Cyndi Dale
Reality Sandwich

The following is excerpted from Energetic Boundaries: How to Stay Protected and Connected in Work, Love, and Life, available from Sounds True.

Ever since we crawled out of that primordial slime, that’s been our unifying cry, “More light.” Sunlight. Torchlight. Candlelight. Neon, incandescent lights that banish the darkness from our caves to illuminate our roads, the insides of our refrigerators. Big floods for the night games at Soldier’s Field. Little tiny flashlights for those books we read under the covers when we’re supposed to be asleep. Light is more than watts and footcandles. Light is metaphor. Light is knowledge, light is life, light is light. –Television producers and screenwriters Diane Frolov and Andrew Schneider

Everything in this world, from sunlight to cupcakes, is made of energy. Energy is simply information that vibrates or moves. Some energy, such as the energy composing a table or a chair, moves slowly. You can see, touch, discuss, and prove the existence of these slow-energy objects. But most of the energy in this world can’t be seen, heard, or touched through our typical five senses. It moves so fast that we can’t perceive it; usually, we can notice only its effects. Is the energy transmitted by your car radio any less real than the energy that makes up the book on your coffee table? How about the microwaves that zap your food or the satellite transmissions that zip e-mails your way? You know these energies exist, even though you can’t see them, yet they are vital to your life.

Trillions upon trillions of bits of energetic data are zinging around us 24/7, and our energetic boundaries, themselves composed of fastmoving, unseen energy, keep us from being overwhelmed by them all. Energy also composes our feelings, thoughts, and needs, as well as our inherent beliefs and spiritual essence.

Throughout history and across all cultures, intuitives, healers, visionaries, and shamans have been able to perceive the energetic fields that science is only now coming to comprehend and study. In fact, they have been able to see and work with the three systems that link our physical and spiritual energies and interact to form our overall energetic anatomy: the channels, also called the meridians; the centers, the most well known of which are the chakras; and the fields, one of which is the auric field. Other types of fields include various types of magnetic fields, morphogenetic or species-based fields, miasmic or disease-creating fields, and all sorts of other fields that link our inner self with the outer world.

The meridians spread energy throughout our body. The chakras are energy receptors or holders, located mainly inside of the body. The fields, expanding bubbles or circles of light, are found outside of our body, emanating from our skin to several feet away. These fields compose our energetic boundaries. They listen to the data in our chakras and other energy centers to determine which information to bring from outside to inside of us. The fields also communicate messages from us to the outer world. There are actually dozens, maybe even hundreds or thousands of layers or energy boundaries extending from your body. Some hover upon your skin like a butterfly kiss; others are similar to madcap children, dashing in all directions. Some of these fields perform specific activities, ranging from protecting us from dangers to attracting people to us. (For information on the scientific research about and evidence and applications of these various energetic systems, please see my book The Subtle Body: An Encyclopedia of Your Energetic Anatomy.)

The most well-known field is the auric field. Many believe that our auric field is the same as our electromagnetic field, a continually emerging and fluctuating field of energy produced by the electrical currents in our bodies. Every cell in our body pulses with electricity. Electricity produces magnetism, which means that every cell and organ, as well as the entirety of your body, generates energy fields. Kirlian photography, a scientific tool in use since the 1930s, employs a special type of film to illuminate the life energy, or auric field, around plants, animals, and people. Kirlian images reveal that all living beings emanate a set of electromagnetic fields.

These fields are interactive; they both take in and emit energy. That’s why you can sense people, or even get a read on their personalities, when they walk into your space. Our energetic fields respond to trauma and healing energies. They also react to emotions and love; when two people interrelate, their energy fields blur and merge. Science can locate the heart field from at least four to six feet away from the body, which means we’re able to exchange energy with others near us, but we can also swap energy with people hundreds of miles away. As quantum physics is proving, once two particles or people have met, they remain connected forever. That’s how you know what’s happening to your best friend who you haven’t talked with for months or how you sense the exact moment a faraway loved one dies.

Even more startling, human energetic fields invite energy-information exchanges between people who have never met, between the living and the dead, and between people from the future and present day. And this process isn’t limited to people. We can also converse energetically with plants, animals, and even inanimate objects.

No matter which scientific instruments we employ, we can take pictures of only a few of the many known energetic fields. Dozens of other scientifically proven energies, such as high-level infrared, ultraviolet, and gamma waves, as well as microwaves, expand farther than and stretch under visible light, the tiny spectrum of color we’re used to working with. Every physical cell and organ actually generates its own magnetic or auric field. Furthermore, your body is 70 percent water, and each water molecule in your body spawns its own energetic field, because water molecules have north and south poles and conduct electricity. With so many individual components of our body generating their own energetic fields, it’s almost impossible to figure out how many energy fields each of us actually has.

Most images of the auric fields depict them as rippling bands of light. This is because electromagnetic energy is light. The electromagnetic spectrum is really a band of different speeds and temperatures of radiating energy or light. At the measurable end of this spectrum are radio waves, which, with their long wavelengths and low frequencies, are considered low energy, or not very powerful. On the other end are gamma rays, which feature short wavelengths and high frequencies, and are high in energy, or very intense. Somewhere in the middle is the relatively small band of energy called visible light, the range of rainbow colors we’re actually able to see.

These various electromagnetic energies are not really different from each other. They are all made of photons, the unit of energy that creates light. This means that everything composed of electromagnetic energy is light, including your energetic fields-and you yourself. Research such as that conducted by Hal Puthoff, and discussed by Lynne McTaggart in her book The Field, is showing that we are actually made of and surrounded by photons. Our DNA is, in fact, a biophoton machine, a mechanism responding to the light outside and inside of us.

Not only are we made of light, but we also generate light. That personal, literal light radiates from deep within our bodies. It also streams right through from outside to the inside of us, not stopping for skin or clothing. Because we consist of light, our energetic boundaries are nothing more or less than light.

Our auric field actually consists of twelve different bands of light.

Each band operates at a different frequency in the electromagnetic spectrum. For instance, most intuitives and Kirlian photographers see the band closest to our skin as red. We are born with each layer intact, but each becomes active at different points in our lives, from conception all the way to our elder years. The bands become colored in, or tuned to a specific frequency, with our life experiences.

Measuring the Miracles of your Energy Field

Decades ago, only mystics and madmen believed that there was an energy field around all living beings. Now science has actually proven that series of fields exists and that the sum total is much stronger and more potent than ever imagined. In fact, research done on this field is yielding a rich base for everything from diagnosing illness to enhancing food to creating prosperity.

The new science started in 1963, when Gerhard Baule and Richard McFee of Syracuse University detected a biomagnetic field around the human heart. The prefix bio stands for biology, or the chemical processes that create life. Magnetism is the energy produced by electricity, although it can also generate on its own under certain conditions. In the 1970s, researcher David Cohen of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) used a SQUID (superconducting quantum interference device) magnetometer, a means of measuring magnetism, to confirm Baule and McFee’s results and measure the magnetic fields surrounding  the human head and produced by brain activities.

Science has since started using the magnetocardiogram and magnetoencephalogram to measure magnetism from the heart and head, respectively. The magnetic fields detected by these instruments are so strong that we can analyze them for signs of disease before disease shows up in traditional medical tests. Illness alters the biomagnetic field, and the “sick area” of a field can be tracked to the related part of the body. Even more importantly, changing the biomagnetic field changes the body, which means that pulsing magnetic fields into the body can stimulate healing.

For almost five centuries, healers across the world have used the energy of their own bodies to help others heal, to detect events before they happen, and to transform physical matter. Eastern medicine is based on these concepts, as are most shamanic methods from the Western world. It’s pretty amazing that science is now showing how these practices work in physical reality, and research is revealing the potential of these long revered, ancient practices.

For instance, in 1992, Japanese researchers studied practitioners of various martial arts and healing practices. Many of these systems are based on the idea that a natural energy called qi (chi), prana, mana, orgone, life energy, kundalini, or other names flows through the body and regulates health. These researchers discovered that the qi emission from hands is so powerful that it can be detected with a simple magnetometer consisting of two coils with 80,000 turns of wire. Since then, a number of studies of qi gong, a well-respected energy-balancing method, have measured the sound, light, and thermal fields emitted by its practitioners.

Particularly important is that the frequencies of these emanations, which often pulse, vary from moment to moment. Medical researchers creating pulsating magnetic- field therapies are discovering that these same frequencies can actually initiate healing in soft and hard tissues, even in patients who have gone unhealed for as long as forty years.

Other research is just as exciting. Bioengineering professor Henry Lai of the University of Washington, along with three colleagues, used weak magnetic fields to eliminate and heal malaria bacteria. In the study of magnetism, researchers found 33 to 70 percent fewer parasites in the exposed versus unexposed samples.

These dances into the scientific prove what ancient wisdom has already known: if you paint your world with every color of the rainbow, the world will smile back.

Exercise: Finding your Field

Want to see your energy field with your eyes? Find a private place with low or soft lights. You want to be as relaxed as possible, so you might want to sit in a comfortable chair or lie on your bed. You don’t need much light-a candle in the corner, light seeping under your door, or the moon or streetlights shining through your bedroom window.

As your eyes become accustomed to the relative dark, hold out your hands and gaze at them. Your eyes should be glazed; you might want to actually peer just beyond your hands and keep your hands in your peripheral vision.

Now move your fingertips so both hands are touching, finger to finger. Breathe deeply, sensing the spiritual flame inside your heart. Consciously invite this flame to emanate from your heart, down your arms, through your hands, and into your fingertips. After you can feel the exchange of this spirit-flame between your fingertips, examine the outside rim of both hands. You might see a hazy, rather dim corona of light. Now move your fingertips slightly apart and gaze at the electrical charge that continues to connect them.

If you want, consciously send this energetic electricity from one fingertip to another and then move this glowing blaze over your skin, up and down your fingers, and over your hands. What happens? Can you perceive a shift in the hazy white you previously perceived?

You can play with this energy as long as you desire. When you are done, gently release your fingers from their position and draw the energy back into your heart. Breathe deeply and return to everyday consciousness.