Channels

Channels

The Sugar Pine Café, 2011, was just a block from our hotel.  

I had been up in the early hours of the morning meditating.

  I was learning about the energy system, learning how to find my own. 

I learned something that morning, and I was eager to tell my husband.  The air was cool as we walked to the Sugar Pine Café.  Why do I remember this moment some fourteen years later?  Because the story just started to tumble out on our walk to the Sugar Pine Café, and we were still talking about it on our walk back after breakfast!  Moments like these are just very emotional.

Meditation

Slow breath in, slower breath out, slow breath in, slower breath out.  I had been meditating about five o’clock in the morning.  Ten, maybe fifteen minutes into meditation a channel in my heart chakra surged with a slow moving substance, with an energy that I had not experience prior.  I felt the energy move up and out, right through the center of my heart chakra.  At first I could not tell what I was feeling, but it expanded with every moment. The energy was warm, thick, soft yet surging. 

It left me feeling a profound longing, a longing for justice.  

I did not know that such a thing could happen, in a very deliberate channel.  I did not know that the energy itself felt different than other energies I had experienced.  I did not realize that the heart had many channels.  I did not realize that justice was how energy felt in a very particular channel.  I did not realize that justice could manifest as a longing, a longing that had a very particular energy to it.

When I felt this energy surging, I felt the longing so powerfully it moved me to tears.  The feeling was not in my head.  It was in my heart.  I felt it so powerfully that I felt like my heart could have left my chest.  There were no words.  There was no content, really.  Just a more powerful longing for justice than I had felt in my entire life. 

I tried breathing deeply to see if the longing would dissipate.  The deeper I breathed, the more intense the longing!  The longing was for justice, but it was not justice for any specific thing.  It was a longing for justice created by deep charity, charity for all who had so little, for all who were oppressed.  I was drinking my coffee at the Sugar Pine Café, telling my husband about this experience when it occurred to me that it was justice created by deep charity that I was longing for.

Yosemite Grandeur

I was working very hard at that point in time, helping people overcome trauma, illness, addiction, despair, worry, all part of my psychology practice.  Their struggles moved me deeply.  The enormity of suffering flowed through my being every day.  That is why we were going to Yosemite, why we were enroute.  We were going to Yosemite to breathe, to walk among the wonders there.  We were off loading suffering.  We were breathing in the fresh air, letting awe fill our hearts, letting go of the suffering I witnessed daily. 

Yosemite was a weekend long . . . sometimes a week long . . . meditation.

We were just about done at the Sugar Pine Café.  My husband had reached for the check, when I suddenly realized something.  We sat and talked longer.  “Tzedakah” is a word in Hebrew that means “justice”, but it also means “charity”. “Tzedakah” means justice and charity at the same time because in Hebrew justice and charity are  the same thing.  What I was longing for was “Tzedakah”. 

What astounded me was that longing for “Tzedakah” is an energy channel that moves right through the heart.

Channels of Light

The river that runs through Yosemite is the Merced.  Tumbling over rocks in places, wide and quiet in other places, it is where the creeks and streams and waterfalls all end up.  Some streams and waterfalls grow dry during the summer and fall, only to be filled with gushing water again in winter and spring.  The storms of winter and the snowmelt of spring are what drive the water ever downwards toward the river.

Sometimes events of life drive energy internally.  My father had died in 2009.  My kids graduated college in 2010.  The energy released by grief awakened places in me that I had only theorized existed.  I was financially freer than I had been before.  Meditation helped me through grief.  I was freer inside than I had been in a decade, free to explore my energy system without overwhelm. 

That morning meditating in 2011, a gush of energy began to awaken my heart to a longing I had not felt so acutely up to that point in time. 

Wintry Wind

We turned off the car in the Yosemite parking lot.  The wind was whipping the trees, tearing the brown leaves off of them.  I sat pondering the strength of the wind.  It’s a powerful energy that moves the wind so strongly.  Mighty currents of air move across the landscape. 

Mighty currents of energy move through human beings too, currents of subtle energy.  The energy I had felt moving through my heart that morning was subtle energy.

Subtle energy can move slowly in the human body, a bit like molasses.  Just as the wind tears off the dead leaves from trees, subtle energy cleanses the channels of the body as it moves.  It clears energetic debris just as the wind clears the dead leaves.  Subtle energy clears blockages we have developed.  Subtle energy puts back our sparkle, re-energizes us.  It revitalizes.

Energy is energy.  But energy shaped by different channels in the heart chakra are experienced as different longings.  Different channels give rise to different feelings.  Different channels give rise to different feelings because the channels are shaped and located differently.  Our experience of energy moving through each channel is different.  The shape of each channel helps us determine what feeling has been aroused.

I would describe the shape of the longing for justice channel as of medium width, coming from deep within the heart chakra.  It is a straight shot from the depths, curving outward only at the end.  It curves outward and pours out into the world.

There are other channels beside the one I’ve written about here.  There are channels for joy, for example.  They start almost in the belly, arching outward and around the breasts, and come together in the middle just above the breasts, very much the shape of a valentine heart.  There is a channel that begins in the big toe, follows the inside of the leg until the upper thigh, where it extends outward and up the side of the body.  It is a channel that makes us feel re-energized. 

It puts back our sparkle! 

Yosemite Dawn

When did you last feel joy? 

Where did you feel it in your body? 

When did you last feel re-energized? 

Where did you feel that feeling in your body? 

What longings have you felt with your heart? 

Deep longings? 

How would you describe them?