Different elements of a given internal environment can have different energies to them, awareness of which can inform you about where you are.

As you begin to explore the inner world, you may notice that different aspects of it are composed of different types or kinds of energy. There is a unique flavor or “signature” to everything you come across, and it’s this energy that can inspire the forms we see inner entities take in our visions of them.

Take for instance a vision of a lush, green, open landscape, on a sunny day. The landscape itself might have an energy to it, representing, if you sense it, feelings of ease, openness, relaxation and an energized mood. As your awareness explores the landscape, you might sense these aspects, and might be able to explore them with greater specificity: the sun might be inner brightness, the grass has a soft comfortable sense to it, the earth below a solid, stalwartness. And maybe over there, a forest with a sense of mystery and relaxed ease, or the sky, full of a spirit of openness and freedom. You might see a bunny hop over to where you are in this picture, and sense its simple curiosity, as it explores, and goes on its way.

The experience of the inner world, then, can be explored in this way – sensing, with simple awareness, the elements of your inner reality, shifting between images and the energy behind them whenever you choose.

Exposing False Images

One benefit to knowing how to sense energy is to enhance your ability to perceive the true nature of things, including sides of yourself. For instance, a side might try to coax you into taking a path you’re unsure of, but their stalwart nature and sense of faith in you might move you to further explore the viability of that path. Or, underneath, you might sense a torrent of pain and anger, and a desperation to control you and the situation you’re finding yourself in. In this case, you might switch tracks from considering their recommendation to wondering why they’re in pain in the first place. You could then potentially focus on letting that part heal, rather than taking advice that’s coming from a sense of reality potentially distorted and twisted by a desire to escape pain.

Or, in the example of the green landscape, let’s say underneath these serene landscape you sense – not those pleasant things I mentioned – but pain. Pain and anger at not being in a place of tranquility or cheerfulness, anger at not being able to be freely curious and simple. Anger, perhaps, at all that’s going wrong in your life, or anger at the inner landscape you’re naturally in. The way we perceive the inner environment can sometimes be a reflection of desire, rather than something we pick up from our own inner awareness. Being able to sense the energy of what we see inwardly – even in just our casual, day-to-day visualizations of things, can help us understand where those images come from, and what the spirit behind them is.

Being able to see what’s really there, we can more effectively respond to the inner situation we find ourselves in. For instance, if really our inner environment, the one we naturally find ourselves in, isn’t a tranquil setting, but a fiery, cacophonous, hellish one, then knowing and seeing the truth of that can give us the opportunity to transform the real situation. We can approach transformation, even if it seems impossible at first, because the information we use to respond to and transform our reality in positive ways will be more accurate.

For instance, present to a hellish landscape in which fires continuously burn, we may feel inspired or drawn to an image of us pouring water on the fires, to calm them. And indeed, we might feel this helps us. On an energetic level, we can examine the fire and water and make even more sense of this, for instance of the fire represents a writhing sense of pain, fighting, and struggle. Just this constant, neverending activity that doesn’t go out. Then, on the other hand, there’s the water. Sensing that, you might see a sense of calm, compassion, flow, and an invitation to rest, relax, and to be kind to one’s self. When the two spirits or sides come into contact with each other, the fire may allow itself to release from its pain, and with its relaxing, the fire might fade too. The hellish landscape might calm down, and a sense of rest might be brought to that place.

And yes, you are fully able to introduce new energies and elements into a scene, even if those elements aren’t present at the outset. There’s a certain intuitive, present creativity you can step into, and actions might come to you, then.

Then of course, there’s the ability to see through fear. For instance, you might see, inwardly, some gigantic or terrifying beast, but, its energy might be completely transparent as a part of you who’s afraid, and, in their fear, is creating this outward image. The image of the beast might inspire us to react in fear, but the reality of the underlying fearful side may bring out compassion and patience instead, which can be an enormous difference.

Sensing your own Energy

It might be said that all elements of the inner world are you, but they aren’t necessarily the you that’s active in the inner scenes you might perceive. When you’re viewing these scenes, where’re you coming from? What place are you in? What spirit and energy does the viewer, explorer, or present part, have?

In our body, this is something pretty common to be able to perceive. An honest answer to the question “how are you?” would be pretty comparable. That is, what energy are you currently in? We might feel kinda bored, or indecisive, or cheerful and happy. We might feel optimistic, or just all-around “good”.

When we go inward though, where are we currently? Knowing this can help with staying centered and self-aware, since any element of our own energy is something we can explore and be apart from, stepping into more of an observational role.

If we’re in pain, for instance, we don’t have to act from that pain. Same if we’re fearful. Instead, if we externalize the part we would rather investigate than act from, we step into the place of not-being that part, where we can observe and be aware of that part from some amount of distance.

Or, we might choose to see what’s going on in ourselves by extrapolating it out as another landscape. For instance, even though we might be present in a scene of openness and tranquility, who we are within that scene may be someone who’s anxious, tossing and turning, and a bit on edge. So, sensing within that person we seem to be, we may see another scene, perhaps also valid or maybe more relevant, where we’re a version of ourselves in an icy waste, caught in a blizzard where we’re struggling to get out of a large, cocoon-like straitjacket, and to move to some kind of shelter. The blizzard may have fearful panic to it, the snow below a sort of anxiety, and the straight jacket a fear that’s grappling with and trying to gain a grasp of the surrounding reality. Dealing with that reality, again perhaps using present, intuitive creativity, we might find that on the larger level, the one where we’re in the field, we relax and feel at ease, even where before, in the same spot, we were anxious.

Sensing the Energy of Entities

Just as you can sense “your” energy – so too can you explore, with awareness, the energy and personal experience of any part of yourself, or any entity you come across. This can be helpful for healing, because sometimes the issues a part’s going through may be hard to understand or obscure to you. You can’t see or address the source of their pain, or some other behavior that might be creating conflict or disturbance you don’t know how to resolve.

By looking within these parts, and sensing their energy, you may pick up new scenes that describe the energy dynamics going on inside them. After resolving things on this level, perhaps by allowing some new element to get introduced, you might see a change on the surface level of that entity, and in the overall feeling and dynamic going on inside you.

The Energy Signature

From my experience, everything inward has its own energy signature – a sort of unique ID tag that can allow you to distinguish one energy from another. This is the same for larger, more complicated entities as well as for the more simple ones.

Let me give some examples of things that, for me, have their own energy signatures: creativity, annoyance, understanding, freedom, joy, intellect, groundedness, happiness, anger, peace, awareness, calm, practicality, flow, dissatisfaction, passion, presence, common sense, sensitivity, balance, and many, perhaps infinite numbers of others.

Even for just the words themselves, you may feel a sense of the energy of these things. Indeed, most words might have their own energy signature for you. You might be more easily be able to see this in the way you perceive the difference between similar words. For instance, anger, being perturbed, annoyance, might all have their own energies to you. You can also consider how different colors have different energies to them, for us, individually.

As for the energy itself, though, it exists on an inner level – and the way we’d each identify, name, personify, or visualize these energies is something unique to each one of us, even if we might have access to realities with similar or identical energies.

Furthermore, our relationship toward different energies, the way we perceive and respond to their presence, how we view them, what we understand about them – all of that may be an individual thing.

For instance, there might be certain “ideal” energies we hang onto, or certain energies we feel that being in touch with brings us wisdom, or perhaps a greater sense of fun. Then of course there’s energies that naturally come up day-to-day, which could be anything.

Outer Energies

I’ll take a short bit to talk about outer energies, because I imagine this is something anyone might be curious about. Can you sense the energies of other people living in the outer, physical, sense-witnessed world? Or, would anything you sense just be a reflection of, say, how you perceive that person? Can you sense a tree? Or, is it just a reflection of how you perceive that tree’s being, and how you’d characterize or personify it, perhaps based on your prejudices or limited knowledge?

Does the attempt to sense and pick up the energies from the other individuals of the world around us only tell us something about ourselves, does it only create for us an experience of being present to some inward energy?

Well, it’s difficult to say. Many things could be the case, and I’m not sure exactly how well the outer world can be picked-up-on through inner senses. Indeed, you may be able to pick up on how other people are feeling, or what they might be thinking. It’s not something completely alien to be able to empathize or to understand when someone’s in pain, or relaxed, feeling open, or perhaps feeling stubborn, or negative. We can read their faces, their tone of voice – everything they’re expressing, whether they mean to or not.

And this energy we pick up on, whatever seems to be there in them, is something we can experience inwardly. This indeed may be part of what goes on in an empathetic experience. We witness someone else’s pain, and become present to that pain on an inner, emotional level. Or, we might feel glad for their happiness, just as we might feel a sense of gladness at a part of ourselves who appears happy and upbeat, even with a slight gap between the self who is happy, and the self observing and feeling that happiness.

So, these are all tricky issues – even exactly how inner energy works, as its own thing, can be something hard to understand. So how it all works, I’ll leave it as a question, one that I’m providing observations and insights into, without necessarily being able to give any sort of definitive answer.

Exercise: Sense your own energy

For a topic like this, I thought I might give a little visualization exercise that could help you distinguish for yourself what I mean by energy, and to have a little experience with exploring and sensing your own, inner environment.

1. Take a moment to relax. Breath in, and out. Let go of any tensions you can pick up on in your mind, body, or emotions. Doesn’t have to be perfect, just spend a few moments letting go, and letting yourself relax.
2. Put your awareness on how you feel, and on the nature of your inner experience right now. Call to mind a picture of a place that would describe or represent where you are internally at this time.
3. See this place. What do you see here? Notice each element in turn. If you want to, or if your mind wanders, you can write this description out on paper.
4. Now, gently go to each element and try to sense the energy behind the image. What energy does  each thing represent? What’s behind these images? If you’re having trouble seeing more than just the static images, you can try asking yourself how might these different elements express themselves if they were truly alive? If they were living, and conscious in some way? Would they be smiling serenely, or perhaps expressing anger and rage? Again, if you want to, you can write down a list of each element in the scene and the energies behind them.
5. If you are satisfied with the exercise and done, you can exit it – however, this next part is for potentially transforming, contributing to, or exploring the scene. If you’d like to continue, go for it.
6. Moving on, within this scene, and present to it, what feelings come up in you? Where do you want to go? How is the you, who’s in this scene, doing? Are you calm, curious, creative, open? Are you anxious, worried, self-conscious, maybe? Let yourself be, and live the experience of being present to this scene. If new elements pop up, let them, and if you want to, you can explore those energies too.
7. Where you want to take things from here is up to you. If you’re in some hellish scene, or in a situation you don’t like, you might feel like trying something to try and move things in a positive direction. You might rely on your intuitive creativity, while present to what’s going on. Or, maybe in the original scene, you felt badly, and want to explore this you’s inner environment, to see what might be going on there. Or, maybe you just want to experience, see, and feel this place you’ve found yourself in, allowing the experience and the awareness to develop. Allow yourself to take things in directions you might like, to feel what you feel, and to go gently, perhaps, as you balance, or maybe heal, yourself and feel whatever’s there. If you’ve been writing, you can certainly describe what happens in narrative, story-like form.
8. Once you’re done, you can allow the vision to fade.

This is something you can come back to any time, whether you’re curious about your inner world, or perhaps concerned about what seems to be going on there. Either way, this exercise is meant to enhance your awareness and enable your ability to connect with what goes on within you.

Hope this helps anyone looking to explore, understand, or gain awareness of their inner world and the vast array of energies and dynamic forces that can play a part in what goes on their. Good luck with your journey, and take care.

-Oliver

Related Topics

Creative Visualization – The above exercise is basically a creative visualization exercise, and knowing how to sense energy may greatly help with connecting with the realities being visualized.

Explore Your Inner World – All of these techniques, in a way, rely on or are enhanced through a knowledge of how to sense energy. Expression is based in expressing the energy within you fluidly, and processing can be a way of expressing, perhaps in a piecemeal way, energies you pick up as part of your inner dynamic

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