Downward Facing Blog

 In the Upanishads , the body is described as having 5 layers: individual spirit, emotions, mind, energy, and physical body, moving from subtle to gross respectively.  Many systems have different models for this, Kundalini yoga employs  a model using ten.  In either case, it’s helpful to just acknowledge that our anatomy is more than just what we can touch.  I made a cool  flash diagram of this here

The layer just around our spirit, is the body of feelings. In some places it’s called wisdom, in this image it’s called the intellect sheath. It’s basically the part of you that  resides just under the thoughts. The idea in tantra is that at the core of your being is LOVE and BLISS CONSCIOUSNESS. Pure awareness. This becomes more gross to form individual spirit, then more gross to form the feeling body. The feelings are your first entry point into your own higher Self, higher intelligence.  It’s the bubbling up of intuition that comes from this level of your self. It’s also here where we need to go to visualize and manifest our desired realities. See what you want but also create the feelings inside your body. It’s amazing that when you can generate the feelings of love internally. It becomes easy to see why love and all other emotions happen internally irrespective of the outside events. Can be happy when things are going down, and depressed when you got everything in the world. But let’s not digress, those emotions are from the ego’s attachment to things, not the feeling/intellect/wisdom body that I’m referring to here.

But sticking with our model of the inner creating the outer, relax deeply, step into the feeling body and create your future. Notice that when you visualize, you might come out of trance a bit… then you FEEL and you go in deeper. Ride like a wave in between visualizing and feeling.  So if you want love, FEEL the love. If you want money,  FEEL abundant. If you want health, FEEL the joy of health and abundant energy. Bit by bit this changes the reality for you.

Briefly, this is how I teach and practice yoga: 1. asana for the physical body 2. pranayama and energy work for the energy body (vital sheath) 3. mantra and concentration practice for the mental sheath (mind). 4. Feeling/love/devotional/bhakti yoga for the intellect/feeling sheath. and 5. samadhi or dissolving into pure spirit for the blissful sheath.  It took me a long time to understand these concepts, I hope I can teach them faster to you.