Let’s look at subtle body energy, particularly the nine systems that comprise the subtle body.
The idea of subtle body energy might seem far-fetched to you because it’s rarely incorporated into standard medicine.
I was very skeptical of subtle body energy until I realised that it doesn’t deny or negate the typical systems that Western medicine works with, such as the cardiovascular, immune and respiratory systems. It is, in a sense, on a level above or beyond these systems, and influences them from behind the scenes. There need not be a contradiction. Once I realised that, I was ready to learn how it works.
In fact, I now believe that the subtle body energy will soon be treated with equal importance and skill as the gross body, as medicine evolves towards a holistic point of view.
What is Subtle Body Energy?
To understand subtle body energy, it’s useful to distinguish it from gross body energy.
Gross body energy is your entire felt sense of your physical, biological body, made of skin, bone, muscle, organs, and so forth. It’s your first-person experience of everything people see when they look at your physical body.
Emotions and thoughts are a bit less gross or solid than typical gross energy. They lie nearer to the subtle body, and some consider them strictly part of the subtle body.
Subtle body energy is not so accessible to our first-person awareness. If the gross stuff is fully conscious, subtle body energy is semi-conscious. It sits on the boundary between pure, unqualifiable awareness and our sense of solidity. Often we can only understand it by feeling our gross energy and extrapolating back the way.
Subtle body energy is what governs the gross body. There is an entire ecosystem of subtle body energy experience that is just beyond our immediate perception, yet which is constantly active and as crucial as our gross body.
There are several well-known subtle body energy systems, and with training you can become highly attuned to them, both in yourself in their internal form, and in others in their external form.
Let’s look at the six major subtle body energy systems.
The 6 Major Subtle Body Energy Systems
The Chakras
Think of the chakras the body’s subtle energy stations. The word chakra means a disk, vortex or wheel: they are centres of swirling subtle body energy.
Each one is associated with a specific developmental theme and tend to be activated at different points in one’s life. They also store trauma and conflict. Unhealthy chakras can lead to physical ailments, while healthy ones bring vitality, fullness and health. By identifying which chakra isn’t functioning correctly and restoring its balance and rhythm, you can heal physical symptoms.
Usually they are presented as seven, but the number can vary from five to ten depending on the source. Here are the seven, along with their colour from the diagram below and their developmental themes:
- The Root Chakra: Red, survival and sexuality,
- The Womb Chakra: Orange, creativity,
- The Solar Plexus Chakra: Yellow, identity and power,
- The Heart Chakra: Green, love and compassion,
- The Throat Charka: Blue, expression,
- The Pituitary or Third Eye Chakra: Purple, deep perception and understanding,
- The Pineal or Crown Chakra: Pink, self-transcendence.
Chakras aren’t flat, static disks, but more like spinning vortices. Each has seven layers: the top layers react to your current life situation, while the lower ones are related to past themes.
The Meridians
The meridians are 14 channels that transfer subtle energy around the body, including to organs. Think of this as the bloodstream of your subtle body. They don’t correlate with any of the structures known to Western medicine, though many people are implicitly familiar with them because of acupuncture.
Each meridian has a set of acupuncture points on the surface of the body. Stimulate particular acupuncture points, with needles or pressure, and you stimulate the meridian associated with it.
Many of the meridians run the entire length of the body or large sections of it, which explains why many acupuncture points lie at the extremities of the body, even though the organ they supply is located elsewhere.
Meridians also possess alarm points and neurolymphatic reflex points on the surface of the body, which enables you or a practitioner to monitor and influence their functioning. Tracing the meridians is another common practice used to restore their health.
Like the chakras, these channels can be blocked or damaged. Their malfunction precedes physical ailments, while their healthy functioning encourages gross-body health.
Each meridian functions like the organ it serves. For example, just as the kidney purifies the gross body, so the kidney meridian purifies the subtle body. Each meridian also derives its name from its associated organ.
The 14 meridians are:
- central,
- governing,
- spleen,
- heart,
- small intestine,
- bladder,
- kidney,
- circulation,
- triple warmer,
- gallbladder,
- liver,
- lung,
- large intestine,
- stomach.
The Aura
The aura is an energetic shell surrounding the body, like an eggshell. It acts as a go-between between our body and the environment, protecting the body and bringing energies to and from it. It’s known to scientists as the biofield.
When we sense somebody’s energy, vibe or demeanour, often we’re sensing the quality of their aura, particularly the energy they’re transmitting from the inside out.
Energy experts consider that the aura has seven bands, but they’re not static: they expand and collapse and are influenced by our actions and physical state. For example, the aura tends to cling around our physical body during illness.
Basic Grid
The basic grid is the bedrock or infrastructure of all our energy systems. Energy experts often see it as a graph of interlocking lines, like a crane or frame structure.
Besides being the fundamental energy system of the body, it acts as a shocks absorber for traumatic incidents. This means that trauma-induced dysfunction here can cause major weakness and instability.
If the basic grid is functioning suboptimally, we feel lifeless and inflexible, and the body relies on emergency resources and raw effort to keep us going.
Meditation and other peaceful practices repair the basic grid, leaving it tight and strong, like a well-exercised body. By finding time each day for an activity that brings you peace, you are fortifying your basic grid.
Donna eden
The Triple Warmer
The triple warmer is the subtle energy body system that manages the immune system and mobilises the body to fight off invaders. You’ll have seen above that the triple warmer is a meridian, but it’s able to hook up with all other meridians, meaning it’s often considered a system in its own right.
It also governs flight or fight mode, in conjunction with the hypothalamus. This is a strong system and it can override other systems if it deems it necessary.
The Radiant Circuits
The radiant circuits work in the opposite way to the triple warmer. They gently organise the body systems to promote health through cooperation and coordinate energies among them. There are 10 of them, and the spleen meridian is the main one.
These circuits direct energy where it’s needed and prepare the subtle body for a coordinated response to any threat it encounters.
Further Elements of Subtle Body Energy
Let’s look at some further aspects of subtle energy body. Some practitioners consider these to be energy systems in their own right, but I’ve chosen to deal with them separately. To me, they seem to be aspects of the above energy systems rather than systems per se.
The Electrics
The electrics are part of all the above systems and connect all of them. They are most dense of the subtle energies in each system, or the most subtle of the dense energies, depending how you view it.
The electrics run throughout the entire subtle body and coordinate the organs. There are several points on the body you can touch to engage them, and doing so can bring great healing to them. Touching them feels like plugging into a socket.
The Celtic Weave
The Celtic Weave is a spiral, figure-eight pattern that repeats all over the body, the largest of which extends from the head to the toes. This pattern binds our various energy systems and helps them work in harmony. It weaves them together and holds our entire subtle body together.
In Tibet, a facet of the Celtic Weave is known as the energy ring. In the yogic tradition, it’s found as two curved lines that cross seven times at the major chakra centres.
The Celtic Weave is also an exercise that helps strengthen the Celtic Weave system. By tracing figure of eights over a given area of the body, you activate the Celtic Weave and bind together the active energies there.
The Five Rhythms
The Five Rhythms govern all the energy systems. They consist of the four seasons of the year, along with another that is the transitions between them taken as one.
Not only is our subtle energy body characterised by one or two of the rhythms, we all pass through seasonal periods in our lives as a more global pattern.
Each rhythm has certain strengths and weaknesses, and our primary rhythm can atrophy or dominate, leading to dysfunction.
Here are the themes associated with each rhythm:
Winter = childlike enthusiasm, playful energy, innocence;
Spring = assertiveness, vision, self-assurance;
Summer = warmth, exuberance, passion, pleasure-seeking;
Autumn = perfectionism, ambition, compassion, congruence;
Transition = stability, fairness, peace with change, calmness.
The Explanation of Subtle Body Energy
To modern Westerners, the idea of subtle body energy and these systems might seem far-fetched, mystical, hocus-pocus and woo-woo.
It’s worth noting that they’ve been discovered and rediscovered over and over again in diverse cultures, and evidence is now trickling in that proves the existence of the subtle body energy systems and the effectiveness of techniques based on them.
Let’s talk a little bit about how our subtle body energy relates to our gross body, using Ken Wilber’s work on this topic as a guide. That way we can better connect the two and understand how they fit together.
If you’re any way inclined spiritually, you may accept the idea that fundamentally you are not your mind or your body, but rather the empty awareness behind everything you experience.
To be more precise, we can say that we all begin, in each moment and in all four quadrants, in non-dual, pure God consciousness. Then we descend down into the storehouse consciousness, then to existential mind, then to thought mind, then to the five senses. This is recognised by many traditions, including ones as diverse as Yogachara, Ibn Arabi’s eight levels and the Christian creation myth, so long as you don’t take it literally.
According to Wilber, who bases his conclusion on several body-mind models, every one of these minds has a body component associated with it, both in terms of one we feel, and one that others can see or detect from the outside.
Thus, our sense of being a sack of skin, bone, muscle and organs within a highly active inner world is largely based on the gross body. We feel it as density and solidity, and others see this from the outside as our material body.
Along the spectrum from the gross physical body to the empty/Witness/spiritual body, there is a series of subtle energies, and this is where the subtle body energy systems reside (perhaps corresponding to existential mind and the storehouse consciousness).
These aren’t entirely inaccessible either to us or to the outside, especially with training, but they are much less accessible than the material body. They lie on the threshold of the material body.
At the same time, because of how we descend down from God to the gross body in each moment, the latter is the result or the physical manifestation of all our subtle body energy systems, which are themselves the emanation of the higher, emptier bodies, much like a Russian doll.
This means that any state or condition in the physical or emotional bodies, healthy or unhealthy, is a mirror or echo of the subtle body. A healthy subtle body means a healthy physical body, and vice versa. This explains why therapies that address subtle body energy can be effective, even though they don’t fall within current mainstream medicine.
The creation of the manifest world occurs by Spirit going out itself, stepping down and reducing itself to a lesser version of itself
Ken wiler
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The post Subtle Body Energy Unpacked first appeared on Deep Psychology.
The post Subtle Body Energy Unpacked appeared first on Deep Psychology.
