Perception and sensation precede thinking in the human evolutionary journey on both the individual and collective levels. On the individual level, a child is immersed in a sensory world for many years prior to ever having a thought about what they are seeing, hearing, or feeling. On the collective level, people initially lived without words and discursive thinking narrating their lived experience, whereas now, separating, labeling and picking apart experience through the process of ratiocination is the norm.
Similarly, it could be speculated that an awareness of the sensation of qi as subtle energy has declined over time as embodied awareness and feeling became overshadowed by mental awareness and cognition, but one cannot say for sure. What is known, based on lived experience, is that the ability of people to feel subtle energy varies greatly from person to person, and thus, qi perception is highly variable in a population. People sampled in a population may range in ability from not being able to detect any subtle sensations, to conscious awareness of sensations that are imperceptible to most others. However, qi perception is an ability that can be developed. Chinese Medicine instructor Janice Walton-Hadlock teaches classes on feeling channel qi and writes that there have only been a couple of students in all of her years of teaching who were not eventually able to learn. (Hadlock, 2019).
Writer and embodiment expert, Phillip Shephard describes the process of becoming more sensitized to embodied sensation as a process of surrender:
“You can sensitize the body in different ways—each a little surrender. You can allow yourself to become permeable to the aliveness of the world around you, and feel how that aliveness holds your aliveness. You can rest so deeply in the still node within you that you feel it grounded in the sensitized exchanges of mutual awareness. You can allow the experience of your mind to escape the silo of the head and attune to an emergent intelligence that you will never understand but is always there to be felt…Any surrender that sensitizes you to the bodyworld sensitizes you to the whole” (Shepherd, 2017).
Furthermore, the ability to perceive qi is related to the umbrella concept of body sensitivity and requires introducing the concept of “highly sensitive people” (HSPs) and empaths. Elaine Aron, the psychologist who coined the term “highly sensitive person,” estimates that people with traits that are linked to high sensitivity make up about 15-20% of the population.
“The highly sensitive person (HSP) has a sensitive nervous system, is aware of subtleties in [their] surroundings, and is more easily overwhelmed when in a highly stimulating environment. But the key quality is that, compared to the 80% without the trait, they process everything around them much more—reflect on it, elaborate on it, make associations. When this processing is not fully conscious, it surfaces as intuition. This represents a survival strategy found in a many species, always in a minority of its members” (Aron, 2020).
Empaths, or people who can accurately feel the energy, emotions, or physical sensations of others, are thought to make up a lesser percentage of those under the umbrella of HSPs. Empaths are thought to share all of the traits of HSPs, but have a much more intense experience (Moorjani, 2021). Therefore, the ability of highly-sensitive people and empaths with increased nervous system sensitivity compared to others in a population, also leads to an advantage with being able to feel the subtle movements of qi. In addition to an innate ability, sensitivity is also postulated to arise because of trauma, where the nervous system becomes sensitized overall, or following a near-death experience (NDE) or spiritual awakening. It is well documented by people who have had NDEs or a spiritual awakening that the ability to perceive subtle energies, as well as the direct perception of energetic anatomy such as the chakras, meridians, or subtle body fields, can come online spontaneously (Shutan, 2015).
So, if one desires to enhance their perceptive abilities and to access the body-based abilities that became latent in the human evolutionary journey, it is necessary to learn to be more embodied and less mind-full. And for those who are already able to perceive the movements of qi or aspects of energetic anatomy like the channels, there are a few things to be aware of prior to coming to conclusions about one’s subjective experience. The first of which is that one’s consciousness and thoughts can strongly influence the perception of sensorial movements and qi! The nervous system responds to thoughts and beliefs, conscious and unconscious. This is the reason why quieting the mind and emptiness are two of the foundational pillars of Daoist practice. The Daoists were the ones who painstakingly preserved the information on the channel pathways and esoteric knowledge about subtle energy in China. But, prior to becoming a formal tradition and religion, there were people who stumbled on these things through their own experience, and only later was the information thoroughly investigated, organized and written down.
The reason why emptiness and quieting the mind are so essential to Daoist practice is that one's thoughts can project a nearly limitless array of experiences onto reality, often causing the acquisition of illusions and delusions, and this is especially true concerning the energetic and the immaterial aspects of reality. In addition, the Daoists also recognized that the act of thinking, in and of itself, consumes a lot of qi (modern science nods in agreement on this one in that the brain consumes approximately 20% of the body's total energy). Therefore if one desires to retain more of their vital energy, silencing the mind also serves the purely pragmatic purpose of conserving energy. What is important to note is that although qi can be influenced by the mind, qi naturally moves and behaves in predictable ways when left undisturbed, and it is these predictable unadulterated patterns that were used to flesh out the early Chinese medical theories.
So, for people that are downhearted about living in the world as a sensitive soul, there is a plus, you may be perfect for a career in acupuncture or East Asian Medicine. The gift of the ability to feel things that others can't may not be valued in American culture, but it has historically been valued by traditional cultures. Even today, blind acupuncturists are preferred to sighted ones in Japan for this exact reason. And in addition, those who weren't born sensitive, greater sensitivity can be developed over time as the brain and nervous system builds out more of these neural connections with practice. There are also purely material-physical aspects of acupuncture relating simple anatomy to the function of nerves and blood vessels. This is a "yes, and" situation. Therefore the practice of acupuncture does not require understanding qi... understanding qi is a bonus and opens up more nuanced levels of understanding the universe and the human body as a reflection thereof.
With time spent working on feeling qi, the ability to feel more nuanced sensations as well as greater accuracy with interpreting sensations can develop in ways that are highly consistent between people that have mastered this skill, and may even become so fine tuned that the results appear magical to others. But, the ability to feel qi is not really magical, it's just something that seems mysterious because is not yet understood by modern science, nor experienced by everyone.
Next article: Interoception and Exteroception
References
Aron, E. (2020). The highly sensitive person: How to thrive when the world overwhelms you (25th anniversary edition). Citadel Press, Kensington Publishing Corp.
Hadlock, J. (2019). Tracking the dragon: Advanced channel theory (3rd ed.). Raja Books.
Moorjani, A. (2021). Sensitive is the new strong: The power of empaths in an increasingly harsh world (First hardcover edition). Atria Books.
Shepherd, P. (2017). Radical wholeness: The embodied present and the ordinary grace of being. North Atlantic Books.
Shutan, M. M. (2015). Spiritual awakening guide—Kundalini, psychic abilities, and the condition.
Citation
Juniper, Evren. “Qi Perception is a Variable Trait.” Universal Qi, 2022, https://www.universalqi.org/post/qi-perception-is-a-variable-trait.
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