Alan Davidson: How do explain the chakras to someone who has never heard of them before?

Caroline Myss, PhD: Well you know I describe them as energy centers or databases that the body has and to put them in contemporary language…the body has seven major databases and just like a computer it contains the information of your life…your thoughts, your attitudes, your opinions and these are stored in these databases and this data casts a vote into the formation of your body. Each of the chakras regulate the function of a part of our anatomy.

What do you mean by the first chakras’ relating to our tribal experience?

Well I want you to picture an hourglass. The base of the hourglass contains the first three chakras which relate to the tribal mode of consciousness. The mid-point of the hourglass is the heart chakra and the top of the hourglass contains the upper three chakras of higher consciousness. Tribal consciousness, Alan, is group…the group mind. When you are first born …imagine you have a hundred circuits of energy coming into he top of your head. Those circuits have got to be plugged in to some stream of consciousness so our tribe, our family does the plugging in for us because we can’t do it ourselves. So they plug us into the tribal religion, to all tribal things, to the family culture, to the social culture, to our ethnic culture and all of these things are group cultures and it teaches us how to think and behave like a group being, so we’re part of a tribal mind and we learn to think this way…what would my family think, how can I do this, how will the group think, how do I participate in a group, how do I have power in a group…we become that part of ourselves, the tribal part of ourselves is activated.

Yes, yes I’m following you.

The way I describe it is consciousness has three levels…toilet water, cologne and perfume.

(Laughs)

And the tribal mind is the toilet water level. Which is not critical. When you operate in a tribal mentality, you need a lot of people to push something forward.

Right.

And it takes a lot of effort to pull the group forward. If your energy circuits are plugged in to belief patterns held by the tribal mind, then what you’re doing is agreeing to evolve at the speed of the group as opposed to evolving at a speed more kin to yourself.

Right, right

How many times I’ve done a reading and I’ve said to someone you could do this and that or this and that. I’m watching them and I know exactly what they are doing. They’re transferring the suggestion to their tribal mind, to their family, to their group, and they’re getting the data back that says, “Oh, we don’t approve of that, don’t you dare!” Then out of their mouth comes, “ I could never do that.” What they are really saying is I just took a vote and they are not backing me up so I am not doing this.

They’re not willing to risk.

Yes, it’s the old, “What will they say?” As opposed to who am I? I care what you say, but excuse me, I think this is my life.

Right…that takes a lot of courage though.

Yes it does, but that’s what evolutionary consciousness is all about, to go from the support of the group mind to being able to say I can do this myself now…I can take responsibility for the quality of my thoughts, for the creation of my thoughts…I no longer need to say I inherited it. That’s why I am the way I am…I no longer need to dilute my responsibility into a group consequence…i.e. look at the World War and all the Nazis who said, “Hey, I didn’t do anything, I was under orders.” All of a sudden from this massive murder created by this nation only fifteen were tried because everybody else was “ doing their jobs.”

Yes I see that. In your teaching you talk about the chakras losing energy. Can you explain this to me?

Let me use an example. If I became very jealous of you and you were a much better massage therapist than I was and your practice takes off and mine is squat, okay and I develop a very envious feeling about you…envy is a feeling that comes out of my third chakra because it has to do with self-esteem.
Right

So that means I don’t have enough feeling about myself…so now you picture my energy leaving my system and just draining out to yours because I feel so envious of you.

Right…

And so my energy gets drained…yours doesn’t because your not returning it…you’re not drawing your sword…it’s just me.

Okay.

But if we were competitive in this way, if we both felt that kind of fiery negativity that jealousy has then both of us would have a third chakra battle going on…you know and both of us would be losing power to each other you see.

So if I can get kind of a visual of that…you mentioned like the hundred streams of energy pouring in the top of the head.

Yes…view that as your life force.

Right. So one cord of energy would come out of your third chakra and attach itself to me.

Yes, or if it were really severe you’d see thirty cords coming out.

Ah…
Because we can be talking a chunk of energy. I have seen so many who can’t let go of a relationship…particularly women and they hold on, I’ve seen women hold on to their ex- husbands as a way of saying they’re still married because they can not bear to say the word single. See what I’m saying?

Right

They have to stay in that married consciousness and so fifty, sixty percent of those one hundred circuits, sixty of them leave their bodies and go into this historic marriage that no longer exist and I’ve got news for you…these people are no longer in present time, they’re taking there life and they’re breathing it into the dead, i.e., their marriage…

Yeah

See they’re trying to do like Imelda Marcos with their husbands for Christ sake. She has him in a glass case like Lenin, she didn’t let his body get buried…that’s kind of wacko.

Are there techniques that you recommend if I feel myself in a relationship where I’m losing energy, what can I do to reclaim it?

It’s funny you’re asking me that cause that’s what I’m writing about in my new book. I like to teach them to think this way…that we have three levels of consciousness that are now operating in us simultaneously. Now instead of thinking of the chakras as this long line, you know, one through seven. Do you have a piece of paper in front of you?

Yes, I do.

You draw two horizontal lines and you’ll have three columns on the page.

Got it.

Over the first column write the word tribal. Over the middle column write individual. Over the third column write symbolic or archetypal. Now these are the three levels of consciousness. All right, now in your first column to the left I want you to make three circles…for your first, second and third chakras. The middle column has four through seven chakras. The third column has the eighth chakra.

So there are three circles, four circles and then one.

That’s right.
Now give me the issue you want me to talk about

Let’s say relationships that have ended badly and I resent the other person…some of these are romantic relationships, some are just friendships…

Businesses or whatever.

Right.

Okay…lets take one where you have a resentment in a romantic relationship. So you’re going to take that first column and you’re going to take a look at second and third chakras, because second is relationships…your one on one contact, and your third is resentment because you’ve been rejected, or you’ve been criticized or whatever. Under that first column you want to write that down. Why you feel resentful, exactly what happened. Right under the first, second and third chakras…you put the number one and put this is my first area of resentment, here’s the person, this is what happened, and this is why. Write it all out, because what you are now doing is you’re identifying how it looks only from your point of view.

Okay.

This is the first floor and from the first floor this is all I see…now I’m going to take you over to the third or symbolic column and I’m going to ask you…from a completely impersonal level, “Why do you think you’re in this circumstance?” Anybody who represented what that person represented in your life could have offended you so it has actually nothing to do with these particular people. It has to do with something in you. So I’m going to reverse your position and I’m going to ask you to see the whole thing symbolically…does it bring out a sense of victim in you, does it bring out a sense of the abandoned child, does it make you feel like you need to learn how to stand up more for yourself and speak up. In which case I’m going to keep you in that column until you can find the gift in that situation and then once you do, you enter the middle column, the individual and you create a path to become strong enough to absorb the gift and let go of the resentment.

That is very exciting…that makes sense.

Yeah…that’s the model I work with.

And so it’s like you can visualize on a piece of paper and begin to create the pathway to your higher consciousness and to see how we get from that individualized “somebody hurt me” to this is my part in it and this is how I get through it.

And it’s even bigger than “my part in it.” It’s seeing the archetypal drama going on here, learning that I can’t rescue everyone because ultimately, no matter who the rescuer is, the people they rescue have to leave them. Because they need to say I’m okay now. What I need to learn is to look at my own motivations, and why I rescue people and what’s my agenda. I have to take a look at what’s my part in it, and what am I supposed to learn from it, and then in some cases, you can end up being grateful to the people.

Energy medicine has been around for thousands of years and yet one of the things that’s refreshing about your work is your interpretation on some of the spiritual and emotional issues and how they manifest through the energy centers…can you describe some of the distinctions that you make about that.

You mean how are emotional issues manifested in our body?

Right

Well you know what, I’d be delighted to, beginning with this…I think that we have had a long time now of beginning to recognize that there is indeed a strong connection between negative emotions and deterioration of our body…agreed?

Right

However, in our enthusiasm to take one principal, one minor discovery and turn it into a full-time universal truth. we’ve jumped the bandwagon and that we now make assumptions quite mistakenly that all illness is the result of negativity…and it is not…a big huge not.

Yet some of the distinctions I’ve heard you make in your work is that sometimes it’s simply a learning tool we need or that it’s an act of service that we do…we take on negative energy.

Or it’s just a matter of genetics, who knows, it could just be one of those things. I mean we are so insistent on looking for a form of divine justice that matches our human justice, which means there’s got to be a reason, one reason, why this happened and by God I will not let go of this search until I find out what that lesson is and i think God could be rolling around on a cloud saying...go ahead look.

(laughing) Look at them down there, ha ha.

Yeah look all you want, which reminds me of what that yogi said…you want to know how to make god laugh?…tell em your plans.

(laughing) Show 'em your date book…

Yeah really I mean its not gonna fly Orville, so I think we’re much better off in assessing each person individually and saying this particular person obviously does have issues okay, but even then Alan, do we really have the right to say everything here is caused by negativity…no…I think the only thing that we are in a position to say is there is some negative energy being contributed to this that may have begun and helped your body to become more vulnerable to what’s going on…because obviously there are so many instances where you simply can’t overlook the coincidences, the timing. How many men? What, sixty percent of men died a year and a half after retirement because they get some kind of illness…prostate cancer, heart attack, stroke…because their whole power base is gone. Their whole tribal system through which they had rank, power, prestige and honor is gone…

And that leaves them with a sense of nothing.

Exactly, so you can’t exactly say I don’t think there is a connection here, what happens fifty, sixty, seventy percent of the times…you have to be brain dead not to connect those dots…or the fact that people do remarkable recoveries in their health when in fact they forgive somebody…you can’t overlook that either…I mean these are very profound incidences.

Right, I would like you to talk about something I see in a lot of emotional work I’ve done I have seen so many people who want to skip over all the hard work and get to forgiveness, so they kind of come up with this faux forgiveness attitude that they go through life with and there’s no real substance to it…or doesn’t seem authentic to me…do you find that in your work?

Oh I think there are stages to forgiveness and each stage has it’s own authenticity, you know what I mean, but I think forgiveness becomes certainly a mental thing first…long before it becomes embodied. For most people, anyway. It’s not often people can pull it off right away, those lucky people, but for most of us we go through knowing that we should forgive and we try to forgive through the mental role which is talk it out endlessly through friends and therapists. We keep doing the witness number, wait till you hear what it/he/she did to me, and then many people go through the bitter stage, and then they go through what I call the lockjaw stage. Which is you ask them did you forgive them they clench their jaw and say absolutely.

(laughs)

But you see through that whole time there is a tremendous struggle inside. I mean the conflict of not being able to forgive…you know it’s kind of like a bank where you owe a loan and just because you’re not talking about it any more doesn’t mean the banker isn’t sending you notes

Isn’t that the truth.

Okay, just simply there is a part of you that just will not let you go, that will not let you forget that you have not completed this task and this reminder process can go on for decades, for as long as you hang on, and when you think of all the energy that you invest in holding on. Alan, I have been with people who have spent as much as twenty five, thirty five, forty five years hanging on to a remark one of their parents said to them that took maybe ten seconds.

Right and has traumatized them for most of their life.

For half a century and so I said to them…just based on economics alone, so you think this was a good use of your time? Just from that position alone I want to shake you upside down like a rag doll.

This is not practical.

Yeah this is just a stupid way to spend your energy and never mind the emotional end of it. This is stupid and I’m not interested in you telling me about a ten second incident that took you a half a century to get over…what kind of person are you, are you that weak?

But there are so many people in our culture that are that weak..

Well you know from that point of view my dear, I think we’ve encouraged that.

Well, I agree with you

That is my whole policy on woundology and I’ve taken a couple of licks in the chops for it.

(laughs)

I won’t back off on that one because I am not saying the injured do not deserve care, nurturing and a witness. Of course they do, but there come a point where that kind of help only serves to increase the wounds, not the healing.

Right, right. This is one of your concepts that has really helped me a lot in my work and my life. To work with the people that I hear saying the same thing over and over and it’s given me a format to say…listen, this does not serve you or me anymore and it takes a lot of courage for me to say that.

Yep, yep, yep it does, but you know in the long run they’ll thank you.

(laughs) Well maybe after a couple of years of not speaking to me, but yeah I think you’re right.

Well you know they will, because they realize what you’re really telling them is take up your bed and walk, get back to the mainstream of your life, you’ve taken enough from the blow, you are healed, the thing is you don’t get it you’re healed and you don’t want to recognize that. You’ve gotten used to the view, the bed and the food…

Get uncomfortable and get on the road.

Yeah and you know, it not even get uncomfortable, I don’t see why anyone would mourn about getting their life back, Alan. See what is wrong with us? You know it was a normal….it’s like I’m screaming at you, will you forgive me? I don’t mean to do that, I’m just passionate about this.

Don’t feel bad, I’m excited about it

You know I’m just incredibly passionate, you’re right in my ballpark now, but you know I do believe that in becoming fluent, in developing a vocabulary that allows us access to our interiors, which we’ve done, between the spiritual and psychological vocabulary, we’ve unearthed and accessed, we’ve liberated ourselves in such a way that we were able to put our emotions on leave and our mind became the caboose on the train and our emotions became the engine and for centuries, it was always the reverse, so as with anything else, in reversing a dynamics, the first stage is revolution because you’re breaking a pattern and revolution means exaggeration, it means out of control, so we’ve had an emotional era that to some extent has gone out of control because we didn’t know how to put perimeters on it and we didn’t want to because that’s exactly what we were breaking away from. With perimeters around emotional discovery, but now we need to. Like the way Hegel described it a century ago or more….there’s thesis, antithesis and synthesis and now we have to bring back the force of the respect of the mind with the heart and the respect of the heart with the mind. We cannot allow our hearts to fear our minds anymore because it makes us emotionally irrational and we cannot allow our minds to resent our hearts anymore because it makes our minds arrogant. So these two forces, they have now got to unite into one coordinated and harmonious voice within the human being and that’s the stage we now have to enter.

You mentioned earlier the symbolic level of the eight chakra, how do you use the concepts of the archetypes to move people from say the tribal level of evolution into the higher chakras?

Well now wait a minute here, you’re asking a question like an ordinary mortal okay.

Okay (laughs) please forgive me!

Oh well, your forgiven, I’ll get you out of that…there is nothing wrong with the tribal level, we cannot look at it like good, better, best…not allowed…the tribal level is grounding, it is essential, it is where your system of honor is, it’s loyalty, it your interaction with the physical world, you don’t want to look at it like this isn’t good. The task is to use all three levels simultaneously, so that when you have a crisis in the physical world, you can return to the symbolic world and use that level of thinking as a way to cope with what happened in the physical world and then you create a path in the individual column as to how to balance the two…like you could say this incident drew out an insecurity in me, but if I look at it like this person represents the warrior and it makes me feel like a victim so I really understand that the warrior is an invitation for me to wake up the warrior within myself, now what can I do that would help that and maybe you’ve decided, okay what I’m going to do is not beat that man or woman up, I’m going to take a course in karate, I’m going to take a course in Tai ’chi, something that wakes up the warrior in me
Right

And then you return to the physical level with power in you, the tribal level…that’s how you work with it. And I want to emphasize, this is not good, better, best.

I’m so glad to hear you say that, because it is easy for me to fall into that, I mean I know in my own thinking I do that. I have a question about your coming to Houston. I noticed on your flyer that some of your sponsors is St. Joseph and St. John’s Hospitals and that is so refreshing to me that traditional medical hospitals are helping you with your work.

Isn’t that lovely?

It is and do you see that as more and more happening for alternative kinds of therapies?

Oh I hope so, I think so because you know I’ve noticed a tremendous change in how the media approaches stories on alternative medicine, now they’ve taken a shift from the voice of the seventies and eighties…from what are these screwballs doing…

(laughs)

To, my god, this works and let’s face it, Alan, we’re gonna win and you know, what are we doing, we’re calling the world we have now the information age, which is an energy age, information is energy…

Yes, like one of my clients likes to say, information is power.

You’d better believe it

So the age of Aquarius has delivered that for us I think.

Exactly right, so there for the energy in medicine is as powerful now as the energy in technology, we have an energetic technological system, how can that not convert to medicine?

Yeah, yeah…well I know in one of your tape series you talked about in a hundred years or so you anticipate that there will be technology and machinery sensitive enough to really detect the chakras and the flow of energy and that we can really look on a cellular level to see what’s going on…

Oh it won’t take a hundred years Alan, it might take fifteen or twenty.

We can expect some revolutions.
What can we expect from your new book “Why People Don’t Heal”?

Well I’m presenting this model of the three columns and how to work with it…because that is the second part that I never, ever taught., but it’s how you can heal.

…So to begin that real process. Writing it out, looking at it, working symbolically.

Right, and through the years that I focused on why we don’t heal, but it has that model, until I began to ask myself, well now why don’t we? It’s enough to spot woundology, what do we do then? You know I’ve investigated the material I’ve taught at a much deeper level and when you get to write a book, you get to take it more slowly, more thoroughly.

Right, work it piece by piece. Do you recommend some practices that we can do, as modern day mystics, to stay present in this hectic world?

Yeah, actually I do, one really rich practice is to develop a personal mantra for yourself that continually brings you back to home base…something as small as I trust that all things happen for good reasons…and no matter where you are, when you feel yourself losing power because you’re scared, or you’re insecure or whatever, just repeat that, repeat it, remind yourself of the highest truths you’re capable of touching…

A personal mantra, anything else?

Well I think you have to give attention to your spiritual practice, one of the points I make in this book, is that we’ve, in our enthusiasm to jump into holistic medicine, alternative thinking shall we say, and into the liberation from religion to spirituality, we’ve crossed a wire, which is that we think spirituality, a spiritual practice, is the same as a practice for health, and it is not. It is not. These are two different disciplines entirely and what you do to maintain your health is one thing but that is not a spiritual practice, spiritual practice is a very demanding and jealous companion and you have to give that a lot of attention. While they both serve to help you, they’re like a right and a left leg that support the same body.

So when you talk about a spiritual practice, can you give us some examples of what you do?

Well you have to find a way to keep yourself in touch with your sense of God, whether that is prayer and meditation. And eating the right food is not the way to do it okay?

(laughs) Contrary to popular belief

Yeah or jogging, on the other hand, let’s say you jog and you pray while you do it, you’ve got something going here, you’ve got a walking meditation, but you’re consciously doing both, instead of doing one and assuming it covers both bases one shoe does not fit two feet and so you have to spend a little time during the day, how much varies…time is not of the essence, quality is, so you spend a few minutes a day in conscious prayer or you read something that is very inspirational…other than a holistic cookbook, you know you don’t get those kinds of thoughts from those, you read something tranquil, Thomas Merton, you read any deep thinker that helps you think more deeply.

Right, right, well thank you.

You’re welcome…

Alan Davidson is a Registered Massage Therapist and director of Essential Touch Therapies in Houston. He teaches classes in massage, meditation and yoga. He has practiced touch and energy medicine for 9 years. He has contributed articles and interviews for Up and Out Communications for 3 years.