The Scalpel Of Awareness

As I’ve been preparing to give the lecture on the anatomy of the energy body (chakras, nadis, etc.) this week in YSD, these teachings have been very much on my mind. So I wanted to share something I learned a few years ago that completely changed the way I understand and work with these ideas.

When I first heard about chakras – like most people, I imagine – I gathered that people thought of them as “woo woo” or “out there” concepts. For a long time, and even as I became quite interested in them and began studying them in my 200hr yoga teacher training, I didn’t really think of them as "real". Studying the chakras, for me, felt like studying ancient Egyptian gods and goddesses: fun, cool, interesting. People USED to take them seriously until we as a society gained more knowledge. And now we know better.

(From where I sit now, I have a very different view on those last two sentences 😆.)

A few years ago, I heard something that totally shifted the way I think about these concepts. I was taking an online anatomy course with Leslie Kaminoff, one of the leading teachers of functional anatomy for yoga teachers. In one lesson, he was speaking about the energy body, chakras, and so on, and how he reconciles these teachings with our modern, western ideas of anatomy. This was my takeaway from his lecture:

Before we had the tool of the scalpel, yogis and meditation practitioners used the scalpel of the mind to dissect the body.

They used the finely-sharpened tool of consciousness / awareness to cut through the layers and study their experience of the felt sensations within their bodies. Without being able to “see” or “touch” the inside of the body, they were able to understand how our systems function with, what I consider to be in many cases, a great deal of accuracy.

To go one step further, I notice that even though I enjoy continuing to read and research and learn from outside sources, no amount of scientific information about the functionality or types of tissues in the stomach will be able to help me understand and discern between the felt sensations of hunger and contentment, anxiety and excitement, grief and guilt, or any other emotion (energy) I might experience through an abdominal sensation.

Only my direct experience can do that.

Working in earnest with my own energy has been a key piece to more deeply understanding myself, how I function in this world, and ultimately how I can walk down the path of healing. And as with so many things, it took me going “out there” to find a “reputable source” and get permission to come back and begin to trust the thing that I’d had with me all along.

So if, like me, you find yourself needing evidence before you’ll allow yourself to begin working or even just playing with energetic practices, I won’t ask you take my word for it, or Leslie Kaminoff’s, or the yogis who lived 2000 years ago.

I’ll just ask you this: what do you notice?

In Love,

Lucy