Chapter 3
Centring
Many of us think our way through life. We use our brain to navigate everything: where we are going, what we want to eat, what we choose to wear. We even decide how we feel. We live in an intellectual world surrounded by things to stimulate our minds, and if we don’t have a project, a hobby or a problem to work through, our brain goes back to our past, or flies into our future and ‘chooses’ something from there for us to become preoccupied with.
When we tend to be in our heads most of the time, it’s as if our Life Force Energy follows, moving up to be more in our head as well, because that’s where we’re focusing our attention. Sometimes our Life Force Energy moves up and out of our head, and outside our body too.
Think about it – have you ever felt like you haven’t fully arrived somewhere yet? Or notice that when you drift off into your thoughts, you lose connection with your body? How about right now – do you feel that you are fully present in your physical body? Do you know what your feet are doing? Do you know what your legs are doing? Now that you’re thinking about it, did you notice a shift in the energies of your body? Are you more aware now of your feet? Start to notice how much you drift, and know that your Life Force Energy also drifts with you.
Let’s get started with some basic Energy Healing exercises!
To begin your healing practice you will need to create what I call a space of love for yourself. Some people call this a sacred space, but love is sacred, so it’s the same thing. A space of love is a quiet space where you feel completely safe, and will be undisturbed. You can go all out and burn a candle or incense, play soft quiet music, dim the lights. But you don’t have to do any of that if you don’t want to. Feeling safe in your space of love is the most important thing.
It’s best to treat all these Energy Healing exercises as work and to be wide awake for them so you can experience them to the full. Sit up straight with your feet on the ground, or sit on the ground if you prefer. However, if you want to use any of the exercises in this book to help you fall asleep, your intention will then be to fall asleep, rather than to do healing work. You can go ahead and do them lying down, but make sure that you also do the exercises while awake so you don’t just sleep through them all!
You can set a space of time around your exercises too if you want to, it’s completely up to you. Time can help you feel secure in your space of love as well. If 15 minutes feels too long, try 10, and remember that even three minutes is better than no minutes! If you choose to set a time boundary around an exercise, know that sometimes doing that can help you go deeper into it. It’s as if you give your mind permission to concentrate fully on the work at hand as it will only be for a set amount of time. Wonderfully, sometimes after an exercise things don’t seem as urgent or as important as they did before, so this helps with stress management too! If you set an alarm, make sure you use a soft tone so that you don’t get a shock from a harsh buzzer breaking into your relaxed state.
Your space of love can be used as a setting for all the exercises you do from the book, or for any type of ongoing healing practice that you may choose to create for yourself. You can set a space of love just to experience the different energy you feel while inside it.
- Take some time to create your space of love. Set your alarm if you wish to set a time boundary.
- Set an intention to sit in the space of love just to be with yourself, just as you are.
- Sit for as long as you feel comfortable and breathe, relax and let your mind wander, not having to do anything, just being present to whatever is going on for you.
- Don’t get caught up in thoughts. If you do, just disconnect and bring yourself back to your breathing, back to being in the space.
- Notice how you feel – do you feel different now?
- Come back to yourself. Feel your feet on the ground, and bring your awareness back to the room.
What was that like? Was it difficult just to be still or was it easy? Do you feel refreshed? Calmer? Or more agitated? What would you like to change about your space of love, if anything?
Notice that this is your starting point, before we get deeper into the healing work. If you were feeling nerves, agitation, anything like that, it’s OK. It’s natural. In your normal daily life do you tend to avoid quiet, peaceful times? Do you always have to listen to the radio or television, or be on the phone or on Facebook? Try this exercise again with a time boundary, or without one if you used one already, and notice if it feels different to you. Just learn, there is no right or wrong, there just is what there is. We start from this place.
‘I don’t feel happy or joyous. It’s been about five years since I really felt alive. I want that feeling back. I need something to change but I don’t know how to do it.’ Tucking a loose strand of hair behind her ear, Carol looks distant and sad.
‘When was the last time you felt connected to your body?’ I ask. ‘I mean, really in your body, fully present, here and now?’
‘Hmmm… I don’t actually remember.’
‘Let’s start by introducing you back to your body, saying hello to it, no pressure to do anything, no pressure to be anything – would that be OK?’
She sits up in her chair, but moving slightly back and away from me. ‘I’m not sure – what does that mean exactly?’
‘Well, your body feels, that’s its job. You think thoughts, but your body feels the emotions that go with them and only by processing the thought and emotion together can you truly embody change. I suppose the main problem is if you’ve not felt anything in a while, you can become afraid of what it is you may feel when you come back to the body experience. It’s perfectly safe – you don’t have to do it all today.’
‘Maybe. I’ll think about it,’ she says.
It can be difficult to reconnect with your body if you have been away from it for a while, so here I suggest a very gentle exercise, coming back into your body and saying hello, as if it’s an old friend whom you have not seen in a long while. Doing this might bring up difficult feelings that you may have for your body; you may not be happy with parts of your body, or you may feel discomfort being in your body owing to physical pain. Becoming centred in your body is very important though, because it’s only here, in your body, that you can access your full potential.
You can do this exercise in segments over a longer period if it becomes overwhelming, or you can take some time to go deeply into it. If you feel anxious just thinking about doing this, take out your journal and check in with yourself. Ask yourself why you feel anxious. What’s going on for you? Go outside for a walk, clear your head, then come back and try again.
- Sit comfortably in your space of love. Have an open posture, no folded arms or crossed legs. Close your eyes. Bring your awareness to yourself, to where you are focusing your attention right now.
- Breathe.
- Imagine that your attention, your focus of awareness, is a ball of light. It is usually outside your body, so if you locate it outside your body, that’s perfectly OK!
- Give yourself a minute to settle with this, and you may notice that as you pay more attention to this centre of awareness, the ball of light in your mind’s eye may get brighter and stronger! Just let it be whatever it is.
- Gather up all of this light that is you, outside your body, and invite it to come and sit at the top of your head, over your crown. Notice as you do this you may feel a shift in your energy.
- Imagine this ball of light has moved up and is now directly over your head, shining brightly there, bringing you more awareness of your actual head!
- Breathe, and allow yourself to settle like this for a moment, and give thanks to your energy for taking part in this exercise.
- Now with your next breath, invite this ball of light to come gently through your skull, and into your head. Don’t worry, it won’t hurt. Feel it dropping in, and imagine the light shining from the inside of your head, out through your eyes, washing your brain clear of negativity, opening up your ears.
- How do you feel doing this? Breathe, and keep your focus and awareness on your head, on the light inside your head. As it shines more brightly, you relax more deeply with every breath. Go slowly, feel every bit of this if you can.
- You’re still not centred right now. You’re in your head! Better than being outside it. Does it feel different to you? You can stop here if you want to and come back and try again another time.
- Breathe. On your next out breath, imagine your centre of awareness, your ball of light, dropping down into your mouth. Feel it shining out from behind your teeth. Bring your awareness more deeply into your mouth, your tongue and your cheeks. Stay in your mouth for as long as you feel comfortable; imagine that you open your mouth and the light shines out. Imagine this light is cleansing and purifying the cells in your mouth, tongue, cheeks and even your teeth.
- Breathe softly and deeply. Allow your centre of awareness, the beautiful ball of light, to drop down gently into your throat. Notice if your throat tightens up as you do this, and tell yourself ‘it’s OK’. Breathe with the light, and notice if you relax, or if you don’t. Feel your attention and awareness still with your throat, then bring it to the back of your throat, to your neck, and imagine the light is feeding the cells in your throat and neck and they’re getting a ‘drink’ of healing from you.
- Breathe again, and feel your feet on the ground, bring your awareness to your throat again and now allow the ball of light to drop down into your chest. Become aware of your shoulder blades, the tops of your arms. Notice how you feel, how your chest feels – is it tight? If it is tight, stay with it and breathe a little bit longer, give yourself permission to relax, and enjoy this sensation of being in your chest.
- If it helps, you can imagine that you have armour around your chest, and each time you breathe, the light that you are shining melts the armour, and you feel more free and open. If this feels scary to you that’s OK too; perhaps this virtual armour is a shield you are carrying as protection from the outside world. Remind yourself that you are in a space of love, and you are safe. See if that helps. Again, you can stop here if you don’t want to do any more, and come back later and try again.
- Breathe, and allow the light to drop down to the centre of your chest, to your breastbone. This is your heart centre. Breathe, and imagine the light inside you lighting up your rib cage, breathe big and strong and then relax the breath, soften and notice how you feel.
- Normally, when at the heart centre of the body, people feel more centred. How do you feel now? Maybe write it down. I see the whole body as the centre, the sky as the above, and the ground as the below. So for me, centring isn’t truly complete until you are in your whole body.
Ready to keep going?
- Breathe and get your bearings. Make sure that you’re actually still at your heart centre. There could be a tendency for you to shift back upwards as you become more familiar with the feeling. If so, bring yourself gently back down again, and you’ll notice that the more often you do this, the easier and the quicker it gets.
- Drop your focus of awareness, your ball of light, downwards to just above your bellybutton. Use your breath to do this as before. This is the part of the body that most people are very conscious of; they hold that belly in tight!!
- Remember that you’re in your safe space now, you may need to tell yourself that it’s all OK, and that you’re fine just as you are in this moment. Again, you might have trouble believing that, but do your best to relax with yourself, with your body. You can change anything if you really want to; perhaps getting to know yourself at this deeper, physical level, will help you make some changes too, if that’s what you want to do.
- Soften and relax your stomach, let it all hang out! Nobody’s looking!!
- When you’re ready, imagine the ball of light, the centre of your focus and awareness, dropping down to just below your bellybutton. This is where many people hold the most anxiety, so go gently here, feel your feet on the ground, and breathe with yourself. Slow down if you need to. Bring your awareness into your belly, into your lower back, into your spine. Just feel what you feel, and know that it’s all OK. Again, you can stop if you want to and come back later for more.
- Breathe, and drop down into your pelvis. Imagine the ball of light splits into two parts, each part moving into one of your hips. You have two smaller balls of light, one in each hip now, shining brightly; you might become more aware of the chair you are sitting in when you do this. Let these balls of light gently and slowly move down your legs at the same time, moving into your thighs and down to your knees. Imagine the balls of light now moving from your knees, down the front of your legs, together and at the same time, into your ankles and then into your feet. Imagine your foot bones lighting up, touching the floor.
- Breathe. You are centred in your body now.
‘How do you feel now?’ I ask Carol, after doing the body reconnection exercise with her.
‘Different. Not really sure… heavier, but much more peaceful.’
‘It’s funny how we’re not allowed to feel heavy, as if being heavy is something bad. It’s not bad, it’s how it feels to be in our body, until you get used to it!’
‘Yes, that’s what it is,’ says Carol with a smile. ‘I’m in my body! Wow!’
Being centred in your body is a great place to be when you have to make decisions, think clearly or be present for other people. If this is the first time you’ve felt like you’ve been in your body in a long while, I recommend you try this exercise every day for a few days to settle into it before continuing with the rest of the work in this chapter. And if it takes you a few tries to complete the whole exercise in one go, that’s wonderful work, well done!
Notice what brings you right back up and out of your body again! A loud noise outside? Or a thought? Maybe you could check in with yourself at different times of day, notice where your focus of awareness is and pull it back into your body. It gets easier the more you do it. You will find that after a while, doing this becomes second nature to you, and that you have more awareness, and are more able to be present in the moment. It’s a gift!
When you connect to your centre, you have access to your intuition. Your intuition is part of the very fabric of your being, your soul essence, the Life Force Energy that makes you, you. Images are the way that our soul speaks to us. The soul has no language; words are something that our minds created. For everyone, the experience of communicating with his or her intuition is different. Some people see an actual image before their eyes, some get a taste in their mouth, a shiver down their spine, or hear an inner voice, while others experience a sudden knowingness. You probably already know how your inner wisdom reveals itself to you, but you may also be an expert at avoiding listening to it.
Our brain is impatient and likes to jump in and guess before we actually get a chance to really connect. This is something you need to unlearn. Before you can truly believe that the wisdom you get from your intuition is a real message from your Self and not just something you’ve made up in your head, you need to know what a ‘yes’ and a ‘no’ feel like. Are you ready to do this? Be as real with yourself as you can, as this will aid your authenticity and integrity in your healing work.
- Create your space of love, with the intention to feel a ‘yes’ and a ‘no’.
- Sit, breathe and relax. If you need to, come more into your body using the centring exercise, until you feel as if you’ve arrived.
- Work on a yes first. Tell your body you want to hear/feel/know a yes.
- Ask a question to which you know the answer is yes, such as ‘Is my name…’? ‘Do I live at…’? Ask if your family are your family. If your favourite book is the one you love best. Ask as many times as you need to in order to feel the yes, learn the yes, resonate with it, recognize it.
- Then work on the no. Ask yourself something that you know is a no, such as ‘Am I SCUBA diving right now?’ Think of as many questions as you can where the answer is obviously a no and ask yourself those – notice how the no feels different in your stomach, in your chest.
- Now breathe and centre, letting go of the thoughts. This is clearing a space, like cleansing your palate at dinner. Now say out loud ‘yes yes yes yes yes’ and notice how that feels, if it maps to what you were feeling earlier. Let the wave of ‘yes’ shift away from you, come back to centre. Now try with a ‘no no no no no’, and again, map that, anchor the feeling into yourself so you will recognize it later.
- Now really use your intuition by asking a question that you don’t know the answer to. Not a serious question, but one you are interested in knowing the answer to, such as ‘Am I making all this stuff up?’ or ‘Am I feeling OK right now?’ Wait and feel your body’s response, your heart’s response, your gut’s response. Is the yes and no response clearer now?
- Don’t pressure yourself for an answer, your system is only getting used to having your full attention and it might jam up! It might also jam up if you ask the most serious questions first, like ‘Am I on track with my life?’ or ‘Should I leave my job?’ Give yourself time to grow into this, practising it with any choice you need to make, or any question you know has a yes or no answer. Confidence using this yes/no intuition exercise will come over time, as you get the results you expect.
Your heart is the seat of your emotions. On a good day, your heart centre shines its light to the world, radiating love. On a not-so-good day your heart centre can shut down and hide from the world, hoping nobody sees it. We can very quickly disconnect from our heart centre, and get back up into our heads, into our minds, thinking about how we should feel, telling ourselves how we do feel, without actually knowing how we really feel. And if something should hurt or upset us it’s very easy to shut our heart centre down, although not so easy to wake it up again.
Cynthia’s boyfriend Michael betrayed her, but even after forgiving him her heart shut down, and months later, when she thought she was ready to move on with her life, her heart still felt the pain.
‘It’s like I feel dead inside sometimes, like the colours have drained out from the world. Nothing seems to bring me joy. I’m with a crowd of friends, they’re laughing, and I’m laughing too. But I’m not really laughing, not laughing on the inside. I don’t remember the last time I really felt happy.’
Having a closed heart can make you feel disconnected from life. Energy Healing can help awaken your heart, help you feel more connected and bring the colours back into your day. But you have to feel safe. It comes back to being authentic, being congruent. If you have a closed heart because of years of abuse, you have to make sure you’ve worked through the issues in your mind that stop you moving forward. Energy Healing can still help soften the mind, soften the emotions, but it can be a long process.
Now we are going to reconnect with the heart. If you get caught up in your thinking, you are getting distracted from the work. Ask yourself if what you see/hear/imagine is real, wait for your yes or your no. If it’s a yes, keep going. If it’s a no, regroup, centre yourself and start again. This takes practice.
Our brain has a lot to tell us, and we do need to pay equal attention to the mind, the heart and the soul. Nobody gets left behind! Reassure yourself that you will listen to all of it, but this time, it’s your heart’s turn to speak to you.
- Create your space of love and make sure you feel safe.
- Set your intention to reconnect with your heart, to be gentle with yourself.
- Give yourself permission to go as deeply as you feel comfortable, and to stop if you need to.
- Sit with open body posture, check in with yourself and ask yourself if you are feeling nervous about doing this. If you feel nerves or tightness in your stomach, tell yourself it’s OK. Go at your own pace.
- Imagine your focus of awareness, the ball of light, just as before. Bring it into your body, just like before. Take as long as you need to, and you can stop when you reach your heart centre.
- Breathe and feel your feet on the ground. If you are feeling light-headed at this point, continue with the exercise like before, bringing the ball of light down into your pelvis, down into your legs and into your feet. Then bring your awareness back up into your heart.
- When you feel connected to your heart centre, breathe and relax even more deeply. Open up your chest. Imagine the armour or protection you carry around you is melting away.
- Now step into your imagination and visualize a garden. It could be one that you have visited or seen before, or it could just be one that materializes in front of your mind’s eye. It’s a beautiful garden, and at the back of the garden is a flower; this is the flower of your heart.
- Move towards the flower as if it is an emotional being and you don’t want to frighten it. Notice what type of flower it is, and whether the petals are open or closed. Ask permission to sit, and then when you feel it’s OK, imagine that you sit down beside the flower. Look at it with kind eyes, appreciating the things that this flower has been through, the pain and the trauma, the fear and the anxiety. You are a bringer of hope, you bring with you love, and healing. Ask the flower if it’s OK to heal now, and see if it feels right. Breathe, and imagine that this flower is breathing with you, in and out, in and out.
- As you’re breathing in and out, both of you breathing together, you can visualize a glow of healing light coming down from the sky, through the top of your head, down through your body and outwards from your heart centre. This healing light is silvery gold. It’s beautiful high-vibrational energy and feels like champagne bubbles. It flows around you, through you and across to the flower. Helping you both to soften, relax and heal.
- On the out breath, all the stress and tension you’re both carrying flows to the ground. On the in breath, new, fresh energies come in and feed your soul. And you’re looking at the flower, and the flower is looking at you, and you’re breathing together. Your heart is opening, along with the flower.
- If there are any blemishes, tears or sore patches on the petals of the flower, see them healing and repairing themselves with the healing light. If the stem looks stark, visualize the healing light feeding your flower and the stem thickening up, fresh new leaves growing on it.
- Ask the flower what it needs from you. Does it need some quiet time to rest? Is there anything you can do in the physical world, the day-to-day life, that would help your heart feel better? Wait and listen.
- Now, give thanks. Visualize the healing light dissolving away gently, leaving you both revitalized and glowing. It’s almost as if you bow to the flower, and the flower bows back to you. It’s time to go. Put your hand on your heart and imagine yourself standing up to leave the garden. Tell the flower you’ll come back and visit again, and visualize yourself leaving the garden; as you do this, come back into your body gently, and back into the room, into your space of love.
- Take a moment or two to reorient yourself. Notice how you are feeling. You might want to write down what comes to mind, what the flower said. You might want to draw a picture of your flower, or find a picture of it on the Internet and use it on your phone as a screensaver to remind you that your heart does have the capacity to open.
If your heart flower opened only a little bit, healed only a little bit, it’s a great result. If your heart flower acknowledged your presence and breathed with you, that’s also a wonderful thing. And if all that happened was that you got into the garden and saw there was a flower there, then that’s also wonderful. Even if you got to the garden and there was no flower, that’s still a good first step. Come back again tomorrow and wait, the flower may be too upset to show its face just yet. Trust me, we have very high expectations, and that can be the pressure that breaks the healing process. Step back from what you expect, and be with what actually is.
By your showing up, your heart learns to trust that you do actually care, and it shows you a little bit more of itself every time.
As you get more familiar with yourself, with your intuition and your heart, you will notice all of the things that affect it that you may not have been aware of before. Remember Sandra with her job? She realized that connecting into heavy, slow, group energies was making her sick. You may also begin to realize that the group energy you are exposed to has the same effect on you.
This next exercise is one you can do when you are surrounded by other people, and find yourself caught up in their emotions. This is difficult to do if you have not spent time centring yourself in your own space of love, so if this exercise appeals to you, make sure you spend lots of time learning how to get centred when you’re on your own first.
You can use visualizations to speak to your soul, to give it an instruction, depending on your intention. So in the case where there are people around that are upsetting you, you can visualize a bubble surrounding you, disconnecting you from their emotional energies, and lifting your vibration. By being strong in the visualization you’re actually telling your soul you want to disconnect from the other people, and it will listen to you and do it! It’s remarkable.
You don’t actually create a real bubble around you. What happens is that you reorganize your biofield energetically, pull your energy in and become more consolidated, and at the same time you push out the energy you don’t want and that helps you feel stronger.
Your bubble can shift and change in your mind’s eye – the colours and the texture of the bubble can be different depending on the situation, your imagination, or the energies that are involved. Let it be what it is without trying to influence it, it could surprise you! It might not even be a bubble at all – I have a client who told me he imagines himself as a tank when he walks down dark alleyways, a big strong tank with armour and a gun facing outwards. He said that it makes him feel much stronger and safer, and that nobody ever approaches him when he does that.
You can do this exercise quietly while still paying attention to what is going on around you, and the great thing about this is nobody will know you’re doing it. It’s very empowering to be able to push away the heavy energies that upset you. It helps you get your focus and take your power back from a situation.
This next exercise takes it one step further; try it and see how it feels. You can then choose to do the short exercise when you feel you need to and the longer one (below) when you’re at home and you have more time.
- Set your intention to create a disconnection between you and any heavy energies around you that are not yours.
- Locate your centre of focus and awareness. If you have trouble doing this just ask your Life Force Energy to come back to the centre of focus and awareness (try it – it really works!).
- Using your intention, draw the centre of focus and awareness closer to your physical body and feel your energy coming back to you from the others in the room. You can draw it into your heart, your head, your stomach, wherever feels appropriate to you at that time. (Like a quick version of centring – but this is by no means a way to do the other exercise quickly! It’s more like an emergency response.)
- Visualize a bubble around you, 365 degrees. Even if people are standing close to you, that’s OK, your bubble is energetic. They may even feel it and move a little further away from you.
- Make sure the bubble in your mind’s eye is strong and clear, so you can see out of it, breathe inside it and see that there are no tears in it. Check the quality and strength of the bubble, particularly behind your back, too, as we tend not to check there so much.
- Now breathe, and feel your feet on the ground. As you breathe, imagine you’re pushing any energy that is not yours outside the boundary of the bubble. It might take a few breaths to feel like you’ve really cleared a space for yourself. You might find yourself getting light-headed, so place your feet on the ground and slow down the breathing.
- Notice how you feel. Now if you think the bubble is too small, breathe and use your imagination to tell your Life Force Energy, your soul, to expand the size of your bubble until you feel more comfortable.
- Over time, the bubble will dissolve away as you will lose your awareness of it, and your energy will mix and match with that of the environment again. You need to be constantly centring yourself and putting energy into making the bubble for it to be active. As you do your healing work you will expand naturally by yourself, and you will notice that you don’t need to create a bubble of protection around you any more.
Centring is very important to learn, and once you have worked with all the exercises in this chapter and are comfortable doing them, you can move onto the next principle of Energy Healing: Grounding.
Don’t be afraid to come back and revisit these exercises if you need to – all these aspects of healing go hand in hand and it’s important to get them all working together.