âYou have a wellspring of energy inside that is almost overwhelming when it is fully flowing. When you are open, it floods through your heart and fills you with love, enthusiasm, and excitement about life.â â Michael A. Singer
Part II shifts focus to the energy that flows through you. Singer explains that there is an infinite source of spiritual energy available to every person, but most of us unknowingly block its flow through our mental and emotional patterns.
You know what it feels like to be energized versus depleted. Some days you wake up full of energy and enthusiasm; other days you feel drained before you even begin. Singer asks: where does this energy come from, and why does it fluctuate so much?
Most people assume energy comes from food, sleep, or external circumstances. While these play a role, Singer points to a deeper source: an inner energy that flows through you constantly. This energy has been called many things throughout historyâchi, prana, Spiritâbut whatever you call it, itâs real and experiential.
If infinite energy is available, why donât we feel it all the time? The answer is that we block it. Every time you close down, resist an experience, or get lost in negative mental patterns, you restrict the flow of energy through your system.
Think about how your energy changes based on your thoughts. If someone gives you good news, you feel energized. If someone criticizes you, you might feel your energy collapse. But the external event isnât creating or destroying energyâitâs just triggering you to open or close.
The energy doesnât fluctuateâyour openness to it does. When youâre open, energy flows. When youâre closed, it doesnât. Learning to stay open is the key to accessing unlimited energy.
Singer introduces the fundamental distinction between being open and being closed. When something happens that you like, you open up and energy flows. When something happens that you donât like, you close down and energy gets blocked.
Notice this in your own experience. When you fall in love, you open up and feel infinite energy. When you experience rejection, you close down and feel depleted. But the trigger is arbitraryâdifferent people open and close to different things. The common factor is the opening and closing itself.
Imagine a flower that opens when the sun shines and closes when clouds appear. If the flower could learn to stay open regardless of the weather, it would receive sunlight all the time. You are like that flower. The inner energy is always available, like the sun. The question is whether youâll stay open to receive it.
Singer suggests that this inner energy is not really âyoursââitâs a universal energy that flows through all living things. You are not the source of the energy; you are a channel through which it flows. Your job is not to create energy but to remove the blocks that prevent its natural flow.
This reframes the spiritual journey: instead of trying to acquire something you donât have, youâre learning to let go of whatâs blocking what you already have access to.
When energy flows freely, you experience enthusiasm, love, creativity, and joy. These arenât things you have to manufactureâtheyâre the natural result of being open. Children often have this quality because they havenât yet learned to close themselves off.
As adults, weâve accumulated so many reasons to close: past hurts, fears about the future, fixed ideas about how things should be. Each of these creates a constriction that limits the flow of life energy through us.
The profound teaching here is that opening and closing is ultimately a choice. You may not be able to control what happens to you, but you can choose whether to stay open in response. This choice is made moment by moment, and it determines your experience of life far more than external circumstances do.
This doesnât mean you have to like everything that happens. It means you can choose not to close yourself off from life, even when life is challenging. Staying open in difficulty is the essence of spiritual strength.