Sunday’s Focus

Where does your energy go? See if you can feel how your energy shifts and where it shifts from and to. Do a Current150 and then spend some time remembering a pivotal moment in your life. Track how your sensations and energy changed from before remembering and after.

Sunday’s Concepts

When you allow your energy body to expand fluidly, you prime the other bodies for growth and adaptation. Energetic expansion encourages beneficial mental, emotional, physical, and environmental development.

When all of your bodies are vibrant and in sync, a fluid fusion happens. The bodies begin to collaborate and cooperate. They get more conscious, less reactive, and more responsive. They work together to identify and playfully seize previously unrecognized opportunities.

The energy in all your bodies will react, respond, configure and reconfigure to the value your conscious and subconscious mind places on current stimuli, potential, and opportunity.

We talked a little last week about where your energy goes, let’s explore that a bit more. Your bodies expand, contract, project, radiate, pull, push, distance, and are drawn toward stimuli.

Physiologically, your physical body shifts resources to maintain homeostasis. If you get cold, you shiver. If your hands get cold, the blood vessels in your arm dilate (expand) to allow (project) more warm blood to flow toward your fingers. If that isn’t sufficient to warm your hands, your entire body will want to move. Refer to previous homeostasis overview in Layer One, Week Four – Saturday.

Shivering happens when muscles twitch (micro-contraction). The twitching generates heat which radiates out toward the skin. If you get sufficiently cold, your body forsakes your extremities and contracts the blood vessels in your extremities to protect the vital organs in your core and your brain.

If you are cold, your body will be drawn toward heat sources. If you are hot, your body will want to distance itself from those same heat sources.

If your skin is dry, it will absorb (pull) moisture from your environment. If you are over-hydrated, your kidneys will draw fluid out of your body and push it into your bladder for disposal.

Monday’s Focus

Do a Current150 right when you wake up in the morning. Do another after you have completed your morning rituals. Feel for the changes in sensation. Where do your tension levels rise and in what bodies?

Monday’s Concepts

Your physical body reacts and responds to every stimulus and so do all of your other bodies. They expand, contract, project, radiate, pull, push, distance, and are drawn toward changes in energy or sources of energy.  And like the physical body, most of your movements are subconscious and habitual.

Some reconfigurations cause energy to collect and accumulate. Tension headaches happen because more mental energy collects than your head and neck can metabolize. Your subconscious mind has decided that you need more energy in your head, so, it shunts energy there. Since there isn’t an outlet for it, it compresses and overwhelms the tissues. That compressed energy triggers a reaction in the tissues and they contract in fear, creating tension. As the statically contracted tissues fatigue and cramp, they protest with pain signals. Your emotional body creates a label for the pain, tension headache and begins to siphon off energy from your other bodies to justify the labels.

When your subconscious mind decided to increase the energy of your mental body, it reduced the amount of emotional energy you have available. Your emotional body reacts to the pull it feels by pulling back. Tension headaches increase emotional reactivity. You get triggered more quickly when you have a tension headache than when you don’t.

When you get nervous, emotional energy pools around your stomach, but your physical body lowers the amount of blood it sends to your stomach as it prioritizes energizing your extremities to meet whatever threat it perceives. Lower physical energy and much higher emotional energy in the stomach lead to an imbalance and overwhelm. Overwhelmed and triggered stomach tissues react with muscle spasms and erratic changes in the levels of acid and enzymes … which brings about nausea.

Tuesday’s Focus

Do a Current150 on the drive from one place to another (commute to work, appointment with dentist, drive to trailhead, etc.). Do another after arriving. Feel for changes in sensation in your physical and energetic bodies. Look for anomalies, things you wouldn’t have expected.

Tuesday’s Concepts

Less dramatic energy reconfigurations happen every time something changes. Your energy moves (reconfigures) to meet the demand, threat, or opportunity. Your bodies move energy according to their individual hierarchical systems (what is most important to them followed by what is second most important).

The value your bodies place on any given situation or stimuli is rarely the same. Your physical and emotional bodies are going to value hunger differently than your mental and environmental bodies.

Conversations with coworkers will be prioritized much higher by your mental and environmental bodies than by your physical and emotional bodies.

Memories are of significant value to your mental, emotional, and environmental bodies. Your physical and energetic bodies have no current value for memories.

Imbalances happen because the subconscious values your bodies place on things is different.

When was the last time someone asked you to do something beyond your normal? Let’s say your employer or client asked you to work an extra three hours after a full day. How did your bodies react and respond to that request? How did their response and reaction change from the beginning of the first hour to the end of the third hour?

The following things could have happened which would lead to a growing imbalance in your system. Physically, you were probably some degree of fatigued after a full day. As the three hours went by, you would be more fatigued. As your fatigue level surpassed your normal and familiar level of fatigue, your physical body would start to react as if it were threatened. It would signal its discomfort. Your emotional body would interpret those physical signals as non-beneficial and create a label.

Depending on your level of fatigue and your habits, that label might be tired, overworked, being taken advantage of, spaced out, mad, sad, or even things like loved, appreciated, or needed. Your mental body would take the label and compare it to previous experiences and then project future consequences of that label and send the projections back to your emotional body. If they are greater than the original label, your emotional body increases its threat assessment and confirms the label of your mental projection.

Then, your mental and emotional bodies collude by sending that increased threat assessment to your physical body. It reacts by getting increasingly defensive. Your physical body’s tension increases. You get stressed, not because you are stressed but because your mind and emotions have conspired to convince your physical body that it is under attack. You feel more tired because your bodies have prioritized the sensations of fatigue above every other sensation.

And that elevated tension would probably lead to a tension headache. And and here is the rub, the non-typical fatigue that triggered all of this might not have been anything to worry about. It probably wasn’t a threat. You were tired but it wasn’t debilitating.

Wednesday’s Focus

Yes, another Current150. This time, toward the end of your day at work and another on your drive home. Feel for the transition in sensation. Does your physical body relax and if so, how quickly? Do your mental and emotional bodies unwind or wind up?

Wednesday’s Concepts

When you are startled, your energy reacts by moving in the direction of the stimuli. Fight, flight, or freeze are directional. Fight and flight indicate the overall movement of energy toward or away from the threat. The freeze response is a collapsing of energy into itself (contraction and compression).

Overall movements of energy, as in a fear response, only tell part of the story. When triggered, your bodies can respond by distancing themselves from your other bodies. Out of your mind with worry is a real thing. Your emotional body completely disconnects from your mental body. One body is on one trajectory and the other on a different one. And both might disconnect from your physical body.

Being beside yourself with worry happens when your energy body splits. One part of your energy stays connected to your environmental, emotional, and mental worry. The other part stays with your physical body because your physical body doesn’t sense any actual, current, or present threat since worry is a projection.

When you space out, it is your mental body disconnecting from your other bodies.

When you are emotionally distraught, your emotional body isolates itself from your other bodies. That isolation pulls your other bodies out of balance. They strain and contort to meet the emotional demand.

Pain can drive you mad. The physical imbalance that results from pain can pull mental, emotional, and environmental energy out of balance. Your other bodies react to physical pain by shifting an overwhelming percentage of their energy to the site of the physical discomfort. You can’t think straight because your mental energy is no longer in your brain. You can’t be intimate, cooperative, or collaborative when in pain because all of your relational energy is focused on the physical pain.

Understanding and being able to feel energy configuration variables will help you predict where things are heading and understand more fully where they’ve come from. It will also help you connect with things easier.

An analogy would be jumping into the back of a moving pickup truck. If you see the truck coming, can gauge its speed, and predict its trajectory, your jump will have the greatest chance of success. If you know you want to be in a pickup truck far enough in advance, you can get into the cab before it begins to move. That same sequence will work in relationship, business, family, or career. (Note to self: find a better analogy that doesn’t involve the stupidity of jumping into the back of a moving pick-up truck)

Understanding the factors in energy configuration and reconfiguration will help you feel changes on multiple levels in multiple bodies. Nothing is black and white. Everything changes. Magic and shit both happen, usually simultaneously. When you are aware of the mystic and the scat and find opportunities in both, you will gain fluidity and effortlessness.

Thursday’s Focus

A couple of more Current150s. Today, do a before and after assessment when you are going to communicate or collaborate with someone that typically has an influence on your mood or energy. What sensations arise, shut down, or change? How do your bodies transition? If you have a change in mood, what does that feel like?

Thursday’s Concepts

The sensing mechanisms of each body seek and evaluate or detect and react. Seeking only happens when there isn’t a current threat being addressed. If your system is always in threat detection, there is rarely any time or energy for you to assess opportunities.

Your subconscious mind reacts to mitigate fear. The bigger the fear, the more value it gives. Your conscious mind evaluates your environment looking for opportunity. The bigger the opportunity, the higher the value. Value doesn’t inherently exist, it is assigned by your minds. The energy in all your bodies searches for and then reacts or responds to the value your conscious and subconscious mind places by reconfiguring your energy.

If you are hungry, food will have more value to each of your bodies. If you just ate, it will have less.

A pending conversation with your boss can have very different values. If you place a negative value on it (fear of termination), your bodies will react by assuming defensive postures. If you place a positive value (projected raise, bonus, and promotion), your bodies will respond by expanding and increasing your energy flows.

The boss’s energy flow will react to your energy configurations. Your fear or your enthusiasm will influence the boss’s energy, either in a response or reaction. If you come in thinking you are getting a raise and the boss is going to lower the boom, his or her energy will be in conflict and will react. If you are both on the same page, the boss’s energy will relax … unless he or she is afraid the raise isn’t going to meet your expectations.

Value is assigned hierarchically in three tiers. The first tier is threat, second is familiarity, and the third is benefit. Your mind, especially your subconscious mind, values what is beneficial last. Think about hunger and satiation. Can you feel the different value you give to each? You are programmed to value hunger more strongly than being full. Some of it is physiological but most is mental and emotional.

Your mental body detects threats by comparing the internal and external stimuli of the moment to historical and projected data. You see, feel, smell, taste, hear, or sense something and your mind starts associating it with your database of knowledge and experience … and projections. The projections (story creation of possible future events) takes up the majority of subconscious mind’s energy.

Your emotional body detects threats by compounding sensations into a matrix (label) that it compares with your existing list of bad or negative emotions. When it finds a match, it uses the majority of its energy to completely fully reconfigure itself to the chosen label and then tries to convince your other bodies to follow suit.

If you are out hiking and your legs begin to tire at the same time as your stomach feels empty, your emotional body might create the label hungry and tired and signal your subconscious mind to begin creating mental configurations that align with being tired and hungry. Your physical and energetic bodies will respond to those mental and emotional configurations by increasing the energy of your digestive system and prioritizing fatigue in your legs.

Your physical body is the least reactive. It spends the majority of its energy in movement and the processing of energy for fuel. When it reacts, it shifts its energy to address the perceived threat. When you sprint, you stop digesting food. When you eat, your body pulls blood from your extremities.

Your environmental body is in near constant threat assessment. It tries to pull energy from your mental and emotional bodies by prioritizing external stimuli over internal. When you worry more about what others think than what you think, it is a subversion by your environmental body. (Much more on this next week)

Your energy body is the most reactive. It reacts every time any of the bodies reconfigures. Every reconfiguration is assessed as a possible threat. The main reason it is so hard to stay balanced is because your energy body is so reactive. Meditation soothes the energy body. It gives it some down time, settles it, and allows it to rejuvenate. Meditation soothes because it greatly reduces the number of changes taking place.

Friday’s Focus

Do a Current150 before and after doing the Balancing Your Bodies Kriya. Identify your imbalances and then track the effectiveness of the Kriya. Where did the Kriya succeed in balancing your bodies and where did it fall short?

Friday’s Concepts

When your bodies aren’t in threat assessment, the second tier, familiarity, comes into play. Familiarity is when each body decides whether or not it is in a familiar range and a safe configuration (comfort zone). Your bodies evaluate how close they are to the edge and what they can do to return to the middle of their respective ranges.

Mentally, your subconscious mind looks for the degree to which your thoughts, emotions, and physical expenditures are in line with your limiting beliefs and patterns. Put simply, if your subconscious mind doesn’t detect a threat, it then looks to see if you are in your comfort zone. If not, it starts thinking of what distractions, diffusions, and dysfunctions it can provoke to get you back to what it feels like is an acceptable range of vitality and presence.

If your emotional body doesn’t have sufficient stimuli to create bad or negative labels, it looks for familiar labels. It tries to decide how current stimuli conform to your historical labels. Your emotional body tries to get you to feel some way you have felt before and then act and feel in a way that is recognizable. This is what makes up the majority of your personality. Your emotional body either contorts you to some perceived threat or contorts you to some familiar configuration. Once you are emotionally contorted, your other bodies begin to align.

Physically, your body looks for comfort when it is not tensing in reaction to some mental or emotional impulse. Its priority becomes relaxation and rejuvenation. Tension in your physical body is a sign of poor communication with itself and the other bodies. Tension in your neck and shoulders, even though there isn’t an actual threat, is a sign that the “no current threat” signal isn’t getting through to those tissues.

Your environmental body looks for familiarity when no current threats are detected as a way to gauge and reduce future threat potential. If looks to confirm that all current relationships are in a recognizable and previously experienced configuration. Once confirmed, your environmental body tries to convince you to maintain those existing, known, and survivable patterns. It wants all of your relationships to remain the same, regardless of benefit or deficit.

When your energy body detects no threats, it looks to shape itself into familiar patterns. It looks for habits to default to. An analogy would be what you do with your hands when you are not using them. Do they rest at your sides, do you hold them across your chest, or clasped behind your back? Your energy does something similar, it configures itself into its resting position (energetic personality). Again, without regard to benefit or efficiency, it chooses habitual and familiar. If your habitual resting energetic position is frenetic, that is where it goes. If it is completely unbalanced toward the top of your body, that is what it reverts to.

The comfort zones of each of your bodies may or may not be healthy, efficient, and productive. They may or may not be playful, happy, or fulfilling. But they will always be familiar.

Saturday’s Focus

Do a Current150 before Balancing Your Bodies Kriya. Track and encourage the transitions from imbalance to balance in each of your bodies.

Saturday’s Concepts

When your bodies aren’t being threatened and are firmly entrenched in their familiar zone, then and only then will they start looking at the third tier, benefit. When you feel safe and comfortable, your bodies start looking for opportunities.

After your mental body relaxes into its comfort zone it starts to expand. It expands because it isn’t spending a ton of energy dealing with threats or getting you back to your comfort zone. Since the energy it is creating has no place to go, it starts looking for places, opportunities, to use it, to expand into. Creativity happens from this place. Deep understandings happen when your mind seizes opportunities to grow beyond the familiar. Intimacy is very opportunistic, you allow it when expanded and unthreatened.

Your emotional body expands beyond its familiar range when emotional energy builds without a habitual outlet. You get emotionally effervescent, passionate, and more intimate when you are without threat, in a familiar configuration, and not allowing any drama to drain you.

Your physical body expands into current opportunities when your rejuvenation leads to vibrant and vivacious vitality. You get recharged and then you want to charge forward. One of the challenges of recurring tension is that the constant drain on your system doesn’t allow you to feel physically enthusiastic.

Your environmental or relational body follows a similar path as your physical body. When it isn’t being drained by possible threats or conforming to familiar patterns, it starts looking for ways to spend some of its burgeoning energy on expansion. It starts looking to increase its influence by the cooperative comingling of collaborative connections. It tries to increase its intimacy and energy flow with the things and people around it. It wants to blend and multiple.

When your energy body isn’t overwhelmed with the monumental task of shuffling energy between each of the threats that every body senses, it relaxes as the other bodies hang out in their respective comfort zones. It begins to collect, balance, center, and then expand in every direction. Passive energetic expansion is spherical. Spherical expansion is fluid, without resistance or demand.

When you can get to the place where you allow your energy body to expand fluidly, you prime the other bodies for growth and adaptation. Energetic expansion encourages beneficial mental, emotional, physical, and environmental development.

When all of your bodies are vibrant and in sync, a fluid fusion happens. The bodies begin to collaborate and cooperate. They get more conscious, less reactive, and more responsive. They work together to identify and playfully seize opportunity.

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.