Despite the fact that yoga and meditation have moved from   suspicious hippie culture to activities firmly planted in mainstream middle class American life, and that energy healing practices such as Reiki and acupuncture are gaining credibility in Western medicine, I still think it is God's cosmic joke on me that I practice Reiki and am a firm believer in the unseen energetic world around us.   I'm a university professor, with all that implies about a belief in rationality and the power of the analytical mind—I've   taught critical thinking, reading and writing for over 15 years.   My training is in precision, clarity, well reasoned conclusions based on impeccable evidence.   Not waving my hands around someone's invisible aura, clearing their invisible chakras and blowing invisible healing energy through their mental, emotional and etheric   astral bodies in order to help heal and balance their invisible energy fields.

 

And yet.     And yet this invisible world, this healing practice that sounds so ridiculous to my rational mind, is absolutely real.  

 

Two of the most commonly talked about,   and probably misunderstood, components of energy healing are chakras and auras.   These, along with energy cords, are some of the basic elements   of the human energy field.   They serve many functions, one of which is to store   patterns of emotions and thoughts until we are ready to release them. It is through our emotional and mental patterns, held in our energy and played out through our feelings and thoughts that we create the reality we experience.  

 

Think about it: how many of your thoughts and feelings that you had today are similar, if not identical, to the ones you had yesterday? I'm sure it was a lot, perhaps as high as 80%?   We live in habitual patterns of response.   For most people and situations in our lives we don't respond creatively in the moment. Instead, we automatically go into whatever pattern we've created around this person and scenario and play the same scene out, over and over again.   The details may change, but the energy—of anger, frustration, worry, anxiety, etc.—remains pretty much exactly the same.    

 

At any time, however, we can also reprogram ourselves into new patterns.   We have, every day, the opportunity to live out pretty much the same thoughts and feelings that we experienced yesterday, or to choose something completely different. Making changes on the energy level helps us to create those changes in our physical lives.

 

At a basic level, our aura is our own personal energy field.   We make jokes   about auras and the people who believe in them, but all of us have experiences of our own aura at work in our lives. For example, intensely liking or disliking someone we've just met, based on nothing but an immediate sense we get, or feeling that another person is staring at us behind our back and turning around and finding it is true, or thinking about a friend 5 seconds before he calls you on the phone.   These are all examples of our aura in action. We sense other people's energy and the effect it will have on us before we know anything else about them.   Our auras store and contain our emotional and mental patterns (the thoughts and feelings we hold onto about other people, situations, events) and through it our energy reaches out towards others and inwards to affect our physical body and life.  

 

As this energy contained in our auras moves into our lives to affect   our health and well being,   it passes through one or more of our chakras. Chakras   are the energy centers where we process and transfer this life force   energy   and stored emotional patterns, to manifest in our lives. They are connected with qualities such as our love, will, passion,   communication, sense of security, and spiritual awareness, as well as physical symptoms and mental thought patterns.       Our chakras can be opened or closed, in balance with one another or filled with too much or too little energy, depending on the characteristics of the energy itself and the emotional, mental and spiritual patterning it contains.

 

Our knowledge of chakras are based in ancient   Hindu philosophy, but awareness of the chakras has been present in most non-Western cultures for thousands of years. Caroline Myss' book Anatomy of the Spirit does a wonderful job connecting chakra energy with the Christian sacraments and the Kabbalah's Tree of Life, tying them all together and explaining their relationship with the stages of spiritual maturity and personal growth.   I highly recommend it for people wanting to understand how the field of energy healing corresponds to both Western religious tradition and Western emphasis on self-growth and psychological well-being.

 

  Think of our energy field—our aura—as electrical energy running through power lines.   The source of this energy is Source, the universal power generator.   All of us are connected to this Source of energy and therefore to each other energetically, through this shared origin.   As the electricity gets to a neighborhood, our chakras act like transformer boxes that direct the flow of electricity to the individual houses (in this metaphor, all the houses in one neighborhood are   one person). If the transformer is operating efficiently, the same amount of power is available to each house (chakra) on a street.   If something is wrong, the box might send too much power to one house, not enough to another and could blow a fuse and stop working altogether at a third.  

 

Our chakras perform much the same function in our lives—if you are hurt, it might shut down the flow of love coming into and out of your heart. If you are in a creative frenzy, you might have an overwhelming amount of energy pouring out in your painting, for example, with less available to think about routine tasks you need to get done.   All of our chakras open and close on a daily basis, but when we live in any single energetic state for too long, a temporary condition becomes an energy pattern and we become emotionally, mentally, physically or spiritually stuck.  

 

Energy Cords describe the way we connect and hold on energetically to relationships with other people, to beliefs we carry, to expectations we have about the way the world works.   They represent the ways we stay stuck in attachments and expectations that we have outgrown. They are almost always, except between parents and children (and even then too frequently) used to grasp hold of something   or someone relentlessly, and not let go, no matter what the circumstances.   There are healthy cords, such as the attachment between parents and dependent children, but energetically speaking, healthy relationships between adults do not manifest as cords.  

 

Cords are therefore most often energetic descriptions of our vampire nature, the parts of us that want something from someone, or believe we can't survive without that person, or still holds onto the emotional state of a relationship long after the relationship has ended. They are the part of us that can't accept what happened or who someone is, forgive if necessary, and move on.

 

We can cord with people living and dead, people currently in our lives and those long gone from it.   We can cord with who we wanted them to be, who we wanted to be with them, what they gave us and what they didn't.   We can cord onto ourselves. Other people can cord onto us and we may not know it --but often we sense it.   Statements such as   "my father always…." Or, "my ex-wife drives me crazy when she…" or "he did…to me" are almost always statements that reflect energy cords, the way we hook into others and want them to change, or stay connected to others because we can't let go of what they did to us.

 

I'm quite prepared to think of chakras and cords as metaphorical descriptions   of psychological conditions and emotional states.   I'm an English Ph.D., I love metaphors.   Except for one thing: metaphors, while symbolically rich, are physically inert. When I put my hands 5 inches over someone's closed heart chakra and open it through healing energy, and then that person (who has their eyes closed and can't see or physically feel what I'm doing) starts crying over an old relationship she thought she was long over, or if I put my hands over a woman's shut down 2 nd chakra, directly over her reproductive organs,   and hear her body screaming, then later find out that she has a painful IUD inserted that is causing her monthly pain, these aren't metaphoric events.   They are physical manifestations caused by shifts in stored energy patterns.  

 

One of the ways to create change in our lives is to unhook the cords, clear the chakras and balance our energy fields.   This disrupts our stored energy patterns, our habitual ways of responding to people, situations and relationships. Unhooking the cords and freeing the energy does create   change—but it isn't magic. We must be prepared to follow through, filling the new energy with new thought patterns, new beliefs, new activities. We must consciously catch ourselves when we fall into old story lines and replace them with new thoughts.     This is what the Law of Attraction people mean when they say to believe the new thought is true before it literally is, to act and feel happy about money even when you are broke, to give thanks for the new relationship before it has manifested in your life.   We must shift the old energy patterns before the new energy can take root in our lives.

 

I recently taught a Reiki One and Two class that included a mother and daughter. Two other students were practicing Reiki separately on the mother and daughter, and each felt their   person's energy was stuck at the third chakra level.   Both students did the things I suggested to clear the energy, but it didn't move. I put my hands over first the mother's 3 rd chakra and then the daughter's.   As I did that, I felt a huge sadness and fear rise up in my heart and what felt like an electrical shock through both my hands.

 

  I told the pair that I thought that what seemed like individual blocked energy was actually a cord they had connected between them. The third chakra meant that they had bonded over issues of identity—the daughter is dependent on her mother in several ways, including employment and emotional support. The mother gets a great deal of her identity from her daughter's need of her.   The questions that I voiced aloud was "who am I if I don't need my mother this way anymore?" "Who am I if my daughter doesn't need me like this?" And the fear I felt in my heart represented the underlying emotional component: will she still love me if I change the way we interact with each other?   As I voiced these out loud, both mother and daughter started to cry.   The rest of us in the class were affected as well—after all, what mother/daughter dyad doesn't contain issues of identity and belonging?  

 

They weren't ready to release the cord in class.   And that's just fine. Maybe they will each work individually on their own identity and release them on their own.   Maybe they aren't ready yet to change their way of relating to each other.   Releasing energy patterns is transformative work, and that can be difficult and emotionally intense.   You don't have to do it.   We all know this—we won't let go of habits of relating and thinking about people until we are ready to let go.   It's enough sometimes to know that blocked energy is there, and to have faith that once the energy is let go of, the pattern released and something new allowed to grow instead, a new life will begin.   But until that new life is well underway, it is often an uncertain void.   You have to be ready to live in that   before you allow real change to transform your life.

 

 

 

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