- What Every Woman Needs to Know About Her Energy BodyContinue reading →
by Lisa EricksonInterest in the chakras, reiki, and energy healing has exploded in recent years, with many of us turning to these modalities for greater wellness and empowerment. What isn't as widely covered is how women's energy bodies differ from men's. Learn how you can get the most out of working with your feminine energy body - including help for healing from sexual trauma.ÂRochelle was a new massage therapist having trouble managing enough clients per day to pay her bills, as she felt drained after just one or two sessions.Lauren was a health-conscious yoga practitioner who did everything she could to take good care of her mind and body, but suffered such extreme fatigue during her period each month she was effectively sidelined from her life for several days.Beth was a long-time meditator, but after the birth of her first child found that her usual meditation practices provided no relief from the heaviness and anxiety she was frequently experiencing.Shari was a 50-year old woman struggling with perimenopausal symptoms, questioning the direction her life was headed, and fearing she was going backwards.What do all these women have in common? They all were experiencing shifts in their energy bodies but didn't know how to work with them. While an increasing number of yoga classes and energy body workshops help us connect with our primary energy centers, or chakras, most of the time chakra mappings are presented as the same for men and women. But there are differences in how women's energy bodies function that any woman can benefit from knowing.Our energy body serves as the interface between our physical body, our psyche, and our spirit. Chakra mappings in particular developed within both energy medicine and spiritual traditions around the world, and in the 20th century were even viewed by psychologist Carl Jung as a way to map different aspects of our psyche. The chakras offer many doorways into healing and empowerment, and hundreds of different methods for working with them including yoga, breath work, reiki, guided imagery, meditation, mantras, mudras, affirmations, crystals and more.However, most chakra mappings and tools don't account for the differences in how men's and women's chakras function. While at the spiritual level the energy moving through the chakras is ungendered, at the interface level between the chakras and the body, there are differences that mirror the physical differences between men and women. Trans and pan gender individuals will often experience the chakra patterns associated with the gender they most strongly identify with, or aspects of both. While male-female energy body patterns exist on a spectrum, rather than simply being binary, knowing about these differences can really help finetune chakra work.The most important difference is that women's energy bodies tend to be anchored in their second chakra, located in the pelvis, while men's tend to be anchored in their first, or root chakra, associated with the tailbone, legs and feet. These two chakras serve as the foundation for everyone's energy body, and so we all need to work to heal and strengthen both, but the differences in anchoring have real-world implications for women and those who identify as female.The primary difference is that women's energy bodies are more centripetal and tend to pull in and absorb other's energies. While anyone can be empathic, women by default tend to be more this way. This is because the second chakra is receptive and 'yin' in nature, and so having their energy bodies anchored here means women's energy bodies are more receptive in general. It also means women's energy bodies are more adaptable and fluid, which can be a good thing when in a positive environment. But it means women need to pay more attention to energetic boundaries in daily life - something most women resonate with as soon as they learn of it.Take the example of the masseuse Rochelle from above. She couldn't understand why she felt so drained after just a couple of clients, when physically she still felt strong. The issue was energetic, not physical - she was unconsciously taking on energy from her clients. The reason was partly technical, based on this tendency of the feminine energy body, but also based in personal conditioning - like many women, Rochelle had patterns of people-pleasing that caused her to open up her energy body to others in a way she didn't need to give a good massage. After learning to work with her root and navel chakras to create a simple, but effective energetic boundary, Rochelle was able to change this tendency, and work with clients successfully without draining herself.Women's energy bodies also experience cycles and phases in sync with their physical reproductive cycles and phases. While we now know that both men and women experience hormonal cycles and shifts, for women it is much more pronounced, in the form of menstruation, pregnancy, perimenopause and menopause. Each of these life events comes with its own energetic shifts, and learning to work with them can be key. For example, a woman's sacral chakra waxes and wanes with her monthly cycle, at its strongest and most emanating at the peak of ovulation, and at its most sensitive and inward-facing during menstruation. While most women can't organize their lives around their cycle, making even small accommodations can be helpful. For Lauren, the yoga practitioner who experienced extreme fatigue, allowing herself extra rest time and additional focus on her navel chakra during menstruation helped her to reduce the fatigue - and enabled her to tap into the deep contemplative energies available to her during this time.Post-partum is another life phase in which women can benefit from understanding the energetic shifts occurring. Like Beth, mentioned above, even women with good support and self-care routines can find themselves struggling after birth. Not only is a woman dealing with physical fatigue and hormonal shifts, her energy body is adjusting to an additional energy line in the form of the mother-child bond. While a beautiful form of connection, if a woman leaves this line open all of the time, never learning to close it when she can to experience her energy body's singular power and integrity, she will often feel ungrounded or uncentered in addition to fatigued. Because the sacral chakra is a woman's energy body anchor and mother-child lines are centered there, post-partum a woman may also feel as if she can't access the energies or functions of her upper chakras, with all of her energy pooled downward. Tools to help close the mother-child line when needed, while still maintaining a healthy loving parental bond, are key to a woman's post-partum physical and mental well-being.Perimenopause and menopause too are opportunities for energetic and spiritual growth, but are often not recognized as such. We tend to view them as medical events, or as endings. But perimenopause - the years preceding menopause when a women's body and energy body are beginning to transition - are characterized by surges through the chakras linked to personal growth. Each chakra has particular 'lessons' and themes associated with it, and depending on where a women's greatest obstructions to owning her power lies, she may experience discomfort in her body or psyche as these obstructions attempt to clear. If a woman can stabilize her energy body at this time and engage with energy healing and personal growth modalities, she can enter menopause truly feeling like she is coming into her most powerful and fulfilling time.For example, Shari from the intro found herself feeling adrift and unfulfilled in her career, in addition to experiencing insomnia and nightly hot flashes. Once she was able to identify her feelings and stabilize her energy body, she began to feel much better. She also began a chakra meditation practice that helped her to smooth the shifts in her energy body as they were occurring. As this unfolded she found herself contemplating a shift in career that felt positive and empowering, and realized it had been coming for a long time. Her shift into menopause from that point was physically and psychologically smooth.Chakra work should never replace medical and holistic healing advice, but it can play an important role in a woman's healing and growth. Sexual trauma healing is another area where this is especially the case. Because the second chakra is linked to sexual energy and is also the anchor for a woman's energy body, sexual abuse and assault can have a particularly damaging impact to a woman's sense of her own power, and all of her chakra functions. Working gently at this level to clear shame, fear, patterns of hypervigilance and disassociation can be an excellent modality for sexual trauma survivors who are intimidated by the idea of physical body work, or of talk therapy. In other cases, chakra work can be a complementary method to these modalities. For a woman, healing and empowering her second chakra is instrumental to full body, and full psyche, healing.The wonderful thing about chakra work is that anyone can engage in it, and there are multiple access points. Some people relate more to visualization, some to physical triggers like sound, others to affirmations or emotional memory. Everyone can find a connection point with their chakras, and once they do, can work with them anywhere, anytime. For women, understanding these differences in their chakras and energy body functioning in daily life can help unlock the full potential of their self-healing and manifesting abilities.
Lisa Erickson is an energy worker specializing in women's energetics and sexual trauma healing and author of Chakra Empowerment for Women: Self-Guided Techniques for Healing Trauma, Owning Your Power & Finding Overall Wellness from Llewellyn Publishing.
- Double Vision: Did Reading Book Lead to Astral Projection?Continue reading →
A week ago while visiting my husband's mom in Virginia, a strange thing happened to me. On this particular evening I was reading the book "Phenomenon" by Sylvia Brown, and was about to turn in for the night. I bookmarked my page and noticed the next chapter was entitled "Astral Travel." Though I was excited to read about it, I couldn't keep my eyes open, so I went to bed thinking I would read it the next day. I drifted off to sleep in a matter of minutes, and then suddenly I felt myself leaving my body. (I felt sort of half awake at this point). It began with my hand and arm leaving my body, and then it was as if I was moving at a thousand miles an hour in a black, swirling hole. It scared me! Then Slam! I felt as if I was thrown back into my body with a great force. I woke up frightened and unsure about what had really happened. Was I dreaming because of the book I was reading, or did I actually have an experience where "my body" caught my spirit leaving and then freaked out? Any thoughts or advice would be really helpful. My date of birth: 6-4-70 - Karen
Dreamchaser:
Over the years, I have mentioned this very subject over and over in this column. I am glad to talk about it again, however, because it happens so frequently to people.
When we go to sleep, our soul leaves our body and goes to where it most needs to be in order to fix whatever happened today and prepare for tomorrow. Sometimes it works very hard, and sometimes it just plays by itself or with other souls.
Dreams, by the way, are the journeys that our souls go on every night. Sometimes we remember our soul work, and sometimes we don't. Either way, our souls DO leave and travel and learn every single time we are asleep. Scientists have yet to prove why our bodies need sleep; it's because our souls must have time to do their work when our human mind is not in the way.
What happened in your case was that your mind was not fully asleep yet. Your logical, human mind was still relatively conscious of what was going on around you. When your soul lifted off, your human mind was aware of it.
Usually our souls wait until REM or deep sleep to lift off. When your soul realized that your mind was still active, it jumped back into your body. That was the SLAM you felt. When you woke up, your human mind was searching for a "logical" explanation as to what had just happened.
This can also work in reverse, by the way. Our souls can wake our bodies sometimes before our minds kick into gear. Have you ever woken up and not known who you were, where you were, what was going on, etc.? Then it took a little while for you to shake out the "cobwebs" and come back to reality? That is when your soul pops back in before your human mind is awake, clear and ready to be cognizant of what is happening.
Your mind was running on high gear because you had been reading new information. You were learning and growing and evolving, and it was exciting for your mind to filter into your soul and back up. The cycle was working, but you were too tired to stay awake and read more.
Your human mind was ready and wanting to learn about astral travel. Your soul was saying, "Go to sleep so we can integrate what you have already learned." Part of you was ready to sleep and part of you was ready for more exploration. The two were running on conflicting schedules, and you caught it happening. So in a way, the book caused this, but it happens on a nightly basis anyway. Because you were conscious, you just happened to catch it happening this time!
You can learn how to astral travel while you are awake. Keep reading! I wish you many more conscious experiences with astral travel!
*****
Astrea:
Many times in life we hear, "You will always have what you NEED, but not necessarily what you WANT." Your spirit must have needed to experience the feeling of leaving your human body, and the suggestion in the next chapter of Sylvia Brown's book was all it took to get you there.
Even though you hadn't read it yet, your SOUL recognized the title of that chapter as something it had been seeking, and your soul, knowing that you had that reference to read after your experience, got with it and out you went!
While I don't usually recommend her books, Sylvia Brown has a wide reaching and powerful effect on lots of people. A Gemini like you would be able to relate easily to her writing and put it to good use. Synchronicity - you gotta love it!
I like your description of "getting caught." That's exactly what it feels like, isn't it? One minute you're free and hovering above the room, and the next minute, ZAP! back down into your corporeal form you go!
As a little kid, I loved that "feeling of return." With practice, most of the time we can control that event, but sometimes, when our physical ears hear a distracting noise or something else occurs to knock us back into reality, back we go. With practice you will be able to control your return better.
I find it interesting that you were visiting your mother-in-law and not someone in your own genetic family. Evidently, you and your husband got married for reasons that are even deeper than love. His family's interest in "psychic stuff" will nurture your children in such matters and help them to grow into their own abilities.
You'll never have to be concerned that when your daughter visits them, she'll be discouraged from exploring her own psychic life and power. My parents encouraged me to develop my psychic senses in a time when it wasn't nice to even discuss such things in public. Heck, it's STILL not considered a great topic at the dinner table in some families!
Your kids will get to talk about it ALL and ask questions and read and study. This is going to give them such an edge in life! Talk with your husband about how you want to present this to your kiddos, so that you are united in your approach and ready to tell them their experiences are all natural and okay.
A word or two of warning: Geminis often have difficulty staying grounded in REAL LIFE. Don't get so strung out on your ASTRAL life that you neglect what you're doing here on Earth.
You are at the beginning of a long journey to learn where your power really lies. Try to be patient with this process and take your time.