The accelerated program
Late in 1996, at twenty-one, I enrolled in the six-month accelerated program of UCMT, the Utah College of Massage Therapy in Salt Lake City. My whole desire in going there was to connect the wisdom of the body with the mysteries of the spirit.
UCMT was one of the older massage schools in the country and held a very good name in its field, and I counted it among the leading schools of holistic bodywork anywhere. An accelerated program packs a long course of study into a short time. The days were full, with lectures, practical sessions at the table and long hours of hands-on work.
I applied myself with a single focus and graduated at the top of my class on 17 May 1997. From there I set up a private practice in energy medicine and holistic bodywork. Both during my schooling and in the decades that followed I have worked with more than 300 clients, drawing on a set of methods that kept growing as I did.
The maps of the body
The formal training was broad, and it included advanced massage therapy in several systems, hydrotherapy, deep tissue massage, anatomy and physiology and advanced structural realignment, along with a wide range of energy modalities. I also studied craniosacral therapy, acupressure, shiatsu and Feldenkrais, and movement therapies built on Chi Gong and Kundalini Yoga.
Each of these came with its own map of the body. The anatomy class gave me muscle, bone, nerve and organ, with every origin and insertion learned by name, and physiology gave me the systems of the body at work, the skeleton and the muscles, the nerves, the blood and the lymph, the breath and the digestion, each with its own laws. Hydrotherapy gave me water as a medicine, hot and cold applied in turn to move the blood and calm the nerves. Deep tissue work taught me to go slowly into the deeper layers of muscle and fascia, waiting for the tissue to give before going further. Structural realignment gave me the long lines of the fascia and the way a body stacks itself over its feet, so that a knee, a hip and a shoulder can all be answering the same old strain.
The Eastern maps were different again. Acupressure and shiatsu, the "finger pressure" of Japan, gave me the meridians and their points, the channels along which the old medicine of China and Japan says the life of the body runs. Craniosacral work gave me the slow tides of the head, the spine and the sacrum under a very light touch. Feldenkrais, the method of Moshe Feldenkrais, gave me movement as a way the nervous system learns, small and gentle movements repeated with attention until the body finds an easier way to move. Chi Gong gave me the breath and the slow gathering of energy in the body.
My early work in theurgy had already brought me to the teaching of the "body of light". At UCMT my fascination with the human energy field took on a practical dimension, and the intuitive side of my work met the precision of anatomy and structure.
The woman in her sixties
I had many good and gifted teachers in the classrooms at UCMT. The two who changed me most did so outside the formal classes.
The first was a fellow student, a woman in her sixties. She had spent more than thirty years attending colleges and universities around the world, collecting graduate degrees and certificates in conventional and alternative fields alike. She came to the massage college as one more school among many, and she brought to it a quick and very accurate intuitive eye for people.
When I met her I already had a good deal of experience with subtle energy and the human energy field. She recognized in me a deeper gift that I had not yet fully seen in myself, the capacity to see the human energy field with my eyes. Through a series of informal teachings she showed me how to deepen it.
The first of those teachings came in the middle of a class. We were observing a student walk across the room so that we could study her gait and pick out the patterns of muscular tension in it. The woman gently placed her arm on my shoulder, gestured toward the student's knee and whispered, "Look." I looked, and I saw an iridescent fountain of light rising from the knee, shimmering and alive. At her urging I went over to the student and asked whether she had ever had a serious injury there. She told me she had suffered a bad sports injury to that knee and that it still troubled her. That moment opened a doorway for me.
Over the following months she tutored me on the side. She showed me how to see subtle color and vibrance in the field, the distortions that sickness leaves in it and the fields of strength around a healthy person. She taught me to recognize the energy within people, the geomagnetic fields of the earth and even the subtle glow of photosynthesis within the living green world, which I still teach today in our retreats. Her mentorship ran through those six months, and she gave at least a third of that time to my personal training. Her generous mentorship was one of the greatest gifts I could have received.
Reading a body at the table
What she taught me went straight into my work at the table, during school and in my private practice. The colors, the distortions of sickness and the fields of strength became part of how I read a client, and the anatomy told me where to look under them. A session in those years began before my hands touched anyone. I stood at the head of the table, let my eyes soften over the body and looked for the dull patches, the bright pooling over an old injury and the places where the field thinned.
Then I went to the muscles, joints and channels that lay under what I had seen. Very often the field and the tissue told the same story, a tight band of muscle under a dull place in the field or an old scar under a patch of disturbed light, and the work went to that place first. The deep tissue work, the points of shiatsu and acupressure, the light holds of the craniosacral work and the energy work of the hands were all tools for the same purpose, chosen by what the body and the field showed me. Energy medicine works with the field itself, sometimes with the hands resting lightly on the body and sometimes with them held a little above it, smoothing, gathering or drawing off what the eyes and hands find there. In my sessions it went together with the work on the tissue. I kept the methods of the college and added to them whatever my own study and practice taught me.
The Kundalini Yoga teacher
The second great influence of my UCMT months was my Kundalini Yoga instructor. Every day after classes ended I went to his sessions. They were powerful and very demanding, and they changed my state in a way I could feel for hours afterward.
Kundalini Yoga, as it was taught in classes of that kind, works through sets of postures held for long periods together with the breath, the chanting of mantras and the locks of the body. The breath of fire, a rapid breath pumped from the navel, runs through many of the sets. The locks are held at the base of the spine, at the diaphragm and at the throat, and each set ends in stillness and meditation, with the body tingling and the mind very quiet.
In addition to the physical practice, he would stay after class and speak with me about the nature of energy, the rise of the Kundalini through the body and the union of spirit and matter that the yogis hold as the goal of the whole practice. I kept up with him every day for a full six months and took in everything I could from him. I came away with that experience in my own body and with the inspiration to study Tantra and Kundalini Yoga academically, at a much deeper level than a class could give me.
The yogic teaching he gave me runs like this. The Kuṇḍalinī is the power of Śakti lying coiled at the base of the spine, at the center the yogis call Mūlādhāra. The breath, the locks and the long holds wake her, and she rises along the central channel of the spine, the suṣumnā, with the two currents of iḍā and piṅgalā winding about it. On her way she opens the centers, the cakras, one after another, until she reaches the crown and the union the yogis seek is made there. In the language my teacher used after class, that union is the union of spirit and matter, the divine power at the root of the body rising to meet the divine consciousness above it.
East and West in one practice
His teaching changed the way I approached theurgy. Until then my ritual life had been Western in its forms, the Kabbalah, the Golden Dawn and Thelema. My teacher showed me in practice that the East had worked out, in great detail, how energy moves in the body and how breath, posture, sound and attention can raise and direct it. I saw how those Eastern principles of energy could be brought into Western ritual practice.
I knew that Aleister Crowley's orders had already explored a synthesis of Eastern and Western methods, and I went deeply into his works while I was still in school, seeking to understand how the two could be brought together into one current. In the same months I discovered Atkinson's yogic books.
The decade that followed was the decade in which I fully committed to ritual theurgy as a living, personal path. I drew on Crowley and on the other occultists whose work was reshaping the modern ceremonial tradition, and I kept the Eastern thread running through all of it. This was the first time I set out on purpose to bring the systems of East and West into one practice.
In those years energy medicine, theurgy, Kundalini and the living language of the body were fused into one practice that kept deepening. They taught me that a healer has to be both scientist and mystic, able to perceive muscle and bone and also the luminous template of spirit within them. Within each human being, in the same flesh and blood the anatomy class names, burns a living spark of divine intelligence waiting to be awakened.
From the Tantric years that followed I kept Raja Kundalini, the union of Rāja yoga with Tantric Kuṇḍalinī, and I have practiced it ever since. In our School today the physical set of Kundalini Yoga, with the breath and the meditation of Raja Kundalini, is the preparation of the vessel, and it is completed before the rite begins (Ritual Praxis and Instruction, Preface). Our students learn the forceful breaths of that preparation, Kapālabhāti and Bhastrikā in alternation, and the Breath of Fire of the physical set. Every forceful breath ends before the Opening Preliminaries begin. Inside the rite the breath is always deep and natural, and it carries the light of 'Ehyeh through the whole Grand Invocation (Ritual Praxis and Instruction, Ch. 5, §5.8.4).
The purge
During my time at school I entered a powerful period of energetic transformation, and it sped up every part of my life, for better and for worse.
My days had a pattern that hardly varied. I spent hours in class doing bodywork and physical practice, and after class came the Kundalini sessions. Then came long hours of study in the parking booth where I worked, and at home the banishing rituals and the Middle Pillar in the basement chamber I had built just before school began. Nearly all my waking hours were immersed in energy work, theurgy, shamanism and the deeper mysteries of the occult.
With growing certainty I could sense that something was beginning to stir in me. A hidden current had broken free, and I could feel it working its way through every layer of my being.
Much of it was very unsettling, and I began to lose friends who could no longer understand the path I was on, and some of those friendships never came back. My sleep became troubled and chaotic, and at times I had flu-like symptoms so strong that I knew them as a spiritual purge more than a physical illness, with something old and poisonous being drawn out of my system.
My body and mind were under siege, and through all of it I knew that a cleaning out was going on. A deeper intelligence was clearing away the debris of my psyche to make room for something larger. During those weeks I kept to the same round of class, practice, study and rite, every day.
Students of our School sometimes meet a smaller season of the same kind when their practice deepens, with troubled sleep, old griefs rising and friendships changing around them (Ritual Praxis and Instruction, Ch. 1). We ask every student to receive it calmly, neither seeking to repeat it nor fearing it, and to keep the daily practice steady through it.
Forty fields in the anatomy class
Then one day everything changed in a single moment. I was sitting at the back of my anatomy and physiology class, listening quietly, and all at once the energy bodies of every person in the room flared to life before my eyes. Before that day I had to concentrate and soften my vision to glimpse the subtle field, and it would come and go at the edge of my sight. Now it was fully visible, vivid and undeniable, around each of the forty or so students in the room like a second skin of living light.
The teacher that day was a visiting professor. He was a strict materialist and dismissed in public any notion of subtle energy or esoteric healing. As I looked at him I saw a sickly, stagnant green pooling in his field around his back, unlike anything I had ever seen before.
When the class ended I knew I had to speak to him. I walked up to him and said quietly, "You're sick. There's something very wrong with your back." His eyes went wide with shock, and he told me in a low voice, "That's correct. I have spinal problems and live with severe pain." He had not confided this to anyone, and I will never forget the look on his face.
A world of light
When I left the building that day I stepped into a world transformed. Everywhere I looked the field shimmered around living things, plain to see without any effort of concentration. I felt I had landed on another planet and was seeing reality for the first time.
Trees, bushes, animals and people were all joined in one vast, flowing field, alive with movement and light. On every leaf I could see globules of energy dancing in the process of photosynthesis, as the plants took in the light of the Sun. A single unified field of consciousness vibrated and pulsed all around me and through me, and I stood inside it on an ordinary street in Salt Lake City.
That afternoon was a powerful Kundalini awakening, brought on by the intense bodywork, the Kundalini sessions, the ritual study and the single-minded devotion I had carried through that whole period. The energy that the yogis say lies coiled at the base of the spine had risen, and my seeing had risen with it. From that day on I was able to see and work with these fields in a controlled and deliberate way.
What I saw
What I saw in the anatomy class was the light of the body that my theurgic reading had spoken of, the body of light. The Platonists wrote of it as the ochēma, the luminous vehicle of the soul. My Kundalini teacher spoke of the subtle body and its currents, and my bodywork teachers, when they spoke of it at all, spoke of an energy field around the physical form. Each was describing the same thing, and in that classroom I saw it with my own eyes.
In our Central Doctrine we teach that there is among the world's traditions an agreement that this inner light exists, from the indigenous shamanic peoples to the most devout of Catholic priests. The Taoist practitioners call it qi, and the Eastern teacher speaks of prāṇa or the subtle body. The mystery schools throughout the ages have explained this inner light together with their teaching of secret knowledge and illumination.
I teach the first encounter with the body of light from long experience of my own and of my students. It begins in meditation or in ritual, when you are focused on feeling and experiencing the living ground of the body, and an opening of awareness comes in which you meet the body of light that fills the same space. When you come into contact with it consciously it can be a bit of a shock, and a true encounter is impossible to just write off as a delusion. The body of light is always there, and it works much like our autonomic processes, such as the autonomic nervous system, of which we normally remain unaware.
A beginner sees "something" and cannot yet tell whether it stood in the room or in the imagination, and that uncertainty is itself one of the first signs of the encounter (Central Doctrine, Ch. 31, §31.5.2). After several successive experiences in ritual the body of light becomes luminous and continuous. Outwardly it is a field of light about the body, and inwardly it is a luminous visionary state.
For our methods and training to be applied we teach one objective fact first, that you are emitting light. Our plants absorb the Sun's light and with its energy split water and release the oxygen on which nearly all animal life depends. All our foods are converted forms of sunlight, and our own metabolizing bodies give off a faint light of their own (Central Doctrine, Ch. 31, §31.1.2). We teach that the light by which the body lives and the light of the soul's vehicle are a single light, shining in the flesh and in the soul from Our Divine Infinite Being.
We also teach the difference between two kinds of awareness of this light. To be aware of the body of light is to know it as an object, a glow seen around a knee, a back or a leaf. To be aware from the body of light is to dwell in it and perceive from it as your own center. I have taught my students for many years that the aura is seen and the body of light is the place one sees from (Central Doctrine, Ch. 31, §31.5).
A practice built on awareness from the body of light treats the vehicle as what we already are, and the work becomes a change of the place from which we are aware. Its success shows as a shift in the seer, as the center of awareness moves from the narrow, stepwise, time-bound point of the personal mind to the luminous vehicle of the whole human being. After all it is you, as I so often tell my students. In our School the ochēma is recovered and never built, and the work awakens us to the sphere we have always been.
The O.T.O. friend
During that same year I became close friends with a longstanding member of the Ordo Templi Orientis, the O.T.O., a magical order grounded in the Thelemic philosophy of Aleister Crowley. Crowley led the order from the 1920s and reshaped it around The Book of the Law. The O.T.O. works its members through a series of initiatory degrees, and it celebrates in public the Gnostic Mass that Crowley wrote for it. After years of reading Crowley mostly on my own, I had a friend who had lived inside the order's work for a long time.
Together we went into a series of rituals and shared our work with the Tarot. We stayed up late night after night talking about the nature of reality, about theurgy and about the architecture of the soul and its bodies. I brought to those talks what I was seeing at the table and in the classroom, and he brought the long experience of the order.
Through those collaborations my interest in theurgy grew even more intense. I began to experience the transformative effects of ritual practice on a scale I had never dreamed possible.
Teaching the seeing
The ability I woke to in that anatomy class is one I still teach to my students today, and many of them reach these perceptions within a single weekend retreat. These abilities are dormant gifts in all of us waiting to be remembered.
The seeing of the field has become my signature exercise, and my testimony goes with it. The field outside of your body, and the same field around all metabolizing life, can be seen, and I teach this to audiences when I am out speaking. Near the end of the class I have each student pair up with another for the exercise. Most of my students see it within the time given using this technique, and I have had several classes where one hundred percent of the students were able to see it.
A well-known metaphysical description of this field calls it the "aura". Whatever its properties, it is easy enough to see with the naked eye, and the exercise takes about ten minutes. If we ever meet in person, I will show you. As I have said to my students many times, it's not metaphysical, it's actually there.
The tree and the sky
There is a way to practice this alone, and I have done it successfully for years. When you are walking down the street, sitting in a park or out in the natural world of any sort, and can turn your attention away from your thoughts, look at the perimeter, the topmost branches, of a tree where it has the blue sky as its background. While holding those branches in full focus, try with all your might both to keep the tree in focus and to draw the blue sky into focus behind it.
You will find that you cannot do both, but the effort causes something very special to happen. We live in and experience three-dimensional space, yet our eyes focus and refocus on two-dimensional surfaces, and that gives more of a three-dimensional illusion. When you do this exercise a green aura will zip around the tree into your line of sight. You will see it, and if you are doing it correctly it is impossible to deny that you see it.
It may take a few tries before it begins to happen all the time, both when you call it and when you do not. Once you have seen the aura of the tree and you keep spending time with it, you can see the green aura absorbing light from the Sun in what look like luminous globules. What you are seeing is photosynthesis. You can see it happening, and nearly everyone I have helped with this exercise in person has seen it.
Once you have done it with the branches of a tree a few times, you use the same method on people, on other forms of metabolizing life and on every kind of plant. Even mountains and open meadows will light up. What the trained eye sees is the living world drinking in the Sun's light, which is what the leaf is truly doing, while the chemistry of photosynthesis runs in its chloroplasts below the scale of the eye.
I also teach students to tell the light of the living world from the small effects of the eye itself. A halo of complementary color appears at the edge of any figure you stare at hard, and bright points dart about against a blue sky, the white blood cells passing through the small vessels of the retina. Both are ordinary, and a student who knows them can set them aside and see what remains.
In a practical way you are using a directed, purposeful concentration to widen your field of vision so that you can see the body of light. You can train yourself to see it, and over time you can make the seeing more permanent. In my teaching on the co-equal masculine and feminine I give this method as the masculine knower, the observer, acting on the feminine nature of the physical world. The knower sees into its occult nature and uncovers the body of light that interpenetrates and surrounds the planet (Central Doctrine, Ch. 31, §31.10).
If you continue, you discover in time that the seeing itself has changed. Where before you were looking at a light around things, you are now seeing from a light that includes both the tree and the one who sees it.