Inner Work

For the week of July 28, 2014

Inhabiting the Sensitive Energy

(Energy Practice: Part 3)

The practice of breathing energy can dramatically increase the amount of sensitive energy passing into us, into our body. But without the necessary actions on our part, that energy will rapidly dissipate. The question can be framed as where does the incoming energy go: into our physical body or into our sensation body?

At first this distinction is subtle because our sensation body is thin and weak, effectively just a sprinkling of sensitive energy in parts of our physical body. Our body awareness remains almost exclusively awareness of our physical body. Although our sensitive energy serves as the medium of that awareness, the quantity of sensitive energy present at this stage is not enough to become much of an object of awareness itself. As long as our body awareness is primarily physical, any excess sensitive energy we generate by attention, by sensing, by breathing energy, or by other practices, tends to dissipate back to the norm of mediating ordinary contact with our physical body.

So the practice needed consists of turning toward the possibility of a body made of the sensitive energy. We do that by inhabiting our sensitive energy, by being here, in our body, in the sensitive energy. This goes beyond putting our attention into our body. When we put our attention on something, including part of our body, there is typically a division between us and the object of our attention. It is as if we are in our head and what we are attending to is out there. We are not inhabiting it. I am here in my head as the observer and my right hand is out there as the observed.

To inhabit our sensitive energy, we begin by sensing our entire body. For that, the practice of breathing energy does help. It enables us to fill our whole body with more and more sensation. In doing so, the sensitive energy itself becomes the object of our attention. We become aware of this energy as a whole, contiguous with our physical body. From there, we shift our feeling of where we are. Instead of being in our physical body, which happens to be full of the sensitive energy, we feel ourselves to be in our sensation, which happens to have the shape of and be in our physical body. At that point we can begin to consider that energy to be a body in its own right, a sensation body.

Then we bring our intention to bear and occupy our sensation body, more and more robustly. We direct our attention into all the sensitive energy throughout our whole body. We encompass and embrace the whole, including ourselves, with our attention. We are in our sensation body. We reside in it. We stay in it. We continue to feed it by breathing energy. Only now, when the energy comes to us, we are there throughout our sensation body to receive the incoming energy. We give it a place to land. By raising our will-to-be and turning that will, our will, to the job of inhabiting our sensation, we provide the scaffold to stabilize our sensation body. The energy has a shape, that of our physical body. And we have a place, our energy body, our developing soul. We are intentionally basing our presence in our sensation body, in this moment. And in the next.

For this week, practice inhabiting your sensation body.

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