I've often imagined us as ecstatic lines. Lines bursting forth from their point of origin, moving here and there, criss-crossing, running parallel, diverging, never intersecting at all, and quickly coming to a halt.
That initial spark - that thing that gets the lines going, keeps them traveling, and eventually stops - that is energy.
The Science
Energy is the physical property that leads to all action and change. It fuels your thoughts, choices, feelings, and everything else you do. Without energy, life simply wouldn't exist.
Energy is transformed through various processes to power our machines, turn plants green, and move Earth's tectonic plates. It generates heat, allows fire to come from rubbing sticks together and steam to come from boiling water. It's the property behind all movement and change in the universe. Without it, we wouldn't be alive, and the world as we know it wouldn't exist.
Energy is thought to be stored in our body's molecules. When we eat, we initiate a chemical process that transforms food energy to meet our body's needs. This process heats our bodies to nearly 100 degrees Fahrenheit. We burn energy to stay alive, and when we die, this process stops.
But our body temperature doesn't drop to zero. It drops to room temperature. Our molecules are still holding energy, and this remaining energy undergoes another transformative process. If our body's are burned, our energy is sent into the air. If we are buried, it's released into the earth and transformed by animals and plants. Either way, your energy continues to cycle through existence.
This is because energy can't be created or destroyed. It can only be transformed. And energy is transforming around and within us all the time. We live an energetic existence.
The Philosophy
And because energy can neither be created nor destroyed, the energy moving through you is having an experience far beyond the memory of your life.
What does this mean? Well, humor me here while I share some currently unfounded theories that align with what science tells us as well as my own experience.
The energy moving through my body was somewhere before it was in me. I don't know where. It may have been concentrated in a single entity - such as a person - or it may have been spread between many different things (be it people, animals, plants, light, etc.). I don't know. What I do know is that it wasn't created upon the creation of my body, so it existed.
When I die, my energy will cycle through existence, potentially accumulating again in a single life form or dispersing amongst many different things or both.
That's the before and after beyond my memory, but there's also a before and after within my memory.
My mind takes my life experience and places it in a tidy, straight line with a beginning, middle, and end. But the energy moving through my body when I was five has changed and is different from the energy moving through me now. My body is constantly cycling through energy - consuming, burning, and releasing it back to the world. My life is part of a larger whole of energy transformation and exchange. Who I was then is different than who I am now.
When I think of the concept of reincarnation and past lives, this is what I think of. I don't think this necessarily takes the shape of multiple human lives - one coming after the other - but I think our energy is potentially constantly cycling through many forms of existence, and that we carry that experience with us.
Down the Rabbit Hole We Go
Now, back to that tidy, straight line that my mind creates. This is what we all know as linear time.
But physics teaches us that time doesn't exist in the way we experience it. I'll go into more detail about this in another post, but for now, just consider that time and space are flexible. That time is actually flat. That everything is happening at once. That our experience of now and then is simply our mind cracking open a window to a specific point in everything that is happening and thus creating the illusion of a past, present, and future.
Still with me?
Okay, so if this is true - if everything is happening at once - then it's possible that all of those potential incarnations of our energy are also happening right now.
This means that our lives are not only the life we are living in the body we see, but our lives are possibly the complete extension of our energy at all times throughout these various incarnations. And by working with mindfulness practices that anchor us to the present, we learn to keep our minds from wandering into the illusion of past and future. We become increasingly connected to the present moment, and this potentially holds everything that ever was and ever will be.
Why does any of this matter?
In short, maybe it doesn't - and I certainly don't think it's a thing to worry too much about - but I love the truth. I love the search for truth. I love that if there's something to this, then there may be ways to address suffering in our lives and in this world that many of us aren't readily exploring.
And I think there's something to this. I think this because I am exploring these alternative ways, and through this exploration, I've consistently had unconventional experiences with time and space. This shows up again and again in the energy work I practice.
When I work with people, I learn things about them that I previously didn't know. I learn things without them telling me, and I learn it when I connect into what I perceive to be their energy.
I see the time they almost fell off a horse. I see the medicine they've been injecting into their bodies. I see the fighting in their home when they were seventeen. I see the trip they're about to go on.
I also feel things. I feel their exhaustion. I feel the congestion in their nasal passages. I feel the discomfort in their stomachs - so much so that my stomach will mimic their discomfort and start making noises.
I've even smelled someone who was 2,000 miles away.
There are many possible explanations for all of this. The one most often attributed to people who have these experiences is that they're crazy, and I too have been quick to invalidate these strange experiences for much of my life. But every time I learn something before someone tells me and it's revealed to be true, it's clear to me that I'm not crazy and invalidation is not a sufficient explanation.
I also don't think I'm particularly special for having these experiences. I think I'm just a person who's worked to keep an open mind rather than dismissing experiences that don't align with the status quo. I think things are happening that we simply haven't figured out yet.
And I think it's connected to energy.
Energy Practices Connect Us to More
I've had strange experiences like the ones mentioned above since childhood. Dreams would come true, etc. But it wasn't until I began working with energy practices - yoga, meditation, Reiki, tarot, astrology, etc. - that I learned to harness these experiences.
By intentionally tapping into what I understand to be energy, I can trigger this unconventional way of knowing.
Energy practices seem to unlock a deeper truth about time and space and the way things are.
And what this work has taught me is that our lives often go beyond our nurturing and our external circumstances and our thoughts and into this deep energetic layer of nature.
That is why I work here.
Rub your hands together until they begin to feel hot. Hold them - palms facing each other - a few inches apart and close your eyes. Do you feel that? That heat? That's energy.
Energy practices work kind of like that - by harnessing our energy, by working with heat and conservation of momentum to transform energy.
Think about two billiard balls on a pool table. One rests in complete stillness. The other ball rolls toward it. When they collide, the still ball starts to roll. This is because it absorbs part of the other ball's momentum in order to conserve the overall momentum between the two balls. We feel this when we bump into each other on the street. When we hug each other. When we kiss. Touch is powerful.
Now think about a metal pan on an electric stove. Energy in the form of electricity heats the stove. Energy is released through heat. This increases the vibration of atoms in the pan, causing the pan to also release energy through heat. And remember that our bodies are also a heat source.
Our bodies - our heat, our mass, our momentum, our gravitational and magnetic fields - can affect each other's energy. We affect each other. We can do this through intentional energy practices, but I think we're also doing this simply by existing.
We are regularly working with our own energy - to add energy to our system and transform our energy - like when we drink a cup of coffee or eat a meal or take a nap.
Intuitive energy work is simply another way of working with our energy to transform it and to widen our mind's experience of space and time.
At least this is how I've come to understand things. This is how the seemingly crazy experiences of my life seem less crazy and actually completely plausible.
The reality is that they are happening, so they are plausible. The question to be answered by science is simply how.
✧ ∞ ✧ ∞ ✧
"Coming in so many different guises, energy is difficult to define. Even now, physicists do not know intrinsically what it is, even though they are expert at describing what it does and how to handle it. Energy is a property of matter and space, a sort of fuel or encapsulated drive with the potential to create, to move, or to change. Philosophers of nature going back to the Greeks had a vague notion of energy as a force or essence that gives life to objects, and this idea has stuck with us through the ages."
