What is energy work? A more basic question, perhaps, would be the exploration of what is energy.
Energy is the term that has come to be used to explain or to connote the basic life force that exists in and all around you. Its very intangibility to those who exist solely, in their perception, on the Earth-plane gives it an ethereal quality that makes it seem difficult to understand.
Often people say they cannot feel energy. What they really mean is: they do not know what they are feeling when they feel it.
All of you feel energy all the time. All of you have the ability to discern what it is that you are feeling. You simply need to bring awareness and attention to what it is you feel.
Understand, however, that this can be a difficult process. Sometimes certain protections are built-in to your patterns of awareness that make it difficult for you to notice when you are feeling certain kinds of energy. The people who feel energy the most tend to be those who have chosen to accept that doing so is a benefit to them. This is a choice that you can make at any time. But understand that such choices need to be made on all the levels of your being. You are your conscious mind. You are also your heart space. You are also your soul or essence. All of You works together, all the time, to create the choices and the responses that you have all the input that you receive in the course of a day.
Energy Expanded
Going back to the question "What is Energy?":
Energy is simply the explanation for the life force that exists in and all around you.
In other words, everything has its own awareness: a table, a book, the cells that make up your nose all have an individual awareness. This collective awareness moves in a cyclic fashion, much like a wave and much like electricity does.
In fact, a very good analogy for "What is Energy" is to compare it to electricity. However, electricity has far more instant tangibility than does energy. You are beings made of energy. That is what you are made of - there is nothing more to you than simply energy. Another way to describe energy is, of course, calling it Love. It's gathered together in certain patterns, in certain ways, to create form. The form can be a microphone. The form can be a person. The form can be a tree. It's all made of the same "stuff".
Energy work, then, is an activity that helps to bring awareness or attention to the energy that you are and the energy that exists all around you. When someone puts their hands on someone else, when they're doing Reiki or other energy healing, they are simply intending to bring attention to the energy that is already that other person. That's all there is to it. Energy work brings attention to what already exists within you.
The reason why energy work is effective is because it acts as a catalyst to assist you with the process that you choose to embark upon. If you are receiving healing from someone else, you are choosing to accept that healing, and in so doing accept whatever comes of your new attention and awareness to the healing that is taking place within you. No one person can heal another without an interaction and a choice being made by the recipient to bring their energetic awareness and attention to the possibility of healing taking place.
Question: So the healing actually comes from increased awareness?
Yes, but even saying "increased awareness" is a little bit misleading.
You don't necessarily have to have that awareness within your conscious mind. Your body, made up as it is of energy, has awarenesses of its own all over the place. Your leg has awareness that you may not be aware of in your mind - but your leg knows. If your leg is choosing to hold attention to the healing that needs to take place within it, then that will happen.
Question: If one person intends to bring healing energy to another, when will it be helpful and when will it do nothing?
That is a very good question.
Understand that the recipient of energy work chooses to accept the awareness and attention that comes from the healing action. Understand also that this choice need not be on a conscious level.
It is easy to differentiate between when this is helpful and when it will do nothing. There is always, within you, an even deeper and more underlying part of you - your essence, or soul - that you tend not to factor in when you think about choices, decisions and healing. If you are the target of intended energy work or intended healing because you have a condition that others think needs healing (for instance, if you are a person with cancer) other people will give you energy and will send energy to you in the hope that you get better. But perhaps on a soul level it is your choice to experience the illness to its ultimate degree. Perhaps it is the choice of you on a soul level to not accept that healing - in which case it won't work.
It will always work, however, when you you, as your conscious mind, are in closer connection to You on a soul level. When you are making the choices, living the life and walking the path of someone who is connected to themselves on a soul level, then energy work will always have an effect - and it will always have the effect that you choose, that you desire.
Often people don't know what they want - in which case energy work can also be very useful. We already mentioned that it acts as a catalyst for what's already present. So, if someone wants a shift - a transformation - in their life and they receive energy work, it can help them bring clarity to their desires. It can then help gather together what they need within them in order to move off in the direction that they want to move in.
