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As someone with aphantasia, I often come across advice that says you can substitute visualising in energy work with the other 4 senses. The most common of them being feeling. But the thing is that I also struggle to feel properly. It's often said that by rubbing your hands together and feeling the sensation between them will give you an idea of what energy feels like, but I've tried it multiple times and I don't feel anything except the air on my skin.

That leaves me with the 3 other senses (personally, hearing is the strongest for me). Though, I have no idea how to apply them. No one mentions anything about how to apply them. How do I taste/smell/hear energy when doing spellwork? For example, say I have to make energy flow from my hands to an object. This can be done by visualisation or feeling energy, but what if I'm trying to do it with the other three senses instead?

Anyways, thank you for your time, Chicken! 🩷

Let's take this right into left field. Consider this, which I do not claim is necessarily true, but which I present as a thought exercise:

As it's commonly used, visualization means something like within the mindscape. So it's not really sight vs. the other senses, but something internal versus something external. We do not have to guess at what that internal thing is: it's the hidden Witch-body, which is the same thing sent out when we Journey.

In other words, when a resource tells you to visualize,

your goal is to engage in a mild form of spirit flight: you're activating your spirit body and using it to sense the world you're in right now, instead of sending it out into a spirit world.

This would also mean that energy sensing is closer to a mild trance state than an acutely grounded state where you're honed in on the physical.

It's this activation of the spirit body (witch-body, the body of many names) which opens the gateways not only to Sensing, but also Journeying, Knowing, and the ability to commune directly with spirits.

All of these are internal experiences. Your goal is not to be able to feel if the spirit touches your arm, necessarily; but to be able to directly experience the spirit's presence, and directly speak to them and receive communication back. All of this can be done regardless of whether or not you happen to be a visual thinker.

There are many exercises available for identifying, activating, and empowering the hidden body, I think a very useful one given by Horne in A Broom at Midnight, but they're almost certainly going to be in the "learn spirit flight" books and not in the energy work books.

Now all that being said, if you aren't a visual thinker, then what's to be done with all these exercises that linguistically favor visual thinking? The key for me was to just basically replace visualize with other words like observe, believe, feel, understand, and know.

Take a gander at this simple energy raising exercise. See in red, where we have taken words or phrases that would normally give instructions to visualize and adjusted them:

There is freely flowing energy in the Earth available to you. When you focus your mind on this energy and believe or agree that you are connected to it, that pre-existing connection becomes activated and stimulated. This is possible because your present-moment focus inherently holds an intense activation energy.

Once you've narrated to yourself that this connection is activated and you feel immersed in that story, force needs to be applied in order to move the energy. One way to move the energy within the Earth is to believe or agree that when you inhale, energy you are linked to will be drawn into your body.

Breathe normally while you focus timing your best present-moment focus with your inhales. When you feel ready to try it, tell yourself that the Earth energy rises into your body with the inhale. Doggedly focus on this narration along with an inhale.

See if your active narration about the situation changes as you inhale with the intention to draw up Earth energy. Does the storyteller or Quiet Wise One within your mind think the energy of the Earth has stirred or risen up as you took a breath?