Connecting to Energy
by Irini Rockwell, M.A.
One
morning I was listening to the classical music station. The announcer
introducing Beethoven's Fifth Symphony was lamenting how many words had been
spoken trying to explain the meaning of this powerful piece of music. Finally he
said, "It's just pure energy! Pure Beethoven!" I burst out laughing as
I realized that he was essentially urging people to get beyond their concepts
and connect directly with the power of the music. Yes!
The world we perceive, conceptualize, and think we know is only a surface
reality. Underneath it lies a magical realm, more elusive and yet more vivid.
Every philosophical, spiritual, and religious tradition, every art form, in
every corner of the globe, in every century of human existence, teaches about
this deeper reality. In this book (The Five Wisdom Energies) we refer to it as the surprising and powerful force called energy. To move
through the world without connecting to energy is like learning about being in
love from reading romance novels. Just as we don't really know love until we
love, so we are not truly in the world until we engage with it energetically.
Energy is the vibrant aspect of being -- the quality, texture, ambience, and
tone of both the animate and the inanimate, the visible and the invisible. It is
the basic vitality of our existence. It pervades our inner, psychological world
as well as the outer, phenomenal world. It exists in what we see, smell, taste,
touch, hear, and feel. People express their energy through attitudes, emotions,
decisions, and actions. Furthermore, we each display energy in our own unique
ways -- through body posture, facial expressions, mannerisms, word choices, the
tone and tempo of our voice.
Energy is life force, our natural power or strength. It resides in our
breathing. When our breathing changes, our emotions change, our movements
change, and our perception of the world changes accordingly. When our vital
energy is obscured by strong emotions, opinions, and concepts, our perspective
narrows and our strength diminishes. When we are free of such blockages, our
power is free and expansive.
From moment to moment our experience is made of bodily sensations, feelings,
thoughts, and perceptions. We string these myriad and constantly shifting
elements together to create what we call "I" and "my
experience" and "the world." For example, when we eat an apple,
we see it, touch it, taste it, and then decide whether we like it. Altogether
this is our "apple-eating experience."
When we are not bound by the solid sense of self that comes from building a
story line or making our experiences into an identity, we can connect with our
innate energy. Without the filters, the energetic quality of our existence is
more fluid, fragmented, illusory, and shimmering. With no solid sense of
"me" to block the flow, it is pleasurable to experience ourselves.
Energy is also a way of understanding karma, the Buddhist view of cause and
result. The energetic makeup of a situation produces (causes) a corresponding
energetic situation (result). Our thoughts, words, and actions have their
inevitable outcome. Traditional Buddhism sees that these patterns follow us
through lifetimes and so create our karma, good or bad. Working with ourselves,
our energy, is the key to creating good karma.
The forces of nature are elemental energy in the raw. Earth is solid, firm,
and trustworthy, a good foundation and a nourishing ground. Water is fluid,
changeable: it can be forceful and flowing or still and reflective. Fire is
playful and intense, quixotic and passionate, impossible to grasp. Air might
manifest as a light, refreshing breeze, which seems harmonious, or as a harsh
hurricane.
Elemental energy is harder to experience in cities, where we fortify
ourselves against the elements by creating constructs, much as we fortify
ourselves against energetic reality by creating story lines. We confine earth to
potted plants and manicured gardens; water to sinks, bathtubs, and toilet bowls;
fire to the fireplace and stove; and air to fans, vents, and air conditioners.
There is nothing wrong with this, though domesticating the elements tends to
distance us from their magic.
We can evoke energy through creative expression. For example, in an
autobiographical dance theater piece, I moved through many different emotional
states, focusing not on specific life events but on their emotional energy. In
pounding a hanging duffel bag (as a boxer would) and repeating the line
"Could, would, should, go do" until it became a screech, I evoked a
masculine energy. The feelings I had about my mother's dying took the emotional
energy of the query "Mother, why did you die on me?" and turned into a
cry as I ran across the stage. The experience of the evoked energy had more
impact than the words.
We can also see people as manifestations of different energies. Imagine for a
moment that good friends walk into your living room. Instead of seeing them as
the Jenny or Steve you "know" so well, erase your familiar picture of
them and notice their energetic qualities. See a perky, fun-loving, fluidly
moving Jenny. See a slow-moving Steve, with a soft smile and accommodating
manner, who never gets ruffled. Both are expressing their particular energies --
their quality, tone, and rhythm; their dance; their song.
Most of the time we think of the physical world as composed of solid
material, yet it also has an energetic aspect. A table is a "table."
We rarely notice the energy the table radiates. A shiny, smooth table radiates a
different energy than an old, beat-up table. The big thing in the yard that has
roots, a trunk, branches, and leaves -- we call it a tree. We know a few things
about tables and trees. Yet naming things and having concepts about them is
different from experiencing them on an energetic level.
In new environments we are more likely to be aware of the reality of energy
because we have fewer preexisting ideas through which to filter our immediate
perceptions. Awareness is heightened further if we are unfamiliar with the
language, because we are less apt to get distracted by words. I once traveled by
train through a long tunnel in the Alps that took us from German Switzerland
into Italian Switzerland. Although at the time I didn't know what had changed, I
felt the difference in my surroundings vividly and immediately after emerging
from the tunnel. I knew with my whole being that I was in a different energy
space, a different ambience. The air became soft and warm, colors were brighter,
and my body relaxed. The freshness of my sense perceptions connected me with the
people and the place.
Providing the right ambient energy for a situation can enhance it. A language
school in Minnesota exemplifies this by creating different "villages"
for each language taught there. Each village is a miniature replica of a
country, with the appropriate architecture, food, and so forth. People learn
more easily because the language is evoked by the energy of the surroundings.
To illustrate: I spent my early childhood years in Turkey. When I was eight
and my sister was ten, we took a two-year sabbatical in the States. Upon
returning to Turkey on the boat, my sister and I realized we had completely
forgotten our Turkish. Dad's lessons on deck made no impact. The end of our
journey came; the boat neared the port of Istanbul. It eased up to the dock, and
the walkway was placed. Our Turkish friends came running up to us, crying out
warm greetings. And down we ran to them, answering in perfectly fluent Turkish,
completely oblivious to the fact that our language memories had returned!
All world cultures have found ways to explore, celebrate, and express
energetic reality in their religions, art, and philosophical traditions. In
Greek and Roman mythology as well as in Eastern religions such as Buddhism,
Hinduism, and Shinto, different deities symbolize different energies. In
vajrayana Buddhism the five wisdom energies are traditionally presented as the
five Buddha families and are personified as symbolic deities. As such they have
been around for over a thousand years. Native Americans recognize elemental
energies as spirits. Buddhists and Hindus evoke particular energies by chanting
mantras, repetitions of certain sounds or words. African and Australian peoples
use ritual dance to call up energies or spirits.
Novelists, musicians, painters, dancers, and poets all tune in to the world
of energy in their art. Music expresses a full range of energies, from the
pizzicato of violins to the rhythm of drums to the driving beat of a rock
guitar. Classical ballet, European folk dance, and slam dancing each evoke a
unique energy. In visual art the impressionistic canvases of Monet and van Gogh
display an energy quite different from the abstractions of Mondrian or Klee. The
works of art that come to be considered classic are often those that most
gracefully and powerfully evoke the universal energies and communicate them to
their audience.
Sciences like acupuncture and feng shui and body disciplines like martial
arts and hatha yoga work specifically with energy as a medium of healing. These
disciplines are based on working with the meridians, or energy channels of the
body. The basic principle is that our energy moves along certain lines, but in
the course of life, particularly when we are ill, the energy becomes blocked.
Acupuncture or postures that work with energy are ways to unblock this energy.
Psychology has noted the importance of energy in body-centered therapies like
bioenergetics. Cognitive science and the study of perception bring the physical
and psychological worlds together through theories about energy.
Energy can be used to enhance function, as athletes and dancers know well.
Watch the swings, falls, jumps of a gymnast and see how they align with energy.
As a dancer, I often found that if I focused only on the technical aspects of a
movement -- lifting my leg above my head, turning on one leg with my body arched
back, leaping across the room -- the move was difficult. When I connected with
the energy of what I was doing, the movement was easier and more enjoyable. I
would use an image -- reaching my leg to the sky, rooting my supporting leg in
the earth as I threw my body into the turn, and then experiencing myself as
weightless as air on the jump.
Feeling is a word that we use for both physical and mental experiences.
Feeling joins body and mind. It is more complex than the physical pain we get
from banging our knee. It is more subtle than an emotion like anger, or thoughts
about what we have to do tomorrow. Feeling is like a sixth sense, the ability to
tune in intuitively to what is happening. It joins intellect and intuition,
heart and mind. It is the way we experience energy.
A colloquial language acknowledging the power of energy has grown up since
the 1960s, when we might have heard people talk about energy as vibrations, as
in "picking up the vibes" of a person or place. The verb grok came
into being; it means to understand the full situation intuitively. When we
"grok" something, we pick up the "vibe" in a way that
transcends concepts. Nowadays we might say that a person has
"presence" or a place has "atmosphere." An event might be
characterized as "intense" or a person as "mellow." These
terms simply acknowledge that each person and situation has a perceivable
energy.
Working with energy plugs us into our experience in a way that reveals its
illusory nature as well as the illusory nature of the world around us. We see
that the world is not as solid as it seems; it is made up of energies constantly
in flux. There is nothing, yet there is something. For instance, a favorite view
in a natural setting is infinitely changeable, depending on the time of day, the
seasons, the weather. There is no one view. We could hardly say it is the same
place in February as it is in August. And so it is with our bodies, the elements
of which have come together in a form that we call "human," which will
dissolve when we die.
This
article is excerpted from:
 The Five Wisdom Energies: A Buddhist Way of Understanding Personalities, Emotions, and Relationships
by Irini
Rockwell, M.A.
Reprinted with permission of the publisher, Shambhala
Publications. ©2002. http://www.shambhala.com
Info/Order
this book.
About the Author
Irini
Rockwell, M.A., director of the Five Wisdoms
Institute, has a background in dance, creative process, psychotherapy, Buddhism,
and leadership training. She was director of undergraduate dance and dance
therapy at Naropa
University in Boulder, Colorado and directed
her own dance company in the San Francisco Bay area. She is a senior teacher in
the Shambhala
International community and a founding member
of Maitri Council International. She travels internationally to teach workshops
on the five wisdoms.
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