Every physical, emotional, or sexual exchange you have with another human being creates an energetic cord between you and “them.” It’s like quantum entanglement; your energy is connected to that experience and that person until you sever the cords. As these exchanges mount up, your energy body will become so depleted that you will open yourself to disease and accidents.

            The Toltec art of recapitulation, first introduced by Carlos Castaneda, which the author has practiced for thirty years, can help release these cords and reclaim this lost energy for your greater development. The author presents step-by-step instructions to release childhood traumas, relationship encounters, abuse, and the insults of daily living.

            Once you’re cleared, the second half of the book presents exercises to raise one’s consciousness and become fully integrated spiritual beings. Here the author explores the recovery aspects of yoga, meditation, the non-talk therapy of Focusing, and the Jungian balancing of our four psychological functions.

            This leads the reader, or those ready and invited by the Goddess, to clear one’s chakras of present and past-life debris and to ignite the fire of kundalini and nurture its rise to higher states of consciousness.

A Guide to Energetic Healing makes healing trauma, abuse, or the insults of daily living, very accessible. John Nelson's kind, gentle and engaging voice clearly explains these ancient healing practices while guiding you toward greater healing, balance and peace. Nelson expertly grounds energetic healing in historical context while adding fascinating anecdotes and examples. Highly recommended!  

—Donald Altman, best-selling author, Clearing Emotional Clutter

and 101 Mindful Ways to Build Resilience

John Nelson is the author of  Starborn, Transformations, Matrix of the Gods, I, Human, and The Magic Mirror, the COVR winner of best book of the year for 2008. He is the former editorial director of Bear & Company and Inner Oceans Publishing, and the owner of Bookworks Ltd. He has been a cutting-edge thinker on spirituality, consciousness, and self-realization for some forty years.

Contents

Preface

Introduction

Part One: Energetic Black Holes

1. The Body Energetic

2. The Cords That Bind Us

3. Unplugging the Cords

4. First Applications

5. Special Applications

6. Dark Matters

Part Two: The Shift

7. Body Knowledge

8. The One-Step Program

9. The Compensatory Factor

10. The Flying Beetle Effect

11. The Long Stretch

12. Crosstalk

13. Everything Mirrors Everything

Part Three: Raising Energy, Raising Consciousness

14. Breathe In/Live Long

15. Monkey Mind/Spiritual Mind

16. Through a Glass Darkly

17. Clearing the Path

18. Tickling the Sleeping Dragon’s Tail

Bibliography

About the Author

"It's difficult to write a book about energy healing that stands out, but COVR [Coalition of Visionary Resources] award-winner Nelson has managed to do just that. The teachings that he offers have authenticity because they all come out of his own personal healing journey . . . [the book] is thorough and lucid . . . the real power of the book is the fact that Nelson doesn't shy away from the harsh realities of this kind of intense work . . . [Nelson] lets readers know exactly how grueling healing of intense emotional issues can be and offers plenty of guidance for easing into that indepth work, as well as cautions about getting stuck in deadend healing modalities . . . "New Age" libraries are filled with authors who claim to be able to heal the wounded. Nelson tells readers they are responsible for their own healing and shows them how to do that."

Preface

As I look over today’s new consciousness landscape, especially in regard to male spirituality, I see a segmentation between the yin aspect of self-transcendence and the separate yang arena of recovery from trauma and addiction, whatever the program. While my own path started out with yoga in my late teens, it had more of a recovery focus to loosen tight muscles, the residue of psychological pressure from unresolved issues. It was only after I had cleared enough of my human trauma through various practices over the years that I came to appreciate and apply the higher aspects of this practice, which of course has been the thrust of Hatha yoga for centuries. This later led to a premature kundalini awakening in my early forties, which required even more years of clearing the chakras to open the sushumna nadi and allow this flow to rise into the upper chakras.

So recently I began to wonder about writing a book that employed some of the clearing practices I had learned over the years, and most prominently the practice of recapitulation, which first came to my attention while reading Castaneda’s The Eagle’s Gift in the late 1980s, and later Victor Sanchez’s The Teachings of Don Carlos. What I discovered from self-healing and sharing this energetic technique with others is that it excels at clearing intractable emotional “knots” that can usually be traced back to our interaction with others. This applies to the customary trauma we all experience growing up, but also for some, the deep wounds of sexual and/or physical abuse and the dark trauma the repentant perpetrators of major offenses experience. Talk psychology, which many will attest to, can’t clear this kind of deeply rooted trauma. But then the idea came to me that this is not enough, especially for those coming to such a book needing not only a clearing of such histories but also a developmental path to follow during it and afterwards.

Having edited two prominent books on recovery, The 12-Step Buddhist and Yoga and the Twelve- Step Path, which deal with the limitations of standard 12-Step programs and try to infuse a more expansive spiritual purpose, I saw the need to outline another such path. But, I asked myself—to be true to my own process—why stop with an adjustment of the ego/mind when the whole thrust of spiritual development, as any yogi master will tell you, is to awaken the kundalini energy and ride it to higher states of consciousness. So, I wondered, is it possible to write a book that helps people clear intractable emotional histories, even those with great abuse issues, and moves them along a path to this ultimate activation—or at least gives them a path and a glimmer of hope for this life or their next one?

I once had a palmist read my palms, which intrigued her, given that my left palm—what I came in with from past lives—was riddled with numerous broken lines, or negative past karma, and my right hand—what we make of what we brought in—was fairly clear. She turned to me and asked: “How did you do it?” Well, this is how I created a psychospiritual developmental awakening program, a task still in progress, as others will attest to, that I think can help others, especially men.

Introduction

The exercises in this book will certainly help address intractable emotional and spiritual challenges of all kind, especially those that afflict hardened types who have histories as perpetrators of abuse. However, it is mostly written for the rest of us who are saddled with the after effects of emotional or/and physical trauma from abuse or victimization, some of which may seem minor in retrospect but that cumulatively can be very debilitating. I’m not a self-help guru or psychologist, but there will be some psychological remedies gleaned from my lifelong study of Jungian psychology. I am a sufferer like the rest of you, a Buddhist of sorts, and at one time a particularly hardened case, as many will attest to, but I’ve never crossed the line into the physical, if not the psychological, abuse of others. Mea Culpa.

As a yogi, meditator, and a writer, I’ve been a spiritual seeker all my life. At age seven I worked out the laws of karma on my own, and by age seventeen I was practicing yoga and meditating, which is what saved me from teenage emotional problems and set me on my own life-long countercultural search for answers. I take this early interest in things metaphysical to be a holdover from past lives, which a past-life regression later confirmed. So if you’re looking for a credentialed authority with textbook answers to your questions and needs, this is not the book for you. However, The Magic Mirror did win the COVR award for best New Age book of the year and best divination system at INATS in 2008. And I have been trained and certified in energy medicine with a Hawaiian Kahuna, and I have edited some forty published books on these subjects. I might also add that I have not presented these techniques in workshop settings, so they are not informed by experiential feedback, although I have shared them with friends and colleagues and helped them move through the process. And while the book presents some fairly advanced recapitulation and kundalini awakening exercises, the developmental path outlined will also include some basic information and healing modalities—but with a new energetic slant or gestalt.

But if you’re willing to take a chance that this knucklehead in his late sixties, who is healthy and fit and fairly emotionally and spiritually sound, may have developed some useful techniques to relieve your suffering, I don’t think you’ll be disappointed with them or the developmental path I’ve outlined in subsequent chapters. While I have written several visionary/metaphysical sci-fi novels, my most successful book, relatively speaking, was the aforementioned nonfiction title The Magic Mirror, about scrying—or crystal ball gazing. Even if this subject does not interest you, what I found was that the spiritual clearing exercises in that book are what resonated best with the readers, preparing them to scry or partake in other mystical arts practices, such as reading tarot or other divination cards, and to help them on their development of psychic skills.

Those were mostly day’s end emotional clearing exercises to open and prepare oneself for direct inspiration from some higher source or from one’s subconscious mind to scry or read cards. What I’m addressing here, however, are ways to reclaim your soul or reopen your connection to higher aspects of yourself, which may have been damaged by your abuse of others or self, or your own victim abuse by others, and the emotional patterns that they create. While I have experienced some mild childhood abuse like most of us, I have known and loved women with devastating childhood sexual abuse histories, and so I know just how intractable to healing such histories and others like them can be. These are not, in my experience, issues that can be resolved by talk therapies alone, or that recapitulation is the final answer either.

Every physical, emotional, or sexual exchange we have with another person—or exposure to violent or sexually debasing films, television programs, or music—creates an energetic cord between you and “them.” It’s like quantum entanglement: you’re bound to this human being or the creators of such programming, until you sever the cord. This also applies to self-abuse, physical or psychological, and the cords they create with those experiences buried in the subconscious. This may not be new information to some of my readers, but the techniques and exercises I’ve developed and continue to use may be helpful to you and to those for whom this is a revelation. If you are willing to reenter the experience, you can sever these cords and erase the hold they have on you and be freed of them and their emotional baggage to some extent.

The primary practice for this release, as mentioned earlier, is recapitulation, which was introduced to many Western readers by Carlos Castaneda and described as an art, and was later brilliantly elucidated as a practice by Victor Sanchez. I have instructed people in this practice for their great benefit. Others have told me they are already doing a similar practice, but invariably their technique is a recollection of memories—not an energetic reliving of them and a clearing of the experience from one’s energy field—thus, they do not release the trauma of this abuse. I have, however, applied recapitulation in very original ways—like the onerous impact of violent or sexually debasing media on the viewer and its creators—which isn’t usually presented elsewhere and may be deemed by some, even longtime practitioners, as rather speculative, until they practice these clearings themselves and see the results.

As a further assistance in this clearing, I will delve into my understanding and practice of Jungian self-therapies, as I like to call them, including active imagination, balancing the four psychological functions, and how the understanding and application of synchronicity can be a guiding principle in one’s life. I will present techniques adapted from Eugene Gendlin’s Focusing, or more of a body-based non-talk psychological self-therapy, and how that can be applied to clearing trauma and is particularly useful for addiction. Also covered is the new science of quantum mechanics that validates much of these Jungian practices, as well as many of the ancient mystical arts practices such as scrying and reading tarot cards, and clearly points to the co-creative power of the new “quantum gnosis” as some have called it.

I will tell of my experience with Hatha yoga and how it has kept me healthy and disease-free all my life—doing a little yoga at night has helped me sleep well for fifty years. What is important here, for those who are clearing emotional traumas, is how that energy gets trapped in the muscles of the body until you release it. I’ll also present some health practices like the importance of taking high daily doses of antioxidants, especially for those with heart conditions—it’s the free radicals that oxidize cholesterol and turn it into plaque that clogs up the heart arteries. Since both my father and grandfather died of heart attacks in their late forties from high triglycerides, I began taking Kyolic liquid garlic years ago, which lowered mine to safe levels without Lipitor or other pharma remedies, which I believe contributed to my sister’s brain tumor and early death.

Recently I had a visionary/sci-fi novel published, I, Human, set in a future where most people have neuroimplants and two-hundred-plus IQs, but are plagued with emotional problems. I have since had articles published in magazines, including New Age Journal Online, Kindred Spirit, New Dawn, The Edge, and Mind Body Spirit about how the use of the new technology can have a deleterious effect on our consciousness. Here I will explore my thinking on this subject and how we must be vigilant, individually and as a society, about these techno-energetic inroads into our lives that can enslave us. Otherwise, we’ll wake up one morning in the near or distant future, look into a bathroom mirror, and see a soulless cyborg staring back at us with no hope of a higher spiritual activation.

This presentation will conclude with advanced spiritual clearing practices for those who have worked on clearing emotional patterns, so as to raise one’s energy and consciousness. The main thrust will first be focused exercises to further clear one’s chakras of emotional patterns— an extension of my earlier exercises—and what the yogis called past-life samskaras—an exercise unique to me but that I have found to be very effective in this regard. (This exercise alone is worth the price of admission.) This is to set the stage for the journey of a kundalini awakening and its elevating effects on our consciousness. Raising this energy will further clear out the chakras on its path from the base of the spine to the crown chakra—which few aspirants will initially reach, but all can benefit from even a partial activation. The approach here is to first “clear a path” as it were, since my experience with kundalini and those of others, especially that of Gopi Krishna, is that emotional blockages can impede its upward flow. I’ll deal with the much publicized “harsh effects” and warnings of his otherwise inspirational books, published back in the 1970s and 80s. I’ll also include methods to increase our body’s supply of prana, for which kundalini is a precursor; Gopi Krishna claimed his lack of ample reserves caused some of the “challenges” to his awakening of this force of nature.

As a kind of author’s note, I’ll conclude this introduction by saying that I’m not going to belabor this presentation with tons of footnotes. I’ll list an extensive bibliography of books that have contributed in one way or another to my thinking, and as such will quote from them or reference them in the text. If you like, you can consider what I present here as anecdotal, or even revelatory for the spiritually inclined, but all of it is based on personal experience and application. And to quote the proverb, “The proof of the pudding is in the eating.”