Sunday’s Focus
Do this week’s movement at different points through the day and allow yourself to feel. You might or might not feel anything. Even if you only do it for three breaths, do it. Do it often.
Sunday’s Concepts
Starting with this Layer, you will begin to relate everything to energy movement by focusing on your energy body and the energy bodies around you. I’ve talked about energy generally, albeit in great detail, and now I am going to get specific. You will be spending more time practicing your ability to be aware of the feeling of energy with an emphasis on focal complexity (which I’ll explain later).
Let’s call this week’s introduction: Chakras, Channels, and Areas of Influence.
Some of what you will read is different than traditional esoteric or yogic texts on energy, Prana, Chi, life-force, etc. My languaging will relate to what you have already learned, are familiar with, and, more importantly, to my personal experience. This isn’t theory or conjecture, it is knowledge and intelligence gained from actual events.
The purpose is to expand your experience of energy and give you a framework for future experiences that might currently be inconceivable. As you understand the foundational principles of energy and how they apply to your life, it will be easier to connect to them and then use them in ways that may now seem impossible.
Soften your mind, open your heart, engage your Hara, radiate your Essence, and continue the journey.
Monday’s Focus
Try doing the CPCA movement during different activities or in different positions. Do it standing in line at the supermarket, while watching Netflix, listening to your neighbor gossip about another neighbor, doing dishes, while jogging, or surfing social media. Get comfortable with the kriya as you explore the possibilities.
Monday’s Concepts
You eat an apple, bite by bite. You chew it up, mix it with saliva and swallow. Each of your digestive organs breaks the apple down more and absorbs the energy of the fruit. Once absorbed, the sugars from the apple are further broken down and then sent to the cells through the bloodstream. An apple is energy. The major input for the apple is your digestive system. Oxygen is energy with the major input being your respiratory system.
The apple and oxygen are general energies that we convert to specific tasks through absorption and distribution. At each level, there is a sub-level with greater specificity. The oxygen and apple will convert to components that will allow very specific bodily processes. The apple and oxygen will fuel your thoughts and emotions as well.
The energy around you is general. At each level and sub-level, the energy you absorb will gain specificity. Energy will flow into your body where it will enervate organs, limbs, tissues, and cells. At the cellular level, energy will flow into each of the parts of the cell. You ingest and expend energy hierarchically. Energy comes into your body through major energy inputs and minor energy inputs, each of which will have cascading levels of, you guessed it, specificity. The energy you ingest also fuels your thoughts, emotions, and your ability to interact with your environment. It does this with similarly increasing amounts of specificity.
In your energy body, the major inputs align with your major nerve plexuses (junctions). I will use the common term Chakra which means wheel or disk in Sanskrit. चक्र (Chakra in Sanskrit) Each of the seven major chakras connects into a central cylindrical channel commonly called the Sushumna or Central Power Channel that lies just in front of your spinal column and originates at the tip of your coccyx and terminates at the center of your brain.
My experience of the Chakras is less like a wheel and much more like a whirlwind, tornado, or cyclone with the tip connecting directly into the Sushumna. All chakras have a front aspect and a rear aspect. Healthy chakras spin in a clockwise direction (picture yourself wearing an analog clock, the second-hand sweeps clockwise).
The chakra is nothing more than an energy structure that holds energy.
Tuesday’s Focus
Read Tuesday’s Concepts and touch the chakra point for each corresponding body part with the index finger of both hands as you do the CPCA movement. Do several breaths in each chakra location.
Tuesday’s Concepts
All your major energy inputs connect into your Central Power Channel, Sushumna. The first major energy center (from the ground up), Muladhara, or root chakra projects downward through the perineum. The second, Svadhisthana, or low belly chakra projects out the front and back of the body on a line roughly equal to the tip of your coccyx. The third, Manipura, or solar plexus chakra, projects out the front and back on a horizontal line just below your sternum. The fourth, Anahata, or heart chakra is in line with about the center of your sternum. The fifth, Vishuddha, or throat chakra is in line with a point an inch or so above the top of your sternum. The sixth, Ajna, or Third Eye chakra is between the brows with the rear aspect in a line out the back of the head. The seventh, Sahasrara, or crown chakra, points up vertically from the center of the head.
Don’t feel like you must memorize the names or locations. You will be learning more about them in the weeks to come.
Each of the major chakras taps into the Central Power Channel or Sushumna like funnels draining into a pipe. The Sushumna distributes the energy throughout the physical body and other bodies.
The Sushumna also has the ability to convert specific energies into general energies and vice versa. It is a melting pot and the alchemist. You can thank your Sushumna when your energy transitions from fighting with your partner to yay!, make-up sex, When you take the stress of the day and burn it off in the gym, thank your Central Power Channel. When you sit down and allow yourself some time to be creative, your Sushumna fuels the birth of ideas.
Wednesday’s Focus
Put two index fingers near each of your major organs for several breaths while doing the CPCA movement. Heart, lungs, liver, stomach, small intestine, large intestine, lungs, brain, eyes, ears, throat, mouth, skin, and sexual organ.
Wednesday’s Concepts
Beyond the major chakras are minor chakras. Minor chakras will absorb energy specifically. Beyond the minor chakras, there are chakras with increasing specificity. Your emotional body chakra brings in energy to help fuel your emotions. Each organ has a chakra, as well as each cell. Every thought, emotion, and interaction will have a chakra.
Each body (physical, mental, emotional, energetic, and environmental) has its own set of chakras that coexist and interpenetrate each other. Each component (focus, speed, flexibility, stability, strength, endurance, and rejuvenation) has a corresponding set of chakras.
The levels and sublevels of energy that the chakras represent give specificity to the energy. With increased specificity, possibility narrows. If you are a long-distance runner, that apple you ate and the oxygen you absorb will have a much higher likelihood of being used to fuel your running. If you eat the apple while running, that likelihood increases.
If you like someone, you configure your energy to confirm that belief. You give specific beliefs preference. Every belief you have has its own chakra. When you see someone you adore, the chakras that metabolize affection will have preference. You will allow more energy to enter your system through those chakras.
Thursday’s Focus
Begin to feel energy as influence. Check in with each of your bodies and feel for the relative influence each of them is having on your state of being. Feel other’s energy as influence.
Thursday’s Concepts
Energy has an energy field and every chakra has its own field. In the parlance of Esoterics, it is commonly referred to as an Aura. In my experience, the Aura is an area or sphere of influence. Chakras have auras, you have auras, each of your bodies and components have an aura. Your community has an aura. Trees, Skittles, and cartoons all have auras. Auras are influencing fields that move, pulse, expand, and contract.
Auras interact. You might like or dislike Skittles. The energy of Skittles might influence you one way or another … or might not influence you one way or another.
Stephen King’s writing has an aura. The color beige and a whale’s dorsal fin have auras. There is an aura to your memory of your last relationship. Words have auras.
Auras are spheres of influence. Picture the steam coming off a pot of boiling water. The steam influences the air around it directly and proximally. The closer you are to the source, the more influence it will have. The steam from a boiling pot changes the humidity in the room. If you are in the room, you may or may not feel its influence depending on your proximity to the pot and your level of awareness. If you get close enough, say waving your hand through the steam a couple of feet (2/3 of a meter) above the pot, you will almost assuredly feel the steam. If you place your hand just above the pot for more than an instant, you will get burned. (Don’t try this last part at home.)
Auras influence like the steam influences. If Aura is the steam, chakras might be the pot and the heat source in the above example. Chakras enliven with specificity. The bigger the chakra, the more general its influence. The smaller the chakra, the more specific. The flame heats the pot and to some lessening degree the area around the pot. Your liver chakra enlivens your liver and to a lesser degree the blood and bile going through your liver. Your liver chakra will have a negligible influence on your kneecap or elbow.
When you start to feel emotional, the energy goes from general to specific. Your emotional body chakra and your emotional body aura are energized and you start to search for meaning, labels, direction, and threat. You configure your emotional energy into something more specific. As you do, the configuration of your emotional body changes. If you are feeling generally emotional and then you determine that the emotional feeling is anxiety, you configure yourself as anxious. How you are influenced by that configuration changes. You shift your aura from generally emotional to specifically anxious. An emotional person will have a different influence on the environment that an anxious person. Generally, emotional will have a different influence that specifically anxious on all your other bodies too. It will influence your thoughts and subsequent emotions. If will change your physical and environmental postures.
Friday’s Focus
Do a Current180 and then do the CPCA movement for ten minutes. Feel for the difference in the energy in and around you before and after. Get specific. Where do you feel change and what does the change feel like?
Friday’s Concepts
You have a central power channel or Sushumna that collects and distributes energy from the major chakras. There are also interpenetrating layers of auras that allow your energy to influence and be influenced by other auras.
What you will be exploring is how to bring awareness and intentionality to each of the influencing factors. You will start with the Sushumna and work toward more subtle aspects.
The movement this week highlights your ability to feel energy moving up and down your Central Power Channel, just in front of your spine.
As you bring energy into your body through your chakras, it enlivens you. The more enlivened you are, the more potential you have … and the more potential influence. The more potential influence you have, the large your aura. As you direct your energy to do or be certain things, the corresponding aura and your influence will grow.
When you expand your influence, you are expanding your aura. When you expand your emotional body, your emotional aura expands. It may or may not include your mental body’s aura. If you get emotional without an increase in mental awareness, your auras will not be the same size. You will have more emotional influence than mental influence. If you get physically expressive when you are emotional, your physical aura will expand. If you shut down physically when emotional, your physical aura will contract.
Imbalanced auras will accompany imbalanced chakras, bodies, components, and configurations. (More on this later.)
Saturday’s Focus
Use your ability to be empathetic to discern the movements and influences of the energies around you. How do those influences change as you get closer or farther away. Look for simple things. How does it feel to be standing right next to the flower section at Trader Joe’s and how does it feel when you are in the parking lot or 10 miles away? How does the proximity change the influence potential?
Saturday’s Concepts
Empathy is the ability to feel the energy of the auras and chakras around you. To the degree that you are aware of the influencing energies, you are empathetic.
Self-empathy is your ability to discern the movements and influences of your auras and chakras. Your ability to feel energies arising, moving, compounding, degrading, and stagnating will tell you what configuration is present and its path. Once you can recognize the configurations, patterns, and trajectories, you can begin to consciously direct them.
Once you can direct your own, you can create a greater influence on your environment. Influence is a direct result of the balanced, fluid, and targeted energy of the chakras and auras. More energy, more influence. More beneficial energy, more beneficial influence.
This is where Essence and Hara come in. You absorb and ingest energy. What you do with it is a choice. You will use your Hara and Essence to direct the energies of your chakras and auras to influence the world around you in the most beneficial manner.
And that is how you will change the world from the inside out.
C•P•C•A – Central Power Channel Awareness
Step 1 – Find some time in a place that is quiet and with a low level of distraction.
Step 2 – Sit and adjust your posture so that your ears are over your shoulder and your shoulders over your hips. Find an erect and stable posture.
Step 3 – Take a couple of deep breaths and allow yourself to settle and soften.
Step 4 – Rest at the bottom of the breath and allow the energy to collect.
Step 5 – As you inhale, feel for the collected energy rising along your central power channel.
Step 6 – Allow it to rise a foot above your head as you reach the top of the breath.
Step 7 – Pause and follow the energy down as you exhale, reaching just below your perinium at the bottom of the exhale.
Step 8 – Rest at the bottom of the breath and allow the energy to collect.
Step 9 – Repeat steps 5-8 for as much time as you have.
Why it Matters – The ability to feel energy moving at your core will help you feel energy moving in your extremities and then in the world and people around you. This is a foundational practice that we will build on.
Everyday Usability – This is a great meditation to consolidate your energy. It will help you feel less stressed, overwhelmed, and frenetic. It is also very balancing. It will serve as a reset button to align and rebalance your chakras, auras, bodies, components, and configurations. It will literally pull you back into balance.
Progression – Next week, you will begin exploring your ability to be aware of the energy moving in your major chakras.