Intuition and gut feeling

In Zen practice we purposefully cultivate attention in our hara, our belly, our gut. We emphasise turning off our discriminating, thought dominated mind, and develop a kind of knowing that is beyond this’s and that’s, right or wrongs – essentially beyond language itself.

One word in English that we often use to point to this direct knowing is “intuition”. Intuition is defined as an "almost immediate situation understanding” – a kind of direct, immediate knowing. “How do you know that?” someone asks, and you reply “I don’t know, I just do”. This is intuition speaking. Like a hunch or a feeling. You arrive at a conclusion through processes that typically remain mostly unknown to your conscious mind.

The word intuition comes from the Latin intuir, which means ‘knowledge from within.’ In the last few centuries intuition has been kinda poo-pooed because it’s not rational - it's “just a feeling”. With the rise of science in the West, rational thought has rather taken superiority.

Second brain

Recently there’s been quite a bit of discussion about what people call our "2nd brain” down in our gut. This 2nd brain consists of sheaths of neurons embedded in the walls of our gut – intestines, stomach, etc. – about 100 million of them in total. That's more than in either the spinal cord or the peripheral nervous system (but a good deal fewer than in our 1st brain!). The feelings from these gut-nerves influence, to quite a large degree, our emotions, so you could say our second brain very much informs our state of mind. One obvious example is when we feel butterflies in the stomach. The butterflies sensation arises as blood is redirected out of our digestive system as part of our flight or flight response, and it signals to us we’re feeling nervous or anxious. As it says here, a lot of the information that the gut sends to the (head) brain is about well-being, which is understandable since eating and digestion are fraught with danger! Like the skin, the gut must stop potentially dangerous invaders, such as bacteria and viruses, from getting inside the body.

Intuition is a very undervalued and underused skill in most people. But interestingly, people with certain types of brain-damage who can’t form emotional intuitions can take hours to decide between two kinds of cereal! They’re caught trying to reason out whether they want Frosties or Coco Pops, and ultimately it’s not a rational decision (any rational person would choose muesli...).

In research, you’ll often start solving a problem by going with a hunch – it’s what sends you off in one particular avenue of enquiry over all the others you could go with. Einstein knew:

The workings of intuition transcend those of the intellect, and as is well known, innovation is often a triumph of intuition over logic. – Albert Einstein

How does intuition arise?

Obviously intuition doesn’t just arise out of nothing. The more experience you have, the better your intuition. Intuition arises out of a rich array of, what you might call, patterns of experience – memories, understanding, learning, observations, that all become integrated into your being. 

As Massimo Pigliucci explores in his book, "these days cognitive scientists think of intuition as a set of nonconscious cognitive and affective processes; the outcome of these processes is often difficult to articulate and is not based on deliberate thinking". In his famous book "Thinking, Fast and Slow", Nobel Prize winning author Daniel Kahneman notes that "thoughts come to mind in one of two ways: either by “orderly computation,” which involves a series of stages of remembering rules and then applying them, or by perception, an evolutionary function that allows us to predict outcomes based on what we’re perceiving. It is the latter mode that precipitates intuition."

So let's say you're a company executive conducting interviews for a job. You've been at it all morning and none of the candidates have been any good. On paper, the next two candidates have everything and you're excited. The first one interviews very well, comes across confident, gives well thought-out answers, and has great body language. The second one also answers well, is inquisitive, quick, and well-presented.

So who do you choose? From a rational point-of-view, both are equally good, but you just get a feeling that the first one hasn't got what it takes. The feeling arises from your gut (what in Japanese they call the 'hara'), and informs the decision made by your brain.

Intuition in Zen

In Zen, however, we're moving to a place of intuition that's not based on memory, experience, or discrimination. By going beyond just knowing about things to actually perceiving things directly, we come to understand our true nature and in doing so literally become the whole Universe. And if we are the whole Universe, then there's no finding out – we know. We enter the flow of the Universe so fully that the 'knowing' is no longer ours, but an obvious, immediate response of the Universe.

As a teacher, this is a very valuable tool. The more sensitive you are, the more you can enter this flow, and the less our feelings are coloured by our own desires, wishes or judgements, then the more truthfully we can 'intuit' how another is feeling.

Years of training, repetition, beds experience into being,

And from the gut arises direct knowing, a felt sense.

So easily coloured by desires,

Train hard and make discernment clear.

I am part of the Zenways sangha led by Zen master Daizan Skinner, and we meet twice a week at our dojo in Camberwell, London. For more info see www.zenways.org

 

I'd love to hear from you

If you've read any of the booked I mentioned, or have any other comments about intuition, I'd love to hear from you. Leave a comment below, join the discussion. 

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Feeling sad, being depressed and how mindfulness helps

We all feel sad, lonely, or depressed at times. Feeling depressed now and then is normal, perhaps we feel a little lonely, we're grieving a loss, maybe lacking in sleep and exercise, or work is being particularly difficult. Depression is a continuum of feeling. For some of us, though, we end up edging towards the dark end, and that's when these feelings can become overwhelming, begin to involve physical symptoms, and last for longer periods of time.

Depression is when we feel sad and low for weeks or months on end. It's not just a passing blue mood. The exact symptoms of depression can be complex and vary widely between people, but it's often accompanied by feelings of hopelessness, a lack of energy, and taking little or no pleasure in things that you once enjoyed. Sadly, anxiety and depression are the most common mental issues in Britain, and between 8-12% of the population experience depression in any year.

Many people come to believe there is something fundamentally wrong with them, but that isn't the case at all. Often it can be to do with lifestyle and external factors, like isolation, grief, or stress.

Happily, mindfulness, either practised in stillness or through yoga, has been shown to be incredibly effective in helping people deal with depression. In this interview with leading mindfulness and depression expert John Teasdale, he explains that depression is often fuelled by streams of negative thoughts going through the mind. This replaying of negative or unhelpful thoughts is termed "ruminating".

Even if you don't suffer from depression, we can all connect with what it means to ruminate, to dwell on negative events, or (more technically) to compulsively focus your attention on the symptoms of your distress. I found myself doing this the other day when I broke a dish in the kitchen...

Replaying of negative or unhelpful thoughts is termed "ruminating". In mindfulness, we gently redirect our attention away from these ruminations to what's happening in the present right now, thereby breaking the cycle.

In mindfulness, we practice bringing our awareness to what's happening or we’re doing right now, gently redirecting our attention away from these ruminations as and when they arise. As John Teasdale describes, by doing this we 'starve' the thought streams of the attention they need to keep going.

By bringing our attention back to the here and now each time we wander off into a thought stream, we learn to live more in the reality of the present moment and less in our heads, going over and over things that happened in the past, or worrying about the future.

But it's important as we practice, as we notice the "magnetic pull” of the negative thoughts and feelings that we apply an attitude of kindness, acceptance, and non-judgement. It only adds suffering to suffering to add criticism and judgements to what we find. It may be that, up to now, these negative thoughts formed a big part of who we perceive ourselves to be, so it's even more important to be gentle, patient, and forgiving of ourselves.

My next 8-week course in Mindfulness for Health & Wellbeing will start on Friday 16th January, and I'm now taking bookings. See my website for further details.

 

I'd love to hear from you

If you've found mindfulness or yoga to help with negative feelings or moods, I'd love to hear your experience. Leave a comment below, join the discussion. 

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For more on the clinical research into the effectiveness of mindfulness on depression see here http://mbct.com/clinical-research/

Releasing tension and stiffness helps us feel more

Tension and stiffness in the body create numbness. They create a barrier to awareness and the full experience of life. If we can’t relax, then life becomes dulled; the extra tension is tiring to hold and inevitably produces an undercurrent of fatigue. Look around you when you walk through the streets of the city and you'll see tension is a chronic condition. Happily through, yoga and meditation practice teaches us how to begin releasing all these tensions, better align and balance ourselves, and brings us to a new appreciation of the incredible vibrancy of life.


Perhaps one of the first things we notice when we start with our yoga and/or mindfulness work are these areas of stiffness or tension – and for some of us discomfort or even pain. They come about for a number of reasons, and can affect us on various levels: from the superficial to the deep. Causes include:

• our genetics (for example weak joints mean the muscles have to work harder, or scoliosis causes asymmetries in the spine muscles)
• past accidents (e.g. a broken toe meant you avoided putting weight on that foot and now the other leg feels overworked)
• past traumatic experiences (the body mirrors the mind in wanting to protect our soft vulnerable parts so often we end up hunching over)
• our occupation (e.g. sitting at a desk for long hours with bad posture)
• our hobbies (e.g. playing or doing an asymmetric sport like tennis or shooting)

So you can see that the reasons our body might be tight or stiff are intimately connected to our past, our upbringing, and our life choices.

I can see now that when I started my own journey into the world of yoga and self-exploration, I was pretty numb, desensitised, and tense! There were many blockages and tight areas, and I was nowhere near being able to feel the subtleties I'm now able to tune into. In the words of a good friend of mind, I was a brut... An insensitive, lumbering vertebrate with his heads in the clouds and a body that, if on a map, would be labelled “here be dragons”!

When we experience unpleasant sensations in our life, one of our strategies for blocking these out (after all no-one wants to feel unpleasantness!) is to tense up, because tension causes numbness. The body learnt that a long time ago!

Releasing the tension

For many years I understood in my head that yoga could help us release the tensions, blockages and imbalances, but I struggled to relate it to any actuality in my body. I could see my weight changing, muscles developing, and stamina improving, but had no sense of my body coming into better alignment or flow.

It took a sustained level of awareness and the keen eyes of my Zen teacher Daizan Roshi and yoga teacher Jonathan Monks to show me, on a physical body level, that this was actually happening. Through my yoga and meditation practice (and to some degree through my years of psychotherapy), I'd begun to let go of my body’s patterns of tension. Slowly, I’d begun to dismantle the layers of holding and blockages built up over years and years. With alignment, mindfulness and relaxation I suddenly found I could feel finer and subtler sensations in the body that I’d never noticed before.

One of the keys to releasing tension and encouraging relaxation is bringing the body into correct alignment. By aligning ourselves with the vertical, with our innate sense of “up” and “down”, then the force of gravity will support us instead of weigh us down. Right now try leaning to one side. It takes work! So aligning of the physical body with gravity allows us to relax and shed unnecessary tension. This is why in meditation sitting up straight is so important, and why in yoga we learn to move with gravity, not against it.

In the words of Will Johnson (from his lovely book Alignment, Relaxation, Resilience), I've started tuning in to the "fine, shimmering currents of sensation that constantly flow through the body”. As I described in this previous post, these are the shimmering currents of our subtle bioelectromagnetic field.

Spiritual energy by Alex Grey

Meditation is not about clearing your mind!

One of the most common misconceptions about meditation is that it’s all about clearing your mind. And sadly this idea seems pretty pervasive. Most people I talk to who've never done much meditation before say something like "oh I can't do meditation, I can't clear my mind".

I'm not surprised! Clearing the mind is nigh-on impossible! Even for someone like a Zen master with decades of meditation experience. But perversely it's often this clear, calm, unaffected mind-state that brings people to meditation in the first place. We all want to find some respite from the whirlwind of thoughts and worries in our heads.

Then when you try it and find your mind is anything but clear, it can be very frustrating!

I think one very useful way of thinking about the brain is like any other organ. The function of the heart is to pump blood; the function of the stomach and intestines is to secrete enzymes and digest food; the thyroid to secrete hormones; and likewise, the function of the brain is to secrete thoughts. Thoughts are a natural product of the brain. Why would we want to stop them?

It's not the thoughts themselves that are the problem, it's how we engage with them. So often we unconsciously end up following trains of thought, and, more often than not, these end up going down a negative route, leading us into worries and anxieties.

Mindfulness is all about developing our awareness of how things are in this moment, without trying to change it, or judging it to be good or bad. So when we come to practising our mindfulness meditation, our first job is to notice just how busy the mind is. Some days it might be as busy as the M25 at rush-hour, and other days like a quiet country road... Either way, that's fine. One of the most wonderful effects of observing the mind as it is right now without trying to manipulate it in any way is that it automatically begins to calm down. The less we try, the more it responds.

One helpful analogy to how our mind and thoughts work is the following. Imagine yourself walking deep in the countryside and you come to a river. You take a rest and come to sit on the river bank. In this analogy your thoughts are like the water in the river, flowing naturally downstream. Let's say you find a few large logs and attempt to dam up the river – you try to "clear your mind". Firstly, this takes a great deal of effort. You might succeed in creating a dam, but sitting back to admire your work you see that the water level is gradually rising behind the dam. At some point it either flows over or around the dam, or the dam breaks...  It's much easier just to let the water flow.

The other trap we get into is jumping into the river and grabbing hold of the various thought forms that flow down this river. Let’s say you see something awful on the news. Immediately your mind is flooded by a whole range of negative thoughts and emotions like anger, sadness, fear, revenge. Before you know it, your mind is grabbing similar thoughts from its memory banks, and new thoughts come in followed by more emotions. The next thing you know, you're totally consumed by these thoughts, wondering about the safety of those you saw on the news, of you, your family, friends, what to do about it, how to stay safe, etc.

So instead of engaging with these thoughts as they arise, in our mindfulness meditation we practise simply observing the thoughts – sitting by the riverside, seeing the flow of thoughts for what they are. Not trying to block them, but also not grabbing hold of them. We practise making the choice not to engage with the thoughts as they arise, so we have that choice in every part of our life. Sometimes it's imperative that we do engage with our thoughts, but sometimes it's more healthy not to.

I teach 8-week courses in Mindfulness for Health & Wellbeing regularly through the year in Camberwell, London. See my website for further details.

I'd love to hear from you

If you've found mindfulness or yoga to help with negative feelings or moods, I'd love to hear your experience. Leave a comment below, join the discussion. 

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Ki energy and intention

In this last few week's I've been thinking a lot about what people in the yoga and martial art world call energy, or prana, chi, qi, ki. In the first of these series of articles I was talking about my understanding of the ki energy phenomenon from a yoga and Zen practitioner's point-of-view, as well as my (ex)scientist's point-of-view. 

My main motivation was to understand the experiences I've been getting of waves or rushes, sometimes jolts, of pleasurable sensations in my body when doing certain yoga or meditation practices. I concluded that these sensations are the result of my body's bioelectromagnetic (hereafter bio-EM) field coming into coherence.

In the last article, I was thinking about how this makes sense when it comes to feeling and drawing on ki energy that originates from outside our system – like in plants and trees, and in the Earth. Since plants too have electrically charged cells, and also take in electromagnetic energy (in the form of sunlight) as part of their nutrition, I thought that the fact they could excite a response in your own bioEM field didn’t sound so far-fetched.

So why is it that not everyone feels these kinds of sensations? Or to put it another way, why haven't I always felt these kinds of sensations?

I think when I started my journey into the world of yoga and meditation, I was just too numb, desensitised, and tense to feel anything of this sort. In the words of a good friend of mind, I was a brute! An insensitive, lumbering vertebrate with his heads in the clouds and a body that, if on a map, would be labelled “here be dragons”!

If we’re too tense, out of alignment, or imbalanced then there are too many blockages, frozen areas, and too little sensitivity. In this state, I would think, there's no way our bioelectromagnetic fields can ever come into coherence! So one of the primary aims of yoga and meditation practice, particularly at the beginning, is to start unblocking and relaxing the body, and getting you to develop more sensitivity to your sensations.

Next question: now I can feel these pulses or shimmers of sensation, why don't I feel them all the time?

Thinking back to my experiences, I can see that just opening, aligning and balancing the body wasn't enough. It seems like a certain intention (i.e. directed mind energy or focus), often coupled with a physiological action, is also needed.

Let's take 'intention' to start with. What kind of intention? I think there can be many, starting with an intention just to feel something. Then there might be an intention to draw inwards, to follow the movement of the breath, to let go, to reach out. For any intention to be effective, it would make sense that we need to stay with it without getting distracted. Thus another central skill we learn in our yoga and meditation practice is concentration or focus. Most people are generally pretty bad at it... Our mind wanders like a drunk from memories to fantasies, from fleeting thoughts to emotions, and whenever we ask it to stay put on something it rebelliously does the opposite... Slowly, we can learn to regulate this concentration and sustain it for longer and longer periods.

So we've got an open and aligned body, and our intention is set. Sometimes this is enough. I've felt strong energetic pulses and jolts during sitting meditation when I've set my mind on letting go down into the floor. The physical reaction is then a response (muscle twitching, pelvic floor lifting, eyes crossing).

But sometimes, particularly in yoga, the intention is coupled with a physical action, and together this precipitates pulses or movements of ki energy. One example of a physiological action might be a muscular lift (contraction) of the pelvic floor muscles. If we're soft and sensitive enough in that area, this can have the effect of exciting a much softer inner "suck" that seems to be very effective at bringing the bioEM field into coherence. In yoga this is called engaging mulabandha (mula meaning "root", and bandha being translated variously as lock, or gateway; see my article here).
 
As I see it in all of this ki energy work, you have to want, or intend, for something to happen before it can happen. Far from being imagined or "all in the mind", the feeling and movement of ki energy seems to very much need this direction of the mind. I guess this is why my teachers have often said "energy follows intention" and "energy follows awareness".

How I understand ki energy from outside myself

In my last article I was looking at my understanding of the phenomenon of energy (in the eastern chi/ki sense) and how I've come to see it as an (ex)scientist. I described my experiences of feeling waves or rushes, sometimes jolts, of pleasurable sensations travelling through my body during certain yoga or meditation practices, and concluded that these body-felt sensations are what I feel when the electromagnetic field in my body generated by the movement of electric current within my nerves and other cells comes into coherence. The reason why we don't all feel these is due to blockages and restrictions that have built up in our bodies over time (tight muscles, imbalances, etc), and a general lack of sensitivity.

I've been told for many years by various yoga and meditation teachers that it's not only possible to feel this ki energy moving within us, but it’s also possible to feel and even receive ki energy from sources outside yourself. As I said in the previous article, both in traditional Chinese medicine and modern physics, everything can be seen as a form of energy – but things being energy, and being able to receive that energy are two different things. So does this make sense?

Let's consider the chairs we're sitting on right now (assuming you are sitting on one!). The chair is made of solid matter (wood, metal, etc), which, as Einstein showed us, is just a form of energy (remember E=mc^2). Can I feel that energy? Sure I can – just by the mere fact that I'm still sitting on the chair and haven't passed straight through it means that my body is experiencing the physical energetic forces that make the chair solid. But does the fact my chair is really just energy mean there can be an exchange of that energy with me, or that I can feel that energy at a distance?

Well, I don’t have an answer about chairs yet, but as I've been tuning in to these shimmering, pulsing sensations in my body, my teachers have been encouraging me to see whether I can feel ki energy from other things – particularly organic things like people and plants, but also places.

And as crazy as it sounds, I can actually feel something! Trees have been a big source of these sensations.

London Plane tree

At first I would be in the park here in London and I'd try feeling a tree... Being acutely aware of how weird I might appear(!), I would would try approaching a tree surreptitiously when no one was looking and lightly touch the bark. Sure enough, whooff, waves of tingling, pulsing sensations would often (not always) ripple through my body. Some trees do it more than others (generally big old ones are best!). Now, when I really tune in, I can feel these familiar tingling sensations when I just come near a tree, or even stand under its branches – just being in its presence. I can't feel it every time, just when I'm trying to tune in, and I'm feeling particularly open. It happened pretty powerfully a week or two ago when I was standing between four very fine beech trees, and for the first time the other day with just a house plant!

Taoist masters throughout the centuries have observed that trees are tremendously powerful plants. Taoist master Mantak Chia explains how, in the Taoist view, trees are seen to be constantly in meditation and are natural processors of ki energy. The best trees for healing, they say, are big trees, especially pines and those growing near running water. But again, all this is ideas and beliefs. How do you explain it?

It turns out that, like animals, plants too have electrically charged cells (so-called cell action potentials) and use them to rapidly send signals through the plant. This came as a surprise to me. So plants generate their own electromagnetic field as well… (Apparently by attaching electrodes to the leaf and root they be made to sing.) When you think about it, we all know that plants depend on light, which is just electromagnetic energy, for their nourishment. We learn that at school. They photosynthesise the carbon monoxide in the air together with water that they draw up from the earth and the energy from sunlight into sugars and proteins – and oxygen which they expel.

So sensing the bioelectromagnetic field (or ki energy) of a plant doesn’t sound so weird, even when it’s at a distance. And the fact that plants can excite a response in your own bioelectromagnetic field also doesn’t sound so strange. I think of it like a form of induction, like how your electric toothbrush charges or how an induction hob works. Changes in the field of one object influences the field of the other.

My teachers also say that one can feel and receive ki energy from the Earth. In fact one of the first times I felt these strong energy pulses I've mentioned was when doing what my yoga teacher Jonathan Monks calls the root meditation. As he describes it, this is about opening your root (the energetic centre in your pelvic floor) so that you can connect with and receive the energy of the Earth. The sensation was clear enough, but energy in the Earth...?

It's known that the Earth's magnetic field is generated by electric currents moving through the highly conductive layer of molten iron alloys in the planet’s outer core. The currents are formed as the molten iron moves around due to convection. But how this relates to potential ki energy at the surface of our planet is much harder to understand. Some people talk about ley lines being paths of energy in the ground, some people about feng shui and the harmonisation of ki in the wind, water, stars, and earth.

Personally I haven’t found a way of understanding Earth energy yet. I feel it in my root (pelvic floor), in the soles of my feet on the ground, and in my hands when they’re on the ground, but that’s all I can say.

As always, your comments are very welcome - here on the blog, on FB or by e-mail. More on this in the weeks to come...!

As a scientist, this is how I've come to understand energy (chi)

Over the last few years I’ve had many experiences of sensations that people would call "energy" (or chi/qi in Chinese, ki in Japanese). The sensations are absolutely undeniable. Often they take the form of pleasurable waves or pulses travelling through the body, sometimes more like jolts.

As a scientist, many people have asked me how I’ve come to explain these and how I understand this "energy". It's taken me a while to come up with a decent answer...

Energy in Physics

According to the dictionary, “energy” simply means a capacity to do “work”. It's surprisingly vague isn’t it! In physics, “work” is defined as the energy expended in applying a force to an object to move it over a certain distance. One joule is the energy needed to apply one newton of force through a distance of one metre.

Energy can, however, take many other forms such as kinetic (moving), chemical, electric, nuclear, potential, etc, and has the ability to be converted from one form to another. For example, a ball held out over your balcony has gravitational potential energy, and when you let go, this energy transforms into kinetic energy as it falls. A burning candle is converting chemical potential energy into heat (kinetic energy at the molecular level) and light (electromagnetic energy).

In his theory of special relativity, Einstein derived his famous equation E=mc^2; meaning energy is equivalent to mass, or put another way, mass is simply a manifestation of energy. This blows my mind every time I think of it! According to this, every thing is just a manifestation of energy. This is what the Chinese have been saying for centuries! In traditional Chinese medicine, they say when a child is conceived and develops, chi condenses to form a material being. In one sense this is obvious – the energy that formed the egg in the woman and animates the sperm in the man, when brought together causes the formation of a foetus, and the energy within the woman’s body goes into growing that foetus into a baby.

But how does this go anywhere to explain the waves of sensation that I've been experiencing?

Bioelectricity

Cascade of electrical signals through nerves

It has long been known that the activities of cells and tissues within the body generate electrical fields that can be detected on the skin surface. All the cells in your body naturally generate a slight imbalance between negatively charged potassium ions on the inside and the positively charged sodium ions on the outside. "Excitable cells", like neurons, have a much larger imbalance than others. When the body needs to send a message from one place to another, it uses these excitable cells to create a cascade of electrical signals. It opens a “gate” on the first cell's wall and the negative potassium ions rush outside attracted towards the positive charge, and the positive sodium ions equally rush inside. This switch of charge triggers the gate on the next cell to open, creating another electrical impulse, and so on. Nerves are simply long strings of excitable neuron cells that carry these electrical pulses of information.

These currents of electricity generate a corresponding magnetic field in the surrounding space; electricity and magnetism are really just two faces of the same coin. However, because the electric pulses in the body are so weak, the magnetic fields associated with them have been very difficult to detect. In recent years, scientists have started to detect and measure the tiny magnetic fields associated with physiological activities in the bodies of animals and humans. This has been possible with the invention of what is known as a SQUID or "superconducting quantum interference device” in the 1960s.

However clever we think we are with our modern SQUIDs though, there are a few animals that got there way before us! Some migratory birds have been shown to be sensitive to the magnetic field of the Earth via particular magnetically sensitive chemicals or photosensitive proteins in their retinas. This is how they're thought to navigate over such long distances. Also, some types of sharks, rays, and sturgeon have an array of special sensing organs called electroreceptors on their undersides that help the fish sense electric fields generated by other creatures in the water and hence locate prey. Cool huh!

Since our nervous system is based entirely on electrical impulses generated and triggered by our cells, it’s not a huge leap to think that the body could produce large-scale coherent alignments or patterns of electromagnetic energy that could be felt as tactile sensations.

This is the way I have come to see the pleasurable rushes of energy I often experience in yoga and meditation. They are coherent pulses of bioelectromagnetic energy moving through the body. I'll talk more about these coherent pulses next week.

The inevitable conclusion is that we must be fully capable of cultivating and controlling the bioelectricity we generate in our own bodies.

Other aspects to energy

Teachers and texts claim that this energy travels along distinct pathways in the body called meridians (Sanskrit "nadi", Japanese "myaku"), and concentrates in certain energy centres (called "chakras" in the yoga tradition or in Chinese "dan tien", Japanese "tanden").

The meridian system of the body

In these last few years I have begun to experience what it means for the energy to build-up in my hara (belly) area. I feel sensations of solidity, tingling, glowing. When you first start doing Zen meditation it's one of the main energetic practices – make your hara the focal point for your attention and draw your energy there. "Tanden" translates as something like "field of elexir", where elixir is another way of saying energy. In Chinese and Japanese Martial Arts, the tanden is seen as the main reservoir of ki energy – akin to your body's battery pack.

I can't say, though, I've really been able to discern energy flowing in in my body through any particular pathways that you might call meridians. With the strong pulses/waves I mention above, they often have a general up or down the body quality to them. With certain yoga sequences and practices, I can feel sensations moving up or down the front and back of my body (what might be called the "microcosmic orbit").

So I think it's all about slowly tuning in more and more. As your sensitivity to the body and sensations increases, then your aerial becomes finer and finer tuned and these very subtle phenomena start to become noticeable.

Next I'll discuss energy from sources outside ourselves, and it's relation to intention.