Energy Language

What I want to believe is not that most people in my culture can’t feel the absolute fiasco of ambient energy permeating their bodies and environments, but rather that they just don’t (yet) know that’s what they’re feeling.

My native cultural framework was underdeveloped in terms of “energy” language for embodied experience. The more I explore practices to facilitate that experience, the clearer it is that this language is less woo-woo metaphor and more 9th grade science class.

You know, not accurate enough to create a whole universe with, but enough to do some actual science to provisionally confirm some things about the world — and reject other things — and to provide an empirical framework with which to live by observing and updating one’s model.

That is to say, this kind of energy is AS REAL as the kind measured in joules or calories, and it’s reasonable to me that we’d use the same word for it.

Maybe the Western World™ isn’t ready to teach qigong in 9th grade science class, but I am ready to believe the experimental work needed in order to do so is possible, and I already know that I’d be in an even better place today if I had been.

I don’t just mean I would be in a better place spiritually. I mean that approximately all of the body movement I was taught to do as a young person was the kind where you drastically increase your risk of injury in order to beat people (who were your friends before being made into opponents).

Obviously I also mean spiritually. But healthfulness is also a big loss. Sports made me so ANGRY that it instilled an emotional hatred for vigorous exercise, just because the emotional state of exertion was conditioned by needing to kick people’s asses.