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There are many ways to work with the chakras. One that isn’t often mentioned is the use of personal writing. Chakras are a vast field of study and this isn’t meant to address these wheels of our subtle anatomy completely.

First a few words about journaling. While this is a popular practice, many are intimidated by writing, or journal inconsistently and feel guilty about it.

You don’t have to be Charles Dickens to benefit from journaling! There are no deadlines, you don’t have to be a great writer, or even know grammar particularly well. There are no rejection letters, you don’t need an agent or have to appear on Oprah. The New York Times isn’t going to pan your work, and you don’t have to hole up in the Florida Keys, drunk. So, chill out.

Journaling is about allowing your thoughts, feelings and intuitions to surface on the page. It helps to understand your life, process various things, heal and get clear. It’s also a great way to record your journey and growth. Over a lifetime, significant themes emerge and journaling is a powerful way to use hindsight for future betterment. Your journal is a mirror and container.

It’s also a place where imperfection is allowed. Each entry doesn’t need to be complete everytime you journal. You can revisit and continue exploring. Associative threads emerge, and it’s safe to express yourself in this way.

Chakra prompts

There are many great resources available on the chakras and some basic familiarity will be needed to journal through each one.

Simply put, chakras are nonphysical wheels of energy corresponding to specific locations along the spine and head, which relate to your human experience on earth, and also your spiritual experience as a soul.

Following are one journal prompt for each chakra. Many more and different prompts could be used, and you’ll probably come up with your own. This is to get you started. When you practice personal writing, don’t censor and let it flow.

• Chakra 1, tip of spine, element Earth: Am I rooted and grounded in the earth with a solid foundation to survive and build my home here?
• Chakra 2, genital region, element Water: Do I move well though my emotions and desires, feel pleasure and express my sexuality/sensuality, relating to people, and flowing with my creativity?
• Chakra 3, solar plexus, element Fire: Am I in control of my personal power and will, both retaining authority and avoiding aggression so I can be intact in body and mind?
• Chakra 4, center of chest (heart), element Air: Is there balance between my giving and receiving in the fullness of love and compassion and the openness of my heart space, both for myself and for others?
• Chakra 5, the throat, element Ether: Do I communicate my truth and express my creativity?
• Chakra 6, pituitary gland/point between eyebrows, element Light: Do I honor my intuition?
• Chakra 7, cerebral cortex/crown, element Consciousness: Do I know what and who I am?

As you may notice, the prompts for chakras 5, 6 and 7 are brief but profound. The contemplation for these centers is multifaceted and for 6 and 7, essentially spiritual (and also for the heart chakra). For instance, intuition helps you to know both at a mundane and cosmic level. As for the thousand-petaled lotus that is the crown chakra, this is the transcendent knowing of Self.

When you are going to journal, make sure you can be alone, in a quiet place. This kind of writing is more of a meditation. It comes from inside, not so much from your logical mind. It’s not a diary of the day’s events, but a way to have a deep conversation with all aspects of your being. It’s transformational writing.

If you have any questions or need further guidance please leave a comment. There’s a lot of subtlety involved and I’d be happy to mentor, and provide more information by replying to your comments.

Okay, now go get your journal!

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In its simplest, most direct manifestation, to be empowered is already happening if you’re consciously involved in working on yourself. If this work is psychological, spiritual or better a combination, and it’s consistent and sincere, then empowerment is taking place.

This truth is often missed. Perhaps your inner work’s momentum hasn’t quite gathered yet. Perhaps your struggles are still in your face. Delight in the fact that still elusive outward changes are a reflection of how you’re changing inside; they just haven’t quite taken form yet. And things may not be all that pretty inside. Instead of being neurotic that change hasn’t manifested, realize it’s in process; you’re working it.

The truth of the matter is that empowerment is ongoing. You have to climb a while before reaching a plateau. And then the path still continues.

Empowerment is personal power. It’s used for routine tasks such as getting up, making breakfast and going to work. It’s also used as self-determination and integrity. Personal power properly claimed and wielded, can bring you emotional freedom and peace of mind. There has to be a modicum of personal power to just survive, let alone thrive. Depending on your ‘story,’ your bio, you may have been raised in an environment that provided this. Then it can be built on. If not, and even if so most of us still need to work on it, personal power is personal: You must dust it off and let it shine. No one else can really do it for you.

Everything that we’ve shoved away, we shoved away with a curse; most of it came from the outside. With a curse comes a hiding, comes a shame. To dare to be seen and to speak from what’s authentic undoes a curse. It’s time to stop hiding behind some fiction of “bad me” and burn through to shining.  — Jeannie Zandi

With personal power comes tremendous trust and energy. You’re able to trust yourself, and life. It energizes your psyche which fuels your imagination, purpose and passions. It lifts you. Personal power can be a diamond in the rough, however. Its best use isn’t for you to impose your will over your circumstances. This can be destructive, short-lived, and in service of the ego.

Humility does not mean you think less of yourself. It means you think of yourself less. — Ken Blanchard

Once personal power is actuated and exercised regularly in a balanced way, it begins to become empowerment. Empowerment is a settled resource, while personal power can fluctuate. Empowerment is lifelong and more of the spirit. Personal power giving way to empowerment is the transition from ego to soul. The soul is truth. When you know your spiritual truth, all other lies fall off. It’s a knowing that can’t become unknown.

This is the pinnacle of empowerment, but it doesn’t have to be fully reached before being radically effective in your life. You need empowerment in your career, for personal growth, to heal, for spiritual development. If you’ve put in the work to find some psychological wholeness, and also reached into your soul and are on a spiritual path, the practices you’re engaged in, the realizations that come, and the way of being that establishes itself in you are all naturally empowering. Over time it becomes firmer and firmer, more and more knowable and reliable. There’s a gentleness to empowerment, a detachment. Even with annoyances or more substantial issues that may still come up, empowerment once accessed filters into your life, and eases your way.

Truth is empowering. Everytime you turn to truth, it empowers you more. Knowing your true nature, and before that growing in understanding it, being it, experiencing life from its perspective is empowering with each encounter. Each moment of spiritual practice polishes your diamond.

Fear does arise on the way to empowerment. Fear is a many-headed beast. Therefore courage is a must. Ironically, you need courage to be empowered, and empowered to show courage. They are inextricably linked. One feeds the other. Courage is a fire that burns away fear. Empowerment keeps the fire going.

Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgment that something else is more important than fear. — Ambrose Redmoon

Power is essential to life. Every living thing needs to be powered somehow. Humans are powered by soul consciousness, light, breath, life force, and food and water. Of these, consciousness is the overseer and director, and life force is the ‘electricity’ and subtle hub making each item work with all the parts of a human.

If consciousness and life force are trapped in past hurts, or projected into future worries they aren’t available now where you need them. Their power is diminished greatly, and you’re left powerless in the present. Loss of power is much more than lack of energy. It can lead to depression, confusion, and low vibration choices which exacerbate your situation.

To reclaim and cycle your power in through your present moments is an act of empowerment. Feeding old ghosts or giving juice to future fear dragons is disempowering. Your power is needed now, here with you.

But the greatest power is always love. Power can be used in the service of love, but not vice versa. — Ram Dass

…

Want to stop power leaks? See the simple and affordable 2-month program.

Each post for the Reiki Help Blog can take anywhere from 1-5 days to write/research, proofread/edit, and post with an appropriate image and formatting. If you leave this space with any value, knowledge, joy or understanding, please consider making a donation of your choice.

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© Pamir Kiciman 2010

Many aren’t even aware of the option to be healed. The long history of healing is unknown to them, since it doesn’t get much airplay. And if healing is sought, it’s often for mundane reasons, although that’s still valid. Often people come to healing when there’s real trouble and all else has failed.

So, what is it, to heal, to be healed? Is it to feel better? Is it to have no pain? Is it to have a flesh wound close? Is it to end emotional suffering? Does everyone need healing? What if you’re healthy and your life is functional?

The short answer is, yes, everyone wants to be healed, whether that’s known to them consciously or not. The why is what this post is about.

There are some human fundamentals: Everyone wants to be happy, suffer not, be healthy, be provided for, have a place in the world, and have dignity. The way there we’re told is through the usual trajectory of schooling, career, advancement, relationship, a home, family, and the accumulation of stuff.

This isn’t a terrible model. It works in the world. Yet, it’s still a model of survival, with how well depending on the number and quality of creatures comforts you have. It causes a frustrating tug on these things to fulfill you that inherently don’t have that capacity. So you change majors, careers, partners, houses, and the particulars of your retirement account.

This model leaves you hungry, no matter how “full” your life may seem. It’s a cycle of searching. It’s a cycle of needs fulfillment.

Underneath all this searching there’s a seeking. You want to be happy, healthy, safe and loved. The only real way that can happen is if you get to know your true self. You can still have a career, family, and good retirement, but unless your true nature is known to you, fulfillment remains elusive and distant. The really juicy bit here is also that knowledge of your true nature as a foundation, launches the most incredible life in all its worldly permutations.

And that’s why everyone wants to be healed. At a core level everyone wants to become one with themselves, to be in their own fullness, power and beauty. What we’re told is the way there, isn’t the way there. The way there is inward. The way there is healing.

Your overarching purpose is to know your true nature. This unifies and clarifies all time-bound purposes. Knowing your true nature betters your outer world too, because then life is authentic. No matter your biography and resume, you’re here to know your true self. This is the real meaning of healing and it removes pesky pains and dramas too.

There’s alternative and complementary healing, only named such because medicine has become the primary avenue of health, for the resolution of human physical, emotional and mental ailments. There’s also spiritual healing. Both of these have been around for centuries, with storied traditions, which makes the alternative/complementary moniker misleading. In fact there’s only one kind of healing, and that is spiritual healing.

We are soul-infused biology. A healer heals at the soul level which filters to all human parts. Whether the spiritual is acknowledged or not, it’s unavoidable because it’s the very matrix of life, being and living.  All the external ways in which you want to bring yourself happiness, health, safety, success and love are in reality also ways in which you address your spirituality. What you’re searching is your original unity with your body, mind and soul, and the great living universe. This search is often fruitless unless it becomes a seeking.

Your true nature is real. It’s of Light substance, not carbon, unbound by time, Love in form. People work with healers to better their human, only to realize they were Divine all along. The human is Divine. The human is not skin-encased parts. That’s the body. It’s of the earth, it’s a fine vehicle for the sojourn here. The human is Heart and pure Being. It is Soul and Breath. It is Sacred Beauty.

There’s healing to be done in your timeline. Greater spiritual healing is to know your true nature. The physical body slowly breaks down. It needs healing. Your emotions and mental realm are challenged by this proposition of living. They need healing. Healing the dramas and pains of your life is a valid reason to work with a healer. It bears many gifts. There are yet more gifts.

“Who/What am I and what am I doing here?” is answered through healing. Awakening to your abiding self is the healing of illusion. The greatest illusion is that you’re your bank account, the kind of car you drive, your accomplishments and the physical life you lead. These have value. Their value is never quite realized without the missing piece: The conscious quest to know your true nature.

This quest is a healing up. Healing mentally, emotionally and physically is healing down to where you are on the planet at any given moment. Healing up is outside of time. It occurs in the nonphysical. It takes place in essence, not shape. It’s in the causal realm.

The healing of this primary illusion transforms everything. How you live, how you live in relation to the planet, in relation to yourself and other people and species, what you live, how you touch other lives, and what you leave behind from your expression in this specific iteration.

What do you live? Is it your Divinity?

Our true nature is self-authenticating. When we bump into our true nature, it authenticates itself. Something inside us knows. —Adyashanti

(You can work with me if you’re not in the local area. Find out here.)

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The Love Embrace of the Universe, the Earth (Mexico), Me, and Senor Xolotl by Frida Kahlo

This week marks another Earth Day on Friday, April 22. Today it’s been one year since B.P.’s oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. The way we live with our planetary home is a prominent piece of the Earth changes and humanity’s evolution as we’re currently witnessing on the world stage. This evolution isn’t only in the human psyche or society, but is directly in relation to our co-living with the Earth, this great Mother Being.

The repercussions of the oil spill disaster are nowhere near understood or even acknowledged. It’s complex and only a few items will be mentioned. Congress still hasn’t raised the liability cap for companies that cause oil spills. BP has so far paid only $3.8 billion of its $20 billion restitution fund. The human toll continues financially and emotionally. Samantha Joye, a University of Georgia researcher has found oil coating coral ecosystems in the Gulf after five sea floor expeditions since the spill; species like dolphins, turtles and whales are suffering losses that will not manifest for years. 235 miles of coastline are still actively being cleaned. Safety, preparedness, and regulatory failures were exposed and it’s uncertain how another event will be prevented. Drilling permits in even deeper and more dangerous waters are now being issued again, after a short moratorium. You can read in-depth reporting from these sources: New York Times, Los Angeles Times, DiscoveryNews, Huffington Post, BBC News,  Mother Nature Network.

Today, I really want to write about a substantially different point of view, one that continues the new story of the Earth and humanity as I’ve been posting here lately.

Every human being has a unique and mystical relationship to the wild world, and the conscious discovery and cultivation of that relationship is at the core of true adulthood. In contemporary society, we think of maturity simply in terms of hard work and practical responsibilities. I believe, in contrast, that true adulthood is rooted in transpersonal experience—in a mystic affiliation with nature, experienced as a sacred calling—that is then embodied in soul-infused work and mature responsibilities. —Bill Plotkin, PhD

The ancients have known this. There are many who know it today because it’s passed down, and it’s felt. What’s missing is the tipping point number of people who need to know it for there to be a significant cultural shift in the way we live. The way we live with ourselves, each other and this planet of life we cohabit. We humans live here with more than 11 million species, of which we’ve named only about 1.7 million.

By embracing Nature and soul as our wisest and most trustworthy guides, we can raise children, support teenagers, and ripen ourselves in ways that enable us to grow whole and engender a sustainable human culture. We can progress from our current egocentric societies (materialistic, anthropocentric, competition-based, class-stratified, violence-prone and unsustainable) to soulcentric ones (imaginative, ecocentric, co-operation-based, just, compassionate and sustainable). —Bill Plotkin, PhD

The world’s soul and Nature’s soul are rather vocal as we come into another Spring on this planet of about 4.6 billion years. The world and Nature are inseparable. What makes the Earth habitable is her Nature. Mars doesn’t have it, nor any other in our solar system, and beyond (as far as we know today for all practical purposes). Without Nature as foundation and life sustainer, we can’t have any of the human achievements that may swell up our pride.

There’s a life that flows through everything on Earth. This life has a soul. This soul speaks. Much of humanity is alienated to it, but this soul is simply us, and all of everything in creation. When I first started contemplating what’s been going on in the world this year, a phrase came to me spontaneously:

We are in the time of the Circle.

I didn’t use it at then. Now its time is ripe.

All life is a circle. The atom is a circle, orbits are circles, the earth, moon, and sun are circles. The seasons are circles. The cycle of life is a circle: baby, youth, adult, elder. The sun gives life to the earth who feeds life to the trees whose seeds fall to the earth to grow new trees. We need to practice seeing the cycles that the Great Spirit gave us because this will help us more in our understanding of how things operate. We need to respect these cycles and live in harmony with them. —Rolling Thunder, Cherokee

Each post for the Reiki Help Blog can take anywhere from 1-5 days to write/research, proofread/edit, and post with an appropriate image and formatting. If you leave this space with any value, knowledge, joy or understanding, please consider making a donation of your choice.

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© Pamir Kiciman 2010

Earth has been framed in many stories since its inception. Broadly, these are early creation myths, agrarian times, Flat Earth and being center of the universe, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, Modernism, and finally the scientific/technological age of globalization. At this very juncture, Earth’s and humanity’s narrative within it is being radically rewritten. It’s an emergent story, one that’s on the edge of the future and so in some ways unknowable. However, there are clear signs and indicators. The first quarter of 2011 has been extremely eventful and what these signs and indicators mean, or how we may utilize them in solution-oriented ways can be confusing.

We must participate in the emergent story of the Earth and humanity without the mistakes and limitations of the old one. In essence, humanity’s trajectory on Earth has been one of increasing ‘separation.’ We began with a healthy respect for Nature and working in harmony with her. The Earth was understood to be sacred. This remained true even as ideas of ‘mine’ and ‘ours’ crept in when everyone wanted to protect their land. We started to feel separate from each other, while still feeling one with Nature. As cities developed, humans spent less time outdoors. With the Industrial Age and its aftermath all the way to the present, our relationship with Nature and the Earth shifted from gratitude for resources to profit from resources.

This shift and science’s ability to measure only matter but not ‘life’ has established the worldview that creation is inert. Only humans are alive, but even then we can only love those who are the same as we are. Trees are alive, but they’re a commodity so clearcutting rainforests is permissible. Animals are alive, but they don’t have our intellect, so we can raise them solely to be slaughtered as food. A seed is full of life, but what it grows into can’t be shipped easily so we’ll modify it genetically. Oil is not alive, so it’s perfectly fine to drill and extract it with no end in sight. If the world around us is inert, if we live in a dead solar system, then a neighbor who’s ‘different,’ the extinction of a species, or the final demise of old growth forests is of little consequence.

Current world events, capped by the earthquake in Japan and military action in Libya are a giant call to awakening. We don’t know what may happen next. What we do know is that when a planet and its life forms become commodities only, stripped of all other intrinsic value, that planet is in dire danger. The New Earth can only emerge from the understanding that creation is in fact not inert, but teeming with sacred life.

This is the choice point we’re facing collectively. There’s a way to heal through our dilemmas. The Earth herself has wounds, as does humanity. Oneness is an ancient truth we must now adopt as our new narrative to heal. Oneness has always been Earth’s and humanity’s narrative. What’s needed now is its embodiment. Our task now is to permeate social, political, economic and scientific systems with it. A united Earth can step into a possible future that’s now emerging.

Oneness includes compassion, not only tolerance. It includes wisdom, not only intelligence. It includes nonmechanical power. It includes abiding inspiration and creativity. We need all of these to usher in the sustainable good of the future.

Although there have been massive undercurrents to what we’re seeing in the world today, events are at the same time spontaneous and self-organizing. This and the severity of upheaval all around the world is a sure sign of much needed global healing. We can make this a teachable moment for humanity. The world’s healing traditions hold the wisdom that change includes cleansing. Cleansing is a process of reconciliation. The unhealed must be processed. This means it’s acknowledged and understood first, which leads to acceptance and insight. Finally, higher functional states open up.

When creation is understood as living, honoring it comes naturally, and our acts become hymns to it instead of dirges. Will you emerge and merge with Earth’s and humanity’s new healing narrative?

© Pamir Kiciman, written March 2011

Each post for the Reiki Help Blog can take anywhere from 1-5 days to write/research, proofread/edit, and post with an appropriate image and formatting. If you leave this space with any value, knowledge, joy or understanding, please consider making a donation of your choice.

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