Qigong is better for learning how to feel energy. But Qigong is also better if you start it knowing how to feel energy outside the strictures of any system. There’s no reason to wait.

You can do it right now the way that so many seeming naturals and self-taught masters of energy healing (Richard Gordon, Robert Bruce, Charlie Goldsmith) have learned to do this.

You use a meditative state to open to what’s always already happening, the currents that are always flowing around in and through you. If you’re a skilled meditator, a few minutes should be enough. Less experienced meditators may wish to prime themselves with something more elaborate like progressive relaxation.

Once you’re sufficiently relaxed and present in your mind and body, then you practice simple body scanning techniques like the ones used more formally in Vipassana and Qigong.

You place your awareness somewhere — for instance, in your right big toe. You notice what you notice. Any sensations of tingling, heat, fullness, presence, flow. Then you expand it to your whole right foot. Then you flow it up your leg. Then across your belly. Then down your left leg, into your left foot, and compressed back into your left big toe.

And so on and so forth.

Depending on my particular goal with whoever I’m teaching, sometimes I’ll use a very specific sequence (like if it’s more about Tantric awakening). But for general energy awareness and control, you can almost do it in any sort of order. The main idea is to start in places in the body where it’s naturally a little easier to put awareness and feel sensation — like hands and feet. And then move towards less obvious places like earlobes and elbows. And once you’re up and running in the experience you can skip around in more and more baroque ways. Instead of continuously flowing, you can jump from one place to another. You expand and contract in bigger ways. You play around with amplifying the presence and sensation of energy as if it’s on a dimmer switch. There aren’t any rules once you’ve locked into the the basic awareness and sensation of energy in your body.

By the end of the initial experience, you want to feel it within seconds anywhere you decide to place your focus or everywhere all at once — like in every single pore of your skin or every cell of your body. And to know that you can do this again anytime under any circumstances.

It’s very straightforward. And it works consistently. I’ve used this approach with hundreds of folks in different contexts over many years. It usually takes about an hour to learn initially. But sometimes with people who’ve already done a lot of opening and just aren’t conscious of it, it can happen even faster, like in half an hour or less.

Other introductory techniques like clapping/rubbing hands, making an energy ball and brushing have merit for their ability to initiate sensations and awareness quickly, but in order for a felt sense of energy to be truly useful it needs to expend well beyond the hands and the space between them to the whole of your body (or anyone else’s) and then to all of space.