Getting Down To Business Spiritually-Detoxing to Move Upward

I am going to use a yogic model from the Himalayan tradition for this discourse as a base to extrapolate from simply because that is my background. But you can change the words and it certainly remove the Sanskrit and it applies to any tradition. Physical - Annamaya kosha ..(here just think about the body..the most dense energy level of our being) Energy - Pranamaya kosha (the subtler forms.breath, kundalini) Mental - Manamaya kosha (our thoughts..) Wisdom - Vijnanamaya kosha (ability to discern) Bliss - Anandamaya kosha see below) Self - Atman *Anna means food. All of the physical aspects of life come and go, and are consumed by another aspect of external reality. Thus, the outermost of the koshas is called the sheath of food, or Annamaya kosha. *Prana means energy. *Mana means mind. It is the level of processing thoughts and emotions. It is in direct control of the operation, through the prana, chi, kundalini, breath (all the same) of the physical body and senses. *Vijnana means knowing. It is the sheath of wisdom that is underneath the processing, thinking aspect of mind. It knows, decides, judges, and discriminates between this and that, between useful and not useful. *Ananda means bliss. It is simply being, resting in bliss called ananda. *Atman is the Self, the eternal center of consciousness, which was never born and never dies. What I want to focus on in this discourse is first the physical sheath..the body..and then the mental sheath, the mind. It seems that a lot of folks who are wonderful loving spiritual people want to go straight to enlightenment and leave these two areas behind. Perhaps it is our western religious roots that tell us the body is not important in spiritual matters and that we must be strong and "pull ourselves up by the bootstraps". The Protestant ethic has delivered that message to us for generations. However, the bottom line is that enlightenment has laws, and being in a body has laws..spiritual laws that if we do not acknowledge will stop us or cause us stagnation and possible pain if ignored. The physical sheath, our body must be cleared out in order for kundalini to rise and not run into blocks. In other words, if you are eating foods filled with preservatives, gluten,white flour products, making the blood sticky, the intestines caked up and causing the body to be unable to clear itself of the same poisons over and over again...you will develop symptoms. These will include everything from cancer to migraines to fibromyalgia and a whole list of common symptoms in between. If you are smoking and drinking caffeine..your blood pressure is at risk and you are taxing the liver and kidneys and your breathing will not be what it needs to be when you work on your spiritual practices. So, what happens when you have a body that is filled with sticky blood, an overtaxed lymph system, reduced life force from trying to process preservatives and pesticides..and is already sluggish..and you are working on a spiritual practice and you begin to move the kundalini up the spine? A lot of people are calling the pain and the dis-eases that are coming with this combination ascension symptoms. Your physical sheath is simply not prepared and open for the more subtle energy to flow. The heavier fluids cannot flow..the hormones and even the blood can barely flow through the quagmire of the average American diet..how can subtle energy move through without it being misdirected and causing complications and problems? The solutions of course are in detoxifying the body...getting rid of the meat, the dairy, and yes..the gluten which creates sticky blood....drinking a lot of water and eating the kind of diet that will allow the body to become lighter..then the LIGHT energy can flow. Another area that a lot of us seem to want to skip over is the mind . I am a great believer in cognitive behavioral therapy....i.e. I do not think it is terribly useful to be a Freudian and sit on a couch and re-examine every hurt you ever went through in your lifetime and feel sorry for yourself. However, many of us wish to skip dealing with abuses and trauma altogether. We want to just think good thoughts and ignore the hungry dogs in the basement. That is not useful either. There are issues in most of our lives that we must look at. Sometimes a professional is useful for this. I deeply do not believe anyone should become a professional patient or allow a therapist to tell you what you are feeling. This work takes enormous self honesty and the ability to be fearless..to go through our pain . If we try to go around it or over or under it it will find us in our karma until we deal with it..we are doomed to repeat the lesson. Once we have gone through our issues, we are then free from them. many of us are using spirituality as an avoidance technique. In the end this is useless. Again..As we go into spiritual practice and our kundalini begins to rise...what is not cleared out in the mind field will be there to cause symptoms of dis-ease. Repressed anger notoriously causes cancer, fear is a huge block to Love and to growth, and I cannot count how many people I have met through Myspace who suffer from anxiety and panic attacks..which can be overcome.. the list goes on. (I would recommend for those of you who are friends of Michael Skowronski to look at some of his blogs..they are very useful.) Meditation and journal writing will help in the area of clearing our mental and emotional issues..for lots of us some counseling is usually necessary in the world the way it is today. Just be careful not to get stuck there either! When these two areas , the physical and the mental and emotional sheaths or levels are working more smoothly our spiritual practices will be more fruitful. We must quit putting off dealing with getting our bodies detoxed from unhealthy food because it is a habit or because we like the way Fritos taste. If we really wish to pursue enlightenment, our path, whatever that might be: Reiki Healer, yoga, Prayer Warrior, Lightworker, Christian, ..the list can go on..that which leads us to Oneness with the Light and Love..then we must detox our bodies of the things that are blocking the flow of chi, prana, kundalini..etc. We must go fearlessly into examining our inner world..our thoughts and emotions to clear away the debris of the past so that we are loosed from negative patterns and build those positive thoughts and emotions that we have all become aware of thanks to wonderful teachings like, "The Secret" and Conversations with God" among many others. I am working on all this just like everyone else! I definitely make no claims to have become any more enlightened than so many of the wonderful spiritual people I have met. I do think that we must remember that we it is not an option to tend to these two levels of our being as the whole system is connected. As we have chosen to incarnat, our soul and prana, chi, kundalini must work with the various levels of this body and even once we drop this body the patterns we create in the mind field will continue to affect our souls, atman, call it what you will. It is all just heavier and lighter forms of the same energy patterns. (c) butterflylove-spirit 2008