Directly tangible, sensory-based self-training and sensitization?
by Win Wenger, Ph.D.
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Photo courtesy of Elan Sun Star
Described here is one of many ways to experience life force energy as an immediate sensory reality. I remind the more narrowly hardened skeptics that basic elementary-school science teaches that chemistry and electricity are the same thing—the transfer of electrons. Anything living runs on biochemistry and therefore energy states and flows. (At least some of this effect is electromagnetic, as measured by the appropriate instrumentations, but not necessarily all of it.)
What follows is a way to sensitize yourself, alone or with a partner or in groups, to the concrete tactile experience of life energy force — a/k/a pranha or chi — familiar enough as that is to most human cultures but not to stand-offish Anglo-Euro-American culture. The following program instructions are in three sections:
- Preliminary sensitization.
- Further sensitization, and start of an experience with life force energy.
- Further sensitization, and one use of life force effects toward health and well-being.
You are welcome to print out these instructions for ease of use.
Section 1 — Preliminary Sensitization
This is the only part of the procedure where imagination is needed, to help get things started. Once past this point, no more imagination is needed, only attention to what your actual sense of touch, your actual sense of feel, is reporting to you as feedback on your own actions. Once you’ve reached the point where your own and/or others’ energy fields are tangible to you, playing with these can teach you — through feedback — more than any guru can teach you.
The need for imagination in the first step is in order to get up circulation of blood and lymphatic fluid in your hands and arms. Increase in those forms of circulation is also accompanied by a strengthening of energy circulation, part of the process of bringing the level of energy-tactile sensation high enough for you to begin to notice it in actuality, to feel it, to play with and work with it and to learn from your actual feedbacks.
Besides the main process in the numbered steps below, two things that can help you a little toward the level of sensitivity where you can begin to notice and play with energy, are:
- remove rings, watch and/or bracelets; and
- wash your hands in warm water (and then dry them).
Now for the main process of sensitization —
Know that in order to work changes in physiological state, even in someone whose primary mode is visual, remembering or imagining FEEL is more effective than is directed visualization, though both can be used together to still greater effect. Do both, but emphasize working with the feeling in the numbered steps following below.
Step 1 — Extend one arm and hand in front of you. Imagine your hand and arm to be long enough that they reach clear across the room. Imagine and study the feeling of having your arm and hand extended that far in front of you. Imagine touching various contrasting surfaces at a distance, feel yourself touching them. Describe aloud in detail, to a live listener or to an audio recorder, the differences in sensation when you “feel” one surface compared with another.
(3-5 minutes of this activity, of “distance feeling.”)
Step 2 — Now please bring your two hands close together without physically touching each other, and without your hands or arms touching anything else. Compare: the quality and level of actual feeling and sensation in the one hand which you had been doing this “distance feeling” with, to the actual feeling and sensation in the other hand which you had not involved until now. Describe in detail the difference in feeling between your two hands, to partner or to audio recorder.
Step 3 — Now to bring up circulation and sensitivity in your other arm and hand, extend these the same way that you did the first, and for several minutes feel and describe different contrasting distant surfaces with that other arm and hand.
Section 2 — Further Sensitization and a Beginning Experience of Life Force Energy
Step 4 — While you still have that increased circulation and sensitivity going in both your hands, bring your hands very close together without touching, palm and extended fingers of one hand close to and facing the palm and extended fingers of the other. (Don’t physically touch — that would mask the sensation and make it slower to learn to work with energy. Don’t let hands or arms be physically touching anything else.)
Step 5 — With your open hands very close together, slowly slide them around across each other, and pay close attention to any sensations or feelings that you get as the palm and fingers of one hand cross the lines of force of the other hand.
Step 6 — To make those physical sensations much stronger, imagine and FEEL your hands physically expanded, doubled in physical size so that as you slide your hands across each other’s lines of force, it’s as if each hand were moving about WITHIN the space of the other — still without flesh physically touching flesh. Working with the slow movement and the feel of those expanded, overlapping hands, now study closely the resultant actual physical sensations of your own energy field.
Section 3 — Further development and one useful application
(For this part you need someone else as a partner.)
In this section you get to feel and work with someone else’s energy field besides your own, and in a way that meaningfully has you functioning as a healer.
Thereafter, you can exercise some healing effect both on your own condition and that of others. Another turn of that same fact of elementary science — that electricity and chemistry are the same thing, the transfer of electrons. To change the energy field within which a chemical — or biochemical — or psychochemical — process is happening, changes that process. So it is not surprising that there are ways — indeed, many many different ways — to use life energy fields toward health and well-being. This is but one of them. You and your partner may take turns with each of the following steps.
Step 7 — (Further sensitization:) Imagine and FEEL your fingers to extend to be about four or five inches greater length than they are. Without physically touching your partner, reach with those long “energy fingers” deep into your partner’s left shoulder and slowly, massively and against some resistance, move some of your partner’s life energy down his left arm and into his hand. Pull it down to there, pull against resistance as part of getting it there. With more of your partner’s own energy now in his hand, slowly move both your hands closely parallel around your partner’s hand (without physically touching, so you don’t mask the physical sensations). Each of you describe to the other, from both ends of that process, what it feels like for your hands to be moving through the lines of force of your partner’s hand.
Step 8 — To get the sensations “louder” — i.e., stronger and less subtle, while doing this have your partner also imagine HIS hand physically expanded so it is as if that hand physically overlapped with yours in the same space. (Continue or resume that expanded feeling in your own hands also.) Describe to each other, in detail, your respective resulting sensations.
Step 9 — Still without physically touching, extend your “long” fingers into another part of your partner’s body. Run those long fingers like a comb through there to interact with your partner’s life energy field. Comb head toward foot, and/or comb away from the center of the body toward the extremities (that’s in the direction of flow for this form of life energy — going the opposite direction doesn’t feel very good).
- Pull a bit against resistance in your combing and you will find some irregularities in your partner’s field. Some of these irregularities, especially where energy is piled up, have some bearing on current or previous stresses, difficulties or even injuries.
- This form of energy you don’t want to get rid of — it’s still good clean life energy, only congested into that pile. Make it move and it releases back into good clean living flow, part of the resources of your partner’s being and system.
- Compare notes in detail, both you doing the combing and your partner being combed, as to your feedback sensations. You are complete with the process when you are able to finish with the impression of your partner’s energy body all sleek and gleaming, like a well-combed head of hair.
Sounds fanciful. It is not. Follow the steps and examine your own sensory, tactile, feeling, feedback sensations. Let your own perceptions teach you.
This is just one approach to one form of life force energy. Your energy body has many aspects and complexities, just as the physical flesh of the human body has many aspects and complexities. This particular method of sensitization does not usually lead directly to direct perception of chakras and acupuncture meridians, nor to aura visualization, and the energies experienced through this method only partly coincide with those explored in most of the martial arts. However, because it is so very sensory-immediate, and because energy-combing is so effective a method of healing, and because this method is so easy to learn, I offer it to your consideration as a modest starting-point.
I offer you (this form of) your own life force energy not as a fantasy, not as a metaphor, not as an abstraction to be taken on faith, simply a reality as concrete and specific as Galileo was offering to his colleagues and critics with his telescope. I wonder what all the excuses will be here, or whether there will be any, for not bothering to look through that telescope….
My abject apologies to all those here whose expertise and experience in life-energy field work far exceeds my own. The above could nonetheless be a possible shortcut for your teaching others and getting them more readily sensitized to the point where you can then teach them your own forms. I hope that at least a few here will find this set of instructions helpful.
Beyond O.K. has remained a favorite of many people since our original publication of this book in 1978. Often a third generation of readers, who received their copy from friends or parents who received THEIR copy from friends or parents, have written in to order fresh copies. The secret: try out step-by-specific-step experiences, make your own observations from those experiences, learn many new skills (including about one hundred energy-working skills developed from the above energy-sensitizing method). The book’s contents bear upon health, well-being, self-discovery, stress-removal, skills-building, accelerated learning, problem-solving methods, and techniques to help you make discoveries on your own.
Special Notes
The main contribution we think we can make here is not all the things one can do with chi, despite the hundred or so procedures given in our early book Beyond O.K. Our main contribution in matters pranhic may be that of providing an easy, reliable, high-rate-of-success way for different programs with their own historic, millenia-accumulated chi technologies to better sensitize their people to such energy-use in the first place. If you have contacts with one or several of the programs and disciplines where pranhic work is a feature, please bring this to their attention. This can multiply by several times the number and quality of people whom they can readily develop to advanced levels in their own unique program.
This same sensitization procedure can also contribute in another way. Any scientist or science lab that wants to study the phenomenon can immediately do so with the people they already have on hand, as a result of such easy sensitization. They don’t have to import special “psychics” thereby rendering inapplicable the independent-verification aspects of scientific empiricism. This may open the way to wider study, acceptance and use in human service of chi in the west. If you have contact with an appropriate lab or scientist whether physical or behavioral, please bring this easy-duplicatable-results aspect of this reliable sensitization procedure to his or their attention. Bringing formal science into the topic could be very useful – we could all stand to learn a lot more about this phenomenon of life force energy. Thank you.