Opening the Ascending Heart -Transforming Everyday Life into a Way to Higher Awareness 3

Part 3 – Moving On From Energy Testing

Many years ago, Stephen was approached by a woman at an exhibition who cheerfully informed him that she was the best dowser in the world. The conversation went something like this:

“How did you discover you were the world’s best dowser?”
“I’ve just come back from Stanford University, in California, where they were testing a group of professional dowsers – and I got the highest scores.”
“Congratulations. How long have you been using a pendulum?”
“For over thirty years . . .”

Hmmh, if you really wish to develop your energy insight, pendulums, muscle tests, electro-acupuncture instruments and so on are only introductions to the world of energy – you certainly shouldn’t still be dependent on them for anywhere near ten, let alone thirty, years. After all, would you wish to still be slowed down by trainer wheels on your bicycle after learning how to ride it? No, you’d ditch them as soon as you could ride confidently.

In fact, it is our usual experience in the Living With Energy Awareness Training, that some people move on from needing any external energy insight amplification device (such as a pendulum) by the end of just a weekend.

When you use a 6th chakra-dependent method to amplify your energy insight – i.e. any technique that depends on the energy fluctuations at the surface of the 6th chakra – your options for becoming more aware in your own right become extremely limited. Which is why we encourage people to move on as soon as they can.

The reason for this is the ‘robbing Peter to pay Paul syndrome’ – i.e. you are cannibalising some of your own awareness qi to get answers from the pendulum or other 6th chakra devices. We call the process that begins in the Living with Energy Awareness Training the ‘Way of life’ – because its primary focus is on releasing you from these ‘dependent’ tests by starting you on the way to steadily expanding your own grounded awareness.

This means you will discover how to increasingly root, or ground, your awareness so that, just like a tree, the more you root your awareness, the ‘taller’ it can grow and grow new ‘branches’ or forms of awareness that extend far beyond the world of ‘Yes/No or shades of grey one gets with a pendulum.’

6th chakra-dependent techniques ‘step-down’ your higher awareness to the simplest, least-aware, form of response to any given possibility – yes/no. If you sincerely wish to step-up your consciousness, you need a way to become free of any awareness amplification technique that depends on a horizontal chakra – one that faces forwards from within your energy body into the world of normal perception, such as the 6th.

Dependent energy testing dooms you to a life of repeatedly encountering the same problems – simply because it doesn’t raise or ‘step-up’ your awareness. To become free of the same kinds of issues occurring again and again – or the same issue going on and on – you have to raise your energy. And to do that, you need sufficient intent, (an energy contained in the solar plexus), to be open to more powerful ways of arriving at solutions to anything you wish were different in your life.

“The accumulating results of what I took back from the Living With Energy Awareness Training and the Energy Solutions [http://www.energysolutions.realhealth-online.com/ consultation have been consistently amazing – light years beyond what I’d got from taking up any other self healing / self realization method in the past . . .” Philip G., UK

What Have You got To Lose?

The realisation that you have a problem which isn’t being wholly addressed by your knowledge or reason is the beginning of the awakening of your energy insight. But it is just the beginning. As long as a person continues to believe his mind (even with the aid of some energy insight) can arrive at solutions to all his problems, he will lack the intent needed to expand his awareness beyond the limiting conditions of testing energy.

With the dawning of energy insight, people typically become involved in energy testing and/or meditation. Both paths have their advantages but they work better together rather than alone. However, both paths (meditation and energy testing) also fail their practitioners to the degree they lack concreteness. Being or becoming more ungrounded is the reason people’s meditation or energy testing experience often doesn’t change much even after years of practice.

Unfortunately, becoming ungrounded can be very enticing, beguiling and entertaining. Rather than gradually making progress in the direction you need to be going, it’s all too easy to become lost in the details – like Narcissus staring at his own reflection in the pool – of meditation or energy testing. But, nothing really changes for the better.

Everyone’s life exists within certain boundaries. So we have our possessions, our social circle, the kind of work we do, the foods we tend to eat, and so on. No matter its form, effective awareness development work will sometimes challenge our boundaries – the familiar spaces we are comfortable being inside. If it doesn’t challenge them at times, it isn’t being effective. So we don’t really grow beyond the illusory ‘safety’ of the known. We all construct lives that keep us ‘safe.’

Growth is scary. It’s a step into the unknown. And, to make such steps, we have to let go of whatever it is that keeps us the way we are – stuck in the unfulfilling aspects of ourselves and our lives.

If we don’t ‘lose’ the parts of ourselves or our lives that keep us stuck, nothing really changes. Outward forms can change but, once the initial buzz of something new wears off, the experience turns out to be essentially the same.

An old friend of Stephen’s, an ex-audiophile, told us how he was once obsessed with having a high quality sound system. And he eventually got to the point where he was wealthy enough to have the best components money could buy. But once he had set up his ultimate system and listened to some music, he realised he was still the same he’d always been. He’d fulfilled his dream – but it turned out his dream didn’t really change anything. It was just new stuff cluttering up his living room. He finally ‘got’ that to really change his experience of being alive in truly liberating or expansive ways, he’d have to change his own energy. Nothing ‘out there’ would really make any difference.

Awareness naturally grows the more we leave behind whatever drags our energy down. Our ability to see clearly what this is, then to let it go, is a gradual ‘work in progress’ – a process of entering into the world of energy one step at a time.

“Although I had been a spiritual seeker for many years – and a serious meditator – I felt myself still bound by disparate dispondancies from childhood that enveloped me, so rendering me powerless to actually change my reality . . . since the training the energies around me seem less entrenched and . . . I am for the first time really seeing that things could be different. The image that emerges was of myself mending a car continuously with no real hope it would ever start or go anywhere.  I can now see a way forward . . . I think you are energy midwives!” SR, UK

Brightening Up Your Lights

This gentleman, Akhyuk [Acho] Rinpoche was a Tibetan Buddhist lama who spent much of his life in meditation and other awareness cultivation practices. When a chakra contracts, it becomes darker; when its energy advances it becomes brighter.  Akhyuk’s energy, on the left side of his forehead, is extremely bright.  As it is at his navel, heart chakra, throat and the left side of the top of his head.

Akhyuk Rinpoche probably didn’t spend much time swinging a pendulum. Unlike most people who practise energy testing – including those who often get good results – he spent his whole life cultivating several forms of direct energy awareness.

It’s almost impossible to over-emphasise the critical difference between the process in which Akhyuk Rinpoche was engaged and the process inherent to conventional energy testing, e.g. mentally or verbally asking questions with a pendulum or muscle energy test, or depending on an electronic device. The former cultivates genuine super-normal consciousness and perception, whereas the latter, in spite of potentially making some progress, increasingly damages one or several critical (to your awareness development) forms of consciousness.

This is, understandably, very hard for many energy testers to hear – especially since a damaged 6th chakra often generates the stress of reality avoidance. And sometimes, achieving good results without really being aware of how they come about encourages one to believe that a technique can only be for the good.

Like all traditional forms of awareness development, Tibetan Buddhism has many of its own issues and potential pitfalls. But, one way or another, any effective energy awareness cultivation process necessarily, gradually, brightens up your lights (chakras). Conversely, a self-harming process – even one in the guise of personal development or spiritual development – increasingly darkens affected chakras and damages at least some of your life energies.

Brighter chakras generate greater strengths, new awareness and novel competencies – there’s nothing particularly subtle about it. This is the nature of becoming more grounded. With sustained practice, the difficult becomes easy, the impossible becomes probable and the extraordinary becomes everyday.

The Light of the Ascending Heart Chakra

One ‘light’ in particular – the energy of your heart chakra – is profoundly important for increasing your energy insight. So much so that the quantity of ascending energy from the heart chakra is an accurate indicator of an individual’s spiritual maturity. Akhyuk Rinpoche, for example, has a bright light rising from his heart chakra to high above his head. The light of the average person’s heart chakra – even after years of energy testing or many forms of meditation – barely rises at all . . .

The light of the heart [chakra] is so important because it is the only part of your energy body that frees you from repetitive karmic experiences. This isn’t a statement rooted in religious conviction, new age belief or hope. It’s simply an observation, shared by countless seers, of how the energy body works. Regardless of the nature of your life, the more energy rises from your heart the less you suffer your experience of being alive.

To put it another way, energy awareness practitioners often remark how a recent experience that would once have seriously upset them no longer had any influence or control over how they felt. They discovered they were literally free of their previous reactive conditioning relative to that particular kind of experience.

This increased detachment is an automatic consequence of energy rising from your heart – it liberates you from [the current nature of] your life. It also increasingly reveals the extraordinary extent to which we, lacking energy insight, are all so controlled by the nature of our experiences . . .

We live in a reactive state most of the time – anxiety, confusion, fatigue, irritation, discontent, ambition, self-importance, low self-esteem, reality avoidance, avarice, envy, etc – without even being aware of what’s really going on, or thinking that how we are is really that much of a problem. This is why one term for awareness cultivation is, ‘self-realisation.’ To the degree our heart energy doesn’t ascend we literally don’t know who we are.

“None of this would have happened without your guidance. Awakening my essential creativity has totally changed my feelings about myself, my abilities and how I can be of service. It is so interesting to look back and see the progress that has been made . . .” JK., USA

Wishing To Be The Best You Can Be

Of the relatively few (albeit some millions of) people who practise energy testing of one kind or another, a much smaller number have a serious interest in becoming more aware – committed to cultivating their energy insight not just far beyond the need to use any kind of test but also to let go of the restrictive domination of their mind.

Thinking, (particularly compulsive thinking), although indispensable for some purposes, is the activity that most binds the energy of the heart. It forms a cage that keeps your spirit – a common term for the energy at the root of your heart chakra – under lock and key.

Naturally, the knee-jerk reaction to this is to try to stop thinking, or to meditate regularly, or practise some other form of mindfulness discipline in the hope that being more internally still for at least some of the day might help. And it might. But, on its own, it’s rarely enough to cause much ascension of the heart or brightening of any other of the energy body’s lights.

Cultivating your energy insight in the midst of modern life – in ways that don’t depend on religious beliefs, complex teachings or rituals, or living far from the madding crowd – requires the increasing engagement of the totality of your mind, feelings, energy and body in a dialogue with your heart [chakra]. We call this whole-energy body’ dialogue, or communion with the spirit in the midst of one’s daily life, ‘living with intent.’

When starting to live a life of intent, an energy testing method is used for a short time (with a specially-designed pendulum that prevents the energy losses described above) because it’s easy for most people to begin to concretely sense their energy responses this way. And with effective practice, it gradually evolves into other more grounded and inclusive forms of ascending energy awareness.

A simple form of concrete awareness is to be able to feel the warmth of someone’s skin so you know they aren’t too hot or too cold. A simple form of concrete energy awareness is to be able to feel the pull of the energy of something you need in a shop you are passing by. So you can then follow the energy to its source. It’s just awareness – no test or thought involved.

Energy awareness brings the world of energy that’s all around us to life. A more advanced form of energy awareness is to be able to receive instruction and empowerment from the intent or spirit of a certain place. It doesn’t have to be a bodhi tree in India. It could be the pond in the park down the road.

There is a certain ambition implicit in the ascension of the heart, which is that of wishing to be the best you can be – not in some obsessive, competitive or stressful manner but simply feeling the need to transcend your currently-experienced limiting conditions.

Because it raises your consciousness, intent – which is not the same as intention – is sometimes called the ‘ascending force.’ Living with intent is a way of making choices that provides fuel for the ascension of your heart and your fortunes – your wisdom, inner strength, happiness and success. In fact, part of the practice of living with intent is becoming able to follow your heart.

To follow your heart, you have to become quiet enough (mentally) within to be aware of what your heart is showing you all the time. This is real energy insight, which, regardless of the paths you may follow, is the only way to freedom from conditions that, otherwise, covertly, drag your energy and awareness down.

By gradually revealing the magical world of energy that underlies and connects all that exists, living with intent transforms the whole of your everyday life into the liberating adventure of following your heart. This is the way to discover who you are really capable of being.

“What I find completely delightful . . . is that your teaching has led to this! What I discovered through doing this is impossible to write . . . it has been immense . . from following my heart, to believing my awareness, to trusting the gifts I have been given . . . THANK YOU for the continuing inspiration!” AR., Italy

The 2014 UK Living With Energy Awareness Training is in Glastonbury on April 12th and 13th 2014. Join us to discover your own energy awareness and open your ascending heart.