Sensing Subtle Energy

It appears that I'm gaining the ability to sense subtle energy. This has manifested in various ways lately with increasing frequency.

I have felt flows of energy while doing yoga, while having acupuncture (which I love), and sometimes while meditating or when I am feeling relaxed and centered. Recently when I was doing a one-day Vipassana retreat here in Vancouver, I was feeling fairly powerful energy flows at one point; around the same time I started to get some dreamlike imagery and mentation.

One night I was lying in bed practicing the 61-point relaxatin techique - this is used to promote the induction of WILDs, Wake Induced Lucid Dreams - and when I was focusing on the first point, which is located essentially in the 6th chakra, I started to get hypnagogic imagery and dreamlike thoughts. At the same time I had a fairly vivid sense of a roughly spherical zone of sensation at that point; it almost felt as though I was "pushing a button" and I wonder if I was activating that chakra. However, I was quite tired and close to sleep anyway, so it may simply be that I would have been drifting into hypnagogia and the exercise had nothing to do with it.

Possibly related to this, I have been much more "in my body" lately - probably attributable to practices such as vipassana, yoga, NIA - and sometimes I have a sense of the totality of my body all at once; this is quite a contrast to how I experienced my bodymind long ago, when I would almost always experience my consciousness as localized in my head, and would have very little awareness of my body from the inside at all. One evening recently I was lying on the couch relaxing, focusing on my entire body in a vipassana sort of way. Suddenly it seemed as though I was sensing the space around my body, with my body contained within it. It felt as though I had unclenched/relaxed my focus. I could feel some tension in my body and a tendency to contract into that, but for several minutes I was able to just rest in that spacious awareness. I speculate that I may have been sensing my 'aura' or energy/dream body.

No doubt a committed materialist could "explain away" the experiences I've detailed, but experientially they are valid in and of themselves, and the simplest explanation for me to work with is that I'm starting to become more aware of my subtle body. I also seem to be starting to feel other people's moods or in other way sense in a non-physically mediated way. I believe this is all related and will probably increase as I continue to practice yoga, meditation etc. I'm very curious as to how far I can take this, and how the retreat in Brazil will affect, and be affected by, all this.