I have been working on balancing my heart chakra. With the techniques I’ve been using to try to get out of this flare up, they say to pay attention to the words and phrases you use associated with your symptoms. There can be messages or clues in them. I’ve written about how I’m having trouble with acid reflux. I have had trouble with acid reflux over the years as part of having Eosinophilic Esophagitis and Gastroparesis…but I don’t think I’ve ever thought of it as having heartburn. I always thought of it as reflux…and I wrote a post about how I was using the word reflux recently and it made me think of the word influx…and how an influx can lead to a reflux…and how all of that has to do with processing. And about a week ago, for the first time I started thinking of it as heartburn. I think my mind was trying to communicate something to me…a new way of thinking about it that can be helpful. It’s called heartburn because you have pain in your chest but the pain is actually in your esophagus, not your heart. But it does feel like your heart is burning. And that helped me think in terms of my heart energy…it’s burning…in pain…not nourished. So I was listening to heart chakra meditations trying to balance my heart chakra and was having trouble…or feeling resistance to balancing, so I thought I would try getting a set of chakra crystals to see if they would help.

When I got the crystals out of the bag, I immediately felt an energy shift…a balancing of this energy I’ve been trying to work with during the flare up. That was really encouraging. It was like the crystals absorbed some of my energy…and I felt a healing energy flow into my body from the crystals, too. I only know a little bit about using the crystals, but they do absorb people’s energy. And you have to clear the energy out of the crystals regularly. Some people have had the experience of the crystals cracking if they take on too much energy. And that made me think, “That’s what my body is doing!” It clicked. There’s just too much energy…I can’t process it…and I am having trouble clearing it. What I’m trying to say is that feeling the crystals absorb my energy helped me see how my body absorbs energy that is in my environment…and it absorbs too much. I’ve written before that I am a Highly Sensitive Person and am neurodivergent. I did not learn to meditate until I was 29 years old. Up until then, my mind/body was going through the process of absorbing too much energy without clearing it and getting sick. Then I learned to meditate and learned how to process and clear energy. I did really well for about 12 years, and then I started having this flare up. Something connected with, or triggered, unconscious energy…unconscious energy is from when you were 2 years old or younger…which was a time when you didn’t have words to put with things…and you won’t have clear memories of what happened. But it’s during those years that you form the pathways for how you are going to process information for the rest of your life…unless you can learn how to get new pathways. So I’m trying to get my mind to update to the present moment and process this energy with the new pathways I have instead of with the pathways I had when I was little.

So the point I’m trying to make is that now I have a good visual…good imagery…of what I’ve been working with during this flare up. It’s like there is a tank, or balloon, of energy that is holding a lot of toxic energy in it. It has been triggered and all of this stuff has bubbled up and is causing serious symptoms. I am working with titration with this energy and it has been helping…trying to let a little bit of steam off of it at a time…taking things in steps. But when I felt the crystals absorb the negative energy and then almost push back at me with a healing energy…I realized that those healing energies in my body are not as active as they should be. And again, I’m talking as a patient, not a practitioner…so I hope I am explaining it correctly. Peter Levine talks about 2 vortexes…a trauma vortex and a healing vortex. And you need to strengthen the healing vortex in order to be able to get out of the trauma vortex. I might not be saying that correctly. But I think what’s going on for me is that the trauma vortex related to this energy that has been triggered is stronger than the healing vortex. The healing properties in the crystals were very strong. So I am going to keep working with techniques for building capacity and resilience…and working on developing that sense of feeling safe…and see if I can strengthen my healing vortex.

In John Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion, in the section about Providence, he was writing about how “Though human life is beset with innumerable evils, the righteous, trusting to Divine Providence, feel perfectly secure.” In the 10^th paragraph, he writes about that as humans we are beset by many ills/threats in our external environment, and that within our own bodies, because they are susceptible to illness, we “cannot move without carrying along with us many forms of destruction.” He was talking about that life is interwoven with death. He writes about how Christians can still feel perfectly secure in the care of God even though they are in the midst of these threats. So he was making a different point…but sometimes a phrase will make you think of an image…so this isn’t exactly what he was talking about…but I kept remembering that phrase, “cannot move without carrying along with us many forms of destruction” because that is what it feels like to have PTSD. I’m carrying around all of this compressed energy…like in that video I posted with Peter Levine when he is demonstrating with the sphere that expands and contracts. The difficulty with these energies is that anything can trigger it, but you cannot regulate it. So it feels like I am walking around carrying this destructive energy that could bubble up at any time. Before I had the tools to know how to work with it, I just kept locking it away…or compressing it. Thankfully now I have learned a lot about how to work with this energy and have hopes of being able to heal. And it really is in knowing that I am in the loving care of the Good Shepherd that I can feel totally safe and secure…which helps create an environment for healing. I just thought it was an interesting image…and you might connect with it if you are struggling with the same thing…that feeling of not being in control of your own body…having those energies that are so harmful but you are having trouble resolving. So it feels like you are carrying destructive energies around with you…but thankfully those energies can be transformed and released…and there are techniques that help you process things in the moment and prevent those energies from building up in the future. So I’m going to keep working on strengthening that healing vortex and hope to see improvements soon.

Links: John Calvin: Institutes of the Christian Religion – Christian Classics Ethereal Library