Energy Work

Introduction to Energy Work

One of the most confusing topics in my business is working with spiritual energy. I have been working to take much of the confusion out of this topic. I have experimented with teaching energy work form several different angles over the years. Trying to see which style of presentation works best to train people and also resolve out many of the false views on spiritual energy work.

I have been a Taoist explorer all my life, even as a child I was playing with ancient spiritual energy techniques. Then I went and became a physicist and engineer to understand energy from the viewpoint of modern science. The way people use the terms in energy work has always bothered me. People use the same name to mean different things. Many people try to reconcile and judge ancient techniques relative to modern terms. It’s a mistake always to compare modern to ancient.

Spiritual Energy: Modern vs. Traditional

The way we think of spiritual energy has changed over time. As a result, languages have changed and the terms we use now don’t necessarily translate to the way a shaman would see spiritual energy.

A shaman would see energy regarding life, spirit, and primal forces. A Shaman doesn’t create distinctions for teaching purposes. Instead, a shaman in training would experience life and then come to terms with it in a personal manner over time.

This page is set up to teach spiritual energy practices to students in Awakening Dragon Taoism. Julie approaches spiritual energy in a more traditional shamanic manner. This material is set up to teach in a written manner and also bridge the modern world language to more traditional teachings. I stress from a shamanic perspective you cannot thoroughly learn by reading or categorizing instead it’s something you ingest, take into yourself with direct experience, then play with over and over again to finally come to terms with life energy in a very interactive manner.

Life Energy Vs. Physical Energy

The first thing I am going to do is relabel the whole process.

Energy work is a generic term covering two distinctly different approaches of manipulating energy.

• Physical Energy Work

Which represent physically measurable energy fields based upon physics.

• Life Energy Work

Spiritual energy work techniques based on living/human perception

I’m making the distinction for a very good reason. Life energy work is subjected to human perception, and that blurs the lines to make it harder to quantify. When people try to measure spiritual energy work to physical energy work. We often create conflict, and that conflict doesn’t serve anyone.

Many life energy techniques cannot be measured directly to scientific standards, and yet they still work. So I don’t want to diminish valid techniques due to perception mistranslations that make the process harder to quantify. As a result, I want to keep the two areas separate for quantification and teaching purposes. Many life energy techniques can be quantified regarding physical energy, but that doesn’t make one technique superior to other methods.

All too many practitioners (scientific and spiritual) try to justify spiritual energy work in physical work terms. While comparing the two sides creates an exemplary scientific process,  people’s judgment taint the process into becoming lousy information. Taoist practice requires one to remove judgment. As a result, I had also to separate out the two systems to make everything smoother for my students.

Life Energy Classification.

Several classifications get used over and over again within life energy techniques. There exist seven common groupings to collect together the life energy work techniques.

These common groups represent common themes, and each theme tends to produce very similar processes around the world.

The Seven Life Energy Work Groupings are:

• Psychic: This represents Awareness of Life.
• Spiritual: This represents Direction of Life.
  Note In Taoist Terms this is “Shen” and represents both Psychic and Spiritual energy
• Chi: This represents the Spark of Life.
• Jing: This represents Cauldron of Life.
• Emotional: This represents Feeling Life.
• Potential: This represents Fuel of Life.
• Field / Subtle: This represents Interconnections of Life.

Traditional Taoist teaching would only use three groupings: Shen, Chi, and Jing. However, in modern culture, we see the energy in more ways than the traditional Taoist sense. As a result, I have found it useful to extend out and use seven different groupings. It makes it easier to talk about different traditions and gives a slightly clearer perspective on the various angles of human experience and perspective.

As I stated earlier: the various traditional shamanic views can be quite different in use of language. In fact, when I work with other shamanic friends we use the term energy less than one would expect. Instead, we focus upon the spirit, upon intention and the context with which the spirit moves with, how does the spirit shift and what it is holding. Energetically, often a shaman is working in a different worldview altogether. It is not uncommon to shift worldviews while working in a shamanic manner. One second you could be talking about a strong, energetic emotion bond the next second you could be seeing it all as a vibrant spiritual being representing that emotional value. When you work with a shamanic perspective, you have to roll to where your senses take you. Often it isn’t practical to sort out an experience to a common baseline (to do so ends any future journeys with that energy experience and makes the knowledge static and as a result then stagnant). A shaman always works towards a proactive journey, in partnership with the experience. The goal is growth rather than atomizing or forcing something into a static framework.

I settled into these groupings because it made it easier to teach spiritual energy practices. However, as I teach, the materials change relative to each student. The reason is due to the fact how we work with life energy is based on human perspective. So the student shapes the teaching just as much as the teaching shapes the student.

Spiritual Energy Examples

What the seven common life energy groupings represent, are ways, due to human nature, people see and work with energy. These aren’t hard and fast rules, rather a guideline meant to help channel the visualization process life energy workers use to manipulate “energy”.

One aspect of life energy work is a life energy worker is trained to use personal senses to work with energy. A life energy worker doesn’t use equipment that can be calibrated to some neutral standard. This means life energy work is strongly influenced by each practitioner’s training and perceptions.

This means life energy terminology often becomes complicate or confusing quickly due to the perceptional differences between people. Also, people get upset over the differences in how they perceive energy very quickly, because this process is a very personal practice. So personal that practitioners do end up defining their own life relative to how they work with energy. Most energy workers use their techniques to explore the world around them deeply. The techniques aren’t only about healing others; life energy work is also about interacting with the world using additional nonphysical based methods. These techniques are used to explore what extends out beyond our physical world.

A side note: when a person gets upset over how something gets termed, or with the words used to describe the experience… then that’s a good sign they are working with a healthy does of emotional energy even if they claim else-wise.

Now one aspect about this is energy can shift form relatively easily. More importantly, since perception alters how we see it, this creates a very fluid environment to work within.

For example, this means:

• (a) What the energy worker works with can be different than
• (b) What the energy worker perceives and that can be different than
• (c) What the energy workers feel within the client and that can be different than
• (d) What client’s energy gets invoked and that can be different than
• (e) What the client perceives from the energy worker and that can be different than
• (f) What the client feels from within them and that can be different than
• (g) What a third party witness will sense, and that can again be different from
• (h) What a third party feels inside from watching

Read this very very carefully, because what this means is: it is possible to have many different combinations of what energies are in motion and being processed those present. This means trying to create a physical experiment to determine what is happening is not a simple situation to arrange to qualify what happened!

So for instance:

A simple life energy session could run like this

• (a) The energy worker uses psychic energy to connect with another person
• (b) The energy worker then might examine what potentials exist
• (c) The energy worker then might use Chi to shift how the client Breathes to improve that client’s potential.
• (d) The client’s Chi energy shifts as they begin to breath easier and with more awareness.
• (e) The client feels a lightness of being as their muscles relax
  (so physically they feel better as they feel their Jing becoming reinforced and internal organs process the ailment more actively)
• (g) Someone watching could sense the client’s potential expanding as they hold themselves with more surety of self
• (h) In seeing someone else heal that same witness could feel their spiritual energy revive as they now feel encouraged to move ahead and be more active in their own life.

This is an exceedingly simple example of an energy working interaction. But I wrote it simply to illustrate how experience and processes can vary between everyone involved in a life energy working session. Working with field energy creates a much more complicated interplay of results.

A skilled life energy worker can help to focus the process on minimizing the confusion of perceptions, but still, this process isn’t about synchronizing perceptions as much as attaining results. Flexibility is one of the strengths of life energy work and trying to limit it down to only one or two ways to define the process causes more problems than it solves.

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