The Mystery of Life Energy

Sounds like gibberish, right, or maybe the title of a new TV show (remember Dialing for Dollars?). But it’s not a joke – it’s the process by which I’ve begun to access my unconscious mind in order to play a popular online word game. As readers know, I have a longstanding interest in the inner workings of the mind, touching on subjects like energy sensitivity, parapsychology, intuition and more. But I’ve never developed a reliable way of accessing this inner wisdom for myself – intuition tends to come my way in spurts and starts, and at random times (often at 4am, which is why I always keep some Post-It notes handy by the bedside).

This lack of intuitive skill comes despite my immersion in the world of energy psychology (EP), where intuitive processes often guide next-step interventions and interpretations. For example, the technique of muscle testing is a key tool in EP that is used to determine whether a patient’s energy system will be receptive to a particular intervention. Also known as applied kinesiology or ideomotor signaling, it’s akin to dowsing in that a subtle inner perception is translated into a visible external signal, such as the response of a particular muscle group. In the first photo, the strength of the shoulder muscles varies depending on what image the subject calls to mind or what statement she makes, or even what substance she holds in her other hand; the body’s subtle energy system shifts in response to these actions, and that directly affect the strength of the muscles.

                        Muscle testing           

A similar process underlies the deflections of the dowsing rod in the next photo, but the interaction is even more subtle. The rod isn’t like the needle in a compass, passively responding to an external magnetic field; it requires that the consciousness of the dowser somehow access information and translate it into a movement of the rods, though the exact mechanism isn’t clear.                

Dowsing rods

But how accurate are these approaches? It’s a fair question, given how subtle and subjective these signals are; fortunately it’s a question that has been tested in a fair number of research protocols. With muscle testing, the evidence is mixed. One randomized controlled study concluded that statistically significant levels of accuracy (68%) were obtained by muscle testing conducted by EP practitioners. But other studies, using a dynamometer to measure muscle strength directly, have shown no significant levels of success.

With dowsing, the validating evidence is stronger. There’s plenty of empirical evidence: country farmers in New England have for generations dowsed to determine where to drill for water (the American Society of Dowsers is based in Vermont), and oil companies pay serious money to dowsers to locate drilling sites for their new wells. In one research study conducted by a team of German physicists, dowsers were able to accurately locate underground aquifers over 90% of the time in arid regions around the world, even determining the depth underground that the wells should be drilled.

As I described in my August 2024 blog post, I dabbled with dowsing during a recent visit to several sacred sites in England. But I’ve been fortunate to find a more convenient setting in which to fine-tune my dowsing skills – the popular online word game called Wordle. For any of you who may not know, it’s a simple game whose goal is to deduce which 5-letter word is the choice of the day. By guessing at possible solutions, correct and incorrect letters are gradually identified and placed in their proper location as the mystery word is gradually revealed.

Players get a maximum of 6 guesses before they are ruled out, and the goal is to get as low a score as possible. I’ve averaged a bit under 4 over the couple of years I’ve been doing Wordle, with my first two guesses being standard words composed of the 10 most common letters that appeared in an early sample month of Wordles (Being competitive by nature, I generally don’t identify those words to anyone because they are classified as Top Secret. But as a reward for following this blog, I am about to share my secret words with you!).

I score an occasional 2, but I usually attribute that to pure luck; I even got a 1 once, which was obviously luck (my friend Pat has twice gotten it on her first guess, with two different words, so she’s obviously psychic!). The key moment comes after two or three guesses, when I’ve narrowed the options down to two or three possibilities, but don’t have a logical reason to choose one or the other. Then it’s time to use intuition. For example, in a recent puzzle, after two guesses I had narrowed the field down to any 5-letter word that included the letters E, O, R and T. I did not know which slot any of the letters belonged in, however, just that they were part of the final word (in the figure below, gray letters don’t appear in the puzzle word, yellow letters appear somewhere in the word but not in this position, while green letters appear in the same slot where they are shown). Only 4 possible answers came to mind: OTTER, OUTER, VOTER and TOWER. Other possibilities were eliminated because I knew where several of the letters could not be located – the second letter couldn’t be an E, for example, which means RETRO is out.

So how to choose? For my first intuitive hit, I used yet another technique: the word option that appears brightest and clearest to my inner vision is often the correct one. Today the brightest word was OTTER, with the others showing one or more letters in a muted color. So I went with that choice, and was rewarded with a correct answer.

For the next day’s word, I ended up using the dowsing rod itself because the final choices appeared equally bright to my inner vision. It was an unusual word because none of the 10 most common letters showed up after my first two tries (something that happens less than once a month). But after my #3 word, DUMPY, identified a U and a Y and their positions in the word, I could think of only three possibilities – BUGGY, FUZZY and YUCKY.  I eliminated the last one on logical grounds because Wordle doesn’t use slang words, and the two others looked equally bright to my inner vision. So it was up to the dowsing rods to be the intuitive decider, and this time they closed up for BUGGY and swung open for FUZZY – the correct answer!

The next day I also scored a 3 thanks to dowsing (which also gave the same result as another intuitive technique that we all use – going with first impressions). So I’m looking forward to seeing how this upcoming month of dowsing for Wordles stacks up in comparison to past months – hopefully there will be more 3s than 4s this time around. But so far it’s been like the old saying: when I take a wild guess, I’m only right half the time, but when I dowse, I’m right at least 50% of the time!  Practice makes perfect, especially when it comes to exploring the mysteries of life energy.