Lessons Learned On The Energy Body and Tuning Into the Broader Field of Consciousness
A collection of lived insights, observations, and how-to's for expanding perceptual abilities
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In my last post, I described my experience of having my energy channels open and some of the phenomena you might experience.
In this piece, I wanted to take the opportunity to describe more broadly some of the things I’ve learned about the energy body and how to work with it.
Let me preface all this by saying 4-5 years ago I would have been highly skeptical of everything I’m about to say. But now my view is that these notions seemed more aligned to a deeper truth than most of the popular things I see and read about our bodies and nature of reality.
All Things Are Energy
For most of history, humans have thought that everything including this physical world was made of matter.
The latest science suggests that all things, including matter and energy, are ultimately made up of energy. This idea is based on the principles of modern physics, specifically the theory of relativity and quantum mechanics. So it’s not that the world we see doesn’t contain matter. It’s just that there is a more fundamental substrate of reality.
According to the theory of relativity, matter and energy are fundamentally interchangeable. This means that energy can be converted into matter and vice versa. For example, nuclear reactions involve the conversion of matter into energy, while particle collisions can create new particles from energy.
Quantum mechanics, on the other hand, describes the behavior of subatomic particles and their interactions with energy fields. According to this theory, all matter and energy exist as waves of probability, rather than discrete particles. This means that even seemingly solid objects, like a table or a rock, are actually made up of energy fields.
Furthermore, recent research has also shown that the universe is composed of dark matter and dark energy, which are forms of energy that cannot be directly detected or observed. These mysterious substances are thought to make up the majority of the universe's mass and energy, and their existence provides further evidence that all things are fundamentally made up of energy.
So What Does This Mean For You!?
Everything that you interact with at the most fundamental level is energy. Thoughts are energy. Emotions are energy. Information in the form of ideas and insights are energy. The coffee you drank this morning is energy. And YOU as the conscious awareness experiencing it all are energy.
Matter experienced on this physical plane is simply a denser form of energy than something like a thought or emotion. Therefore, until you work on your perceptual faculties which I outline below, you will mostly be limited to experiencing matter vs. more refined energies.
For a long time, it’s been hard for science worshipers to grasp the concept of the energy body. This is because they have no direct experience with it nor do we have widely available instruments to measure them. The concept opposes everything they’ve been taught and unless someone has been reading up on the bleeding edge of physics, they probably just bought into the old narrative, maybe even eschewing things that they don’t have access to.
This scenario probably isn’t that different than when someone first came out and said everything is made up of these little things called atoms that we can’t see. Bullshit, we can’t see them! I imagine the initial atom advocates were considered crazy until things like microscopes were not only invented but widely distributed and experienced.
Today we are on the precipice of what mystics have been saying for ages and modern science converging. Though this doesn’t necessarily mean you will start to experience the energy body directly, it doesn’t serve you to remain in ignorance. I think the most profitable thing to do would be to educate yourself and begin to experiment with different access points to achieve greater perceptual abilities which can result in greater health, insight, and wisdom.
As this literacy increases, we will see more interest in all the modalities and agents which impact energy such as acupuncture, sound healing, Qigong, EMF awareness, and more!
We are electric beings and it’s about time we start acting like it.
What Is The Energy Body
The precise details of the energy body are still a mystery to me. People and books out there claim to describe it in detail, but the deeper I go with all this stuff, the more I recognize that everyone is just sharing expressions of their own subjective experience which often aren’t universal nor in alignment with mine.
Therefore, I consume information on the topic from time to time while maintaining an incredibly open mind. In this way, I empathize with everyone who has not experienced the energy body as I too base my daily activities on what is accessible to me. I can’t bi-locate nor do I spend all day in non-dual bliss consciousness. But I love reading about these potentials and find them inspiring vs. threatening to my existing paradigm. I don’t see the achievement of these siddhis as a goal, but I welcome their emergence if that’s meant to happen.
My predominant direct experiences with energy fall into two broad categories:
sensations in my body (pulsing and subtle)
information transmissions through a broader field
Does the energy body look like an actual body in the pictures we see? I’m not sure.
In my own experience, I have seen the auras surrounding people probably around 10 times for a period of 30 minutes to an hour and then it went away. The only consistent thing about these experiences is that they occurred when I was in a state of intense presence.
I like to think of the energy body more as a composite of all the energy from our consciousness experience. The specific shape of it - I don’t know!
The major feature I associate with the energy body are emotions which are felt as sensations. These can be everything from tingly champagne feelings to more abrupt pains and tightness with everything in between.
In my experience, sometimes the energy sensation expresses spontaneously in the body and then is followed by an emotion. Other times something arising in the mind causing an emotion to pop up which then instigates the energy movement. So in terms of sequencing, it seems to go both ways which aligns with Einstein’s theory of relativity.
Energetic Blocks?
Early on in my journey I read about the notion of there being energetic “blocks.” This made me think of the energy body as almost a plumbing system with valves. I’d feel areas of tightness physically that would accompany the energy sensations. It felt like the energy wanted to go somewhere, but just couldn’t squeeze through resulting in tremor-like sensations. Naturally, this would inspire an ambition to unblock anything obstructing the flow. For a long time, my response to this was attempting to “feel the shit out of stuff” vs. deeply relaxing into it. I learned the hard way that this can cause more harm then good. Eventually you learn to get out of the way and allow the body and nervous system, which are healing machines, to do the work.
This concept of some energetic plumbing system no longer resonates with me. When I feel shooting energy or pains, I now interpret that as an emotion that is seeking to get acknowledged vs. facing a roadblock. It is not restricted by some static valve system and moves much more fluidly and dynamically. A better visual concept is to consider uncomfortable energetic sensations are balls of yarn or knots in an open space that just happens to express in different regions felt in the physical body. When that suppressed emotion or impulse is ready to be acknowledged, that is often when you can feel some somatic sensation like discomfort, shaking or twitching.
I used to believe that you’d feel this in different parts of your body because it was stored in the tissues there. This was mainly inspired by books like the body keeps the score. The way I see it now is that these somatic experiences are more like incomplete reflexes or processes that are stored in your consciousness. When the consciousness and nervous system are in a state of safety, the repressed energy or incomplete process seeks to complete in the way it originally intended to. This initiates an impulse from the brain that instigates movements in your body.
Well, why do we feel things in different parts of the body?
I’m not sure. But there seems to be a consistency of sensations in the body where the original reflex would normally occur vs. some notion of it being stored in those tissues.
For example, I’ve had 2 ACL surgeries from my college football days. In both cases, I was put under anesthesia. I’ve had lots of somatic releases of my legs shaking with intensity like I’m dancing on hot coals or something. I don’t think that’s because the tissues down there store the trauma from the surgery. I think a better explanation is that my legs are where a typical reaction would occur which originates from the brain and more fundamentally consciousness.
This a subtle, but important difference. When it comes to energy, I like to view the body as an expression vehicle vs. a storage container. The storage container is consciousness which includes all past experiences that we are both conscious and unconscious of. When the material emerges from the unconscious into our awareness either prominently where we can acknowledge the imprinting experience or obtusely (no conception of the memory), the body is merely there to complete the process it wanted to complete at the moment we suppressed it. In this way, we can view the body as almost a communication device for our healing, spiritual growth, and consciousness expansion. The body lets us know when healing has occurred and when we need to perform some investigation in the depths of consciousness. Sensations and pains are often signals that we need to investigate patterns, emotions, and traumas that need to be acknowledged.
When you start to view the malfunction of the body as a way to get clues for what needs to be examined in your consciousness vs. a nuisance to throw pills and vitamins at, your entire life changes. Though vitamins have their place too! It’s just my experience that if you’re eating healthy, exercising, and sleeping yet the body is still underperforming, there’s usually an emotional/energetic issue impairing the system and cells.
Information From The Field
The other component of energy that I have lots of experience with is information.
Information can come in the form of spontaneous insights, direct knowing, visually seeing things (i.e. auras), or feeling emotions that originate outside of your direct awareness. In every case, it’s about getting access to a field of information beyond your immediate experience and historical exposure.
I talked about this in the last post, but one of the challenges you experience as you open energetically can be taking on emotions from others that aren’t your own. This often happens when there are holes in your energy field which can occur after using psychedelics. This doesn’t happen to everyone and seems to occur more on some substances vs. others so I wouldn’t freak out if you’ve done them.
The upside of energetic openness is that you can retrieve information in a much more expansive way beyond your local consciousness. This is the mechanism for psychic abilities. With the presence of or identification as a more expansive awareness, psychics break out of the limitation of their immediate body consciousness. When this happens they are able to tap into the broader field of information which includes other people’s ideas and experiences. I love the story of Ram Dass meeting his Guru Mahariji and him saying “so you were thinking about your mother yesterday.”
The same underlying mechanic holds true for other special abilities like remote viewing which happens when you identify as consciousness and realize that consciousness is not limited by space and time. These abilities can emerge spontaneously or can also be intentionally trained at certain levels of awareness. All these more robust human abilities are what the ancient mystery schools taught and I anticipate “evolution schools” will be a thing in our lifetime.
I often wonder whether we are going to experience a 4-minute mile phenomenon with special abilities. For a long time, it seemed like running a 4-minute mile was an impossible human feat. Then in 1954, Roger Bannister clocked a 3:59.4. Despite it being deemed as impossible leading up to this point, the next year 3 more runners ran it under 4 minutes.
For more normalization, we need prominent figures in society coming forward bucking the consensus about what humans are capable of. Ideally these same people have achieved and/or will continue to achieve what the predominant population’s level of consciousness desires - career success, money, status, an attractive partner…you know all the shit you’re told will finally make you persistently joyful when you attain.
Meeting people where they are with what they think they want is how this narrative will ultimately change. Paradoxically, there is reverence for the timing of it all and no need to change anyone which means the acts emanate from natural inspiration vs. force.
How to Get Information From the Broader Field
Getting information from the broader field comes from learning to practice direct inquiry as well as becoming attuned to spontaneous insights. The more you open and practice, the easier and more frequent both get.
Getting more expansive information from inquiry just looks like getting into deep states and asking questions while patiently awaiting for insights to emerge. If you’ve ever experienced the direct knowing phenomenon during a psychedelic experience, it’s kind of like that. I will write more about this in detail as I believe the capacity to invoke information from the universal field is a superpower. It’s something I’m passionate about and wish for more people.
Spontaneous insights just pop into your awareness like pings. Usually, they arise around whatever is held in mind. This is why posing a question and then letting it go is so powerful. This initiates total consciousness working in the background to bring the information into awareness. The texture of spontaneous insight appears more like emergent strokes of genius and aha’s vs. any sort of active thinking process.
Now you might be saying aren’t that just thoughts? Well, all thoughts originate from consciousness and in most people’s cases they arise from their conditioned consciousness. I can only speak for myself, but most of my conditioning was pretty shitty orienting around survival vs. unbounded prosperity and safety. Moreover, thoughts are more a derivative of what you’ve been exposed to vs. the collective field of information and wisdom.
I was consumed by rational thought until all this opening happened. Now it’s common for ideas and knowledge to come into my awareness that are outside the realm of my experience. For example, I can ask about what I should do in a situation and be guided to reach out to someone random that I haven’t thought of in years. And then before I even get to that item on my to-do list that person will text me. The synchronicity is bananas. And after spending more time observing these phenomena, it seems like what’s really happening is just a broader awareness of the total field of information which is inclusive of things that other people are thinking about.
There is much more territory to explore here and I no doubt have much to learn. But all of this is incredibly fascinating and clearly outstretches the potentialities of what we have traditionally been told about our humanhood.
How To Cultivate The Energy Body
My energetic opening was not something I was seeking. The massive energetic opening was the byproduct of an ayahuasca experience and the abruptness of it all caused all kinds of challenges. So my advice to people who are interested in all this would not be to go do lots of psychedelics and hope the energy channels open up. You’ll likely pay for it on the backend with a long period of discomfort as your system recalibrates. Moreover, most of the people I know who have done lots of psychedelics have yet to become in touch with these things so it’s unclear whether it's even a consistent, effective mechanism.
Instead, I’d look to the tried and true ancient wisdom traditions to begin to develop energetic sensitivity:
Qigong or Tai Chi (I learned Qiqong here)
Yoga - not the American kind
Pranayama (breathwork)
What all of these practices have in common is that they help still the mind which allows you to become better at sensing and feeling things. The awareness becomes more acute as it is directed inward. This first happens inside of your body and then as you reach greater depths, the lines between the inner world and outer world begin to dissolve. This is when you start to develop sensitivity and access to the information from the field I discussed earlier.
With more refined cognitive and perceptual abilities, a more robust version of reality begins to emerge. Up to this point you may have read about these things, but now you get to experience them directly and many notions that you read about start to click. Concepts like oneness are extended from a definition of shared humanhood to directly experiencing the fundamental field where everything is interconnected. Ahas around why things like synchronicity or even rarer phenomena like telekinesis exist all start to make sense. If it’s all one conscious field that is connects everything of course these harmonious capabilities exist! My own realization most closely relates to the quantum entanglement theory of consciousness.
Yesterday after writing this I asked ChatGPT what it thinks and it apparently it’s come to some to similar conclusions!
My journey started with meditation and then about 3 years ago I started to do Qigong (my school). At first, I found qigong easier to directly experience energetic sensations than meditation. I found meditation more helpful for quieting the mind to get information from the field, though qigong helps with that too.
If you're reading this and not knowing where to start, I’d just try one practice for a month and see how you feel. Intuitively you will know which one gives you more energy and has a greater draw…so I’d double down on there!
The big challenges that most people will face are the liminal period of beginning to experience and understand the heightened sensitivity. I call this phase of evolution energetic puberty. Once you start to open up, you can’t return to your old numb self which appeared more robust due to the lack of sensitivity. The tradeoff is that the sensitivity gives you access to all kinds of heightened abilities and information, but this means you need to take care of yourself more.
There’s a reason why many great beings went into isolation like the yogis going to live in caves - the sensitivity often made things more uncomfortable than they needed to be!
This transformation is like going from driving a Ford Focus to suddenly having an F1 car. You now have access to far more performance, but that comes with added responsibility. It takes some time to learn how to drive and frankly probably a support team of people. However, once you learn the ropes you can’t imagine going back to the Focus. The added performance comes at the cost of more maintenance and care. You can’t just dump 87’ unleaded fuel into the car anymore (a.k.a. alcohol, crap food, excessive caffeine). This new car requires much higher quality fuel and nourishment if you want it to run at full performance and last. You also need to learn how to listen to the car and pit when it needs it. The more driving you do, the better you get at handling it and understanding all these nuances.
If some of this sounds scary to you, that is normal. I mean today these things are called paranormal after all! Think about 50 years ago telling someone they’d be able to send anyone in the world a message in a few seconds. Many people would think that this probably sounded awful. Today it’s just part of life. At some point, the paranormal will just become normal as more and more humans expand their consciousness. This is the evolution of our species. It is exciting and must be treated with great reverence.
There is a lot more to discuss on the topic of energy, our nervous system, and the unfolding process. I will continue writing on these things as the inspiration comes : )
If there is anything in particular that would be interesting to you, please let me know in the comments.
If you liked reading this, feel free to click the ❤️ button on this post so more people can discover it on Substack 🙏
You are a legend. Thank you for all that you post and for all of the work that you do. ☮️ ❤️ Your perspective is so refreshing because you recognize how this information could be perceived/responded to by those who are just getting introduced to it, yet you also let us see the other side and the possibilities associated with it. My journey is just beginning and I’m feeling both excited and scared by it… similar feelings I had when I interacted with CHATgpt or Google Maps for the first time. It’s almost as if my human consciousness is leaping forward in tandem with artificial intelligence. 🤔
Hey Scott -- I see texting as clunky humans becoming used to the idea of being telepathic, though it will take Z and younger to go completely w/o the machine. All these devices are redundant and will translate to invisible grids and automatic thought, which will beg the question of bodily/mind autonomy, if all is accessible in the "field."
The good news is that there are plenty of people quietly changing this rigid, outdated paradigm, even if they aren't shouting it from the rooftops. I have many clients in various industries who don't use "woo" language but are exploring their own understanding of consciousness.
I was invited to many ceremonies by a true Columbian shaman 15 years ago but always had an aversion -- felt like it was "cheating" for me, while not discounting the healing that others have experienced. With the eventual legalization of mushrooms and the like...ya never know.
No worries -- if you could stay in non-dual bliss consciousness, you'd be long gone! :)