When you decide to go to Bali for your holiday, your knowing it'll be warm there probably influences your choice.

When you decide to go it's because you believe you'll have a good time.

What you choose to eat is because your senses tell you the food tastes good. Or you believe it's good for you.

But when you "sense" that you shouldn't walk down a dark alley, it is your intuition or gut feeling.

So, between your knowledge, beliefs, senses and intuition you should be pretty much prepared for anything . . .

But, of course, we aren't. Our lives present us with all sorts of unexpected challenges - difficult people, accidents, illnesses, where to live, what career to pick and relationship problems.

The reason we are so unprepared is we can't see the energy of what we do or are about to do. The energy of what you do is a flow of energy commonly - called chi or qi - through your body every time you do anything. For example, you might decide to eat a certain food, take a certain medicine, buy a certain car, wear a certain ring or go to Bali...

Every time you do anything - anything at all - your qi changes. And that change affects you and your life now and in the future.

On the one hand, your energy is changing all the time. On the other, you don't notice most of these changes and the few that are noticed, like the gut feeling about not walking down the dark alley, may be because of nervousness or some other form of stress rather than a real awareness of what you need to do.

Intuition is sometimes called the "edge of awareness" because it can touch upon the energy of whatever is going on. However, it isn't the same as real energy awareness that is as concrete an experience as when you feel the rain on your face or see the sun in the sky.

Energy awareness is a great step into the unknown where the unseen world of energy is as real as anything you sense or know. The world of energy underlies every experience, state or circumstance.

Your qi precedes, or maintains, every experience and every circumstance in your life: the car that almost hit you last week (security qi), your problems with a lover (partnership qi), your difficulties at work (work qi) or your lack of energy (health qi). Anything you care to name in your life reflects the state of your energy in that area of your life.

Our problems are consequences of our energy deficiencies. But, unfortunately, most of us aren't aware of our energies. You may not be aware, for example, that the helpful medicine from the doctor is leading to a problem in twenty years time, that a tree in your garden is damaging your relationships, or that a ring on your finger is weakening the energy in you that keeps you safe.

It's all a mystery. Life just seems to happen - however it happens - for better or for worse. And we try, to the best of our ability, to explain it to ourselves or we ask someone else to explain it to us. But the mystery - or is it irony? - of life is that without developing your own awareness of your energies you simply cannot know why something is happening.

The awakening of your energy awareness depends upon the strength of an energy called your intent - not to be confused with the currently popular concept of "intending" something to happen. This energy, contained in your upper abdomen, causes your awareness to ascend. The more your awareness ascends, the more you experience body energy awareness, environmental energy and, finally, spirit energy awareness.

By living with intent your awareness can achieve new heights. Why would you want to raise your awareness? Because it's the only way to become free of the repetitive challenges that appear in all our lives - whether they are in the area of our wealth, health, work, relationships, etc. Living a "normal" life generates or maintains the problems that inevitably result from a lack of awareness of the energetic consequences of our daily choices.

Cultivating your energy awareness steadily brings new solutions into your life and consciousness that otherwise, inevitably, remain unknown. Sometimes, these solutions can be quite unusual - like curing a case of arthritis by creating a wire model that made the stress causing the arthritis to drain out of the affected joints! For people without energy awareness, such novel solutions to common problems sound absurd. But the more you choose to cultivate your own energy awareness, the more you see how all kinds of difficulties can be resolved through simple, yet extraordinary, methods.

Anyone can develop their own energy awareness. It doesn't require some peculiar, preexisting talent. We all have basically the same energy body which can be strengthened in ways that lead to almost "magical" results in your life - ways that generate more wisdom, inner strength, happiness and success. But it isn't about spending time and energy chasing the results you want; living with intent automatically generates the changes that you need in your life, in a natural sequence.

Although energy awareness is possible for everyone, it's only practiced by a few: those who already have enough awareness to recognize its potentially extraordinary benefits. So it is one of life's ironies that the faculty - to perceive the consequences of your choices and actions even before committing them - most needed by everyone, is the faculty that is most ignored . . .

"I would have done something entirely different if I had not followed my awareness, but I sat there and gritted my teeth and it turned out to be the best decision I could have made!"

Robin T, UK

(c) The School of Energy Awareness 2008. Reprints welcomed so long as article and byline are reprinted intact and all links made live.