“Before the first morning break I want to give you an overview of how the energy system works, and then, for the rest of the day, we’ll look at Muladhara, the root chaka, and how to effectively work with it. Also this weekend, we’ll do some practical exercises which I hope will help you experience what we are studying, from the inside.
The first thing you need to know about the human energy system is that we all have an aura: we have a container of energy that encircles us like an egg. Just like the Earth has an atmosphere, and that there is an edge to that atmosphere, human beings also have an edge to their energy field. This is your boundary with the world. If someone gets too close to you, physically, they more into and through your boundary, and you may feel uncomfortable. People who are strangers, we like them outside our boundary. Friends, family, our children … they can be inside the boundary, they can be closer to us. From an energy healer’s point of view this boundary is generated (and powered) by the energetic equivalent of the nervous system. So, as well as a physical nervous system you also have an energetic consciousness nervous system. And we’ve known for thousands of years that this energetic nervous system runs up through the spine and into the brain.
In India this main power current up the center of the spine is called the Sushumna. If you are a Star Trek fan like myself, this is your “warp core”: the power system that provides energy to the space ship. Or, think of it as a force field, where the actual machinery that is producing the power is running through the energetic spine.
Each psychic sees this boundary slightly differently, but most of us see it as an egg-shaped boundary around the body. This boundary is very important for healing work because many of us have problems with our energetic boundary: it’s either too rejecting, or too porous or open. If you are the kind of person that loses yourself in relationships, if you merge and lose part of your individuality when in relationship with someone, you probably have a porous boundary.
The Auric boundary is represented in the Relational Energy Healing logo
The other extreme is someone who has a hard time letting others in, and letting things happen to them. Their boundary may be too hard, too rigid. And because this boundary is generated by the quality of the energy running through the energetic spine, we can look to the spine as where to strengthen our boundary.
As human beings, we grow in sequences, through stages. Each stage is already wired into your energy consciousness system: you are pre-wired for growth. What’s needed for us to get that wiring activated, to fire up the “software” in it, is opportunity … and a healthy environment in which to function. Just as the fetus needs a healthy mother and a healthy uterus in which to grow, so do we need certain conditions in order to grow into adults. Your conscious mind has nothing to do with how you develop or grow in the uterus; it’s all wired into your consciousness system, into your genetics, into your biology. The wiring of consciousness (from a psychic healer’s perspective) is wired into each chakra. Each chakra is a certain “cpu” of our functioning. So, my computer has a cpu that allows the Operating System to run; we, as human beings, have many different cpus operating at the same time. Each power center, each chakra is an organic cpu, running it’s own particular software. Just as the lungs deal with breathing, the kidneys deal with filtering the blood, so does each chakra deal with a certain stage or necessity of functioning that we have as human beings.
So, we have our energetic boundary, and we have our sushumna (energetic spine) and out of the sushumna these power centers (chakras) arise. Usually when you see a picture of a chakra you see it from the front, but they emerge like flowers out of the spine, and out of the front of the body. Everyone here knows there are seven major chakras. There are also additional chakras, dotted up and down the spine and in other parts of the body, that are just as important as the main seven. And for us, in the West, having seven chakras to study was a lot … it was all we could deal with. But hopefully I think we are getting a little bit more sophisticated, and so we can include these additional chakras (into our map).
Over the course of our four classes (2009-2011) we will cover these main chakras, and a few of the additional ones, too. Let’s begin by a look at some of the chakras, and I’ll tell you how they all fit in to an integrated system. The first chakra hooks into your tailbone, and it emerges down between your legs, and is slightly curved. For me, the root chakra is probably the most important of all the chakras because without the power the other chakras can’t reach their full potential. If my computer needs to work effectively it needs to have a full power source. This afternoon when we work with the root chakra hopefully you will get a sense of not only how important it is to your growth but also how it can be energized and strengthened through certain practices. Think of the root chakra in terms of a pyramid. The root chakra is the base of the pyramid and each subsequent chakra relies on this depth, this grounding, in order to function well. One of the ongoing problems with training energy healers in the West that a lot of people who are drawn to psychic and energy healing (and to spiritual work) are challenged and disconnected from their body. Many of us are very developed up here, in the upper chakras, in the heart, and intellectually, but many people drawn to this work have challenges being in their bodies. So, we are not only trying to have an out-of-the-body experience, we are trying to have an in-the-body experience.
Over the course of our classes I’ll be talking about the impact of trauma, on both the physical body and on the energy consciousness system. Trauma is an important study, because at one level it spurs us on to grow and develop (and to heal the trauma) but at another level it disconnects us – through the shock – to certain parts of our energy system. Where our physical and emotional body has been impacted by trauma, very often what happens is there’s a freezing, a numbing out in the body and, consequently, the energy system. If somebody hits me, and I can’t block it or get out of the way, my body holds the impact of that blow, in the flesh and in the bone. A natural response to a physical energy coming towards us in order to deal with an impact is to contract and hold the energy. For instance, if you were struck as a child by a person, or perhaps suffered an accident, the impact could still be affecting you today. It could still be affecting your energy consciousness.
And – as if that wasn’t enough to deal with – we often find trauma and shock from previous lifetimes, previous incarnations, still affecting today’s physical body. It’s very common if I’m working with someone’s organs, say the liver, that we uncover several lifetimes of having problems with the liver. Just as your family genetics predisposes you to certain physical challenges, this is the equivalent … lifetime after lifetime you could be struggling with a similar trauma, a similar issue. Energy healing deals with releasing trauma, and replacing it with energy consciousness that allows us to grow and expand as humans. Trauma (from an energy healing perspective) is not bad, because part of living, part of being human, is dealing with unresolved shock to the system. Once trauma is resolved, it’s replaced with resilience, with consciousness, with openness … it’s replaced with a more effective way of dealing with life.
So, in our practical overview of the chakra system in our classes over the next two years we will first look at how the chakra should be functioning in a healthy way. Secondly, we will explore what happens when a chakra is unhealthy, or it doesn’t develop well. And thirdly, we’ll look at trauma to the chakra. In the advanced class we look at other categories, too.
Your healthy chakra will work in a certain way; we need to know what a healthy chakra looks like. Secondly, if you have a chakra that isn’t working very well, or one that has not been developed through opportunity, you need to know how to get that chakra running more effectively. And, thirdly, we need to look at trauma, in other words, an outside effect, any outside shock to your system that is separate from your own, inner, personally-developed system.
Everyone has a chakra system that is growing and evolving; there are no perfect chakra systems. There are people who will tell you that they have perfected chakra systems, but, by the very nature of the way this functions, it is always in evolution, always in process. As long as you are growing as a person, as long as your relationships are growing, as long as your passion about living is growing, your chakra system will also be evolving and growing. Actually, in my advanced classes, we look at how there is stage-specific growth in each chakra. In other words, as we get older and work with different issues in life the healing of the chakra becomes slightly modified. So, as an example, if I’m working with a teenage boy or a teenage girl: their boundary issues are going to be very different from say, a forty or fifty-year old person. At forty, at fifty, our boundaries have a certain habitual way of holding, where we actually need to learn how to release the boundary. But when someone is younger they are still trying to create a boundary.
After our break we’ll do a meditation, an exercise, for you to bring your consciousness to your boundary, and begin to energize your root chakra. But the point I’m trying to stress is that the boundary, sushumna (the energetic spine), the chakras are one system, they are one integrated system. In relational energy work, which is what I call what I do, we start at the boundary, we start at the container of somebody’s energy field, we work inwards, and then we integrate it back into the container. A relational approach to energy healing is always looking to see how everything is related to everything else; how everything is interconnected and interdependent. If everything is interconnected, and everything is interdependent, then wherever we make a change in the system it will affect somewhere else in the system. If I strengthen the root chakra I immediately start sending more power up into the higher chakras, and also I start to strengthen my boundary. Even now, with both my new clients and clients I’ve worked with for years, I always start at the boundary … I come in and strengthen the root chakra … and when I finish the healing I come back, and end at the beginning: the boundary.
This is helpful in personal relationships, in that when you first meet someone the first meeting of your boundary with their boundary gives you a lot of information about the person, and about the potential relationship you could have with this person. So, a practical application of a healthy root chakra is to bring your attention to a first meeting with someone – personal or business -any kind of meeting, as your boundary first comes in contact with theirs. Those first few moments, those first few minutes, give you a lot of information.
Most of us, when we meet someone for the first time, we may be shy, or want to look good … we often numb out to experiencing that person for the first time. In the West we would say this is about the importance of first impressions: that those first few moments of meeting someone often give you a clue as to whether this person is going to be a friend or not, whether they are going to be safe to be with….
OK, let’s have a break, and we’ll continue in fifteen minutes. Thank you, everyone.”
This is an edited transcript of the second part of the Introductory lecture to Dean’s Tokyo Seminar #1: November 19, 2009. Some words have been added to aid in clarity for the reader.
Click here to go to Part 1
© 2013 by Dean Ramsden. All rights reserved.
