Energetic Posture - what is it and why is important?

You have likely heard about the importance of good posture. Today we are going to learn about how to hold yourself energetically - your energetic posture - and why it's important . Good energetic posture can calm your mind, allow for easeful flow of your emotions (making tough emotions more easy to let go), relax your muscles and nervous system, deepen your inner peace and clarity (which then enhances discernment and conscious decision making), and importantly, allow you to understand yourself more deeply and inform how you walk through your life and the world.

Energetic posture is similar to grounding or centring yourself, but it takes a somewhat different path and can be considered more comprehensive. You can incorporate it as a regular consciousness or meditative practice to begin and end your day, and you can cultivate it as a habit throughout your day. It can also be very helpful in bringing you back to yourself when emotional processing is intense, restoring flow to emotions (energy in motion) that have become stuck or overwhelming, thus allowing them to release and return you to a more stable state.

How to practise good energetic posture:

Start by taking a moment to get comfortable. You may sit, recline, or lie down completely, whatever works for you and is safe (i.e. please don't try this when you are driving). Close your eyes. Take a breath, notice your body, and give awareness to where you are in your body. We are often quite in our head and concentrated toward the front of the body.

Take another breath and drop down into your heart. Notice how easy and natural this is; you don't really have to do it but rather let it happen. You may also notice that you spontaneously take a deep breath when you drop down and that your shoulders relax. If it feels good, repeat the phrase "drop down into my heart" to yourself (in your mind or out loud) a few times, emphasizing the word "drop" and enjoying the sensation.

With time and practice, simply saying, "drop down into my heart" can become an easy prompt to restore healthy energetic posture throughout the day. Please also know that how this feels may vary from day to day. If you are processing big emotional waves and are struggling to "catch a breath" emotionally speaking, dropping down into your heart may feel muted, like a tendril of energy, but I promise, you are doing it right.

As emotions float to the surface, your only job is to acknowledge them with gratitude, let them flow, and let them go. Always, always give yourself grace, be gentle with yourself, and understand that your deepest self recognizes truth without fail and will bring you back to yourself if you just trust the process.

Once you have snuggled into your heart as best as you are able today, we will focus on moving from the vertical plane to the horizontal. You just dropped down from your head to your heart, and now you are going to settle in from the "frontish" or middle of your body to the back. The modern world is designed to keep us in our heads and in the front of our bodies, on the edge of our seats if you like, distracted and always paying attention to the chaos, noise, and illusions around us.

In this aspect alone, the impact and ripple effect of proper energetic posture cannot be overstated. Simply by deeply embodying ourselves - innerstanding and truly feeling - who we are, we change our vibration and the trajectory of our life in ways we may not even be able to appreciate at this moment. And because we are all connected (also ways that we don't often fully appreciate), we change the world and its trajectory, too. In every moment that you hold your posture with deep awareness, you feedback truth and love to the Universe, which then feeds that information back to itself (and you); it's a beautiful and continuous heartfelt conversation.

Next, while still sitting in your heart, take another deep breath and allow yourself to settle more fully into your chest, travelling from the front of your body, back, back, towards your spine. Once you get there, feel the front of your spine, the strength and texture of your vertebrae. Let your awareness continue to sink back, sensing if you can the aliveness of your spinal cord. Take a moment to marvel at your nervous system and how it energizes your life and body, as well as how your skeletal system holds you straight and strong.

Up to this point, people often find the process fairly natural. At this next step, you may start to sense resistance - not overtly emotional resistance but more like the impression of a firm, gelatin-like barrier, which some people sense as gray in colour, that gives off a distracting-like message of, "There is nothing to see here." Slowly with your breath, start to apply pressure to the resistance and see if you can pass through it with your awareness. If you cannot seem to penetrate, don't worry, don't try to force it, and don't judge. Pause here and appreciate how peaceful and centred you feel.

Each time you practise your energetic posture and reach this point, simply continue to apply gentle pressure to the resistance and progress slowly, at your pace. And most importantly, enjoy the feeling of deeply connecting with yourself and know that you are doing it just right. You can trust that your inner divine wisdom will guide you deeper into yourself as it is time to do so.

Feeling past the illusion

You may be surprised to realize with each passing moment that's it's not really a barrier at all; it's just an illusion that you can simply now see through.

Continue moving back, noticing the interesting sensation of what you are experiencing - that is, you are passing through the apparently solid front of your spine, through your spinal cord, and through the back of your spine. Then in an instant, you feel the resistance dissolve and again you may feel yourself spontaneously taking a deep breath as you sense light, peace, joy, and a spaciousness that defies description.

Turn your attention up then down, noticing that this beautiful space continues all the way up past your head and all the way down past your feet. Somehow you know that it just keeps going and going. It may feel somewhat like a big, clear column that is bursting with bright, radiant life force, yet it is somehow entirely calm at the same time. You may get impressions or images that are unique to you like colours, sounds, the feeling of natural elements like water, or air, or a sense of earthiness.

You know this place.

You have reached your energetic core. This is the centre of who you are. We've been led to think that our energetic centre is midway between the front and back of our physical body, but that is an illusion, and now you know the truth. Take a moment to fully realize what this means, who you are, how deep you run, and where you belong. This is where you fit into the infinite continuous field of Source energy that makes up - and contains - everything.

It can be quite an emotional experience, like falling in love with yourself or feeling simultaneously as pure and whole as you were when you were a small child, as well as the fully realized person you are today. From this deeply centred and embodied place, take full, relaxed breaths, over and over, and feel the rush of energy - it feels like air - flowing into your core then emanating out as you exhale.

Be curious. Turn your attention forward, noticing where your true essence embodies your physical form. With gratitude, notice how you "wear" your beautiful physical form, and notice how it cannot possibly contain you because you go on forever. How far forward in your physical form, how widely, does your infinite glow extend into your body? Is it concentrated around your spine or does it extend further out into your body? This can be a helpful clue to how deeply and divinely your are living your humanity at this moment in your life.

The Universe and everything in it is not just pure consciousness, it is pure "self-consciousness" (and not in the limited sense we often use this word). Your life is meant to be a long, deep breath of the Universe. The inhale is intentionally embodying your awareness of yourself as a unique focal point of infinite, universal consciousness. The exhale is allowing this self-awareness to fully saturate your physical form and emanate that awareness out into your life and into the world.

We are here to remember ourselves, to allow the Universe to know itself through the song we sing with our life.

My sincere wish for you is simply this: Do not just live a life, let Life live you.