Question: When I’m sitting I often feel a lot of energy in my body. It feels like every cell in my body is vibrating. What is this energy? Is it physical?
Linda: It is both physical energy and an energy that is beyond the physical. When you start to withdraw from thinking and become more still, your consciousness starts to speed up, because it is not being dragged down by the mind, which feeds off thinking. Even though it appears that thinking is an incredibly fast process, it’s actually very slow compared to the speed of pure consciousness. Thinking is a relative process and with anything relative, time is involved. When you start to withdraw from the thinking world you start to go into the timeless dimension, where there is no relativity, no separation – there is only now. The belief in time slows your consciousness down because you are always going from one thing to another thing. When you stop doing that – when you realise that everything is one, the energy wasted in going from one thing to another, which is the thinking process, is freed up and starts to vibrate at such an incredible speed that everything becomes still, everything becomes one.
So, what you’re experiencing is your consciousness speeding up, and you will feel that in every cell in your body.
Question: There are times when it’s very uncomfortable and I don’t know what to do with it – I feel like expressing it in some way. What’s the best way to cope with it? Should I move around?
Linda: It does become very uncomfortable and sometimes painful, but I would suggest staying as still as possible during the sitting. The habitual reaction to feeling energy in the body is to express it in some way, to release the energy, but stillness is the way to contain and ground this energy more deeply in your body. The tension that can often be felt in the body while sitting in meditation is the physical body trying to contain this non-physical energy. It creates a kind of friction that can sometimes be felt as intense heat. The more deeply you can ground the energy in your body, the stronger and more concentrated it becomes, and the faster your consciousness becomes.
The whole way I use energy has changed. I’m not extreme with my body anymore. I can’t be forceful with my body any more. I used to push it to do things that I thought I wanted to do, without listening to it, but I can’t do that anymore- the force has gone out of it. It felt a bit disconcerting at first, but it now feels completely natural. The body is actually far more intelligent than the mind.