Your energy fields are designed to be protective, connective and to hold you strong and resilient in all situations.

Since I was born, I’ve been able to see energy. If I was looking at you now, I would be able to watch your energy weave and flow within you, around you, and continually interact with every other form of energy and life around you. Paraphrasing Thich Nat Hahn, you are designed to inter-be.

How do you feel about that? Perhaps this knowledge lights you up as you realize just how essential and interconnective every being is in the great weave of the web of life. Perhaps it feels utterly exhausting and brings up awareness of overwhelm that you already experience in your daily life.

Because of the emerging shifts in planetary consciousness that we are all living within and being affected by — every second of every day — we are experiencing connection at a new depth than in previous decades.

And if you have a sensitive energy system, or already know that you are an empath, then you will likely be noticing a greater level of sensitivity — which, of course, can lead to overwhelm, and feeling bombarded by the energy of others, places, animals, plants, technology, EMFs, lights, and noise.

You may feel as if you always need to guard and protect your energy.

First, let’s explore what is meant by “empath” or “highly sensitive person.”

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Being empathic versus being an empath

While being empathic means showing an ability to understand and share the feelings of another, an empath is a person with the ability to perceive and often experience the mental or emotional state of another individual.

Sensitivity and the Highly Sensitive Person

Sensitivity can be defined as being quick to detect or respond to slight changes, signals, or influences, or as having and displaying a quick and delicate appreciation of others’ feelings. The Highly Sensitive Person is someone who experiences acute physical, mental, or emotional responses to stimuli. Highly Sensitive People know from long experience that they feel things far more strongly than others do.

How do you know if you’re an empath or highly sensitive?

Here are a few questions to ask yourself

• Do you find bright, busy, noisy places like supermarkets, shopping centers, or social gatherings overwhelming, draining, and stressful?

• Do you struggle to be around and connect with loved ones after you come home from a long day of work?

• Are you impacted by the emotions and energies of those around you?

• Do you feel wiped out or unwell after being on screens for a short amount of time?

• Do you feel you need a lot of quiet, alone time to recover from normal life?

If you are answering yes to any of these questions, it is likely that you have a highly sensitive or empathic energy system that is tuned into everything around you, potentially leaving you drained, frazzled, and fractious.

But does that mean that your sensitivity is a curse and you are always going to feel overwhelmed? That you have no choice?

No.

Before I go on, I want to share with you that everything you experience and perceive is energy.

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You are energy. Your thoughts are energy, your emotions are energy, your relationships are energy.
The cosmos is energy. Everything is energy.

You can’t be separate from it. You can’t protect or defend yourself from it. You are a co-creative vibration thrumming your own way through the cosmos connected to everything else.

I also want to let you know that as someone who has a super-tuned, super-sensitive, super-plugged-in system, you do not need to be a victim of your own sensitivity, and it is totally possible to thrive as an empath or highly sensitive person.

I love being connected at that vast and cosmic level. It lights me up and helps me sing my soul into the world, as well as deeply grounds me and holds me, keeping me feeling strong, trusting, and safe.

So, as an empath or Highly Sensitive Person, the big question is: how can you feel grounded, safe, protected and joyful in your everyday life?

It’s easy! You learn to understand and support your energy system, which is the foundation of your health. Understanding your energy is not only easy, it’s also key to being able to hold your own dynamic energetic container so you are protected and connected, so you can be you — joyfully, utterly you.

And yes, it is possible to be protected and connected at the same time.

Connection means protection. Protection means connection.

• Protection does not mean your shields go up and nothing penetrates

• Protection does not mean your intuition will be blocked

• Protection does not mean limited empathy or compassion

• Protection does not mean you miss out on anything in your life that enhances you and your ability to be your fullest self

When you activate your energy systems in their balance and health then your fullest, most magnificent protection kicks in.

• Protection means you can stay grounded in all situations

• Protection means your system is resilient

• Protection means not having to react in fight, flight, freeze response in situations that aren’t life-threatening

• Protection means an easy ability to connect and relate with others in your life

• Protection means not experiencing overwhelm

• Protection means always feeling safe

Being grounded and staying energetically cohesive are essential forms of protection, and therefore healthy, safe, and balanced connection. They also help you stay strong in the face of difficulties and still hold your own space. Your energy field becomes resilient.

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So what does being energetically grounded mean?

Simply put, being “grounded” means your energy fields are holding your energy body and physical body connected to the world beneath your feet, and the world above your head. You are physiologically and energetically designed to have an electromagnetic flow moving through every cell in your body every second of the day.

Without this flow, your energy fields will lose coherence and cohesion. Your system will not feel safe, your stress response will be easily triggered, and you will be in a spiral of energetic reactivity.

When you understand how to support your energy, you are able to support and sustain your groundedness — even when you are in stressful or sensitive situations.

Life should be about living, about thriving, about discovery and enlightenment. Your energy fields hold this understanding deep within their templates.

Along with your incredible protective system, you also have the template for optimum health and vitality at every level of your energetic anatomy. It is this pattern of optimum health that you need to encourage daily — and there are so many ways that you are able to do this.

One of the most wonderful and empowering aspects of understanding your energy anatomy is that you really can affect deep and lasting change every day by working with simple energy practices and techniques.

Here is one of my favorite practices for enhancing protection and connection, building resilience, and restoring grounding to your system.

Wings of Strength

1. Bring your hands together in front of your chest with your thumbs gently pressing into your breastbone.

2. Breathe in deeply as you visualize that the oxygen and fresh energy that you are bringing into your body are stoking up your battery one breath at a time.

3. As you breathe out, visualize that you are holding all of that fresh oxygen and energy deep inside you.

4. Do this for at least three breaths.

5. When you feel ready, bring in an energizing breath and this time, as you breathe out, move your hands out, palm first, as far as your arms can stretch. It doesn’t matter which direction you move your arms. You are moving them out to the edge of your own aura. As you go, that energy that you have been building inside you will be moving through your hands so that your aura becomes more and more energized. It is as if your arms are wings that build the strength all around you.

6. Keep repeating this breath with your arm and hand movement until you feel strong, safe, and resilient.

And here’s a video!

Prune shares how to cultivate Energetic Resilience in her exclusive online event with The Shift Network. Learn more here.

Prune Harris is an energy expert, British shaman, and soul activist who has been able to see energy of humans, animals, trees, and the Earth since birth. For the past 50 years, she has been tracking, understanding, and translating this world for us all to experience. Prune created an expansive collection of programs and resources that have already empowered thousands of people across the world to return to their natural patterns of health, harmony, and radiant resilience through understanding their energy and fully connecting with their vitality, deep wisdom, and soul path. You can find out more about Prune, and how you can evolve your energy systems and transform your health by visiting Prune’s Substack, website, online school, and global online community.

by Suzanne B. O’Brien, RN

There’s something I’ve known since the very beginning of my career — before I had the language for it, before I had the experience to explain it.

I felt it.

With my very first patient who died.

I was a new nurse, standing in a hospital room that felt like every other — white walls, fluorescent lights, machines humming in the background. Clinical. Sterile. Quiet in that artificial way hospitals often are.

She was alone.

And yet… she wasn’t.

Because in the moment that she was transitioning, as she took her last breaths, something happened.

The room changed.

The energy shifted in a way I had never felt before. Profound. Peaceful. Almost sacred.

It stopped me in my tracks.

No one had taught me this part. There was no charting language for it. No clinical explanation.

But I knew, without question: There was nothing to fear here.

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What I Discovered After 1,000 End-of-Life Experiences
That moment became the beginning of a journey that would shape my life.

I went on to become a hospice nurse, an oncology nurse, and eventually a pioneer in the global death doula movement, sitting at the bedside of over 1,000 people at the end of life.

And I can tell you this: What I felt in that very first room was not an exception.

It was the truth.

I have witnessed:

• Profound peace in the final weeks, days and hours

• Moments of deep connection between loved ones

• A natural unfolding that feels guided, not chaotic

• And again and again, a sacredness that is almost impossible to describe, but unmistakable when you experience it

If more people knew what I have seen, they would not be afraid of death.

And that’s why I’m telling you.

Death Was Never Meant to Be Feared
For most of human history, death wasn’t something we feared.

It was something we understood.

People died at home. Families gathered. Children were present. Communities supported one another.

There were rituals — not to “fix” death, but to honor it.

Death was seen for what it is: a natural transition, a sacred rite of passage, a part of life.

The Moment Everything Changed
About 100 years ago, death left the home and moved into institutions.

Hospitals. Medical systems. Behind closed doors.

And while modern medicine has brought incredible advancements, in that shift, we lost something essential.

Death became:

• Medicalized

• Hidden

• Isolated

• And unfamiliar

And what we don’t understand, we begin to fear.

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Fear Was Never About Death
Fear didn’t come from death itself.

It came from our disconnection from it.

When we stop…

• Seeing death

• Talking about it

• Understanding it

• Participating in it

… it becomes unknown. And the unknown is where fear lives.

This is why today:

• Death is avoided in conversation

• Families feel unprepared

• Grief is often rushed or minimized

• And dying is treated like a failure instead of a natural part of life

But this isn’t the truth of death.

It’s the result of forgetting.

What We Lost — and Why It Matters
When we lost our connection to death, we also lost:

• The understanding of how to care for someone at the end of life

• The rituals that helped us process grief

• The communal support that held families through loss

• The profound teaching about life that people at the threshold often share

• The recognition that this moment is sacred

Without these, people are left navigating one of life’s most profound experiences without a map.

And that’s where fear takes over.

Bringing Death Back to Where It Belongs
The truth is — death hasn’t changed.

We have.

And the good news is, we can remember.

We can:

• Talk about death openly

• Bring presence back into the dying process

• Support families with education and compassion

• Reintroduce ritual and meaning

• Honor this time as the sacred transition it is

Because when we understand death, we don’t just fear it less.

We live differently.

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What My Patients Have Taught Me
After more than 1,000 end-of-life experiences, I can tell you this.

Death is not what people think it is.

It is not something to be feared.

It is something to be understood… honored… and even, in many ways, trusted.

Because the most consistent thing I have witnessed is this: There is a natural intelligence to the dying process.

And when we stop resisting it… when we support it instead of fear it… there can be profound peace.

That very first patient taught me something I have spent my entire career confirming:

Even in a sterile hospital room… even when no one else recognizes it… death is still sacred.

We just have to remember how to see it.

Suzanne shares the 7 core truths that emerge at life’s end in her exclusive online event with The Shift Network. Learn more here.

Suzanne B. O’Brien, RN, is a speaker, author, elder advocate, and wellness warrior. Suzanne spent most of her nursing career in hospice care and oncology care, and in 2008, began offering free community educational seminars at her local library to teach families how to care for their loved ones at the end of life. In hospice care, the nurse manages the care of the dying patient and teaches the family how to do the same. It is far from successful, due to the overwhelming fear of death (the number one fear in the U.S.) and how late in the dying process people commonly receive hospice services. Seeing this systemic break and the compounded amount of suffering it causes fueled Suzanne’s passion to help teach families the life-changing skill of how to care for their loved ones before the need actually arises. This training and concept proved so successful that Suzanne now travels to communities, offering training in person and on live webinars so that people around the world can attend. She was named a “Worldwide Leader In Healthcare” in 2016 by The International Nurses Association for her humanitarian work.

by Jane Hardwicke Collings

There is a kind of forgetting that has happened in our culture.

Not a sudden loss, but a gradual drifting away from ways of knowing that once guided how we lived, how we cared for ourselves, and how we understood our place in the world.

Many women feel this without necessarily having words for it — a sense that something is missing, something that would help make sense of their bodies, their lives, and the changes they move through.

And yet, the clues for how to live in a more connected, sustainable, and meaningful way are still here.

There are clues hiding in plain view for how to live a sustainable, earth-honoring life — and one of the most overlooked places we can find them is in the menstrual cycle.

For most women, this idea is unfamiliar. We have been raised in a culture that largely ignores, suppresses, or even rejects the menstrual cycle and the wisdom it carries. This long-standing taboo has distanced women from their bodies, and from the natural rhythms that shape our lives.

And when we reject the cycle, we reject the body. It is the same thing.

When we look more closely, we begin to see that the way women’s bodies are treated mirrors the way the Earth is treated. The same pattern runs through menstruation, childbirth, and menopause. It is often said that how a culture values the feminine is how it values the Earth — and we can see the truth of that reflected everywhere.

The menstrual cycle offers a simple but profound teaching: honor the rest phase — or there will be consequences.

When a woman does not rest, nourish herself, and respond to her body’s needs during her bleeding phase, the rest of her cycle is affected. This often shows up as discomfort, imbalance, or distress. The cycle is not broken — it is responding.

This wisdom extends far beyond the body.

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We live in a culture that prioritizes constant growth, productivity, and output. There is little space for rest or renewal — yet these phases are essential to any living system. Without them, depletion is inevitable.

The cycle teaches us another way: to move with the phases of life rather than override them. Everything in life moves in cycles. The day moves from light to dark. The moon waxes and wanes. The seasons shift from growth to harvest to stillness. A woman’s body follows its own rhythmic pattern. And a human life unfolds through distinct stages or life seasons.

Each of these cycles reflects the same pattern: birth, growth, full bloom, harvest, decay, death, rebirth. There is an intelligence to cycles and our body’s cyclical nature. When women begin to understand this, something shifts.

Life starts to make more sense. There is less self-judgment, less confusion, and less pressure to keep going in ways that are unsustainable. Instead, there is an opportunity to align with what is actually happening, internally and externally.

One of the simplest and most powerful ways to develop cycle intelligence and begin reconnecting with this wisdom is through menstrual cycle charting. Tracking the body’s rhythms reveals patterns in energy, creativity, mood, and desire. Over time, this becomes a kind of map — a way of understanding oneself that is grounded in lived experience.

If there were such a thing as a woman’s body owner’s manual, this would be one of the first instructions.

At the heart of my work is the understanding that a woman’s life is shaped by her rites of passage. These are the moments when we change from one version of ourselves into another — menarche, sexual initiation, childbirth, menopause, and beyond.

They are not small events. They are transformational thresholds.

And yet, in our culture, these transitions are rarely recognized, supported, or honored in meaningful ways. What happens at a rite of passage matters deeply. It teaches us, often unconsciously, what is expected of us in the next stage of life, how we are valued, and how we must behave to belong.

When rites of passage are ignored, rushed, or stripped of meaning, they can become confusing or even wounding experiences. But even then, they are not without purpose. They become what I call soul-crafting opportunities — invitations to understand ourselves more deeply, to recognize the patterns that have shaped us, and to consciously choose a different way forward.

One of the most powerful questions a woman can ask is: “What did this experience teach me about being a woman?” And then: “Is that the message I want to continue living by?”

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It is never too late to reclaim a rite of passage. In fact, this is a lifelong process.

We begin by understanding the impact of what happened, and how it shaped our beliefs, behaviors, and sense of self. From there, we can consciously create new experiences that honor who we are and who we are becoming.

This might look like creating a personal ceremony, gathering in circle with other women, reflecting on past transitions with compassion, or offering new messages to younger parts of ourselves.

Rites of passage are not only personal. They build community. They create connection, belonging, and shared meaning. And when they are honored, they restore something that has been missing for many women: a sense of being seen, supported, and initiated into each stage of life.

We are living in a time of profound change. Many of the systems that have shaped our world are showing their limits. The model of endless growth and control is no longer sustainable, and the consequences are visible everywhere — especially in the state of women’s health and wellbeing.

Menstrual cycle pathology continues to rise. Unnecessary intervention in childbirth, and the resulting birth trauma, increases year by year. Menopause is increasingly medicalized. Women are being led to believe that their natural bodily processes are faulty and in need of fixing.

This is deeply demoralizing. It turns essential, intelligent functions of the body into problems to be feared, leaving women disconnected from — and even resentful of — their own bodies. And it comes at a cost — emotionally, physically, and financially.

What is being called for now is something different.

We need women who are resilient.
Adaptable.
Grounded.
Connected to both their inner world and the natural world.

This is not something we have been taught to do or become. The capacity for this kind of change emerges through inner work — through understanding how we have been shaped, releasing what no longer serves, and reconnecting with our own nature.

When women do this work, something shifts.

They begin to trust themselves.
They begin to see clearly.
They begin to act from a place of embodied knowing rather than external pressure.

And this is where menopause becomes particularly important. Because menopause is not simply an ending. It is an initiation into the Wise Woman stage of life — a time of clarity, authority, and perspective. When supported and understood, it prepares women to step into roles of leadership, guidance, and contribution in their communities.

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I live in the bush in the Southern Highlands of New South Wales, at the edge of a vast forest. Living this way brings me into daily relationship with the cycles of the Earth — the seasons, the weather, the movement of life around me. It is quiet, spacious, and deeply grounding.

There is a kind of conversation that happens when you live close to nature.

You begin to feel the shifts.
You notice the changes.
You respond differently.

And this way of living is not separate from my work. It is the foundation of it. Because ultimately, the invitation is simple: to return to a way of being that honors the cycles of life.

To rest when it is time to rest.
To grow when it is time to grow.
To harvest what has been lived.
And to allow what is complete to fall away.

This is how regeneration happens — in the body, in our lives, and in the world.

Today there is a growing recognition that the menstrual cycle, childbirth, and menopause are not just inconvenient, messy, and risky biological events, but are profound life transitions that deserve understanding, support, and meaning.

When women are given a framework for these transitions — one that includes the body, the psyche, their lineage, and the spirit — everything begins to change.

This is the work I have devoted my life to.

Jane Hardwicke Collings is an author, teacher, and speaker on women’s mysteries, and the founder of the School of Shamanic Womancraft, an international women’s mystery school now in its 16th year, training hundreds of students worldwide. A retired registered nurse and former home birth midwife with 30 years of experience, she is an expert in menstrual cycle awareness, rites of passage, childbirth, menopause, and sacred feminine knowledge. Jane is also the creator of the Wisdom of the Cycles map; a sought-after contributor to podcasts, summits, and educational programs, and a facilitator of transformation using body wisdom, nature connection, and ancient spiritual practices. Find more about Jane here.

by Dr. Divi Chandna, MD

I have worked as a professional intuitive for close to two decades. I trained as a physician more than three decades ago — yes, I am aging myself. And yet, despite all of that training and experience in the healing fields, I was shocked when I discovered something profound: parts of my own personality were blocking my intuition, limiting my business, and creating stress in my body.

This is what we often refer to as “shadows.”

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When Life Brings the Shadow to the Surface
I didn’t come to this realization in a quiet moment of reflection — it came through something much more confronting. A few months ago, I lost my vision in my left eye — completely. Thankfully, much of it has now returned. It was one of life’s big moments, and it brought me to my knees.

The medical diagnosis was a retinal detachment. And if you know me at all, you know that I deeply honor the medical perspective. I believe in understanding the clinical reality of what is happening in the body. But I also ask a deeper question: “Why did this happen?”

I have never been someone who can settle for “bad luck” or “this just happens with age.” Alongside receiving medical care, I began to explore what might have been happening beneath the surface — emotionally, energetically, and unconsciously. What I discovered surprised me. It opened my eyes to shadows that many of us as sensitives carry — patterns that may be quietly impacting our emotional wellbeing, finances, relationships, and health.

The Moment That Changed Everything
A few months before the detachment, I went home to see my parents. I only see them a few times a year because of the distance. They are both in their 90s, still living in the home I grew up in. During this visit, my mother was in the hospital, and I was shuttling my father back and forth to see her.

My father had already lost his vision due to glaucoma. Seeing him like that — physically weakened, dependent, and shut down — was deeply painful. There was grief, but underneath the grief, there was something else.

I couldn’t immediately name the emotion, but over time, I began to hear the thought looping in the background: “You didn’t do enough. You should have helped him more. His wellbeing is your responsibility. Your job is to take care of him.”

I could feel that thought moving through me — the guilt, the sense of responsibility for his health — even though logically I knew it wasn’t true. That thought stayed quietly in the background of my awareness. At the time, I didn’t fully understand the impact it had — but my body did.

The Hidden Pattern
As I reflected during my healing process, I realized that this moment had activated something much older — a pattern I had been carrying for most of my life. Somewhere in my childhood, I had internalized the belief that it was my job to take care of him, that his wellbeing depended on me, and that a part of my purpose was to make sure he was okay.

As I grew and moved through life, that belief extended into many areas — my husband, my business, my clients, my finances, my friendships, even my dog. How others were doing, emotionally or mentally, somehow became my responsibility.

Underneath it all was a simple but powerful belief: if something is wrong, it must be my fault.

On a conscious level, I knew this wasn’t true. As a physician, a coach, a healer, a mother, and a wife, I understood this logically. But the subconscious is faster and often more powerful than the conscious mind.

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A Different Kind of Vision
In my own way of understanding the world, I began to see that losing vision had brought me a different kind of clarity. It showed me that I was still looking at life through an old lens — one shaped by guilt, responsibility, and emotional burden.

And as I brought awareness to this subconscious pattern, something began to shift. Not through force, but through noticing. This is the essence of shadow work.

What Are Shadows, Really?
On the spiritual path, many of us eventually encounter shadow work — sometimes intentionally, and sometimes life brings it to the surface.

Shadows are unconscious patterns that hold onto stories we formed early in life. Most often, they begin in childhood, when we interpret experiences — big or small — as moments of emotional survival. Over time, these patterns become part of who we believe we are.

They are not “bad.” In fact, they are often the very patterns that helped us succeed. But eventually, they can begin to limit us.

Empaths and Shadows
As sensitive people, we tend to carry very similar shadow patterns — patterns that impact us in ways we often don’t even realize.

They affect our mental health, our relationships, our physical wellbeing, and even our financial flow. Some of the most common include perfectionism, chronic vigilance, and people-pleasing, among many others.

These patterns are not random. They are adaptations formed in childhood as a way to feel safe, loved, and seen.

When Strength Becomes Strain
Let me share a very common pattern I see, especially in many of the sensitive women I work with — in their relationships with partners, children, and even close friends. As you read this, just notice if you recognize even a small part of yourself here.

You’re at home at the end of a long day. Your partner walks through the door. Before they even take their jacket off… you can feel it. Something is off.

You don’t say anything right away. Maybe in the past, when you have, it hasn’t gone well. So instead, you try to keep peace. You might ask a gentle question, or maybe you will say nothing at all. You subtly pull your energy back — just enough to protect yourself.

But internally, everything is activated.

Your mind starts moving quickly: “What’s wrong? Did I do something? Are they upset with me? How can I fix this? How do I make this go away so I can feel okay again?”

At the same time, you’re scanning — using your intuitive sensitivity to read their tone, body language, and energy. Trying to understand, anticipate, and restore peace. And all that has happened is that they walked through the door.

This is the inner world of many sensitive people, and it can be exhausting. Because underneath this moment are multiple shadows operating at once — people-pleasing, perfectionism, chronic vigilance, fear of abandonment, and the need to feel loved and safe.

These patterns run unconsciously, shaping how we interpret situations and respond to them. Over time, they affect not just our relationships, but our nervous system, our energy, and our sense of self. We may feel overwhelmed, disconnected, or even “crazy” — without understanding why.

We often label this as being sensitive and feel like victims of our intuition. But this is not just intuition. Your intuition picked up the energy when they walked in the door. The rest — the mental and emotional spiral — is your shadow responding.

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The Sensitive’s Dilemma
These shadows do not have to hurt us. And yet, many of us feel powerless to our empathic gifts. A core part of my work is helping people understand the difference between intuition and shadow.

As you can see in the example above, this pattern can leave us drained and mentally exhausted. It impacts our relationships through subtle miscommunications. On a physical level, the nervous system stays activated — cycling through fight, flight, freeze, or fawn. Over time, the body begins to shut down.

For those of us who use our sensitivity in our work, the impact can also show up financially. If money is energy, and we are leaking energy through worry, tension, and self-doubt, we are ultimately costing ourselves.

So, the question becomes, “Does it have to be this way?”

The answer is no.

We do not have to live like this. Awareness is the first step. It takes honesty and vulnerability to notice these patterns, but once we do, we can begin to shift them. There are tools and practices that support this healing. The nervous system can be released from these cycles we have been living in.

Personally, I teach my clients to work with Divine Mother — the energy of unconditional love that resides in the heart. She is deeply compassionate and able to meet our pain and help release it, often in just a few breaths.

As someone who has experienced this personally, and who has supported thousands of clients in moving out of feeling like victims of their sensitivity, I can say this with certainty: it is possible to heal these shadows, and when you do, your sensitivity no longer becomes your burden — it becomes your super-power.

Dr. Divi explores the Shadow of the Empath in her exclusive online event with The Shift Network. Learn more here.

Dr. Divi Chandna, MD, is an intuitive spiritual teacher, author, and founder of Intuitive Coach Training, who helps clients shift, heal, and transform their lives through intuition, love, and waking up to their own power. She started her career as a family physician, but after becoming sick herself, discovered the power of yoga and meditation — practices that unlocked her intuitive gifts. She is a professional certified intuitive, and sees the link between our thoughts, emotions, illness, and health. Find more about her here.

by Monique Brignoni

There is something fascinating about the way we, as humans, relate to beginnings… and endings.

When a baby is born, the room is often filled with a very particular kind of energy.
There may be intensity, even chaos. The cute little soul enters this world covered in blood, crying, while the mother may even experience physical strain. All these moments, if seen out of context, could easily be interpreted as distress or even danger.

And yet — no one panics.

Everyone’s mantra is: Breathe — everything will be all right.

Why?

Because we understand what is happening. We know that birth is a process. We know that the body is doing something intelligent. We know that what may look alarming is, in fact, part of something natural, purposeful, and deeply meaningful. And so, instead of fear, we bring presence. Instead of urgency, we bring support. Instead of trying to stop the process, we allow it to unfold.

Now, let’s turn our attention to the other end of life. Because here, something very different happens.

When a beloved animal companion begins to approach the end of their life, many of the signs that naturally arise in the body can feel frightening. Withdrawal. Loss of appetite. Altered awareness. Physical weakness. Changes in breathing. Without context, these moments can feel overwhelming. They can look like suffering. They can feel like something is going wrong.

And so fear enters the space. And when fear enters, it tends to take the lead. Suddenly, decisions are made quickly and urgency replaces presence. And many loving pet parents are left feeling like they must act fast — often without truly understanding what is unfolding.

But what if we approached dying the same way we approach birth? What if we understood that dying, too, is a process? And that just like birth, it’s a sacred moment to be fully present to, so we can catch the often hidden, but meaningful transformations.

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The Missing Map

We live in a time where veterinary medicine can do more than ever before. And this is a gift. But at the same time, something essential has been lost: an understanding of the process of dying itself.

Most of the guidance available today focuses almost entirely on the physical body, on symptoms, interventions, and outcomes. Yet dying is not only physical. It is emotional.
It is energetic. And above all… it is a deeply spiritual transition.

Without a map that includes all of these dimensions, we are left trying to interpret a sacred process through a very limited lens. And this is where fear takes over. Because when we don’t understand what we are seeing, the mind begins to fill in the blanks. And it almost always fills them with worst-case scenarios.

A Small Shift That Changed Everything

I remember working with Robin, whose dog, Wilson, had been diagnosed with a serious heart condition. Robin had been told to start preparing for the end. It was time for that heartwrenching decision.

With tears in her eyes, Robin shared with me that Wilson had a basket full of soft toys. For 14 years, his favorite pastime was to pick one, bring it to her, and wait — full of anticipation — for her to throw it. He would run, retrieve it, and come back again.

But now, with Wilson’s weak heart, if he ran too fast or got too excited, he would have a coughing or panting episode. And that was painful to watch. So Robin stopped playing with him.

Wilson wanted to play. Robin didn’t want him to be in pain. Wilson didn’t mind the cough. What he wanted was Robin.

I asked her gently, “When he runs after the toy — is he suffering, or is he happy?”

She paused. Then she smiled softly. “He’s the happiest.”

In that moment, something shifted. Robin began to see that she had been focusing on the few minutes of discomfort, rather than the moments of pure joy that filled the rest of his experience. And that focus was shaping everything: her energy, her choices, and the space she was creating around him.

So she made a very courageous decision: instead of focusing on her fear, she would focus on Wilson’s joy. Instead of throwing the toy far, she rolled it closer. Instead of stopping life, she adapted it.

And Wilson came back to life! Not because the illness disappeared, but because fear was no longer leading the way. And that was over 2 years ago. Today, Wilson still goes on his walks. Still meets his dog friend — the one Robin lovingly calls his “wife.”

Wilson still engages with life, in his own rhythm, in his own way. He has slowed down, yes. But he is living. And Robin is no longer holding her breath. And even Wilson’s symptoms softened in that new space.

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When Fear No Longer Needs to Fill the Blanks

This is the power of understanding.

When we begin to recognize the natural stages of dying, the same signs that once felt alarming begin to reveal their meaning. Withdrawal can be a turning inward. Just like with Wilson, changes in the body can be part of a progression, not a crisis. Less activity does not mean less life.

What once felt like “something is wrong” begins to feel like “something is unfolding.”

And from that place, everything changes. The nervous system softens. The urgency dissolves. Space returns.

Imagine that in fear, our energy is close to our body, whereas when our energy expands, it also encompasses our pet’s energy. This allows us to get messages from them and how they are really feeling (which is very different than what we imagine when we are in fear). And in that connection, everything changes.

This connection, if nurtured well, can be what keeps our hearts filled when our beloveds grow angel wings.

The Hidden Impact on Grief

There is another layer to this that is often overlooked.

So many people carry grief — not only because their pet has died, but because they believe they did something wrong.

I have worked with people who, years later, are still replaying a single moment. A decision. A sign they didn’t understand at the time. And underneath the grief, there is a question: What if I had known? Could I have done better?

Understanding the process of dying does not remove sadness. But it changes how we move through it. Because when we are present, when we understand what is happening and feel connected in those final moments, there is a completion that happens. The grief is lived as the journey unfolds but then it heals — and what remains afterward is different.

Yes, we still miss our little ones, but we also find peace. And above all, there is love, without regret.

Beyond the Physical Body

One of the most important shifts we can make is to recognize that dying is not solely governed by the body. The body has its own intelligence — and at the very end, it is capable of regulating pain and guiding the final stages of life in ways that are not always visible from the outside.

But beyond the body, there is also an energetic and emotional experience unfolding — one that deeply affects how our pets actually experience this journey. So it becomes essential that we learn to recognize what is happening on all levels — because how we show up shapes the space they are moving through.

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A Truth We All Carry

If we are honest, most of us hold a silent wish. We hope our pets will simply go to sleep and die in their sleep. A peaceful passing. Without decisions. Without uncertainty.

But when we don’t understand the process of dying, we leave that peace to chance. Understanding gives us something different. It allows us to participate in the experience with awareness.

To recognize when the body is letting go. To stay present when things change. To support our beloved animals in a way that aligns with what is actually happening instead of what we fear might be happening.

Walking Each Other Home

We are not helpless on this journey. Not because we always have the answers…
but because of the presence we bring.

When we understand the process of dying, we are able to offer something deeply meaningful:

A space that is calm.
A presence that is steady.
A connection that remains open… even beyond what we can see.

And in that space, the end of life becomes a moment of deep connection. Of completion. Of love that continues beyond the physical form. And perhaps this is what our animals have been showing us all along.

That the end is not something to fear, but something to meet with the same presence we bring to the beginning. That nothing essential is being taken away… only transformed.

And that when we are willing to stay, to soften, to listen, to trust what is unfolding, we don’t just help them feel truly at peace in their final moments, but we also discover a deeper kind of peace within ourselves.

A peace that doesn’t come from controlling life or from a medicine, but from walking this journey consciously, fully present, all the way to the threshold — and realizing that love was never something that could leave.

Monique offers supportive techniques for what to do when your pet is nearing the end in her exclusive online event with The Shift Network. Learn more here.

Monique Brignoni left the glamorous role of personal assistant to a prince to follow her true love — animals and the unseen. Today, she trains pet death doulas around the world and supports animal lovers in transforming end-of-life experiences into peaceful, conscious, and regret-free journeys that transform loss into a loving bridge across forever. Her journey began with the heart-wrenching death of her beloved cat, Rami, which sparked a decade of deep study with a vet, a shaman, and Tibetan monks, and ultimately led her to become a human death doula. The animals themselves brought these teachings to life and shaped her unique approach — The Awakened Pet Parent Pathway — which turns challenging moments into opportunities for healing and awakening.

by Dr. Martha Jo Atkins, PhD

Edges are everywhere.

The end of a marriage. The adult child who has become a stranger. The diagnosis that rearranges the operating system of your life in a flash and doesn’t ask permission first. The friendship that dissolves so slowly you can’t name the day it ended.

Until we know differently, we move through these passages, most of us, (I sure did) with our eyes tilted away from what is actually there.

I work at the far end of the edge where life finishes. What I have come to know is that what people may need most when they are dying is not comfort in the way we usually mean it. It is not reassurance that everything is going to be okay. They need a witness. They need someone who can be fully present with what is happening, without flinching, without managing it into something easier.

Sounds simple. It’s not so simple.

Culture, family, and schools have trained us to help by doing something. Fill the silence. Say the right thing — whatever that is. Fix what’s broken, and by G**, if we can’t fix it, we must at least appear to be fixing it. Sitting with someone who is dying and doing none of those things, simply being a steady and unflinching presence, requires unlearning almost everything we were taught about what it means to help.

Being matters more than doing.

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I sat with a dying woman who’d stopped talking. In the days before, we visited each morning, telling each other about our respective evenings and our dreams. Today she was without words. I whispered a greeting and said I’d sit with her a bit if that was all right.

I got an affirmative nod. I crossed my legs and pushed my big red shoe against the rails of her bed as a way to connect. I didn’t reach to touch her, not because I didn’t want to, but because she was softened in a way I didn’t want to disturb.

We sat for a while, eyes closed, sharing the air and energy between us. Her sheets rustled. When I opened my eyes to look, she was reaching her hand toward me. Of course I took it. She pulled in a way that caused me to stand and get closer. Her eyes still closed and head unmoving, she pulled my hand to her, kissed it, and placed it against her cheek. No words needed.

The presence of someone who is not afraid to be in the room, who is not already somewhere else in their mind, who will look at you and stay looking: What if that is the energy people carry with them to the other side?

Witnessing is not watching. It is not standing at a careful distance and observing. To be a witness means letting the reality of what is happening actually reach you. It means being changed by what you are present to, rather than insulated from it.

There is a cost here. There’s supposed to be. This is how we learn about ourselves and find new ways of being.

This is not only about death.

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I believe the skill we practice at the bedside is a skill for the whole of life. Every irreversible passage has an edge. Every ending we cannot stop is asking us the same question: Can you stay? Can you be here for this? Can you let it be what it is without looking away?

The relationship that is ending. The parent who no longer knows your name. The version of yourself you thought you would be by now. These are edges too.

We so often flee them in the same ways we flee the dying room. We do this by staying busy, by finding reasons not to think about it. We hurry for it all to be over so we can get to the part where we have processed the hard stuff, moved forward, and become wiser.

Here’s the thing: You can’t move through the edge without being in it first. To paraphrase Brene Brown, if you numb yourself to the pain, you will in equal measure numb yourself to the joy on the other side and miss out on some of the goodness — hard as it is — of living.

Staying at the edge of what you cannot change is not weakness. Maybe it’s the whole point.

When you sit with someone who is dying, you are practicing an essential human skill. You are learning, in the most concentrated form possible, what it means to love something you cannot save. To be present with an ending. To let the fact of impermanence land in your body as information rather than threat.

Living life this way changes you. It is supposed to change you. And it makes life so much richer.

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What and who you become, on the other side of that change, is someone who can stand at edges. You become someone who does not need to flee every irreversible thing. You become someone who has learned that presence is not nothing.

Presence is everything.

One of the kindest, most compassionate human acts we can do for each other is not to rescue, fix, or find the next great intervention for someone who is staring down an edge. It is to be present as we are able and to trust in their capacity to do what they need to do.

Standing at the edge of what you cannot change and being open to all of it? This is what love does when it has run out of other options.

This is what remains when everything else is gone.

Learn more about Dr. Martha Jo’s Shift Network course, Explore The Map of Dying™, here.

Dr. Martha Jo Atkins, PhD, is an end-of-life psychotherapist and doula, and has spent her 30-year career helping children and adults negotiate end-of-life and grief. She is the founder and first Executive Director of the Children’s Bereavement Center of South Texas, and served as Executive Director of Abode Contemplative Care for the Dying in San Antonio. She is the author of Signposts of Dying and the founder of Dying School, designed to deepen conversations and abilities to care for friends, family, and ourselves at end-of-life. Her TEDx Talk, “More to Dying Than Meets the Eye,” has almost two million views. Find her Substack, Love Them Out, here.

by Brian Siddhartha Ingle, ND, DO

Most people come to healing with the same assumption — something is wrong, and it needs to be fixed.

This belief shapes nearly every modern approach to health, whether physical, emotional, or psychological. We search for the problem, diagnose the dysfunction, and try to correct it.

Yet what if this entire orientation is backwards? What if the body is not broken, but intelligently responding?

The Shift from Fixing to Listening

In our work, the foundation is simple: the body is always expressing an intelligent response to lived experience.

Symptoms are not mistakes.

They are communications. Whether we are looking at chronic pain, anxiety, fatigue, or even deeper physiological changes, the question is not “What’s wrong?” but rather: “What is the body trying to resolve?”

This shift — from fixing to listening — changes everything. When we stop overriding the system and begin to sense into it, we discover that beneath the symptoms is something I call “The Health” — an underlying, organizing intelligence that is always present.

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The Nervous System and the Language of Protection

Much of what we experience as dysfunction is actually the nervous system attempting to protect us. Patterns of tension, holding, bracing, or collapse are not random. They are learned responses — adaptive strategies that once served a purpose.

In somatic work, we don’t try to eliminate these patterns. We bring awareness to them. Through slow, intentional movement and attention, the system begins to differentiate:

• Tension from tone

• Habit from choice

• Protection from presence

And in that differentiation, something remarkable happens: the system begins to reorganize itself.

Somatic Movement: Accessing the Self-Correcting Mechanism

Somatic movement is not exercise. It is education.

It is a way of reintroducing the brain to the body, allowing new information to emerge from within. Rather than forcing change, we create the conditions for change.

Through practices like pandiculation, gentle sequencing, and internal sensing, we engage the body’s self-correcting mechanism — the same intelligence that learned the pattern in the first place. This is not about stretching or strengthening.
It is about waking up the system.

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A Broader View of Healing

When we widen the lens, we begin to see that healing is not just mechanical — it is relational. Our physiology is shaped by our environment, perception, relationships, and our sense of safety.

Approaches like circadian biology and quantum biology remind us that we are not separate from our surroundings. Light, water, magnetism, and rhythm all play a role in how our cells function.

Similarly, Internal Family Systems (IFS) shows us that our inner world is made up of parts — each with its own role, each trying to protect something vulnerable.

From this perspective, healing becomes less about correcting a problem and more about restoring relationship — the relationship to the body, our inner parts, and the environment we live in.

From Control to Trust

One of the most profound shifts in this work is moving from control to trust. Control says:
“I need to fix this.” Trust says:
“Something in me knows what to do.”

This doesn’t mean passivity. It means participation with intelligence rather than dominance over it. When we slow down, feel, and listen, we begin to sense the direction of healing — not as a concept, but as a lived experience.

The Spine as an Organ of Listening

In my teaching, I often refer to the spine not just as a structure, but as an organ of perception.

It is the central axis through which we orient to gravity, to movement, and to the world around us. When the spine becomes rigid or collapsed, our perception narrows.
When it becomes responsive and alive, our perception expands.

Through somatic movement, we restore communication along this axis.
We begin to feel the body from the inside. And in doing so, we come back into contact with something deeper than technique: presence.

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The Return to The Health

At the deepest level, this work is not about creating something new. It is about removing interference so that what is already there can emerge.

The Health is not something we build.
It is something we uncover. It is present beneath pain, beneath tension, beneath confusion. And when we learn to orient toward it—to listen for it—the system reorganizes around it.

A Different Way Forward

Healing does not have to be a fight. It can be a process of:

• Listening instead of forcing

• Sensing instead of analyzing

• Relating instead of controlling

The body is not the problem.

It is the pathway.

This 22-minute video of somatic movement education and therapy expert Maya Gayatri Andersson, MSME, MSMT, who teaches with Brian, guides you though a gentle yet powerful somatic movement exploration to connect with your spine and the re-enliven effortless fluid spinal function. This practice is done lying down and demonstrates the principles Brian writes about in this article.

Brian Siddhartha Ingle ND, DO, is an osteopath, naturopath, and somatic educator whose work bridges ancient healing wisdom with modern science. He explores a fundamental shift in healing, from fixing the body to listening to its inherent intelligence, and integrates somatic healing, biodynamic osteopathy, circadian biology, quantum biology, and somatic embodied inquiry into a unified approach that honors the body as a living field of intelligence. He is the founder of Quantum Embodied Osteopathy and co-founder of Living Somatics. Find him here www.livingsomatics.com

by Pea Horsley

For more than 20 years, I’ve been communicating with animals — not through sound or gesture, but through stillness, focused awareness, and heart energy. This exchange of impressions between two species of the animal kingdom is often called telepathic animal communication, or intuitive interspecies communication.

My introduction came through my adopted dog, Morgan — my first dog, rescued, and quietly carrying a sadness I could feel but not fully understand. Curiosity led me to my first workshop. I wanted to understand him more deeply. There, somewhat skeptically, I connected with a rabbit through his photograph. From that moment, my “teachers” expanded — dogs, cats, horses, guinea pigs, llamas, tortoises, and so many more — plus one unforgettable green fly.

I was sitting beneath a parasol one summer afternoon when a fly landed on my left hand. I asked it to circle the parasol and return. It did — the same way each time I asked. After the third time, I said, “Thank you,” and it flew off — message delivered. My curious request wasn’t about spectacle; it was about possibility. In that moment, I understood that communication is not limited by size, species, or our assumptions about significance.

Over the years, my work has taken many forms. I’ve helped track missing animals across counties and continents. One dog in Australia was thrown from a car during a crash; his guardian was hospitalized, and the dog disappeared. Weeks later, after exhaustive searching, I was asked to connect with him. He didn’t know where he was. Frightened and hiding, he had no reference for “home.” My role was not to instruct him, but to gain his trust, explaining that to be reunited he would need to approach a human when he felt safe. Within hours, he had approached a man who had happened to see the missing poster, and they were reunited.

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One case that profoundly shaped my understanding involved a missing dog named Marmite. His guardian had been searching for seven days, fearing he was stuck down a hole in the sand quarry next to her home after chasing rabbits. Search dogs, a mini-digger, heavy equipment, even thermal imaging had failed.

When I connected with Marmite, I sensed endurance, not panic. Using a Gestalt technique, I moved my consciousness into his perspective. I saw he was in a hard, square, man-made structure. Looking up through his eyes, a faint glimmer of light appeared far above. Brambles and a metal grid confirmed he was underground. Marmite did not need reassurance; he needed to be located.

He gave precise impressions: how he left the house, crossed a road, moved through fencing, across a field with forest to the left, and continued for about a mile, after which there were only brambles. Then he indicated: “It’s enough.” I was doubtful, but I had learned to trust animals. If he said it was enough, it was enough.

I relayed the details to his guardian. She insisted she’d searched that area and explained Marmite didn’t bark — how could she find him underground? I suggested she revisit the area she was thinking of while I reconnected with him, asking him to bark when he heard his guardian calling and not to stop until their eyes met. Marmite replied, “OK.”

An hour later, my phone rang: “He’s here! He’s here!” He was still underground and unreachable. The fire brigade was contacted, and a bucket was lowered, but Marmite stood firm. When his bed was lowered, he jumped straight in. All this time, he barked. When his guardian lifted him up to her face and their eyes met he fell silent — exactly as agreed.

This reinforced a fundamental truth: telepathic communication is not imagination or projection. It is not about influencing behaviour. It is about receiving information accurately from another conscious being. Marmite was not “rescued” by me — we came to the solution together.

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I believe this ability is innate. It’s not about being “gifted” — it’s a matter of re-membering ourselves back into the animal kingdom. With patience, commitment, and guidance, anyone can learn to communicate with animals through heart energy.

Not all communications involve crisis. Some are about transition. A dog in-spirit wanted to tell his guardian he was returning as a horse — a pure black beauty — and the word “moustache” came through clearly. His guardian later confirmed that a black horse with distinctive moustache hairs joined her herd.

I’ve listened to a cat insist he needed to return home if he were to survive his illness — and against the odds, he did. I’ve had a kitten in another country communicate that she was meant to live with me, she is now family.

I’ve communicated with a bumblebee tangled in a thick cobweb. I felt its shift from panic to steadiness as I carefully freed it — it paused directly in front of my eyes, and time seemed to stop as we shared a feeling of oneness.

I’ve walked at night with a fox who told me her name was Clever. Once, I came across a fox killed on the road. I asked where she wished to rest. The answer arrived immediately. I followed her guidance, laying her body gently among leaves and branches. That moment taught me more about consent and respect than any formal training. Communication is not about extracting information; it is about relationship.

These experiences have taught me that communication is never about directing or influencing. Telepathic listening works best when we approach with humility, openness, and trust — with respect and unconditional love, allowing the exchange to unfold naturally.

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Over two decades, I’ve also communicated with wild animals. I connected with a humpback whale in Hawaii, who, answering my question, showed me through images in my mind’s eye where dolphins were. I then connected with the dolphins themselves, who seemed to say, “Follow us,” and they led me to a mega pod in a space that felt sacred, like a cathedral.

On another occasion, a lion in Botswana spoke to me without my initiating contact, guiding my retreat group on why we were there and how he wished us to connect. These moments show the profound connection possible between humans and animals.

Over time, I’ve come to see animals not just as companions, but as conscious collaborators. They are sentient beings with perspectives of their own. To listen deeply is to recognise that life is not arranged in hierarchies of importance. It is interconnected, responsive, and alive with awareness.

When I connect with a dog, a horse, or a fox, I am not observing or analyzing. I am not reading them as if they are passive participants. They are fully present, exercising their own free will. The communication is an exchange of impressions — information in the form of electromagnetic energy.

I intentionally open myself to receive whatever they wish to express — their wishes, fears, dislikes, or wisdom. The exchange is alive, spontaneous, and mutual. It unfolds as a shared moment of consciousness.

What began as curiosity has become a lifelong service to those beyond our species. The animals have been my teachers — patient, direct, and often far wiser than we give them credit for.

Two decades of listening have taught me that communication is not a rare gift bestowed on a few. It is rooted in presence. It flourishes when we cultivate patience and respect, and when we communicate through unconditional love. It transforms not only how we interact with animals, but how we inhabit the world itself.

In the end, animals have taught me more than any single story can convey. They have shown me how to inhabit a world of coexistence, to honour life in all its forms, and to recognize consciousness wherever it exists. The ability to communicate with animals is not distant — it is innate in us all.

Each connection is an invitation — to listen, to learn, and to participate in a living conversation that enriches both human and animal life.

Animals are not just companions or teachers; they can choose to be mirrors, collaborators, and guides.

Every time we open ourselves to them, we open ourselves to the beauty, intelligence, and wonder of the world around us — and to the incredible capacity within ourselves to connect, through heart energy, with all life.

Pea shares how to develop heart-centered communication with animals in her exclusive online event with The Shift Network. Learn more here.

Pea Horsley is the UK’s leading telepathic animal communicator, with decades of experience guiding people to deepen their connection with animals and the natural world. Pea helps individuals hear, understand, and respond to the thoughts, emotions, and wisdom of animals through heart-centered communication. She is the founder of Animal Thoughts, author of The Animal Communicator’s Guide Through Life, Loss and Love, and co-creator of The Pride–Animal Wisdom Membership, a global community where people engage in heart-to-heart communication with animals, learning to honor their intelligence, guidance, and consciousness.

by Dr. John Ryan, MD

Over the past several years, many people have begun describing an unusual inner experience.

They speak about fatigue that doesn’t seem to have a clear medical cause. Heightened emotional sensitivity. Changes in sleep patterns. A feeling that time itself is moving differently.

Some describe moments of deep clarity or expanded awareness, while others feel periods of confusion, intensity, or unexpected emotional release.

Often the question that follows is simple: “Is something wrong with me?”

In my work as a physician and energy medicine practitioner, I hear these stories frequently. And increasingly, I find myself offering the same reassurance: “You are not imagining this.”

Something is changing — not just within individuals, but within the larger energetic environment in which we all live.

The body often knows before the mind understands

Human beings tend to think of change as something we recognize intellectually first. But biologically, the opposite is often true.

The nervous system and the body register shifts long before the rational mind has language for them.

When the environment changes — whether physically, emotionally, or energetically — the body adapts. Hormones shift. Sleep cycles alter. Emotional patterns reorganize. The nervous system recalibrates.

Throughout history, large transitions in human culture and consciousness have rarely been announced with clarity at the beginning. Instead, they first appear as subtle disturbances in the familiar rhythms of life.

People begin to feel different before they understand why.

Today we may be witnessing a similar moment.

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The Earth is not energetically static

For much of modern history, we have understood Earth primarily as a physical system. Yet many scientific disciplines — from geophysics to space weather research — show that the planet is also an energetic system in constant motion.

Earth’s magnetic field fluctuates. Solar activity interacts continuously with our atmosphere. Electromagnetic environments shift across time.

Human beings, as biological organisms, are deeply responsive to these environmental fields.

Our brains function through electrical signaling. The heart generates a measurable electromagnetic field. Even our cells communicate through subtle electrical potentials.

In other words, we are not separate from Earth’s energetic environment. We are participants within it.

When the larger field changes, living systems naturally respond.

Ancient traditions spoke of planetary energy

Long before modern scientific instruments existed, many ancient cultures described Earth as a living energetic network.

Indigenous traditions across the world referred to “ley lines” or subtle pathways of energy within the planet. Sacred sites were often located at intersections of these energetic currents. Temples and ceremonial structures were placed with careful geometric alignment to celestial bodies and terrestrial energy patterns.

Today, some researchers and consciousness explorers describe this planetary network using the language of a crystalline grid — a global energetic matrix that helps organize and distribute subtle planetary energies.

Whether one approaches this idea symbolically or literally, it reflects an important insight: Earth functions not only as a physical body, but also as an energetic system supporting life.

If that system undergoes periods of change or amplification, it is reasonable that sensitive biological organisms — like human beings — would feel the effects.

The human system Is remarkably adaptive

One of the most extraordinary qualities of the human organism is its ability to adapt.

The brain constantly rewires itself through neuroplasticity. The immune system evolves in response to environmental conditions. Our emotional and psychological patterns reorganize throughout life as we encounter new experiences.

But adaptation is not always comfortable.

When deeper shifts occur — especially shifts that affect our sense of identity or worldview — the adjustment period can feel disorienting.

Old emotional patterns may surface for healing. Long-held assumptions about life may begin to loosen. People often report a growing desire for authenticity, meaning, and alignment rather than simply maintaining familiar routines.

Many describe it as if an inner compass is recalibrating.

In my view, these experiences should not automatically be seen as dysfunction. Often they are signs that the human system is reorganizing itself in response to new conditions.

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The emergence of greater sensitivity

Another common theme people report today is increased sensitivity.

Crowded environments may feel overwhelming. Harsh media or constant digital stimulation can become exhausting. Many people find themselves drawn toward nature, quiet spaces, or contemplative practices.

Rather than seeing this as weakness, it may represent an increase in perceptual capacity.

As awareness expands, the nervous system becomes capable of perceiving more information. Just as our eyes must adjust when moving from darkness into bright light, our psychological and emotional systems may require time to integrate expanded perception.

Sensitivity, when balanced with grounding and self-awareness, often becomes a strength rather than a liability.

Learning to stabilize in changing times

If we are indeed living through a period of planetary transition, one of the most important skills we can cultivate is inner stability.

Fortunately, the human system already contains the tools needed for this.

Simple practices such as conscious breathing, time in nature, meditation, and mindful attention to the body help regulate the nervous system and restore coherence. These practices reconnect us with the deeper rhythms of life that exist beneath the surface noise of modern culture.

Equally important is learning to trust our own internal signals.

The body often knows what it needs: rest, quiet, movement, creativity, connection. Listening to these signals allows the organism to integrate change more gracefully.

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A new relationship with the planet

Perhaps the most profound shift taking place is not only biological, but relational.

For centuries, humanity has largely viewed Earth as a resource to be used. Increasingly, many people are beginning to sense a deeper relationship — a recognition that the planet itself is a living system in which we participate.

This shift in perception changes how we live.

When we begin to feel connected to the Earth’s larger field of life, choices naturally move toward greater balance, care, and stewardship.

In that sense, the inner changes many people are experiencing may be part of a broader awakening: a gradual remembering that humanity is not separate from the planet, but woven into its evolutionary story.

We may not yet fully understand the scope of the changes unfolding on Earth. But one thing seems increasingly clear: many people are sensing that something new is emerging within themselves, within humanity, and within the planet we share.

Perhaps this is you?

Periods of transformation rarely arrive with certainty or clear instruction. They invite curiosity, humility, and a willingness to listen more deeply — to our bodies, to one another, and to the living world around us.

If this moment truly represents a shift in the relationship between human consciousness and the planet itself, then each of us has a role to play. Not by forcing change, but by learning to live with greater presence, coherence, and care.

The beginning of a new era does not always announce itself with dramatic events.
Sometimes it begins quietly, with individuals noticing that something within them — and around them — feels different, and this awakens the profound opportunity to explore what that might mean.

Dr. John explores Quantum DNA and the Diamond Light Body in his exclusive online event with The Shift Network. Learn more here.

Dr. John Ryan, MD, is the founder of Unity Field Healing, an energy-based healing modality that integrates principles of consciousness, coherence, and subtle energy with insights from both modern science and ancient wisdom traditions. A former diagnostic radiologist, he now teaches internationally on human consciousness, energetic healing, and the emerging crystalline dimensions of human evolution. His work explores how individuals can align with deeper states of coherence within themselves and with the evolving energetic field of the Earth. Find him at www.unityfieldhealing.com

by Dr. Akil Palanisamy, MD

Most people know that practicing gratitude is beneficial for health, but few people truly appreciate how profound an impact this practice can have on multiple different domains of health.

Science suggests that gratitude can measurably improve your mood, heart health, sleep, relationships, and cognitive health as you age — and thus be an indispensable tool to help keep your body and mind in optimal health.

In fact, if gratitude were a drug, I always tell my patients that it would be a billion-dollar blockbuster.

There is hardly any other nonpharmacologic practice that has as wide-ranging a variety of positive effects, as I will review below. In addition, I would like to teach you exactly how to utilize it to leverage its benefits for maximum gain.

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Gratitude Supports Your Heart
A review of adults with heart disease found that gratitude interventions enhanced markers tied to heart health, leading to lower inflammation, healthier autonomic nervous system activity, and reduced heart rate and diastolic blood pressure. The likely mechanism? Gratitude increases parasympathetic activity and reduces the chronic stress responses that can strain the heart. A simple gratitude practice can thereby improve blood pressure, eating behaviors, and inflammation markers, all of which have a huge impact on the risk of heart disease, which is still the number one killer of people worldwide.

Gratitude Strengthens Your Mental Health
A large meta-analysis of 64 randomized clinical trials found that gratitude interventions consistently improved mental health in a wide variety of groups — kids, adults, older adults, patients, and healthcare workers. On average, people who practiced gratitude had lower anxiety, lower depression, higher life satisfaction, and better overall mental health compared to controls. Researchers noted the benefits across the board and the message is clear — there is no group that would not see their mental health improve with this practice.

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Gratitude Helps You Sleep Better
Gratitude may be one of the most powerful but least appreciated ways to improve your sleep. People who felt more grateful had better sleep quality, longer sleep duration, shorter time to fall asleep, and less daytime fatigue (thanks to fewer negative thoughts before sleep and more positive ones). Multiple research trials confirm that gratitude exercises before bed improved sleep through multiple mechanisms, and this is one of the strongest and most consistent effects in the research on gratitude.

Gratitude Protects Your Brain
Everyone needs to think about keeping their brain functioning optimally, especially as they age. In a study of older adults, those who scored higher in gratitude also showed better cognitive function and larger brain regions involved in emotional processing and memory. It is thought that gratitude may help preserve cognitive health by strengthening brain circuits involved in emotional regulation and having other beneficial effects on brain pathways through neuroplasticity, which is the ability of the brain to rewire and create new connections due to specific activities.

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How to Practice Gratitude
If you want to practice gratitude, keep it simple. And don’t just do it on Thanksgiving or special occasions. Here are five tips to maximize the health benefits:

1. Write daily — but be specific
Spend at least five minutes a day writing down 1 to 3 specific things you’re grateful for. Granular recollections are more potent than generalities. Just thinking that you are grateful for good health and your family may not be very impactful. On the other hand, if you remember a moment during your day in which your son smiled at you and you realized how much you loved him and how grateful you are for that connection, that is much more compelling. As that example illustrates, the key is to be as specific and detailed as possible.

2. Send a weekly thank you
Once per week, send a message (text, email, or handwritten note) telling someone what you appreciate about them. This could be to someone who you are grateful for but have not expressed your feelings to. Drop them a quick note and be detailed and explicit about what exactly you appreciate about them. Research shows that there is something very powerful about expressing your gratitude to someone in a meaningful and substantive way, and that the mental and emotional upliftment from that could last potentially for up to a month! Gratitude, when communicated with the person you feel it for, is multiplied and enriches both giver and receiver.

3. Improve your sleep
Before bed, note one thing that went right today to shift pre-sleep thoughts. Keeping a gratitude journal, or focusing on particular moments that you are grateful for as outlined above, can leverage the positive effects of gratitude on improving sleep quality.

4. Apply gratitude to deepen your relationships
In a series of studies, couples who expressed more gratitude toward each other felt closer, were more responsive to each other’s needs, and were more likely to stay together nine months later. Gratitude creates a positive cycle: feeling appreciated helps you become more appreciative, which strengthens the bond. Relationships can be challenging yet also deeply rewarding, and gratitude can be of great value here.

5. Make it a habit, not an occasion
The most important tip? Consistency. Tiny actions create a big ripple effect, and the science says they add up. Don’t wait for special occasions or holidays. Make gratitude a daily practice, even if it’s just for five minutes.

Gratitude can be a valuable tool that can transform your physical and mental health and even your daily experience of life. By positively impacting your heart, brain, sleep, mood, and relationships, it can be a game changer to significantly boost your vitality, well-being, and longevity

Dr. Akil explores the gut-longevity connection in his exclusive online event with The Shift Network. Learn more here.

Akil Palanisamy, MD, is a Harvard-trained physician practicing integrative medicine, blending his conventional medical expertise with holistic approaches including functional medicine and Ayurveda. He graduated magna cum laude with a Bachelor of Arts in biochemical sciences. earned an MD from the University of California, San Francisco, and completed family medicine residency training at Stanford University. He then graduated from a fellowship in integrative medicine with Dr. Andrew Weil at the University of Arizona, and received certification in mind-body medicine from the Georgetown University Center. He is Department Chair for Integrative Medicine at the Sutter Health Institute for Health and Healing, serves as IHH Physician Director for Community Education, and leads their educational initiatives and programs. He’s the author of The Tiger Protocol and The Paleovedic Diet: A Complete Program to Burn Fat, Increase Energy, and Reverse Disease.

by Dr. Katharina Johnson, MD

We make countless decisions each day — some small, some life-shaping.

While we’re taught to think these decisions through carefully, many people notice that their most aligned choices didn’t come from analysis alone, but from a felt sense of this is right. These moments often arrive quietly, without explanation, and yet they carry a remarkable clarity.

What if this kind of knowing isn’t accidental? And what if your life would begin to change — not through thinking harder, but by learning to access a broader form of intelligence more often, one that arises through the intuitive power of your own heart?

The thinking mind plays an essential role in our lives. It helps us analyze, plan, and understand the world around us. But there are moments when clarity does not come from thinking things through more thoroughly, but from sensing what feels coherent and aligned. In those moments, another form of intelligence quietly comes online.

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Intuition feels very different from thinking. When intuition is present, you are no longer piecing information together or weighing every option in your mind. Instead, there is a sudden sense of clarity. You see the whole picture at once and simply know. There is no strain in this knowing, and no need to convince yourself. It feels as if awareness has shifted to a higher level.

This is why intuition can be understood as access to a higher form of intelligence or consciousness. It does not work by analyzing parts, but by perceiving wholeness. Rather than moving step by step, it recognizes meaning instantly. What might take the thinking mind a long time to figure out becomes clear in a moment.

This understanding is not new. Albert Einstein once observed that the intuitive mind is a sacred gift, while the rational mind is like a faithful servant.

Many people believe that intuition comes mainly through what is often called the third eye. Inner images, sudden insights, visions, or flashes of understanding are usually associated with this center.

And while this is one way intuitive information can arise, it is only part of the picture. When intuition is accessed only through the mind or the third eye, the information is often fragmented and open to distortion.

A helpful way to understand this is to imagine intuition like a zip file. The third eye allows us to receive the information, but it often arrives in a compressed form. Images, ideas, or symbols may come through, yet the meaning is not fully accessible.

Without the heart being involved, this information can remain unclear or easily misinterpreted. It is the heart that opens the file. When the heart is engaged, the information unfolds with clarity and precision, and what is received makes sense as a whole.

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Across spiritual traditions, the heart has long been described as the seat of the soul. The heart is where higher emotional states such as love, compassion, and connection are felt. When the heart is open and engaged, intuition carries a different quality. It feels grounded, calm, and trustworthy.

Without the heart involved, intuitive information can easily be colored by fear, unresolved emotional patterns, or personal projections. With the heart involved, intuition feels quieter and clearer. There is less mental effort and far less doubt. The information does not need to be analyzed or justified, it simply feels right.

What makes the heart especially relevant for intuition is not just its symbolic meaning, but how it seems to register information.

Research into heart-brain communication suggests that the heart can respond to stimuli before we are consciously aware of them. Changes in heart rhythm have been observed seconds before the brain registers a signal. This points to the possibility that intuitive perception begins below conscious thought, rather than created by it.

Equally important is the state in which this information is received. Emotional states do not simply color intuition; they determine access to it.

When the heart is contracted by fear, inner conflict, or unresolved tension, perception narrows. Intuitive signals are more easily distorted or misinterpreted.

When the heart is open and coherent, especially in states of love, compassion, or appreciation, perception widens. Information is received with less noise and less projection.

Modern research helps shed light on this process. Studies from organizations such as the HeartMath Institute show that the heart has its own complex neural network and communicates continuously with the brain. The heart sends more information to the brain than the other way around, influencing perception, emotional regulation, and decision-making.

When the heart is in a coherent state, the entire system processes information more clearly and efficiently. This research does not explain intuition or consciousness in their entirety, but it helps us understand why intuition feels more reliable when it is accessed through an open, regulated heart.

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There are also practical consequences for health. When people repeatedly override intuitive signals, the body often remains in a state of subtle inner resistance. Decisions made against one’s deeper knowing create ongoing stress in the nervous system.

Over time, this constant inner friction can contribute to exhaustion, dysregulation, and physical symptoms. Learning to listen to the heart reduces this internal strain. As alignment increases, the body no longer has to compensate for constant inner conflict.

Listening to the heart is not something you are either born with or not. It is a capacity that can be developed. As people learn to open the heart and trust it as a source of guidance, intuition becomes clearer and more dependable. Decisions tend to feel simpler, and there is less second-guessing.

Over time, this way of living supports emotional balance, physical wellbeing, and spiritual development in a very grounded way. Rather than searching for guidance outside oneself, a steady inner orientation begins to form.

Life feels less reactive and more guided — not because everything becomes easy, but because actions arise from a deeper sense of coherence and trust.

Dr. Katharina explores the Energetics of Heart-Based Medical Intuition in her exclusive online event with The Shift Network. Learn more here.

Dr. Katharina Johnson, MD, is an intuitive healer bridging science, spirituality, and energy awareness to help people understand the deeper messages behind emotional and physical imbalance. She earned her medical degree from Karl-Franzens University Graz in Austria, and completed a residency in family medicine and postgraduate education in nutritional and orthomolecular medicine. A profound spiritual awakening in her teens opened her awareness to deeper states of consciousness and sparked her lifelong dedication to understanding the true nature of healing. For more than 20 years, she’s guided clients from around the world through emotional clearing, intuitive insight, and heart-centered healing. Find her at drkatharina.com

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Deep within the thresholds of psyche and soma, if we quiet the mind, we can hear them. They call us inward, toward the liminal and fertile spaces where the divine and our humanity merge. They are the dark goddesses.

They are the suppressed aspects within the psyche — the sacred initiators that hold our neglected wisdom.

The dark goddesses materialize psychologically and somatically:

• In the moments we ignore, as we bite our tongues, holding back the words we know we are meant to speak

• When we say “Yes” to the wrong things or take on circumstances out of guilt

• They linger in the breath we hold and mingle with the excuses we use to justify the ways we suppress our desires

• They stir as we go unconscious into default behaviors, avoiding and ignoring every opportunity to trust our deep knowing

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Their presence is an invitation of depth and a return to authenticity. They teach us the magical power of shadow, and how to soften our resistance.

They are misperceived as destructive forces who seduce us into darkness. They do not seduce into darkness, they teach us how to embrace our humanity by integrating shadow material. They attune us to the invisible light within darkness, the hidden intelligence that has yet to move into consciousness.

When a woman begins to reclaim her power through the dark goddess, she unwinds years of suppression of her voice, her desires, her right to rage, and her intuitive knowing.

The dark goddesses are not the disobedient women, as patriarchal systems tend to portray. When we take a metaphor literally, we operate within the confines of a structure without opening or deepening into its potential. This is stereotypical versus archetypal.

The dark goddesses can be approached as living symbols rather than fixed images or cultural projections. When they are reduced to stereotypes such as monsters, seductresses, witches, or destroyers, we block their wisdom. A true symbol cannot be contained. It continues to unfold, revealing new layers as we evolve, deepen, heal, forgive, and learn to trust ourselves.

Symbols carry psychic energy that continues to both delight and disturb us, transforming consciousness as we mature. Engaging with the dark goddesses requires we release a literal interpretation, and surrender the mental rules imposed by the ego/mind.

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The dark goddess appears differently in each of our lives, shapeshifting to provide us with what we are ready to receive.

Figures such as Hekate, Nyx, Lilith, Medusa, and Persephone represent a range of distinct facets of the shadow, including but not limited to rage, death, wildness, sovereignty, grief, and the sense of liberation that emerges when we face what we fear.

Gods and goddesses are not confined to books or belief systems. They are alive and active within us. They are powerful forces that move through the body and psyche in mysterious ways. When we interact with the dark goddesses, we begin to unravel, unwind, and attune to the wisdom within us.

To detect these goddesses within, we must feel safe as we awaken our instincts and listen to what has been held in the nervous system. Where many seek only light, the ones who live in the depths know: you cannot experience the authenticity of the soul while disowning your shadow.

These feral, feminine forces are within each of us, in body and mind. They live in those deep, psychic spaces where we have not yet invited the wisdom of our emotions, sensitivity, and intuitive knowings. Where consciousness has been associated with the rational and analytical qualities of ego, the dark goddesses move us inward, offering what can only come from the depths.

They are the feminine in her chthonic form, drawing us into confrontation with the shadow so we may become whole.

They teach us how to trust the process as spirit descends into flesh, as consciousness inhabits the body rather than conquers it. Their presence exposes the ways we spiritually bypass, teaching us how to honor the soul’s calling for wholeness. Sometimes that call requires us to burn through layers of the false self.

The Dark Goddesses help us transmute all that blocks us, in service to the soul. This transmutation allows a deeper alignment through the release of resistance.

The goddesses speak through the body before they ever reach the mind. They meet us in breakdown and in expansion, in crisis and in enchantment. They arrive in our deeply felt, yet unexpressed feelings. They invite us to return to the places where we have become fragmented, split, and psychically divided.

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In this light, the nervous system is a sacred threshold, a place where memory, emotions, and the archetypal energies of the dark goddesses are at work within us.

Nyx might present as a deep exhale, a surrender into stillness, a softening of the nervous system, and an all-enveloping quiet that draws awareness into the vast, fertile dark where everything begins.

Lilith might present as tension in the pelvis, sacral contractions, a shaky sensation that signals resistance as one begins to recognize they are unconsciously being confined or caged.

Persephone might present as numbness, grief, heaviness in the heart or womb. A pull inward that causes us to move downward, into the depths.

These experiences are not random; they are symbolic communications, invitations to sink beneath the surface.

As they move through us, the dark goddesses activate various aspects of the nervous system, a process can be terrifying, disorienting, liberating and… holy.

Holiness here does not mean purity or transcendence, but a nonsexual form of intimacy, with that which is real. The dark goddess does not shy away from our humanity. She meets us precisely where we feel most divided, most ashamed, most lost.

They move through our human afflictions, such as depression, addiction, and anxiety; these afflictions are a call from the soul, asking us to live more creatively, symbolically, and consciously. These states are signals — they ask us to slow down, to listen differently, to challenge rigid concepts that have taught us to divide light from dark, spirit from flesh, strength from vulnerability. The dark goddesses dissolve our false beliefs.

The dark goddess invites us to retrieve our soul from the places we have abandoned it. She becomes the sacred fire, the holy water, the whisper in the wind. She will burn through what is false and transmute invisible blockages into useable power. To walk her path is to descend into the underworld — not to die, but to remember who you are.

Her essence is not meant to be contained… but to be expressed.

Melissa explores the wisdom of the Dark Goddess in her exclusive online event with The Shift Network. Learn more here.

Melissa Kim Corter is trained in traditional Jungian Shadow Work and is the author of Apothecary for the Afflicted: Shadow Work for Invisible Wounds, a creative approach to shadow work through the analysis of dark fairytales to uncover hidden patterns and untapped potential. Melissa’s expertise and writing style blends psychology with symbolic forms found in film, fairy tales, and forensics. Find her at www.melissacorter.com

by Master Mingtong Gu

Something is calling us home.

You feel it in the gap between your racing mind and your forgotten body.

In the exhaustion that comes not from doing too much, but from being disconnected from the very ground you stand on. In the quiet moments when you catch yourself living entirely in your head, as if your body were merely a vehicle to transport your thoughts from meeting to meeting, screen to screen.

We have become refugees in our own bodies. And at this threshold in human history — with artificial intelligence advancing exponentially and technology seducing us toward further disconnection — the question is no longer whether we’ll return to embodied consciousness. The question is: will we return before we forget the way home entirely?

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The Four Noble Truths for our time

Twenty-five hundred years ago, the Buddha articulated the Four Noble Truths. Today, we need to hear them again — not as ancient philosophy, but as urgent medicine for modern suffering.

The First Noble Truth: There is suffering

But the suffering of our time has a particular signature. We are not suffering primarily from physical hardship or material scarcity. We are suffering from disconnection — from our bodies, from each other, from the natural world, from the present moment itself.

Look around. Anxiety disorders affect 40 million adults in America alone. Chronic pain touches 100 million. Depression rates have tripled in the past decade. But these numbers reveal only half the story. Behind every statistic is a human being who has forgotten how to feel safe in their own skin.

This is not a failure of individuals. This is a crisis of disconnection disguised as individual pathology.

The Second Noble Truth: There is a cause to this suffering

The root cause of modern suffering is not stress, or trauma, or biochemical imbalance — though these are real. The deepest cause is the split between mind and body, the exile from our own embodied presence.

We have been trained — systematically, culturally, persistently — to live in our heads. To treat the body as a machine to be optimized rather than a temple to be inhabited. To value thinking over feeling, doing over being, productivity over presence.

Descartes declared, “I think, therefore I am,” and in that single phrase seeded centuries of disconnection. We elevated the mind above the body, splitting what was never meant to be divided.

The Third Noble Truth: There is an end to this suffering

But here’s what the ancient wisdom knew and what modern science is rediscovering: wholeness is not something you achieve. It’s something you already are. The body you’ve abandoned is not broken — it contains the very healing intelligence you’ve been searching for everywhere else.

Your body knows how to regulate your nervous system. It knows how to metabolize emotion. It knows how to connect with the infinite energy field that surrounds and sustains all life. It has been waiting, patiently, for you to come home.

The Fourth Noble Truth: There is a path

The path is not complicated. It’s not about learning more techniques or acquiring more knowledge. It’s about returning — again and again — to the lived experience of being in your body. Feeling your breath. Sensing your energy. Allowing yourself to simply be here, now, embodied.

This is the path of embodied awakening. And it may be the most important path humanity can walk at this moment in our evolution.

What is embodied awakening? And why now?

Embodied awakening is not a new concept. Every authentic spiritual tradition has pointed toward it. But we need it now more than we’ve ever needed it before.

Let me be direct: If AI can outthink us — and it soon will — what remains uniquely human?

Not our jobs. Not our intellectual prowess. Not our capacity for rapid calculation or data processing.

What remains is this: our capacity to feel deeply, love fully, cry authentically, laugh freely, make love ecstatically, birth courageously, and face mortality with presence. What remains is our embodiment.

Embodied awakening is the recognition that awakening doesn’t happen to the body or despite the body. It happens through the body, as the body, in the body.

It’s the understanding that you are not a soul trapped in flesh, waiting to escape. You are a sacred unity — body and soul dancing together, inseparable, whole.

Without this body, your soul cannot evolve in this lifetime. That’s not a limitation. That’s the gift. Your body is the vehicle of your transcendence.

I know this not from books, but from lived experience. At six years old, I fell into a septic tank — a trauma that severed the thread between my spirit and my flesh. For 30 years, I lived with chronic asthma and a curved spine, a stranger in my own body.

It was Qigong — an ancient practice of energy cultivation — that showed me the way home. Not through positive thinking or mental reframing, but through direct, felt experience of the body’s own healing intelligence.

The moment I stopped trying to fix my body and started actually inhabiting it, everything changed. Not all at once. But steadily, surely, my body remembered what it had always known: how to heal, how to breathe, how to be whole.

This is what I mean by embodied awakening. It’s not transcending the body. It’s fully, finally, courageously coming home to it.

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Healing and awakening: One path, not two

Here’s where Western culture has led us astray. We’ve separated healing from awakening, treating them as different journeys requiring different maps.

We send people with physical ailments to doctors. People with emotional pain to therapists. People seeking spiritual growth to meditation teachers. As if the body, mind, and spirit operated on different planes, requiring different specialists.

But embodied awakening reveals the truth: healing and awakening are not two paths. They are one movement, one return, one coming home.

When you truly inhabit your body — feeling its sensations, breathing with its rhythms, sensing its energy — healing naturally arises. Not because you’re trying to heal, but because presence itself is healing.

And when healing happens in the body, awakening naturally follows. Because awakening is not an escape from the human condition. It’s the full embrace of it.

I’ve witnessed this thousands of times. People come to Qigong retreats seeking physical healing — chronic pain, autoimmune conditions, fatigue, illness. They practice. They open. They allow their bodies to be felt rather than fixed.

And yes, physical symptoms often shift. Pain softens. Energy returns. Sleep improves. But something else happens too, something more profound: they wake up. Not to some cosmic consciousness floating above the body, but to the vivid, immediate, sacred reality of being alive in flesh.

They discover that the body they thought was broken was actually the doorway they’d been seeking.

This is the gift of embodied awakening: you don’t have to choose between healing your body and awakening your consciousness. They happen together, or they don’t happen at all.

Ancient wisdom for modern crisis: Why Qigong now?

We are living at a crossroads. On one path: increasing technological sophistication, AI advancement, virtual reality, digital existence. On the other path: embodied consciousness, direct experience, felt presence, sacred return.

We don’t have to choose one path over the other. But we do have to integrate them consciously, or the technology will complete our disconnection from flesh and earth.

This is where ancient wisdom becomes urgent medicine.

Qigong is not just exercise. It’s not even just energy work. It’s a 5,000-year-old technology for activating the body’s innate healing intelligence and connecting with the infinite energy that sustains all life.

In Chinese, “Qi” means energy, life force, vital breath. “Gong” means cultivation, practice, work. Qigong is the cultivation of life energy — your birthright, your natural state, the field that has always been holding you.

What makes Qigong so relevant now is this: it doesn’t require you to believe anything. It requires you to feel. To sense. To notice. To be present in your body while moving, breathing, opening to energy.

It’s a practice perfectly designed for our time — a bridge between ancient wisdom and modern necessity, between individual healing and collective awakening, between the technology of machines and the technology of consciousness.

When I work with AI to write, create, or organize my work, I stay deeply grounded in my body. The AI provides assistance, but my body provides the transmission. The AI can generate words, but only my embodied presence can offer what truly heals: energetic resonance, lived wisdom, the field of coherence that arises when someone is actually home in themselves.

This is the future we’re being called to create: not humans replaced by machines, but humans so deeply embodied that our irreplaceable humanity shines through everything we do.

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The movement: Coming home together

For two years, I’ve been calling this movement into being: Coming Home to Embodied Awakening. It began as a whisper. It’s becoming a roar.

My book, Coming Home to Embodied Awakening: Reclaim Your Body, Power and Purpose in an Age of AI, launches March 31. It’s not just a book about embodiment — it’s a transmission, an invitation, a map for the journey home.

But a book alone is not enough. A movement requires community, practice, and ongoing transmission.

That’s why I’m offering a comprehensive journey with The Shift Network: Coming Home to Embodied Awakening: Ancient Technology for New Humanity. This isn’t a course you complete. It’s a field you enter — a living practice space where ancient Qigong wisdom meets the urgent needs of our time.

More than information, this journey offers what information alone cannot: direct transmission. The energetic transfer that happens when you practice together, in real time, held by a collective field of intention.

You can read about embodied awakening. But you cannot think your way into it. You have to feel it. Live it. Practice it.

Your invitation

If you’ve read this far, your body already knows. Something in you recognizes the call home. Not the mental concept of it, but the felt sense — that quiet knowing that there’s a different way to live, a more whole way to be.

The world doesn’t need more information right now. It needs more people who are actually here — present, embodied, awake in their flesh, connected to the infinite intelligence that flows through all things.

It needs people who can feel their bodies, sense energy, stay grounded while the world accelerates. It needs people who remember that we are not artificial intelligence — we are original consciousness, embodied in sacred form.

This is not about becoming special or achieving enlightenment. This is about coming home. To your breath. Your sensation. Your energy. Your body as the living temple it has always been.

The revolution begins in your cells. The return starts with your next breath.

Welcome home to your body. We’ve been waiting for you.

Master Mingtong shares ancient Qingong practices for embodied awakening in his exclusive online event with The Shift Network. Learn more here.

Master Mingtong Gu is an internationally renowned teacher of Wisdom Healing Qigong and founder of The Chi Center and Southwest Sanctuary in New Mexico. Trained in China under Grandmaster Dr. Pang Ming, he brings the medicine-less Qigong hospital lineage to modern seekers, offering Qigong as both a spiritual path and science-based method for activating the body’s innate healing. Through retreats, online programs, and global summits, he has guided tens of thousands in transforming trauma, chronic illness, and emotional fatigue into embodied vitality and awakened presence. His mission is to cultivate a worldwide community that lives, leads, and loves from fully embodied wisdom. Find him and his work at http://www.chicenter.com

His new book Coming Home to Embodied Awakening launches March 31 at www.mingtonggu.com/book

by Chris Niebauer, PhD

One of my favorite icebreakers is to ask, “Which world do you live in?” In addition to a strange look, almost everyone responds with, “What do you mean?”

While all other species on the planet live in the real world, at some point in our evolutionary development, humans invented a new, abstract world we spend far more time in than in the real one.

Let me describe the two worlds, and you can estimate from your own experience which of the two you spend more time in.

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We should begin with the older of the two worlds.

If you have a drink handy, take a sip. Let’s say it’s tea. What does it look like? Smell like? Taste like? Would it be hot if you touched it?

Take some time to explore the sensory experiences on all levels. Take a slow, deep breath. You can experience your lungs expanding as you breathe in the air. If it is quiet, you might even hear the breath you are taking.

Another example. Ask yourself, “How do I know I have feet?” How do you know your feet are there without looking at them? Do they tingle with sensation? Are they warm? Cold?

Close your eyes and feel the awareness in this part of the body. These direct experiences exist in what we will call the real world.

Contrast these examples with the other world — which, from an evolutionary standpoint, is relatively new. I call this new world the abstract world, because it is a world of thoughts and ideas that exists only in the human mind.

While you already know this world well, let’s examine it using the idea of ownership.

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Modern humans live in a world where I own this, and you own that.

But can you directly experience ownership in the same way that you can directly experience the taste of your tea? I want you to try to experience the idea of ownership. Can you touch it? Can you see it? Abstractions are far more elusive than the real world because they are ideas rather than direct experiences.

Beyond examples or words that describe what you do or do not own, consider what ownership actually means. What does it look like? Once you own something, does the thing itself change in some way from before you owned it?

Perhaps you are at a coffee shop and believe that the cup of coffee in front of you is yours. If someone picked it up and walked away with it, you might say, “That’s my coffee — give it back!”

Why do you believe you own it? Did you pay for it? What if the coffee shop gave it to you for free? Ownership is a collective belief shared among abstract minds; it does not exist as a direct experience in the real world.

In this new world there are innumerable abstractions — government, money, credit, cryptocurrency, stocks, businesses, careers, property, laws, fame, success, wealth, poverty, retirement, and loneliness, to name a few — as well as psychological concepts like worry and regret.

One of the most common ways people visit the abstract world is by imagining different futures, most of which never turn out as we expect.

Before we go further, it is important to acknowledge that abstraction is, in many ways, a superpower for modern humans.

The abstract world uses language to communicate its ideas, and it would be difficult to imagine modern life without language. The abstract world also gave rise to ideas like fairness, responsibility, equality, and human rights. These may be only ideas, but they have improved human existence in ways for which we can be grateful.

If you are looking for happiness and joy in the abstract world of thinking, however, you may be looking in the wrong place.

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Mindfulness and meditation are so effective at bringing about a sense of peace and wellbeing because they are practices that return us to the real world — reconnecting us with the natural, playful, and joyful state we occupied before constant abstraction took over.

As you move between the two worlds during an ordinary day, ask yourself: which world is vivid and alive, and which is blurry, dull, and lifeless?

The real world is alive with experience, consciousness, and awareness. The world of abstract thought cannot compete with the clarity of direct experience. Do not take my word for it — experience for yourself which of the two worlds is most alive and energetic. Compare a walk on the beach in the real world to a walk on the beach in your imagination.

Before we became absorbed in the abstract world, we used language as a pointer to the real world. The word “water” pointed to something you could drink, touch, and feel.

But modern humans have created a proliferation of words that no longer point to anything directly experienced. Again, see for yourself whether this is true. The next time you feel “regret,” ask exactly what in the real world this word points to.

The next time you believe you are worried, try to experience exactly what that means. You may notice your heart beating faster than usual, but no matter how closely you look, you cannot directly experience worry in the same way that you can taste your tea.

There is no requirement to believe anything you’ve read here.

Experience for yourself whether time spent in the real world is its own reward — or whether life was meant to be lived primarily in abstract thought.

Dr. Chris explores the neuroscience of your identity in his exclusive online event with The Shift Network. Learn more here.

Chris Niebauer, PhD, holds a doctorate in cognitive neuropsychology from the University of Toledo, specializing in the differences between the left and right sides of the human brain. He is the author of the bestselling book, No Self, No Problem: How Neuropsychology Is Catching Up to Buddhism, which The Wall Street Journal called the second-best book on the brain. For 22 years, he taught consciousness, mindfulness, artificial intelligence, and left-brain and right-brain differences at a Philadelphia state university.

by Lorenna Bousquet-Kacera & Shantree Kacera

Cellular memory and the field of belonging

Sitting on the ground, my body yields as the cares of today’s chores melt into the living earth. I am folded into the green through jungle scents, layered sounds, and the moist breath of the forest. The soil receives my weight, and in that receiving, I come back into a felt remembering of myself.

It feels so easy to forget that I have a body, yet my body always remembers, because it lives in continuous relationship with the natural world that surrounds me. The mind may wander and drift away, yet the body stays faithful to the movement of lungs, the beating of the heart, the circulation and inner tides that this ancient organism has known for billions of years.

Every cell carries memory of water, minerals, sunlight, and microbial life. My tissues recognize gravity, rhythm, and seasonal cycles. The nervous system listens to vibration. The fascia responds to pressure and subtle movement. Blood carries not only oxygen and nutrients, yet information. Hormones, neurotransmitters, and electrical impulses form a living language inside me.

When my skin touches soil, when my breath meets humid forest air, when my eyes rest on leaves and shifting light, my biology receives signals that say safety, belonging, and connection.

When I bring my attention to the movement and frequency of the earth below me, I feel how every cell receives nourishment through this steady conversation. The ground offers more than physical support.

There is a field of life moving through roots, fungi, bacteria, stones, and water veins. This field meets my own electrical and fluid systems. My bones release. My organs settle. My nervous system shifts into deeper rhythms. My body begins to move in gentle waves that open me to the more that surrounds me.

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The body as a listening instrument

How do we enter this state of soft listening? First, we begin with breath. Breath itself is a wave, a rising and falling tide that gently rocks the inner waters of the body. With each inhale and exhale, cerebrospinal fluid, lymph, blood, and the subtle fluids within tissues respond with their own natural undulation.

Then we allow the spine and the rest of the body to follow these natural waves, letting movement arise organically rather than through effort.

This wave motion is older than thought and older than language. It is the same primordial rhythm that shapes oceans, guides embryonic development, and moves sap through trees.

As I yield into this tidal continuity, movement becomes less something I initiate and more something that moves through me. In this fluid state, perception shifts from effort to resonance. The body becomes a listening instrument.

Plants are sensed through pulse, tone, pressure, and subtle rhythm. Their language arrives as wave and vibration, meeting the inner tides with an ancient, shared intelligence.

Over time, many of us develop ways to keep parts of this out.

Habit, speed, and constant stimulation train attention to live upward in the head. The body holds a far greater capacity for receiving what wishes to communicate with us.

When I make myself available with my whole being — mind, heart, tissues, breath, fluids, and subtle sensing — something releases. Reconnecting unfolds. Remembering deepens through sensation, through stillness, through presence.

This experience lives far back in human memory. Our ancestors knew the places for communion — on ground, rock, by rivers, before plants, beside trees — and opened to the natural exchange that arises when we become present with life.

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Meeting the plant field

Plant intelligence has always been part of this communion.

Plants perceive light, moisture, vibration, chemical signals, and touch. They communicate through roots, fungal networks, scent molecules, and subtle electrical signaling.

When we sit with a plant, we enter a field of shared sensing. Our nervous system meets plant awareness. Our tissues receive more than compounds. They receive pattern, rhythm, and information.

In energetic herbalism, medicine arises through relationship as much as through chemistry.

A plant carries a unique field shaped by soil, climate, water, light, and time. When that field meets the human field, a conversation begins. The plant offers signals that influence mood, perception, immune tone, digestion, inflammation, and emotional landscape.

The forest as a whole acts as a living pharmacy and a living teacher.

Volatile oils, phytoncides, and plant hormones move through the air and enter the breath and skin. These substances interact with human biology, supporting immune function, calming stress responses, and shifting nervous system tone. At the same time, there is a subtler exchange through presence, scent, sound, and vibration.

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Remembering the larger body

I remember that I belong within a larger ecosystem of intelligence.

My body is part of a web of relationships with soil organisms, plants, insects, water cycles, and atmospheric flows. This communion lives in every cell, in every tissue, in every pulse of blood. The boundary between inner and outer grows thinner. What I call my body is a living extension of the larger ecosystem.

There is a continual embrace here. Air, sun, water, earth, plants, and forest all offer steady nourishment to nerves, cells, and the emotional body.

When I pause, when I practice stopping, feeling, and receiving, guidance arrives through sensation, intuition, and subtle knowing. Wisdom arrives through the way my body relaxes, through the way breath deepens, through the way thoughts slow and perception widens. Nourishment arrives for the next moments of life.

The nervous system, the rhythm of the heart, the flow of blood, and the pulse of breath all recognize the natural world because they arose within this living biosphere.

In this remembering, the intelligence of plants, the intelligence of ecosystems, and the intelligence of my own body meet as one field of sacred, living medicine.

Lorenna and Shantree share ancient plant medicine and eco-somatic practices in their exclusive online event with The Shift Network. Learn more here.

Lorenna Bousquet-Kacera is a Métis elder, Earth ceremonialist, and founder of Shamanu: Earth Wisdom Teachings, where she guides people into deep, living connection with the Earth, its plant allies, and the elemental forces. For over 45 years, Lorenna has helped seekers awaken their life force through ceremony, movement, sound, breath, and sacred ritual — offering a path to embody vitality, presence, and regenerative wisdom. Together with Shantree Kacera, she is co-director of The Living Centre, a 50-acre eco-spiritual sanctuary near London, Ontario.

Shantree Kacera, PhD, is a Diplomate of Ayurvedic Medicine, herbal elder, elemental herbalist, eco-nutrition specialist, regenerative medicine practitioner, and author. In his private practice and customized retreats in Canada and Costa Rica, he draws on 50 years of experience to weave Ayurveda, energetic herbalism, life-force nourishment, constitutional medicine, and regenerative living into deeply personalized wellness journeys. Find them at www.thelivingcentre.com.

It is an astonishing truth that our ancestors, through the intricate web of DNA, can pass down their traumas.

These unresolved wounds — whether emotional, physical, or spiritual — can unknowingly influence and silently shape our lives.

Often, we have limited knowledge of our ancestors’ experiences, which can make it difficult to understand how — or why — certain issues of theirs have been carried forward into our lives. Insight alone is rarely enough to resolve these. This is why I created Kindraya™ Ancestral Healing.

During a Kindraya session, I carefully weave together the tapestry of a client’s ancestral lineage. I draw upon information they provide before and during the session, navigating the intricate threads that shape a family’s story. In this sacred space, the untangling begins.

I delve deep into the roots of the ancestral lineage, unraveling patterns, traumas, and unresolved emotions that have been passed down through generations. I work to reveal hidden connections and illuminate the underlying causes of your present challenges.

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My aim is to facilitate a sacred healing between each client and their ancestors, releasing ancestral burdens and restoring balance in their soul.

Here are three examples of ways ancestral wounds may show up in our lives.

Feeling Unheard or Unseen in Relationships

The experience
She feels invisible in her own relationship.

The thoughts she doesn’t say out loud
“He sees me as the maid. The organizer. The emotional glue.
Everything I do to keep this life running goes unnoticed.”

What’s happening for her
She longs to feel valued, chosen, and appreciated — not just depended on.
She gives care, labor, emotional presence — and tells herself not to need acknowledgment.
She’s financially provided for, yet emotionally starved.

What’s happening for him
He benefits from the stability she creates without truly seeing the cost.
He assumes things are “fine” because nothing is falling apart.
He doesn’t realize her silence is not contentment — it’s resignation.

The ancestral layer
What she hasn’t named yet is that this ache didn’t begin with her.
Her mother learned to swallow her needs.
Her grandmother learned that being useful was safer than being seen.
In this lineage, love was expressed through service — not recognition.

The wisdom
This isn’t a personal failure.
It’s an inherited pattern of disappearing in order to belong.
The wound is not “needing too much” — it’s generations of women learning to survive without being witnessed, and it’s ready to be healed now.

Working Hard but Never Getting Ahead Financially

The experience
She works harder than everyone else — and still gets passed over.

The thoughts she carries silently
“I’ve done everything right.
“If they still don’t choose me, it must mean I’m not worthy.”
“I’ll never feel financially safe.”

What’s happening for her
She’s qualified. Dedicated. Reliable.
She gives more than what’s asked and waits to be noticed — but isn’t.
Each missed promotion chips away at her confidence, not her competence.

What’s happening for the authority figure
The boss overlooks her depth and consistency.
They reward visibility over substance.
They choose someone louder, newer, or more confident — not more capable.

The ancestral layer
This story is older than her résumé.
She grew up watching her father do everything “right” and still be overlooked.
He learned not to ask.
She learned not to expect.
The lineage absorbed the message: Hard work does not lead to reward.

The wisdom
This isn’t about effort — it’s about an inherited belief that recognition is unsafe or unavailable.
The wound isn’t laziness or lack — it’s unseen devotion.
The lineage is asking to be re-patterned, not worked harder.
And financial flow begins to change when visibility feels permitted.

Estrangement and Broken Communication Between Family Members

The experience
A once-close relationship has gone silent.

The thoughts the parent can’t stop replaying
“I did everything I could.”
“I don’t know what I did wrong.”
“How did we end up here?”

What’s happening for her
She carries grief, confusion, and a constant ache.
She wants repair — but doesn’t know how to reach out without making things worse.
She waits, hoping time will soften what words couldn’t.

What’s happening for the child
The silence is not punishment — it’s protection.
They long to be seen and understood without being dismissed or minimized.
They want connection, but only if it doesn’t require self-betrayal.

The ancestral layer
Neither of them realizes they are carrying an older fracture.
Generations ago, communication broke down under cultural displacement, survival stress, and misunderstanding.
First-generation immigrants and children adapting faster than parents.
Love present — language missing.
That silence was never resolved, it just kept moving forward.

The wisdom
This is not a modern failure or a parenting mistake.
It is a lineage-level rupture waiting for conscious repair.
Both sides want the same thing: safety, recognition, and understanding.
When one person sees the pattern clearly, the cycle finally has a chance to end.

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Cosmology Behind Kindraya

I’ve experienced two near-death out-of-body experiences which activated my clairvoyant, clairaudient, and clairsentient abilities and my life path. I was then guided to attend medical school as well as become an ancestral healer, author, and evidential medium. I completed medical school pre-requisites and was accepted into medical school at the age of 54!

During one of my Near-Death Out-of-Body experiences, I was shown a vast, silvery, luminous web surrounding the Earth. It shimmered with intelligence and coherence, and I was told — without words — that everything on Earth is connected to each other, and everything on Earth is connected to this web.

Ancient traditions call this web Indra’s Net: a cosmology that describes reality as an interconnected lattice in which every being is a radiant node, reflecting and influencing the whole. Any shift in one node subtly alters the pattern of the entire web. Kindraya is grounded in this understanding.

In this cosmology, ancestral healing is not symbolic or metaphorical. It is relational. The lineage is a dynamic system, holding memory, trauma, resilience, love, rupture, and unfinished stories.

When you heal your node within the web, the threads connected to you begin to reorganize. Healing ripples backward and forward through generations — not through force, but through resonance.

A Three-Layer Healing System

Kindraya works through three integrated layers of awareness, allowing healing to unfold in a way that is both intuitive and grounded:

1. Cognitive Awareness

This layer helps you understand the architecture of inherited patterns — how ancestral wounds form, repeat, and seek resolution. Clarity at this level reduces shame and self-blame by reframing struggle as meaningful rather than personal failure.

2. Somatic Awareness

The body holds ancestral memory. Long before we can think our way into understanding, the lineage expresses itself through sensation, emotion, tension, temperature shifts, and energetic weight. Kindraya treats the body as an oracle — where listening to the body’s cues becomes essential to create healing.

3. Superconscious/Spiritual Awareness

This layer activates intuitive perception — inner seeing, hearing, feeling, and knowing — allowing direct communication with the ancestral field. This is not imagination, but attunement — the ability to receive information through subtle sensing, once the nervous system feels safe enough to listen.

Healing happens when these three layers speak to one another.

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The LIGHT Mapping System™

To support this process and help us understand our cognitive awareness, Kindraya uses a science-informed framework called the LIGHT Mapping System, which helps identify how ancestral wounds originated and why they are active now.

These are the five primary ancestral wounds we see across generations that can be both inherited and lived, and which are often layered together.

LIGHT stands for:

• Lineage Break — disruptions that fractured the ancestral system

• Interruption of Love — broken bonds or unmet attachment

• Generational Rejection — exclusion, exile, or silencing

• Hidden Alignment — unconscious loyalty to an ancestor’s fate

• Transgenerational Karma — unresolved consequences carried forward

Rather than overwhelming the system with analysis, LIGHT Mapping provides a gentle compass — helping you recognize the specific signature of the wound you carry so healing can be precise, compassionate, and effective.

Healing Through Integrated Awareness

One of the core principles of Kindraya™ is that ancestral wounds heal through integrated awareness.

Lasting repair happens when we engage all three layers of healing at once: cognitive understanding, somatic presence, and superconscious perception.

Kindraya is not a one-time healing experience — it is a living framework you learn to work with for the rest of your life, giving you a repeatable, intuitive process you can return to again and again. As new life experiences, relationships, or challenges arise, you learn how to recognize when a generational pattern is activating — and how to meet it with clarity, presence, and embodied awareness.

Becoming the Cycle Breaker

Kindraya is not about carrying the weight of your lineage — it is about becoming the moment when coherence returns.

When you heal what you carry, you are not only changing your own life. You are altering the vibrational pattern of the web itself. The past is acknowledged. The future is freed. And the present becomes spacious enough for something new to emerge.

What unfolds is a deep sense of coherence — within yourself and across generations. You begin to recognize why certain threads chose you, how your gifts were shaped, and what kind of healing is now ready to move through your life.

This work is an invitation into deeper presence, expanded awareness, and meaningful

transformation — not only for your lineage, but for the way you live, love, and belong in the world.

That quiet pull you may feel as you read this is not curiosity — it’s recognition. It is the body and the lineage knowing that the time for healing has arrived, even if the mind cannot yet explain why. When you follow that pull, you are not stepping into something unknown — you are responding to something that has been waiting to be resolved.

Dr. Lotte shares how to heal inherited patterns through the Kindraya™ method in her exclusive online event with The Shift Network. Learn more here.

Lotte Valentin, NMD, is an author, evidential psychic medium, medical medium, ancestral healer, and keynote speaker. She’s the author of Med School After Menopause: The Journey of My Soul, an inspirational story about transformation, healing, and spirituality, and produces a podcast, Dr. Lotte: Science with Soul, to bridge the gap between science and soul, and help people create a path to healing their own lives physically, emotionally, and spiritually.

What thoughts arise when you focus on that book that you feel called to write?

I am not a good enough writer.

Everything worth saying has already been written.

I don’t know how.

I am the author of 40 non-fiction books. Despite my track record, I get it. Every time I sign a contract for a new book, a little voice starts grumbling. Up come the doubts. Fortunately, I recognize them for what they are.

There is the voice of my father, who quit a beloved job at NASA because he didn’t think he’d make enough money at it. There are statements from my mother, who used to say that I wasn’t creative enough to be an author. The echoes of our history resound every time we take a risk — especially when the summoning is soul-deep and profoundly inspirational.

These days, many therapists label these pesky opinions “Automatic Negative Thoughts,” or ANTs. They picnic on the banquets of dysfunctional beliefs that live inside most of us. ANTs specialize on interpreting situations in upsetting ways. By the time they have finished munching, they — we — have talked ourselves out of stepping forward.

Devious as the ANTs are, they aren’t accurate. Still, when they start creeping around, it’s difficult to remember that a thought or belief is only an opinion; nothing more and nothing less.

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ANTs might seem all-powerful, but they are merely symptoms of old fears, shame, and grief. When it comes to writing, I’ve made peace with the main origin causing the ANTs about authorship.

My mother wanted to be an author her entire life but could never complete a writing project. She justified that by stating that her time was absorbed raising her three daughters. When she turned 86, I was pretty much over her excuse, yet she was still editing the same 30 essays about growing up on the prairie during the Depression she’d been working on for decades. She wasn’t too happy when I insisted it was time to get that book done. Of course, she probably reacted to how I phrased it, as I said like, “Mom, you’re going to be dead soon enough and then when will you finish this book?” But she let me hire an editor for her and move her book over the self-publishing finishing line.

You should have seen her face every time she signed a book for a fan.

These days, I recognize my self-critical thoughts about writing as symptoms of my mother’s disbelief in herself. Those ANTs dwelled inside of her before they proliferated inside of me. It’s a funny thing, though. Our resistance to a summons to write are beautiful opportunities to heal from the inside to the out and move from fear to compassion.

I now bless my mother every time that inner voice grumbles.

If you have a book inside, I believe with my entire heart that you deserve and need to write it. In fact, I would suggest that its creation is necessary to fulfill your destiny. I know that every book I’ve birthed was first carried by my soul. Every word typed was a laugh, cry, statement, shout, whisper, or revelation transferred from the heavens into this earth by my soul. Every share was a service offered to this world. Every attempt at phrasing a sentence just so — even the rewrites — blew away a few dark clouds.

If you are called to bring a book through, I would suggest that the world itself is asking you to respond. No matter how many books have been written, only you can arrange words in the specific and special order that will compose the prayer for the planet that will be your book.

It’s also smart to have a strategy for getting yourself through the fog of doubt.

Personally, I’ve developed my own tried-and-true method. I developed it years ago and it really works for me. It’s a chakra-based approach that brings my creative voice on-line and helps me block-bust.

(I can hear you thinking. Chakras? What do they have to do with writing?)

I work with a 12-chakra system that I developed decades ago. Chakras, the topic of many of my books, are subtle energy centers that each manage a specific set of physical, psychological, and spiritual functions. Each is like a unique box of Crayola crayons.

Basically, I believe that our soul shines strongest through a specific chakra. When we center in that chakra and use its strengths to start and continue a creative process, we can most fearlessly and joyfully succeed at writing. My fiercest chakra is the first, which is a red energy center in the hips.

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A first chakra person is motivated by physicality and security. We first chakra-people aren’t going to accomplish a darn thing by emoting, self-affirmations, or getting out the calendar. We must act.

In other words, no matter the writing task ahead — starting, editing, tearing up pages, starting over — I simply do.

I sit down and write, even if what comes out is gibberish, which is not uncommon.

My children can tell you their own stories about being raised by a single mom who carried — and still carries — a laptop everywhere. My favorite strategy with my youngest was to grab him and a bunch of his friends and hang out at Best Buy for a couple of hours. During the couple of hours that they would be lost in the maze of geekiness, I would sit at the front of the store and type away. Win-win!

I got endless sentences sculpted at baseball games, mainly because my youngest son was a pitcher. Since he only got up once or twice a weekend, I’d sit under the stadium awnings and type away until it was his turn on the mound. Then there were rugby, football, soccer, and hockey games — and these incredible electrical warming gloves that made my task possible.

Of course, my kids often wondered whether I paid attention to them at all. My oldest son once asked why he could see a lit computer screen at a choir concert. “M-om, no one else does things like that.”

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Do you want to write your book? Decide that you will heed the call of your soul. Embrace the ANTs and do as the ant creatures do. Go after what you want! Consider if you can pull from a chakra to support yourself. Here is a short description of the specialty of each chakra.

First Just act

Second Feel into it

Third Get thee a good calendar

Fourth Have a friend help

Fifth Sing, chat, affirm

Sixth See it done and dress the part while writing

Seventh Let the Spirit help

Eighth Connect with otherworldly guides

Ninth Harmonize with your future readers

Tenth Write in Nature

Eleventh Use your willpower

Twelfth You have a unique gift no one else has; uncover it

If your soul has been summoned to create, you’ve discovered an essential life purpose. The path of creation is one of self-healing, a journey into believing, but also a process for giving to others.

Cyndi goes deeper into the Energetic Writing Method in her exclusive online event with The Shift Network. Learn more here.

Cyndi Dale is an internationally renowned author, intuitive coach, and energy healer. Her groundbreaking books on chakras and intuition include The Subtle Body: An Encyclopedia of Your Energetic Anatomy, Advanced Chakra Healing, Energy Wellness for Your Pet, Llewellyn’s Complete Book of Chakras, Awaken Clairvoyant Energy, and Energy Healing for Trauma, Stress & Chronic Illness. She is passionate about helping people open their “essential energy” — the powers and perspectives unique to them — and believes that once an individual understands their own essence, they can tap into the energies of and beyond the world.

by Shifu Lindsey Wei

What distinguishes Daoist Medicine from what we know as Traditional Chinese Medicine? It is the ritual empowerment and worldview.

Daoist Medicine maintains a worldview that believes there are unseen influences affecting our health. The methods of talisman writing, incantation and prayer are a special language to communicate with those unseen influences. The practitioner is the bridge or communicator between worlds of form and formless, celestial and terrestrial.

Through sincerity and devotion, the practitioner distills a drop of golden light. This light is captured on paper in celestial language through the writing of a symbol. This talisman becomes the medicine, like an herb or a needle.

Daoist medicine relies on the cultivation level of the healer (their biomagnetic field) I and their connectivity to higher dimensions, thereby making it possible to distill this yang substance of “light.”

In Daoism, it is believed that every injury and ailment is a manifestation of karma. Karma is action and reaction, gan ying. Every action stems from the tip of a thought. Our thoughts, actions, and the way we act and the things we say all contribute to our karma and energetic field.

Inherited burden from ancestors is included, as we are a continuation of a genetic pattern. At the core of Daoist Medicine diagnostics is asking the patient, “Why do you think you are sick?” This brings up the story or belief that is linked to the ailment, the hidden cause. In a petition to remove the cause, the healer may need to ask the patient to recall the exact day, month, and year of the moment they began experiencing symptoms.

In the Chinese medical corpus, ritual healing largely fell under the rubric of zhuyou 祝由 to uncover and expel the unknown, imperceptible, and occult causes of illness. Often dealing with uncertain or incurable cases, zhuyou remained at the cutting edge of contemporary medicine. For a rising medical elite after the Northern Song, zhuyou was the branch of medicine to flexibly incorporate and critique the variety of ritual therapies into orthodox practice. Zhuyou employed prayer, incantations, talismans, gestures, and drugs in a nuanced clinical encounter to reveal the hidden root of disorder ranging from a blockage of Qi, spirit possession, emotional imbalance, or loss of virtue. These rituals opened an imaginative space for therapeutic play where patients and healers could use spiritual proxies and props to address difficult emotions or issues that were often the hidden cause of affliction. The development of zhuyou also reflected the changing role of ritual in the history of Chinese medicine and the exchanges among physicians, Daoist priests, and other ritual healers. The significance of ritual in Chinese medical history has largely remained unclear as most editions of medical classics republished since the early twentieth century excise relevant chapters and zhuyou manuscripts, until recently, were uncatalogued.

— Philip S. Cho, in “Healing and Ritual Imagination in Chinese Medicine: The Multiple Interpretations of Zhuyou”

https://www.jstor.org/stable/43686801

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Zhuyou, 祝由, has been translated as “exorcizing the cause,” “incantations for removal,” “to invoke the [demonic] origin [of illness],” and “to invoke the origin.”

Li Shi Fu once said, “With so many methods to heal, shouldn’t there be no illness that cannot be healed? And yet, there are so many mysterious ailments! This is due to human thought and action.”

A Daoist promise is to only heal those who you have the destiny to heal. Those who have the heavenly will and heavenly timing. When you are a clinical practitioner, you don’t have this choice anymore — you serve everyone, anytime of day, destiny or not.

There is also the promise to only heal those who are “begging” to be healed — or if unconscious, a family member can be in the state of begging. Only in this state can a miraculous healing occur. Only in this state is the patient ready to heal, and then you’re halfway if not almost entirely there.

The Daoist healer also has an empty mind, unattached to outcome. As Chapter 5 of Dao De Jing says,

Heaven and earth are not benevolent, they take the 10,000 things as straw dogs (trans. Assandri).

The ultimate compassion is the sun rising each day. When we are brought to our knees through hardship and suffering, or when encountering death, we know and understand the sacredness of the sun rising and setting. The most potent thing to be grateful for is life itself — how do we live without the sun, the air, the water? Therefore, this is what nourishes us. But the sun does not rise because it cares for us, it is simply following its nature.

Therefore, the state of mind of the healer has to be disinterested in the outcome, being “healed.” The healer simply continues with their nature, and if a healing is the result, then so be it. We can’t be “trying” to fix while healing.

I remember hearing from many who joined university to become acupuncturists, that the original wanting to study acupuncture was based in a seeking for a medicine that had intersections with spirituality and the unknown. They were always disappointed to find in university a medicine that no longer had that “magic” and was now standardized in a similar way to western medical science.

After years of accepting the established modern version of Chinese Medicine, has that original wanting for the unknown been eclipsed? Is there even a way to integrate this into the mainstream? It has been known as the mi jue 秘诀, the secret arts, and maybe it must stay that way, on the fringe, on the edge of society, reserved for those who have put in years of cultivation and refinement of self?

Touching the sacred is an endangered place within us, no different than what we talk about in the transition into “Qigong” during and after the cultural revolution, where religious notions were extracted from culture. The same cultural revolution happened for us “westerners” somewhere along the line, as well.

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We were brainwashed to think that faith was the ultimate brainwash and was dangerous — we could “lose ourselves” in it. But what did we replace that story myth with? A world where nothing is animate, nothing has spirit, and that which is mysterious has no space to be real?

Blind faith, without wisdom, is of course, a dangerous thing. Wisdom within faith is called “discernment,” and this can be gained only through experience, trial, and error.

Self responsibility, having agency in one’s choices, should not be renounced with religion. It is also wrong to think that if you believe in a higher power, and pray to the gods, that nothing bad will ever happen to you. On the contrary, possibly more bad things will happen to you, because you are here to grow and to learn. To elevate, sublimate, transform.

How can you transform if not put through pressure tests? How do you respond? What are your true intentions? Are you sincere, honest, authentic, compassionate?

In our Wudang lineage, a healer must have a ferocity and a strength in physical form, a fortitude and clarity. If some healings are like exorcistic battles, you can see why the healer would need such prowess, power, and command. Courage, awareness, stillness under pressure, the ability to eat bitter, and be a healer but also a protector.

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Talismans are either curative or protective. To heal is to exactly fight demons, internal and external forces — only no one can see this, it is in the formless realm. Why are so many Daoist deities wielding swords? Not because they were fighting off bandits, no. It is a symbol of their healing power. A symbol of the thunder of heaven.

I apprenticed with Li Shi Fu, issuing talismans, empowering water, using fire healing, guan zi, gua sha, pai da, prescribing dao yin, and prescribing herbs. He would take us on walks in the mountain forests and cliffs and we would harvest the wild herbs, just like Tao Shi Fu taught Li Shi Fu when he carried her on his back because she could not walk at her old age.

Sometimes Li Shi Fu prescribes simply changing the environment, changing habits, changing thoughts. Sweep the temple, clean the altar, offer incense. Gather the herbs, brew them over the fire, drink them. Wake up and recite scripture, practice gongfu.

My personal journey as a healer is to heal through teaching. Ultimately the goal is to empower the person to heal themselves. Only the healing which you create yourself is long lasting. Others can help and assist but that is borrowed power.

It is my mission to create space and preserve the practices. The practice itself is what heals. The landscape heals — it is the ultimate healer, so much older and grander than a single person. A temple even, it lives beyond one single life, like a forest, a mountain. To tend to these places is my passion, my method.

In contemplation of what is illness and disease and how do we heal, I leave the reader with a quote from The Xin Yin Miao Jing (Heart Seal Wondrous Scripture).

上药三品

shang yao san pin

The high medicine has three qualities

神与炁精

shen yu qi jing

Shen, Qi and Jing

Lindsey shares how to nourish your life with Wudang Qigong in her exclusive online event with The Shift Network. Learn more here.

Lindsey Wei is a 24th-generation lay disciple of the Chun Yang Sect of Wudang Daoism. She trained in Traditional Chinese Gong Fu at a remote mountain temple in the Wudang Mountains, Hubei Province, and in China under her master Li Xing De for more than nine years before returning to the U.S. in 2010 to start her martial arts teaching career. She is a practitioner of Tai Ji Quan, Qigong, Ba Gua, and Double Edge Straight Sword (Jian), as well as other weapons arts.

Through working with AI, everything came into focus with startling clarity. I could suddenly see to the bottom of a truth I had sensed but never articulated so clearly: the deepest cause of our human disease, suffering, and struggle is the disconnection of our own mind from our own body.

— Master Mingtong Gu, from “Will AI Help Us Become More Human?,” The Daily Shift, October 16, 2025

In 1928, Virginia Woolf first told the tale of Judith, Shakespeare’s equally talented and imaginary sister, who was unable to pursue her artistic talents due to the economic and social constraints placed on women in the times she was living. She died, in Woolf’s telling, a miserable death by suicide after being betrayed by a supposed ally, left pregnant and frustrated, and unable to step into her gifts.

In her landmark work, A Room of One’s Own, Woolf proceeded to detail how financial and social constraints on women and the beliefs about their inferiority throughout the centuries accounted for the absence in the artistic canon of women artists.

Fast forward at warp speed to time present. As we watch Artificial Intelligence, AI, explode into our communication systems and lives, I find myself wondering frequently about AI’s genius sister, Authentic Intelligence.

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Like Shakespeare’s sister Judith, Authentic Intelligence — our whole mind, our ability to develop our true nature, gifts, and energetic potential — is being obscured by the massive financial investment and ballyhoo over the potential of machines to step into cognitive and traditionally human functions in new ways.

Woolf was not saying that the world should dump Shakespeare, or wipe out his accomplishments, to make way for Judith’s potential. But instead, she argued essentially that the flowering of gifts requires financial resources, a room of one’s own to allow a woman (or each of us) to tap into creative flow, and a social will to recognize Judith’s gifts and contributions as equally valuable to those of her more famous brother.

What does that mean for us, at this inflection point in our shared reality? As we stand on the precipice of a revolution involving the evolution of machines to accomplish great things (and perhaps trigger unintended woes), it is worthwhile to explore what Judith 2025 — Authentic Intelligence — has to offer us.

First of all, despite Western culture’s belief that intelligence resides in the brain (hence the excitement about creating artificial brains), my inner teachers and others’ spiritual teachings suggest: our MIND can be found throughout our whole multi-dimensional being.

There is intelligence in each body and its senses in the subtle energies we are made of, in the spirit we are embodying, and in the ongoing creation of self we (collectively) have only scratched the surface of perceiving and understanding.

This shift in paradigm is as revolutionary as AI’s “promise” to change the world as we know it — moving from seeing ourselves as biological creatures managed by the brain and operating primarily via chemical messaging to seeing ourselves as made of subtle energies, communicating in the language of energy, and embodying spirit.

But do we have the economic will to invest in Judith 2025? Are we making the space for our whole minds to develop in our educational settings, our communications, how we structure our systems? Do we even recognize what the constraints are to allowing our Authentic Intelligence to take her rightful place as the genius and artist that she is?

Consider these beliefs, values, and choices woven into our Western culture that keep us from developing our Whole Mind:

We Look Outward. Not only is the grass greener on the other side of the fence, but a thought from “out there” is often seen as more authoritative. Objectivity trumps subjectivity in our culture.

And even in the field of spiritual endeavor, visionaries often see wisdom as emanating from “out there” in the Cosmos — we talk about inter-galactic beings of light coming to raise our consciousness. But what about the wisdom emanating from “in there” — from the INNER galactic reaches?

This is not an either/or proposition. It’s just reflective of a cultural belief that says if it comes from far away, it is somehow more valuable than what we can generate from within.

Because we believe in objectifying, illness is seen as a thing — something to study and define. What happens when we shift our focus to see it as a process, happening within the exchange of energies we are made of?

We Denature. We have learned to extract nutrients and use them to bolster our nutrition. So, we take a pill to get our Vitamin C, instead of eating the orange grown in rich healthy soil that carries the co-factors that make its nutrients truly bio-available. We use a machine to aid every task, then have to go to a gym to work the muscles that we no longer use in context.

I confess, I LOVE a good washing machine, dishwasher, electric car, bidet toilet. But I also know that when I drive instead of walk, I pump less earth juice and diminish my contact with Mother Earth! Separation from nature, from context, impairs our ability to hear inner guidance and to access our whole mind. But our economy is rooted in our need for more and more aids that denature us, including the need now being cultivated for Assistive Intelligence!

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We Seek the Generic. Our desire to understand humankind — the body, health, emotions, and behaviors — supports a belief that there is a generic human. Instead of seeing each of us as creating a unique, specific self and working to improve our abilities to perceive and recognize the artistry in each body, mind, spirit, we push to master the generic understandings.

Medical training details the workings of the body and teaches how to repair them. What if medical trainees learned to see healing as a communication process, learned to attune to the subtle energies, the wisdom of each embodied spirit, and support their unique evolution?

According to healing visionary Donna Eden, each person’s subtle energies are as unique as a thumbprint. If this is so, then why not focus on learning to heal the artist rather than “fix” the artwork?

We Outsource Gratification. We school our children to work for the grade, rather than follow their natural interests and take pleasure in exploring their gifts. We are rapidly evolving via the internet into a society that seeks external recognition and clicks, rather than finding our gratification in the act of creation, or in the art of living-and-sensing itself.

We learn to value ourselves because we have a certain title, or position, or have been praised by others. But in both people who are praised and those who lack praise, this skews our sense of gratification and creates a disconnect between body, mind and spirit.

We Make Knowing a Science. When we use quantitative thinking to try to understand qualitative issues, we flatten and distort lived experience in all its glory, we shut down our WHOLE mind in favor of the socialized mind. When we talk about our subtle energies in terms of scientific concepts such as frequency and vibration we are not WRONG, but we aren’t making space for the intelligence inherent in our subtle energies. We are scientizing what is most likely better understood as art!

We Teach Illiteracy. Energy is the language our body speaks, and even chemistry is a form of energetic exchange. It is our mother tongue. But when our culture doesn’t recognize this, we fail to teach our children to perceive and communicate with the energies they are made of. If, as adults, we still can’t speak energy to energy, we must pay a practitioner to intervene when we are ill and we are not able to move energies the way they are designed to move. This is costly for the entire society.

Imagine if your thyroid stopped working. You could restart it, or get a friend to restart it, at no cost and without medications or irradiation. Imagine if a stent went walkabout in your body, and instead of needing exploratory surgery to find it and remove it, you could use intuition to find it and speak energy to ask your body to move the stent back to where it could be easily removed. Our bodies are capable of these “miracles” and much more, but our society does not recognize the potential of actually being able to communicate and speak our body’s lingo!

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We Ask What’s Wrong. Much of our culture is rooted in problem solving, in asking: “What’s wrong and how can I fix it?” This promotes brokenness, and the hero’s journey of fixing brokenness. But what if we asked what our Authentic Intelligence asks: “What is needed (for me/us to flourish), and how can we provide it?” Change the question and change becomes a creative act, rather than an ongoing repair job.

We Separate Body, Mind, and Spirit. Our professions are so divided that it is considered stepping on toes if an MD looks at nutrition rather than calling in a nutritionist, psychologists are not allowed to use therapeutic touch, and a massage therapist is not supposed to tap into the emotional realms.

This separation of our WHOLE MIND into fiefdoms promotes illness and supports our separation from our own innate wisdom. We laugh at old-fashioned beliefs such as seeing the body as having “humors.” Yet when we fail to perceive how our body lives our story, how our story is shaped by our soul in collaboration with our mind, how we create a self, how we co-create our shared realities, then we fall into superstitions about how body, mind, and spirit work that people 100 years from now will shake their heads over and smile about condescendingly.

We Elevate Ambition and Competition. Even those of us who value collaboration and inclusion are steeped in the culture’s entrenched beliefs in competition, in survival of the fittest, in constantly striving to improve ourselves, even when that leaves others behind. In this age of the World Wide Web, this manifests as monetizing the value of most activities, rewarding obsession and overwork, and celebrating those who can break through the noise, stand out, and influence others.

In spiritual pursuits, Whole Mind can be obscured when the culture’s obsession with ambition and perfectionism leads us to treat spiritual practice as boot camp, and claim “old soul” status, or “higher wisdom,” rather than learning how to truly inhabit our moments, deepen into each lived experience, and live wisdom in ways that value the contributions of each sentient being and all of nature.

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If you hear criticism or judgment in this recitation of constraints and cultural norms, then I invite you to know we ALL are stewing in the soup of the cultures we grew up in (including me). Perhaps instead, allow yourself to see this discussion as an opportunity to muse on what might bring you home to your own Authentic Intelligence. What is your own room, your investment, your support for your own gifted self? Our challenge in the age of AI is to ask ourselves again and again: In this era of artificial intelligence, how can we cultivate our authentic intelligence and step up to co-create a world that supports all of life more fully?

Ellen demonstrates how to transform subtle energies that shape your reality in her exclusive online event with The Shift Network. Learn more here.

Ellen Meredith is a conscious channel, medical intuitive, energy medicine practitioner, teacher, and author of Your Body Lives Your Story, The Language Your Body Speaks, and other works. She’s been in practice since 1984, helping over 10,000 clients and students across the globe communicate with their own energies, hear their inner guidance, and heal.

by Anodea Judith, PhD

What I love about the chakra system is that it covers all the dimensions of human experience:

• Our embodied reality here on the earth plane

• Our emotional and psychological development, along with its gifts and wounds

• Our relational realm of intimacy and communication

• The spirituality of reaching higher states of consciousness

There are few systems that embrace all three of these realms: Body, Psyche, and Spirit. Let’s look at how this plays out.

Yoga takes the important step of bringing the body into spirituality.

Through physical postures and breath practices (as well as guidelines for behavior from the Yamas and Niyamas), yoga is an embodied spiritual practice. But it tends to ignore our psychological wounds, advising us to transcend them instead.

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This often becomes what psychologists call a “spiritual bypass,” where people try to reach enlightenment without dealing with their psychological baggage, which eventually holds them back, or comes out in shadow form.

Somatic therapies bring the body into psychological healing, yet often ignore spirituality.

Bioenergetics, Somatic Experiencing, Neurosomatic therapy, breathwork, some types of massage, and many other disciplines recognize that psychological issues are stored in our tissues. Behaviors and defenses developed in childhood — as survival strategies — become lodged in our physiology, creating lifelong imbalances.

Muscular tension, and even illnesses, can be the result of unresolved mental and emotional issues. But while some somatic practitioners may have a spiritual perspective, the field of somatic therapy itself typically ignores the spiritual dimension.

Transpersonal Psychology brought spirituality into psychotherapy.

It rose up as a field in the early 1970s, when interest was rising in Eastern spiritual disciplines, such as Buddhism and Hinduism, along with the practices of meditation. Transpersonal psychology posits that spiritual practices can enhance psychological healing. Yet, here the body tends to be ignored, as most of these practices are more mental than physical.

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The Integrative Nature of the Chakra System

The chakra system is an embodied spiritual system that embraces our inner psychology. The basic seven energy centers each have a location in the body and derive their correlation to the nerve ganglia branching out from the spinal column, and the physiological systems of the body.

The chakras also correspond to elements, such as earth, water, fire, air, sound, light, and thought, all of which occur in the body. Chakras can be accessed through physical practices, such as yoga postures, breathing, and bioenergetic movements, or even dance.

In my work as a somatic psychotherapist, I have correlated the chakras to developmental stages of childhood and their emotional and psychological issues.

My book, Eastern Body, Western Mind, delves deeply into the traumas and abuses that happen at each developmental level, which in turn influence the areas of life correlated to our chakras, such as grounding, sexuality, personal power, healthy relationships, good communication, imagination, and beliefs.

These issues correspond to the areas of the body where that chakra resides, such as digestion being related to our personal power and energy, the legs being related to grounding, or the lungs being related to the heart chakra.

As a spiritual system, the chakras are an integrative system. They provide a ladder of liberation through which we climb up to higher levels of consciousness, incorporating spiritual principles and dimensions. By working through our psychological issues, we free up the energy that gets caught in repetitive patterns, so as to better experience our limitless, divine nature.

But the chakras also give us a means to manifest our highest ideals — as a step-by-step process, coming down the chakras, from mental conception into physical reality. In this way, they are a practical way to embody our spirituality.

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Integrative Healing

In my view, no healing is complete without addressing the body, our psychological wounds, and the spiritual aspirations of the soul. Another way of looking at this is combining physical practices, mental beliefs, and the movement of energy or charge.

The chakra system gives you a template for transformation that embraces the full spectrum of the human experience. By integrating all seven of the basic chakras, we unite all of these realms. Healing becomes profound and permanent. We become whole, which is the true meaning of the word heal.

Tools for Practice

Anyone can practice this integration. When a physical issue arises, ask yourself what might lay behind it. Place your hand on that part of the body and notice what the energy there is doing or how it may be blocked.

Consider the chakra that is related to this area of the body. Learn about the psychology of that chakra, and see if its meaning has relevance for you. Employ physical practices to move the energy, psychology exploration to understand the issue, and a spiritual framework to give you a larger perspective.

In this way, every obstacle can become an opportunity for healing, greater awareness, and more aliveness.

Anodea Judith, PhD is the author of a dozen works on the chakras, including the classics, Eastern Body, Western Mind, and Wheels of Life. She is also founder and director of Sacred Centers Academy. She teaches worldwide and has been a frequent teacher for The Shift Network.