I’ve been in a contemplative, processing mood of late, pondering big questions but also tuning in to discern how to reach more people and help them open and expand and become more empowered beings.

One of the things I keep coming back to is the importance of three pieces of information basic to understanding the Spiritual Development process.

Those three pieces are
1) having a basic understanding of our Spiritual Anatomy,
2) knowing how to do a basic Connected Meditation, and
3) understanding the role of Spiritual Healing.

When you understand the basics of your Spiritual Anatomy, it becomes clear as to why Spiritual Healing is such a critical piece to the Spiritual Development process and why knowing how to do Connected Meditations can help you advance both your healing work and your spiritual development.

In this week’s blog, I’m going to focus on the first piece of this picture, so let’s take a tour of our Spiritual Anatomy.

The tour starts with the recognition that you are, first and foremost, a Soul, an individuated spark of Consciousness birthed from God into the realms of formed reality. When you first emerged from Source long, long ago, the Soul that is you needed to merged with Nature in order to exist within the realms of form. This is because Nature Intelligence provides the form for all expressions of Consciousness. That’s Nature’s job in the whole scheme of Creation! (And it’s why I’m so adamant about promoting conscious, co-creative partnerships with Nature!)

The first formed part of you is your High Self, which I like to describe as “home base for the Soul.” It’s the part of you that stays “closest” (vibrationally and consciously) to God. Your High Self sees you as God sees you and also understands the whole of your Soul’s journey. I’ve discussed in other blogs the importance of a strong High Self connection as a source of guidance. Ultimately the goal of the spiritual journey is to mature to the point where, in exercising the fullness of our innate Free Will, we live and function from the level of consciousness that is our High Self, a level from which our personal will is completely in alignment with God’s Will.

The evolutionary maturation process happens by “experiencing” life out in the realms of creation. To venture forth, the Soul, which again is beyond form, needed some kind of formed vehicle through which to do this venturing! (This process always makes me think of Star Trek!) And so when the individuated consciousness that is your Soul merged with Nature, what was also created was the first of your energy bodies, your spiritual energy body. (Remember, all form is energy and all energy has form -- don’t worry if you don’t get this quite yet; understanding will come sooner or later if you keep an open mind!)

And so, your spiritual energy body, which is the deepest, most subtle and most expansive part of your spiritual anatomy, was the first formed “vehicle” that your Soul created, in conjunction with Nature, for going out into the created realms and experiencing life. 

As the exploration of the Soul into the myriad realms of formed reality continued over eons of time, there became the need to create the mental body, which sits within the spiritual body and is of a slightly more tangible vibration than your spiritual body. Eventually there came a need to form the emotional body, which again sits within the mental and on the vibrational scale is even more tangible than the mental body.

And as we started to move into exploring the fullness of God’s Creation in the astral and physical planes of existence, we needed an etheric body and finally a physical body.

In sum, the foundation of your spiritual anatomy is a vibrational continuum that consists of your energy bodies: the spiritual, the mental, the emotional, the etheric and the physical. Think of your energy bodies together forming the whole of what can be called your "unified energy body.” All of these identifiable levels truly do form and function as a vibrational continuum. They function as a vibrational whole that seamlessly extends from the spiritual body, which is the most deepest, most expansive and subtle level of your unified body, all the way to the physical level of your unified body, which is the most outward, tangible and vibrationally dense.

Before moving on to the next stop along our spiritual anatomy tour, I want to address a couple of issues about our energy bodies.

First of all, your auric field is really just the outer edges of your unified energy body. As I say over and over to my clients, the real universe is within!

AND, because we are this energetic or vibrational continuum, I steer away from using the “mind-body-spirit” language to describe our holistic nature. To me, this verbiage separates and compartmentalizes and gives a poor and incomplete description of the whole of who we are. I find instead that when describing our energy system terms of levels - spiritual, metal, emotional, etheric and physical - and as a vibrational continuum the sense of connectedness and wholeness is maintained.

Second, I’m often asked “What’s the etheric body?”

My typical response is, “Think of someone who’s had a limb amputated but who says they can still “feel” that it. What they are feeling is their etheric limb, which cannot be amputated!” (Though it can be damaged by not having a physical structure to connect with.)

Or, I will say, “Your etheric body looks just like your physical body, only it’s not solid like your physical body is. But if you put your hand about 2 or 3 inch out form your physical body, you can feel it, you can feel the energy of it.”

Now the conventional mind stuck in a Newtonian understanding of the Universe would describe what an amputee is feeling as a “phantom” limb, as if it’s not real, as if it’s just a figment of their imagination because it cannot be seen with the 5 physical senses. But in an expanded, quantum understanding of the Universe that knows that all energy is form and all form is energy, the mind finds room for recognizing that just because we can’t see it with our physical eyes or touch it with our physical hand in the same way as we grasp a baseball, doesn’t mean that it’s not real!

And so, yes, even our physical body is an “energy body.” It’s not separate from our spiritual body, our mental body, our emotional body, nor it’s closest cousin, our etheric body. Our physical bodies just happen to be, on a vibrational level, dense enough that we can see it, touch it, etc. at the PHYSICAL level of our 5 senses. Our physical body or vehicle can be also described as the smallest or most limited part of our unified energy body.

Another thing I say over and over again to my clients is “We are SOOOOOOOOOOO much more – in both our energetic, or formed, makeup and in our consciousness – than we are aware of in our walking-around-in-the-world-just-doing-our-thing” level of consciousness!”

That’s why I can do distant Christa healings and distant spiritual energy attunements for people and we don’t have to be physically in the same room with each other to work together. And, because our consciousness is so much more expansive than our ordinary, pedestrian level of awareness, we can connect with and communicate with each other at the “higher and deeper” levels to do this kind of energetic work.

Okay. Let’s resume our tour of our Spiritual Anatomy.

Now that you know a bit more about your energy bodies, the next thing to know is that chakras are the structures or energy centers that connect and govern all of these energy bodies. That’s why so much emphasis is put on the chakras, because they are so important to the overall functioning of the whole of our whole, unified energy system. 

Chakra is a Sanskrit word that means “wheel.” And the hub of that wheel is what we call the seat of the chakra, which sits within the spiritual body and then extends into the mental, emotional, etheric and physical levels.

 
A lot more could be said about the chakras, and better said by others who have studied them more intricately than I have. But the key concept I want to impart about them is that chakras are control centers. And as controls centers they are doorways to what is probably the least understood structures of our spiritual anatomy– at least to those who have not delved into a deep study of yoga. Those vitally important, but little understood or recognized structures are our energy channels.

According to the yogis who have studied the intricacies of our spiritual anatomy, we have over 72,000 thousand energy channels that flow out from the chakra system and that course throughout all of our energy bodies.

Now, I’m a farmer & gardener at heart and I like to use the analogy of an intricate water irrigation system when teaching about our energy channels. Again, like all analogies, it’s not a perfect, but it is useful.

In this water and irrigation analogy, think of your Energy Bodies as "the fields" which you cultivate and from which you produce “fruit.”

And GOD is the SOURCE of the “living water” (life-force energy) that is distributed through an elaborate system of control stations and distribution network in order to nourish these fields and help them to be fertile and productive.

The distribution system includes some key main energy channels, deep within the core of your spiritual body and which can be accessed within the spinal cord of the physical body. These main energy channels flow out from your High Self, which is your own personal connecting point into to God-Consciousness, into the Everlasting Pool of Living Water!

The main energy channels run down from the High Self, through what we refer to as the upper chakras (those extending “up” through the spiritual dimensions) and down into your Crown chakra seated about 4 inches above the top of your head. These main energy channels continue down the center of each of your chakras, deep within the spiritual body, all the way “down” into your Earth chakra – a key energy center that grounds you in the Earth Plane of existence.

Again, the chakras are the control stations that not only connect the energy bodies – "the fields" – together as one seamless whole, they also oversee the distribution of the “Water” to the “fields,” to the different levels of your energy system. The flow first comes into the spiritual body, then flows out into the mental body, then out into the emotional body and then out into the etheric body and finally out into the physical body.

The most extensive part of the energy/water distribution system is the “network” of thousands and thousands of energy channels – the "irrigation pipes and canals" – that take the “living water” to all parts of self, making sure the vital life-force energy reaches that every square inch of those “fields.”
 
So this is the way our Spiritual Anatomy is supposed to work when we are a fully functioning God-Being with a fully developed and functioning energy system!

Unfortunately, most of us on this planet do not have fully functioning energy systems! When looked at and compared with its original design, our energy systems look like an irrigation system that is extensively damaged and dysfunctional. Major parts are missing, clogged, filled with muck, broken, abandoned. Some parts look as if thieves have come in and diverted the flow of “water” that is suppose to nourish us, but which instead is being siphoning off and used by others “illegally.” (That’s what energy cords are!) Many other parts of self are withered and dried up or dormant because of the lack flow of life-giving God Energy to these areas.

And yes, every Embodied Soul (person) on this planet has this same Spiritual Anatomy, whether they are aware of it or not. Or whether they acknowledge it or not! Just because Western spiritual traditions have not studied these things as intricately as Eastern spiritual traditions have (or at all), doesn’t mean that Westerners are exempt from having this basic spiritual make-up.

We ALL have this same Spiritual Anatomy. In the western world this includes Atheists, Agnostics, Muslims, Jews and Christians – including Catholics, Lutherans, Anglicans and Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Baptists, Evangelical Free Church goers, Assemblies of God, Church of the Brethren, Amish, Methodists, Unitarians, Universalists, Unitarian-Universalists, Eastern Orthodox, Mormons, etc., etc.

We ALL have a High Self. We ALL have a spiritual body, a mental body, an emotional body, an etheric body and a physical body. We ALL have a chakra system. We ALL have thousands and thousands of energy channels. We’re ALL spiritual beings having a HUMAN experience and that’s how we humans are made . . .

Connected Meditation that incorporates the skilled use of the Breath and of Empowered Sacred Sound is a proven way of accessing the whole of our spiritual anatomy and of strengthening our connection to High Self and God.

Connected Meditation also helps us to explore the intricacies of our energy system so that we can become aware of which parts are NOT fully functioning and therefore hindering our ability to not only receive but also hold and work effectively with God’s Life-Giving Water/Energy.

And this is why Spiritual Healing is such a vital and necessary part of the Spiritual Development process.

And the Christa Healing Method® and the Spiritual Energy Attunements developed by Master Spiritual Healer Adriene Wentworth – and which I offer to my clients! – are PROVEN tools for helping us heal our spiritual anatomy and our develop our consciousness so that we can be the fully functional Beings of Light God intends for us to be and which the author of the Prayer of St. Francis of Assisi envisioned:


So next time, we’ll delve into the specifics of what Connected Meditation involves and its benefits. Until then . . .

Namaste,

Julia