Layer Eight, Week Four – Sunday
- Read Week Four Concepts
- Watch video and read descriptions for Balancing Your Bodies and Releasing Resistance
- Do Movements – Balancing Your Bodies and Releasing Resistance
Sunday’s Focus
Watch the linked Fractal video for at least 5 minutes with the accompanying soundtrack and feel for changes in your mental body. What thoughts, memories, labels, or judgments do the changing images and music bring up?
Sunday’s Concepts
Let’s talk a bit about your energy body and how it influences and is influenced by your emotions and the environment (people and things around you). As you begin to understand and feel energy and its configurations, you will be able to read your energy, predict its progression, and adjust the energy in each of your bodies so that they support your intentions and trajectories while lowering your stress, overwhelm, and resistance.
Your energetic, emotional, and environmental bodies are in a constant state of flux. They group, regroup, and ungroup into and from electromagnetic fields of varying sizes, trajectories, and fluid compositions or expressions.
Fractal progressions are a good simulation. As you watch the linked video imagine the colors and shapes as energy, emotions, and thoughts. Your bodies take the current stimuli and configure or contort them into patterns that your conscious and subconscious mind can identify as familiar. It is almost impossible to watch without recognizing colors and shapes. Try it!
Energy movements follow similar reconfigurations as the fractal patterns. Consider the last time you saw, felt, smelled, heard, or tasted something that you had absolutely no context for. When you encounter something, you compare it to something else or some combination of remembered things. People remind us of other people, places of other places and experiences are compared to previous or imagined experiences.
Like fractals, sometimes the energy reconfigurations are abrupt and, at other times, the changes gently fold and swirl into something different.
Layer Eight, Week Four – Monday
- Read Monday Concepts
- Do Movements – Balancing Your Bodies and Releasing Resistance
Monday’s Focus
Mute the accompanying soundtrack and watch the video with a favorite upbeat song playing in the background. What comes up? How are your memories, labels, or judgments different?
Monday’s Concepts
Here is an example I have used before, you are driving along the highway, traffic begins to back up and someone pulls their car into your lane right in front of you … at a safe distance, but closer than you are comfortable with.
Your discomfort is triggered by the change in stimuli. The vision you have of the road ahead of you has changed. An object has changed its position. Your mental body signals mental discomfort as it qualifies and quantifies the changed degree of threat.
Your emotional body checks your memory database and looks for something similar. If you typically turn into Psycho Road Rage Ranger, your emotional body will configure to intense anger. Emotional anger is usually held high up in your body and some distance in front of you. The emotion of anger is then conveyed to your other bodies (instantly and simultaneously).
Your physical body reacts with some degree of physiological changes from full adrenalin dump down to increased tension in your core, neck, hands, arms, shoulders, and face.
Your mental body determines your level of anger and starts creating scenarios from mild to apocalyptic.
Your energetic body goes to full alert and shifts your energy forward to meet the threat. (Lots more of where energy pools next week)
Your environmental body reconfigures from neutral to under attack and shifts even more energy forward as it increases its defenses and prepares for the perceived threat and pending attack.
Layer Eight, Week Four – Tuesday
- Read Tuesday Concepts
- Do Movements – Balancing Your Bodies and Releasing Resistance
Tuesday’s Focus
Mute the accompanying soundtrack and watch several minutes of the video with a least favorite song playing in the background. How do your memories, labels, or judgments reconfigure differently? Replay the song if necessary.
Tuesday’s Concepts
Now let’s take that same scenario and change a couple of things. What if the space was greater between you and the merging car, say 500 yards/meters? What if the merging car was being driven by your daughter or grandmother? I’m guessing your fractals wouldn’t get in quite the same bunch.
If the merging car is far enough in front of you, it is out of your trigger zone. Your trigger zones will be determined by the value and proximity you assign to any given energy configuration. Every situation will have a trigger zone. Your trigger zones are fluid and will be influenced by other trigger zones, triggers, changing stimuli, and your current configurations.
A merging car, 500 yards in front of you, probably wouldn’t evoke much change in your configurations. The distance would be out of your trigger zone. You would probably place little value in what goes on in the roadway that far in front of you.
Give some consideration to your trigger zones when you drive. What is your general threat level? How defensive are you? How offensive? What evokes a reaction? What are your personal pet peeves presently? What is your degree of static tension in each of your bodies as you drive? What types of people or vehicles increase your threat level? What situations are your typical trigger zones?
Layer Eight, Week Four – Wednesday
- Read Wednesday Concepts
- Do Movements – Balancing Your Bodies and Releasing Resistance
Wednesday’s Focus
Again, with the video … This time, watch the video with the soundtrack muted and play a song that you have a strong emotional connection to. Try to feel your emotional body reconfigure as the song plays (or as you are trying to decide on a song).
Wednesday’s Concepts
Your daughter or grandmother pulling in front of you would evoke different triggers than a stranger. Unless you are a complete ass, you probably wouldn’t get angry. You would be worried. You would have compassion and empathy. You would reconfigure yourself and your car to lower the threat level. You would slow down, create some distance, and start thinking about how you might give some lane changing advice.
Your emotional body will configure to worry and compassion. The energy of worry is held in your throat and midsection, empathy radiates out from your core. Those emotions are then conveyed to your other bodies (instantly and simultaneously).
Your physical body reacts with some degree of physiological changes from mild adrenalin dump down to increased tension in your neck, chest, and diaphragm.
Your mental body determines your level of worry and starts creating scenarios from mild to apocalyptic.
Your energetic body goes to full alert and shifts your energy lower to help ground the fear and enliven your Hara.
Your environmental body reconfigures from neutral to Hero and shifts (reconfigures) to bring in and convert more energy to help fuel your determination to rescue and protect.
Put yourself in this fictitious scenario and try to evoke your configurations and reconfigurations.
Layer Eight, Week Four – Thursday
- Read Thursday Concepts
- Do Movements – Balancing Your Bodies and Releasing Resistance
Thursday’s Focus
Search YouTube for videos of people failing, flailing, and falling in your favorite sport or recreational activity. I used this mountain bike crash compilation. Feel how quickly your physical body reconfigures. Record how many things in your physical body reacted and changed. (Feel free to stop the video when you have recognized your reactions and reconfigurations)
Thursday’s Concepts
One last example, let’s say you really like the car that cuts in front of you and/or there is an astonishingly attractive person driving it. How would you react? How would your bodies reconfigure themselves?
If you are not in a current relationship, your bodies might configure to increase your Eros (sexual desire) and expand your desire to connect. Your bodies would increase the amount of energy moving as a way to make yourself more attractive. You would project your energy toward the car, sit up straighter, smile, and configure yourself in the most seductive way you know how. Your energy would expand and reach toward the car in front of you. You would relax your defenses and increase your assertiveness. Some percentage of this will be conscious and the rest unconscious. You would parade your pompadour like a peacock’s posterior to project your preference to propagate.
If you are in an unhappy relationship, your configuration might have qualities of Eros, resentment, guilt, unhappiness and/or projections of an alternate reality (with the hottie in front of you instead of what is at home waiting for you). Your energy would be frenetic. It would be trying to configure to multiple different intentions. One aspect would be on the hunt for Hottie, another would be configured to guilt and recrimination. Another to whatever your memories dredged up. Your mind might try to create scenarios that confirm each of those configurations. Your physical body wouldn’t know what to do or how to do it. Your energy body would fracture into separate spheres of influence leaving you with a feeling of being scattered, anxious, and excited but certainly not centered, balanced, and optimal.
If you are actively involved in The Change Militia and in a happy, fulfilling, and playful relationship, you might practice your ability to be empathetic. You might expand your sensing mechanisms to read the energy configurations of the person in the car with the intention of understanding his or her fears and imbalances. You might set your empathetic energy configurations to radiate kindness, understanding, and acceptance which would leave you feeling centered, balanced, and optimal … and might have a similar effect on the occupant of the car in front of you as he or she entrains with your radiated energy.
Layer Eight, Week Four – Friday
- Read Friday Concepts
- Do Movements – Balancing Your Bodies and Releasing Resistance
Friday’s Focus
Sorry (insert shrug emoji here), but watch another crash video and focus on your mental and emotional bodies. What shifts in your mind and feelings when you watch? What are the components of your wince and cringe?
Friday’s Concepts
Over the last few days of content, you have read not only about how energy reconfigures but also to where it reconfigures. Let’s explore that a bit more.
Energy flows to where your attention goes.
Understanding how energy flows and where it collects when you configure and reconfigure will help you feel changes sooner. Initially, you might feel them after they happen, then as they happen, and then as they are about to happen. When you get to the place where you can predict changes in your or other’s configurations, you can consciously choose to encourage or discourage your transitions.
You will explore these much more in the weeks to come, but here are a few quick examples of energy configurations.
Let’s say you are having a conversation with your ten-year-old. If you feel your energy wanting to scatter and diffuse, you will be forewarned that you are about to move into distraction and lose your ability to be present. As a healthy, involved, and empathetic parent, you can choose to refocus your energy on what your offspring is saying.
If you feel your energy compressing and beginning to reach toward your child, it will be a sign that you are getting angry. Compressing and scattering will be a sign of frustration.
If you feel your energy pulling and shifting toward your back or behind you, it is a sign you are fearful and the degree of intimacy or connection is about to trigger a fear response that will lead to distancing and disconnection.
If you believe you are being loving but your energy is overwhelming your solar plexus, that will signal your loving has an element of judgment and restraint.
If you feel your energy actively pushing your child, you will know you are already triggered and trying to create distance.
If you feel your energy trying to pull your child, you will know you are trying to manipulate and mold your child into something that you will be more comfortable with. Pulling energy signals non-acceptance, intolerance, and disregard.
As you find yourself in energetically charged situations, see if you can discern where your energy is collecting or pooling. Feel for whether it is compressing, expanding, diffusing, or fragmenting. Feel for the direction it is moving and the level of resistance.
Layer Eight, Week Four – Saturday
- Read Saturday Concepts
- Do Movements – Balancing Your Bodies and Releasing Resistance
Saturday’s Focus
Watch enough of a crash video to feel how quickly you react and then watch a video of people excelling at your favorite recreational activity or sport (like this). How much quicker does your body to shift to wince and cringe versus engaged and excited?
Saturday’s Concepts
The energy in all your bodies will react and respond to the value your conscious and subconscious mind places on current potential and opportunity.
Your energy responds or reacts to the value you assign and your bodies reconfigure to confirm that assigned value. When you believe that you are threatened, all of your bodies react to that threat. When you believe that you are sad, your bodies reconfigure to confirm that label. When you feel happy, your mind and physical body reconfigure to confirm that feeling.
Feel for where and how you react. Energy pools in specific places for specific emotions, thought patterns, or pain signals. When you understand and can identify your configurations and reconfigurations, you can begin to direct them.
The bodies interact and inter-react. Subconscious inter-reaction creates patterns that lead to distraction, diffusion, and dysfunction. Conscious inter-reactions lead to success, fulfillment, playfulness, and fluid efficiency.
Next week, you will read about some of the other variables that influence your configurations, reconfigurations, reactions, responses, and inter-reactions.
Balancing Your Bodies
Step 1 – Spend a few minutes. Determine your relative vitality and optimization in each of your bodies.
Step 2 – Stand with one leg in front of the other, bring your hands together as if you were holding a ball, and begin to move your hands forward and back as you shift your weight from one foot to the other.
Step 3 – Allow yourself to soften as you move. As your physical body relaxes, allow your mental and emotional bodies to entrain with that relaxation.
Step 4 – Your goal is to soften to a place this is euphoric and expansive, without resistance.
Step 5 – Imagine the space between your hands is a ball of energy that holds your soul, that it is something of great value that you are moving forward and back.
Step 6 – Feel your energetic connection to the energy ball and then begin to feel and identify your physical connection.
Step 7 – Imagine that your mind is within the ball of energy. Entrain your mind with your physical motion. Set an intention to picture and feel your mind in the energy ball.
Step 8 – Next, put all of your emotions into the ball of energy. Feel your emotions entrain with your mind, physical, and energy body. Infuse the ball of energy with every emotion that you have and your entire emotional capability.
Step 9 – Bring the energy of everything around you, your environment, into the ball of energy. Add in the energy of all of your relationships.
Step 10 – Confirm that the ball of energy holds the energy of each of your bodies.
Step 11 – Feel the vitality of each body begin to grow within the ball of energy.
Step 12 – Each time your hands move forward or back, the ball of energy collects more energy.
Step 13 – Each body’s energy increases.
Step 14 – Continue to rock back and forth collecting energy until there is a feeling of vitalized fluid fusion where all of the bodies sync, connect, and resonate with each other.
Step 15 – If any of your bodies feel reluctant, give it a chance to entrain by increasing your empathy and understanding.
Step 16 – As you feel vitalized fluid fusion or as your available time expires, slow your movements and try to give yourself a few minutes to integrate your new configurations and the new balance points.
Why it Matters – Balanced is efficient, energized, and present. When you make a habit of being balanced, your subconscious mind will default to it. Your subconscious mind will begin to try to help you stay balanced because balanced will feel normal. Balanced will be stress and overwhelm free. Balance will provide you with your greatest level of capacity and capability.
Everyday Usability – If you do this daily, the time it takes to get balanced will decrease. What might take 30 minutes now will only take a couple of minutes after your systems adapt.
Progression – This can be done with any rhythmic, full-body movement. If you have something you are already doing, bring this sequence of intentions to it. As your bodies adapt, you will be able to use less-than-full-body movements to achieve the same result. Something as simple as moving your hand diagonally across your chest as you turn over your hand will be just as effective. (after your systems adapt!)
Releasing Resistance
Step 1 – Identify and clarify a specific resistance you want to release. Put your intention into a sentence. This will be your Sankalpa.
Step 2 - Find a comfortable seat and verify that your posture is aligned and vertical. Stack your shoulders over your hips, your ears over your shoulders, and gently tuck your chin. Allow yourself to settle and soften.
Step 3 – Take a couple of deep, slow breaths and physically relax on the exhale. As your physical body relaxes, allow your mental and emotional bodies to entrain with that softening.
Step 4 – Your goal is to soften to a place that is euphoric and expansive, without resistance.
Step 5 – If you can’t feel yourself soften, if you don’t feel expansive and euphoric, continue to practice settling and softening. Come back and continue with this Kriya only after you are able to find that euphoric, expansive, and softened space.
Step 6 – After softening, bring to mind a current resistance that is limiting you in your life.
Step 7 – Let your eyes close or softly focus on a spot in front of you.
Step 8 – Bring your attention and focus on your specific resistance and then be curious where that resistance lives in your body.
Step 9 – Begin feeling for the answer.
Step 10 – Resistance has a physical presence in your body as tension. The fear that is the cause of your resistance has an emotional and mental energy as well.
Step 11 – If you can feel where it lives in your body, great, if not, acknowledge and accept that it does exist.
Step 12 – From your Hara Point, a couple of inches below our navel and just in front of your spine, begin to sense the energy of your Hara.
Step 13 – As you connect to your Hara Point, repeat your Sankalpa to set an intention to release your stated resistance.
Step 14 – Acknowledge and accept that your resistance doesn’t serve you, that it is not beneficial.
Step 15 – Allow the energy of your Hara to expand. As it connects with the energy of your resistance, it will absorb it. Your Hara will absorb and metabolize the energy of your resistance (fear configuration) as it envelops it. Once metabolized, that configuration will cease to exist.
Step 16 – Gently contract the muscles in your low belly and perineum. As you breathe, direct the energy of your breath to your low belly. If it is helpful, imagine your Hara energy as a light that is getting brighter and expanding.
Step 17 – Breathe with your diaphragm. Don’t allow your ribs to expand or your shoulders to lift. Keep your focus on your low belly and Hara Point.
Step 18 – As the energy expands, you will feel it get denser. If you can’t feel it, assume it is happening. Continue to allow and encourage it to expand. Continue to breathe into your low belly.
Step 19 – Allow it to expand until it is bigger than your body. Repeat your Sankalpa two or three times.
Step 20 – Allow the possibility that this will work. Allow the possibility to become a probability. Allow the probability to become a certainty.
Why it Matters – Statically held resistance is the single greatest impediment you face. By addressing the root cause of that resistance, you will end its limiting influence.
Everyday Usability – Make this a daily practice. Keep a mental check list of the resistances your feel and begin to eliminate them.
Progression – Next week, you will see a video on how to use this meditation to manifest your aspirations by removing the obstacles, drag, and resistances that are in your path.