How did I heal and awaken my dantian?

(part 2 of a 4-part series)

Key Topics: Building Personal Relationship, Visualization, Psychic Awareness, Numbness, Trauma, Observer Consciousness, Speaking Truth, Vulnerability, The Language of Energy.

Reading Time: 3 minutes

There are numerous ancient systems that cultivate and balance chi through activating and strengthening the dantian. The most obvious ones are Qigong, Tai Chi, Traditional Chinese Medicine, Taoist Sexual Practices, and the Martial Arts.

The primary methods they use to build chi for longevity, self-defense, healing, and enlightenment are through controlled movement and body posture, breath-work, moving meditation, visualization, and ejaculation control. But I never actually partook in any of these common traditional practices. Somehow I fell upon the power of the dantian through quite unexpected means...

In the early days, my teacher would talk about his “center” or “hara” and I didn’t have a clue what he was talking about! He would point to it and explain its purpose but I felt clueless because I couldn’t feel it. I would do all of the practices he offered to awaken this power center but all I felt was a whole lot of nothing! I actually felt the opposite of “power”. I felt completely powerless for about the first two years of practice, but I trusted that it truly did exist and was something of the utmost importance because I couldn’t deny the power coming through my teacher.

He repeatedly claimed this power center to be where he was listening and acting from - where all of the wisdom, light, and chi [he was working with] was pumping through from. He had discovered how to channel powerful healing energies that took people through a cellular healing process. Plus he was insanely psychic and claimed this hub to be the intuitive muscle he had toned over many years - the source of his psychic awareness and deep presence. I was hooked and needed no further convincing! If there was any chance I could be as clear, intuitive, powerful, and awake as he was, then I was going after that sucker with everything I had! So the healing and training began.

Day and night I tuned into and spoke to my center. Yes, that’s right, I “spoke” to my center, asking it for guidance and direction in the same way my teacher did within his workshops. Even though I was incredibly numb and couldn’t feel much happening at first, I focused on it every time I thought of it - on the bus, in line at the store, cooking dinner, making love, etc. What I was instructed to do was build a personal relationship with my dantian, as if it were my new best friend! I would constantly place my hands on this part of my body imagining a ball of energy the size of a basketball and the color of the sun. I would take my dantian for walks around the city, asking it which way to go as I listened for the nuance of expansion or contraction/push or pull/yes or no, to show me the way.

More importantly, I cut right through massive chunks of numbness every time I trusted my “gut instinct” in relation to other people. I would express my deepest intuitive truths in the workshops and in everyday life - things that upset me or made me angry or caused me to feel unsafe that I would normally be too afraid to share, I started speaking out loud. I also owned my unconscious ego patterns and made myself really vulnerable anytime I could.

The more I backed up my deepest, most important truths by “putting them out there” in a manner that created expansion and love (what I call “verbal aikido”), the more awake my dantian was becoming. I was finally starting to feel something! And side-note; it doesn’t take much truth-telling to bring us back into our bodies. There’s something remarkable, even miraculous, that happens when we learn to back up our deepest intuitive knowingness.

But here was the thing... the more I sat in the light, talked to my dantian, and backed up my intuition - all of which was bringing energy into my dantian - the more memories of trauma, pain, and fear unlocked in me. Every time I faced a fear and dived into greater vulnerability, the expansion I created unlocked the next layer of trauma. I felt like a snake who was growing more beautifully and rapidly every day, but who also had to shed way more skins than she was used to.

In time I felt the power building in my center. The numbness was lifting and I got the sense of a whole new muscle down there - one that translated into a feeling of confidence and strength in the world. My intuitive abilities were also heightening at an incredible rate. This is part of why I felt so confident and strong because I was trusting and expressing myself at a level where no one could fool or seduce me. I trusted the language of energy, the sixth sense, more than I trusted what people were communicating with their other senses. I came to learn that most of us are performing over what’s really going on for us - often masking our pain and trauma with illusive, controlling ego patterns that cause a drain in the energy field. I learned to read this drain in people’s bodies, sensing where their patterns, pain, and disconnection were stemming from. I could tell what someone was feeling and thinking by reading what was happening in my own body. I learned that “my feelings” were in fact not always mine, but what I was picking up from the environment around me. I began using my own feelings as a gauge, my own body as a tuning fork, to read the energy field so I could stay on top of things, in other words, so I could consistently move into expansion and love and away from contraction and drain.

To do this I tried to keep my body numbness-free by staying away from alcohol, drugs, disconnected situations (eg. bars, nightclubs, heady conversations), and only surrounding myself with like-minded seekers of consciousness and spirit. I lived with my sangha in my home temple, working always on myself, my blind spots, my sensitivity, my speech, my thinking, and my fears. I traveled the world only to do workshops and turn other like-minded souls onto this healing path. I also practiced “observer consciousness”; the art of knowing with every cell of our being, that love is the only true feeling and everything else is illusory. I learned how to hold these illusory feelings up to the light and to ask the universe to transform them for myself and others. In time, with each of these skills, I could read a person’s cellular history and walk them through a cellular transformation process.

I could do all of this because this is what my teacher did with me over a sixteen-year period. All of it came through direct and personal experience. Whether he was personally giving me feedback or I was observing him at work with others, I absorbed his structure every time I surrendered my will and took in his guidance. Through osmosis, I downloaded the software within his hard drive, hit-by-hit, layer-by-layer, year-by-year, until I realized the power and light within my own dantian.