"subtle energy" and "energy work" and mental models:
At some point, maybe incidentally, or quite centrally, or somewhere in between, you may encounter phenomena that correspond to something like subtle energy, qi, chi, ki, ruach, prana, fuzzing, buzzing, tingling, vibrations, etc.
Loosely speaking, you might find that you can do something like attend to it, move it, push it, pull it, accumulate it, dissipate it, circulate it, store it..
You might find that it’s somehow related to muscle tension, physical (as opposed to "energetic") sensations," or subtle muscle activity, or "somatic refactoring," or "autonomic activity," or glandular or vascular activity, or muscle tone changes, fascial changes, myofascial changes, body map changes, "phenomenological field" changes, sensory re-saliencing/re-factoring, etc., etc., etc., etc.
You might or might not eventually also start encountering phenomena that could be called knots, tangles, twists, coils, gates, blocks, blockages, complexes, closures, etc., etc. etc.
And you might naturally, or because of things you’ve read, want to untwist, unblock, open your "channels," "meridians," "energy centers," etc., etc., etc.
An important thing, here, is that you must, over time, go beyond any particular models, theories, etc., of (a) "what is" and (b) "what to do," to engage with the territory on your own terms with your own sensuous feedback loops.
It’s important to have agnosticism, an experimental attitude, care and caution, if you decide to do anything systematic (and "systematic" itself shouldn’t be inappriopriately avoided, too, cf. "cranking"!), and, in any case, to have open/modifiable/responsive ontologies and open/modifiable/resonsive methods.
You may be aware of historical concepts, in natural philosophy and physics, such as phlogiston or luminiferous aether. These are ideas that, over time, gave way to more contemporary theories about combustion, oxidation, electromagnetism, etc.
Similarly, you may find that "subtle energy," "movement," "accumulation," "circulation," etc., etc., etc., not to mention "attention," are useful initial pointers to, or hooks for, phenomena. But, these ideas may eventually get in the way.
That’s not to say that the experiences themselves, should be dismissed, ignored, downplayed, etc. It’s just that they’re part of a wider playing field, of all meditative and experiential phenomena, where local things can affect global things, and vice versa. All of spatial, sensory, temporal, meaningful, seemingly non-meaning-laden, seeming, knowing, etc,. etc., etc., etc., etc., etc., etc., etc., are all part of seamless playing field.
Consider, if you’re experiencing something like an "energy block" (or etc.), should you ignore it, push/pull/attend to it, deliberately push/pull/attend somewhere far away—in or on the body or even in the environmental surround? Should you not "push/pull/attend" at all? Should you do something "cognitive" instead? Or move your body? Or take a walk? Or talk to a friend? And so on, and on, and on, and on. It is sometimes the case that systematic "energy work" is far more tangling than untangling. And, engaging with "exactly that territory" may not ultimately look like "energy work," at all, depending on how so conceived. It just depends.
Sometimes local "untangling" will cause adjacent or global "tangling," because, in some sense, "everything in the bodymind is somehow connected to everything else," so one has to account for global effects in all local choices. "Local" has to be done in an order that leads to a global outcome, so one might revisit "localities" in complex interleavings and interweavings and so on, and localities themselves will mix and blur, etc., etc., etc.
Just as it’s often better to think of meditation as precise puzzle solving, versus "general strength training" ("puzzles versus muscles"); it’s generally better to think of "energy work" as a subset or seamless interleaving with meditation, and so again, as precise puzzle solving, versus "general energy cultivation," or etc.
Always guard against inappropriate reification (including inappropriate reification of "inappropriate reifiication"!) and "magical button pushing/mashing," via general intuition and things in spirit of things like the meta protocol. [sic] And, in any case, this "stuff," too, is not separate, not special, in some sense, with respect to the whole meditative enterprise.
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See also: