Whole-Body Mystical Awakening focuses on four centers of spiritual knowing. This is, in part, based on our adaptation of the research and method called Interactive Embodied Meditation. This has been cultivated by prominent transpersonal psychologist Jorge Ferrer at the California Institute of Integral Studies based on several decades of research with hundreds of individuals and researchers.

In this practice, primary centers of spiritual knowing are accessed through direct physical touch. The body part that is the source of spiritual knowing depends on which center is to be explored. The mind is accessed through physical contact with the head and forehead; the heart through the center of the chest, arms, hands, and back; the vital life force through the lower abdomen or spiritual womb; and the body through the feet and legs.

By intentionally activating these interconnected yet unique faculties, we facilitate multidimensional knowing beyond the type of mind-centered knowledge that is typically privileged in Western education and research.

Ferrer says,
“These physical areas are entryways into the depths of these human attributes and associated ways of knowing . . . A human being is a multidimensional unity, and any attribute can therefore potentially manifest throughout the entire organism. This fact does not preclude, however, that sustained contact with certain bodily areas tends to facilitate access to specific experiential worlds for most individuals; after all, it is generally easier to feel one’s emotions when being touched in the heart center than in the toes or the nose.” (Participation and the Mystery)

In Individual Whole-Body Mystical Awakening, each person is initially invited to focus on their own experience in each of the four centers. Self-touching, by placing our hands on our head, heart, or gut, helps our awareness move there and energize that area. We adopt a posture of curiosity and openness to any sensations, thoughts, emotions, memories, intuitions, and visions that may arise.

In a WeSpace WBMA, a facilitator present or via the internet may verbally guide the meditation, weaving in prompts of awareness. Once practitioners gain some familiarity with their basic four-center awareness, greater complexity can be introduced, such as inclusion of multiple centers of awareness and the other meditation partners in the group. This invites awareness of the palpable “in-between” WeSpace that can emerge during conscious relational encounters. This is the energetic field of knowing that exists between the group members, experienced in embodied ways.

WHY FOUR CENTERS?

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.

For many of us, probably the most familiar starting point into the mystical 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 three principal centers from many other traditions, including Celtic shamanism, Qigong, the enneagram, and more.

Drawing on the Integral research of Embodied Spiritual Inquiry, Jorge Ferrer wo rked 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.

Many will experience their “mystical language” in different forms, often depending on which body center of spiritual knowing we are most connected to. Therefore, it will be beneficial to look more closely at these four centers. We go through each more in-depth, but here is a brief overview to start.

Awakening Our Radiant Hearts

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 often felt as 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.

Rooting into the Body of God with Our 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, into 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.

We All Have a Spiritual 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, intuition, and courage. It is often felt as 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.

Embodying Mind in Our 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.

These four physical areas are entryways into being present from awakened ways of spiritual knowing

Thinking alone does not connect us to God. It takes feelings, intuitive sensing, and grounding to the material cosmos.

Whole Body Mystical Awakening practice is not being aware of your body but being aware as the body. Here we learn to “soak” in the bliss, love, sensations, feelings, images, colors, words, sounds, intuitions that arise from deep within—as well as from the spiritual field between us and the other physical and non-physical beings present.

This is the shift from “ordinary consciousness” into a fuller, more integrated consciousness. We begin in an entry state of feeling and sensing from each center, then with more practice, into an awakened state of spiritual knowing. At times, we’ll also find ourselves flowing into a unified state of deep oneness.

In some sense, we can make this shift in each of our centers individually, opening up to the awakened field of knowing from each of these embodied structures of consciousness, these ways of knowing and being. The process of coming to this openness can come forth differently for each person, with some centers opening more easily than others. We can be patient with ourselves, trusting in our body’s capacity and timing—and having faith in God-Being-Us to shine through whenever it may be that dawn comes this day. Or for the grace as well to breathe in the goodness of the divine darkness.

Over time, the shift becomes more holistic, more free-flowing as we open more immediately to each of the centers and to the movement through and among our whole body. We welcome the energy and awareness wherever it is drawing us—we are less directed by our mind on where to place our attention. Our awareness simply finds itself coming forth in whatever part of our body, whatever structure of consciousness, whatever form of knowing is becoming present in that moment.

In Christian terms, this could be called “being filled with spirit” (remembering that spirit is less of an external force and more a facility of our evolving consciousness). Some may find it helpful to think of it as flow.

Being in a flow state is that place where everything is working in natural harmony and ease, doing the “work” of the moment in a sense without struggle, without debilitation, without anxiety. There is still effort, but without the tension of the common snags and hiccups that come when we’re too “in our heads” or in disharmony with the others—those we are working with or the terrain of our action. It is invigorating, focused, joyful, and usually altruistic. It has a timeless quality as well. Some experience this flow in artistic work like making music or visual imagery, in physical activity like skiing or swimming, in creative work for a job or personal project.

Most experience flow states in relation to something task-oriented, given to a singular point of focus. In the flow state of our mystical body, our “task” or central focus of attention becomes reality itself. It becomes the moment before us. The immediacy of what is not only before us but what is present through us. In the fullness of our entire embodied being and becoming.

Spiritually, we experience this more fully to the degree we have come into the openness and participation of each of our embodied structures of consciousness. Into the integration that makes possible new ways of being.

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.

Questions for Reflection:

1. How connected to your body do you feel in your spirituality? Where would you like to experience more conscious awareness?
2. Have you experienced deeper awareness from your body, feet, spiritual womb, or heart? What has that been like?
3. Describe experiences you’ve had with flow. How did that feel in your body and this way of being and knowing?

The *Whole-Body* in Whole-Body Mystical Awakening