What do you feel when you read the title of this blog? Perhaps you feel excitement and curiosity into what they mean. Maybe you have a familiarity with such subjects, or maybe you feel a strong resistance and pulling away from words regarding “Energy” and “Subtle Body”. I am not asking you to agree with anything that I write about, but my one request is that you remain curious to your responses of what I write. What do you feel churning in your belly throughout this blog? What are you aware of in your breathe as you read the words? Do you feel tingly or numb? Just notice…
Over the last few years in my research on trauma recovery and the body I have found it harder and harder to ignore such concepts as energy, chakras, vibrations, and the subtle body. I have read books from Christian, Buddhist, Scientific, and Agnostic points of view, and the overlap of themes regarding energy have been staggering! I am under no illusion that I will be able to merge or even come close to merging these modalities in this blog, which is honestly one of the reasons I haven’t written a blog in a while. I have wanted to honor what I am learning, and it doesn’t feel like an easy task. But my hope is that through allowing some of the themes and ideas to come up here they will continue to flow into more succinct presentations in the future.
First off it feels important to answer WHY I think it is important to explore the themes of energy. I grew up in a Christian tradition that shunned theories from Eastern religions or medicines as wrong or bad. I find that so sad, and it makes me even more sad the more I learn about the importance of energy when it comes to healing the body, mind, and spirit.
When I think about energy there are various words that come to mind: Vibration, Spirit, life force, Eros. All of these words have the same concept: aliveness. All things, all matter, are energy.
E=MC2
This is a theory I am not going to pretend to understand in full. But what I do get is that energy and matter are one in the same. Therefore all matter holds energy within it. The keys I am typing are energy, the table in which my computer is resting is energy, the faces and bodies around the coffee shop around me all consist of energy. Even the words and the laughter that I am hearing are vibrations of energy moving through time and space to reverberate in my brain and make my neurons light up energetically in ways that translate and make sense of the energetic vibrations in my ear drums…. sensing a theme here?
Genesis 1 speaks of the beginning of the formation of matter, but begins with the Spirit of God “hovering over the deep”. Synonyms for hovering include flickering, dancing, and fluttering. This to me insinuates that the imagination of the author of Genesis held for God was of a moving, vibrant Being. To be created in this image is to be a being of vibrancy and movement. Perhaps being created in the image of God involves the ability to be able to dance, to flutter, to flicker freely.
Fear is the only emotion that has the ability to immobilize us. So when we are bound to spiritual and religious dogmas that teach us not to be curious, not to seek, because we may “fall off the path” we become locked in fear. The invitation from Jesus, however, is “whoever seeks will find.” Yet more often we are told in churches today that other people, usually white men, have already done the seeking for us. We are told to NOT seek, because who knows what we will stumble upon if we do? Fear therefore becomes the easiest thing for religious leaders to latch on to in order to build their congregations and followers. This creates a trauma bond between churchgoers and their pastors. When we are told that the mouth of God is coming out of a man and not within our own bodies, our own subtle energy, then we disconnect ourself from the very Spirit of God within us. We lose the vibration of the Living Spirit and are actually not then living into the fullness of what it is to be made in the image of God. God is love, Eros, Energy. God is within the vibration, the hovering, the flickering of our cells and neurons.
When we take time to listen to the voice of God within the quality of energy in our body we can tune in to the still, quiet voice that leads us to life and life in abundance.
This is why it is significant for me to step into realms of energy, chakras, and subtle body. So much of what it means to be fully alive has been lost in the Western version of Christianity out of fear and immobility. But perfect love casts out fear and enables us to gain back our mobility, our energy, and step into terrain of new life. So now that have answered why I think it is important, I want to talk briefly about what I think we can glean from it. But I want to pause and ask you to pay attention to your sensations, to YOUR energy. Is it stirring with excitement at what you have read? Do you find that your energy and blood is hot with anger at what I have said? I invite you to have an authentic experience in whatever is coming up for you- without judgment or expectation of how you “should” feel about what you are reading.
So what can we glean from theories of energy?
Plain and simple I will say wellness. Much more wellness than I have the breadth to go into today. But when we connect to our own energy and awareness we are able to release toxic energy that gets stored in our body from trauma. We are able to clear out energy blocks from shame and fear. When we do this our cells are able to function at full capacity, and we can have a healthier relationship to ourselves, to others, and to our world. When we remain curious about ourselves we are required to stay in a posture of openness. This brings softness and rest to our body which enables us to come out of fight-flight-freeze mode. When we are in a state of rest we can properly digest, our immune system can function at full capacity, we can produce fresh blood cells, and all of the other amazing things that our bodies know how to do naturally- if we give it the time and space to do so!
So I invite you on a journey with me. A journey to be curious and to stay open. A journey to discover what our bodies, and the voice of God, are speaking.
Recommended books:
Waking the Tiger by Peter Levine
The Jazz of Physics by Stephon Alexander
Eastern Body Western Mind by Anodea Judith
The Psoas Book by Liz Koch