Create the Life You Imagine ~ May 2019
Opening the Upper Triangle
“A person is not a thing or a process, but an opening through which the absolute can manifest.”
The final power center of the upper triangle is the seventh chakra. The seventh chakra is often called the “crown chakra” and can be pictured as sitting right on the crown of your head. In Sanskrit it is called Sahasrara, or thousand petaled lotus. The color associated with the seventh chakra is violet or white, and it is often visualized as a thousand petaled lotus flower opening at the crown of the head to allow spiritual awakening in an individual and the experience of transcendence or liberation from human suffering or limitation. Located in the cranium at the top of the head, this is the most subtle of the power centers of our spiritual energy system and opening this center allows us to connect with the true essence of our being as pure energy, cosmic awareness or formless presence. Physically, the seventh chakra is connected to the pineal gland, the central nervous system and the cerebral cortex. Just as our physical pineal gland responds to outer light, our seventh chakra responds to inner light. Imbalances in the seventh chakra can be experienced in nervous system disorders, poor coordination, or chronic headaches. Psychological imbalances in the seventh chakra might include feelings of isolation or alienation, depression, malaise, or a “why bother” sense of meaninglessness about life that can show up as despair, exhaustion, a desire to sleep all the time, toxic cynicism or suicidal thinking.
The seventh chakra creates the opening for the peak experiences that many of us describe as spiritual experiences. Although the seventh chakra is connected to the invisible and subtle world of energy, more and more people are opening to seventh chakra experiences. Recent surveys show that more than 60% of Americans report having had some sort of spontaneous peak experience where they felt a deep sense of love and a profound sense of presence, connection and oneness with the universe. These experiences are like breakthrough moments that provide us with an expanded sense of identity or awareness and where our notion of ourselves as the “separate self” dissolves into a sense of oneness or universal consciousness. There is a numinous quality to these moments that can only be known by direct experience and that cannot be fully conveyed to others through the limitations of our everyday consciousness and language, but most will describe some sense of penetrating or glistening light that wakes up our sense of connection with the Mystery of the Universe. In these moments, most people experience a deeper, broader, higher, or truer sense of reality that allows them to temporarily transcend their ordinary way of seeing the world. These moments often have the power to create permanent shifts in how we define ourselves and how we experience a sense of meaning and purpose in life.
Great examples of these peak experiences are found in the accounts of people that have had near death experiences. The universal nature of these accounts helps us to see the power we access when we step outside our ordinary consciousness and into the transcendent consciousness of the seventh chakra. One of the most compelling of these accounts comes to us from acclaimed neuroscientist Dr. Eben Alexander. As reported in Newsweek Magazine in 2012, Dr. Alexander spent decades as a neurosurgeon at some of the most prestigious medical institutions in our country before contracting a rare and typically deadly form of bacterial meningitis that rendered him comatose and destroyed anything that would be recognizable as brain function while he was hospitalized and completely monitored for the duration of his coma using our best neuroscience tools. His account is documented in the gripping book, Proof of Heaven. In short, he described that despite his extensive training as a scientist and his confirmed pre-coma skepticism of religion and spirituality, against all the odds, he emerged from his coma forever changed and fervently committed to sharing what he experienced while his brain was clinically off-line.
In his book, Dr. Alexander describes the mystical experiences he had during his coma and how he came to the undeniable awareness that who we are is certainly bigger than our bodies and our brains, that we are all connected to a universal force that is both personal and transcendent, and that love is the ground of all things. He also depicts his meeting with a celestial presence that shared with him three truths we all need to know: 1) You are loved and cherished dearly and forever; 2) You have nothing to fear; and 3) There is nothing you can do wrong.These are seventh chakra spiritual truths that transcend our ordinary consciousness and that belie the thinking of our small self. Living inside these truths has the power to heal all of our feelings of separation or isolation and to transform the suffering of our ordinary consciousness.
As we have been exploring our spiritual energy system you will recall that our first three chakras are attached to the lower triangle and if we anchor our consciousness inside the lower triangle we will likely experience life from the perspective of the small self and its sense of separation and isolation from others. Because we view life through this small self lens, we get caught in endless cycles of frustration, disappointment, pain and suffering, and generally experience life as a challenging survival course. The only way to escape the suffering that defines the experience of the small self locked inside the prison of the lower triangle, is to use our heart center as that escape hatch to enter into our upper triangle. The heart center allows a transformation of our consciousness as we make that connection with our Soul Self and prepares us for the transcendence experience of the seventh chakra. When we connect our heart center to our head center, the fourth chakra to the seventh chakra, we anchor our energy in our upper triangle and activate the powers of our higher operating system, forever changing the way we experience life.
The magic of our times is that mystics and physicists are telling us the same thing. As Dr. Alexander shares, “modern physics tells us that the universe is a unity—that it is undivided. Though we seem to live in a world of separation and difference, physics tells us that beneath the surface, every object and event in the universe is completely woven up with every other object and event. There is no true separation.” This is the same truth taught by ancient mystics and eastern philosophers and it is the truth that echoes from the seventh chakra. There is no separation. From this truth flows many others, among them are the following: You are not separate in time or in space from me or from God, the people we love are always connected to us before life and after death, there are no coincidences, you are never alone, and life is both playground and university where we simply play and practice and learn and grow. When we come to know this truth from the depth of our being, then we are no longer prey to the con job of our small self that wants us to believe we are all alone and constantly in peril. When we can live from this truth we change the flow of our life to live from the crown down, and then the struggle and the suffering subside as we begin to experience in our everyday moments the numinous qualities of our peak experiences.
The seventh chakra is our opening to spiritual connection, unity consciousness, non-dual awareness, deep inner peace, serenity and equanimity. When we activate this power center we plug into the timeless energy of the Universe and we live our life from the perspective of our Soul, using our lower triangle as our vehicle for love and service in the world. When we activate this power center, life takes on a numinous and sacred quality; we see ourselves in other people and other people in ourselves, we honor our bodies, our senses, our emotions and our relationships, we enter into life with our whole heart, our whole mind and our whole body. Simply, we allow our life to become the point of connection where heaven meets earth.
Another soul quality associated with the seventh chakra is grace. Grace is an inherent quality of seventh chakra presence and we don’t need to do anything to “earn” it. The truth we discover in the seventh chakra is the truth about what lies at the very essence of our being and at the very essence of the Universe—it is the awareness of our eternal connection to the Divine energy of Love that is the ground of all being. From this perspective, life is just a series of experiences that allow us to RE-MEMBER or come back into connection with who we really are. We are loved, and we are an emanation of Love, and no movement toward that Divine reality goes unnoticed by the Universe.
Wishing you the blessings and light of the Soul, as you create the life you imagine.
Tracy
Stepping Stones:
I offer you two practices this week to help you activate the energy of your seventh chakra. First, if we are going to trust that we are each unconditionally honored and loved by the Divine energy of the Universe, we need to practice offering that unconditional love to others. In India it is common to greet others by bringing your palms together over your heart chakra and offering the other a slight bow and the word Namaste. Namaste means that I honor the place in you in which the entire universe dwells. I honor the place in you which is of love, light, truth, and peace. When you are in that place in you, and I am in that place in me, we are one. This greeting opens a seventh chakra connection with another person. You don’t need to say this word and you don’t even need to make the gesture, just practice silently greeting the people you encounter from this awareness—family, friends and strangers—and see how it changes your experience of connection.
Second, I offer a brief seventh chakra meditation to help you open your connection to this powerful energy. Sit comfortably in a quiet space and center yourself with some gentle, mindful breathing. Close your eyes and follow your breath as you breathe in and breath out. Don’t try to control your breath, just bring your attention to it and notice that as you breathe in and breathe out with conscious attention, it slows down your mind and quiets your body. As your mind becomes quiet, draw your attention to your seventh chakra center and imagine a beautiful, thousand petal white lotus flower over the crown of your head. As you continue to breathe in and breathe out, the flower begins to unfold, slowly revealing a luminescent violet light. As you continue to breathe, draw that violet light down into your body with each breath, until you imagine your whole body enveloped in shimmering violet light. Now repeat this seventh chakra affirmation several times: I am attuned to the divine energy of the universe and all is well. Doing this meditation for just 5-7 minutes a day will change your mind-body state and the way that you experience even the most challenging life circumstances.
The seventh chakra responds to the sacred sound Om. To inspire you this week, click below to find Kate singing the Sanskrit chant Om Namaha Shivaya to open the connection to this transcendent energy. You might use it in the background during the breathing meditation, by going to the Products Page on my website and just scroll down to the Transcendence CD and click the track. Both of Kate's CD's are available for purchase on that page.
