Life Force Energy - What Is It?
So what is this life force/"energy" -- or just "energy" for short--that we're talking about healing?
It’s not as esoteric as you may think. In fact, it's everywhere. It surrounds you and embraces you—invisible, like the air you breathe, and just as real.Also called prana, chi, ki, qi, mana, the bio-energetic field, and many other names, it is the life force that is the basis and animating power for the universe and everything in it. It surrounds us, permeates us, sustains us, and connects us to all things.
It's like the ocean, with each of us like a drop of water—-part of the ocean and yet at the same time, in some circumstances, separate. To put it another way, everyone and everything has its own energy field, which is both part of the larger, universal field, and in some ways separate from it.
You may think that this intangible force or field is something that can be perceived and understood and influenced by only a few gifted people--but that’s not the case. You constantly experience it and interact with it. For example:
- When you walk into someone’s home and instantly do or don’t like the way it feels.
- When you're in a forest, and have a feeling of deep peace and renewal.
- When you put your arm around a troubled friend, and they feel better.
- When you speak up and bring calm and reason back to a group that has become angry and irrational.
- When you liven up a dull party.
Energy is everywhere, as common--and as miraculous--as the air we breathe, the light of the sun and stars, the love of our family and friends.
Yet it can be difficult for people to entertain, let alone grasp, the concept of this invisible field.
How Do We Know Life Force/Energy Is Real?
After all, we can't see it or touch it--so how do we know it's real? It just makes sense when you think about your own experience.
It has no measurable, tangible presence. This makes it easy for most people to ignore, and for skeptics to dismiss. But does subtle energy's non-material character necessarily mean that it doesn't exist? Of course not! Our lives are full of non-material realities.
I offer The Energy Healing Site free of charge and without external ads. If you'd like to support me in my work to make energy healing more accessible to a broader range of people, you can purchase my book, Chakra Care: Do-It-Yourself Energy Healing for a More Joyful, Loving, Fruitful Life. You'll learn
to clear, nurture and support your own chakras with 500 fun, down-to-earth
activities. A user-friendly, practical guide that teaches about energy and energy healing as well, it available as a paperback
or Kindle.
The World View of Philosophical Materialism
Most of us in Western culture are skeptical of things that can’t be seen
and touched. This stems from growing up in a culture that is still
caught up in the matter-based, mechanistic world view that arose from
Newtonian physics.
Although Newton's great treatise was published in 1687 and science has moved generations beyond this in its interpretation of the world, we’re still steeped in the doctrine of materialism, which basically holds that nothing except matter truly exists. A culture's ability to update its world view is apparently very slow!p> Our culture’s materialist, mechanistic version of reality is in conflict with the views of most scientists today, as well as with reality as most of us experience it. It is also in conflict with how people have viewed the world for most of recorded history. It's more a dogma or an ideology than anything else.
If we stop and think about it, our own experience tells us that there is
so much more to reality than what we can see and touch. And more than that, energy has been measured and documented extensively with scientific instruments in recent years.
The Reality of Thoughts and Feelings
For example, I can’t imagine anyone denying that love (or any strong emotion) is real—but we can neither see nor touch nor smell nor taste nor hear love (although we can certainly experience its effects).
The same with our thoughts. They can’t be directly perceived by any of our senses—yet who would deny that thoughts are real?
So our own experience directly refutes the world view of materialism.
Modern medicine, embracing the Newtonian world-view, at least until recently thought of and treated the body primarily as a machine. They simply ignored the life force (or consciousness or energy) animating our bodies, thoughts, and emotions.
But in our hearts, we know that we are more than fancy machines or complicated computers. We know—because we experience it every minute of the day—that there is more to the world, and more to us humans [and other life forms], than what we can see and touch.
And if thoughts and emotions are real, it seems reasonable that subtle energy might well be real, too--even though we can't measure it or prove it scientifically yet.
How Do We Decide If Something Is Real?
So is energy real? I guess it depends on the internal mental rules or definitions--often sub-conscious--by which we separate our experience into "real" and "not real."
Depending on those rules and definitions, we admit some things into the category of what we call "real," while excluding others as fiction, lie, imagination, myth, hallucination, or mistake, and just ignoring still others because they don't fit into our model of reality.
Science and medicine have their own rules about reality, and those rules are, of course, useful. I'm not arguing against science and medicine. I'm just saying that they're not the only valid set of rules possible.
And my internal rules (shaped by my own experience) say that unseen things like emotions, thoughts, and subtle energy are real. How about you? Is energy real?
Explaining Non-Local Experiences from an Energetic Perspective
A related issue is that of non-local experiences or consciousness. Non-local experiences -- things that we experience even though we are not physically present in space and/or time, or awareness/consciousness that comes to us from something other than our physical senses -- are far from rare.
These experiences can include hunches, clairvoyance (and clairaudience and clairsentience), premonitions, synchronistic events, precognitive dreams, intuition, telepathy, remote viewing and distant healing. They can occur while you're awake, asleep, or in the state between sleeping and waking.
But as common and downright normal as non-local experiences are,
they can be confusing, disorienting and difficult to make sense of,
because they conflict with our conventional model of reality. But viewed from the perspective of energy healing, they make sense.
Learn more about what non-local experiences are here.
Photo by Emmanuel HEREDIA (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons