Body Transformation two articles

The Dance Between Spirit and Embodiment

As a vehicle through which our spirit can express itself the body is unique in incarnatory possibilities.

Experience of the third dimension is only possible through a body, although the body itself can not consciously experience without our waking consciousness.

In the intertwining of consciousness and form, the divine drama of the interplay of our divinity and humanness takes place. This unfolding story of our life where we gradually face the past as it is written in our body, constitutes one of the great mysteries.

As we explore or "go into" the pains, feelings, tightness and lack of awareness in our body we come face to face with the memories of the past - sometimes literally and sometimes as a metaphor - sometimes as high drama where we are wracked with pain, fear, sadness and loss, incompleteness of expression - loves that did not flower to fruition, and anger at the way events unfolded. And there is also more. As we release and surrender these embodied memories of the past we somehow allow more space for descent and inflow of that which we truly are - spirit in the embodied form, seeking to express itself, seeking to experience the energetic dance between the atomic and molecular, the very play of delight that is the force of creation. As we tap into this layer of existence we can experience great bliss, rushes of ecstatic realization, waves of connectedness to every living thing : these also are our birthright as beings exploring the mystery of embodiment.

The great historic spiritual traditions of this planet have often seen the body as problematic - as an obstacle to our spiritual realisation - as something to be transcended, as a barrier between us and oneness. However, this approach overlooks one simple fact - that when, on this planet, we do experience the great moments of spiritual awareness and elevation that human life can bring, it is precisely through the body , through the complex interlayering of nervous tissue and biochemistry, in the dance between history and the moment that the bliss of realisation descends upon us, and we realise that we are more than our bodies, that our awareness extends into the infinite, that although our body lives in history, our being is timeless.

And this is the nub of the problem, for our bodies not only live in history but are also historic products. They contain the memories of everything that ever happened to us in this life - not only in childhood and infancy, but also our birth, gestation and conception live as energetic moments captured into biological reality. Beyond this, there is more.

In our descent from the planes of spirit into biological matter we pass through complex intersecting matrices of energy - the light grids, that control how consciousness will express itself in this particular incarnation. In passing through these, the purity of spirit, which has no attachment, becomes fashioned by energetic vortices and we take on or absorb patterns in much the same way as a piece of clay is sculpted on a potter's wheel.

We absorb past life influences - karmas - parts of our past still to be brought to completion and a point of stillness within us - and we absorb family influences; the karmas of the family that wish to express itself through us. These karmas may be thought of as a standing wave pattern that influences the expression of consciousness that will eventually become embodied, much as a 35mm slide in a projector influences the expression of the pure formless light that initially shines through the slide to produce the pattern of light that we see on the screen. These layers of information, which are initially sub-atomic, gradually slow down in frequency until they eventually intersect with biological reality - genetic coding, cellular function and energetic flow through the nervous system.

In working with the body we start to work backwards through the layers of karma accumulated in our body, through the layers of holding of our muscular movement and expression, through the restrictions on our breathing and expression of our feeling life. And as we do this we meet the past as it has come to live in us as body pains, unconsciousness, fear etc. This is the essence of the hands on work with the body and the movement re-education work.

Participants who come to take part in the work will receive it at the point of intersection between what you can give , and what comes through you, and what they can receive. They will experience it according to their evolutionary level of unfolding intersecting with yours, in the mystery of the moment. If you bring the fullness of your being to the moment, you are doing all that can ever be asked of you. And such moments are rare. Often it is a matter of prayerfully gathering ourselves to a temporary point of stillness in the storm of our ongoing process of life, and sharing a session from that place - noting our incompleteness, lack of full presence, judgements, inability to fully connect etc. as we make our way into the mystery of another person's embodiment and their struggle with the journey.

Daricha: March 1996

Transmutation of the Body into Light

There are many writers now who are writing of a time when the body will transmute into light - when the corporeal shadow of our spirit will explode into transcendent brilliance. What are we to make of such claims?

On the one hand they seem far fetched and fanciful, smoke dreams of spiritual hippies and shamans of long lost tribes, but at least for some of us such ideas bring forth an echo of a sacred truth we once heard and have treasured in our hearts.

The body transmuting into a body of light is the very essence of millenarian dreaming - the resurrection of the body into the full glory of its origins.

What a vision and what a problem - trying to work out the biological physics that could enable it to happen. Yet such a process may be thought of as the reverse of what happened when we incarnated from planes of spirit into the third dimension; when we as beings of light compressed ourselves through increasingly dense dimensional planes into bodily reality - possibly in much the same way as gas condenses from the air to water and then to ice.

Using this metaphor, bodily reality could be seen as frozen light - the pure light of consciousness frozen into intersection with biological matter. Consciousness slowed down in its frequency response so that manifestation of physical form could occur. What it seems the writers are suggesting is that the reverse of the incarnatory process could take place, somehow bypassing the normal death process where consciousness reinhabits the subtler realms and disengages from the body leaving it to gradually decay over a substantial period of time.

The process that is being suggested is one where the body moves into something like a chain reaction where the molecular and atomic structure of the matter in the body releases very suddenly and we are catapulted consciously into transcendent realms of glory - exploding out of matter and time based existence into an existence defined by energy and the moment of the eternal present (or presence) which can justly be called eternity.

Third dimensional linear time based reference systems do not look kindly upon notions of eternity because such systems usually have the notion that eternity means forever. A simpler way of conceptualising this is to ponder the moment of the eternal present. In such a moment the idea of for ever is nonexistent because thinking of "for ever" takes us out of the moment of eternal present/presence and into a linear time based reference system.

Many members of western society have great difficulty thinking outside third dimensional systems. However, anyone who has touched the transcendent in their lives, glimpsed into the mystery, or spent time in those states the yogis called samadhi or satori knows experientially that the moment of eternal present/presence always is and there never has been a time when it was not.

So it seems that critical elements of the notion of transmuting into light body include a completing of the incarnational process - we become free of the need to continually incarnate into human form and master the alchemy of transmuting the body back to its original components -i.e. light or pure consciousness, and we free ourselves from a matter and time based reference system and locate our point of awareness in dimensions of energy and eternity.

So the next time you read about or hear about someone speak of the human body transmuting into light perhaps you might recollect the awesome nature of what it is they are proposing as a possibility.

Daricha: April 1996