Overcoming Resistance As A Path To Healing

 

 

Many years ago I overheard my Chi Gung teacher speaking with a person in my class between sets. He explained that we can learn how to let go of all kinds of resistance in our energy field and consciousness by paying attention to the body. He said that many unconscious feelings are held in the body and that they can be held in different parts of it. He said that sometimes when we allow ourselves to become aware of this tension in the body it can tell us something about our own feelings. By going into and letting the resistance in a part of our body relax and unwind itself, we can also let go of emotions that get stored there. He said it might just be a little feeling in the back, the hips, the shoulders, or even a toe….all of this had something to tell us and teach us about letting go.

By letting things go like this, you can unwind all sorts of unconscious emotional material. It can be surprising how much that we hold onto. I have found that the more I do this work the more aware I become of still smaller elements in my body/mind landscape. It can lead to greater and greater clarity and a state of inner peace. I can also attest that if this process happens quickly, like it did with me during kundalini, the landscape is changed so quickly that it can even be bewildering sometimes. So, I suggest that you take this kind of work slowly and be easy on yourself.

When you can see that you are the source of all of your feelings, then you are one giant leap closer to taking responsibility for how you have thus far arranged your own inner emotional landscape.

 

Everything that we feel is not the result of what others have done to us but is instead how we have reacted to events in our lives. Buddha had something to say about this, and it is sage advice. No one makes you feel a certain way. No one. When you can see that you are the source of all of your feelings then you are one giant leap closer to taking responsibility for how you have thus far arranged your own inner emotional landscape. This is not always easy to do, especially in a time when people are increasingly wanting to have the world to conform to their own feelings instead of just being an adult and understanding how we each make choices ever day about how we feel and respond to the world. Being able to develop this honesty about how we feel (and that we feel) what is happening is the second big leap in work of this kind. Be easy on yourself, but be honest and be responsible.

When you feel resistance in your body, the first step is to observe it. It can sometimes manifest as physical pain. Instead of resisting it, try going into it. It wont hurt you. Explore it with your intuitive faculties. How does it feel? Why is it that you are holding tension there? Try breathing deeply and slowly and then imagining that your own breath is filling that tense hard space in you. Depending on how tense or how resistant the area is, you might need to do this a number of times. As you breath, imagine warmth going into that location. Imagine that your breath is being sent there, that it is opening up that area. Relax. Give yourself this moment to simply explore. What things that you do help to limit or soften the tension in your body, this pain or feeling of resistance? Often you will reach a place where you realize that the tension was in fact in your mind, being fed into a part of your body in a way that sent a message to tighten. Over time, this location can begin to hurt because of how recursive this feedback loop can become. A back can develop significant pain, hips might hurt, leg muscles might remain chronically painful or fatigued. In some cases, stretching gently can help, but in others, merely recognizing the feeling that is feeding the resistance is enough to short-circuit the feedback to that location in the body. Always, bringing awareness helps to limit the problems, but this is just a first step. If you can stop your mind after you reach the problem area and let your mind go blank, you will actually be in a much better position to intuit the problem.

Albert Einstein, who learned how to cultivate this form of intuition in his life described it precisely this way. He said that as long as his mind was busy with the problem, he would not find an answer, but once he let his mind go blank, the answer would just come to him. It turns out that this is what yogi’s and yogini’s do also. It is a cornerstone state for resolving all sorts of challenges in life.

By having a few encounters with how this method works, you can apply it to a broad range of other issues in your life, including things far-afield of our topic here.

There is a hazard in going about this in too much of a rational way because if you do, you will tend to draw on previous experience, whereas this approach I am describing to you now is the opposite. It requires your mind to go blank. Imagine that you mind needs this silence in order to pick up the deeper messages which will arise through your consciousness, for surely this is how they do. By having a few encounters with how this method works, you can apply it to a broad range of other issues in your life, including things far-afield of our topic here. As a Westerner, you probably have been taught to always have a busy mind. This is one big problem many of us have, which is that we tend not to cultivate more nuanced forms of awareness as our busy monkey-minds steal the show. There is a great benefit in allowing your mind to go quiet and to slowly learn how to cultivate this state of mind. In fact, all meditation practices have this as one of their chief goals. By quieting the mind you can more readily get to the substratum of awareness, to the Essential Self which tends to lie just below the surface. When you do this, it is much easier to delve into these problem areas and see them for what they are. It always requires some degree of discipline, courage, and self honesty.

Are your shoulders tight? Is your solar plexus hard as a rock? Do your knees hurt? In some cases, you might have some issues with your physiology because of an injury or something that comes to your through your genetic line. That can sometimes be separate from what you hold in a center, like say, your knees. And yet, the knees can go on to hold tension that is more than merely how you have been gifted in your physiology. There is a lot that we do with feelings of vulnerability to further impact a part of the body. It is worth noting what part is purely physiological and what part might be exacerbated effects of emotion or tension in that area. I once had a shoulder in jury that I made worse because of my protecting it too much. The shoulder joint literally froze in place, hard as a rock from inactivity. I had to learn to open up the injured shoulder and not be afraid to move it and allow it to work as it had before the injury. In time, I found that I was able to bring more flexibility to it than it had prior to the injury itself, which was an unexpected bonus.

It sounds cointer-intuitive, but many reflexologists and energy healers have found that certain parts of the body tend to be areas where quite specific feelings can get trapped. Have had self-esteem? Your root and your sacral region might need some attention. Is your willpower off or is it too strong? That could very well be an issue in the solar plexus. Feelings of being a victim? Goodness, your heart might need some work. If you take on too much of others’ stuff, you might find your shoulders literally tightening up with shoulder and upper back issues plaguing you.

The more you do this work the more you will find yourself letting go of age-old problems.

It is helpful to have a good body worker who can help to loosen those areas up, the open the energy channels so the old stuff can go and new growth and healing can take its place. The more you do this work the more you will find yourself letting go of age-old problems. If you find yourself going back to an issue in your past over and over, this itself is a stuck emotion and it will almost always have its compliment in the body somewhere. It is actually pretty amazing how much we can become aware of this stuck material if you take the time to slow down, get quiet, and then begin to listen and pay attention in a meditative way to what your body is telling you. In some cases, you might not be able to get to the source of the problem yourself. You might know that there is something likely stuck in a certain spot, but you have no idea how to let it go. Despite everything that you try, it just hangs on. This is where an energy worker can often help. Whether that person does acupuncture, acupressure, reiki, cranio-sacral, or similar types of energy work, someone who is practiced in energy work often will have the intuitive abilities to get to the problem in order to provide you with relief. It is my experience that truly great energy workers are rare, so you will want to look around and ask people about their experience.

It is really quite a revelatory experience when you can feel the emotional energy move out of the body. It normally never comes back, which is a great relief, too. 

With practice, you can use meditation as a way to take a quick inventory of your body state and see what is coming up for you. We are human, so we are prone to holding onto things, obsessing about something that upset us or not being able to let go of something as far back as childhood. We have lost the ability that most other mammals have for “shaking off” the tension or past emotion or trauma. This is why I recommend for really sticky issues a healing modality called TRE. If you use this term to search my blog you will find a number of posts on this method. It is actually quite simple to do on your own and has been shown to relieve symptoms of PTSD, and if done more intensively, it can eliminate the trauma stored in the body for good! It is really quite a revelatory experience when you can feel the emotional energy move out of the body. It normally never comes back, which is a great relief, too.

As you replace old negative self-talk with more positive thoughts, your whole outlook can begin to change.

While mulling this post, a quote came up on my social media feed in a group that I am part of. It was a person describing how one day they realized that they were free to feel anyway that they wanted about themselves. They described this feeling as being able to become like a butterfly, free from being tied down to old thoughts and feelings. One day this person suddenly felt free to feel fantastic about themselves, and so his life changed after that, forever. He now lives his life considering that he is this marvelous creature with so much good in himself that this now fills him with joy and wonder instead of being hemmed in and feeling bad about himself. This is a really great way to treat yourself, which is a form of self love. If you don’t love yourself, how can anyone hope to do similarly? Plus, you will feel really great as a result of shifting this way. For some of you, you might need some practice, but go easy on yourself. As you replace old negative self-talk with more positive thoughts, your whole outlook can begin to change. Aren’t you worth it? My best of luck to you…

Conquering Anger

The hardest thing that we face as a species is our habitual tendency to want to shove our emotions down. We are told in many ways that hard harsh emotions are not good.  The solution has been to simply push them away.  This winds up being a much bigger problem than the emotion in the first place!  Psychologists all know about the idea that an emotion that is suppressed only comes back far worse later. This can lead each of us into neurosis-disease of the mind and emotions.  The answer is simple and takes a shift in how you relate to your emotions. 

Anger is a natural emotion, and one of the hardest for us to deal with constructively.  It is also one of the most intense of our emotions because it is so driven by energy.  Anger uses a lot of energy and when it is pushed down, you are pushing a lot of feeling down into your subconscious self where it only festers and gets worse over time.  This can come back as emotional problems like anxiety and depression, or even disease over time. Suppressed anger can change your physiology in ways that you do not notice, small changes, but given enough time, can result in very real physical problems.  Adrenaline and cortisol are two very powerful chemicals in the body that relate both to fear and anger. They can deplete the body of a whole range of very important nutrients.  When this is allowed to go on for a long time, decades, the result is something that can emerge later in life as a chronic problem.  It is important, then, to learn how to deal with anger constructively and not push it down.

When you get angry, let yourself feel the emotion.  When you feel anger, remind yourself that the emotion is not you, it is a phenomenon like the wind blowing through you.  Let it be like the wind and think of it flowing through you.  What you do not want to do is to direct your anger at a person, because this can be hurtful to others.  You also do not want to fall into the trap of defining yourself in relationship to your emotions because this means that you ARE anger.  You aren't.  Anger is an emotion that you feel.  We call emotions because they are in-motion. So let it BE that for you. When you are angry, practice being clear with yourself that this is your reaction to outward events.  It is not who you are. By associating so closely with anger, you allow yourself to be defined by it.  When you do this, you are no longer the master, but the slave.  Slaves will then complain about just how terrible the world is to them.  I ask you: is this a good way to live?  There is indeed a much better way to be.

Do not treat your anger as an entitlement.  You are not angry because someone made you angry. No one makes you.  You make you. You are angry because of your reaction to what someone else has done. Be clear about this one important point no matter how much you might want to make it the other person's problem.  It isn't the other person's problem.  It is yours.  Own it.  The world may be a terrible place with mean hard people, but without you, there would be no reaction to it.  You are simply reacting.  Own your reactions.  When you are more mature and developed, you will grow enough to see that the world is the way it is for reasons that, if understood, would change how you see any "problem" in it. 

By taking offense to something outside of you, you are trying to make your reaction someone else's problem.  It isn't.  The person who was short with you earlier and cut you off in mid-sentence may have had a drama playing out in their lives which you are not privy to.  They might have been hurting inside from something that is happening in their lives, they might have been terribly late for their next appointment. it could be anything.  Try not to let things become so personal.  When you identify so strongly with "I" you have trouble.  Most often, it isn't so personal as you tend to make it.  When you can do this, you will find that your reactions to others is greatly decreased by owning your feelings and letting things go. The other side to this is that you wind up taking a banner against what angers you and you will very soon be using your anger to hurt many people, and you will wonder what is wrong with everyone around you.  After all, your identification with your anger has blinded and blocked you. 

Allow anger to flow but do not direct it at people.  If you do, you will hurt them and then the effort of letting anger flow will have created more problems than they have solved. By letting anger flow, it will move through you and will not become subsumed within.  Do not capture or trap anger or else it will come back in larger uglier forms later. Anger can build up like an account that you pay into each day.  Later, the account will be so full that you will be paralyzed by the sheer mass of your anger and you will feel helpless to the power that you feel it has over you.  Anger will lead to emotional blocks in your body and awareness that can have very troubling effects, from hampering your relationships to harming your physical health.  You will also be very difficult to be around.

Children know very well how to deal with anger.  One minute, they are red in the face, their eyes are filled with rage, and the next minute, they are completely different, wanting to grab your hand and get into your lap, smiling all the while.  They are done with it, you see, and they do not think any more about what had just happened.  This is how we should deal with anger, too. So let it flow. 

By following these simple set of ways of dealing with anger you can allow anger to move through you without hurting other people, and you will not be harmed either.  Let anger be a storm for you, a storm that will naturally pass as all storms do.  When you do, the sky of your inner environment will be fresh and clean after this emotion has been allowed to blow through you. Most of the problems related to how we deal with anger are themselves the very root of our problems, so do not let business as usual capture you.  Like every storm that comes, it will leave you feeling clearer and ready to feel happy again. 

Energy Awereness & Leg Chakras

When we discuss the concept of chakras, most everyone who knows about them will conjure the image of seven chakras with differently-petalled flowers, all with colors that run through the rainbow hues from red into brilliant white, going from root to crown. 

This is a popular image, but for someone who wants to dig down deeper into what this is about, this popularly held awareness of the seven-chakras is just scratching the surface.  The human body has thousands of chakras. The seven major chakras has persisted so well because they are the easiest to identify right out of the gate.  You might think that each of these seven major chakras might be characterized by the colors they are most often associated with.  There is so much more than this. Some of it you can learn from what has been gathered by seers from the past, but all of this information is also available to you directly through your own inner perception.  Everything that we know about the subtle energy system has been gathered from the inner sensing capabilities of those who have gone before us. 

Through my years of studying energy that we each have this ability in a very native way.  Most people, though, do not know how to bridge the gap between the realm of the outer senses (the physical senses) to touch on the awareness that exists within the sensing ability of the energy body. But really, you can.  I have been witness to numerous people who didn’t think energy as being a real “thing” that a person could see or detect in any sensory way, but I have been lucky to have had an odd habit of having people develop this ability while I am doing a reading of them or others.   

This characteristic of energy means that a wave thus has no mass, and, is a channel for travel through time.

The energy body is made up of over 70,000 channels called by the Hindu as nadi. Some say that they are beyond numbering.   In the Chinese tradition they are called meridians.  There are no chakras conceived in the Chinese tradition.  The reason for this is because the science of acupuncture and acupressure does not affect the chakra centers directly, and because they do not, they have not become part of the Chinese system.  Chakras are the result of an accumulation of forces in a type of vortex, which in the old language was called a spinning “disc.” When each of these nadi cross each other, a chakra exists. 

The number of branches in the nadis means that there are many thousands of chakras in the body.  These are not unlike how capillaries in the body join to make veins and veins join to make larger trunks called aorta.  As the channels join into more channels, the force builds and larger more obvious chakras exist.  Because this system is not made up of dense matter but energy, what governs them is energetic.  As a result, each chakra, every nadi or meridian will have its positive and negative compliment.  Every chakra is thus double-lobed in a sense, of positive and negative energy flow.  In the same way that a magnet has a polarity, so too does prana have a polarity, which is what flows through the nadi channels.  Those who were able to detect these channels and the chakras mapped them carefully so that we have very dependable locations mapped for identifying acupuncture points, for example.  When the mind is clear enough and you can focus on the energy centers, you too can detect these.  To do this requires an openness to detecting prana flow and then an ability to translate this information into some visual form in order to make sense of it.  When it happens it can seem like you are making it up, or imagining it, or grasping for something that you can’t quite see, with images forming in the mind.  This is the cognitive bridge that happens when you use the inner senses.  It is possible, too, that others will experience the process differently.  As westerners who are informed by a materialistic view (everything happens because of physical matter), it is easy for some people to tend not to trust themselves.  If you will relax, chill, and open up to the notion of your innermost capacities you can discover what you are indeed capable of.  If you haven’t caught on yet, I am keen on people being able and willing to inquire for themselves. 

The energy that flows through the whole entire body, while following these paths called nadi are also  made up of energy that is electromagnetic in nature, which means it is not merely a particle-based energy form, but a waveform.

The body is thus made up of a complex web-work of prana that is fed by lines of force.  When viewed with the inner senses, which is how all seers have detected them, they can look like extremely fine webs like spider webs that go all the way down to the atomic level.  Lines of force will at the deepest, most fundamental level go from lines to a kind of mist or “fog” at the lowest subatomic level. This is just how deep all of this goes.  

This system feeds from the extremities and concentrates along the trunk of the body where there are three main vessels or channels for carrying different aspects of alignments of the energy.  One is called Ida, which is thought of as lunar or feminine and resides along the left side of the body, with the Pengali (or Pengala) channel, that is thought of as solar and male, which is on the right side of the torso, but closely tracking, in parallel, to  the spinal column. The central channel, which is very close to the spinal column is known as Shushumna.  This third channel carries an energy that is felt as the sum of the Ida and Pengali channels. Being aware of the energy flowing in this channel leads to Cosmic Consciousness. These channels all branch out throughout the body in a flow of negative and positively charged lines of force. 

Working with clearing these channels is most often done through the yoga of pranayam which involves body movement meant to "massage" these blocked nadi while also using breathing to help to move the prana. Other methods include Qigong, which means "energy work." It is possible also to release blocks with such therapies as deep tissue massage, reiki, and polarity massage, to name a few. Alternating nostril breathing helps to charge and awaken the Ida and Pengali channels in the body, and is an important first step in clearing the nadis.

it is just as important to stimulate and accelerate the flow of these channels as it is to be able to slow them down.  Sometimes by clearing one center higher up in the body, for example, you may need to go back to "lower" chakras in order to clear "new" blocks that seem to emerge, blocks that have always been there but whose presence were blocked in your awareness until another center was cleared.  The clearing of the nadi is, as a result, a dynamic process that has many feedbacks that are the result of one "leg" of work revealing new aspects that had been previously not known or detected.  Like the uncovering of a layer, the new layers come more into focus.  What worked at one point in the process may need a different method or technique in the next.  While sitting and focusing on an energy center may have worked extremely well in the beginning might not work later on where, for example, more aggressive physical movement is required.  What is so helpful is that the energy of prana is itself an intelligent energy and when you can feel its flow in greater amounts, its intelligence has had a tendency to reveal itself to me more clearly.  As a result, by opening myself up to the wisdom in this finely tuned energy, I find my own intuition increased.  You find that you have a teacher within, you see. 

 As a waveform, this means that the energy has what is called nonlocality.

The energy that flows through the whole entire body, while following these paths called nadi also is made up of energy that is electromagnetic in nature, which means it is not merely a particle-based energy form, but a waveform.  As a waveform, this means that the energy has what is called nonlocality.  Nonlocality is hard to comprehend for those who are used to thinking of everything as being made up discreet particles, pieces, and lines of force through which energy particles flow.  Nonlocality is the gift of the nonphysical in a sense, a characteristic of energy whereby particles can emerge seemingly from “nowhere” and everywhere at once.  This means that prana can reach out across vast distances without any travel. This characteristic of energy means that a wave thus has no mass, and, is a channel for travel through time.  Let those who have the ears to hear, hear this!

I know that this might seem to be off the topic a little, but bear with me.  The energy of the wave cannot be controlled by the rational part of your mind.  This also means that for the average person, they rarely, if ever, experience what this “state” of energy is all about because we are all so focused in the linear and the rational. This is itself a central teaching and a discovery that I made in the midst of working through my own awakening and in developing and honing my new sensory awareness that was inherited through the awakening process.  I know it may seem exotic or strange to some, but this is only because it is a larger than normal leap that happens and is a normal facet of awakening (to make leaps instead individual steps). If you are a creative and deductive thinker, you can figure out how to harness this awareness in a way that is meaningful and fulfilling in your own journey of understanding this seemingly “hidden” dimension of our experience. 

So in this vein, I will tell you that In order to support the waveform as an energy that carries your awareness, you must learn how to be in alignment with the different polarities that exists within the energy and how these also correspond to aspects of your own awareness.  This requires moving out of the rational and linear part of your mind and awareness. One hint I will give you is that instead of an analytical state of mind that needs to figure it out,” this is instead the part of you that instead considers a more expansive sense of your being.  Some examples of how this feels is how you become open to new ideas or possibilities.  The excitement of beginning a road trip that has no agenda, just the pure enjoyment of discovery, is one such state that is very similar to this mode of awareness.  It is much more aligned to feeling than analysis, you see, and is one reason why it is missed by many who seek. The fact is, you have it all in you.  We are all beings of amazing potential who are often barely aware of it!

 In another post I would like  to share with you how to anchor or to cultivate this mind and body focus if you are interested. Explaining how this is done in a more complete way is beyond the scope of this article, though.

While the energy body has a positive and negative polarity all through it, these two polarities also align along certain parts of your awareness. Are you familiar with how some anatomists say that thought is partly determined by how our physiology is constructed? The same idea is applicable to the energetic system. The yang or positive polarity tends to align with the rational parts of the mind where the yin aligns more with the holistic right brain. Kundalini is often described as the "kundalini shakti" which points to the shift from one current of awareness to another.  In truth, BOTH currents of the "Shakti" and "Shiva" must be present as they are aspects of each other, not mutually exclusive (remember the particle/wave duality I was telling you about? This is the same; one does not create the other or flows out of the other-they exist concurrently as part of their broader nature).

The earthly ego-mind and the linear parts of the brain that give rise to it cannot handle the scope that the nondual mind offers, and this is, coincidentally, where the infamous Dark Night Of The Soul enters in along the journey of awakening. By learning how to strike a balance between these two in a new arrangement or focus, the self can allow for a better flow of prana and awareness within experience. This is usually more important when the charged force of awakening is churning in the self. On a boat that encounters only mild winds, tuning the sail perfectly to capture the wind  might not seem to be as important to the captain.  But on a boat where the winds are often extremely strong, how the sails are hoisted can be much more critical and their role more obvious. It is the awareness of the self that can lead you to understanding what this energy is all about through inner inquiry, which is how all of these discoveries have been made. Without this inquiry, you are merely taking it on another person’s word that what they say is so, without determining for yourself. As a result, most people are not aware that there are countless chakras. By being aware, you see, you can learn to feel their location and know character.

Take for example the ear chakra.  Most people have never heard of this.  It is certainly not even written about anywhere that I can find.  And yet I and my friend Ali have both experienced these ear chakra activations.  What is most interesting is that as a male, I experience the ear chakra openings as a cool “lunar” energy while Ali, who is female, experiences it as a warm yang energy.  This lead me to the next consideration about chakras and how they are experienced in the body, which has to do with overall alignment to masculine and feminine energy, or yang and yin force. 

The male lingam, or genitalia, is normally polarized in the positive while the female yoni, or genitalia is normally polarized in the negative.  The heart of the male, however, is the opposite from the root. The female heart is also polarized in the positive.  This, in heterosexual couples means that in sexual intimacy, the masculine energy is “received” and transmitted upwards into the heart of the woman, which then transmits the energy back to the man. This is what I call the “short cycle” flow.  The energy in fact can be experienced as flowing beyond the heart up into the crown, which is itself another level based on how the chakras are active and how aware you are of them.  At each center, the energies continue to change vibration as prana expressed through desire, is focused in the body of both people, both probing, and receiving all at the same time.  The heart center of the feminine is initiatory while the root chakra of the male is initiatory.  This short cycle flow circuitry is thus complimentary. Because of their complimentary polarities, spiritual union is possible.  In a similar way as how two merge energetically, each individual has fully merged energy that flows from one polarity within each chakra into the other.  Thus, union also exists within each individual, or the potential of its awareness.  Not everyone is aware of this, but becoming aware of it leads to increasingly higher levels of bliss.  This bliss is a healing force.

Having brought this up, let me explain that while I am speaking in terms of heterosexual couples, there is another level of understanding about this energy that takes in other orientations, so don’t think that my words are in any way exclusive to heterosexual experience.  At all.  Prana is like a very large tent that is like the sky.  It is big enough to let us all in to experience its reality  in a myriad of ways.  I think that a book on LGBT sexuality from a tantric perspective is just waiting to be written. 

When prana is at a high enough level, it is called kundalini. But kundalini itself is only prana in excess.  This is all.  A new threshold is met whereby a self-sustaining “fire” is maintained that is both yang and yin in the individual.  The two polarities are experienced, and thus known, more keenly and this has a powerful effect on the awareness of the individual because of the flow of prana which can confer even greater awareness when one avails themselves of it.

Leg & Arm Chakras

Each leg of the physical body also has chakras and the two currents that flow up the main trunk of the body.  Each toe has the same two currents as do the arms and fingers  and the trunk of the body, with much smaller chakra centers in each.  Because they are so small in appendages like toes and fingers, most do not detect their presence. To detect them requires a focus most often in meditation. The male genitalia and the female breast also have similar lines of force and chakras throughout them.  This is one reason why the hands are so often used for healing as there are terminal points akin to the top of the head where the energy flows from positive to negative, what is often referred to as “zero point.” It is here at this place in the energy that anything can happen.  Similarly the male genitalia has many hundreds of “points” that correspond to points in the female genitalia. In the male these are positive and negative and in the female they are positive and negative as well. Each polarity allows for a continuity of energy in the same way that an electrical circuit is made.  This is the path for higher union spiritually.  The clearer each center is, the broader the experience of this union is.  But having said this, even the skin has a vast network of energy points all across it. Think of every single pore on your skin as being an energy point that is joined to all other points along the surface of the body.  In the same way that the skin is criss-crossed with a vast network of nerves to tell the brain what is happening at that surface, so too does the physical sensory have a nonphysical sensory component.  One flows out of the other and thus each can take information from both to input into their respective sensory system. It is pretty amazing when you think of it. 

In the Hindu system, the chakras in the legs are seen as  both negatively and positively charged centers. That is, they are referred to in a negative and positive light as corresponding to our more animal natures, and are said to belong to the “underworld.” These centers are just like all other centers.  They are neither positive or negative but depend on the emotional, physical, and spiritual energy that have been invested or cast into them.  In the same way that a sacral chakra can convey a lack of good self image and a lack of sensual beauty, so too can the same center be magnetized in the opposite direction. This is so with every single center in the body. 

While you are probably familiar with the Muladhara, Swadhishthana, and Manipura chakras, for example, the chakras in the legs have also been  named. The Patala, located in the soles of the feet, is said to be aligned with malice and hatred as well as forgiveness.  The Mahatala is located more centrally in the foot near the arch and is aligned with a sense of entitlement and lack of conscience as well as expansiveness.  The Rasatala is located in the ankles and is aligned with selfishness and charity, while the Talatala is located in the calves and is aligned with a materialism for the self and an awareness of being conscious.  Sutala is in the knees and is aligned to inadequacy, inferiority, but also self-confidence. Vitala in the thighs aligns with blind wrath while also aligned to forgiveness.  Atala in the hips is aligned to lustful promiscuity and the ability to be healthily sexual. 

The way that each of these centers are charged by your awareness and your feeling, will determine your experience through them.  As with all chakras and the nadi system, blockages can occur in them and removing these blocks is important in freeing the old perception of the self in order to open up to a new awareness of who and what we are. The work of release is the same as with any other part of the body.  There are numerous methods and they can all work for a variety of reasons.  There are posts on the blog that are about these different methods.  Search using tags like “healing blocks”

I hope that this was illuminating and helpful to

you.  If you have questions about other sources, feel free to let me know and I can dig them up or you. I hope that you can find the information served up today will help you in developing a broader awareness in your own life about who you are.  :-)

Working Through The Centers

Imagine that overlaid on your body is an extremely fine webwork of energy lines, fine as spiders thread which create a vast jungle of pathways that align to organs and centers in your body that are physical that these lines help to feed the necessary nutrient of life force or prana to. You can't see or touch these lines, but you can feel them.  In fact, there are people, like myself, who can see the energy radiating off of them which can tell you all about where that person is physically, emotionally, and spiritually.  It sounds a little wild to some people, but really, its only because you have never heard of it or experienced it directly for yourself.  But when you do, it is a game changer.  But you don't have to see this energy in order to work with it.  There is a lot that you can do with it that is healthy and beneficial.  
 
These lines that make up the energy body begin so small that they are difficult to see.  They go down in scale to subatomic since the energy force literally does feed right into and out of the subatomic.  Its a very very detailed system for carrying energy.  Most systems for understanding this only show the seven chakras that go up the core of the body.  In the same way that your vascular system goes from extremely small structures that feed into organs and cells, they get bigger and bigger like the branches of a tree.  Finally they go up a central main trunk, which is where the most obvious centers of vortex energy reside.  We call these "chakras" which mean "wheel" or "disc" in the Sanskrit.
You don't need to know anything about esoteric traditions to know and understand what a chakra is or what your energy is.  I can tell you that by becoming sensitive to energy fields that are in others around you and by feeling your own energy, you can learn right away FROM the energy itself to know how it behaves and how incredibly complex but beautiful it is. By learning directly with the energy, you can allow your own natural intuitiveness to bloom.  Most people feel they have to learn this from another person, but I say that you literally have the capacity within you to decode the information for yourself because it is what you are.  But absent that, a few very basic guidelines about how to reach a place where the energy of the infinite can move through you with calm and peace.

Blocks As Solid (Ideas and Emotions)
 
We like to think of energy as something that is not solid, but I want to propose to you that at the level of energy itself, the energy body has amazing structure and a kind of "solidity" to it that makes the lines that run through it that the Chinese have charted as "meridians" as incredibly consistent from one person to the next.  Far from being just a current or amorphous flow of energy, the energy that makes up our consciousness is amazingly structured.  It is out of this "solidity" that energetic objects can get stuck in the system that is our light body.  In the same way that food can get stuck in your throat, energy can be stuck, sometimes for years, lifetimes even, in your energy body.  The result of removing the block is that perception and awareness changes and the person feels much more peaceful and happy. 

But we are a cluster of thousands of these blocks.  These blocks are always emotions that were not fully felt in one way or another. Do you fear your rage? Do you find yourself putting it away or stuffing it down?  That breakup with your boyfriend or girlfriend where you pulled yourself together and stopped crying because you were afraid you were going to just fall apart? Its possible that you were stuffing something down. Or how about that moment when you feared something that you did not understand...a feeling that just hung there like dirty laundry on the clothesline?  Afraid, we leave it alone.....and we shove it down.  By not fully processing any form of emotion, we literally create a kind of bottled knot of whatever that emotion is that gets stored in the energy body.  

The Body Thinks
 
There is a lot of evidence that I am finding that shows HOW the energy body and the physical body work together to either store or to release these blocks.  It has to do with the nervous system, the brain, as well as the current of prana and how it is polarized in the life force field itself. 
The light body is made up of two fields of energy that are joined and that replenish each other. They aren't really even "two" but two ends of a spectrum of energy that represents a kind of cosmic totality that makes it possible for you to then connect into the totality that exists beyond you.  This is the way this energy works, and is why you can feel the rush of the universe move through you in moments of nondual awareness (or as a continual awareness depending on the extent of your experience).  Two-in-one (energies) who then birth a transcendent third energy.  You see? All of this activity is felt as taking place not in the head but all through the body.  
 
What I am getting at is that there is already evidence to support that the body "thinks" and stores memory.  Now this stands in direct opposition to what we all have been taught, but what we have learned about our capacity to store memory is simply lacking.  Consider that the tissues in your body contain neurons, enough neurons in your gut for the brain of the average cat.  THAT is a lot of processing power.  What do you think our gut is doing with all of that?  What does your gut tell you? :-) So you see, the body has this capacity for dealing with memory, yes, and there is also a way to use somatics (body knowledge) to aid in releasing these memories.  Unlike the brain, the body seems to be more selective in the memories it stores.  It seems at this point in time, to be storing memories that it has had trouble with.  These can now be released once the individual is ready to release them.  And doing so is a saving grace because whatever the short coming was, or the fault or hurt or fear or rage, it all evaporates after releasing these blocks. 
 
In the work I was doing with my friend Alison who is herself awakened and a gifted intuitive, we found that even matter itself has a propensity to hold blocked energy.  I one experience that unfolded that I write about in my book, I describe how we unlocked an energy that had been blocked at a physical site that involved the murder of a man who had been drowned in a lake.  At the time, we did not know that a body had been found in the lake that we saw in our inner vision, but it had been discovered as the waters receded in what was then a dry lake bed (and his body was discovered along with some of his belongings enough to identify him).  We were able to describe a scenario that had a group of friends going out on the lake in the middle of the night with one of their friends not returning.  By simply recognizing the truth of this event, we were able to release it.  Six months after our encounter our local newspaper printed a story about the man who had died in the lake!  It was pretty amazing that events in the physical world would be so closely tied to our own encounter.  The newspaper story told the story of the four friends who took this man out onto the lake.  What we saw was that he was murdered for an elicit love affair with the wife or girlfriend of his friend. It was perhaps the reason why the blocked energy could be released....because someone was able to see what really happened on that night.  No one else would have been able to really see the events as they took place.  While we had testimony from his friends as part of the historical record, it is interesting how no one seemed to even entertain the idea of foul play at all.  Basically, it came down to four people all saying that their friend drowned. As long as everyone sticks to their story, then no one is the wiser.  
 
And of course, this lead the skeptical to suggest that I saw something that was not there, or that I was making it up or seeing a real event bu interpreting it to fit my own life where I felt as though I had been drowned. And I will concede that this is certainly a real possibility.  What suggests to me that we were seeing real events was because both Alison and I were picking up on all the same information, information that was in line with the story when it came out in the newspapers.
And this is where the second lesson in doing this kind of work comes in.  When we went up to this lake, we were simply going to see the sun setting.  But what unfolded was an event not unlike one that had taken place in my own life. There was something eerily similar to what had happened to me and to our friend who drowned in the lake.  While my life was not taken from me, my experience in my marriage was that I was being held underwater to be drowned before my own children.  It was itself a really painful experience that happened to me, something that people in the psychiatric community call 'Parental Alienation Syndrome."  One parent tries to destroy the other parent in the eyes of the children.  When it happens to you, it feels like the life is being sucked out of your body.  it feels like you are drowning.  It was appropriate that I would pick up on this eerie energy that was skulking about in those hills.  It was scary at first....sinister....but as we worked through the memory, I found that I was touching on a whole host of feelings that were in me as well.  By working with one block we were able to clear the other block. 
 
But what took place in the wake of this experience is also very telling.  In the same way that clearing a block in your body leads to a world of new possibilities, the area where this drowning took place also underwent a lot of changes in the years following our event.  Renovations were called for in the main buildings, a new arts initiative was called for with new people with progressive ideas coming onto the scene.  It was as though a new window opened for the people who lived and worked around this location.  To date, a slew of new initiatives have been undertaken on the part of the owners of the property where this lake is.  Its interesting to see how a location can be stuck for years only to see how it becomes unstuck, with a flow of new people, new ideas, and new possibilities entering the scene.  The same happens to you when you release these blocks, too!
 
Complimentary Blocks And The Law Of Attraction
 
Until a block is cleared, the block can be the basis of an attraction by others who are either similarly blocked or complimentary blocked.  What this means is that you either have someone who has had the same KIND of experience or someone who compliments the experience as in the case of someone who has a fear of being pushed, say, and you attract a person who seems to like to push you a lot!  THAT would be an example of a complimentary attraction.  A positive complimentary attraction would be somethign similar but in the positive, not negative.  In either case, however, the two people feel the similarities even if they are opposites, and these dynamics open up the flow of energy within us. They fill a role be it positive or negative.  These aspects of the other person can lay dormant for decades before expressing themselves, or they can be playing in the background all the time.  However, when you release this material, you release any possibility for this same kind of blocked material to ever be of any consequence to you in the future.  it is gone like a poof of smoke.  And this is why this kind of work is so important and life changing; you can change your whole life based on one big critical pivotal move in clearing your blocks in your body.  The result is that you NEVER feel energized by behaviors that would have effected you before.  It's as though your mind has been completely rewired when it comes to whatever hot button issue this block represented to you in the past.  There is a lot to suggest that this event does literally have the power to rewire the brain in seconds flat!  How's that for a speedy transformation?
 
It really is that fast and that easy.  When you have enough of these you realize that you can actually become a free person in ways you have never experienced before.

Ways Of Clearing Blocks
 
The best way to work through blocks is to pay attention to the ones that come up the most for you.  This is one most obvious way.  But these blocks may also be the hardest to clear away.  I am of the observed opinion that clearing smaller blocks is the way to go since it can loosen up material surrounding one block only to result in a kind of energetic avalanche with other blocks going at about the same time. 

You can identify blocks in your body by simply observing when you feel a sense of resistance or even pain in your body when you move a certain way.  Your energy body changes frequency from one end of the field to the other.  As a result, different emotions are stored at different places along this "column" in the body.  This is why some issues are stored in the root chakra than in the crown. The root chakra deals with nurture, abundance, and safety of self, for example.  When you feel a sense of resistance or even pain from tightness in a given area, you can gain a good bit of understanding about the block in general by thinking about where that block is located.  If its between two chakras, then it will contain aspects of BOTH chakras in some way.  
 
If you can identify the spot where the hurt or twinge keeps happening, you can point it out to a therapists who can work on that spot for you.  The types of therapists who can do this work will be people who do both energy work and body manipulations such as deep tissue massage.  Acupressure, acupuncture, reiki, and deep tissue are all methods that can help.  In pranayama yoga there is a lot of attention given to moving certain parts of the body, something called "locks" that help to move blocked material.  All of these involve vigorous movement of the part of the body where the chakra is located and, presumably, the blocked material.  Even placing your attention on the spot and holding it there through the day is one way that you can help loosen up a block in your body.  If it gets enough aware energy, it can trigger the release of the block sometimes. 
 
Chakra Clearing VS. Meridian Clearing
 
This is especially true for the chakras.  When a block is in a meridian line and not in a chakra, it seems to be harder to release it unless you are using acupressure or reiki, systems that actively move energy through the meridians of the energy body.  The chakras, conversely,  have a churning effect on blocks so that if you can use the chakras in meditation to swirl and move around a block, this can be very helpful because unlike clearig one small block in a meridian, a whole cluster of blocks can often be released all at once when its associated to chakra movement.  This is achieved by simply visualizing it and allowing the chakras to open fully and begin their movements, which often feel like you are moving or floating or even flying sometimes.  By placing your intent to clear the blocked material in a given chakra, the energy can begin to melt away the block.  
 
Clearing along a meridian line is more exact and may only clear one block.  It can also lead to other blocks letting go, though, and these blocks can be worked through by acupuncture, acupressure, and deep tissue most often.  The larger blocks can be "swirled" away through vigorous chakra movement and can sweep away lots of blocks at once, leaving a person feeling as though they are a changed person.  Many people who have these types of clearings describe feeling as though their body was being purged by a wave or by a force that sent a whole series of bubbles or shots of energy up along their spine and out their body.  Fundamental to all of this work is intent (willingness) and willingness to surrender at a deep level even into the body.  By reaching this deep state of vulnerability, you will also be reaching a deep state of awareness somatically about your body and your own body of feeling, too. Trust me, when the moment comes, it will be like suddenly seeing things in a very different way, the way perhaps that things really are instead of the way you have chosen to see them through the colorings of the particular block that you have.  Be ready to see things in a very different way, or to feel them very differently.  And remember; this is nothing at all to do with reason.  This is NOT about working through your emotional backlog rationally.  To try to do so is a trap.  Yes, reason can keep you OUT of the thick hot stew of your feelings and can help you to calmly identify what needs to be released.  However, you need to actually jump in the water with no fear or resistance to what you will find since this is a necessary state of mind and heart that you will need in order to clear the block. If you turn away, you are effectively saying to your body that its okay to keep the block in place.  
 
Some blocks go quickly.  Some take months, even years to dissolve.  A good rule of thumb is that if you have a strong investment in a given block, the harder it will be to rid yourself of it.  The more ego focuses on it, the harder it will be for the block to simply dissolve.

Part of prana is the energy body that expresses itself as a vortex, a kind of doughnut-shaped field of energy that is common to most anything that has an electromagnetic field around it.  It is this field that carries your consciousness and also the energy that feeds into your cells. When the energy is blocked, illness and neurosis can result. Life force is literally being squeezed out of you when it should be more abundant. 

When you remove these blocks you can realize stronger energy, a more peaceful state of mind and greater bliss that is not at the whim of whatever blocks are turning in you at the time. 
Until you are able to release a block, the block itself will be energized by prana in your body and it will remain active.  It can cause any number of problems, all of which will revolve around some kind of meme that is less than who you really are as a divine creature in earthly robes.  These blocks can cause no end of trouble for you.  There is little else work that is as important as this is. 
There are numerous ways to clear away blocks in the body.  One method is through energy work like White Crane Chi Gung.  This method of blending movement with energy work will aid in the removal of blocks throughout the body.  In order for it to work, it requires patience and persistence.  By working at it for weeks and months at a time, you can begin to see results.  Deep tissue massage by a practitioner who knows or understands about blocks is helpful.  Also, body movement is key.  The very act of shaking or massaging or moving the part of the body that is blocked can aid in removing material from it.  
 
Until you have cleared one chakra region, you will be dealing with what blocks remain in that region.  You will likely find that less obvious blocks come to the fore in your awareness now after having one bigger more obvious block removed.  Your attention can become much more highly tuned in this way to detect blocks in your system.  As this happens, you can also become much more sensitive to the presence in blocks in yourself and others if you are interested in learning a healing art.  I have dug so deep into myself that I have had some practitioners unable to detect the blocks.  One actually scolded me, saying I should not try to CREATE problems when there were were not problems there.  This practitioner was not able to pick up on this material, and I went on to have a number of clearings surrounding this region, so yes, there was more there, but not all of us will be as good about picking up on it.  While I have done the bulk of the clearing on my own, I have used a variety of methods to assist in clearing my system, and these have all worked well for me when they came along in my awakening journey (almost as if they were perfectly suited for the blocks kundalini was churning away on at the time!).  In many ways, I have been very gifted to have found a certain modality at a given time, as though the timing was perfect.  I was talking with my latest therapist about doing more work in the Fall recently as she expressed some surprise with the level of release I was experiencing with her work. I had to explain that while my being able to release blocks was different from her experience, it wasn't from my experience.  For many people, it seems they get a deep tissue massage and maybe loosen up some material a bit.  For me, I am headed into the final stage of releasing material, a process that has taken years of steady daily attention and work, and I am having flashes of past lives, of deeply held traumas from my ancient past. It seems the deeper I go into it, the harder it is, the deeper the shadows. New things come up, things that had not come up before.  Because I am dealing with the root chakra last, I am encountering a landscape inwardly that shows me all of the feelings that have arisen in me ever since I was a baby.  These are very old things, lifetimes in the making, and yet even so, I am here to deal them a kind of wonderful kind of death, which is in truth a redemption.  I let them free, no longer prisoner.  As this happens, I find that I experience emotions that I have long since pent up.  It isn't easy!  I am afraid I will offend someone, that I will get caught in the vortex of its energy while I am actively trying to clear it out!  But regardless, I go forward.  I go forward relatively alone because I would not want my anger and rage which was so-long suppressed in the root to be bubbling up with people near me.  How would I respond?  What would I say? In moments like these I feel like someone with terrets syndrome, afraid of walking into public places and calling the nice old lady at the counter something I shouldn't.

I know.  I hear that voice in my head, too.  "Oh really, fellah? You mean you might call an innocent old lady who did no harm to you an ugly old hag or a bitch or something?  Is that what you are saying?  Doesn't sound very spiritual to me, fellah....not very spiritual at all!"  This is of course where I give the voice in my head the virtual finger and turn back to what I am focused on.  You see, all of this is spiritual.  The sooner we get that, the better.  Some people will point out that calling someone names is not really spiritual, and I will say you missed the point.  This isn't about pretending to be something we aren't.  But the path to becoming what we know we can be is one that is involved in removing the error (shadow) that gets in the way of that perfection.  So its all about being real.  Its like being the Velveteen Rabbit. 

So don't be afraid of the shadow, I say.  That you get down into such shadows is cause for celebration.  Who on the planet has managed to get this deeply into themselves....to overcome the world?  That is pretty special and pretty damned spiritual.  :-)

This is why clearing blocks is so important; it is all about overcoming the world.  Would you like to see with new eyes?  With clear bodies, we can build a clear world.  And that is why I am writing to you today.  Pass it along!
~P.

The Healing Way

I have been going to have reiki treatments recently to assist with some clearing in my chakras, and my energy field in general.  There is a lot of talk about chakra clearing and chakra meditation.  It is useful to know, though, that your whole body is a vast network of criss-crossing energy lines that go all the way down to the atomic level.  If you were to see your energy field, you would look like a densely packed fibrous body of light, with branches that are big, like arteries, but also with a very fine system like capillaries.  Where energy draws towards the trunk of the body, there are vortices of energy that are called chakras.  There are many many more than the seven we normally talk about, but that is mostly because people aren't as aware of them, but they are there nonetheless.

All throughout this body of light, energy flows. It seems that anything that we do not experience fully and acknowledge completely emotionally winds up getting lodged in the same way that a splinter or scar exists in the body.  When I began this process of awakening almost seven years ago, I knew next to nothing about Chinese medicine and when I hear that the light body stores old memory, I thought that was a little funny. Didn't the brain do that?  I am sorry to say that up until that time, I had been seeing auras and reading energy for years.  I had been seeing how the aura, which is in the body, would show or exhibit emotional states all over the body and I certainly learned to read this energy. It wasn't until I awoke that I became aware of the phenomenon of releasing blocks.  These blocks are merely unprocessed emotion that gets lodged in the energy body.  Once you are able to go down deep into the very block, you can release it. There are a number of methods I was shown how to use by none other than the intelligent energy that has been living in my bod all these years.

Having the reiki reminds me again how these blocks contain memory in them.  Last week I was able to go back into the first year or less of my life.  This was pretty amazing given that I have no memories of my first year of life.  Its just a haze to me.  However, whenever I dig up a block and release it, its almost like uncorking some ancient emotion that I feel again perhaps for the first time.  I was speaking to a friend today while taking a break between teaching my classes at the university how I had encountered this last block and how I had actually KNOWN that the problem that the block was existed all these years but somehow in my own physiology and energy field, I seemed to need to experience the actual  feeling directly instead of having a version of it resting in my awareness.
Isn't that kind of weird?  To me, it actually feels like the block is a living being, locked in ice and waiting to be let go like some Mastadon whose organs are preserved and all that is needed is a careful electrical jolt to get the creature up and moving again. In a real way, though, this was what this last release was all about.  I KNEW that I hadn't grieved my father's passing as an infant.  Of course.  That is obvious, right?  And yet, deep inside the block there was this very specific feeling or awareness that lived in the pit of it.  When I felt THAT, I encountered a week-long process of grieving ina powerful way.  Call it speed grieving if you wish, because that is just what it felt like. Long since dead, I had to get on with it and not stand on ceremony. I was raw for about five days and slowly began to feel more healed from the ordeal.

So I know that I am not any different from the rest of you.  I know that others who have gone through the release process have also described allowing themselves to really FEEL the blocked energy as a way to help move the energy. This works, but it assumes you know how to access the energy.  Its not always possible.  There are other ways to access these blocks, and each is about as useful as any other.

WHile feeling deep into the block is one way, another way is to remain aloof, to allow the Observer part of you to come to the fore.  This Observer is actually very detached and it may help you to allow yourself to feel the same sense of detachment that comes with the Observer,  By allowing yourself to watch everything as though it is just a play, you can watch and see, but not become emotionally enmeshed in what is happening in front of you. Being able to step back like this is useful because it allows the focus of awareness to be present in the healing process, and while it may seem crazy, I have observed that it is observation or awareness being brought into the moment that serves to heal these blocks. Interestingly, the folks doing the reiki on me were saying the same thing.  I never learned this concept in any book, I was taught it by kundalini itself. It showed me years ago that my job was to SEE the block.  Just SEE itl in time, the block will go away.  If you can imagine that just behind your eyes is an infinite consciousness using your eyes to see through you, you can actually begin to allow more of the infinite through because.....that is exactly what is happening!  The method used to dissolve blocks is not to think it but FEEL it.  Thinking it or rationalizing is a very limited activity and is good for solving small problems like how to fix the kitchen sink but is really horrible at being able to divine the core of an issue that might stretch back lifetimes for you. It is the feeling self that must be enlisted for this.  I know; curious that I was just speaking of being aloof. Think of it as using your eyesight to SEE a problem but not get enmeshed in it.

There is another method for releasing blocks and this is movement.  Movement itself can be divided into several different classes.  One is shaking. Shaking has been shown to help release trauma stored in the body. It was first observed in animals that had been attacked by large prey animals.  Turns out, humans also use this method without realizing it when releasing old trauma sometimes. The other form of movement is the kind of movement found in the eastern traditions of Chi Gung and Tai Qi.  Both methods are designed to help move energy and eliminate blocks. Both are gentle workouts for the body and have been shown to bring a variety of health benefits. For anyone dealing with a backlog of blocks or who is aware of the blocks more than the average person, I would suggest keeping with a form of movement like Qi Gung and staying with it for at least a month with one or two session per week.  This is because some clearings take time to happen as well as once clearing does happen, you can sometimes get more clearings as a result of one clearing. Everything affects everything else.

There are a lot of very good visualizations to try when releasing blocks.  One is to stare into the block and feel your gaze breaking it up.  Another is to imagine a large hand opening up instead of clenching. Another is to imagine a river that is flowing and carrying you with it.  You do not control anything, you let the river take you.  Yet another very good visualization is imagining that your body is like a conduit or straw and energy flows through you unimpeded.  You let go of trying to be in control but become more of an observer.  By doing this kind of work, you can begin to shift your focus so that you can help to facilitate the movement of energetic blocks in your system.

Image © Stafford Artglass, Parker Stafford

By studying and knowing the chakra system you can learn more about how to dissolve a block.  If energy is stuck in one center, say, the heart, you can meditate on what the heart does and how the heart might be blocked and how to release it. For example, when dealing with root issues, like I have, I have found that I have been feeling emotional energy surrounding things like survival, nurture, and even abundance and sexuality. I can begin to get a clue about why the material is blocked, but knowing the basics of the center wont always lead me to the block, I have to allow myself to just FEEL it.  Somewhere inside of you, you do know the content of every single block in your body, but we do a lot to filter all of that out from conscious awareness. That is why meditation can be so handy. It can help to bring back into focus those things more on the edge of your awareness.  It is known, for example, that the left hemisphere acts as a giant filtering agent and that by letting down our "guard" so to speak, we can begin to broaden our awareness and filter less.  When you filter less, you also feel a flow of energy.  You don't necessarily have to focus on everything that moves by, but being in a place where you can observe is very helpful as I am sure you can imagine.  Its different, but a very good kind of different and is within your own abilities to try.

The advantage of clearing is that you can better feel and hear the flow of the universe in you. If you want to know cosmic consciousness, this is a good way to do it; by reducing the noise!  It allows you to feel more clearly and it also helps to erase karma.  Being able to reduce karma in your life is huge.  By releasing blocks you are releasing also the vibration that the energy that has exerted all this time.  You will find, bit by bit, that you will attract based more on what you feel you want and need instead of constantly getting stuck on a karmic merry-go-round with different faces and names but the same behaviors popping up over and over and over.  It isn't the world that needs to change, it is merely conforming to what you are.  It is you that must change if you with to attract a different kind of world in your experience.  The really great thing is that you can!