Our ‘Third Eye’ – Doorway to True Seeing

by Lisa Erickson







The voyage of discovery is not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.
~ Marcel Proust


One of the reasons I love chakra, or energy center, meditation so much is because the chakras are doorways to levels of consciousness that transcend religion. Mystics throughout history from all different cultural and religious backgrounds have described similar mystic experiences – profound visions of light and ecstatic waves of love. Visions of light and experiences of universal love are two of the most frequently described spiritual experiences by seekers of all types.


For me, it is truly personal experiences of this type – rather than dogma – that propel our spiritual journey. And it is not only ‘big’ experiences such as these, but smaller moments of stillness, gratitude, or appreciation for beauty that pull us deeper into ourselves and spirit.  While it’s not necessary to meditate on the chakras for these moments to arise, I find it fascinating that so many mystics do have similar experiences, particularly related to the opening of the heart chakra and the third eye. I wrote about the heart chakra here a couple of months ago, so thought I would focus on the third eye this month.

 
In a way this is the perfect chakra to discuss this month, as Buddha Chick Life celebrates Interspiritual Connection, because the third eye is what enables us to see beyond the surface - beyond the limits and categories that our brain and conditioning usually impose. It is through our third eye that our intuition and subtle senses are activated, as well as our ability to inquire deeply into the nature of reality and truth beyond convention.


The third eye, also sometimes called the ‘mind’s eye’, is considered the sixth chakra in the most common 7-chakra system, and is located in our forehead, just above the midpoint of our eyebrows. From an energy healing perspective, it is most commonly associated with our eyes, and frontal brain lobe, as well as our pituitary gland, sometimes called our ‘master endocrine gland’. Some healing systems also associate it with our pineal gland, whiles others associate the pineal with our seventh, or crown, chakra.

 
Our third eye has many layers, and meditating on it connects us with each of these. In our third eye we can find a still-point, a way to connect to the space between or beneath our usual thoughts and busy mind. While meditation is often described as stilling the mind, in our third eye we can discover that this isn’t necessary – stillness is always with us, just waiting in our awareness for us to pay it a bit of attention. Stillness isn’t something we have to ‘do’ or create, but something we can simply see when we turn our attention towards it.

 
Our third eye is also the center of our intuition, especially visual intuition, and some people experience visions of light when meditating on this chakra. For others who are less visual, meditating on it may initially trigger waves of energy, or a physical feeling of lightness, as this chakra helps shift our attention away from our usual focus on our physical body. Our third eye is also a doorway into a sense of metaphysical oneness – the experience (rather than the thought) that we are all rooted in one Source.

 
On a more mundane level, our third eye is connected to our ability to see ourselves clearly. It grounds our capacity for self-awareness – our ability to contemplate our own thoughts and actions, and to revisit them. In this way, it is also the center of self-inquiry practice, or any practice in which we inquire into the contents of our own consciousness, seeking to find its root and Source.

 
As you can see, our third eye is truly another organ of sight, opening our inner vision to all that our physical eyes cannot show us. We naturally connect with our third eye through almost any spiritual practice, but if you’d like to try a more formal third eye meditation, here is a simple one that anyone can use:

 
1.     Sit comfortably with as straight a spine as possible. Take a few deep breaths to center and calm yourself.

 
2.     If you like, use one finger to gently press and release on the third eye spot on your forehead a few times. If you are not sure of the location of your third eye, gently pressing like this, and focusing in on where you feel the most sensations, will often help you locate it.


3.     Close your eyes and visualize a white sphere of light in this location. Each time your mind wanders, simply return your focus to the sphere of white light. If you see other colors, enjoy them for a moment, and then return to your visualization of the white light.


4.     If the visualization of the white light is difficult for you, you can instead try imagining you are floating forward, out the front of your third eye, as if you are on a roller coaster in the dark. For some people this sense of moving forward helps open their third eye, and then you can try the white light visualization, or it might occur spontaneously.

 
5.     If you feel any sensations in your third eye area, you can shift your focus to those instead. Some of us are more visual, while others are more physical and sense the chakras vibrationally, so honor however you connect with them. If you feel a sense of profound stillness or silence, surrender yourself into this experience, however long (or short!) it is.


6.     When you are ready to complete your meditation, shift your focus down to your heart area for a few breaths. Then shift your awareness to the ground or chair you are sitting on, or wherever your feet or legs are touching the floor. This will help ground you again in your physical body, which is important after third eye meditation.


7.     Honor yourself and your meditation however you like – with a small bow, prayer, chant or other expression of gratitude.


Feel free to post questions in the comments. May true seeing be yours this month!


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Lisa is a meditation teacher, energy worker, writer, and mom to three. She loves helping people heal and explore the unseen aspects of themselves through chakra (energy center) meditation and related energy body work. She specializes in women's energetics - the distinct characteristics and phases of women's subtle bodies, and the special spiritual doorways available to women through their feminine divinity. In her work she draws on many diverse traditions, including Vajrayana Buddhism, Tantra, Zen, gnostic Christianity, shamanism, yoga, astrology, and several energy healing systems, most particularly the work of Cyndi Dale. She writes on all these subjects at her blog Mommy Mystic (http://www.MommyMystic.com), as well as writing regularly on Buddhism for Bellaonline (http://buddhism.bellaonline.com/Site.asp), where she is the Buddhism site editor. She offers classes, workshops and personal sessions through The Maat Institute (http://www.themaatinstitute.com.) Lisa's column here is entitled, "Women's Energetics

Opening Your Heart Chakra

by Lisa Erickson

 






Buddha Chick Life’s February theme is ‘In Love With Life’, and I find that refreshing in a month that we usually associate with cupids and valentines. There is so much pressure around the search for romantic love, and the expression of it. Women especially are conditioned from a young age to consider romantic love as the primary foundation for happiness. But isn’t loving your life the real key to happiness?

In relation to Energetics and energy body mappings – the topic of this column – the heart chakra is the center of our ability to experience love in any form. It is also the center of our energetic structure – literally the center chakra in the most commonly used 7-chakra mapping. And although there are many different energy center mappings that have evolved around the world through various healing and spiritual traditions, I have yet to find one that does not center on the heart chakra. The heart is the universally acknowledged center of our being.

  What does it mean to open our heart chakra? In a way, all of life is about opening our heart chakra, especially once we consciously embark on a path of self-development. In our relationships with everyone in our life, from parents, children, and closest friends, to those we just interact with once a day or once a lifetime, we are always faced with choice points – situations in which we can choose to act from love or some other emotion or state. And either way, we feel the results. We learn over time, how it feels to live from love vs. something else. As social creatures, every human interaction becomes our spiritual practice, an opportunity to open our heart more.

But there are also formal spiritual practices and meditations designed to help us open our heart.  Within these practices, our ability to access love is often described in terms of levels:


-       The first level might be called emotional love. This is what we are culturally conditioned to think of as love – the actual feeling of love. The affection or warmth we feel for someone when we are intimate with them, or when we have a meaningful encounter in some form with them.


-       The second level can be thought of as expanded or unconditional love. This is when we begin to experience love as a force that comes through us, and that does not require an attachment – a person we have feelings for – in order to be triggered.


-       The third level is universal love. This is when we begin to know the source of our own being as love. We experience our entire being as an expression of love, as opposed to experiencing love as an emotion or state that comes and goes.


These levels are of course just a way of talking about love – the gradations and variations are infinite, perhaps as infinite as the number of people on the planet. But in many spiritual traditions – some people might say all spiritual traditions! – the spiritual process is about moving from emotional love, through expanded love, into universal love. And then learning to integrate that love into our every thought, word, and deed.

Here is a simple heart chakra meditation that anyone can use to begin to open their heart energy and explore the movement between these levels:


-       Sit quietly and take a few deep breaths. Now visualize some being that you care deeply about, and who instantly evokes a deep sense of affection and connection in you. Often our most ‘uncomplicated’ relationships are the best focus for this – young children or even pets, with whom we have little emotional ‘baggage’, so that our mind doesn’t get pulled into mental conversations or distractions.


-       Visualize this being for a few minutes, until you are actively feeling the emotion of love towards them. This may even manifest as a warmth or tingle in your chest area – your heart chakra. Don’t worry if your mind wanders – as with any meditation, just keep bringing your focus back.

 
-       Now let go of the visualization, and see if you can sit in the feeling of love that you have generated. Don’t try and control the experience, but see if you can simply sit quietly in the feeling, without the visual cue. If it fades, simply re-establish your visualization for a bit.


-       If you feel as if you are able to sit in this beautiful feeling of love without your visual cue, try to move your awareness towards the center of this love. See if you can find this center. In other words, actively seek the source for this feeling of love. Over time, this search will open you up to love in a universal way, to love as the source of your being. You may begin to experience yourself as an expression of love, rather than the other way around.


This practice is really a lifelong practice – in some spiritual traditions, it is literally so. There is no end to love, and so there is no end to the deepening this practice can activate. As our heart center evolves, we can learn to work with that energy in a new way in our daily lives as well. And that truly gives a whole new meaning to ‘In Love With Life!’

 
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Lisa is a meditation teacher, energy worker, writer, and mom to three. She loves helping people heal and explore the unseen aspects of themselves through chakra (energy center) meditation and related energy body work. She specializes in women's energetics - the distinct characteristics and phases of women's subtle bodies, and the special spiritual doorways available to women through their feminine divinity. In her work she draws on many diverse traditions, including Vajrayana Buddhism, Tantra, Zen, gnostic Christianity, shamanism, yoga, astrology, and several energy healing systems, most particularly the work of Cyndi Dale. She writes on all these subjects at her blog Mommy Mystic (http://www.MommyMystic.com), as well as writing regularly on Buddhism for Bellaonline (http://buddhism.bellaonline.com/Site.asp), where she is the Buddhism site editor. She offers classes, workshops and personal sessions through The Maat Institute (http://www.themaatinstitute.com.) Lisa's column here is entitled, "Women's Energetics."

Women’s Energetics: Honoring Our Sacred Cycles

by Lisa Erickson




Nature is full of cycles. We have just passed through Solstice, which for those of us north of the equator officially ushers in Winter, and for those in the south, announces Summer. Each season of the year represents a different phase in the ongoing natural cycle – birth (Spring), maturity (Summer), aging/release (Fall), and death/transformation (Winter).

Our own lives mirror this cycle – over the course of a lifetime, and in smaller versions within each year and month. Our spiritual growth is a continuous cycling through these phases in the form of new realizations, maturing wisdom, release of old patterns, and personal transformation. Most world religions have holidays, rituals, contemplative practices, or retreats that are tied to each of these phases.

In women’s spiritual traditions, the cycles of our bodies are linked with these cycles as well, and we can deepen our spiritual practice by embracing this link, and working with it in our lives. Biologically, our life phases are defined by our procreative phases –the onset of menstruation, our fertile years, peri-menopause, and post-menopause. In women’s energetics – the energy body teachings drawn from energy healing and spiritual traditions – there are energetic shifts associated with each of these phases:

- Our entrance into womanhood with the onset of menstruation signals the first opening of our 2nd chakra, or sacral energy center, in our pelvic area. This is the seat of the kundalini, or spiritual life force, in women. Much of our teen and early twenties is spent learning to deal with this energy, and particularly its sexual expression.

- Our mature, ‘fertile’ years are our birthing and nurturing years, when our creative abilities manifest as children, career building, artistic creations, service projects, building a home, or whatever we apply ourselves too. Energetically we go through many sub-phases during this time, often working on issues associated with one or the other energy centers (chakras) as we experience challenges in our lives.

- Our transformational, peri-menopausal years, which science is realizing can span our entire 40s or even longer, spiritually represents a time of shedding old conditioned identities, and owning a new definition of ourselves. Often this is a tumultuous time energetically, as we strive to redefine ourselves, and literally remake ourselves.

- Our ‘wisdom’ years, in our post-menopausal phase, are ideally a time in which we can fully own our power and accumulated wisdom. Energetically, it is again a time of manifesting, but also a period of increased stability, as we integrate our intuitive and intentional aspects.

Up until the final phase, we are also dealing with the mini-cycle of menstruation, which has its own energetic phases:

-       The first half – from the end of menstruation through ovulation - represents an outward, manifesting, intentional movement of energy. We are most effective at accomplishing goals and interacting with others during this time.

-       The second half – after ovulation through menstruation - represents an inward, contemplative, intuitive energetic movement. This is a time when we need to honor our need for solitude and contemplation to the greatest extent possible.

To begin to work with these phases and cycles, spend some time contemplating where you are, first in your overall life phase, and then within your monthly cycle of outward/intentional and inward/intuitive movement. It’s worth noting that many post-menopausal women feel that they also have a similar outward/inward cycle, sometimes consciously connected to the cycles of the moon, and in other cases just a personal rhythm that reveals itself over time.

Consider first if there are any ways you are resisting honoring the phase you are in. Are you wishing you were in another life phase? Can you see the challenges of this phase as potentially opening doorways to new wisdom for you? Can you identify and appreciate the gifts your current phase has to offer? Can you sense yourself as engaged in a natural, ancient, sacred cycle of birth, maturation, release, and transformation?

Now think back to the prior phases of your life, and consider the energetic themes listed above. Do you think you were able to successfully learn the lessons of those phases? Are there any experiences or challenges that you feel you need to revisit for yourself, to re-frame and understand in the greater light of your current maturity? Often we hold on to self-blame, regrets, or anger from prior phases that inhibits our ability to fully claim our power in our current phase.

When working with your menstrual cycle, or your natural outward/inward cycle if you are post-menopausal, consider how each phase manifests for you. Do you suffer from intense PMS? Because this is our most sensitive time energetically, our symptoms can often be compounded by a high level of activity or social interaction during this time. Experiment with adding just a little more space for yourself during each day of this part of your cycle, whether engaged in explicit spiritual practice or other self-nurturing activities. Likewise, think of ways you might harness your greatest creative potential at the height of your cycle each month.

If these cycles have not yet revealed themselves to you in your own life, consider keeping a little diary for a month or two focused on how you are feeling in terms of inward vs. outward expression each day, and note where you are in your biological cycle.

Just noting our life phases and cycles can be a big step towards beginning to honor ourselves and our lives as part of something larger. We can begin to sense the rise and fall of our own energetic patterns, and work with these spiritually. Instead of the passing of time being something we rail against, we can truly begin to honor our sacred cycles, and where we are in them.

Namaste and Happy New Year!

- Lisa

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Lisa is a meditation teacher, energy worker, writer, and mom to three. She loves helping people heal and explore the unseen aspects of themselves through chakra (energy center) meditation and related energy body work. She specializes in women's energetics - the distinct characteristics and phases of women's subtle bodies, and the special spiritual doorways available to women through their feminine divinity. In her work she draws on many diverse traditions, including Vajrayana Buddhism, Tantra, Zen, gnostic Christianity, shamanism, yoga, astrology, and several energy healing systems, most particularly the work of Cyndi Dale. She writes on all these subjects at her blog Mommy Mystic (http://www.MommyMystic.com), as well as writing regularly on Buddhism for Bellaonline (http://buddhism.bellaonline.com/Site.asp), where she is the Buddhism site editor. She offers classes, workshops and personal sessions through The Maat Institute (http://www.themaatinstitute.com.) Lisa's column here is entitled, "Women's Energetics."

Caring for Your Sacral Center

by Lisa Erickson

I was so happy to see that December’s theme for Buddha Chick Life was "Enjoyment and Delight" because enjoyment and delight are central energies of the second or sacral chakra, and this chakra is also the center of a woman’s energy, or subtle, body. Although the holidays should be a time of great enjoyment and delight, too often they can begin to feel like burdens, especially for women. So much planning, shopping, cooking, and coordinating. So much money spent! Where is the joy, the soulfulness?

Connecting with your sacral chakra, and making a special effort to clear and nourish it, can be a wonderful way to open yourselves to the true spirit of this season. It is also a great way to generate momentum for your New Year, as this chakra is also associated with creation, and our ability to manifest the lives we want and need.

Your sacral center is your womb energy center, located deep in your lower belly, or pelvis area. From an energy healing perspective, this chakra rules your reproductive organs – your uterus, ovaries, etc. – as well as your bladder. From a spiritual perspective, it is the seat of a women’s kundalini, or spiritual life force. Since this chakra resides in your energy body, it is intact even if you have had a full or partial hysterectomy.

Women sometimes have difficulty accessing the power and joy of this center, because of social conditioning, and the shame that they have been made to feel about their sexuality, menstruation, and even their reproductive function. But connecting with this center, and freeing up its energy, is central to our health and well-being. Almost every health condition a woman will face has some hormonal component, and this chakra is intricately linked with hormonal function. On a spiritual level, our connection to creation – whether procreation, or creative expression – is at the heart of feminine spiritual traditions.

In addition to creativity, this center is linked with emotion, and our ability to feel passion and joy. It is the seat of our sensual selves - the part of us that loves a warm bath, a colorful painting, or a cool breeze on a walk through a park. It is of course also linked to our sexual selves, and our ability to own our sexual energy – a force that radiates our being and awareness all the time, not only when we are sexually engaged.

Of course both men and women have sacral chakras, just as we all have brains, hearts, and stomachs. But this chakra functions differently in men and women, just as our reproductive organs do. In women, it is the seat of our kundalini, and so its health and vibrancy is especially linked to our ability to access our deepest passions and manifest the lives that we want.

Here are some easy ways to connect with and care for this special energy center within your being. See if you can weave some of these into your busy holiday season, and connect with the joy and pleasure seated there:

-       The sacral chakra is associated with the element water, so connecting with water in any way has a beautiful, cleansing affect. Try taking a warm bath, walking or meditating by water, or even drinking a glass of pure water with full focus and attentiveness. See if you can feel a resonance between your lower belly and water. Even visualizing yourself seated near a lovely pond or lake can have this affect – our minds can connect vibrationally to energies even when we are not there physically.

-       The sacral chakra is also connected with our sensual selves. Any pleasing tactile or sensory experience will awaken the delight that emanates from this chakra. Set aside time to gaze and enjoy holiday lights, decorations, and candles. Sit by a fire with a hot cup of tea and truly feel the warmth and power emanating from the flames. Indulge in music, foods, fabrics, sights and smells that you love. You don’t need to overdo it - when you are fully engaged, it doesn’t take much of something to awaken your connection to sensual pleasure.

-       The sacral chakra is also connected with the color orange. Although this isn’t traditionally a color associated with this season (and it’s a hard color to pull off in clothing!) see if you can find ways to bring a little orange into your world – an orange blanket perhaps, towel, or candle.

-       Orange foods are also considered nourishing to this chakra, so consider having an orange a day, orange-spiced tea, or building other orange foods such as sweet potatoes or carrots into your diet. Other foods that nourish this chakra are tropical fruits (regardless of color), and foods rich in essential fatty acids/Omega-3s (flaxseed, certain nuts, fish). Incorporating these foods into your diet can also help decrease the chances that you will overindulge in sweets and high-fat foods, because your sacral center will be well-nourished, which cuts down on cravings.

-       Dance! Turn on some music and dance around your house for a minute or two. There is nothing more joyful or sensual than dancing, when we truly feel it from our cores.

-       Finally, consider meditating on your sacral center. Simply holding your hands over your lower belly, and breathing into this space, will help you connect to this chakra within yourself. Moving from this to focus on your heart, and then your ‘third eye’, as described in the meditation I posted last month in the article Understanding Your Feminine Energy Body is also a beautiful option. Keep it simple and accessible – this chakra is about intuitive connection, not technique.

These are all simple and fun ways to connect with and nourish the energies of your sacral chakra. Taking time to do so will help keep this energy flow open at other times of your day, enabling you to truly enjoy the season. Happy holidays and New Year!

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