The Real You

Feeling Energetic

“…body identification is one of the most basic forms of ego…also the one that you can most easily go beyond. This is done not by trying to convince yourself that you are not your body, but by shifting your attention from the external form and from thoughts about your body—beautiful, ugly, strong, weak, too fat, too thin—to the feeling of aliveness inside it.”
Eckhart Tolle

I’ve been writing off and on for a couple of weeks about our over-identification with the surface of our bodies. Now, I’d like to address the essence of our physical form and its interface with the rest of creation. It is easiest to feel this connection in the hands, mainly because they are highly enervated. For just a moment, close you eyes and allow your hands to lie, palms up, in your lap. Now focus your attention on your palms. After a few seconds, you may feel a slight tingling and then a sense of movement and warmth. Your hands may feel as though they are pulsing. That feeling of aliveness, like everything else in the universe, is energetic in nature.

Now, with eyes still closed, shift your attention to other parts of your body. You will likely find the same sensations there, though a little less intense. That breathing, pulsing aliveness is what Eckhart Tolle calls your ‘inner body’. “What I call the ‘inner body’ isn’t really the body anymore but life energy, the bridge between form and formlessness.” (A New Earth) This life energy extends beyond your physical body to about the length of your arms, and forms what the textbooks refer to as your ‘aura’ or ‘auric body’. Some people are able to see it with their naked eyes, and it can be photographed and measured. It is this energetic body that ‘gets a feel for’ other people and situations, that ‘reaches out’ in the form of compassion or anger, and that ‘electrifies a room’.

Increasing awareness of the energetic body helps us to stay grounded in the present moment, and is a means of understanding that we are far more than flesh and blood. Working with the body’s energy keeps the immune system tuned up, helps us heal from illness or injury, and amplifies our mental acuity. It is the ‘real us’ so to speak, and a good way to shift focus away from our cultural obsession with physical form to our connection with that which is soulful and ‘spirit-filled’ about us. And that is a shift worth making.

In the spirit,
Jane