warm water. And you can test yourself to see if you actually absorbed the energy ball by asking your partner if he can see it in your hands anymore.
You and your partner can continue to work with energy balls until you feel comfortable in your ability to generate, perceive, and re-absorb the energy. When you are finished with the exercise, you should each take a moment to get back in touch with your own distinct energies, going back to the subtle body exercise at the beginning of this book and getting a firm sense of the energy moving within you and gathering at your center. Touch both your hands to the ground and allow any excess energy that might cause an imbalance in you to flow out into the earth. When you feel relaxed and in tune with yourself again, you are ready to put the lights back on, discuss your experiences with your partner, and maybe record some of your perceptions in your journal.
Conclusion and Application
Learning how to make an energy ball is the first fundamental lesson in learning how to work with energy. By experimenting with an energy ball, you learn how to perceive energy, how to shape it, how to generate it, and how to absorb it into yourself. Once you've mastered the technique of sending energy to your hands and generating it outward, you can apply this to energy healing. Reiki, one of the most popular energy healing techniques in the West today, is nothing more than the focusing of a particular sort of healing energy through the hands and to the person to be healed. By learning how to perceive energy, you can later apply this perception to people's auras. By learning how to generate and focus your own energy, you can apply this to creating personal shields, to protect you from harmful energies that might unbalance your system. And by learning how to absorb energy into yourself, you learn how to more efficiently interact with the universal sources that sustain every one of us.
From www.kheperu.org/articles/ball.html