CHAKRAS, AURAS, GROUNDING?
What are you on about?
A couple of people have asked me the basics. What's a chakra? That kind of thing. Here goes.
I’ll tell you what makes sense to me. More learned fellow mediums may say I'm way off with this alt-version, but what helps me understand things, may work for you too. If not, Google is your best friend.
Or try Tara Ward’s book, ‘Discover Your Psychic Powers', Very good, very comprehensive. Click here if you're interested. She also knows Sharry, our teacher. Another essential book is 'Mediumship Made Simple', by Ivy Northage. Click here if you fancy a read. Ivy also taught Sharry.
It's all about energy and lots of it
Pretty much all of this jazz is about energy .. .and the speed at which energy is vibrating. I’m not going to get into debates about the meaning of frequency or vibration. Just be reassured it’s a scientific fact that everything is made up of energy and different energies move at different rates.
Love is high frequency. Taking drugs is low frequency.
Laughing is high frequency. Smoking nicotine is low frequency.
We can perceive, sense and feel these energies through different means.
We see light.
We touch a wooden table.
It’s all energy, just moving at very different speeds and perceived in different ways.
Mediums try to increase the speed of their energy
Us lot, living people, vibrate at a certain speed.
That lot, our dearly departed, vibrate at a much faster and lighter speed. They’re not encumbered by physical matter, which is denser and therefore slower.
As a medium you’re trying to increase the speed of your energy to get closer to their energy.
At the same time, if someone on the other side is trying to communicate with us, they try to slow down their energy. (They might not know they need to do it if they're new)
If we manage to sync our energies, it’s like hitting the right signal when tuning a radio, and we can receive what they are telling us.
"I’m just taking the chakras for a spin, darling”
As humans, we come with a free pack of very sensitive instruments which, if we bother to learn how to work them, can raise our vibrations.
This isn’t the physical body with its gloopy blood and sloshy guts or even the skeleton or nervous system. This is a structure of invisible energy. With seven main hubs.
These hubs are spinning wheels of energy. Just to get all ashram-y on you, they’re called chakras because the Sanskrit word for wheel or circle is cakra. I do wonder why we don’t just call them cakras. Why did we need to come up with a slightly different word? No idea. But there you go.
Like those cones you put over a dog’s head when they’ve had an operation and are hellbent on biting out their stitches, the wheels rotate, not so much in a ball, but in a cone shape. The smaller end of the cone is within the physical body and the wider end of the cone is outside the physical body.
We can make them rotate faster and open them up wider so that they can receive more and more refined information. Just think of satellite dishes wide open to pick up what’s coming down from space. It’s similar.
We can slow them down so that they get smaller and tuck into the body, minding their own business.
When we speed them up and they open and extend, it’s even possible to feel them with your hands, extending like hard funnels, outside of the person’s body. But that freaks me out.
Positions & Meaning
Chakras rotate at points up and down your spine and head.
-
At the base of your spine, one cone goes down toward the ground
-
Just below your navel, one cone goes to the front and one cone goes to the back
-
Just above your navel, one cone goes to the front and one cone goes to the back
-
At your chest bone, one cone goes to the front and one cone goes to the back
-
At your throat, one cone goes to the front and one cone goes to the back
-
At your brow, one cone goes to the front and one cone goes to the back
-
At the top of your head, one cone points directly upwards
Each chakra is associated with a different theme and experience. Honestly, I can never remember the difference between the second and third one and I’ve been doing this for years, so don’t worry if you don’t either.
For completion's sake, I’ve included the most nauseating picture of a perfect looking person in a lotus position. This is precisely the kind of image that puts me off the entire subject. Perfect, poised, holier than though. I'm sure the actual person is lovely. It's just all this stereotyping that makes me cringe. And I’m all too aware this can induce upchucks of, “Oh here we go, the Kumbaya My Lord nonsense.” But I can't find a different image at the moment.
Actually, it’s not that whacky-baccy. Once you're through reaching for the sick bag, read from the bottom up.
All that spinning and rotating both pulls energy into the body and sends energy out. That energy is information that we can perceive or not.
We can perceive good and bad vibes coming into us. Others can perceive good and bad vibes coming off us. The more trained, the more you can understand exactly what those vibes mean.
Like any kind of radio equipment, if they are in good shape, neither warped nor clogged with dirty negative emotion, they will receive clearer signals.
All seven chakras need to work together as a group, much like instruments in an orchestra. If one or two are spinning like crazy but others are sluggish, then you can experience distortions. It would be like trying to hear a tune but only hearing the drums and not the percussion. The personal experience could be overwhelming feelings of, for example, being excluded or paranoia or delusional euphoria. Essentially, you’re out of balance.
From a mediums point of view, I’m mostly concerned with information that’s coming in. If we’re working at the medium level then I’ll focus on the brow although information can come in through the throat too. (I've recently learned that the energy comes in through the back chakras but because we use breath to pull it in, it feels like it's coming in from the front).
Very occasionally, I’ll get some super-duper higher-order stuff coming down through the crown. It’s quite fun when that happens as the information becomes quite lofty and philosophical, dealing with universal laws and existence.
When we’re not working with dead people, but practising looking at people’s emotions and thoughts, on the psychic level, then we concentrate on the heart chakra and don’t focus on the brow at all.
Newsflash: there are a whole bunch of other chakras. Because we roughly know what we're doing we include chakras below our feet and several above our heads. But if you're just starting out you definitely need to get a handle on the core seven.
To learn to play an instrument you need to practise scales
A lot of what we did as Beginners and Intermediaries was learning to go up and down the chakras. To start with we were only allowed as far as the heart chakra and down again, sensing how they felt different.
It was like learning to play a musical instrument. Up and down, up and down the scales we went. The key was being able to come back down to the base chakra.
Once we’d learned how to control ourselves up to the heart level, we were taught how to go higher to the throat level, to the brow and to the crown.
The heart level is the transition from the earth plane to the spiritual plane. Above the heart meant going into very different energy. There was a risk that if we didn’t know how to control the chakras, that once above the heart, we couldn’t come back down again.
Again we’d practise going up and down, up and down, stopping, sensing, getting to know what the throat, brow and crown felt like.
How do you go up and down the chakras?
Answer: you think about them.
You can think about lights coming on. For the base chakra you think ‘red light turning on’. For the sacral you think, ‘orange light turning on.’ And so on.
Or maybe you prefer to think of flowers opening. For the solar plexus, you think of a yellow rosebud opening out into full, glorious bloom.
Whatever works for you.
In the beginning, I had no idea what we were doing. The teacher would ask, “How was that for you Polly?” and I’d look startled, “Um, OK.” I think it’s a fair cop to say that no newbie knows what they’re doing to begin with. That’s where good teachers come in. You have to be able to trust that the teachers know you’re on the right track.
This energy structure is extremely powerful and we need to know how to operate it carefully and precisely. In many ways, I think if I'd known this when I was younger, I could have averted quite a few problems, maybe even anorexia. Although having said that, karma was at play, so maybe not.
Auras
With our human bodies packed full of energy, it should come as little surprise that there’s something called an aura. It’s just all that energy buzzing around. inside and outside of the physical body.
I can’t see auras very well. I can see the most basic aura, a thin layer of light, very close to the physical body. It’s just misty white. It blew my mind when I first saw it but in reality it’s not that big a deal.
Sometimes when I’m bored I look at the aura around my hands and fingers. It’s teensy, only about 5 mm from the flesh. Occasionally it’s vivid green. It’s quite fun to put your two first fingers together, like two sausage ends touching. Pull your fingers apart slowly and you’ll see the energy pulling and then separating.
Other people can see the aura in all its glory and colour. They can tell how someone is feeling just by looking at it. If the colours are balanced, clear and vibrant the person is in good health and feeling great. If the colours are murky and dark, then very likely something is troubling them.
By the way, you can see auras around plants, trees and animals. The trick is to look at an object but put your focus behind the object, a bit like looking at those Magic Eye posters. It helps if the object is against a plain background, like a white or cream wall or blue sky.
Cleansing, Closing, Grounding. And then ground, ground, ground again
The golden rule of psychic development is that you cannot work at the higher levels if you’re not grounded. That’s why for the first few years pretty much all I did in spooky class was think about my feet. Then I graduated to thinking about the ground below my feet. Then I had to think about magnets in my bottom pulling me down towards the earth. Until I was able to ground, I was not allowed to go any higher.
Grounding is the foundation for development. Without grounding you can’t pull energy up through you and worse still, you're at risk of just floating around picking up all manner of rubbish. More recently a kind of penny dropped. I realised that lightning has to be earthed. Until that happens it's just a big flashing storm of energy. In a way a medium is an earthing rod, bringing the energy down to the ground.
Every psychic session starts with grounding and ends with grounding. It's not rocket science. You just visualise energy going down through your feet, down in the ground and tying around a rock, holding you firm. Or you can think of roots growing out of your feet like a tree's roots.
The second and third rules of psychic development are finishing off a session with cleansing and closing (and grounding again).
When we’re working the chakras are spinning quickly and are wide open, receiving information. But going about your day with seven radio stations on would quickly become overwhelming. When that happens you can pick up people’s thought as you pass them in the street. You can feel totally mad. And very much out of control.
So every session ends with cleansing to get out any information you’ve received or any dead person’s thoughts or feelings. If you've picked up a suicide's feelings then best to cleanse that away, heh? Cleansing can be done by visualising a huge white light blasting through your energy field or a waterfall dumping gallons of water, washing through your aura.
Again, it’s up to you.
To close, you work down from the crown to the base, imagining slowing and closing the spinning cones one by one, pulling them into their positions in your body. Sometimes they’re quite hard to close so you have to concentrate, maybe even imagine shutting a door on them and putting a cross in front of the door.
The crown and the base always stay open to a degree, constantly pulling in energy but it’s wise to completely shut down the others.
Once you've stopped Major Tomming round the cosmos and are well and truly back to earth, with everything feeling normal again, you can put on a big imaginary cloak for extra protection. Pull the hood up too.
Then it’s off to the pub. Except, be careful, because alcohol can open up the chakras. So, you guessed it, no harm having another cleanse, close and ground before making your way home on the tube. You don't want any of that strange energy sneaking into your aura.