THE ANCHORING CODE: GETTING BACK IN YOUR BODY
3. Hold this tension temporarily as you breathe in and out from the belly several times
Similar to our Subject-Object-Subject exercise, the goal of this anchor point is to recognize yourself as the “one behind the eyes.” This dramatically shifts your focus from external to internal, from “out there” to “home” inside your core. To be anchored in the body, you need to be the consciousness looking out through your body’s eyes.
Now that you’re familiar with the four anchor points along the central channel, you want to start viewing and experiencing the channel as a vital, flowing energetic pathway—the superhighway of your whole energy system. Eventually, when you’re able to do the work without the extra guidance the anchor points provide, you will relax them and allow a feeling of falling into the body. More on that later. In the meantime, squeeze away!
Start contracting the anchor points one at a time: root lock, heart center, throat, and third eye. Hold this tension as you breathe audibly in and out through your nose.
Once you’ve worked your way up the channel, connect the four areas as if there’s a plumb line dropping down through the channel—from the tension behind your eyes, to the throat where you’re constricting and hearing your breath, to the heart that you’re squeezing, down into mūla bandha, and from there all the way down into the earth like the roots of a tree.
Practice feeling that alignment, sensing it, imagining it—making it up, if you have to. The more you do this, the more you will start to build sensory perception in this area, and the increased circuitry of the sensory system will increase both the awareness of the Soulful Self and its energetic flow.
Remember that quote often attributed to Albert Einstein: “The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.” This sensing ability is how we should use the rational mind—as a servant to the intuitive mind. You’re employing the mind to direct and use your senses differently than you have ever used them before. The result is that you become awake in your true essence in a way you have not been awake before.
Besides the four anchor points, the other powerful ingredient that helps to bring this true essence fully online within the central channel is the following unique breathing pattern.
PRACTICE 3: CENTRAL CHANNEL BREATHING
If there’s one thing I see that keeps people from living into their fullness, it’s that they barely breathe! Breath is energy—so when we draw breath into and exhale it from our body, we move energy into and out of our personal energy field as well. Breathing while maintaining a conscious connection to our anchor points and the earth is an efficient way to activate our energy centers (chakras) and solidify the energy in our central channel, the seat of embodiment for the Soulful Self.
Central Channel Breathing is a fundamental practice of the Energy Codes.
Breathing through the core of the body gives you the tangible experience of your multidimensional reality (body-mind-spirit), and swiftly shifts you out of survival and reactivity mode and into a perspective based in a sense of higher purpose instead.
As with the other practices, here you’ll be doing belly breathing—meaning that, with each breath, you will extend the belly on the inhale and compress it for the exhale, rather than breathing shallowly in the chest. As you breathe through the central channel according to the instructions below, you want to take special care to have your concentration travel up and down through each energy center in the core of the body, like going up and down inside the elevator within an elevator shaft, without skipping any portion of the central channel. This is key to igniting all of your electromagnetic and eventually neurological circuitry.
Here’s how to do Central Channel Breathing:
1. Start with your anchor points—lifting the pelvic floor in mūla bandha, squeezing the heart as if doing a bench press, Darth Vader–style in-the- throat breath, and momentary tension behind the eyes.
2. Take your attention up above your head—about six inches—and inhale from there. Initially, it may help to visualize a white or golden ball of light with the breath, so feel free to give that a try. (Ultimately, though, you want to realize that you are the ball of light, so you can feel yourself moving down through the top of your head and through your own central channel—as if you are in the elevator going down to the basement floor—rather than seeing it from an external focal point.)
3. Inhale all the way down through the channel, into your belly, keeping your anchor points squeezed as best you can. Extend your belly on the inhale.
4. Exhale from the belly, straight down through mūla bandha and into the earth, still squeezing your four anchor points. Retract your belly toward the spine on the exhale.
5. Now reverse the action: draw a breath from within the earth up through mūla bandha into the belly. As you exhale, feel yourself as the energy flows up through the shaft of the central channel and out the top of the head.
Repeat the whole cycle. Note that a complete cycle includes two full breaths: one inhale starting from the top, six inches above your head into the heart/belly/core space, followed by an exhale down into the earth; and one inhale into the heart/belly/core space from the earth, followed by an exhale out the top of the head.
When you first start this practice, breathe at a comfortable rate. This will allow you to concentrate on maintaining the tension in your anchor points and moving (as the breath) up and down your central channel. Once you become proficient and
holding the anchor points starts to feel natural, you can deliberately speed up or slow down your breath to create specific outcomes. More active or fierce versions of this practice—where you breathe more quickly, powerfully, and audibly—serve to pierce through densities within tissues and veils between chakras, whereas slow, gentle, and deep versions are for the intricate details of circuitry building and integrating subtle energies. Slower breathing also promotes relaxation and eases the effects of stress and prolonged mental concentration. I’ll provide more details on mastering these specifics as we progress through the book.
To engage in a more active version of Central Channel Breathing, breathe to a count of four: inhale for two counts, and exhale for two counts. You will notice that the exhale here happens in a “whoosh.” You can imagine that forceful breath piercing any thicknesses or densities you observe along your central channel.
To employ a gentler version of this practice, slow the breath to a count of six, eight, or ten, maintaining equal lengths of inhale and exhale.
With any form of Central Channel Breathing, the most important thing is to consciously follow the breath (and, ideally, to be the breath) up and down the system, activating all the circuits along the path. Don’t skip over any of the anchor points or any area along the channel in between.
You will progress quickly if you do this practice several times throughout the day
—especially every night when you go to bed, making it the last thing you do before you fall asleep, and every morning as soon as you awaken, before your feet hit the floor. These times, on either side of sleep, are when the subconscious and conscious minds talk to each other the most, and so are the best times to create and establish a new reality for yourself.
For maximum benefit, make every breath, every day, a central channel breath!
Each time you breathe in from beyond the body, and through the body, and then exhale out to beyond the body again, you are activating the subconscious awareness of being more than just a physical being, and you draw from your multidimensionality, rejuvenating yourself constantly. This is how I accomplish so much in a week’s time and feel as if I’m getting younger every year.
PRACTICE 4: DROP IN, DROP THROUGH
Drop In, Drop Through is a more free-flowing version of Central Channel Breathing
and has a slightly different purpose and use. Like Subject-Object-Subject, it works to pull all of our energy into the center of our body from where it might otherwise be hanging out—in our head, around the surface of our shoulders, and up above the body. In this practice, we’re going to let the energy drop in and fall all the way down through the body like a rushing waterfall, gathering densities with it as it goes and flushing them down into the earth in a powerful release.
This “flushing” has huge value for us. It keeps us from holding on to stagnant energies like old thought patterns, stories, or other habits, and from trying to control circumstances and situations. We hold on to these unhelpful energies not because they feel good, but because they are what we know. They’re familiar. Yet if we don’t let these things go, their dispersed densities will continue to weaken our energy field and flow and create painful friction in our lives as they clamor to be released.
If, however, we can energetically familiarize ourselves with change and letting go
—by letting energy flush down through us, as we will in this exercise—and get familiar with what that flushing feels like in the body, it becomes easier and easier for the mind to let go of thoughts and ideas that no longer serve us. That’s because letting go energetically, through the body, replicates the energetic pattern we would experience if we truly released something mentally and emotionally. Since letting go is harder for the mind at the level of story, we can do it much more easily and quickly at the level of the energy, where the density actually resides. We are then able to turn our mind to more creative and productive pursuits.
Imagine, for instance, that you’re having a conflict with someone, and you really want the other person to see and agree with your point of view. Now imagine that this person suddenly gets what you’re trying to say, and agrees with all of it. Suddenly all of the effort you’ve been expending to convince them will release. You’ll no longer be holding an agenda, because your mission is complete. That change in your outer world—the release of friction due to the other person’s shift—then causes a change in your inner world, and a rush of energy will pour down through your body as your desire comes to fruition.
Of course, this example is change from the outside in, which we can’t ultimately control—but we can do the reverse, and create change from the inside out. We can practice what it would feel like if we were already understood, before the other person gets what we’re trying to say. This would allow us to drop our agenda and stop the
friction in its tracks before it creates conflict. Exercises like this one are powerful for releasing the stuck energy and conditions of the Protective Personality.
Here’s how to practice Drop In, Drop Through:
1. Notice the energy around your head and shoulders right now. (It’s likely more pronounced than in your belly, hip, and leg areas.)
2. Drop all of the tension that you can, all at once, into the center of your head as you take a deep breath into your core. Just let go of everything in the upper half of your body.