by Abby Wynne
Drop your focus of awareness, your ball of light, downwards to just above your bellybutton. Use your breath to do this as before. This is the part of the body that most people are very conscious of; they hold that belly in tight!!
Remember that you’re in your safe space now, you may need to tell yourself that it’s all OK, and that you’re fine just as you are in this moment. Again, you might have trouble believing that, but do your best to relax with yourself, with your body. You can change anything if you really want to; perhaps getting to know yourself at this deeper, physical level, will help you make some changes too, if that’s what you want to do.
Soften and relax your stomach, let it all hang out! Nobody’s looking!!
When you’re ready, imagine the ball of light, the centre of your focus and awareness, dropping down to just below your bellybutton. This is where many people hold the most anxiety, so go gently here, feel your feet on the ground, and breathe with yourself. Slow down if you need to. Bring your awareness into your belly, into your lower back, into your spine. Just feel what you feel, and know that it’s all OK. Again, you can stop if you want to and come back later for more.
Breathe, and drop down into your pelvis. Imagine the ball of light splits into two parts, each part moving into one of your hips. You have two smaller balls of light, one in each hip now, shining brightly; you might become more aware of the chair you are sitting in when you do this. Let these balls of light gently and slowly move down your legs at the same time, moving into your thighs and down to your knees. Imagine the balls of light now moving from your knees, down the front of your legs, together and at the same time, into your ankles and then into your feet. Imagine your foot bones lighting up, touching the floor.
Breathe. You are centred in your body now.
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‘How do you feel now?’ I ask Carol, after doing the body reconnection exercise with her.
‘Different. Not really sure… heavier, but much more peaceful.’
‘It’s funny how we’re not allowed to feel heavy, as if being heavy is something bad. It’s not bad, it’s how it feels to be in our body, until you get used to it!’
‘Yes, that’s what it is,’ says Carol with a smile. ‘I’m in my body! Wow!’
Being centred in your body is a great place to be when you have to make decisions, think clearly or be present for other people. If this is the first time you’ve felt like you’ve been in your body in a long while, I recommend you try this exercise every day for a few days to settle into it before continuing with the rest of the work in this chapter. And if it takes you a few tries to complete the whole exercise in one go, that’s wonderful work, well done!
Notice what brings you right back up and out of your body again! A loud noise outside? Or a thought? Maybe you could check in with yourself at different times of day, notice where your focus of awareness is and pull it back into your body. It gets easier the more you do it. You will find that after a while, doing this becomes second nature to you, and that you have more awareness, and are more able to be present in the moment. It’s a gift!
Listening for a ‘yes’ or a ‘no’
When you connect to your centre, you have access to your intuition. Your intuition is part of the very fabric of your being, your soul essence, the Life Force Energy that makes you, you. Images are the way that our soul speaks to us. The soul has no language; words are something that our minds created. For everyone, the experience of communicating with his or her intuition is different. Some people see an actual image before their eyes, some get a taste in their mouth, a shiver down their spine, or hear an inner voice, while others experience a sudden knowingness. You probably already know how your inner wisdom reveals itself to you, but you may also be an expert at avoiding listening to it.
Our brain is impatient and likes to jump in and guess before we actually get a chance to really connect. This is something you need to unlearn. Before you can truly believe that the wisdom you get from your intuition is a real message from your Self and not just something you’ve made up in your head, you need to know what a ‘yes’ and a ‘no’ feel like. Are you ready to do this? Be as real with yourself as you can, as this will aid your authenticity and integrity in your healing work.
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Exercise: listening for a ‘yes’ or a ‘no’ (intuition reconnection)
Create your space of love, with the intention to feel a ‘yes’ and a ‘no’.
Sit, breathe and relax. If you need to, come more into your body using the centring exercise, until you feel as if you’ve arrived.
Work on a yes first. Tell your body you want to hear/feel/know a yes.
Ask a question to which you know the answer is yes, such as ‘Is my name…’? ‘Do I live at…’? Ask if your family are your family. If your favourite book is the one you love best. Ask as many times as you need to in order to feel the yes, learn the yes, resonate with it, recognize it.
Then work on the no. Ask yourself something that you know is a no, such as ‘Am I SCUBA diving right now?’ Think of as many questions as you can where the answer is obviously a no and ask yourself those – notice how the no feels different in your stomach, in your chest.
Now breathe and centre, letting go of the thoughts. This is clearing a space, like cleansing your palate at dinner. Now say out loud ‘yes yes yes yes yes’ and notice how that feels, if it maps to what you were feeling earlier. Let the wave of ‘yes’ shift away from you, come back to centre. Now try with a ‘no no no no no’, and again, map that, anchor the feeling into yourself so you will recognize it later.
Now really use your intuition by asking a question that you don’t know the answer to. Not a serious question, but one you are interested in knowing the answer to, such as ‘Am I making all this stuff up?’ or ‘Am I feeling OK right now?’ Wait and feel your body’s response, your heart’s response, your gut’s response. Is the yes and no response clearer now?
Don’t pressure yourself for an answer, your system is only getting used to having your full attention and it might jam up! It might also jam up if you ask the most serious questions first, like ‘Am I on track with my life?’ or ‘Should I leave my job?’ Give yourself time to grow into this, practising it with any choice you need to make, or any question you know has a yes or no answer. Confidence using this yes/no intuition exercise will come over time, as you get the results you expect.
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Connecting to your heart
Your heart is the seat of your emotions. On a good day, your heart centre shines its light to the world, radiating love. On a not-so-good day your heart centre can shut down and hide from the world, hoping nobody sees it. We can very quickly disconnect from our heart centre, and get back up into our heads, into our minds, thinking about how we should feel, telling ourselves how we do feel, without actually knowing how we really feel. And if something should hurt or upset us it’s very easy to shut our heart centre down, although not so easy to wake it up again.
Cynthia’s boyfriend Michael betrayed her, but even after forgiving him her heart shut down, and months later, when she thought she was ready to move on with her life, her heart still felt the pain.
‘It’s like I feel dead inside sometimes, like the colours have drained out from the world. Nothing seems to bring me joy. I’m with a crowd of friends, they’re laughing, and I’m laughing too. But I’m not really laughing, not laughing on the inside. I don’t remember the last time I really felt happy.’
Having a closed heart can make you feel disconnected from life. Energy Healing can help awaken your heart, help you feel more connected and bring the colours back into your day. But you have to feel safe. It comes back to being authentic, being congruent. If you have a closed heart because of years of abuse, you have to make sure you’ve worked through the issues in your mind that stop you moving forward. Energy Healing can still help soften the mind, soften the emotions, but it can be a long process.
Now we are going to reconnect with the hear
t. If you get caught up in your thinking, you are getting distracted from the work. Ask yourself if what you see/hear/imagine is real, wait for your yes or your no. If it’s a yes, keep going. If it’s a no, regroup, centre yourself and start again. This takes practice.
Our brain has a lot to tell us, and we do need to pay equal attention to the mind, the heart and the soul. Nobody gets left behind! Reassure yourself that you will listen to all of it, but this time, it’s your heart’s turn to speak to you.
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Exercise: connecting with your heart centre
Create your space of love and make sure you feel safe.
Set your intention to reconnect with your heart, to be gentle with yourself.
Give yourself permission to go as deeply as you feel comfortable, and to stop if you need to.
Sit with open body posture, check in with yourself and ask yourself if you are feeling nervous about doing this. If you feel nerves or tightness in your stomach, tell yourself it’s OK. Go at your own pace.
Imagine your focus of awareness, the ball of light, just as before. Bring it into your body, just like before. Take as long as you need to, and you can stop when you reach your heart centre.
Breathe and feel your feet on the ground. If you are feeling light-headed at this point, continue with the exercise like before, bringing the ball of light down into your pelvis, down into your legs and into your feet. Then bring your awareness back up into your heart.
When you feel connected to your heart centre, breathe and relax even more deeply. Open up your chest. Imagine the armour or protection you carry around you is melting away.
Now step into your imagination and visualize a garden. It could be one that you have visited or seen before, or it could just be one that materializes in front of your mind’s eye. It’s a beautiful garden, and at the back of the garden is a flower; this is the flower of your heart.
Move towards the flower as if it is an emotional being and you don’t want to frighten it. Notice what type of flower it is, and whether the petals are open or closed. Ask permission to sit, and then when you feel it’s OK, imagine that you sit down beside the flower. Look at it with kind eyes, appreciating the things that this flower has been through, the pain and the trauma, the fear and the anxiety. You are a bringer of hope, you bring with you love, and healing. Ask the flower if it’s OK to heal now, and see if it feels right. Breathe, and imagine that this flower is breathing with you, in and out, in and out.
As you’re breathing in and out, both of you breathing together, you can visualize a glow of healing light coming down from the sky, through the top of your head, down through your body and outwards from your heart centre. This healing light is silvery gold. It’s beautiful high-vibrational energy and feels like champagne bubbles. It flows around you, through you and across to the flower. Helping you both to soften, relax and heal.
On the out breath, all the stress and tension you’re both carrying flows to the ground. On the in breath, new, fresh energies come in and feed your soul. And you’re looking at the flower, and the flower is looking at you, and you’re breathing together. Your heart is opening, along with the flower.
If there are any blemishes, tears or sore patches on the petals of the flower, see them healing and repairing themselves with the healing light. If the stem looks stark, visualize the healing light feeding your flower and the stem thickening up, fresh new leaves growing on it.
Ask the flower what it needs from you. Does it need some quiet time to rest? Is there anything you can do in the physical world, the day-to-day life, that would help your heart feel better? Wait and listen.
Now, give thanks. Visualize the healing light dissolving away gently, leaving you both revitalized and glowing. It’s almost as if you bow to the flower, and the flower bows back to you. It’s time to go. Put your hand on your heart and imagine yourself standing up to leave the garden. Tell the flower you’ll come back and visit again, and visualize yourself leaving the garden; as you do this, come back into your body gently, and back into the room, into your space of love.
Take a moment or two to reorient yourself. Notice how you are feeling. You might want to write down what comes to mind, what the flower said. You might want to draw a picture of your flower, or find a picture of it on the Internet and use it on your phone as a screensaver to remind you that your heart does have the capacity to open.
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If your heart flower opened only a little bit, healed only a little bit, it’s a great result. If your heart flower acknowledged your presence and breathed with you, that’s also a wonderful thing. And if all that happened was that you got into the garden and saw there was a flower there, then that’s also wonderful. Even if you got to the garden and there was no flower, that’s still a good first step. Come back again tomorrow and wait, the flower may be too upset to show its face just yet. Trust me, we have very high expectations, and that can be the pressure that breaks the healing process. Step back from what you expect, and be with what actually is.
By your showing up, your heart learns to trust that you do actually care, and it shows you a little bit more of itself every time.
Tuning in and disconnecting from the energy around you
As you get more familiar with yourself, with your intuition and your heart, you will notice all of the things that affect it that you may not have been aware of before. Remember Sandra with her job? She realized that connecting into heavy, slow, group energies was making her sick. You may also begin to realize that the group energy you are exposed to has the same effect on you.
This next exercise is one you can do when you are surrounded by other people, and find yourself caught up in their emotions. This is difficult to do if you have not spent time centring yourself in your own space of love, so if this exercise appeals to you, make sure you spend lots of time learning how to get centred when you’re on your own first.
You can use visualizations to speak to your soul, to give it an instruction, depending on your intention. So in the case where there are people around that are upsetting you, you can visualize a bubble surrounding you, disconnecting you from their emotional energies, and lifting your vibration. By being strong in the visualization you’re actually telling your soul you want to disconnect from the other people, and it will listen to you and do it! It’s remarkable.
You don’t actually create a real bubble around you. What happens is that you reorganize your biofield energetically, pull your energy in and become more consolidated, and at the same time you push out the energy you don’t want and that helps you feel stronger.
Your bubble can shift and change in your mind’s eye – the colours and the texture of the bubble can be different depending on the situation, your imagination, or the energies that are involved. Let it be what it is without trying to influence it, it could surprise you! It might not even be a bubble at all – I have a client who told me he imagines himself as a tank when he walks down dark alleyways, a big strong tank with armour and a gun facing outwards. He said that it makes him feel much stronger and safer, and that nobody ever approaches him when he does that.
You can do this exercise quietly while still paying attention to what is going on around you, and the great thing about this is nobody will know you’re doing it. It’s very empowering to be able to push away the heavy energies that upset you. It helps you get your focus and take your power back from a situation.
This next exercise takes it one step further; try it and see how it feels. You can then choose to do the short exercise when you feel you need to and the longer one (below) when you’re at home and you have more time.
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Exercise: creating a power bubble of protection
Set your intention to create a disconnection between you and any heavy energies around you that are not yours.
Locate your centre of focus and awareness. If you have trouble doing this just ask your Life Force Energy to come back to the centre of focus and awareness (try it – it really
works!).
Using your intention, draw the centre of focus and awareness closer to your physical body and feel your energy coming back to you from the others in the room. You can draw it into your heart, your head, your stomach, wherever feels appropriate to you at that time. (Like a quick version of centring – but this is by no means a way to do the other exercise quickly! It’s more like an emergency response.)
Visualize a bubble around you, 365 degrees. Even if people are standing close to you, that’s OK, your bubble is energetic. They may even feel it and move a little further away from you.
Make sure the bubble in your mind’s eye is strong and clear, so you can see out of it, breathe inside it and see that there are no tears in it. Check the quality and strength of the bubble, particularly behind your back, too, as we tend not to check there so much.
Now breathe, and feel your feet on the ground. As you breathe, imagine you’re pushing any energy that is not yours outside the boundary of the bubble. It might take a few breaths to feel like you’ve really cleared a space for yourself. You might find yourself getting light-headed, so place your feet on the ground and slow down the breathing.
Notice how you feel. Now if you think the bubble is too small, breathe and use your imagination to tell your Life Force Energy, your soul, to expand the size of your bubble until you feel more comfortable.
Over time, the bubble will dissolve away as you will lose your awareness of it, and your energy will mix and match with that of the environment again. You need to be constantly centring yourself and putting energy into making the bubble for it to be active. As you do your healing work you will expand naturally by yourself, and you will notice that you don’t need to create a bubble of protection around you any more.