To begin drawing energy just take a moment and focus on your breathing. Feel your breath as it flows in through your nostrils and down to your Dan Tien, the area two finger-widths below your belly button. Feel the chi as it flows in with your breath down to your Dan Tien. Take a few breaths and let the energy build up and spread through your body.



Now, as silly as it sounds, imagine a nose or an opening that covers your heart chakra, just over your sternum. Remember what it feels like when you draw the chi in through your nostrils? As you inhale let the nose over your heart chakra inhale chi directly into your heart. It may take awhile to really feel this, so don't be worried if it doesn't seem to come easily. As you exhale let any stress or unhappiness in your heart chakra flow down through your legs and deep into the earth.

Take some time and practice inhaling energy this way. As you get comfortable with it you'll be able to draw chi into yourself in many different ways. Below are some sample exercises that you can experiment with. You'll probably come up with some others on your own as the possibilities here are literally endless.

Chakra Breathing

We'll get deeper into this in the Chakra Chapters, but you can draw energy into any of your chakras at any time just like we did for the heart chakra.

Energizing your organs

This can be a lot of fun and really help strengthen your immune system and improve your overall health. It's also an exercise in using intention to send energy where you want it to go.

Take a moment and relax as we did above. On your inhale draw chi into your liver. Don't worry if you don't know exactly where your liver is, you don't have to. Just intend for relaxing, healing energy to flow into your liver as you inhale, and then draw it in. On your exhale let the stresses and built up energies flow out of your liver and down into the earth. Can you feel the lightness and relaxation? The liver is related to anger and aggression. The next time you find yourself becoming angry do this exercise and see if it doesn't help to shed some of those feelings.

You can run chi into any of your organs exactly the same way. The infusion of energy will help cleanse your organs and release bound stresses and memories, so you may find yourself having some unexpected emotional releases as that energy has to go somewhere once it's released.

Relaxing Stress Knots out of your muscles

Whenever you feel a stress knot building up in your muscles just draw energy directly into the knot on the inhale and let the stress flow down into the earth on your exhale. As an exercise in awareness you can take some time and just choose a body part at random and draw energy into it.

Improve your eyesight and hearing

I've personally experienced some radical healing in both my eyesight and hearing just by drawing more chi into my eyes and ears. At an age when my eyes should be getting worse I actually have gotten to the point where I only wear my glasses when I'm working on the computer or watching a movie.

Drawing energy from trees, rocks and plants

Sit with your back to a tree or better yet face it and wrap your arms around it. Relax and spend a few moments practicing feeling your own energy. Expand your awareness to the tree. Can you feel the rough bark against your skin and hear the rustle of wind in the leaves and branches. Can you smell it? Can you feel the energy from it? Create a circuit with the tree. As you inhale feel the energy from the tree flow into you. As you exhale let your energy flow into the tree. Let your friends who haven't experienced this laugh at you for being a tree hugger. Experiment with this with other plants as well as rocks and crystals. Do they all feel the same? Can you tell the difference between tree species based on the feel of their energy? Can you differentiate between different crystals based on their energy? You could keep yourself occupied indefinitely in the backyard with this exercise.

Drawing energy is something that you can do at any time, any place. As you get better at drawing energy and more comfortable with it you'll also be able to develop more control over your emotions and your physical responses by using variations on the exercises above. Don't be afraid to play with this exercise and experiment with the healing energies as this is all about building up your personal catalog of feelings and experiences.