Happy June! 

The onset of summer frequently animates our more youthful archetypal patterns, tapping into an urge to fling open the school-room doors and burst onto the summer scene!  With the exception of those who have chosen the heroic path of becoming educators, most adults have a more metaphorical encounter with a months-long summer vacation.  The experience is often fraught with crushing disappointment upon the realization that once you ‘fling open the doors’ and ‘burst onto the scene’, you have lost your youthful ‘self’ somewhere along the way. 

Not to worry, for you are not alone.  You have dealt with this dilemma before and know just how to handle it, right?  Distracted, you glance over our shoulder, forgetting the sunny promise of summer and see your archetypal patterns on full shadow alert, ready to engage.  Ever loyal, the shadow Saboteur stands at attention, insisting that you’re likely to fail in any attempts to find yourself.  The shadow Prostitute, always prepared to sell out your integrity, reminds you that you can just continue to exist in the place you have been, where someone else determines your daily activities and defines your self worth.  Huddled at your feet are your shadow Victim and Child, both of whom just want to be coddled and protected from the big, bad world.  Though you’re tempted to accept this dismal company, you feel an inner urge to excavate your “selves” and embark on a path towards something more.  If you’re ready to follow that path, here are some tools to help you on your journey towards the light.

Neurovascular reflex points

First off, let’s calm you down so that you can develop a plan that carries a higher frequency than the shadow archetypes that you initially engaged.  Energy medicine is a vast discipline, encompassing modalities for working with the energetic systems within and around the body to create and maintain optimal health.  Neurovascular reflex points are specific points that, when stimulated, allow you to reset the nervous system and boost blood and energy circulation throughout your entire body.  They also enable you to balance energy systems impacted by stress.  Being out of touch with your authentic self can be dangerously stressful on a physiological, emotional or psychological level.  Likewise, because most of us have been socialized to lead our lives from a hyper vigilant end-results-focused perspective, endeavoring to shift focus to a return to self (which will ultimately be ‘grounding’ in present experience) can be incredibly fear-inducing. 

When you experience stress, 80% of the blood in your brain leaves the forebrain and redistributes to other areas of the body.  This blood is flooded with stress chemicals, which prompt you to feel emotions (usually fear) sweep through your body.  In the meantime, operating on 80% less blood, your forebrain is impaired, leaving you struggling to access the thought processes that you usually rely upon to process the emotional reality being experienced by your body. 

If you were only stressed at occasional intervals, this scenario probably wouldn’t be very disruptive to your day-to-day functioning or health.  If only…  The rate of frequency at which most humans process stress prompts bodies to repeat the above scenario numerous times throughout each day.  Adaptability and evolution have encouraged our species to develop ‘energy habits’ that address repeated physiological symptoms.  Eventually, our energetic being develops a habit that behaves responsively (in the manner described above) even in the absence of a stressor. 

One of the miracles of the human body’s energetic system is the set of neurovascular points located on the head.  When you stimulate these points, you are essentially holding a reset button on your nervous system, reprogramming the energy and removing destructive energy loops.  You can balance the energy in associated meridians (energy systems) and organs managed by the meridians, or dissolve obstructions at the points themselves.  

Although there are 12 neurovascular points (with some appearing on both sides of the head), and various modalities for working with them, here is one suggestion for working with a point that stimulates a “return to self”.  Lightly touching the spleen neurovascular point, which is located an inch above the top of the ear on each side of the head, should help you feel more centered.  Apply the touch lightly on each side of the head for two minutes, using the thumb, index and middle fingers of each hand. 

How – and why - does this work?  Understanding this requires an awareness of the tenuous balance between two critical energy systems - triple warmer (sometimes referred to as triple heater) and spleen meridian.  We’ll cover this delicate relationship in depth in a future newsletter, but suffice it to say that balancing the energy in the spleen meridian (which is the energy system associated with the spleen neurovascular point) furthers your ability to metabolize everything in life (thoughts, emotions, projected energy and food) and prevents you from being caught up in the fear and overwhelm created when triple warmer (an energy system that governs our fight or flight response) pushes you into energetic overdrive.  Energy medicine practitioners are trained in many techniques that work with the 12 neurovascular points to promote balance and proper functioning of the nervous system.

Mudras

What better way to embark on a soul-stirring journey of self discovery than to be guided by signals that have been relied upon by various cultures throughout civilization that emit a clear bright light?  Hand mudras are extremely powerful non-verbal modes of communication used to express intention and promote manifestation and health.  They can best be described as hand signals that enhance your energy patterns.  They enable you to project heightened states of consciousness because they have been employed by countless civilizations.  As such, they also carry energy patterns that have existed in the collective conscious of our species since ancient times.

The longevity of the energy patterns associated with mudras perpetuates energetic pathways that carry clear bright light and have the power to open and strengthen energetic patterns in the self.  Their power is exacerbated by the influence that they can exert on our cerebral activity.  Mudras impact the intellect in a manner that fosters awareness of more subtle energies, such as those you endeavor to access and understand in your process of returning to the self.  Finally, since the hands serve as the gateway to a number of energy systems in the body, implementing mudras can encourage unobstructed flow of energy, which ultimately promotes increased life force and ideal states of health.

To work on yourself, you can begin with a very simple mudra.  Curl the middle, ring and pinky fingers down into the palm of each hand.  Extend the index finger and thumb of each hand straight up, touching the thumb to the side of the index finger so that it rests along the side of the second phalanx.  Hold one to five minutes - while breathing.

In Naam yoga (http://www.naamyoga.com), yogis enhance the effects of mudras by pairing them with mantras (sacred chants).  We will not introduce associated mantras in this newsletter because the practice of this sophisticated system of sound therapy should be guided by a trained naam yoga therapist.

Check back in July for a 5-minute energy routine that can improve your health!