Sunday’s Focus

Catch yourself, as many times as possible throughout the day, and determine if you are looking for threats or opportunities.

Sunday’s Concepts

Each chakra will have a primary benefit and deficit potential. How those impact you, your environment, and your relationships is the next level in understanding your potential, communications, fears, relationships, and resistances. This week, your Ajna Chakra.

Common Name: Third Eye Chakra

Vedic Name: Ajna Chakra

Number: Six

Location: Between and just above the eyebrows, and in the center of the skull near the Pineal gland

Vortex – Forward and back, perpendicular to the center line of the skull

Primary Responsibility – Identifying and evaluating potential

Body: Energetic

Component: Focus

Healthy Configurations: Accumulating, Expansive, Fluid

Unhealthy Configurations: Accumulate

The sixth chakra, Ajna, is located just above the eyebrows in the center of the skull near the Pineal Gland. Its vortices (vortexes) point forward and back. It is the captain of your energetic ship, setting course and evaluating both potential future threats and non-obvious opportunities.

Commonly called The Third Eye, the sixth chakra is your energetic forecasting radar – your early warning system for incoming threats and budding benefits. It absorbs and evaluates environmental energies and determines their configuration trajectories. When left to the subconscious mind, your Ajna chakra will look for potential threats that could develop from the energetic ingredients present. Awareness and increased consciousness shift the Ajna toward discovering more beneficial options and discounting future fear projections. The sixth chakra communicates directly with the Energy Body. It takes the energy of your environment and absorbs it. After being absorbed, the energy is interpreted by the other bodies, minds, and components.

As you develop your relationship with your Ajna Chakra, it will shift from thoughts to feelings. Your interpretations of those feelings will develop gradually into understandings. My intuition comes as a feeling that I let build and blossom into something. I allow it to develop without demand or expectation. I don’t presume to know. I let it formulate and ferment until it coalesces into a realization. Sometimes, it takes a moment and other times it might take days.

Monday’s Focus

Continue with Sunday’s Focus. Get good at it.

Monday’s Concepts

A healthy third eye will help you connect the dots that lead to growth, success, fulfillment, and happiness. An unhealthy third eye will leave you hypersensitive, intolerant, and cynical. It might also find you overly valuing your intuition. More on this later.

Most growth potential arises in your sixth chakra because it is the identifier of opportunity. It can also be your biggest impediment to growth if you use it to confirm your existing and habitual fears. The Ajna Chakra is the doorway to self-realization, self-awareness, and self-development because it can allow you to disconnect from the past and the future and be present for what exists within you in the moment. More on this later, too.

 Your Third Eye chakra is unique in that it is can simultaneously focus on conscious awareness and funneling energy to your subconscious mind’s fear factory. It is a two-tasker. It is always on and focused intentionally on opportunities AND subconsciously tracking potential threats.

Why it matters: Simply put, creating a relationship with the workings of your sixth chakra will allow you to change your predisposition from threat assessment to opportunity appraisal. Bringing awareness to your Ajna chakra can fundamentally change your world view in every situation, interaction, and relationship.

Everyday Usability: Being able to feel your third eye working will confirm you are looking for better ways or a sign that you are fearful and being led by your subconscious mind. Not being able to feel it will be a sign that you are not present – actively distracted, disconnected in some way.

Progression: Your ability to discern the energies of your sixth chakra will start very proximal and expand farther and farther into your environment and the future. A fully-active Ajna Chakra will see a cascading of future events. Visionaries, people like Steven Jobs, have active and developed third eyes. They connect dots beyond what most people can imagine.

Tuesday’s Focus

When you catch yourself in threat assessment, search for overlooked opportunities.

Tuesday’s Concepts

The biggest challenge in maintaining a healthy sixth chakra is discerning the difference between threat assessment and opportunity. The mental body tends to take the threat assessment of the Third Eye and craft a story around it that might feel like opportunity. Opportunities presented by your subconscious mind will feel safe. They will be small and familiar. They will hide better ways and bigger benefits.

It is a challenge not to confuse intuition with fear projection. This is something I see more often than not is spiritual people confusing their visions with fictions based upon their habitual fears or limiting beliefs. They want to believe their Divine Downloads because the message is familiar, comfortable, and digestible. It coincides with their desires and demands. Their visions confirm their judgements and intolerances. The downloaded messages align with their fear in a way that doesn’t threaten or in a way that confirms their illusions and delusions.

Maggie reads ceiling tiles. She can look at them and hear a story. She is convinced they speak to her. What she hears is a confabulation, a work of semi-fiction created in her subconscious mind from the available facts, her fears, her belief system, and the demands she holds. Every story will mirror some inner fear or projection. She will hear what her subconscious mind wants her to hear. It will confirm what she already believes. Those beliefs will promote the objective of her subconscious mind. The message from the tiles will either comfort her back to a familiar place or the message will confirm the need to increase her fear energy. The opportunities presented by the tiles will marginalize current potential beneficial energies.

Think of some spiritual or religious person you know that downloads. How often are they completly confused, utterly confounded by the message? Probably never. Downloads are digestible because they align with habitual beliefs, configurations, and fears. Downloads collude with the subconscious mind to maintain current energy, expansion, and intimacy levels.

The meditation this week will help you feel the energy of your third eye. Healthy energy will flow into your Ajna and then down the Central Power Channel. Unhealthy or confabulations will be felt superficially, in the head, or outside the body.

I worked with a client who channeled a well-known deity. She truly believed he would speak through her. As we worked together and she got more balanced and centered, her ability to channel waned. As she allowed herself to increase her awareness and consciously connect with her third eye, the energy began to flow into her body instead of into story creation and confabulations. She came to accept that she had some really good ideas that she could claim for herself. Her presence changed. She went from being disconnected and seemingly out of phase to grounded, authentic, and intimate.

Wednesday’s Focus

Continue with Tuesday’s Focus. Get good at recognizing how the threat assessment pattern hides, shadows, or ignores underlying or more beneficial options.

Wednesday’s Concepts

You might not channel a God, historical figure, or recently-passed Korean pop-star but I would venture a guess that you channel your subconscious mind in some similar fashion

Your subconscious mind intrudes, interjects, and interrupts. It imposes, impinges, and insinuates. How often do you allow it? Most of us allow our subconscious mind to influence us a majority of the time in almost every situation, interaction, and relationship. By a majority, I mean over 99% of the time. By most of us, I mean everyone I have ever known.

Fear is the channeling of energy from your subconscious mind into your bodies.

We’ve talked before about the little voice in your head. It is fueled by your sixth chakra when your sixth chakra is in threat assessment. The only time you hear the voice is when your sixth chakra has been taken over by your subconscious mind. 

If the little voice in your head is speaking, it will be trying to convince you that there is a threat. If the little voice is trying to convince you that there is an opportunity, it is trying to limit your options and channel you toward something that it projects as safe or safer than other choices. I am not saying you don’t have intuition, some sort of sixth sense. I’m suggesting that your intuition will never speak to you. Intuition will be a feeling that upwells from your low-belly, slowly developing into an energy that will be equally felt in each of your bodies.

That little voice in your head speaks fear. Every. Single. Time.

Thursday’s Focus

As you master Wednesday’s Focus, feel for the pull to allow fear to dominate. Feel for the habitual nature of discernment. Where do your limiting beliefs support energy flow toward fear?

Thursday’s Concepts

I’m pretty sure I have a stress fracture in my right femur. I’ve felt it for a few weeks. I’ve known it all along. But the little voice in my head convinced me that I should keep running. The little voice went through a litany of other possibilities. It said it was overuse or from increasing my weekly mileage. It said the pain was a result of muscle tension and I should stretch more. It suggested I was weak and needed to strengthen opposing muscle groups. It suggested taking a day off and then getting back to it.

I listened to the prattle of the voice and kept running. It didn’t get better. My running went from 60 miles per week to 15. It hurt too much to run and my muscles would cramp and lock-up to the point where walking was a struggle, but the little voice persisted. It said run. It said pain, suffering, and death awaited if I didn’t.

The thought of not running scares me. Physically, I fear the loss of fitness. Emotionally, I fear the loss of desire to continue to run long distances. Mentally, I fear the loss of self. I have come to see myself as a runner. Not being a runner is an unknown. Energetically, I fear I will get frenetic, overwhelmed, and/or lethargic if I don’t run. Environmentally, I fear rejection. I am afraid I will be scorned and shunned if I am not super fit. I love the ultrarunning community and fear being ostracized for not running big miles every week. Fear kept me running.

After a couple weeks, my conscious mind kicked in and started looking for causes and solutions. I allowed myself to consider uncomfortable possibilities, scary scenarios. I felt into the pain and tried to associate it with my body of knowledge about muscles, fascia, tendons, and ligaments. I looked for muscular imbalances and deconstructed the cause and effects of the pain I was experiencing. Eventually, a stress fracture was the only thing that met every symptom.

My first solution was to replace trailrunning with mountain biking. I swapped hour-for-hour. Twenty hours a week running became twenty hours of cycling. But the pain persisted.

A solution my subconscious mind doesn’t want me to see is rest. It labels rest as death. It offers alternatives that it judges as easier to swallow, more comfortable, or safer. But the alternatives to rest are not healthier. The possibility exists that if I keep running or aggressively cycling, the femoral head could break … requiring surgery and a year of rehab.

Active rest for 6-8 weeks is the healthiest option. Improved diet, electrical stimulation, and some dietary supplements are also on the list.

Do you understand the role my Ajna Chakra played in this? Initially, it ignored a valid threat because there was a fear that it valued more. It was out of balance, I was out of balance, and me health suffered. My Third Eye took the current conditions and created a future scenario that precluded any extended rest periods. Then, it offered up other solutions that didn’t require rest.

Eventually, I allowed my conscious mind to get involved and find opportunities for a long-term solution. As I did, my sixth chakra started looking for future benefit potentials. I started looking for long-term solutions … most of which felt uncomfortable, unsafe, and unfulfilling. As I did, my Ajna Chakra rebalanced, each of my bodies got more centered, aligned, and balanced, … and my health started to improve.

Friday’s Focus

As you identify your fear habits, places where you habitually see energies as threats, focus on the sensations of your third eye. Learn to feel what fear feels like in your sixth chakra.

Friday’s Concepts

The shift from conscious control to subconscious will be tough to discern. Your fears seem real. Your Ajna Chakra might be the toughest to discern when the conscious mind takes and gives control from the subconscious mind … and vice versa.

The third eye was the chakra most challenging for me to experience fully. Even now, twenty-some years later, it takes a bit of time to calibrate, recalibrate, and fine-tune. The meditation this week will challenge you. Initially, your discernment will be lacking. If it feels easy, you are nowhere close. It will come in glimpses, even flashes, and then as you practice, the connection will be seconds, not minutes.

Component: Focus

The primary component of your Ajna is Focus. Which makes sense. It focuses on the energy configurations in your internal and external environments. The Vedic symbol, Yantra or Mandala, for the Ajna Chakra, typically shows an Om symbol inside a triangle inside a circle with two lotus petals on either side. The two opposite-facing lotus petals represent the polarity of conscious and subconscious, threat and benefit. The petals are facing left and right. You are in threat assessment and opportunity assessment. The sixth chakra focuses dually, one and the other.

Joey is a third-grader, new to the school. It is his first day on the playground. As he walks out of the classroom, he assesses the threats and opportunities. The first thing he does is look for threats. If there isn’t a group of surly fifth-graders waiting to rob him of his lunch money, he looks for an opportunity that feels familiar. At his old school, he was the gold medalist in the second-grade Tetherball Olympics, so he joyfully swings in that direction. He will stay primarily in opportunity mode until his energy body detects a change that his subconscious mind believes to be a proximal threat. If the bullies start to be a problem, he will shift some of his energy from opportunity to threat assessment and look for a solution.

Joey’s dad is a professional white-water kayaker. While Joey is scoping the playground, his dad is in Peru attempting to kayak a previously unridden section of a high mountain river. He has fine-tuned his ability to maintain the focus of his Ajna Chakra in threat and opportunity. He has to. As he plummets down rapids and waterfalls, around boulders, and overhanging trees, he has to find a path that offers success and the largest degree of safety.

Joey’s dad controls his fear by keeping his third-eye energy flowing to his conscious mind.

Saturday’s Focus

As you find yourself in opportunity mode, feel the energy in your Ajna Chakra. Get to know the sensations that accompany fearlessly searching for benefit. Contrast that feeling with the feeling from Friday’s Focus.

Saturday’s Concepts

Joey and his dad have active and healthy Third-Eyes. They concurrently track threats while seeking opportunities for fun, fulfillment, and success. Joey is able to be aware of potential bully-imposed fasting threats while still looking to queue up on the tetherball court. His dad uses his sixth chakra to analyze his movements every micro-second.

There are always potential threats, whether you are tetherballer or a kayaker. Consciously evaluating environmental energies allow Joey and his dad to remain open to the unforeseen, unknown, and inconceivable. Fear-triggers are discounted as non-beneficial opportunities. They choose to let every energy they encounter have a calculable degree of benefit.

Healthy Configurations: Accumulating, Expansive, Fluid

Unhealthy Configurations: Accumulating

The Accumulating energy configuration plays a big part in the functioning of the sixth chakra. Most of the time, your Third Eye is absorbing and evaluating energy. That is what it does. Focus and absorb. A single-focus split between two minds – like a garden hose and two potted plants. It is either watering one or the other, not both.

As energy is absorbed, it builds. As it is being absorbed into your head, it fills and then pressurizes – leading to a sense of overwhelm that your subconscious mind chooses to label as a threat. Once labeled, your subconscious mind starts actively looking for someplace to dump that accumulated energy. It looks in the usual places first. It finds people, places, things, thoughts, emotions, and sensations that it has used before and creates enough of a story to burn off what it feels is excess. And then the process starts all over again. Again, and again, all day long. Absorb and purge, accumulate and dump.

These accumulate and dump cycles might be seconds, minutes, or hours long depending on your habits and current circumstances. Expansive and Fluid energies happen when you soften into opportunity assessment, when both lotus petals welcome change and the unknown – when you are full of wonder, long for intimacy, and are fearlessly curious.

Part of the reason that most people confuse intuition with threat assessment is because the Ajna Chakra absorbs, so absorbing feels normal, familiar, and safe. Without conscious discrimination, absorption equals truth. And in a way, it is truth. It is the truth of fear, beliefs, and limiting constructs. False intuition is the honest truth of your subconscious mind trying to keep you safe by only giving you the inputs that collude with its constrained reality.

The transition from threat to opportunity assessment is hard to discern. The subconscious mind uses the absorbed energy to fuel future fear forecasts – which it sometimes labels as intuition. Intuition is rare, a learned feeling that happens after you are able to tell the difference between fear and opportunity. If your intuition whispers to you, it is fear. If you feel an upwelling of something that transforms into an unexpected and not fully understandable thought, that will be intuition.

Next week, your Divine Portal, the seventh or Sahasrara Chakra.