This book is designed to be helpful for both beginners and advanced practitioners. We will review and learn the common basics of sensitivity and energy manipulation. If you are already confident in the subject, feel free to skim this chapter to ensure we start from the same point.

Our Hands

Our hands are very powerful objects. Just look at them. Turn the palms toward you and look. Simply looking at your hands is already shifting the state of your mind in the right direction. Human hands built all these miracles of our civilization you see around us. Any very basic object - imagine how it was created by someone, even if it was fabricated - there is still a huge amount of handcraft behind it, long chains of hands crafting various instruments, extracting resources, etc.

If you sit down and hold your hands in front of you and show them to someone else and they look - you can put that person in a light trance as well.

This is how important, powerful, and sacred your hands are, reflect on this and feel the appreciation towards your own hands as they are friends and companions following you through your life.

From an energy perspective, the most important structures in your hands are:

• An energy channel going along your hand and connecting it to the rest of your energy system. It goes inside the hand, closer to the internal side, almost following your veins, and connects with the body somewhere in the armpit.
• On the other side, this channel ends with a smaller energy center in the hole in the middle of your palm.

Awakening the Hands

To awaken your hands, we will perform a sensory massage:

• Start with one hand, for example, your left.
• Use three fingers of your right hand, as if holding a pinch of salt, and lightly touch the energy center in your left palm by making small rotational movements — as if stirring something with a teaspoon.
• Try to touch your palm as delicately as possible, mostly hovering above the skin and only occasionally making contact. It should feel like tickling your palm with a feather.
• Pause for a moment — you probably still feel the tickling in the center of your palm.
• Resume stirring but without touching your palm at all this time. The tickling feeling should intensify, as if you are touching your palm with an invisible ray emanating from your fingers.
• Gradually move your fingers away from your palm and increase the radius of your stirring movement to cover a larger area. Try to sense a subtle tickling above the surface of your palm, like a small energy funnel emerging from the palm center and expanding upward. Strive to feel this funnel independently from your skin.

If you can feel this, you are already practicing moving the focus of your perception outside your body. If not, switch to the next exercise.

Cleaning the Channel

Once your left palm is active, let's focus on feeling and cleansing the channel:

• Start with the Wrist: Using the pinched fingers of your right hand, hover over the inner side of your wrist along the veins. Begin by lightly tickling the skin, then gradually move to a contactless interaction.
• Cleaning Motion: Imagine the beam from your fingers as a cleaning rod with a brush. Insert it from the side of the palm funnel, as if cleaning the inside of a gun barrel. Clean it thoroughly from the inside out.
• Extend the Reach: Travel along your channel back and forth, each time extending the length of the area you are covering. You should start to feel a similar tickling sensation not only in the palm funnel but also along your entire hand.
• Activation: Working through the entire hand will activate it more intensely. If you didn't feel anything when working with the palm alone, you might start to feel sensations after this comprehensive cleaning.
• Intensity Adjustment: Depending on how "rusty" your channel is and your familiarity with such sensations, the feeling might become intensely disturbing. If it feels overwhelming, calm your hands by hugging yourself and waiting for the sensations to settle.
• Repeat the same process with the other hand. Once both hands are activated, you will experience fully active hands, which, while not practical for everyday activities, are very useful when engaging in magical practices or when you want to perceive something deeply or exchange energy with nature.

Focus of Attention

While activating your hands, you were also practicing operating your focus of attention.

• Try to sense the area just above your palm center.
• Then feel it a bit farther away.

You have just moved your focus point forth and back, receiving a stream of perception from these two points outside your body. This is an important skill, and we need it well-trained to travel far and see wonders.

Another outcome of this exercise is that you are now aware you have two hands. Nothing stops you from feeling both your palm centers simultaneously. This ability to feel them in parallel is also very important.

Simultaneity

• Sit down in a way that's comfortable for you.
• Hold your palms upside and feel how both your palm centers are active
• Do it simultaneously and dissolve yourself in this feeling
• A good option is to do it somewhere in the forest or park: meditate with open eyes and ears and observe how the world around perceived.

The key objective here is splitting your attention between two separate focus points and maintaining them truly in parallel, not by jumping from one point to another.

Energy Balloon

To train our sensitivity and ability to manipulate energy:

• Awaken your hands.
• Turn your palms toward each other as if you are holding a large balloon in between.
• Slowly move your hands toward and away from each other — you may feel a density in the space between your hands.
• This effect is stronger within a certain range and diminishes beyond a maximum distance.
• Overall, this sensation can be described as if both your hands are enveloped in larger bulbs of energy. By practicing this exercise, we train a special type of movement, similar to what practitioners of qigong and tai chi employ, moving not only their bodies but their energy as well.

Spontaneous Movements

By practicing "balloon", you train the skill of movement of energy. You can feel "flow disruption" when you move not slowly and not consciously enough, so it's good feedback.

Now, when you've got that proper sense of energy movement - let's scale it up to the entire body. And to make things even more interesting, we will step away and let our body do it itself.

• Find some safe, big enough space, where nobody will interrupt you and you will not be afraid of looking weird.
• Stay still, close your eyes, breathe slowly.
• Start swaying slowly from side to side like a tree in the wind.
• Let your thoughts dissolve, focus on the feeling of your energy around your entire body swaying slowly with you.
• Start slow hand movements in the same manner. Move them in random directions.
• Listen to your body, invite it to heal itself. Try to guess in which direction your body wants to move next.
• Remember how, when you wake up, your body yawns and wants to stretch- this is a good example of the body expressing its need to make some specific movement.
• Try to provoke yawning and listen if your body wants to stretch.
• Let it stretch and then do any other movements it wishes to do.
• Do not force it to do anything, relax and wait patiently.
• Your goal is to not stand in its way and completely remove your control over movements. Let it do any crazy or lazy thing it wants, don't be afraid it will harm itself - it won't.

This meditation gives two major values:

• the body heals itself
• you learn this kind of movement when it's not your own will only and you move some passive object, but it's rather dancing a partner into the desired direction and you need to learn to not stand in its way.

Later we will interact with external energies, and to channel them, we will need to partially associate ourselves with them so they will move themselves, agreeing to follow your invitation.

Feeling through Association

The focus of attention is not linked to your palms, of course. You can focus on any point of your body or outside it.

Just as you can feel your hand or some space above it, you can feel external objects as well, by moving your focus point inside them and making them a part of yourself temporarily. It's like empathy but towards anything, not only humans. Good objects to train on are trees. Have you already tried hugging trees? Let's try again.

As a first step, hug the tree or lean on it with your back, stand or sit in whatever is comfortable for you, and maximize physical contact with the tree trunk. Now imagine you became bigger by merging your body with the tree. Now you don't have a border between you and the tree; you are submerged in it. How do you feel?

Now detach from the tree and try again, but this time only touch the tree with your palm, nothing more. Notice how easy it is to again associate yourself with a tree and reproduce the same high feeling. You can easily forget about your body sensations and focus only on the feelings of the tree body.

Now let's do the same again, but this time sit a few meters away from the tree. Move your focus away from yourself inside the tree and repeat the same association.

You can do this distant association and feeling with other objects, such as stones, animals, buildings, humans, etc.

With practice, you will learn to grasp the spirit of any object you are trying to feel. It may be difficult to express in words, but even in unspoken form, this information may be useful.

By the way, you just learned to move your focus away, associate yourself with external objects, and feel them.

Shamanic Trip Meditation

When we feel something through distance association, we act starting from a normal awakened state of mind and shift it by extending the borders of our body scheme and including the object or energy we want to interact with as a part of ourselves.

There is another, dream-based way of cognition, when we start our journey from inside, not outside.

• Take a comfortable sitting pose, you are going to spend a while like this.
• Close your eyes and look into the darkness.
• Imagine the world tree Yggdrasil from some distance, like if it grows somewhere ahead. It may be difficult to stabilize the image, it may be changing or flickering, it's ok, just keep refocusing on it.
• Start hovering towards the tree. It's now easier to see when you / everything is moving.
• Notice you have some body-like sensations when you are moving, they are partially "vestibular" and partially remind feeling of the air on the skin.
• Reach the tree and feel it's energy. Starting from this moment your trip will be supported by Yggdrasil. It's now not just a meditation or visualization - the story begins where you are a character, not an author.

There are a few ways you can travel along the Yggdrasil.

You can find the hollow, get inside, and travel along the trunk and roots like inside the tunnels. This way is usually more suitable when you want to visit the lower world.

You can also attach to the trunk from outside, almost like hugging it but in an energetic way, and slide along the trunk and branches by hovering above the bark, like a speedy maglev snail. This way is usually more comfortable for traveling to the middle and upper worlds.

Somehow the Yggdrasil grows through multiple ground levels, so you may find different places where it grows and visually it looks like the tree grows from the soil normally. The dream-based mechanics of this shamanic universe easily resolve this "rendering" challenge.

Now, as it's probably your first attempt, ask Yggdrasil to show you the best place to visit, where you could initiate yourself, and then follow your intuition and travel to any place, explore it, do whatever you feel is appropriate to do there and return the same way as you've got there.

For consistency of experience and results, I recommend always returning to a normal awakened state gradually by traveling back to yourself along the same path you followed initially.

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All these skills, described above, are essential in our Runic Alchemy practice, so make sure you are prepared enough.