Naturally, you will also be confronted by those times when love has faltered or seemed to leave you out. Face these feelings and memories without avoiding them. This isn’t an exercise in happy fantasies. Nor is it necessary to focus on the negative: don’t dwell on loneliness, self-pity, anger toward a failed love, or boredom with a current relationship. Many people find it difficult to make this distinction. None of us has been trained in subtle action; therefore we entangle ourselves in all kinds of feelings that we call love, and the result is confusion and needless suffering.
Subtle action sorts out the confusion, gently and effortlessly, by allowing the invisible force of love to make itself known clearly. You stop mistaking other things for it. Here’s an example:
Loreen, a young woman from Iowa, moves to a new city to take a job offer. It’s a promotion, but Loreen finds herself in a strange setting with none of her old friends. Very quickly she spots a coworker who attracts her interest. Usually she’s rather standoffish in relationships, but her initial feelings quickly turn into a deep infatuation. Loreen flirts with this man, who is single and available. He acts friendly, but doesn’t ask her out on a date.
She finds that her desire for him is turning into dreams and fantasies. They become more erotic, and she drops stronger hints that she is interested in him romantically. To Loreen’s surprise, he says that he knows she’s in love with him, but he doesn’t feel the same way. He acts sympathetic and understanding, which makes him all the more attractive. Loreen feels torn between her intense desire and the knowledge that he is unavailable. She intensifies her campaign, leaving some suggestive phone messages and lying in wait at work on the off chance that she will “accidentally” run into this man. Things come to a head at the office Christmas party, when she drinks too much and throws herself at him in front of other people. Loreen clutches him so tight that he has to peel her off.
The next day the man leaves a note on her desk advising her to seek help. Loreen feels confused and ashamed. She decides to go to a psychologist. In the first session she describes the situation in tears. “I love him so much, I’m beside myself,” she says. The psychologist corrects her. “What you’re expressing isn’t love.” Taken aback, Loreen asks, “If this isn’t love, what is it?”
“It’s abuse,” he says. “You would see that if you didn’t feel so desperate. What you’re calling love is a mask for deeper feelings you’re afraid to face.” Loreen is very shaken, but on a deeper level she recognizes the truth in the therapist’s words.
People often want to be rescued by love, and thus love gets tied to escapism and fear. Things you are afraid of, such as loneliness, isolation, and not fitting in, must be sorted out and healed on their own, not masked by throwing yourself into a relationship with someone you think will solve your fears for you. People like Loreen usually wind up never facing their neediness. Their brains form a pattern of behavior so familiar that even the most negative feedback doesn’t change it. Only subtle action can change the brain by introducing a new intention. (Remember the Tibetan monks and how they became compassionate—a new brain pattern had to be created.) As you learn to heal through subtle action, you won’t be forced into situations that promote failure and rejection. Those are reflections of your old inner state, from which you are slowly shifting away.
As negative impressions and memories arise, simply paying attention to them has a healing effect. Subtle action operates by looking, watching, and being aware, but not judging, condemning, or rejecting. The negative imprints of your past are not the real you. They are the scars of experience, whereas the good things from your past are signposts pointing toward an opening. By feeling what love is like inside, you activate dormant impulses of love in the here and now. You signal to the universe that you are open, accepting, and receptive to change.
Then change will appear, first as fresh feelings inside yourself, the fragile sprouting of love in its higher form. Be patient and continue to be aware. More moments will come when you do feel kinder or more unselfish, compassionate, or giving. You will also see reflections of these same qualities outside yourself. You will notice them in other people; they will begin to direct them toward you. Let the process expand. Don’t demand kindness or giving of yourself or anyone else. Be like a child again, willing to grow without forcing anything; take a chance, however small, at being vulnerable.
Above all, don’t let your self-image stand in the way. Self-image is constructed by the ego. It gives you a façade that you can show the world, but it also turns into a shield behind which you hide. If you let your self-image stand in the way, you can’t be open and receptive. Real change requires a relaxed, natural attitude. Sadly, most people expend untold energy in protecting their self-image, defending it from attacks both real and imagined. Instead, take the attitude that there’s nothing to protect and nothing to defend. You want to be strong, but true strength comes from love that is certain and self-sufficient. False strength comes from building a wall of self-defensiveness. Keep your focus on feeling what love is like for you, and on gently wanting it to expand.
This is a powerful example of how subtle action can accomplish far more than gross action, because only at the subtle level can you train your brain to be completely new.
Breakthrough #2
Your Real Body Is Energy
It’s not enough for a breakthrough to be daring; it must also prove useful. The next breakthrough, which says that your body is pure energy, dramatically passes that test. I can pick up any object—a stick of wood, a match, a tungsten wire—and make it disappear from the physical world. By examining it under an electron microscope, any piece of physical matter turns into a hazy cloud no more solid than fog. It’s just another step in magnification for the fog to vanish into pure, invisible vibrations. Releasing the energy in those vibrations is incredibly useful, which is why it changed the world when we humans discovered that wood could be burned, matches could carry fire from one place to another, and tungsten could give off both heat and light when electricity was run through it.
In every case, untapped energy stands at the junction point between the visible and invisible worlds, which is how we’ve been describing your body. A piece of wood is content to stand at the junction point without doing anything, but your body isn’t. Your cells constantly move back and forth across the border, lighting an inner fire. How DNA learned to do this remains a mystery, because it’s exactly as if a tungsten wire learned to glow, or a match could strike its own spark, without outside help. But the miracle goes much deeper than that. When wood burns, it crumbles into ashes and is gone. When tungsten incandesces, it is doomed one day to burn out. But DNA grows and multiplies as it releases energy. In fact, the only thing that DNA does is to convert raw energy (heat and electrical impulses) into countless complex processes. And since DNA, like any chemical, is itself made of energy, your body is a cloud of energy keeping itself alive by feeding off more energy.
The closer you look, the more clearly you see that there are mysteries hidden within mysteries here. The India I grew up in was a very religious country, even more so than today, and it contained a peculiar sort of spiritual groupie, a person who liked to hang around with saints—saint is an honorary term applied to someone in a higher state of consciousness. Ordinary people hung around them in order to soak up their energy. As a boy, I had an uncle who was fond of dragging me along on such junkets. At the age of eight or ten I would be taken to sit cross-legged on the floor, having bowed down and touched the saint’s feet in homage. My uncle would chat with the yogi or swami, but the real purpose of his visit was to receive darshan, which is the way he soaked up the saint’s energy.
As a term, darshan is simple—it basically means “to see” in Sanskrit. But it felt like much more to me: the experience of receiving someone else’s energy was truly wonderful. Certain saints made me feel buoyant and carefree. Others made my mind go quiet, so that while I was in the saint’s presence, I was at peace. Sometimes the darshan felt
unmistakably feminine, as if my mother were smiling at me, even though the saint was a man (he might have been a devotee of Devi, the Divine Mother).
I noticed other things from these visits. The effect diminished with distance. You could be walking toward the saint’s hut—these are generally poor people living in austere seclusion—and step by step, the closer you got to the door, the more you lost any sense of trouble. Instead, your mind would become filled with the conviction that God was in his heaven and all was right with the world. This uplifted state lasted for a while, but as my uncle drove us back home to Delhi, I felt less inspired and more my ordinary self, like a battery leaking its electrical charge. After some time, either hours or days, the saint’s presence faded into a memory.
People like my uncle weren’t just energy junkies. They believed that exposing themselves to a holy soul (atman darshan) raised their consciousness. For the moment, we don’t have to decide if that’s valid or not. But it would be a mistake to call darshan purely mystical. When you see someone you love, your brain aligns with the love they have for you, and energy passes between you—that’s why the first flush of love can be so overwhelming. In the New Testament, Jesus not only speaks, but wanders among the people to be seen and touched, and clearly his personal energy has a power all its own.
Think of all the qualities about another person that you intuitively pick up at the energetic level. Besides telling if someone is happy or sad, you can sense whether they feel peaceful or perturbed. Looking into their eyes reveals alertness or dullness, tenderness or indifference. It’s hard to think of any human quality that doesn’t have a kind of energy “signature.” The usefulness of this is that by changing your own signature, you can bring forth any quality you want. Disturbance can be turned into peace, sadness into happiness, dullness into alertness. Your body is an energy converter at a very subtle level, where the most cherished aspects of being alive can be accessed. Saints know full well that they are standing at the junction point between the visible and the invisible, because they feel themselves in the presence of God. The energy they transmit is more subtle than heat or light. It’s this same energy that your body is also using in ways that science has yet to fathom.
Energy and health
Consider the most basic function of energy, which is to keep your body alive. Your body is in a healthy state when its energy is in a healthy state. Such a notion goes beyond the worldview of mainstream medicine. A hundred years ago, germs were the stars of medicine. All the excitement centered on discovering new bacteria and viruses, matching them up with the diseases they caused, and then killing the germs before they could hurt the body. Today genes are the stars of the show, and the same pattern is repeating itself. The biggest excitement centers on finding new genes, matching them with specific diseases, then trying to manipulate or splice them before harm is done to the body. Yet the star should have been energy, because germs and genes, like any object, are reducible to energy, and therefore all harm caused to the body is traceable to this fundamental force.
Despite these facts, medicine hangs back from learning more. Energy is too dynamic. It shifts and changes. It leaves few traces behind, and the reason for its myriad changes is poorly understood. By contrast, chemicals are concrete, predictable, and come in small, neat packages. Turned into drugs, they can be handed out to patients in measurable doses. Yet this doesn’t get past the underlying truth that drugs, too, are bundles of energy, and the effects they cause in your body (including side effects) are nothing but energy patterns moving one way instead of another. It would be a major breakthrough if we could manipulate the body’s energy without resorting to drugs, most of which hit the body too hard and too broadly. If you suffer a bad cut and the doctor injects you with penicillin, the antibiotic goes everywhere in your body. While it’s killing germs at the site of your wound, it’s also traveling to your intestines and killing the single-celled intestinal flora that enable the digestive process. That’s why diarrhea is a common side effect of Penicillin V, the updated form of the original drug produced sixty years ago.
Killing off too many single-celled creatures may seem like a simple action, like too much water overflowing the bathtub, but the chemical effects of penicillin lead to many possible side effects, some on the bizarre side, such as “black, hairy tongue.” Others commonly seen include irritation of the mouth or throat, nausea, upset stomach, and vomiting. But you might prove to be hypersensensitive to penicillin, and then something alarming can happen, like skin eruptions, fluid in the larynx, and anaphylaxis—this last is a state of sudden shock that can be fatal. The reason for this wide, confusing, unpredictable range of side effects is that energy is complex. Your body is shuffling energy into countless patterns, and when you throw a broadly active drug into the mix, your whole energetic state is affected.
Drugs are powerful and troubling, but everyday actions also alter the body profoundly. When you walk into a room to deliver good or bad news to someone, you may not think that you are manipulating their energy, but you are. Causing someone else to become happy or sad goes deeper than a mood swing: the body is directly influenced, as messenger molecules course through the bloodstream, delivering to trillions of cells the energetic effect of whatever the brain is thinking and feeling. (It’s no accident that we say, “The bad news made me sick.” Your brain takes in the information, converts it to chemicals, and lets your whole body know if there’s trouble in the world. Quite literally, you are metabolizing the news and suffering from the toxins it contains.)
The tiniest change in energy, no more than a few words, can lead to massive physical disruptions. A person may be living happily, only to get the unexpected news that divorce papers have been filed against him, or that his entire bank account has been wiped out. Injecting that information into the body has the same effect as injecting a physical substance: chemical changes occur immediately. Stress, weakness, and decreased functioning will spread from organ to organ. At the very least the person will become depressed, but if the news is devastating enough, normal energy patterns may not return. Grief is a state of distorted energy that can last for years. The loss of a mate can make you more susceptible to disease and shorten your life. (This has been proven statistically among widowers, who are subject to higher heart attack rates and shorter life spans.)
On the surface, heart attacks, early death, depression, and the physical side effects of a drug like penicillin look entirely different from one another. But they have the same root cause: the body’s energy patterns are being distorted. It takes only a seed of disruption, such as a single malignant cell, to spread incoherence everywhere; if the seed is allowed to grow, the energy of the whole body will break down. It may sound strange to think of cancer as distorted energy, but that’s just what it is. To remove that discomfort, you have to start thinking of the whole body in terms of energy. Dealing with your own energy is the most effortless way to heal yourself, because you are going directly to the source. When a distorted energy pattern returns to normal, the problem disappears. Everyday experience tells us that this is plausible. A small child who thinks that his mother has abandoned him in the grocery store will exhibit multiple signs of physical and mental distress. But when the mother reappears, there is no more cause for anxiety. The normal pattern of feeling loved, wanted, and secure returns. And its return is automatic. The highest healing is equally effortless.
Graham’s story
The fact that energy is always creating patterns in, around, and through the body has been incredibly useful to people who can tune in to their own energy.
“At a dinner party several years ago, I saw a guest’s hand tremble as he reached for the salt,” recalls Graham, a friend of mine in his forties who works as an energy healer. “The man was in his late thirties, and when I asked if something was wrong, he talked freely about having Parkinson’s disease. His name was Sam, he owned a small business in town, and he had lived with his diagnosis for seven years. Sam managed his Parkinson’s ca
refully on a minimal dosage of medication, but he knew that was only temporary. Eventually the tremors would worsen, and full-blown Parkinson’s would set in.”
At the time of this encounter, Graham was just beginning to be interested in energy work. He invited Sam to accompany him to California for a training workshop in an ancient form of Chinese healing called qigong (pronounced chee-GUNG).
“I was new to any kind of hands-on healing, but I’d always been open to it,” Graham said. He had practiced meditation for many years and had read widely in Eastern spirituality. “The notion that the body is composed of subtle energies didn’t put me off me the way it does many skeptics.
“My new acquaintance was wary but willing to go with me to the weekend course. When I arrived to drive him to the airport, his tremors were more severe than what I’d seen the first time. We didn’t talk about it, though, and the next day we sat in a group of about fifty people who had signed up to learn about qigong.”
Qigong, like other traditional Chinese medical treatments, is based on controlling and directing qi (or ch’i), the basic life-force that sustains the body. Because some qigong practices are tied to wider spiritual beliefs that are considered non-Communist, qigong in the People’s Republic of China has been subject to regulation and sometimes suppression by the government.
“Our teacher, who was from Hong Kong, told us that qi exists at a subtle level of the body. Its natural flow keeps a person healthy, but when these subtle energies get imbalanced, disease results. Generally it takes years of disciplined training to control and change the qi in your body, but our teacher had a new idea, that every thought causes a tiny change in the patterns of qi. He believed that even major illness and trauma could be unraveled, so to speak, by healing tiny mistakes in the qi, one at a time, like tiny links in a chain.”