Last night, I did a beautiful full moon ritual written by Shea Morgan of The Spirit’s Edge Shamonial Temple. During the meditation portion, I decided to experiment with some new healing techniques I’ve been learning from Cyndi Dale’s book, Energetic Boundaries, and the experience was quite interesting.
In the book, Dale works with a system of twelve auric layers, which she groups into four types, each associated with a different color. Starting close to the body and moving outward, the groups are:
- physical boundaries: red
- emotional boundaries: orange
- relational boundaries: green
- spiritual boundaries: white
In the meditation, I set the intention to explore these different groups, starting with the physical auric layers, looking for any holes, tears, dense spots, or cords. What I experienced took me by surprise.
While envisioning my red physical boundary, I saw and felt a cord attached to my uterus, which is a hotspot for me right now, because I’m on a healing journey to release a uterine fibroid. As I grasped the cord and asked for insights, I knew that the other end was connected to my mom.
Using a technique from Energetic Boundaries, I asked that the Divine dissolve the cord, replacing it with a stream of grace. Once this process was complete, which happened much quicker than I thought it would, I felt a rush of liberation in my pelvic bowl.
As I moved to the orange layer, I saw two inky black pads, one on each of my feet. The pads were on the bottom, at the ball of my foot, and when I moved, they formed a trail of black marks behind me.
I asked for insight as to what these pads might be, and I received a stream of information. The pads create something akin to a trail of breadcrumbs, and as such, they provide me with a sense of safety, because I know that I can never lose my way as long as they’re functioning. The downside, however, is that the pads are connected to ways of dealing with emotional energy that I developed long ago, and these methods no longer serve me. So while I can always find my way back to the trail, the trail is a rut.
At the same time, this trail acts like an energetic beacon, allowing other people struggling with similar emotional dysfunctions to find me, which adds a new layer of understanding to my tendency to draw in the same type of person over and over.
When I came to a yellow layer, which felt connected to the solar plexus, something interesting happened. I noticed a density near my solar plexus, extending from just above my diaphragm to my belly button.
I physically moved my hands to that area, and through movement and “seeing” with my psychic sense, I touched the area with my fingers. It felt cottony and spongy. As I dug my fingers into the mass, I tried pulling it apart, and clumps of it came off, like sticky cotton candy.
I continued pulling it apart with both hands, tossing clumps of this mass onto the floor, but it kept going and going; there seemed to be no end to the stuff. At one point, I was ripping off handfuls and throwing them on the floor, almost in a frenzy, until I realized what I was doing and began to guide my awareness back to my breath, gradually slowing myself down as I continued to remove sticky clumps.
Eventually, I was able to stop tearing away at this mass, and I gently sunk my fingers into it and asked for insight. Images began streaming into my mind, the first a memory of a bowl of ice cream. As my focus zoomed out, I was in my grandparents’ kitchen, and I was perhaps four or five. I’d been crying and crying after my mom put me to bed, and my grandpa had taken me out of bed, brought me into the kitchen, and given me ice cream. My mom was furious, and the two of them were arguing behind me while I ate.
I felt my stomach fill with this overly sticky-sweet ice cream, lodging in my belly like a bowling ball, swirling with guilt and shame as I blamed myself for causing my mom and grandpa to argue.
The next image was of gummy bears swirled in oatmeal, which confused the hell out of me until I remembered eating that when I was about nine or ten. There was a fad of adding weird, sugary crap to oatmeal then, and in meditation I experienced the sensation of swirling these little bears into the hot oatmeal, watching them melt and turn into this gummy, sticky mess.
I then saw my mom, laughing and giggling in a strange way, and my dad hoisted her up like a child and carried her downstairs. It was the first (and perhaps the only) time I’d ever seen my mom drunk, and I remember being sent to stay with my grandparents for a few days.
I was never told what happened that night, but I recall it leaving a huge impression on me and feeling so confused and scared. Last night, as these images streamed into my head, I felt sadness and anger toward my mom, and the reason that flowed into my awareness is that I was angry at her for allowing her abusers to remain in her life.
I don’t want to go into any more detail about personal issues that don’t belong to me, but suffice it to say, this memory brought up a lot of my habitual childhood thoughts. I recall looking at my mom and sensing her vulnerability and victimhood, and I was so afraid for her that it would cause me to feel panicked. I never told her this as a child, and now as an adult, I can see how I expressed that fear as anger toward her, which was much less scary for me to deal with than believing that my mom could be hurt.
All of this came back to the sticky, cottony mass at my solar plexus. With my fingers still stuck into its dense web, I realized how my defense mechanism when I was abused was to giggle and act “girlish” and overly sweet, in the hopes that the abuser would like me and stop hurting me. This “sweetness” had created this cotton candy mass covering, and attempting to protect, my solar plexus.
I will likely write much more about this in the future, once I’ve had time to process the experience, but for now, I’ll go over the last energetic repair that occurred during this meditation.
When I reached the spiritual layer, I saw two oval-shaped holes in my boundary, running up and down either side of my abdomen. As I explored them gently with my fingers and asked for insight, I saw that they were connected to my false belief that I must suffer in order to “earn” Divine grace and love.
I recently read a book called The MindBody Code, and there’s a chapter about stigmata that discusses commonly held beliefs about suffering and worthiness. I’m very eager to work through the meditations after my experience last night to see what more I can uncover about my relationship to learned suffering.
Just to give you an idea, here are some of the meditations presented in the book: Unlearning Self-Imposed Suffering, Freedom From Your Atonement Archetype, and Unlearning Illness. Pretty juicy stuff.
Thanks to Shea for sharing such a wonderful ritual! I’m looking forward to gaining more understanding about energetic boundaries, how they work, ways in which they become damaged, and the effects of repairing them, and I’ll be sure to share my journey with you here.
