Shape Shifting Through The Sensory Types

Author's note: Nancy read this post in its entirety prior to it being published
and gave her wholehearted permission for me to share.

The Dance

If you take an anger and slam it into your chest,
like a fast tennis ball across the net,

and a laughing Buddha in the other court catches it,
lotus blossoms will flutter to the ground.

If you see your heart is a diamond,
mountains, the waters and the earth
will twirl and dance with you,

pull you tight against their hips,
crush you with kisses,
claim you as one of their geodes.

If you take a hammer
and smash anger open like a ripe watermelon,
oceans of crystals will rise
up from the core of your palms
and belly dance.

Go ahead. Grab a hammer.
Break your heart open.
Offer the shards to the Buddha within.

Nancy Lee Melmon

This poem was written by a client of mine, and arose from some insights she had from the Eden Energy Medicine work we have been doing together. It reminded me of how important it is to be meeting a client’s energy, rather than simply rolling out techniques as they were taught to me. This means being able to step into, or at the very least, understand a client’s sensory type and how that may impact the way I effectively work with them.

Nancy perceives the world through visual clues, whereas I am kinesthetic. When I ask her to rate something she is experiencing, using a scale of 0-10, she will “see” the number, even though I may have asked her how strongly she feels it. She is also a singer, so understanding how important sound and words are to her has helped in making the energy techniques we do more effective. In the beginning of our work together, getting the energies into a healthy crossover pattern, and more importantly, getting them to stay there, proved to be a bit of a challenge. One day I asked her to make up a song while she was doing the cross crawl. As a visual, the words are important, probably more so than the actual tune. The difference was immediately noticeable, not least because suddenly she started to really enjoy what she was doing. Her radiant circuits began "humming" and were able to support the shift in old habits as Triple Warmer let go of its hold. For those unfamiliar with these energies, in Eden Energy Medicine, we recognize Triple Warmer (a meridian and radiant circuit, or strange flow) as being in charge of habits and, in general, controlling the body’s energies. The radiant circuits act as more of a nurturing support system, but often get deactivated when Triple Warmer has been running the show for a long time. Getting the radiant energies turned back on and flowing can give immediate and dramatic shifts.

Realizing we were on to something, Nancy made up songs for other parts of her energy routine, and wrote poems to help process the shifts that were happening for her as the energies came back into balance. We have also brought sound into the techniques. Working with seed cells (specific points that tap into the radiant circuit energy), I will often use representations of the elements through the hole in a ceramic magnet held over the point (e.g.a chopstick or stick of charcoal for Wood), but with Nancy, this wasn’t shifting the energy out of its frozen state. I had her choose a tuning fork (she listened to each one and chose the one she “saw”) and vibrated it through the hole, which immediately started making a change to the way the energy was moving. Other times, I’ve had her tone while we’re holding points.

Meeting a client’s energies by tuning in to their ways of approaching life and processing information provides some distinct advantages for my work. I find that my energies start responding and my intuition becomes heightened. It’s as if our energies begin to talk and all I have to do is stand back and listen. Although my own approach is very kinesthetic, and I feel energy in a very tangible way, when I’m working with someone visual, my perception changes and I’m able to describe energy in terms more understandable to them, such as through a vivid story, with pictures or colors. It can be challenging, because I’m sometimes taken into unfamiliar territory, but I inevitably learn a different way of understanding, or a new way of shifting energy and this is what keeps the work so vital and alive.

Jyoti