If you want to work with energy, you need energy awareness.

As energy in the sense in which we use this term here is invisible, energy awareness is not about seeing auras or imagining things; it is becoming aware of how energy affects us in a strictly physical way.

There is only a tiny minority of people on this planet today who do not have energy awareness already.

Most people are fully aware of experiencing strange feelings in their body as a direct result of coming into contact with extreme energy forms, be this energy forms you find in nature, or in certain places; or energy forms that emanate from an object, or a person.

There are many different ways in which people describe this ability to FEEL energy existences in the body; hard nosed policemen for example call it "their gut instinct" or "following their gut".

This is a reference to having actual feelings in the stomach, taking notice of these feelings, and acting upon the information thus received. For example, whilst interviewing a suspect who "looks and sounds" perfectly innocent, but "my gut told me he was the killer".

With practice, these non-hippy policemen learn to know the difference in the feelings they experience to fine degree and will be able to tell if this person is the actual perpetrator, or someone who knows something that could help, for example.

This fine tuning of reading one's own body signals correctly is what energy awareness is all about.

Another way in which people describe their experience of energy awareness is to talk about "an instinctive knowing". For example, a racing driver may say that he instinctively knows when to slow down a little because there is an oil slick round the next bend that he can't even see yet - but he can sense it, he knows that it is there.

• The key to energy awareness is to learn to pay attention to physical sensations.

The reason that policemen and race drivers get good at energy awareness by any other name is that they practice it every time they go to work, their livelihood or even their life depends on it, and they PAY CLOSE ATTENTION to the signals their body sends them.

Energy awareness is transmitted by strange, unusual feelings and sensations which have no physical cause, such as a shiver going down the back, a tingling in the shoulders or hands, the aforementioned sensations "in the gut" that can range from subtle butterfly sensations to feeling like having been punched in the stomach.

In EMO, we ask the question, "Where do you feel this in your body?"

"This" could be anything, from a house, to a field, to a person, to an object, or even an idea, plan, or pre-supposition.

Now, and this is important, it has been deemed very difficult in the past to trust these body signals that are feelings, and impossible to distinguish from what we call emotions at that, for one single reason.

A person who has had a bad experience with anything at all, and has an energetic injury in their systems, will respond badly (with pain or feelings of discomfort) when they are in the presence of something that is similar to that which caused the pain.

For example, a policeman who was beaten by his uncle will experience, when confronted with a person who looks and sounds much like his uncle did, a negative body sensation, like a pain in the head, or in the stomach - and if he confuses this with a real energy reaction, "his gut" as we talked about above, then he will become convinced this man is the killer, based on the previous experience with the uncle.

This happens a lot with people who are reacting not to what is there now, but what once was and caused a disturbance instead; and this has given the use of this energy feedback system through feelings and emotions the reputation of being unreliable.

This is not the case, however.

If you learn to pay attention to your own body signals BEYOND a simple yes/no response, you will find that the feeling in the body produced by the man who looks like the uncle is DIFFERENT from the feeling the policeman gets when he is in the presence of the killer.

It's a different feeling, it is in a different location, and once you pay attention to that, it is easy to tell the difference between what is a pesonal injury, and what is incoming information from the environment.

Energy is further not a static occurrence.

In the example of the policeman who was beaten by his uncle, the memories of the uncle produce sharp, stabbing pains close to the solar plexus. Meeting a real perpetrator produces a hot sensation rising up into the stomach and the chest.

These are *energy movements* that tell two very different stories, and once attention is paid to these distinctive energy movements, you could never confuse them again or mistake one for the other.

The kinaesthetic (feelings in the body) feedback system of human beings is as precise, as accurate and specific as any form of language, more complex easily, and very little understood.

Yet with just a little bit of attention paid, we can soon start to learn what "our body is trying to tell us" about energy occurrences - on the inside (information about reversals, problems, old injuries, how well our systems are functioning) and on the outside (if there is danger in the environment, information about the environment that is ADDITIONAL to the information gleaned by looking, listening, tasting, smelling and touching!).

With this additional information, we can sort ourselves out so we function better on the one hand, and on the other, navigate our environments better equipped than those who are "energy blind".

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Basic Energy Awareness Exercises

1. Pay attention to feelings in your body.

Learn to distinguish between:

physical feelings that have a physical cause (pants too tight, shoes chafing, being uncomfortable because you've slept wrong, spent too long in front of the computer, ate unsuitable foods, hit your head or dislocated your shoulder etc.)

and

physical feelings that do not have a physical cause (cold shiver going down your back but the room is warm; stomach flipping but there is no danger; hands getting warm even though the room is cold, pressure sensation in the head, on the shoulders but there's nothing pressing on your head, or on your shoulders etc.)

Always start by noticing the location first.

Where do I feel this in my body?

2. Pay attention to the movements of the feelings in your body.

In EMO, we ask, where is this energy going? What's happening? because energy occurrences are always MOVEMENTS that have a start, a middle or a pathway and an end, an exit point where the energy leaves the body.

When you feel a pressure in your head or in your stomach, note where it comes from and where it goes; if you feel a shiver going down your spine, track it with your intention and find out what happens to that energy, discovering the whole path it is taking.

The entire movement - where it starts, where it goes from there, and where it leaves the body - is the "feeling" and it is the path it takes that makes it unmistakable, unique, special.

3. Match up your feelings with your environment.

Once you start paying attention to the sensations caused by movements of energy in your body, you will start to notice the cause and effect between your environment, and the way you feel.

You will notice that certain feelings only occur in response to very specific stimuli from the environment, and that's like matching up little pictures of dogs and cats with the words, "dogs" and "cats" when you first start to learn to read.

You start to build up a "kinaesthetic vocabulary" over time that you can read like a book, only it has far more information in it and is completely reliable, and that's when energy awareness turns into being able to read energy patterns properly - a fantastic skill like no other, a skill that gives you a competitive advantage over those who can't do that, and a skill that might save your life one day.

I'd like to close this short introduction to energy awareness by saying that these skills aren't anything special, or for the specially talented only, or that you have to be born with a "6th spider sense".

EVERY human being can feel energy in their body, and they do - even if it is entirely outside their own conscious awareness, as in the case of people on the autistic spectrum.

By practicing energy awareness, you are activating a natural human skill that is a part of a normal human body and accessible to all who want it.

All you have to do is to start paying attention to your physical responses in your environment, and you'll soon learn your own energy A-Z, and how to read energy occurrences reliably and correctly.

Silvia Hartmann

May 2010

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