It's In Your Hands
by Jeffrey Pierce

When the mainstream world hears words like "magick," "energy work," or "holistic healing," defenses and disbelief often immediately spring into place. After all, we're taught that if you can't directly experience something, it can't possibly exist.

The thing is, we can experience it. Each and every one of us. You can even do it right where you're sitting, reading the article that's currently before your eyes.

Briskly rub your hands, palm down on a surface that has friction (the front of your pant legs is perfect) like you're scratching an itch on both of your palms. Now shake our your hands like you're trying to fling drops of waters off of your fingertips. Take your hands and raise them until they're at shoulder height and shoulder width, holding your hands so that their palms face each other. Relax; breathe deeply, not a forced breath, but a comfortable, relaxing breath; three times. Pay attention to the palms of your hands and the skin your fingertips. Think about how they feel, about what they feel and feel like.

Now, slowly, still paying attention to what you can feel, gradually bring your palms together, stopping when you feel something begin to change.

Most folks feel this as a weird "presence," much like the resistance you feel when you slowly push two magnets together that are turned so that they repel each other. For some, it's a gentle, subtle presence; for other's, it's surprisingly intense. Some people will also feel a sensation of heat along with the resistance that occurs long before you're able to sense actual body heat.

This sensation, for lack of a better term, is what we call energy. It's the same energy that we use in magick, energy work, and holistic healing. There is nothing overly mystical about it - at least no more so than the fact that an odd bunch of cells eventually became a human being who is currently reading this article.

Now try it with a partner. All of us, even the most mundane of us, know someone who is good-natured enough to be willing to participate in our experiment. Stand facing each other. Rub your palms briskly and "fling the water" from your fingertips once more. Each of you raise your hands and hold them at roughly shoulder level with your palms facing each other. Breathe. And then slowly move your palms together, stopping when you can feel the other person's energy.

While this seems pretty cool, the doors really begin to open when you have a third person who is willing to play along.

When you connect with the first partner's energy, stand there for a moment, your palms slightly apart, and pay attention to how their energy feels, what it makes you think of, any associations that may spring into mind. Now have your second partner take their place. Breathe. Slowly move your palms together, just as you did with your first partner. As you and your second partner begin to sense each others energy, ask yourself, "Is it the same feeling? Or different?"

Almost without exception, the sensation will be distinctively different.

You can go from person to person, practicing this technique, and you'll discover that the feel of energy you encounter with each person is different from the one before. As you slowly begin to mentally catalog similarities and differences, you can begin to see how an understanding of this energy and an ability to read and interpret the different feel from person to person would benefit a holistic healer or an energy worker. After all, once they gain some skill in reading energy, they can tell when, where, and how it's blocked and employ the appropriate tools and techniques to get that energy flowing again. Holistic healers, from modern practitioners to shamans of long ago, believe that disease it all its forms typically arises from an imbalance in an energetic state. Bringing the energy back into balance and restoring its natural flow can often be as effective as a surgeon's scalpel.

The secret that shaman's know that has been lost to many of us is that the energy field that you felt in your friend's hand is everywhere. It's in the air around you, the food you eat, the earth you walk upon, even the flow of reality around you and the way you experience it as "time."

Think about it for a moment. Picture yourself in your bathtub, relaxing at the end of a long day. Now imagine that you're standing downtown in your hometown. It's early morning, before the pedestrian and commuter traffic has picked up and, at the moment, you're as alone as you would be in your bathtub. Now think about how you feel, how the air, the space around you feels. It's different, isn't it? That too is energy. And that realization gives you a tiny glimpse of how a shaman sees the entire world.

That energy, whether you feel it in between your hands or in the space you're in, is at the core of everything we do as human beings. It's not a skill we have to be taught or a bargain we have to make with some otherworldly being in order to experience. That energy and the ability to sense it, interact with it, change it, and wield it, is a natural part of what it means to be human. In a sense, it's our birthright. We've been able to experience energy from childhood; we simply forgot about it along the way.

The next time you wonder about the validity of energy work - or the next time someone questions your chosen path if you work with energy - slowly bring your palms together. Pay attention to what the world around you feels like. If you find yourself passing by a store that sells stones, go inside, find a basket of rocks and gently pass your hand over them, palm down, and feel for the energy of the stones. There are countless, simple techniques that you can do, not only to experience energy, but to remember the natural abilities that you forgot along the way.

Thoughts? Comments? You can contact us at connect@oldways.com or interact with Jeffrey, Briana, and the Old Ways community on our Facebook page.

Originally published in Old Ways on August 1, 2008