This meditation is the last of three formal meditations for regular use in my current Druid practice. It draws on a variety of sources – Druid, Gnostic, Tantric – and accumulated personal experience. I use the term ‘energy’, where others might prefer ‘light’. This is to signal the importance of embodied, felt experience in this work.
I find Energy Body a valuable complement to my Living Presence and Wisdom’s House meditations. The image is from R. J. Stewart’s The Dreampower Tarot. (1)
I sit on a chair, feet on the ground and hands on knees. This meditation has a Kabbalistic Tree of Life frame of reference, and I begin with a short form of crossing practice, using my right hand for the movements. I say, In the name of Wisdom (hand upwards to top of forehead), Love (hand downwards towards genitals), Justice (to right shoulder), Mercy (across to left shoulder) and Oneness (both hands over heart centre) Awen (chanted as aah-wen). (2)
Closing my eyes, I attend briefly to my body and senses, relaxing into being on the chair. When ready, I send my attention down below my feet, as if dousing for the energies of the deep earth and underworld. I rely primarily on the kinaesthetic sense – warmth, sensations, the pulse and vibration beneath me. Visual images may appear, but this journey is guided by feel.
The earth energy immediately beneath me is strong and relatively quiet, though I do sense the power of familiar organic life at this level. Deeper down, I get a cooler mineral sense. Deeper still, I connect with the heat and highly pressured turmoil of the underworld, as I get closer to the planetary core.
Directing my attention with the breath, I pull up energy from these realms, starting at the fiery volcanic level, and adding elements of the softer, cooler earth energy as I move up. I pull these energies up through my body and a field extending a little beyond it. I notice an energetic mobilisation – heat, tingling, a feeling-tone of energetic arousal, noting specific sensations in different parts of the body. I use the inbreath to raise this energy and the outbreath to distribute it. Eventually, fully enveloped in this active chthonic energy, I allow myself to bathe in it.
When the time is right, I direct my attention upwards. I sense the sky and the celestial realms beyond – the moon, sun and stars – now seeing both day and night skies from my perspective and bringing my visual sense into more prominence overall. I connect with these energies too, sensing and visualising the powers of a universe in motion at the macrocosmic level.
I draw energy into my field of awareness and intention, bringing it in a focused way, laser-like, somewhat in the manner of a lightning flash, down to the crown of my head. From there it zig-zags successively to my left temple, right temple, throat, left shoulder, right shoulder, heart centre, left hip, right hip, genital area, and feet. Here, I visualise a white lightning effect and feel the ignition of these 11 points, the sephira of the Kabbalistic tree of life.
I now sense a merging of the chthonic and celestial energies, and the rejuvenating power and vitality that this brings. When ready, I direct my energy with the breath up the back and down the front of my central channel, behind and then in front of the 5 energy centres found there: feet, genital area, heart centre, throat, crown. This becomes a circuit descending down the front of my body on the exhale and rising up the back of my body on the inhale.
Once this circuit is stabilised, I develop a second one rising up the right side on the inhale and descending down the left side on the exhale, moving past 8 centres: feet, right hip, right shoulder, right temple, crown, left temple, left shoulder, left hip, and feet again. I keep the two circulations going and use them to scan my wellbeing at the energetic level. At this point I might work with individual sephira and their relationships with each other, but such work is not typical within this generic meditation. Commonly, I simply acknowledge them.
For the next stage, I begin to see, as if from outside, a translucent egg-shaped light energy containing me, with its circuits and currents moving of their own volition. Falling back into place, I feel the benefits of being held within this field of light energy, expanding into it and entering a richer identity. Preferably, the field is porous and open to energy exchange with the world beyond. (If necessary, the eggshell can be made solid and impermeable, an adamantine shield). I stay in the experience for as long as feels right, allowing myself to be recharged and rejuvenated.
Finally I allow the porous egg shape to thin and become insubstantial. Boundaries dissolve. Experience can be imaged as an awareness of tiny sparks winking in and out of existence in a vast indigo field. It is a place of freedom and possibility at the threshold of being and unbeing. There is awareness without boundaries, and no localised sense of body. Sensations and perceptions rise and fall.
When the time is right, I return to my normal physical bandwidth and the journey is over. I enter a period of quiet contemplation.
After the meditation, standing in the centre of the circle, I say I give thanks for this meditation. May it nourish and illuminate my life. In the name of Wisdom, Love, Justice, Mercy and Oneness. Awen.
(1) R. J. Stewart The Dreampower Tarot: The Three Realms of Transformation in the Underworld London: The Aquarian Press, 1993 Illustrated by Stewart Littlejohn
(2) R. J. Stewart The Miracle Tree: demystifying the Qabalah Franklin Lakes, NJ: New Page Books, 2003
Contemplative Inquiry 