Conversations with Georgie #8: Spiritual Something: In Progress 🌊🔮💡🔥
⚡Making sense of the energy flowing through my body. ⚡
For this month’s edition I’m sharing just one theme - spiritual something - because nothing else quite compares right now. It is a shorter read, but given the more unusual nature of the content I would still urge you to grab that warm tea or coffee ☕ and sit for 3.5-5 minutes (delighted to hear that Luke and others have taken this advice on board) to soak up my thoughts and sit with the questions❓that arise within you (do share!).
👋Hello Friends,
I am writing this the morning after a day of intense pressure headaches, as trapped ‘prana’ energy attempted to move through the top of my head, from the base of my spine. It succeeded.
🌊 So now, I am sitting here with expansive, warm, flowing waves of something energetic releasing out of the top of my head.
WTF!?! You might be thinking. Yes, I quite agree. WTF. It’s not easy to explain something that doesn’t really exist conceptually in Western language. So that is why I’ve spent the last 6 weeks+ tearing through Eastern resources to try to make sense of what is happening in my body.
I think this energy mostly started with my 10-day silent Vipassana (insight) meditation retreat in Nov 2019.
I say mostly… 5 years ago I experienced some quite intense and accelerated emotional releases (think 0 to 10 in under 5 minutes) at the hands of my (cranial) osteopath. With his highly developed sense of touch he can sense subtle changes of tension and tissue quality and release system blockages. I felt him manipulate the energy in my body, helping it flow through blocked areas like my stomach or chest. He asked me what I could feel and where, and I realised that simply by paying attention to the feeling of the sensations and using visualisation I could take myself to a point of release. Now I know what feelings to look for, I’ve been experimenting since and learning how to take myself to that point of (mostly cathartic) energy release.
Back to Vipassana ( retreat reflections here). On the 4th day you move from noticing the breath to body scanning, which is about simply noticing sensations in the body (e.g. hot, cold tickle, pressure, itching, pulsations, vibrations) and remaining equanimous to them. A couple of days of scanning made me become aware of a rather frozen block of pressure or tension in my jaw. I’ve always had a tight jaw, alongside tightness in my neck and shoulders. I remember an old massage therapist recommending I sit with, relax and pay attention to my jaw during my upcoming retreat. At the time I didn’t understand but he was obviously onto something. Because after a couple of days of nervous patience (I worried that it would never go away) the sensations started to change. The block of pressure started to ‘melt’ and flow.
After that retreat, the jaw sensations never left me. Eyes open or closed, the melting continued. Although more intensely when I relaxed or meditated.
A few months later on an embodied consciousness retreat entitled ‘Nowhere to Go’ in 2020, the melting in my jaw intensified. At the same time, I experienced another surreal energy experience as I witnessed the energy of sadness come visit me. In my reflections I wrote:
‘letting her fully envelop me was an experience of exquisiteness, of humility and of profound love and gratefulness. She clothed me in a soft blue stream of shimmering light and air, showing me her beauty, her courage and her softness.’
And then last year, when I started experimenting with bottom-up therapy modality EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing), I noticed intensified melting during and after each session. There is definitely a link between somatic tension/pain and trauma; the body does indeed keep the score (reflection #1 from 2020 reflections).
The jaw tightness and melting stayed. So I kept exploring and was drawn to another embodied modality, Somatic Experiencing (SE), which is about accessing the felt sense. During my first SE session I released that there were other parts of my head that contained this energy, but instead of melting they felt pretty frozen. Oh dear, I remember thinking, not more tension to have to melt. When will this end?! That night I couldn’t sleep as my large parts of my head started gushing energy. The stream that was blocked was now flowing.
And flow it has. Each day for the last 6-8 weeks, I experience more and more flow. Especially after SE or EMDR sessions. Some days are intense, as the flow gets blocked by areas of tightness, and so it builds up and up until it has the power to push through. It sometimes feels like my body is being stretched apart or like a tooth is being pulled out. And other times there is an intense burning or fiery sensation. The more attention I give this process the faster it moves, so I’ve been meditating for hours before sleep (and also because I can’t sleep when there is so much activity going on).
My lifelong jaw tension has completely disappeared, along with tension in my neck and shoulders and even some in my hips! The energy has a mind of its own - its strong force has pushed it beyond my head to my back and hips and moves up and down my spine. And when I breathe, I feel it move through though my upper and lower chest, into my hips, legs and out the soles of my feet.
There is now an open channel of energy from the top of my head to my spine base, which feels light, expansive, like there just nothing but spaciousness inside of me. I can feel the structure of form disappearing as this energy seems to want to fill my insides. It is getting there, though there is still tension to be ‘melted’ focused around the back of my head and neck where my skull meets my spine.
Thinking, classically, hasn’t helped at all! I’ll be lost in pure feeling and then suddenly my mind gets excited and its commentary pulls me out of the moment… ‘oh wow, no thoughts are arising, this is beautiful. I wonder what it means!?’… just like how I sometimes think ‘oh, I’m about to fall asleep’ which then frustratingly has the opposite effect and pulls me back into consciousness!
And I know that beyond the flowing energy sensations, change is also happening in my subconscious. My dreams and visions have been loaded with the themes of moving house, death and new-born babies. Rebirth was definitely the right word to chose for 2021. Something is becoming.
A spiritual something that is healing, revealing and mystical. I’m calling it something because the path is pretty unclear right now. Of course, I’m still using other’s theories and spiritual accounts to second guess! It turns out that there are many traditions that are exploring what I believe to be the same thing…
In Vipassana (insight) meditation Goenka says the experience of insight can actually purify the samskaras in the body. Samskaras are a Buddhist term that refer to the impressions left on the subconscious and unconscious mind and body by our experiences, that are then manifested as habits, behaviours, our character, tendencies and dispositions. When we resist or crave sensations (both forms of attachment) we create new samskaras, and when we remain equinamimous to the sensations we purify ourselves of them, layer by layer. It seems like the equanimous awareness I give to my bodies sensations is releasing layers of these patterns.
This feels similar to Peter Levine’s (the founder of SE) research on frozen trauma energy trapped in the body that needs to be discharged. When animals encounter a situation where they perceive extreme threat (and can’t fight or flight), the nervous system triggers the body to freeze as a survival response. Most animals will shake uncontrollably afterwards to release the fight/flight energy which has increased our bodily tension, heart rate, respiration and flooded the body with adrenaline. Humans often don’t release this energy and it is instead locked into our bodies, enabling the trauma to continue to replay itself over and over in the present as if we were still in pain and helpless. For more detail, I’ve written about this process in last month’s letter ( Reflection #1), highly recommend anything written by Peter Levine and also the book Widen the Window by Dr Elizabeth Stanley which delves into stress, trauma and resilience training for the mind and body.
Levine has a whole chapter on trauma and spirituality in An Unspoken Voice. He says ‘It appears the very brain structures that are central to the resolution of trauma are also pivotal in various mystical and spiritual states.’' The discharge of trauma energy sensations promotes embodied transformation and likens it to the ‘experience of timelessness and presence known in meditation as the ‘eternal now’’. Trauma, like death, tantric sexual energy and meditation are ‘all catalysts for profound surrender’ (Levine) and said by Buddhist traditions to be pathways to spiritual awakening.
Generally most embodied practices (e.g. breath work, meditation, yoga, dance) aim to create altered states, activate energy centres in the spine - chakras - which are ‘not materially real (but) are where yogis believe physical, subtle and cosmic energies connect’ (Dr Bonnie Greenwell, When Spirit Leaps) and remove any blocks which often hold the root of physical or emotional trauma. These practices shift, stir and erupt energy which is believed to be who we are, as part of the greater energy field of life.
In The Surrender Experiment, Michael Singer describes early on in his spiritual journey the feeling of ‘a beautiful flow of energy up my spine to the middle of my forehead’ and then years later ‘what later felt like ten thousand volts of electricity jump(ed) from the base of my spine’ as he received a Yogi’s hand land on his head. The latter is an example of Hindu term Shaktipat, to describe the transmission of spiritual energy upon one person by another to arouse a kundalini awakening. Kundalini energy is extra prana situated at the base of the spine. Whilst I am experiencing some of the symptoms I am confident my kundalini is not yet awake.
And it is at this point of writing that I feel it is important to share some nervousness I experienced in my body about writing and sharing this letter. A couple of years ago I didn’t know what half the concepts I have shared here meant and held a perhaps critical response when reading words like energy, chakra or God. If you’re reading my thoughts and they sounds strange, magical or challenging to your belief system then I can acknowledge and understand your feelings.
💡 I am learning that when something doesn’t fit my theoretical models about reality, I do not deny its existence, but see it as an opportunity to realise the limitations of our knowledge and become curious about what else is missing in our box of knowledge. Reading Sapiens is a good way to realise how much our collective beliefs as a species change over time. I feel like I am an explorer, always searching for something outside of what is known. I may hold opinions but they are loosely held - I remain open to changing my mind as I experience more perspectives, especially where I receive direct experience that contradicts it.
So what happens next, I would imagine your mind would like to know?…
Well, mine would too and and I don’t yet have the mental frameworks to cognitively make sense of it all, not that a map is the territory it represents. And like the future, I doubt we really want to know it because it is most satisfying to actually experience it as it happens. So, direct experience, here I am, curious, listening to feeling and waiting to understand more about the nature of consciousness, of self and reality.
I’ll keep you updated.
❓Given the more unusual quality of this letter, I’m really curious how this lands with you? Have you experienced or come across anything similar? Are there any resources or people you can point me to?
Sending (Virtual) Hugs, Smiles & Love,
Georgie 🤗❤️
Life Updates & Curious Finds
🎨 Finding inspiration through images to unlock thoughts, feelings and ideas.
✍️ 30 positive news stories (🙏 Ghilaine)
🎙️Speaking to our internal parts - Internal Family Systems (IFS) Founder Richard Schwartz live with Tim Ferriss.
📚 PhD Progress: Thanks to those who shared love in the Linkedin world 🙏. I’ve just submitted my first studentship funding application. Not confident I will get it as its highly competitive, but feeling confident that I will find another way.
🔮 What am I working on right now? Let's just say it involves some Alchemy… (I promise I will share more next month 🥺)
📖 A Parting Quote
"Paradoxical as it may seem, the purposeful life has no content, no point. It hurries on and on, and misses everything. Not hurrying, the purposeless life misses nothing, for it is only when there is no goal and no rush that the human senses are fully open to receive the world."
- Alan Watts
🙏 Thanks to Michael M for leaving this quote somewhere so that I could serendipitously find it.