3

Emotional Energy

Emotional energy is much more than the experience of an emotion itself; it is also that which fuels and gives rise to the emotion. Before the actual experience or outburst of emotion, the energy that gives it form builds up in your body, and as it does so it affects your body in a wide range of physiological and metaphysical ways. Some emotional energies have a warming, expansive, and strengthening effect on the body; others have an agitating, hardening effect; and still others have a cooling, contracting, weakening effect. These characteristics can be found not only in the muscles and connective tissues in the body, but across all systems of the body: respiratory, digestive, nervous, muscular, skeletal, endocrine, circulatory, lymphatic, urinary, and reproductive.

Eight Emotional Energies

The following describes the physiological and metaphysical characteristics and effects of eight of the most commonly experienced emotions and feelings. It is hoped that by sharing this information, you will be able to better understand your own body as well as be better able to help others who experience the same effects of the emotions.

Fear

All emotions have some degree of physiological or metaphysical effect on the body, but two emotional energies, fear and anger, have the widest range of noticeable effects. And of all the emotional energies, the physiological effects of the energy of fear can be the most difficult to understand, simply because one of the first reactions we have to fear energy being released in the body—for example, during a yoga practice or massage treatment—is to try and stop it. It is not unusual during a massage for a client experiencing the rising signs of fear to say, “Stop, this is making me feel uncomfortable,” or “I don’t like what is happening,” or “I don’t want to go any further.”

Most people ordinarily do not voluntarily investigate the energy of fear, and because of this they do not understand the adverse effects the hidden or unconscious energy of fear has on the body. Notably, some of the fear energy stored in your body today can relate to issues and events originating deep in your past, and these events are probably forgotten or buried. But just because you have forgotten the fearful events from your past does not mean that the energy relating to those events is no longer stored in your body. The body can hold on to the energy of fear for a long, long time, even though the conscious mind may have forgotten or blocked out the event that triggered the original fear.

The lack of conscious awareness of the effects of fear energy can lead to many misunderstandings and misinterpretations of certain physical symptoms that may present in the body, such as chronic, low-level nausea, coldness in the abdomen, weakness in the lower back, tiredness, heaviness, tight hamstrings, closed hips, etc. Misinterpreting the true source of such physical problems can then lead to inappropriate and/ or ineffective courses of treatment, many of which serve only to further bury the hidden emotional energy at the root of the problem, or even worse, cause additional and completely unnecessary harm.

It is not uncommon to experience the energy of fear, although in a milder form, if you are practicing a series of yoga asanas designed to stimulate the second chakra (e.g., cobra, boat, seated forward bend, supine bound angle, dog, cat, seated angle, balancing bear, and frog), or while giving or receiving an intense massage that inadvertently releases second-chakra energy. You may not feel the emotion of fear as you have come to know it outright in its more obvious forms, as described in the discussion of the second chakra in chapter 2, but you may well experience one or more of its less recognized physiological and/or metaphysical side effects:

When during the course of a massage or yoga practice any of these experiences of fear energy are triggered, it may be inconvenient or even uncomfortable, but this kind of release is normal and natural and should pass within a short while, or at most within two to three days. If the symptoms persist, however, it may reveal the remaining energetic presence of an event in your life that once caused you to be terribly afraid and is still causing you to feel the energy of fear in the present.

If you are more sensitive to energy, you may additionally experience an abstract feeling of blackness or stickiness within yourself. In your dreams at night you may see pictures of thick, black motor oil or black witches or black, fearful-looking creatures. And if you are able to sense the colors of energy, you will sense the color black when you touch the energy of fear in someone. These physiological and metaphysical experiences reveal the presence of the energy of fear in your own or another person’s body. The level of energy is not yet strong enough to trigger the actual emotion of fear itself, nor is it strong enough to reveal the event that caused the original fear. Yet it is possible in a strong yoga or massage practice to intentionally raise the level of fear energy in your body such that you can reveal and release its underlying origin.

A Conversation with Fear

Fear has been the major emotional issue in my life, stemming all the way back to my life in the womb. I have had to confront my fear on multiple occasions during the first thirteen years of my self-development, which I started in 2002 at age forty. On one such occasion, in August 2009, the blackness of fear came to me one night, and from a dream in which I was sitting in darkness on the sandy floor of a pyramid it woke me and spoke to me. I was able to write down what it told me.

“We [Fear, which is both female and male] are only a power, a force. We cannot harm you. Nothing can harm you. We are the darkness all around you. These great stone statues you touch in the darkness are your own great, untouched potential. [The statues were present in the dream in the base of the pyramid.] The darkness is all around, but the light is within, so breathe in the darkness. You chose the female form for us. You enter the darkness through the vagina. [Fear of women was the dominant form of fear in the male side of my family, going back three generations. Each of us has our own individual symbol, or chosen form, for fear.] The darkness slows you down, makes you afraid, makes you cold. Your hands get wet, the sand [in the dream] sticks to them. After a while you can crawl no more [in the blackness on the floor of the pyramid]. You bow your head down, afraid of what you might see in the complete darkness. Voices and whispers fly all around you. You are lost. You don’t know where you are. You don’t know what is in front of you. You don’t stop moving completely, because you know that to do so would mean death. So you keep moving forward. Very slowly. But you also begin to realize that nothing bad has happened yet. Although you are surrounded by darkness and fear, you are still untouched, unharmed. We cannot hurt or harm you. We are inert power and force. All we do is slow you down and stop you from discovering the truth. It is fear that makes you feel alone and believe in loneliness. It is not being alone or lonely that makes you afraid. Fear precedes loneliness. Loneliness is born out of fear. And although fear is a darkness that terrifies you, you can talk to it. You can talk to fear. You can ask it questions. You can ask who it is. And it will answer. And it will teach you. It is open and willing to do this. Fear will teach you, if you only let it. And it is quite gentle in its replies. It doesn’t even shout or roar. In its own way fear wants you to breathe it in. By doing so, it is mixed with the light within and is set free. Your reward is then your own potential.”

What the Energy of Fear Feels Like in the Body of a Massage Client

If you are a massage therapist and you like to start a treatment at your client’s feet, check to see if the feet feel cold and hard and if the skin is wet or sticky. If you are unsure about what you feel at the feet, move to the calves and check to see if they too are cold, hard, wet, or sticky. Cold, hard, moist skin is indicative of the presence of the energy of fear in the body area you are treating. If the skin is sticky, it indicates a stronger presence of the energy of fear, as stickiness is a quality of fear energy. There is no scientific proof of this, but when you spend a few years treating clients who hold excessive amounts of fear energy in their bodies, you will have felt all the proof you need.

Be mindful when treating a client presenting with such symptoms, as the person may be carrying buried fears and memories relating to an event in her past, an event she may not wish to revisit at this time. The effect of your massage could disturb these old energies and bring to the surface memories of the event. If you see this happening, ask the person if she feels comfortable enough to continue the massage. If not, you may have to pause until she regains sufficient comfort to allow you continue the massage. If she is unable to regain sufficient comfort, you may have to stop the massage completely. If, on the other hand, she wants you to continue, you may end up guiding her through deeper and deeper layers of emotional energy as they become revealed, and then released, through the massage.

Anger

The energy of anger can pervade the body, with a wide range of adverse effects across all bodily systems. It is, however, not quite as uncomfortable or as difficult to deal with and release as fear is.

There are two types of anger: simple anger and complex anger. Simple anger is an expression of anger related to a single event—for example, the anger at having a bad toothache or a pounding headache. Complex anger is an expression of anger related to a series of events, such as anger at work or anger at life. Complex anger is an umbrella emotion made up of parts of other energies, such as frustration, impatience, jealousy, hatred, bitterness (anger and sadness mixed together), disappointment, unforgivingness, intolerance, judgment, the need to punish, the need for revenge, the feeling of injustice, the feeling of being controlled, the experience of having your personal power undermined or taken away, and the feeling of loss, such as a job loss and the subsequent feeling of entitlement following such a loss or injustice. Rage is an expression of complex anger allowed to explode.

I have grouped these feelings, experiences, beliefs, and behaviors together because the energies that fuel and give rise to them have a common origin or starting point within the body. This starting point is the third chakra, located in the solar plexus (refer to chapter 2 for a detailed description). Due to their common energy and origin, all these particular emotions, feelings, experiences, and behaviors have similar physiological and metaphysical effects on the body.

An easy way to describe the physiological effects of the energy of anger is to list some examples of common situations where this energy is released into the body. If you can relate to any of these examples, reflect on how you felt at the time and how your body felt too.

Such a list could go on forever, but what you begin to see is that the effects of all these different scenarios in the body are basically the same:

From this list there are three key characteristics to understanding how anger energy, or energy from the third chakra, feels in your body: 1) it makes parts of your body and certain muscles harden, the most common areas being the midback, shoulders, and jaws; 2) you cannot fully connect to yourself or somehow do not feel quite right in your own skin, or you are unable to ground yourself; and 3) you lose your natural ability to digest a full range of foods and beverages because they make you feel nauseous. When you experience any of these feelings during or after a strong massage session, it shows that there has been a release of anger-type energy from your third chakra into your system. This is a natural occurrence and should be no cause for alarm. Be aware too that if in yoga you follow a set of asanas designed to open the third chakra (e.g., bow, seated forward bend, upward boat, inclined plane, warrior I, warrior II, and half circle), you might experience sensations as a result of your practice. They are all natural to the third chakra, as are the positive aspects and feelings of an open third chakra, such as any feelings of success, achievement, and added confidence.

If, however, the uncomfortable feelings and sensations persist, it reveals a chronic excess of anger-type energy or a strong imbalance of third-chakra energy in your body. This is your body calling on you to investigate these feelings and sensations more deeply until their cause or origin is revealed. When the origin is fully revealed, then the energy of the event can be released and the body set free of the physiological and metaphysical manifestations caused by the energy. This is the journey of healing through energy work.

Jealousy

Many people say they are not prone to jealousy, but there is a type of jealousy the energy of which you may be carrying in your body, but which you may be totally unaware of, and that is the jealousy that another person has of you.

There can be people in your life who are secretly jealous of you. They can be secretly jealous of the amount of sexual attention you receive from people. They can be jealous of your success at work or in education. They can be jealous of the amount of love you receive in your family circle. Depending on the type of connection you have with such people, the energy of their jealousy enters your energy system through your second, third, or fourth chakra. The energy of other people’s sexual jealousy affects the health of your second chakra; fellow work and academic colleagues can send you their jealousy through your third chakra; and people who are jealous of the amount of love you have in your life will send this jealousy to your heart through your hands and up your arms. The physiological effect of this energy transfer creates tension, tightness, hardness, and a slight coldness in whichever part of your body it is found.

Sibling and spousal jealousy enters your energy system at the outer edge of your hipbone, causing you to feel pain and stiffness on the outside of your hip and down the outside of your leg. In extreme cases this energy can make it difficult for you to walk. In general, the energy of the jealousy of a brother or husband will enter your energy body through your right hip, whereas the energy of the jealousy of a sister or wife will enter your energy body through your left hip.

Most people are unaware of third-party jealousy and so are unaware of the adverse effects this has on the body. If you suspect anyone in your life is jealous of you, seek the help of someone trained to see energy, such as an energy worker, a spiritual worker, or a clairvoyant, and ask if they can see any of this energy in you. An experienced energy worker or spiritual healer will also be able to help you release this energy from your body.

Loneliness

Loneliness is more than just an emotion; it is also a longer-lasting feeling—a mood, a state of mind, or a state of being. Regardless of what words people use to describe what loneliness is, at the heart of loneliness is an energy that comes from an environmental experience, such as that of abandonment, loss of love, or absence of love.

A loveless environment is a cold environment. There is nothing warming and nurturing about it. The resulting emotional state from experiencing such a loveless environment—loneliness—is similarly cold. Of all the emotional energies carried in the body, loneliness is the coldest. To understand the physiological effects of loneliness in the body, it is best to understand the effects of cold on the body. Anyone who begins a yoga practice in a cold room knows how difficult it is to open the body. Muscles are cold and contracted and are difficult to stretch, warm, and release. The body naturally contracts to protect itself against the effects of cold. Men also see the effect of cold energy on their penis when they come out of the cold ocean or walk outside in cold weather. Quite simply, cold energy causes contraction.

Loneliness in infancy, whether as a result of neglect, abandonment, or a loveless home environment, causes particular parts of the infant’s body to contract in a natural act of defense or protection against the cold energy of its environment. If this cold environmental energy is not released in infancy, it remains stored in the body of the fledgling human as he grows into adulthood. As long as the original cold energy remains, so does the original core contraction caused by that cold energy.

There are two key areas in the adult body where the energy of infantile loneliness is stored: the pelvic girdle and the hamstrings. The intensely cold energy of infantile loneliness is the energetic cause of, or energetic root of, contracted muscles in the pelvic girdle and contracted muscles in the tops of the thighs, most commonly known as closed hips and tight hamstrings. The exact location of the cold energy that causes the hamstrings to contract is in the space between the top of the femur and the sitting bone. When you experience this energy, it feels like a needle made of ice stuck deep into this area of your body. When you release this energy, it feels like freezing water flushing downward through the hamstrings and the backs of the legs. As you continue to release this energy, you reduce the amount of cold energy causing the contraction of the hamstrings. This is healing the issue of tight hamstrings through the process of internal energy release.

The other area of the body that is adversely affected by the emotional energy of loneliness is the region around the heart, extending into the lungs, with the breastbone at the center. This can be felt in your own body as tight intercostal muscles, or alternatively in the body of a massage client as an area of cold energy on the palm of your hand when you hold your hand over your client’s heart.

If you are sensitive to energy, you may also experience the energy of loneliness as an intensely black, solid form, similar to obsidian. Sometimes it appears as solid, deep, black ice, especially in the lungs. Loneliness is both the coldest of all the energies in the body and also the blackest. Fear is also a black energy (with the softest form of fear energy appearing as black smoke), but the black of fear feels sticky, whereas loneliness does not.

Grief

Grief is the emotion we feel after a loss. It is usually felt in the area of the heart. It can give the feeling of living in a numbing, cool, damp, gray world. Following a loss, it can become a dominant feeling, temporarily preventing fully integrating with our environment, whether at home, at work, or socially.

Grief, however, is a soft energy. In grief it can feel like we are in the thick of gray clouds or gray cotton wool. When massaging someone carrying the emotional energy of grief, it can be felt between upper breast and clavicles. The area feels spongy, soft, and slightly cold to the touch. If you are sensitive to the colors of energy, you will sense grief as having a gray color. Although the emotional energy of grief doesn’t have any adverse physiological effects on the body, its presence can cloud or fog the heart completely. The good news is that it is an emotional energy that can be easily and effectively cleared and released, particularly through a series of TCM acupuncture treatments.

Sadness, Disappointment, and Despair

Sadness is another soft emotional energy that can be found close to the heart, usually between the breast and the clavicles. Similar to grief, it feels spongy, soft, and slightly cold to the touch. Another area where the energy of sadness accumulates is in the latissimus muscle just under the ridge of the shoulder blade. This can be very painful when you extend the muscle and squeeze it, for instance during massage. Although sadness is found in the heart area of the body, the fourth chakra, it is actually an energy belonging to the third chakra, or solar plexus. If you are sensitive to the colors of energy, you will sense sadness as being yellow. A yellow emotional energy in the heart reveals an energy that has less to do with the heart and more to do with the conscious mind. It is an emotion or feeling that has become a state of mind or a state of being.

Disappointment is very similar to sadness in terms of what its energy feels like, its associated color, its origin, and the areas of the body it effects.

Despair is a deeply held emotion that forms toward the end of life, when a person finally realizes or surrenders to life’s struggles. Despair reveals the issue or struggle in life that has caused the person the deepest sadness. My father’s despair was that he didn’t follow his intuition at a key moment in his life, resulting in a decision he then took that trapped him for the rest of his life.

If you are an energy worker or someone sensitive to the colors of energy, the emotional energy of despair will appear dark green or blackish green. This particular energy is a mixture of green energy, representing the heart, and black energy, symbolizing pain or blockage (more on color combinations in chapter 7). Together they reveal an energy that causes a pain or a blockage to the heart. The body areas most commonly affected by the emotional energy of despair are the heart and the groin. As mentioned, it is a deeply held emotional energy that only reveals itself after years of spiritual self-development, whether through the path of yoga, massage, martial arts, or meditation.

An important thing to note about the emotional energy of despair is that it is sometimes not related to issues and struggles in your own life, but rather to issues and struggles relating to the lives of your parents. Although the energy is present in your body, it can sometimes be an emotional energy belonging to someone else, in this case one or both of your parents. (The ways in which emotional energy gets passed from parent to child are discussed in detail in chapter 6.)

Shame and Humiliation

Of all our emotional energies, shame and humiliation harbor the greatest potential for damage, even greater than fear, in large part because, of all the things we would prefer not to reveal about ourselves, shame and humiliation cause us to feel the greatest aversion. If we feel deep shame about something we experienced in life, it can force us to block out or consciously deny large parts of our life in an attempt to bury and hide that shame. We can even rewrite our entire personal history based on our reluctance to deal with the emotion of shame.

My own mother was deeply ashamed of certain parts of her life, particularly in relation to my earliest infancy. Her shame led her to rewrite the history of certain parts of her life, so that when in adulthood I asked my mother about her life, the stories I was told were a rewriting of her personal history: I was told non-truths.

Because we bury shame so deeply, its energy is found very deeply inside the body, close to the core, or root, of our being. It is an energy wrapped very tightly around the lowest part of the spine, between L5 and S5. When it releases you can feel a sudden freedom in the movement between the vertebrae in your lower spine. The energy of shame is also one of the energies that blocks the release of another, more deeply found form of energy close to the core of our being: the kundalini. A strong yoga or meditation practice focused on the sacral vertebrae can trigger a release of the emotional energy of shame from that part of the body, which in turn can set free a release of kundalini energy. It may be possible to trigger a release of kundalini energy in massage, but the therapist would need to be someone who has already worked on releasing their own shame and their own kundalini energy.

The physiological effects of the energy of shame on the body are small and subtle, but the mental and spiritual effects are great, as it is one of the key energies that blocks us from being free. How can we expect to be free when, at the same time, we are holding on to something shameful from the past? If you want to be free, you have to let go of the energy of shame. Even if you have completely blocked your shame from your conscious mind, the energy of it still remains stored in the body.

If you are sensitive to the colors of energy, then you can find where you store the energy of shame in your body simply by finding its color: it is a dirty, pale, salmon pink.

The experience of being completely humiliated or the fear of being completely humiliated is sometimes too much for a person to bear. It is the one feeling that can lead someone to take their own life. My father carried a great fear of being humiliated by his mother for getting something wrong, and it was this fear of being humiliated by his mother that stopped him from following his intuition at a key moment in his life, when he married my mother, and instead to make a decision to stay in the marriage, which then went on to trap him for the rest of his life. I have felt the energy and presence of my father’s humiliation within me. It is deep in my lower abdomen and pelvis. Each time I connect with this energy in myself, I see my father’s face. I see his tears and I feel his pain.

From my own experience of working on myself, I have grown to accept and understand the energy of humiliation. However, I have yet to find it in the body of another. Maybe I have to further develop my sensitivity to the most deeply suppressed of all our emotional energies.

Guilt

Guilt is a feeling built on a belief, or rather, one of two beliefs: the belief you have done something wrong, or the belief that you have caused something wrong to happen. The former is what I call male guilt, the latter, female guilt. Here is a simple example of what I mean. A husband promises his wife to look after her, but he doesn’t (male guilt), while the wife believes she did something to cause her husband to not look after her (female guilt).

What gives guilt its strength is the level of belief given it. The more you believe in your guilt, the more energy you give it, and the more energy you give it, the more pervasive the energy of guilt will be in your body. The difficulty is that the belief in guilt can come from either your conscious mind or your subconscious mind.

Conscious-mind guilt relates to an event that happened in your current life that can be proven or validated. Subconscious-mind guilt relates to the feeling of guilt that has been passed on to you through your ancestors; this is accumulated ancestral guilt. Depending on your belief in karma, ancestral guilt can also include accumulated feelings of guilt from your own past lives. We are born with the notion of guilt hotwired into our system. One of the great sadnesses in life is that ancestral guilt is based on the notion that somewhere, back in a very foggy past life, you either did something wrong or you caused something wrong to happen. The sadness is that, in truth, the thing you think you did, you did not actually do. This is the root of all guilt: the mistaken belief that you did something wrong.

Guilt, at its core, is a mind trick. It is a mind trick that gets you to believe in something that did not happen. One of the traps in guilt is that in trying to understand it and set yourself free from it, you often have to follow it into the realm of past lives, whether through regression, rebirthing, meditation, or some other means. The trap is that in the realm of past lives nothing can be proven.

In past-life regressions your mind will reconstruct and reconstruct seemingly different episodes from seemingly different past lives. All you end up with is an ever-increasing and unending list of things you did or allowed to happen in your past lives. This brings you nowhere remotely close to understanding guilt, never mind setting you free of it.

What you need to do to understand guilt and to set yourself free is to face your accuser. Let’s say for example that in a past-life regression you discover you were a mother and that, through some actions of yours, you caused your child to die. The accusation is that you caused your child to die. And for every accusation there has to be an accuser—in this case, your own conscious mind. By accepting the accusation to be true, the concept of guilt is created. Instead stop the story and demand proof that it is true. Demand your accuser show you proof of your guilt and you will discover the truth: that the pages in the book of evidence against you are blank. There is absolutely no proof that you caused the death of your child. Your accuser made the story up and then conspired to get you to believe in it. This is the root of guilt. A story that you believe in that never happened. A mind trick.

As guilt is a mind trick, its energy is mental energy and originates in the third chakra. Its energy is carried throughout the body on one specific meridian associated with the third chakra, the gallbladder meridian. Guilt is also passed from generation to generation; the energy of which is housed in the first chakra. The release of the energy of guilt can be aided by TCM treatment of the gallbladder meridian as well as massage treatment or yoga practices that address the outsides of the legs, the outer sides of the rib cage, the tops of the shoulders, and the temples on the sides of the head.

Shock

A discussion of emotional energy would not be complete without delving into a particular type of energy, that of shock. The experience of shock has a profound effect on the subtle energy system of the body and, by extension, on the physical body itself. There are two types of shock: experiential shock and mental shock. To help explain the difference, I offer the example of a married couple, one of whom is involved in a traffic accident while the other is at home. Let’s say the husband suffers the accident while his wife is at home.

The experience of being in a traffic accident and the subsequent experience of being in the emergency room produces enormous shock in the body, the more so if the hospital experience involves surgery of some kind. Experiential shock triggers the release of the energy of shock into the body. Shock energy is very cold, black in color, and creates strong contraction in the body tissues wherever it is released. Even if the husband makes a full and speedy recovery from his accident, his body will still hold the energies of shock relating to the original accident and subsequent hospital experiences. These energies are usually found in the first and second chakras, resulting in physical contraction in the muscles, connective tissues, and internal organs in most of the body areas associated with these chakras: the kidneys, adrenal glands, lower abdominal region, lower back, pelvic girdle, hips, thighs, and knees, including the knee joints. Because the energy of shock remains present in the body long after the trigger event, it means that on a very deep level there are parts of the husband’s body that are still reacting to the accident and subsequent emergency-room experience, even though the events have long since passed.

Physical treatment of such a person involves the massage skills of loosening and warming tight and contracted muscles, while on the energetic level it involves making a connection to the energy of shock present in the body and communicting to that energy that the events of both the accident and subsequent emergency-room experience are over, and that nothing else bad is going to happen—it’s all over. There is no more need for the person to defend himself against these events. They have finished. He is now safe, and he can let go. This type of connection and silent communication originates in the mind of the therapist. The therapist generates the feeling or energy of reassurance and safety, a second-chakra energy, in his or her touch, and through that touch transmits the warming energy of reassurance into the body of the client. It is this warming energy that counters and melts the cold energy of shock in the body of the client.

Following the husband’s accident, word is sent to his wife informing her of the accident. Upon hearing the news, the wife also receives a shock, a mental shock. The energy of this type of shock is also black and cold and causes contraction in her body. The energy of shock is carried in the words delivered to the wife. When she learns of her husband’s accident, the energy of shock enters her energy system through her ears and descends down the back of her body along her spine. If she thinks, even for an instant, that she will lose her husband, the energy of this mental shock triggers the release of shock from within all her chakras, from her sixth to her first. If she is in love with her husband, the thought of losing him will trigger the release of the black energy of shock into her spine at the back of her heart chakra, where it will cause contraction and tightness in the muscles between the shoulder blades. If she has a family with her husband, the momentary thought of losing him as the father to her children will release the energy of shock in her first chakra, causing coldness and contraction to that area of her body. If the couple has enjoyed sexual relations, the black energy of shock will also accumulate at the back of her second chakra; and if there is shared property, business, or money, it will accumulate at the rear of her third chakra. Physical treatment of the wife involves the massage skills of loosening and warming the cold, contracted, tight body areas; on the energetic level it involves a similar type of energetic connection and communication as the one used with the husband, in which she is reassured that everything is now fine.

A specific type of energy connection is needed to heal shock through massage: the energy of shock is a second-chakra energy, and when released into or found in the body it causes the second chakra—the kidneys and the adrenal glands specifically—the most damage. Therefore, the type of energy connection between therapist and the client in massage also has to be of the second chakra. This means a close, intimate contact with the person—no borders, no boundaries, no use of self-protection. A strong and full connection, with the therapist offering complete support and reassurance in their touch, is necessary. It is the warming, second-chakra energies of reassurance and support offered in massage that will release the energy of shock held in the body of the person. In this case, the more formal energies of the third chakra, which are often used in massage treatment, as exemplified by statements like “I am the doctor and you are the patient,” or “If you have the condition of shock, then according to the book I have to press points 1, 2, and 3 to release it,” are inappropriate approaches to releasing shock energy from a person’s body. The person needs the energies of support and reassurance, in much the same way a child needs intimate parental contact, support, and reassurance following a shock, and not the energy of being held at a distance or the energy of being told they will be okay if they breathe and count to ten.

In dealing with the energy of shock in massage, it is less about what kind of treatment you offer a client suffering shock and more about the energy you use in delivering your treatment. The use of loving energy in a shock-recovery massage is also helpful, but love is an energy of the fourth chakra, whereas the energy that needs healing is of the second chakra.

The Healing Energy of Love

Love is the energy that heals all. It is a warming, expansive energy originating in the heart area. It makes cold muscles go warm, contracted muscles open and relax, and heavy muscles lighten. It unwinds confusion and dissolves pain. It creates balance wherever it flows. It melts the ice of fear and loneliness, calms the winds of anger and hatred, and liberates the body of guilt and shame. It forgives all forms of hurt and treats everyone as equals. If able to flow throughout the body, the energy of love brings healing wherever it goes.

Love is, of course, a very powerful energy, which is why sometimes it can cause pain and discomfort. When you bring the strong, warming energy of love to a part of the body that has been frozen with cold for a long time, the effect of love melting the ice causes the body cells that are full of cold energy to change, and this process of cellular change, when strong, can cause a temporary feeling of discomfort. That’s why when working with the energy of love, you sometimes need to be patient, as its heating energy can cause temporary unease.

If you do the hands-off partner exercise outlined in chapter 1, you can experience the energy of love as heat on the palm of your hand when you hold your hand over the heart area of your partner. You may also experience a tingling from the center of your armpit. This latter experience is an energizing of the heart meridian. If you place your hand on the heart area of your partner, it will also feel warm or hot. This is the heat of the fire energy of love. In a massage treatment, if you feel this energy in the heart area of your client, use all your skill and knowledge to stimulate the presence of this energy, then spread it around as much of your client’s body as possible in the way you spread soft butter on bread. There is nothing more healing for the body, mind, and spirit than healing with the energy of love, both for you and for your client.

If you are sensitive to the colors of energy, you will find that the energy of love is green. Not yellow green, bright green, or dark green, but rainbow green. A great form of self-healing is to imagine this color in your mind and then using your awareness, bring this color to parts of your body that you know to be in discomfort. Some people are able to imagine the color gold along with green when they do this exercise. This is a slightly more powerful color combination to use in self-healing through the use of color (a subject explored in detail in chapter 7).

The energy of love and, by extension, the energy of the heart are closely connected to the energy in your hands. There is a small energy center, or chakra, in the palm of your hand through which the energy of love can be transmitted and received. If you have a strong and open heart, there is a good chance you also have soft and warm hands. You can use warm hands to bring great healing, either to yourself or to another, by simply placing your hands on a body area that is in discomfort and simply allow the heat of the energy in your hands to melt the discomfort away. Although the act of healing hands on a partner is a beautiful thing to give, just be aware that sometimes you may cause your partner a little discomfort, or cause a tear to well up in your partner’s eyes, as the heat of love melts the cold hardness of pain.

Sometimes a person with a strong and open heart can have cold hands. This is because someone in that person’s life is in pain and is sending the pain to that person for healing. The other person transmits the cold, hard energy of pain into the person through the energy centers in the palms of their hands, causing their hands to become temporarily cold. When this energy is sent with great force, it can enter the person’s hands through the chakras in the palms and travel up the arms and toward the heart, causing areas of blockage, resistance, and pain throughout the person’s arms, including the elbows.

You may ask What is love? Love is many things, both simple and complex, both visible and invisible. Simple love is when a feeling of love for someone spontaneously wells up inside you and you need to share that feeling with the person. In some instances you share this love by saying “I love you” or by giving the person a big, loving hug. These actions are done spontaneously and given freely, without any need of reciprocation. You just share and give love freely. You don’t need to be hugged or told “I love you” back. The energy of love causes you to give and share without condition. This is love in its simplest, unconditional form.

Unconditional love is simply that: love without conditions. Some people have an idealized concept of unconditional love as love given without conditions, yet they harbor enormous conditions, mainly that it be everlasting. Yet for love to be unconditional, it has to be free of all conditions, including the condition of duration. Unconditional love, therefore, must be free to last however long it lasts, whether that be a moment, a minute, a month, or a lifetime.

Complex love is quite different from simple love. Some people share love with the condition that you share it back. When they say “I love you,” they want to hear you say “I love you too” in return. This is giving and receiving love, love given on the condition of receiving. This works perfectly well as long as both people’s understanding of love and expectations of love are the same, when what I feel when I say “I love you” is the same as what I expect you to feel when you hear me say “I love you”; when what I feel when you tell me “I love you” is the same as what you expect me to feel when you say it. Giving and receiving are equal. Difficulty arises when two people’s understanding and expectation of love are not the same, are unequal. Both your understanding of love and your expectation of love are rooted in your experience of love in childhood.

In her later years, when my mother told me “I love you,” she did so with the need for me to say “I love you too” in return. The difficulty was that the love she offered was different from the love she wanted in return, and, of course, I didn’t know that. The emotional feeling of love she sought from me had to match the emotional feeling of love she felt when her own mother told her that she loved her. That was my mother’s subconsciously programmed understanding of what love feels like: the way her own mother’s love for her made her feel. What my mother offered me, however, when she said “I love you” was a complicated and hidden mixture of energies, emotions, and feelings. It was only years later, after my mother had died, when she visited me in a dream and told me what was in her heart when she offered me her love, that what she was offering became clear:

Her love
Her sadness
Her regret
Her anger
Her guilt
Her belief in not ever having enough in life
Her loneliness

When she was alive, what my mother wanted back from me when she told me “I love you” was the same feeling of love she had once received from her own mother. Sadly, when my mother told me “I love you,” I somehow didn’t trust it. It just didn’t feel like what love should feel like. I had a deep fear that when she said “I love you” she was asking for the right to dump all her life’s pain on me, and that when I said “I love you” in return she was taking it as permission to dump all that stuff on me. When it came to love, we were completely mismatched. Mismatched love not only happens between parents and children, it often happens between adults in relationships.

After she passed, what my mother wanted from me was love in one of its simplest and most beautiful forms: forgiveness. I was prepared to offer her that, and so that was when our love began to became more evenly matched. This is the way it is with love. What it is for one person is not necessarily the same as what it is for another person. We all have different understandings of what love is, many of which are hidden from our conscious understanding of what love is. We all have different expectations of love, many of which are hidden from our conscious mind. This is why, when discussing love, it can be difficult to explain what love is, because love, for each person, is unique.

Apart from differences in the quality of love people can have in their hearts, there can also be a difference in the quantity of love people have in their hearts. The quantity of love you have in your heart and, by extension, the quantity of love you can share with another are also heavily influenced by your family upbringing. Children brought up in strongly loving environments will grow accustomed to sharing large amounts of love. For them, full-on love is the only way. They know of no other amount of love to share. In adulthood they need to be loved fully, and in return they fully love.

Children brought up in poorly loving environments will grow accustomed to sharing small amounts of love. For them, low-level love is the norm. They know of no other amount of love to share. In adulthood they are capable of giving only small amounts of love, and in return they are happy to receive only small amounts of love; they get burned out by the love of people from strongly loving environments, the strength of which overwhelms their heart and causes it to shut down. A person from a strongly loving family in partnership with someone from a poorly loving family may never feel fully loved by their partner. That’s just the way it is; no one is to blame.

It can also happen that adults from very low-level love upbringings may only have enough love in their hearts to love animals. They simply do not have it in their heart to love another human being. This is never to be derided but to be honored for what it is. Similarly, some people do not have a sufficient level of love in their heart to provide the amount of love a child needs. If you only have half a gallon of gas in your tank, you cannot drive your car a hundred miles.

Love not only originates in the heart, or heart chakra, but is found throughout all the chakras, expressing itself in many different ways.

 

First chakra, familial love—love for your children, parents, and siblings

Second chakra, the love of pleasure—the love of going out and having fun; the love of art, artistic creation, and performance; the love of sex

Third chakra, the love of friendship and camaraderie—the love of communication, discussion, philosophy, and learning; the love of mathematics, logic, and form

Fourth chakra, the love of nature—the love of humankind; the love for your partner; the love of freedom

Fifth and sixth chakras, the love you have for spirits, for the dead, and for God

The list is endless. Unlimited!

Feeling the Need for Protection? All You Need Is Love . . .

Protection is, in essence, a form of self-limitation. The initial feeling of a need for protection in massage work can be a valuable teacher, as it forces you to ask two important questions: first, what do I need protection from? (for example, taking on someone’s bad energy or getting burned out); and second, why is this happening to me? This shows that you are not yet fully open to what you are doing and that you have some underlying block, or even fear. If this happens, don’t worry. It’s not at all uncommon when you first start out in massage work or as a novice yoga teacher.

When you discover and recognize the origin of your block or fear, which is always within yourself, then the block is automatically lifted. You no longer need it as a teacher, and therefore the need for protection is no longer needed. This is how you self-evolve during your massage career or your life as a yoga teacher. When you are fully open to what you are doing, your heart is open too. When your heart is fully open in massage and healing or in yoga, its energy—that of unconditional love—will allow you to transmute or neutralize any negative energy that might exist in the body of a client or student. Working with an open heart, there is no need for protection.

The Cycle of Emotional Release in Yoga and Massage

Whether during a yoga practice or a massage treatment, there is a fixed, ten-stage pattern to the cycle of an emotional release of any of the aforementioned emotions. This occurs in two phases: the first phase involves a rising of the emotion, and the second phase is the resolution of the emotion. This pattern is not quite as easy to observe in yoga, as the cycle unfolds slowly, and a single class or self-practice is usually not enough time to allow the cycle to complete. But over a series of yoga asana sessions there are aspects of this cycle that can be observed.

One of the early stages in emotional release during yoga is the experience of physical discomfort that often precedes a rising emotional memory. When this happens, the temptation is often to step off the practice a little to allow any rising sense of discomfort to dissipate, while you return to your comfort zone. The other thing that sometimes happens during a yoga practice is that the overall cycle of emotional release is unintentionally broken into disjointed pieces over a series of individual practices, simply due to the nature and duration of each practice. This leaves the yoga practitioner not always able to “connect the dots” in the overall picture of what is happening, and the practitioner can sometimes be left with feelings of unease in their body that they do not fully understand.

The same cycle of emotional release can be experienced in massage. In massage, however, more time can be given to an emotional release, especially through the guiding hands of a skilled therapist, allowing an entire emotional release to pass through all its stages in a single massage treatment. In such a situation it is easy for a massage client to see how one stage of an emotional release leads to another stage of release, and to experience the different physiological symptoms that characterize each stage of the release. At the end of the massage, the person is left with a full understanding of what happened and why it happened and is not confused by any half-recognized feelings or experiences.

Through emotional release it is possible to see that seemingly different, disconnected physiological and metaphysical experiences in the body—for example, pain in the stomach, tightness in the trapezius muscle, jealousy of another person, and a mostly forgotten childhood—are actually all connected, as they are all symptoms related to a single issue or event. In this example, all the different physiological and metaphysical symptoms stem from something hidden in a long-forgotten childhood. The emotional component, or the emotional-release component, is only one link in the chain of symptoms relating to the forgotten childhood that has been causing various physical discomforts in the body of the person throughout their adult life.

The Ten Stages of Emotional Release

This is an experiential description of the ten stages of complete emotional release. Each stage is characterized by different physiological or metaphysical symptoms, or effects, of the movement of energy. The journey starts with the grosser symptoms of emotional release in phase 1 and ends with the more subtle, or spiritual aspects of emotional release in phase 2. In this way it can be clearly seen how, by following the process of an emotional release, a spiritual awakening or enlightenment can be reached.

To move through one stage of an emotional release to the next, deeper stage of the release, all you need to do is just that: go deeper. Go deeper into whatever way you are presently experiencing the emotional release. If you are currently experiencing pain or discomfort, when you go deeper into it you will meet the next stage of the release coming out to meet you: an abstract sensation. When you go deeper into that abstract sensation, you will meet the next stage of the release coming out to meet you: raw emotion. When you go deeper into a raw emotion, you will meet the next stage coming out to meet you: a specific event or person that triggered the raw emotion. And so on.

There are many methods for going deeper. The way I was taught to go deeper is to focus lightly with your mind on the feeling of discomfort in your body, and while holding your focus there, move your breathing to that area of discomfort. Breathing into the area of discomfort has a metaphysical concertina effect on the discomfort. As you inhale, you hold or compress the discomfort, and as you exhale, you release the discomfort. I was taught to make some kind of reverberating sound on the exhalation to increase the release effect, a vowel sound like oooh, aaah, or eeee. Different teachers use different systems. All work.

Although what follows covers all the stages of an emotional release, when examined more closely it is actually a description of a release of energy rooted in an often hidden or repressed event, the presence of which is connected to a strong emotion.

Phase 1: Buildup and Release

Sometimes during a yoga practice or massage treatment, the energy of an emotion or a hidden event from the past is inadvertently stimulated, thus starting the process of buildup and release. In massage this can happen during the abdominal part of the massage. In yoga it can happen during a sequence of asanas that greatly stimulates the energy flowing through the second or third chakra areas of the body (including the second-chakra asanas cobra, boat, seated forward bend, supine bound angle, dog, cat, seated angle, balancing bear, and frog; and the thirdchakra asanas bow, seated forward bend, upward boat, inclined plane, warrior I, warrior II, and half circle).

Emotional releases usually start unintentionally. For the purpose of describing the full cycle of an emotional release, I am using the point of view of a client who comes for massage who is experiencing some type of physical discomfort. During the massage, emotional energy is unintentionally stimulated, thus starting the cycle of release. I have broken the process down into ten stages:

1. A feeling of discomfort

You arrive for the massage carrying some form of physical discomfort, such as swelling; tightness or hardness in the muscles, internal organs, or connective tissues; tightness in the shoulders; inflammation on the sides of the neck; or a feeling of pressure in a particular part of the body, such as your chest or head. Then during the massage, the cycle of emotional release begins.

2. An abstract sensation

You begin to feel cold, heavy, tired, agitated, dizzy, nauseous, gray or black, etc. You may begin to shiver or your breathing may change dramatically. Upon going deeper by allowing the massage to continue, this stage in the energy release shifts to:

3. An abstract emotion

You begin to feel an emotion, such as anger, sadness, loneliness, or fear. The energy of the emotion is not yet developed enough to tell you what the emotion is connected to. But upon going deeper, the emotion begins to reveal its origin.

4. Emotion with association

As the feeling of anger, for example, grows, something may suddenly come to you, say, a picture of your mother. If you then focus on your mother, she becomes the symbol through which you enter the next stage of the energy release.

5. Emotion associated with a particular event

Focusing on the image of your mother, the event in your life relating to your mother that is causing the pain you currently feel is revealed: “Mother, you sent me away to boarding school! I hate you for doing that!” At this point there is sometimes a strong release of energy, usually an energy that has been building up inside the body for many years. The release can move you to tears, to anger, to shouting and wailing. You may have to get up and move around to help push the energy out of your body. An acute release of energy often causes muscles, tendons, and ligaments to cramp, most commonly in the hands and fingers. Foot cramping during massage is another example of an acute release of energy moving through the foot. In extreme cases an acute release of energy causes such severe cramping that it can lead to a temporary state of catatonia.

Phase 2: Understanding and Resolution

As the first phase of the emotional release subsides with stage five, the discharge of emotional energy, the overall emotional release changes dramatically in form. Whereas stages one through five powered recognition and release—a release of discomfort, a release of memory, and a release of emotion—we enter the second phase, that of healing and understanding. In phase 2, the energy of the release now turns from releasing the past to healing the past. Almost as soon as you release the energy of a hurtful event from your past, your body needs to understand why that event happened. It needs to know the truth that lies behind that event. Seeking answers requires energy, and the energy that motivates you to find the answers comes from the continuing release of emotion in steps six through ten:

6. The need for conscious understanding

“Mother, why did you send me away to boarding school?” The energy from this stage in the overall energy release drives you to find answers. The answers come as:

7. Conscious understanding

“Okay, now I understand why you sent me away to boarding school. Now I can move on from this.” Conscious understanding can come from asking the person who caused you the hurt to reveal the full story behind why they caused you the hurt. Alternatively, it may come through the use of additional professional help, such as counseling, psychotherapy, or family constellation work.

For most people, step six is as far as they need to go in the journey of emotional release. Following a successful series of therapy treatments, most people believe that they are now free of the event that caused the subsequent experiences of emotion, abstract sensation, and discomfort they felt in their body. However, the journey does not always end here. It is not uncommon in massage to be treating a client when suddenly they reexperience an old trauma or event they believed had been dealt with and released years ago. Now unexpectedly, in the course of a massage, it surfaces again. The truth of the matter is, it never left. Some energy relating to the original event is still present in the body. This reveals that there is still some part of the original event hiding even deeper within the person; there remains something waiting to be discovered, some part of the story that needs to be understood. The energy of the original event is still present, and now it causes:

8. The need for a higher-consciousness understanding

“Oh no! Not again! I thought I had dealt with this years ago. Why is it still here? What do I do now?” Indeed, what do you do? If the normal process of conscious understanding is not enough to release your body of a hurtful event from your past, then you need the abnormal process, that of a higher-consciouness understanding. Here is a simplified example of one of the many ways you can get to a higher-consciousness understanding of an event that happened years ago in your life. This is the method my teacher in Chiang Mai taught me when I was seeking deeper answers to a specific event in my own past:

Activating higher-consciousness energy in your body is not that difficult. It usually involves some form of meditation. It can also be achieved with the assistance of an energy worker or spiritual healer who helps you focus your energy and awareness on the energy centers of the body associated with the higher consciousness, the fifth and sixth chakras. When these energy centers are activated, you can feel their presence in your throat and in your forehead, at your third eye. They feel like discs of energy on the surface of your skin, about the size of a silver dollar. Once you have awakened and activated higher-consciousness energy in yourself, you have the ability to connect with the spirit of another person, be they dead or alive, through that energy. It is the same process as distance healing.

There are any number of different ways to connect to another person using higher-consciousness energy. Different shamans, energy workers, or spiritual healers teach different methods of making higher-consciousness energy connections. They all work. There is no one single correct method. Regardless of the method you use in establishing a higher-consciousness connection with the person who caused you a hurt, the real importance lies in the answers you receive from that person through your higher-consciousness connection. The answers will be very different from the kind of answers you would receive in a face-to-face, real-life connection and conversation with that person. The additional information received through a higher-consciousness connection makes you see your life events in a very different light; it forms your higher-consciousness understanding of events.

9. A higher-consciousness understanding

Through a higher-consciousness connection, the events revealed at stage seven are now revealed to you again, but this time in a broader context and in a different light. This is your new, higher-consciousness understanding of events. This stage marks where your understanding of life extends beyond the limits set by the conscious mind. This is where you first begin to understand that a previous hurtful event in your life was part of a long chain of hurtful events that has been running through your family for generations and is not an isolated event that was designed to cause only you pain. An event that once filled you with rage is now regarded with a much deeper understanding: “Ah yes, now I see why you sent me away to boarding school.”

The difference between this level of understanding and the understanding you would get in a face-to-face confrontation or through therapy is the quality of reality you attach to the hurtful event in your life. Traditional therapy tends to focus on feelings, emotions, and conscious-level understanding of the event in question; higher-consciousness therapy uses spiritual energy to reveal and understand the big picture, which includes previously hidden or unknown events. The energy of the original hurtful event at this point is transforming from the gross to the subtle. The result is that you somehow feel the event to be less real than you once experienced it. You feel it less. When it no longer feels real, the need to hold on to it fades. In the end, you let it go completely.

Paradoxically, although you are gaining additional information about the hurtful event in your life, it is also the beginning of the process of letting go. Seeing the big picture of the event is a direct consequence of opening your centers of higher-consciousness understanding.

10. Spiritual understanding

This is the stage when the complete truth behind all the events that happened in the lives of both you and your mother, which led up to her to sending you away to boarding school, is revealed. The final revelation about one’s life through a spiritual understanding is, by its very nature, the antithesis of what you have believed life to be or to have been. One of the functions of the sixth chakra is to turn your understanding of life on its head. You will only understand this if you have awakened your sixth chakra. If you have not yet awakened the stores of higher-consciousness understanding and spiritual understanding to be found in your own body, by opening the fifth and sixth chakras, then the final, spiritual insights will seem completely fanciful to you.

The example I have used in this chapter to describe the full cycle of an emotional release is that of a client coming for massage whose mother previously sent him to boarding school. This fictional client is in reality me. I was the person holding discomforts and hidden emotions in my body, and I was the one who experienced this entire cycle of emotional release and healing.

The Three Levels of Understanding

Here is a simplified version of what I covered in the previous discussion of the ten stages of emotional release, stated in terms of three levels of understanding. Using my previous example of trying to discover why my mother sent me away to boarding school, these three levels are: conscious understanding, higher-consciousness understanding, and spiritual understanding. The insights revealed in each higher level of understanding provide answers to questions that could not be given in the preceding lower level. The full truth is finally revealed on the level of spiritual communication.

Stage seven marked the level of conscious understanding of the event. This understanding resulted after a face-to-face conversation with my mother while she was still alive.

Q: Why did you send me away to boarding school?

A: I only wanted what was best for you. I am sorry it caused you so much hurt. Please forgive me.

A higher-consciousness level of understanding of this event came at stage nine, in which I was able to connect on this level with my mother with the help of my teacher in Chiang Mai, Jasmine Vishnu. At the time, my mother was still living in Ireland.

Q: Why did you send me away to boarding school?

A: I didn’t want you around me.

Q: Why?

A: Because having you around would mean you getting to know me. I didn’t want that.

Q: Why?

A: I did things I am ashamed of.

Q: Like what?

A: I cannot tell you yet. I am not ready.

I took this information into myself but never used it against my mother. What I did do with my mother was return home and ask her in person about our life together when I was young, as I had lost all memory of that part of my life with her. It took me two years to get her to open up about my childhood. All she was able to talk about was how unwell she was around the time of my birth and during early childhood.

By the time I had arrived at stage ten, spiritual understanding, my mother had passed away. She visited me in a series of dreams and meditations, bringing the final answer to my question:

Q: Why did you send me away to boarding school?

A: At one stage, while you were in my womb, I thought about ending my life.

Q: Why?

A: My marriage to your father was not working. It was a complete disaster, but I could not walk away. The only place I could go was back home. I could not do that. I hated my father too much. I could not turn back. I had to stay where I was, with your father in our marriage, but it was such a disaster. I felt completely trapped. I had to try to save my marriage. My plan was to have you. I thought that having a child would work. I thought it would make the marriage work and bring us together. Soon into the pregnancy, however, I knew it wasn’t going to work. Then, when I knew things weren’t going to work out between your father and me, I let you go. I gave up wanting to have you. I wanted you to leave. I even prayed for you to die. That was my plan. Because if you died, then I would have had an excuse to just be left alone. But you didn’t die, so when you were born I didn’t know what to do. I just didn’t know what to do, and that is why I pushed you away and still push you away to this day. I had no one to help me. Your father didn’t want to help me. I had no one. I was alone.

This is a such a simple answer, but one I could never have received from my mother while she was alive. By the time I began asking my mother about her past, she had been on various medications for over forty years to treat bipolar disorder. Her memory of her past was completely gone, or rewritten. There was also no way I could have received these answers in sessions of family therapy with my mother while she was still alive. It took a spiritual connection with my mother after she had passed on to finally reveal the truth.

The investigation at stage seven gave me the answer that my mother had sent me away for my own benefit. But it was the revelation at stage ten that brought me the answer that my mother had sent me away for her own benefit. This turned my awareness of this event completely upside down and released me from much pain.

The first time you attempt this journey to inner truth through energy work and higher-consciousness connection, you will need the services of a guide or teacher properly trained in energy work or spiritual work. However, once you have gone through the journey with a teacher and you fully understand it, you will be able to do it again unaided. The depth of understanding you receive about your life and about life in general is phenomenal. If you are a massage therapist, the level of life understanding you can gain from your own self-development and self-understanding will be transmitted to your client through the energy of your touch. This will allow you to give your client the opportunity, space, support, and trust to discover the same path for him- or herself.

Emotional Release and the Five Koshas

The journey inward through the different manifestations of energy, as described above, is clearly mirrored in the Yoga Vedanta of the five koshas, or energy sheaths that surround the Self. We humans are like a lamp that has five lampshades over our central, pure light, or Self. Each of the lampshades is a different color and density. As the light shines through the lampshades, it is progressively changed in color and nature, such that on the one hand the shades provide the individualized beauty of each lamp, and on the other they also obscure the pure light. The yoga path of Self-realization is one of progressively moving inward through each of those lampshades so as to experience the purity at the eternal center of consciousness, the Self, while at the same time allowing that purity to animate through our individuality. These five levels are the koshas, which translates as “sheaths.”

image

Fig. 3.1. An artistic rendition of the chakras, meridians, and koshas

In figure 3.1, in relation to massage, especially Thai massage, the five koshas are illustrated by Kam Thye Chow, of Lotus Palm, in Montreal, who is one of the most established teachers of Thai massage in the West.

For the purpose of illustration, in the chart below a different color is attributed to each of the koshas.

 Red is attributed to the Annamaya kosha, the physical body.
 Orange is attributed to the Pranamaya kosha, the energy body.
 Yellow is attributed to the Manomaya kosha, the body of memory and conscious mind.
 Green is attributed to the Vijnanamaya kosha, the body of wisdom and higher intellect.
 Blue is attributed to the Anandamaya kosha, the body beyond the mind, or the Spirit.

Although the koshas are shown here to be lying outside of the physical body, this too is only for the purpose of illustration. In reality, the energies to be found within each of the koshas are revealed by journeying inside, going inward, into the physical body, typically through a discipline of self-development such as yoga. As you journey inward through each manifestation of energy, as delineated in the previous section on the ten stages of emotional release, the energy you encounter corresponds to one of the koshas. To illustrate this point, I use the same five colors used by Kam Thye Chow to match my description of the ten-stage journey through the various manifestations of energy in the body, from initial manifestation to final revelation of truth and resolution.

 1.A feeling of pain or discomfort in a particular part of the body.
 2.An abstract sensation: you begin to feel cold or heavy, light, or tired.
 3.An abstract emotion: you begin to feel angry or fearful.
 4.Emotion with association: as your anger grows, you may suddenly “see” someone.
 5.Emotion associated with a particular event: “You sent me to boarding school!”
 6.Need for conscious understanding: “Why did you do that to me?”
 7.Conscious understanding and forgiveness: “Okay, now I understand.”
 8.Need for higher-consciousness understanding: “Oh no, not this again! What do I do now?”
 9.Higher-consciousness understanding: events revealed again in a broader context.
10Spiritual understanding: the complete truth behind all events is revealed.

The point I wish to illustrate here is that the yogic path toward Self-realization can also be attained through the full examination of energy in forms of bodywork such as ayurveda, lomi lomi, martial arts, shiatsu, or Thai yoga massage, as well as other disciplines. All approaches lead to the same goal.

Letting Go and Finding Balance

By journeying in through the layers of your energy, you end up letting go of much of your life’s baggage and finding true balance in life. But in reality you do not let go of anything; rather, what happens is that the world lets go of you—in other words, the world has less of an effect on you.

In the beginning, when the need to journey starts because of the physical, mental, or emotional pain of your circumstances, it is as if your entire universe is defined by the sum of these day-to-day painful experiences. By journeying inward, your universe widens and expands. And as it does so, and as you take in new sensations, new teachings, and new understandings, you achieve a greater balance in life, and the impact of what was once painful in your life reduces in strength.

Using our previous color scheme as an illustration of the journey, we start out without an understanding of life’s events, a state dominated by the pain of unawareness (red). As we journey progressively inward, toward the true, authentic self, the pain of incarnate life gradually is replaced by deeper levels of awareness, such that we arrive at a state of balance (the five colors, or koshas, in balance), as illustrated below.

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As we move toward balance in the five koshas, we lessen our identification with the physical body,a state dominated by the pain of unawareness.