Discovering Your Mystical Body
Part 1
Our Four Centers of Spiritual Knowing
If I asked you to think about your body, what comes to mind?
How you look from the outside? What amount of weight we’d like to lose? Our skin and bones. Organs and tissues. Muscle and fat. Cells and neurons.
This is the body from an exterior, objective material perspective. It is true, but it is partial.
Unfortunately, so much of Christian history propagated and reinforced this division of the material and the spiritual. Body and soul apart, despite being the religion of the incarnation, of God made flesh. Combine that with a Western materialism that also tends toward disembodiment, and here we are—many of us disconnected and disassociated from our body as a true aspect of our being, not just an object.
There has been pushback of course. More yoga and tai chi, dance and movement. Perhaps we’ve learned some about our emotional body, our pain body. And perhaps, you’ve already begun to come more into your subtle body—your mystical body.
This is a big part of the spiritual work that we do at ICN, embracing and cultivating our embodied, mystical being. This is taking embodiment to the next level of development. It is a crucial component to integrate in our spiritual life, especially with the rise in meditative and contemplative movements that sometimes only emphasize going to the causal body or witnessing state. For many in this day and age, in our current context and starting place, this actually ends up further reinforcing the disconnect and disembodiment—further object-ifying and distancing without the counter-balance of more deeply subject-ifying our immanent body and being. Our mystical body encompasses both the subtle and the causal. We need to live in and as both for a healthy and integrated spiritual being, to dwell holistically in our mystical body.
So how do we do that? How do we integrate our experienced reality into a more embodied mystical spirituality? After extensive research and drawing on a lifetime of theology and experience, Paul Smith created the practice of Whole-Body Mystical Awakening to help us. For our time and context, we believe that coming into our mystical bodies is most easily and naturally accessed through four main centers of spiritual awareness: Heart, Womb, Feet, and Head.
Why Four Centers?
For many of us, probably the most familiar starting point into the subtle body is the chakras. This has become popularized through new age teachings and westernized yoga practices especially. Many of us may be familiar with the teaching of seven chakras running along our spine.
These can be helpful reference points that correspond to certain energetic realities and sensations in our bodies—but they are not absolute, nor are they even particularly representative of the original tradition from which they sprang. Early systems ranged from having anywhere from 5 to 28 chakras in the subtle body. So which system is the “right” one?
Well, that’s one of our first hurdles we have to overcome when embracing our subtle, mystical body. It doesn’t play by the same mental rules as our physical body—they aren’t totalized, objective facts that are completely solidified and universally fixed. The energy body is more subjectively fluid and dynamic. Perhaps you could think of it as more “verb” than “noun” even. If that sounds confusing to your mind, we’re on the right track.
Other subtle body systems include pathways like meridians, sheaths or coverings like the koshas, channels or pathways known as nadis. Most of these components and systems come more from Eastern traditions, and their breadth and variety seem to speak to both the reality of the mystical body, as well as the somewhat indeterminacy of one absolute, correct physiology.
However, there does seem to be a consensus of three centers that are found in nearly all systems all over the world: the head, the heart, and the lower belly. Sean Esbjörn-Hargens has done a lot of integrative research on these principal three centers from many other traditions, including Celtic shamanism, Qigong, the enneagram, and more.
Drawing on the Integral research of Embodied Spiritual Inquiry, Jorge Ferrer worked with the graduate program at the California Institute of Integral Studies, finding concentrations of 5 centers of spiritual knowing, adding the feet and “crown” of the head to the other three (as well as integrating the crucial relational component as well). We too have found the feet to be a necessary and important integration for our practice and context—both as a center for grounding, movement, and presence, as well as representative of our whole somatic knowing through our entire body.
We decided to keep the head as one center rather than two—though there does seem to be a distinctive experience of the awakened mind and the more transcendent consciousness we can experience through what we might call “the top” of the head center. For simplicity’s sake, we keep them together mostly in description if a little less so in practice.
Just as the early chakra systems corresponded in relation to the specific practice they supported, so too do the four centers correspond to Whole-Body Mystical Awakening. It is not meant to be taken as an absolute and fixed truth, but a dynamic energetic, experiential reality that seems to connect with generally common and relatable points of primary engagement through practice. If you find chakras helpful, keep using them. If you find other centers or dynamics emerging in your mystical practice beyond these four centers—engage with them! Trust your own embodied, mystical awareness. We’ll even explore some of these other elements later in the series.
We’ll be going through each of these four primary centers more in-depth, but here is a brief overview of each to start.
Heart
The heart is our radiant center of love. It is the core of our humanity, the place where we comprehend with relational connection and compassion. It is the center of fire, burning with longing for intimacy and emanating love and bliss. In our deepest heart, we find ourselves in the universal embrace of all.
We move into our heart center awareness by activating the felt-sense of energetic life in our hearts through attention, emotion, and feelings. We almost always start with the heart, especially in early practices, because it is often one of the more accessible and apparent centers in sensing our awakened consciousness—especially in the WeSpace field of loving connection.
Womb
Our womb space, or what we often call our “spiritual womb,” is our center of divine identity and vital being. We also sometimes call it the “gut” center, as we understand from it with instinct and courage. It is the center of water, flowing with creativity and intuition, generative life springing up from our deepest source—the divine wellspring within. Through the point of origin within, we access the primordial source-oneness of being all.
Everyone has a spiritual womb, whether you have a physical one or not. We find our awareness more in our womb by sinking down into our bellies, underneath thoughts and feelings—like being enfolded in the warmth of a womb ourselves. The sensations and intuitions that arise are often subtle and take time to learn to sense if we’re not already practiced in attuning to them, as this can often be a new center of awareness for many Westerners.
Head
Our head center is where most of us operate and so are probably fairly familiar with it. This can actually make it almost more difficult though in our practice of coming into the awakened mind of our subtle or mystical body. We come into visionary knowing not through dismissing thoughts or “clearing away” so much as reintegrating our head with the spiritual energy of the rest of our body. This opens us up to the cleared, vibrant stillness that is receptive and lucid to mystical vision and impressions.
In the awakened mind we discover a clarity of mystical insight. A clearing of the fog of ordinary reality to see through (or hear/smell/taste) into awakened consciousness. We start to recognize what is beyond our usual myopic and compulsive thoughts—the open breeze of spirit/breath, as the mind is the center of air. Through our open mind, we can also expand into mystery, into the vast cosmic transcendence beyond all.
Feet
Our feet as a center of awareness first bring us to our sense of place here and now, to our grounded presence. This is the center of Earth, rooting us into the energy of material reality through our physical embodiment. In this way, the awakened consciousness of our feet also serves to connect us to our deeper somatic knowing, remembering into not just our own body, but the incarnated body of God throughout all things—indeed, even, embodying all.
We connect to our awareness through our feet by rooting and grounding to the earth. We can feel our roots reaching down, drawing the Christ energy of divine/material reality into our bodies. Or we can hug a tree, absorbing through the roots of our whole body. Movement can bring us there as well. Especially in a group setting, we may feel our roots interweaving and interconnecting with others deep below, in our shared earth. As we open our bodies to more permeable participation, we can sense more of our incarnated entanglement into the great web of life and the energetic interflow of the divine universe.
“It is not unimportant that we take into account the ‘numinous’ role played by our organs in the awakening of consciousness.”
A Whole-Body Spirituality
“I pray that out of God’s glorious riches you may be strengthened with power through spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may have strength to comprehend with all the saints (WeSpace!) what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.” – Ephesians 3:16-19
It may be a little bit of a stretch to correspond this writing from the apostle Paul to our four centers, and even the WeSpace, but here they are. A prayer for us to come into our spiritual embodiment and with one another—to lead us into a love beyond knowledge, into an embodied, divine fullness.
And ultimately in the fullness of our divine being, we are “filled” not from the outside—from a separate God—but from the deepest and truest essence of our own sacred origin within, as a spring from the divine source at the core of our inner being. In and as. God as subjective experience from our embodied being and becoming.
As we practice more regularly, we move into this reality more. From seeing our body as a separate object that we are learning to pay more attention to, into more of a sense of integrated awareness in and from our whole body as divine participation. This is sometimes called embodifulness, and it is a much more holistic, incarnated consciousness. We might even call it the fullness of God being us.
Next week, before moving into each of the centers, we’ll consider how all of this affects our lives, how we integrate this inner work into a transformed and loving way of being in the world.