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This is how awareness of your energy can help heal your mind, body & life

dianamariachapin

Call Diana at 207-249-2261

I looked around me, in the sea of 1200 people and I realized everyone here seemed like a perfectly “ordinary” person.

And we were: there was no single demographic, no common identity other than human. 

We represented every skin pigmentation, the expanse of educational backgrounds, every point on the monetary spectrum from financially impoverished to incredibly wealthy. 

We were aged 7 to 92, and we were from farms and rural outposts, the world’s greatest cities and everything in between.  We were male, female and those who identified differently from the binary order.   

Some of us had travelled the world over and others, this was one of a few privileged trips beyond the familiar life-long existence in a single place.

We were all sorts of spiritual and not spiritual at all.  We were scientists and mystics, the seekers, the finders and the lost.

We had birth defects, were mentally impaired by injury and were brilliant.  We were clear-thinking and mentally and emotionally disrupted by anxiety and depression. 

Some of us were speed walkers, marathon runners and big mountain hikers, others were bound to wheelchairs and walkers and medical devices I’d never seen before, physically limited by diseases like Multiple Sclerosis, advanced Lyme Disease, the degeneration of age or injury, or impaired by mystery illnesses that had no known origin.

We were anorexic and overweight, chronically stressed and naturally peaceful.  We were vegans and meat-eaters, drinkers and smokers and in recovery.

We were from all parts of the world…well, many parts: participants from 121 countries gathering for a week-long healing retreat in Indian Wells, California, in February 2020. 

Beyond all our labels we were all ultimately seeking the same things: healing, relief, wholeness, clarity, the mystical. We were unified by the idea of our own personal transformation, the evolution of humanity and the expansion and elevation of human consciousness. 

We had the idea that if we could heal our self, we could in turn affect the whole of humanity: heal our part of the whole, and thereby, take part in healing the whole.

It seemed we were united by being more at peace and bringing more peace into the world as individuals and as a collective.

Becoming awareness and entering receiving mode

We laid down in meditation, over a thousand of us, spread shoulder-to-shoulder on the floor of the conference center’s great ballroom, which felt the size of a football field.  Our meditation guide—a genius, a master meditator, a mystic, a brilliant scientist, and to me, the greatest global leader of our time—Dr. Joe Dispenza spoke into the heavenly abyss of the low-lit room and we each navigated a journey of our own inner wonderland and simultaneously connected to the energy of the collective in the room. 

Toward the end of our meditation something very special and interesting happened. It started slowly at first. 

A woman on the other side of the room from me started giggling and then burst out a little laugh.  After a pause she chuckled and snickered.  But then she just couldn’t contain herself.  She started laughing and even sobbing a little the way we do when we laugh so hard we cry. 

The people around her started to giggle and a few people in random spots around the room did too. 

I thought this unfolding was amusing and kind of cute, but I managed to hold my awareness on the energy within and around my body in the space of the huge ballroom.

At the same time, I just couldn’t help it, the thought of them giggling made me smile. 

Then something fascinating and delightful happened. 

Know you are greater than your physical body

I sensed and perceived a wave of energy flowing throughout the room: it ebbed and flowed over us, it pulsed with something that magnetic that gripped my interest and curiosity.  I paid attention to it more and held my awareness on it, sensing and perceiving into the energy of the space of the room.

As I tuned in to the space—using my whole body and mind (more aptly I should call it “bodymind”) as an instrument of attunement— I engaged in using an ability we can all cultivate that is perceiving beyond the 5 senses.  Through some fine-tuned and practiced combination awareness, sensing and perceiving, I felt into that magnetic energy present over and around us.

Simultaneously, I mentally tabbed through possibility. 

Was the energy rich? It was pulsing with life.  

What was that pushing sensation? It felt like it was prompting me. 

Had it stilled? I felt pause over me, like an invitation, but demanding nothing.

What was that tickling feeling in my forearms and legs that made my hair stand on end?  Was it…it was fun! It was playful! It was joyful!

As this all dawned on me, as it became conscious and articulated in my mind through words I could understand, I connected fully to the energy. 

I “touched” it through my awareness of it and it touched me.

Know that all energy carries information and you are a decoding instrument

I felt the playful, joyful fun nature of the energy within the space of my body and my body giggled, a little laugh escaping from me, my shoulders shaking as the energy pleasantly flooded through me.

It sounds a little trippy because it is, but I assure you the only chemicals and intoxicants that were making this happen were the natural chemicals within me that my own brain and my own endocrine system produced as it received the information contained in the energy of the room.

I felt the habitual response of social pressure and self-consciousness kick in, that maybe I shouldn’t laugh out loud and disturb the people around me, but I surrendered to the good feeling of laughter instead. It felt too darn good to just let it pass me by.  I let myself giggle, snicker, chuck then just laugh out loud, and soon the people around me were laughing too.

The energy grew, interconnecting fields of bio-magnetic energy, gaining coherence and momentum, one person, then the next and the next.  Within what I think was probably under a couple minute’s time I was in a sea of a thousand people from all walks of life around the globe and we were all laughing for no reason at all, moved by an energy that could only be the Spirit of Joy itself. 

No one was untouched by the feeling of gladness: in the playful common ground of Unconditional Love we were all One.

Feel into the reality that your body is an instrument of attunement

We are attuning to the energy around us all the time, and we either consciously (knowingly) and subconscious (unknowingly) connecting to it.

Whatever we are connecting to we are becoming more like: we embody the energy of our life.  So it’s well worth becoming aware of how our energy works, and how we can use the power of our attention and awareness to change our energy and transform our life.

We can tell we are attuning to the energy of our life because it makes us feel a certain way. 

Think about how your body feels when:

  • You are in an environment or with someone who makes you feel safe and accepted
  • You engage in a hobby in which you get lost in for hours at a time
  • You alone get to choose what you want to do and where you want to be today; no demands, you feel in command of your life
  • You are with a person, watch a movie, listen to a podcast or read a book that inspires you
  • You find the perfect, satisfying words to speak your truth; you feel proud of yourself
  • You get that crystal clear insight that helps you navigate whatever you’re working through personally, or within a relationship or job

On the other hand, think about how your body feels when:

  • You feel scared; you’re overwhelmed by not knowing what to do, feeling threatened, frozen in place physically, emotionally and/or mentally
  • You don’t feel accepted by your family, friends, community, boss or employer…or by anyone at all
  • You have no say over your time, and you’re being driven from one thing to the next; you feel pushed through life; you’re just surviving right now
  • You can’t remember the last time you felt happy or connected to your life and others
  • You experience frustration and anger because you can’t seem to find the words to express your understanding of a situation or why you feel the way you do
  • Your mind feels cluttered, frazzled, foggy, racing or all over the place; you’re anxious or depressed or oscillating back and forth between those states

The body is always processing the energy of your life

By developing a greater level of conscious awareness around attunement and how energy feels in specific areas of our body, we can learn to use our body in our everyday experience as an instrument of guidance.   

We can pick up on the subtle ques our body is offering us in our relationships, in the conditions of our life and in our environment.  We can learn to use feedback make better-informed decisions about what we want more in our life and what we want less. 

And we can learn to use our body—to entrain ourselves—as an instrument of attunement in meditation to connect with energy that is creative and life-giving, joyful, appreciative, abundant and liberating. 

Remember, what we are connecting to we are becoming more like…who doesn’t want to feel more alive, more joyful, more peaceful, more in love?

The body’s nature is to self-regulate and to self-organize into coherence and harmony

Through meditation and energy healing we can get familiar with and memorize the sensations of our own energy so well that we immediately know what’s “ours” and what’s “not ours” in the experience of our everyday life. This ability to attune to the information within your own body—to create and attune to your own inner harmony—helps you to discern which people, places, conditions and things in your life flow helpful, life-giving energy to you, and which ones disrupt your energy or throw you out of your alignment. 

In my experience it helps to consciously make these decisions and affirm yourself in them as you explore your inner being, your inner energy.  These may be new ideas/beliefs for you, so come back to them and see if their meaning changes for you:

  • I want to know myself.  I want to take time to get to know who I am, who I say I am.  I am just going to push the pause button on what the outer world has taught me about being human while I figure this out.  Time is my friend, and I’m here to use time the way that suits my higher purposes in life.
  • I trust myself.  I’m going to take whatever I discover within me as my truth, as my personal authority and law.  I trust that what I encounter will be the best thing for me, and that whatever I might feel is my body educating me on what I need to know. If at times it feels overwhelming or weird, I’ll just remind myself that’s because I’m having a new experience of the energy of my inner being. I’m learning about my own energy and feeling into the part of me that’s pure energy, including but beyond matter.  If I experience something and don’t understand it, I’ll remind myself that it’s only weird because it’s new and unfamiliar.  I’m going to get my bearings in this work and soon I’ll be better at decoding what my body is trying to tell me.
  • I love myself enough to do this.  You know, it’s possible that nobody has taught me the most important things or the full picture about the nature of my inner being.  I’m going to have to teach myself…no! I’m going to ENJOY teaching myself.  I want to know myself and heal myself more than anything.  So I’ll be patient.  I’ll trust that everything is going to come into my awareness at the right time that I’m ready to integrate it into my life’s wisdom.
  • I am willing to accept help.  If I encounter something that seems too hard, too big, to confusing, etc., I’ll get help.  I’ll think about what resources I have available to me in the form of people, medical professionals, therapeutic modalities, massage, energy healing, the internet, books, podcasts, and the like and I’ll stay true to myself, getting the help I need to get to the next level or dig through the next layer.  I believe I’m surrounded by a world of wisdom, and I’ll be supported in my journey, I just know it!

The Anatomy of Self Love: Know your energy anatomy, follow its guidance and fall in love with your wholeness

Your physical body is surrounded by an intelligent field of life-force energy, light and information.  Science calls this your biofield, and it is electromagnetic in nature.  Within the disciplines of energy medicine, it is often called the Human Energy Field or (HEF.)  In energy healing terms, your biofield or HEF has spiritual, mental and emotional energy aspects and manifests/affects the state wellness and order within your physical body.

For now, just hold that as holistic (whole, holy) information, and look at the basic and practical starting point of how your energy anatomy is organized within and around your body.

Not only is a good practice to cultivate self-awareness, but it can be helpful to your healing to take time to feel into each of your primary energy centers whose epicenters are within the brain and at particular points on the spine where nerve plexuses emerge from the spinal cord.

These nerve plexuses transmit energy and information from the world around you and from the tissues in their corresponding areas to your brain.  And your brain sends energy and information through the spinal cord and these nerve plexuses to the tissues of your body in the areas that correspond with the nerve plexuses.

Your nervous system engages with the energy and information of your life and converts that information to chemistry through your endocrine system.  The hormones and chemical regulators move through the circulatory system to the organs, creating a state-of-being in the chemical, physical flesh.

For many people this is a novel view of the body—it sure was to me when I came into this work 9 years ago.  And it’s even more incredible to know that our perception of the energy around us—our thoughts and feelings about it—affect this whole process dramatically.

I don’t believe that anyone makes themselves sick.  But we certainly can learn to use our awareness, our consciousness to help ourselves heal.

The Eastern wisdom traditions have for thousands of years known, discussed and taught energy anatomy. Volumes have been written about this system, called the Chakra system.

An illustration of the Chakra system/energy centers

Chakra means “spinning wheel of light,” and indicates that the life-force energy that sustains and animates us has a spiraling nature.  This is replicated in the natural world around us and can be seen in things like pinecones, sunflowers and nautilus shells, and it’s illustrated in our spinning Earth and spiraling galaxy.

Here’s my table of basic information regarding the 7 primary energy centers and the basic information about them.

Energy-Chakra chartDownload

Spend time in meditation, sensing and perceiving into the space these centers occupy in your physical body. 

Try not to judge the sensations or even assign meaning to the words that come to mind, but gently assess.  You’re just information gathering, so be the mind of an objective observer, what in meditation is called “the silent witness.” 

Hold on to the idea that your body is naturally powerful self-regulating and self-organizing.  As you feel into your energy centers, invite flow, life, grace, abundance, freedom and empowerment into your life.

Does the idea of transformational wellness interest you?  Please sign up for future blogs at this bottom of my blog home, or book an in-person or remote/distance appointment with me by calling 207-249-2261 or emailing me at dianamariachapin@gmail.com.

Call Diana at 207-249-2261

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7 ways to transform your self-image and master your inner energy using energy healing and meditation

dianamariachapin

Call Diana at 207-249-2261

Our attention is the most precious, powerful creative essence on Earth.  Whatever has our attention has our energy.

Think for just a moment about what in your life holds your attention, and therefore your creative energy.

Are the things that have your attention life-giving? Do they support your peace and feelings of harmony in your body? Do they make you feel whole and free? Are you living with clarity and feeling aligned with a purpose that is fulfilling? Or maybe what has your attention makes you fragmented and disconnected? Maybe you feel sustained stress? Does it make you feel fearful and disconnected?

We could argue that this is a very challenging time to be human.  There are unprecedented demands for our attention.

View this as a time of possibility

And we could argue that it’s a time of great potential and possibility.

Many of us don’t want to carry on the current path.  Never mind what’s happening outside our body in our culture and time, we don’t want to carry on this way within our body.  We want to transcend our current conditions, feel more alive, improve our well-being, enjoy nurturing relationships with others.

We want to create a more beautiful reality from a greater level of consciousness.  And maybe we don’t articulate it in this way, but we hold that feeling in our body, that wanting.

In stress, it can be so hard to figure out how to elevate our perspective enough to create from a greater level of mind.

Nearly 10 years ago a series of events happened in my life that demanded I evaluate the trajectory I was on:

  • My mind was a mess of grief from my father passing and a bundle of stress and anxiety around my responsibilities. 
  • My emotions were all over the place and ruling my life with a boiling-just-under-the-surface level of frustration and anger.
  • My physical body was taking a hit, being worn out with repetitive, hard labor and manifesting mysterious issues in my stomach, heart and throat that no blood test, EKG, or imagining could identify or define.
  • I was losing interest in my profession, which I had a passion for in many ways but in which I was growing lonely, bored and restless. 
  • My relationship with my business partner and mother (who was and is one of my greatest friends and teachers) was strained and stuck.
  • I had a plaguing sensation, a dissatisfied feeling that there must be more to life. 

Be courageous and willing to modify your idea of what is reality

At that time my spiritual practice was disintegrating. I was practicing a religious tradition that felt incongruent with my heart: it taught me I was essentially flawed, sinful and unworthy but also made in the image of God, and I didn’t think those two concepts could co-exist in the same space, within the same (my) body.  And anyway, that religious institution was crumbling under its own weight due to its own wildly harmful, dreadfully misaligned, hypocritical, shadowy conduct.

All of these events happened simultaneously but across the span of a few years, playing out as things do when they dawn and build over time.  It all took a toll on mind, body and soul.

Previously I had relied on my analytical thinking to figure things out and I told myself this situation was no different: “Figure it out Diana, think your way through this,” I demanded.

Applying more work, more force, even bulling my way through things had always worked in the past and I figured this was no different.

But then something unexpected happened.

Become more energy, less matter…shift atttention from the physical to non-physical

In my turmoil, I figured I could soothe and fix myself through meditation, which to me meant that day after day I twisted my body up in what I called “the pretzel pose” (what normal people call the lotus pose) and tried to breathe deeply and shut up my mind.  I thought it was about technique, and that I just had to figure it out, based on what other people had done and what they typically instructed.

Then one day as I sat there wrapped in pretzel pose, I perceived the subtlest quiet uttering as my felt my body speak.  That’s just the best way to say it: I felt my body speak.  This to me was a novel sensation.  Looking back now I can see that up until that time in my life I had suffocated my body’s subtle feedback loops, it’s quiet and powerful communication system that is in place to self-regulate order and harmony in our life.  I believed my body to be and I treated my body like a draft horse that could pull through anything and everything through sheer willpower. 

Blinders on.  Head down. Focused.  Muscling through. Forging forward.

That day, my body told me to lay down, and that for me the pretzel pose was non-sense and uncomfortable.  It made no sense to willingly endure pain in pursuit of enlightenment—pain was a signal meant to que avoidance.

Honestly, it was like my body said to my brain, “For the love of God, Diana, just lay down and get out of our way.”

I love my body so much for that day and I love my brain for decoding its message.

Love and listen to your body, your wholeness

I laid down on my living room floor and propped my knees with pillows from my couch.  I was more than a tad bit fed up with typical meditation instruction like “just let the thoughts float across your mind like clouds across the sky.”

That wasn’t helpful to me because there were so many thoughts in my head the sky was totally overcast, a thick mat of grey clouds with no blue sky, no white fluffy clouds in sight.

Viewing meditation as something that happened in my head hadn’t served me.

I remember thinking as I lay down that day, “What if meditation means use my whole body, not my head?”

I shifted my awareness down into my body and let go of the idea that I was trying to not think.

I let my attention roam around in my feet and legs first, just noticing the space they occupied as I lay there on the floor.  I felt my hips and back in contact with the floor and let my awareness float around the space my abdomen and chest took up in the space of my living room.  I felt for where my arms were, their weight and then just feeling for the space they took up.

I just lay there feeling down into my body and forgetting about my brain.

I let myself drift into a semi-sleepy state and kept noticing the space of my body, taking it all in at once.  Soon I lost track of where my body was in space, and my mind couldn’t really tell the difference between the space of my body and the space around my body.

I didn’t really know what I was feeling for but I had the urge to “listen with my whole body.”  I didn’t know what I was listening for so I just paid attention, listening for sensations and movement.  Before long I felt a tingling at my right side, in the space between my lowest right rib and my hip bone. 

At first it felt like a non-physical energy tickle-itch down in my body and at the same time up in my head, in my minds eye, I could see the minute nerve endings down there wiggling around, excited, aroused.

It might sound a little strange, but the best way to put it is that my cells felt happy, like they were anticipating something.

“This feels good, so why not go with it?” I thought.

Teach yourself (take time) to trust what your subtle body is telling you

I held my attention on the tickling-itch sensation, trying to notice it more. The more attention I gave it the more it grew.  It was building and expanding and soon I felt like something outside of me was sending electrical signals to me and all I knew was it felt good.

It felt like three-dimensional goose bumps, the kind you get on your arms and back when someone tells you a story of a heart-moving coincidence or something exciting, thrilling, extraordinary or supernatural, only it was flowing like a sine wave throughout my whole body.

Suddenly I realized something was happening TO me.  I had noticed it but I wasn’t making it happen, it was happening to me.  The niggling good feeling blasted a sudden shot of what only can be described as gorgeous bliss through my body.  I had no control over it as it branched out, running down my left leg and shooting across my chest and up the right side of my neck and filling my head and brain with what felt like spaciousness and light.

This bliss like an elixir of energy: joy, love and harmony all bundled into one.  It was branching out through my body in a way that created the image in my mind’s eye of a tree’s root system as I realized the energy was like a low-grade electricity, “lighting up” my nerves and I could feel the precise structure of my intricate nervous system which I had never previously given a moment’s thought to.

It was like I was being mapped by the energy of some extraordinary force that was outside of but also within me. 

I just noticed kept my attention on it and hung on for the ride as pulsing waves of bliss gently washed through my body from right to left with amplitudes that ebbed and flowed in delicious wave after wave.

Let go of labels, biases and beliefs and become objective awareness itself

Under my belief system at the time, it took some presence of mind to hold on to the feeling and not to freak out, evaluate or judge as the extraordinary event unfolded.  Through my disordered, fear-based thinking at the time I wondered if something possessive was over taking me, but the more I felt and observed the sensations, the more I noticed the waves, the more I paid attention to it the more impossible it seemed that anything that felt so good could be even remotely bad. 

It was the energy of life giving me more life!

It was like a non-physical energy massage that was subtle, gentle, powerful, loving, intelligent, knowing and transformative.

And there was this gorgeous sense of the familiar although I’d never experienced anything like it: like this was something inherently natural, a natural state of being that I had forgotten but should remember.

In just a few incredibly beautiful minutes pure energy itself was teaching me what I was looking for through meditation.  Listening to my inner directive to lay down, I opened up the energetic pathways in my physical body.  Mentally I had become the observer, awareness itself.  I transcended the story of who Diana is, what she was reaching for and struggling against.

I had just forgotten all that and paid attention to something else.

Through intense focus paying attention to space, not my physical body, not thought, I had stumbled upon the present moment and when I held my attention in that experience as an objective observer.  And I became united with, unified with, coherent with the energy around me.

And the only thing around me (and it’s within and around each of us) was the bliss of life itself.

I was able to obtain information from it.  That information surprised me.  It made me feel known and loved in all of creation.  It had always been present, I just had never tuned into that aspect reality.

Know your energy anatomy and fall in love with its wisdom

I know I said in my previous blog that I’d share what I’ve learned about energy anatomy, but for some reason all this came out first.  I’ll do that next time and here’s why it’s mission-critical for our healing:

We all have an innate energetic guidance system that processes the energy and information of our life empowers us to direct our life in love.  Historically this system is called the Chakra system, but I think of it as a process and call it the Anatomy of Self-Love, because it is always:

  • Directing us to take the most life-giving actions, doing the most good and least harm
  • Helping us decide which people, which conditions, which jobs, which environments are most life-giving to us
  • Self-organizing and self-regulating our energy to maintain a state of harmony and balance
  • Grounding us in the here-and-now
  • Helping us transcend awareness into our multidimensional Self, which is Divine Love itself
  • And so much more!

This information has been known for millenia, but is now being validated, defined and understood by the sciences of neurology, endocrinology, cardioneurology, epigenetics and quantum physics.

When you know this anatomy, when you feel into it and into the energy within and around your body, you feel into how magnificent you are.  If you want to create a first-hand experience of knowing more about this, consider attending one of my upcoming Yoga Nidra healing meditation retreats.  For more information see here. 

Please sign up below to receive notifications for future blogs and I’ll share everything I know about this amazing transformational healing work.

Call Diana at 207-249-2261

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You, Mastermind: Moving from matter to energy and changing your mind about who you really are

dianamariachapin

Call Diana at 207-249-2261

We live in a culture that would have us believe that authority resides outside of us.  It’s a contradictory, inconsistent culture that simultaneously demands we find common-ground and figure out and agree on what’s “right,” while it also relentlessly diverts our attention away from the very thing that will help us create that peace. 

Our attention is most valuable resource on Earth.  

If we let it, this modern life can wildly disrupt the sanctity and sanctuary of our inner being and provoke incoherence within ourselves, our relationships and our society, leading us away from, not toward, greater peace. 

Our inner-most being, our true nature—that aspect of us that is pure heart, pure energy, pure unconditional love—is the real authority. 

As a collective, as we are discovering how to listen to our inner authority, to feel peace one body at a time, and to create peace within the whole, one body at a time.

What has our attention has our energy. Another way to say that is where our attention goes, our energy flows.

Energy medicine has helped me (and helped people I support in my role as a healer) to understand and experience that no matter what is happening in the world outside of our body, we can tap into a deep peace within, a peace that is always present—it’s never NOT present, it’s just obscured because our attention is elsewhere.

Before I developed some skill in the art and science of meditation and energy healing, I was solidly anchored in the conditions of the physical world.  With absolute dedication to “keeping up” and with my full attention on what was playing out outside of me, my energy streamed into my work and my responsibilities, into political involvement, into keeping up with the news—particularly on issues that enraged, overwhelmed, alienated, marginalized or scared me.

This non-creative outpouring of energy into the world, as compared to the inward reflection on, the contemplation of, the spending time with the loving, universal life-force of energy within me, caused a lop-sided sort of dynamic in my life. 

My stress showed up first emotionally as frustration and anger.  Next it showed up physically as acid reflux and a sensation of a constant, heavy magnetic pull in my stomach.  Next, I developed a thyroid disorder accompanied by the constant feeling of having a “lump” in my throat.

As time passed and the full-body anxiety came around, I found myself going from sound asleep in one moment to suddenly standing, heart racing, panting, incoherent thoughts racing uncontrollably in my brain while simultaneously experiencing utter confusion and complete overwhelm.  Night after night for nearly a year I’d wake up standing upright and freaked out beside my bed at precisely 2 a.m., my body a nightmare of anxiety vibrating madly at a cellular level. 

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is pexels-photo-1210273-1.jpeg

I hadn’t consciously created my suffering, but I damn well needed to figure out how to heal it: I felt like I was on the verge of a heart attack most of the time.

Being dedicated to physical reality and the physicality of my body, the more poorly I felt, the more I looked for the cause of my suffering…in the people, conditions, environment, institutions, culture and society around me.. 

I sourced my problems as difficult people and screwed up relationships that emotionally hurt me or deeply troubled me with irreconcilable differences.  I attributed it to working too much, working physically too hard, eating mindlessly, too much and too fast, not having enough time or money, having what I felt was too much responsibility.

I carried around so much unresolved grief and my heart felt unbearably heavy all the time.  My dad had passed unexpectedly one November afternoon and there was a vacuum where his joyful warrior presence used to be.  Often, I found myself unconsciously holding my breath and when I did breathe deeply I could only feel my lungs filling to just below my collar bones.  Anything more made me choke, cough, gag or made my lungs feel like a hellish inferno. 

Over the course of one painful summer almost 10 years ago, it dawned on me that the people and the conditions outside of me were unlikely to change fast enough for me to heal what was happening inside me.  I had good evidence: I had tried to get people to change on the relationship front with horrible results.  

This idea that I would have to transform or change from within to make my reality better and to feel better in my body…it didn’t come as a lightening speed epiphany, a revelation that knocked me on my butt with enlightened self-awareness.  It was a slow-dawning, somewhat agonizing process that didn’t storm me with articulate clarity, but which has relatively amazing clarity only in hindsight. 

The revelation was basically a feeling, an impulse, an urge. It was a vague thought: “There’s got to be something more.”

I had a sneaking feeling that if I wanted whatever “more” was, I’d have to change.  I’d have to change my relationship with my body, my relationship with time, my relationship to work, my relationship to others, my relationship to the world.

Turns out, the quickest way to change the world is to change yourself. And by quick I mean in the next 5 years I made shift after transformational shift in pursuit of more fulfillment.

Overcoming Limited Awareness and Waking up the Healer

As life sometimes shows “terrible things—” undesirable events we would never ask for—often result in wonderful opportunities and unexpected outcomes.  Awareness of the non-physical reality that underlies the physical reality we all tend to orient toward began for me with a single experience, on frigid, snowy night in early 2015.  This experience propelled me off my predicted path and onto a path of understanding my life as “more energy, less matter.”

That night, my friend Wendi suffered a severe concussion, which at the on-set was a terrible thing.  (Don’t worry, this story has a happy ending. Here are some shots of Wendi and me unsuccessfully staging what we hoped would be perfectly synchronized leaps off benches on a visit to NYC a couple years ago. Please note Wendi’s total collaboration and my unnecessarily instructive hand-gestures, which make us both laugh our butts off.)

Immediately following her accident, Wendi was physically somewhat disabled and mentally disoriented, incapacitated, ungrounded and overwhelmed.  The first few days and weeks after the event were horribly shocking, as we watched Wendi’s cognitive skills, her relational and her language skills and her incredible story-telling ability diminish. 

We worried for her very survival, for the survival of the personality we loved. 

I had no language around what I was witnessing at the time, but in hindsight the core of my being felt threated with imminent grief, by a fear that she would never recover, that I’d never know, see or hear the Wendi I loved again. 

I wasn’t alone. 

Wendi was (and is, this story has a happy ending!) loved for her amazing awareness, attention, clarity, wisdom and the embodiment of what she believes about this life.  We loved how her personality burst forth from her deeply-held and beliefs that were hard-won by life’s trials: her humor, for how she saw things, for how quickly she connected with others, for the goodness she saw in the world, the potential she saw in all beings.

Wendi’s pre-accident experience of vibrance, vitality and joy was vividly juxtaposed against an entirely different, wildly more limited reality.  In one event, ALL OF OUR PERSONAL REALITIES rocked, shook, held in a balance as we awaited an outcome to assure us all would be well, that SHE would be well, that WE would be well. 

It took some time. 

We watched, helpless observers, as our friend’s incredible life-force, her admirable will rose up from within to exert itself…from within and beyond a brain that had experienced a terrible trauma.

To change is to be greater than the conditions we are experiencing, and Wendi’s recovery showed me that the inner will, and the will and support of those around us matters when we want to change. 

We need people around us to remind us of who we want to become.

It took time to envision a future beyond our injured friend…it was hard to watch, to wait, to help in small ways while healing happened within and around Wendi.  So hard to witness another’s suffering.

The good news is Wendi has rebounded with a tremendous vigor that makes it hard to recall that past reality.  In the meanwhile, though, I’ve learned volumes and volumes about who she, who I, who we are!

In the weeks and months that followed Wendi had debilitating headaches, some loss of vision, loss of memory and trouble speaking. She couldn’t drive because she couldn’t see properly and she couldn’t maintain balance in her physical body.  She needed support with transportation to her Craniosacral Therapy sessions, and so I happily volunteered to drive.

Sitting in a chair in the therapy room, I watched as Wendi’s therapist, Moriah, lightly rested her hands on Wendi’s head or feet.  To my uninformed eye, it didn’t look like Moriah was doing anything because her body was so still and unmoving.  But Wendi was experiencing an inner light show behind her closed eyes, and at times she would utter some expression of relief from the pain or exclaim a statement that had to do with some insight about her life (perhaps even something that happened decades before) that had spontaneously come into her awareness.

After a couple of sessions curiosity got the better of me and I asked Moriah what exactly she was doing to cause this dynamic effect with what appeared to be very little effort.

“Come on over here and I’ll teach you,” Moriah invited.

I stood up and following her direction, I went to the edge of the massage table and placed my hands on Wendi’s head as I had seen Moriah do during the sessions.  Moriah placed her hands lightly over mine and drew my hands away from Wendi’s head so they were barely even touching her hair.

“You’re feeling for the craniosacral pulse,” Moriah explained. “It has a rhythm, a pulse of energy that flows up the spine from the tailbone to the skull and brain.  I’ll feel for it through your hands, and you just follow my hands in and out with the pulse, then I’ll let go and you see what you can perceive.”

No other word but awestruck could describe my state of being as I realized in just a few moments I could—through a strange combination of feeling and awareness and insight that was intuitively an innate skill—perceive Wendi’s life-force energy through my palms.  I was feeling anything physical, but instead I was feeling into non-physical, unseen dimension that was eminently real and which had always been there, just outside of perception. 

And in a weird way it seemed more real, more familiar than the dimension I could see. 

It was magnetic, alive, universal but also unique to Wendi.  It felt creative, bursting with vitality, wanting to express itself and forge on, expand, affect things, be known.  This pulsing sensation felt jam-packed with so much intelligent information it felt like it was struggling to stay bound within the area around Wendi.  It felt boundless and connected.

A frontier.

I have no idea how all these things came to me so quickly, they just did.  And with the same lightening blast of awareness into this magic-feeling unseen dimension, I was aware that I wasn’t doing anything special—that we could all do this.  It felt like I was feeling into something and perceiving something that I remembered from a long time ago and had just forgotten.  Just like that wobbly feeling when you get back on a bike after you haven’t ridden for a while.

“What is this magic?” I asked Moriah.

She giggled and said, “It’s energy.”

“But what’s energy?” I asked blankly.

It wasn’t magic, it was science–practical quantum physics. I had to know more.

Now, after 6 years of nearly daily study and practice, I can answer my own question “what’s energy?” with my ever-evolving understanding of what healing energy is: it is a vital, vibrant, intelligent, living matrix of light and information which is the loving intelligence of the Divine and it’s expressing Itself through us and through all of creation.  It’s within and around everything we can perceive with our 5 senses and everything we cannot.  

My physical body, your physical body, is material energy, sure, but the bigger part of who we are is non-physical energy.  My body, your body, is an instrument of consciousness.  Here’s what I think this time in history is inviting us to do:

  • Become aware, fine tune our perception of energy within and around our body, and among all aspects of our life
  • Develop our ability to use our body as an instrument of conscious creation
  • Consciously, selectively unmemorized some of our beliefs in and relationships with external authority and influences that limit us and limit our awareness of who we truly are
  • Get in touch with the energy of our inner being and true self–which is the bliss of creative and unconditional love–we remember that we get to decide who we are, what we want to feel, what we want to believe and who we want to become

Energy healing and meditation help us to connect to the fields of energy within and around us.  This energy at its source is highly coherent, orderly, peaceful, intelligent and loving.  When we become more aware of it, expand and unfold into, we become more of it, more like it and it becomes more of us.  To me, practicing this feeling into the connection to life-force energy is what creates inner peace, it’s how we pour our peace into the world, how we BECOME more peace in the world.

Next time I want to share with you what I’ve learned about human energy anatomy, because I’m certain if will help us be more aware of who we are truly.  Awareness of this non-physical reality is what saved me from the physical maladies and distress that manifested in my body from the stress of the past, and it’s one tool and framework through which so many of the present collective are leaning into to navigate these strange times.

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 Call Diana at 207-249-2261