Awareness Guide: Nine Principles for Daily Living

by Amy Putkonen

www.TaoTeChingDaily.com

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©2013 Tao Te Ching Daily / Amy Putkonen All Rights Reserved

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Table of Contents

Table of Contents Dedication ........................................................................................................................... 5 A Little Background ............................................................................................................ 5 How to Use This Guide ........................................................................................................ 8 Introduction to Awareness .................................................................................................. 9 Introduction to the Chakras .............................................................................................. 10 1: The Root Chakra ............................................................................................................. 11 2: The Passion Chakra ....................................................................................................... 13 3: The Power Chakra ......................................................................................................... 16 4: The Love Chakra ........................................................................................................... 19 5: The Communication Chakra ......................................................................................... 21 6: The Third Eye (Sixth Chakra) ....................................................................................... 23 7: The Crown Chakra ......................................................................................................... 26 8: The Soul Chakra ............................................................................................................ 29 9: The Universal Chakra .................................................................................................... 33 Conclusion ......................................................................................................................... 34 Resources ........................................................................................................................... 36

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Dedication There are a lot of amazing people that have supported me in doing my work. Firstly, my wonderful husband, Eric and my daughter, Tatia. They had to endure my many days of writing and not paying attention to them as much as I would have liked to while I did my work. This work is also dedicated to all of those who have gone before me in doing work with the Tao that made my own work possible - Hua Ching Ni for being my ongoing inspiration to be the best person I can be. Also Deng Ming-Dao for helping me to believe in my work and for creating such beautiful work of his own to inspire me. To Jonathan Star for helping me to find a way to do my own version of the Tao Te Ching and to Dr. Wayne Dyer for being the launching pad that got me going on this entire project.

To my family and friends, you inspire me every day to be my best self and to believe in who I am. I love you.

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A Little Background As a whole, self development is a vague topic. You can get advice here and there, but how do you really develop yourself?

The Tao Te Ching is the perfect little self help book. It offers timeless advice for issues that have been plaguing humanity since we crawled out of the caves. The text itself is over 2,500 years old and yet is just as relevant today as it ever was.

As I was writing about the chapters on my blog, Tao Te Ching Daily, people would ask me how to practice this work. I didn’t have a good answer for them. You could read different versions of the text on a regular basis. Or you could re-write the chapters in your own words as I did. Both of these methods are great for studying the text. People have been doing that for centuries.

But I thought it would be nice to have a framework for studying this work. I thought that there must be some way to bring the advice out of this little book so that we can use it to study our own lives.

With this in mind, I read through the text looking for themes, or principles, to study. I found nine. I am sure there are many more, but nine is a good number because it represents completion. I love numerology and this felt right because there are 81 chapters in the Tao Te Ching. So nine was perfect.

But it still left me with a question of how to structure the work so that it guided us to study all parts of ourselves. I considered the chakras as a good framework. Overall, the chakras give us a comprehensive overview of our lives. It was the perfect framework for our ancient principles.

There is a nine chakra system from the Que’ro shamans in South America that fits nicely with the natural Taoist perspective of life. I thought that it would be fun to weave them together to come up with the overall framework that you see in this ecourse.

The ecourse that goes along with these guides is the basic introduction to these nine principles. The ecourse covers the basics, but these guides give you a little deeper study of the different chakras. From what they mean, at least from my perspective, to how you can incorporate them into your life. For me, that whole practice of going through this has been very helpful for going deeper with these principles and to find a way to look at the principles in all parts of my life. You can join the ecourse here if you have not already done so.

So that is the scope of this project. This is the first of nine little mini-guidebooks - Awareness - the first principle we cover in the ecourse. I hope you enjoy it! If you

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haven’t signed up for the free ecourse, please do so you can see the rest of the work. In the ecourse, we have a FB group so you can meet the other participants. On the group, you can post whatever you find interesting that you have been learning as you go along. We all learn from each other.

I am not a guru, by any stretch of the imagination. Nor I am a Chinese scholar. I am just a regular person who is interested in connecting the Tao more deeply into my own life. I love sharing my ideas and would love to hear your ideas about how this has work has affected your life. Please post your thoughts in our Facebook group discussions.

The Tao Te Ching teaches us that we all have the potential to be great human beings. We are all part of Tao. If we are all Tao, we are all good enough to do this work - to stand in our own power with it and to make it our own.

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How to Use This Guide There is a guidebook for each principle. You can use it however you want. Some might decide to study one principle each week like we are doing in the ecourse. You may decide to study one principle a month, or one a year. That is totally up to you. People are starting the ecourse at any time, so there are always varying levels of where people are at as you go to the Facebook group and enter your comments.

Anyway you want to do it is good. You could do a rotation where you have the grids printed out (from the ecourse) - you can tape them up on your wall or post them somewhere that you will see them on a regular basis. I encourage you to keep a special notebook for this work as there are many times when you will want to reflect upon this information. See where it takes you. Share your ideas. You will get a lot from reading the comments of others in the Facebook group. Share what you have learned so that others may learn from you.

Each principle has a separate little guidebook. You can download them on your Kindle or print them out and put them in a little binder. The guidebooks are meant as a starting point for you. They are designed so you can come up with some ideas, to help you to uncover yourself.

These are just my thoughts. You may want to write your own thoughts of what this work is telling you. What does it mean to you when you take that principle and dive deeply into that area of your being? I have only thought of a few things. You will discover many more.

Throughout this guide, we will take you through the chakras and the varying levels of existence. We will look at how you can use awareness with each of these principles and how you can use awareness practice to get more familiar and strengthen that chakra in your life.

These concepts are pretty simple. Let the words flow over you. Let yourself create more ideas. My words are only my perception of what all of this means. You may have an entirely different meaning.

My goal is to create a space for people to explore these principles. I want you to surpass what I am doing. This guide is just a starting block for you to discover yourself. Share. Share. Share. We love the sharing because that is how we get the connection to each other and we help to encourage each other to live more fully and that is what this is about - living more fully.

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Introduction to Awareness Awareness is a nebulous concept. In some ways, it is like a light switch. You are either aware or not aware in any given second. Conversely, there are varying degrees of awareness in your day to day activity. For example, if you are going for a walk and you are hearing the birds, you might be aware of the birds. In that moment, your mind is focused on one thing and your attention is fully on that one thing - the birds.

Awareness is the ability to notice what is going on around you and inside you. Awareness is about paying attention. Your attention can go in so many directions. In our multitasking world, when you divide your attention amongst multiple things you really don’t have the clarity of attention.

The question is, what are you going to put your awareness on?

Your awareness is always on something. Your awareness is sometimes in the past. Sometimes you are daydreaming about the future. Any time that you are not in the present moment, you are not aware.

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Introduction to the Chakras This guide is not meant as a comprehensive study of the chakras, but more as a light dusting of the chakras, along with a deep dive into how this specific principle affects each chakra.

Here is a quick summary of each of the chakras:

1 - The Root Chakra: Deals primarily with safety, security and survival. It is about grounding. This chakra can also relate to addictions.

2 - The Passion Chakra: Deals with passion, pleasure and money. It is also related to creativity and addictions.

3 - The Power Chakra: Relates to your personal power, your will and your status in life.

4 - The Heart Chakra: Relates to matters of the heart - compassion, forgiveness and connection.

5 - The Communication Chakra: Concerned with issues of communication with others, self-expression and telling our truth.

6 - The Third Eye: The center of insight, intuition and trust.

7 - The Crown Chakra: Our connection to spirit.

8 - The Soul Chakra: This chakra is unique to the model we are studying. It relates to the various iterations of our soul throughout lifetimes, the stamp of our labels and who we are in relation to our different parts of ourselves.

9 - The Universal Chakra: This chakra is your reality as Tao or God, the creator of the Universe and all that has ever been in it.

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1: The Root Chakra For this first part in our series, we are going to focus on awareness from the perspective of our root chakra.

Our root chakra is all about our security in the world. How safe do you feel? Where does your sense of security come from? Think about these things. Half the battle in awareness is just to spend time thinking about things. Be conscious.

The first chakra is about survival.

Pay attention to your level of fear throughout your day. How much of your daily activity comes down to feeling safe? The subject of your safety could be anything. It can be your physical safety, but it can also be monetary, relationships, job safety...anything. Listen to your self talk and see what you are saying about safety concerns.

Just notice these things without judgement. Observe your patterns. As you go through this series, there will be lots of things that come up. Many of them will be ugly - things you would rather not look at in yourself. Much of the work of the Tao Te Ching is looking at your failures in a new light. Every part of you is accepted in this work. Discovering these parts of yourself that have long been hidden can be very rewarding.

Addictions

The root chakra is also about addictions. Are you addicted to anything? Notice any impulses you have in your everyday life and the feelings that go with them.

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A long time ago, I used to smoke cigarettes. My sister and I decided to quit one day. We lived together at the time, so we did it together. We took a class and they had us write down every cigarette we had and what our reason was for having one. For some reason, it worked because neither one of us ever smoked again and that was more than 15 years ago now. I think a big part of that was because we became fully aware of our habit’s language and we supported each other. We took it very seriously and we talked about it together every day while we were going through it. Awareness was critical to overcoming this difficult habit.

There is a lot of merit to looking deeply into the face of our addictions. We all probably have something that we are addicted to. It is human nature. The key is not to judge ourselves, but just to become aware of it. Look at it with a sense of curiosity, as if you were watching a scientific test subject!

Sex & Passion

Another aspect of the root chakra is our relationship to sex. Other chakras deal with this subject as well, of course, but this would be the relationship to the raw element of sex – our more basal animal instincts. Our species survives because of reproduction, so it is a vital part of this aspect of our humanness. What is your attitude towards sex? Do you have any fears in this area? If so, just notice them. Journal about them if you want or just reflect. How aware are you in this area of your life?

The most important thing with any of these exercises is not to judge. These are not exercises in self-bashing. We are studying ourselves. We are uncovering the beautiful thing that is YOU. If it helps, imagine that you are someone else looking at your life. Try and observe yourself unattached and see what comes up.

There have been many people who have compared the chakras in the body to the evolution of humanity. Our development is a spiral. The very base of the chakra spiral is mere survival. When we are stuck in our first chakra, we stay in a place of fear – in fight or flight mode. It’s that reptilian brain of ours. You can find it there at the base of our existence. Without it, we would not survive. We procreate simply for the sake of continuing our species. That is the level of the first chakra. It is like animals. Animals live at those lower levels. We are fortunate to be given this gift of insight.

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2: The Passion Chakra

At some point, we evolved into the second chakra, which involves pleasure.

Awareness is about digging deeply into our way of being and really looking at things. The purpose of awareness is to really look at who we are being. On some level, we know that we are so much more than, “Hi, my name is Amy. I do ___ for a living. I live in the ___ neighborhood.”

Part of this work is about finding our stumbling blocks and acknowledging them.

We are able to notice our patterns and move through them. As we come to recognize our patterns – passion, excitement and pleasure seeking is that second center. The second chakra is about YOU, what do YOU want to bring out into the world? It is important for you to become clear about what it is that you love when looking at the second chakra.

Our bodies are all about sensory pleasure.

Our bodies long for pleasure. We receive pleasure in all kinds of ways. The more we explore pleasure, the more alive we feel. Many things get us excited and make us want to get out of bed in the morning.

Anytime that you are practicing awareness, what you are paying attention to is the sensory stimulus around you and within you.

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Pay attention to your senses and to your body’s reaction to things happening around you. What do you like to taste? What do you like to listen to? What do you like visually in your space? Do this for each of the senses. Feel the feeling in your body as you listen to something you love. How does your body respond to these pleasurable sensations?

Look at someone you love with awareness. Feel how it feels in your body as you look at them. The second chakra is about you and your body. In later chakras, we will come back around to our relationships to others and how that plays out, but for now it is just about you and your senses.

The second chakra is very much in the body.

The second chakra is about our sensuality. Both the first and second chakras relate to our sexual nature, but in very different ways. Where the first chakra relates to the act of procreation that is necessary for continuing our species, in the second chakra we have evolved into gaining pleasure through the sensual nature of connecting with our partner. I think that it is very important in any practice of exploring your passion to include this aspect of your being. Where does your body love to be touched?

I think that many people who have been raised in a strict religious framework have often been taught to fear this aspect of their lives. Sexual pleasure tends to be considered as a darker taboo image and I think this is sad. Like anything else, it is a part of our humanity and we should leave room to appreciate it and learn what it has to teach us. There is great pleasure that can be experienced if you are able to explore this aspect of your being with openness to what can be learned.

Love and Hate

As you go about your day, you will experience things and react to them. For today, become aware of your reactions to love or hate. Hate is just the other side of the coin of love. If you hate something, you have a real passion for it. Anger is a piece of the second chakra.

What are you angry at?

If you see that you are angry about something, really look at it. When I get mad, I get pretty fiery. (I’m a Leo.) I have realized that I have a real opportunity when I look at my anger. It is not that anger is cool, but it is cool to look at it and realize that there is something there or I wouldn’t have had that fuel behind it. My friend, Judith Froemming, talks about anger representing unfairness. Judith is a great resource for conscious awareness because she is a consciousness coach. Her work with awareness has been very helpful to me personally. Judith suggests looking at what you feel is unfair in situations where anger is activated.

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What do you feel is not fair in the world?

If you go through the list of what you think is not fair in the world, you will find a strong reaction in your body to certain things. Investigate these things. Anger is about finding your passion. Anger can be used as a tool to figure out what you want to do in this lifetime. Digging through these trigger points is not about holding on to the anger,but about turning that anger around and saying, “Let’s help things to be better.” This is the universal fuel that drives people to follow their passions.

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3: The Power Chakra If you are a parent, you have seen your children go through various stages of development. They start out as babies in the first chakra, fight or flight mode. They are just about surviving. They don’t have anything really developed yet around emotions. They poop, eat, sleep and cry.

Then they get that first smile.

This is very exciting for the parents! They get into their “terrible twos” and it’s all about MINE! It is all about what pleases them. Second chakra stuff. I was in the airport and there was this little boy next to me. He was very focused on what he wanted. His mother was ignoring him and I think what he really wanted was some attention. He was very adamant. At the second chakra level, it is all about being pleased.

Then we evolve into the personal power of the third chakra. With my daughter, when she was three, I remember distinctly that she was “not a baby”. She was claiming her personal power. That is what this third chakra is. It is about claiming your stake in the world. In the last chakra, we looked at what you are passionate about. For the third chakra, we are going to bring awareness to how you play in the world.

How do you play this game of life?

Practice awareness of where you put yourself on the grid. Do you put yourself at the top or on the bottom? Do you hold high expectations for yourself or are you always struggling to meet the expectations of others? It may be unique for different situations and different environments. How are you being in your space in the world? The third chakra is about your personal domain. It relates to other people in the degree that we are looking at your position with regards to others. How do you work with others or relate with them in terms of your power? Are you handing over your power or are you possibly wielding it a bit heavily?

Practice without judgement.

Throughout this work, it is so important to be an observer of yourself and to not bring yourself down for your mistakes. As you look deeply at yourself, you will start to see things that are not pretty. A big part of awareness is seeing things that are not pretty and looking at it with compassion because you are a human being. This is part of what you are here to do, to observe yourself and to learn from your mistakes.

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Be grateful for your mistakes because they will move you forward.

Without being conscious of your mistakes, you won’t learn anything. I tell this to my daughter all the time because she gets upset with herself sometimes. I am sure that she learned a lot of that from me because I certainly have had times in my life when I have done that. I am working on growing and moving forward. I am working on being a better person every day.

Notice your space in the world.

Notice how you present yourself. What stand do you take in terms of your relationship to other people? Are you a leader or a follower? Look honestly. Do some journaling on this or just go for a walk and reflect on it. What are your relationships like?

Just be aware.

Look at your relationships with your partner, your friends, family, children, neighbors. If there are pieces that you don’t like, just be grateful for the revelation. With this understanding, you can change. Without it, you are still stuck in your old patterns.

You will find a way to move through this because awareness is a huge part of the whole thing. If you don’t want to be walked on all the time, the solution is simple. You just don’t let other people decide what you are going to do! You decide based on what you want, not on what others want for you to do. Understanding this is simple. You are taking back your personal power. Little tiny steps. Put yourself forth.

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Just decide that this is how you are going to do it now. Let people move around you. If you decide you don’t want to be pushed around anymore and there is someone who pushes you around, just put your foot down. At first, it might be difficult. You have to practice to get better at it. Just keep practicing.

You may find in your observations that are people in your life that you just don’t need to be around anymore.

That is OK. As an adult, you are free to choose your own companions. You get to decide that you don’t want to hang with certain people that bring you down. This will do tremendous things for your personal power. You will begin to choose relationships that support your best self and this will bring you higher.

Perhaps you may find the opposite. Perhaps you find that you push other people around. This can happen too. If that is the case, examine what it is about these people that makes you want to keep them in your life. As a person in this position, you have the potential to turn this around and really bring this other person up instead of down. Take a closer look at them and see if you can find out what they are wanting? What do they desire?

Maybe you are the boss. If you are this type of person, how are you bringing yourself out into the world? What are you doing in the world to utilize that ability that you have? If you have that potential to stand strongly, what are you standing for? Maybe you need to live a little bigger. Maybe you are playing it safe by not pushing yourself out there and using those leadership skills that you have. Just become aware of your space in the world. As we go through the chakras in these exercises, we will move it out more into the world. Right now, it is just about becoming aware of your personal domain.

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4: The Love Chakra

The fourth chakra is all about connection. It is about looking at the people and the things that you love and feeling this love deeply. Today, we want to bring awareness to this feeling. Take some time and sit in that space of pure gratitude, pure love. You don’t have to be sitting still to do this. You can be in a grocery store, standing in line and just feel gratitude for the food that is so easily coming to you. You can be in your car, driving to work, and feel gratitude for the job that pays your bills. You can be cooking dinner and feel a sense of love for your family and what they bring into your life. In fact, this practice of cooking with love will do great things for the health of you and your family. Even if you are single and cook for yourself only, you can feel love for yourself and transfer your love into the food you eat. You can move this love outward and think of all of the people you love who are eating meals around you.

Who shares your world?

As you connect with loved ones throughout your days, take a moment and reflect on why you have chosen them to share your world. What is it about them that makes you love them so dearly? I saw a movie once called Hope Springs. It was about this couple that had been together for many years and they had lost their spark. They had gotten so used to being together that they were just going through the motions. They had forgotten to appreciate each other. The movie is about their path back to each other. It is a beautiful film about love and forgiveness.

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Where is it that your love is blocked? Do you have certain people in your life that you love but you are struggling with that love? Byron Katie has been a tremendous help to me during these times. Her simple little process called “The Work” has helped millions of people worldwide to practice forgiveness and to ignite love again.

My sister studies a book called A Course in Miracles. It is a beautiful book about love. In A Course in Miracles, they speak of a choice that we make in every moment to live in love or to live in fear. For today, just be aware of which you are choosing. This is a great gift that you can give to yourself today.

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5: The Communication Chakra According to Wikipedia, we get about 60 to 93% of our communication through body language. So clearly, not all of our understanding comes from the words we say but it is the integrity of our words and our actions that really does the communicating. Your voice in the world must be on cue with what you believe to be true.

You are most effective as a communicator when coming from a place of integrity.

Human beings are wired to pick up non-verbal signals. In other words, people know it when you are full of crap. It is really important when you are communicating with people that your body language matches your words. People sense falseness and it disturbs the mind of the receiver.

Self-development is just that – working on yourself.

You can’t work on yourself and expect other people to change. You need to focus on yourself. It may be very tempting in a lesson on communication to focus on how everybody else has not communicated properly with you. In preparing this chapter, I went there more than once! Yikes. No. It is about observing your own communication.

Observe your internal and external dialogue.

What words are you saying and how do they match up with your truth? What is that voice in your head telling you these days? This is not about fixing anything. Today we are just observers. We are observing ourselves and noticing what is going on. Perhaps you can do some free-writing in a journal to get those words down on paper that go

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rambling around in your head. I like to record myself with a recorder so I can hear my words and listen to them. I have a lot of words!

Another thing you can do is to practice being silent. Play with silence. Being silent lets you be a receiver and see more clearly without the distractions of words in the air. You may find some things surfacing in the silence. It also lets you hear your internal dialogue with awareness.

With awareness comes power.

Awareness of our internal and external dialogue gives us the power to decide if this communication is true for us. Is this how we want to talk to ourselves? If not, make up new things to say! That negative voice in your head doesn’t have to be the only king or queen in the land. Add some new voices. Talk to some of your role models and ask them what they have to say to you. Try it. They might have some better things to say.

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6: The Third Eye (Sixth Chakra)

How do you perceive the world?

Seeing comes up a lot in the Tao Te Ching. How much are you listening with your eyes? Are you really seeing things? The best way to practice awareness is to try and have an open mind. That means to look at things from a fresh perspective.

Look at things as if you were seeing them for the first time.

The sixth chakra is more than just your sight. We use the word “see“ a lot to mean perception. “I see” means “I understand”. We replace vision with knowledge. We talk about having a vision of how your life is going to work out or we say you have a vision for your company. We say these words, we interchange them, but vision is really about clarity and having some perspective.

So much of this work is about letting go.

One of the teachings from the Tao Te Ching is to respect the space of not knowing. If your cup is full and you already know all the answers, you don’t have the emptiness that is required to be able to absorb what is being taught to you. That is something that you want to be aware of!

Are you an intelligent person? How do you deal with not knowing things? Do you have high expectations of knowing everything? I consider myself a pretty smart person, so I struggle with this one. I feel like I know the answer a lot of times and no one can tell me anything other than what I already know. I listen for their answer based on whether or not they are with my perception or not. If not, they don’t know the answer because I know it already!

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I think the best way to practice awareness of perception is with those things that bring up the most frustration for you. It can bring forth issues that challenge us. Where do you get frustrated with people? Do you often find that people are not as smart as you would like them to be? What about? These triggers of frustration may indicate areas you need to work on.

These are the places where you have a brittle understanding.

Brittle understandings are fragile in the sense that they are not flexible. If you have brittleness, it can break. It should break. It should give way to more flexibility. We know from the work that we have done from the Tao Te Ching that flexibility is very important. Water is one of the most powerful forces on earth and one of the reasons that it is so powerful is because of its ability to move beyond anything. Water is very flexible.

Wherever you have that brittleness in your thinking, those are the areas to focus your awareness on.

Let those brittle beliefs be your teachers. What is it that you need to learn about that? When you feel like you are right about something, it is very difficult to move away from the belief. There is an ancient story about a monk pouring his student some tea. The student’s cup was full and the monk kept pouring tea and it overflowed. When the student asked why, the monk said that it was because the student’s cup was already full. There was no more room for his tea! This famous story illustrates what this chakra is teaching us.

Be open to the possibility that you are wrong.

We learn from that space of openness - when we realize that there are other ways to be in the world. I have some areas of my life where I am quite stubborn. I have a hard time giving up my side of the story. I know that I am closing myself off from the world when I am like that. I am closing myself off from people that may have something to teach me.

I know that I am right about something and it’s all over.

Can you relate to this? We all do this. The very thing that got me upset with some belief structures, ironically, was the idea that the people who have these beliefs are not open. I am against that brittleness and it is my own. We are always fighting against our own mirrors. We are fighting against who we are.

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Everything that is in our perception is just a mirror of some aspect of ourselves.

When you understand that you are fighting against yourself, when you get that your own brittleness can be your teacher, you are ready to learn about yourself. You have true understanding.

The sixth chakra is about breaking free of brittleness.

The word is awareness. Be aware of your perceptions. Notice how other people’s perceptions of the world are different than your own and how you respond to this fact. All of it is perfect.

If you get upset, be aware of getting upset.

Getting upset offers a great opportunity because you are brittle in that moment. You have hit upon something big. Right in front of you is a big belief that you are sure that you are right about. It is a perfect opportunity to study yourself! It is the perfect moment to see where your beliefs are stuck. What is it about this thought that has you so clinging to it? Many times, you have been judged. So you judge. Two sides of a coin. It comes back at you.

Brittle thinking puts you in that space where you can’t be anything but judgement.

You know that space. You have been on both sides of it – the judge and the judged. It is not pretty. Giving up being right is like giving up a big pile of gold. It just seems so wrong!

But if you are right, what is to stop you from just being curious about the other side of the issue? This curiosity can lead to great things. This curiosity can lead to world peace eventually. You don’t have to go to the other side. You just need to listen and imagine the opposite perspective with an open mind and heart. That’s all.

The important thing to remember about our third eye is that information comes to us from everywhere. In the movies, we hear a clear voice in our head and it tells us what to do. That may be the case for some people, but for many of us the voices come through the mouths of our loved ones - and often from those who we do not love so much. The awareness here is to be open to all of these messages and to just practice being ready to empty your cup.

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7: The Crown Chakra

In most traditional chakra models, the seventh chakra is the last chakra.

This is the last chakra in the human body, so most chakra models stop there. I am following a nine chakra model, as found in Dr. Alberto Villoldo’s wonderful book, Shaman, Healer, Sage. The seventh chakra is our connection to source. I think of it like plugging in a piece of electrical equipment. It’s our recharging chakra.

The Tao Te Ching teaches us a lot about source.

The seventh chakra teaches us to be aware of our source. If we look at who we are, we are not the body. As we become aware of our source, we learn what we are not. The higher chakras help us to look outside ourselves and realize that we are more than this body.

Who are we?

Many Christians are raised to believe there is a God “out there” somewhere. There is a God out there who isn’t me. He is out there and he is going to decide my fate. When I die, my body dies and what happens to me? For many people, the thought of death is a very frightening one, especially if one has been raised to believe in Hell after death and a harsh judging God. Sadly, this causes many people to live in fear for most of their lives. It causes many people to lose their true connection to source because they do not believe that they are a part of source, part of God.

How do I connect to God?

Awareness is being conscious of your perceptions. Awareness is so basic. How do you know God or Tao? How does God or Tao feel to you? Whatever your determine your source to be, how does it feel? How does God/Tao taste? How does God/Tao smell? Notice the things in your world that speak to you of the source.

With awareness, you might observe the miracle of a flower in bloom.

I love human anatomy. I am so amazed by what a perfect machine the body is. I look at my body, I am detached from it in the sense that I know that I am more than my body,

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but it is just so miraculous. You look at a newborn baby and they are just so perfect. You look at puppies. So cute! You look at people. They are so unique and so complex!

Yet most of us are living our lives like it is nothing special.

The source inspires us to look bigger. If you think of yourself as just a human being, alone in the world, trying to live this life with all the pain and suffering that is there, you go through life and think, “What is it all for?”

What about a size 28 version of life?

What would that be like? So much bigger! Look at the role of the president or the leader of your country. When you think about a president… they are in charge of figuring out what is going on with an entire country. That is living big! lol… It is such a huge responsibility. The source has all that in spades. We spend so much time in our little minds, living our little lives, just going by day to day.

It astounds me is when scientists are like, “We got this.”

No, no you really don’t! We have this tiny pinpoint version of the world and there is just so much potential outside of what we know! We need to trust our source and trust that there is some intelligence way beyond our own that is kind and loving, that is NOT SCARY.

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Awareness means paying attention to signals.

How is source guiding you? How are you being led through this fabulous life? The Tao Te Ching goes back to this again and again. Your mistakes and your failures are all part of the perfection. They are all part of everything that is going on. In our little tiny version of the world, we ask “Why is this happening?” when something major goes wrong. That is like looking at a tiny pin and saying, “Why is this tiny pin suffering?” when there is an entire field of pins! You can’t look at that little pin and worry about that little pin because there are so many variables that we can’t even scratch the surface of why!

We just can’t know.

It’s mind blowing. It is also very comforting. We don’t need to do this to ourselves. We don’t need to worry incessantly about minute things. We realize this when tragedy strikes a large group of people, like during a natural disaster. We quickly realize how insignificant so many things are. What is really important? That we are safe, that we are alive. That is it. Natural disasters also help us to realize how vulnerable we all are. Life can disappear at any moment. It also helps us to realize how much we need each other.

The upper chakras are super charged. Who are we, really? The picture grows. We are not the body. You know that because when you look in an open casket at someone who has passed away, it is clearly not them. Yet the body is such an important part of who we are. The seventh chakra is about appreciating how miraculously and fabulously things happen in our lives and about all the parts we can’t know playing together and becoming one life.

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8: The Soul Chakra There is not as much information out there on the eighth chakra because most chakra models stop at seven. If you consider that who you are is more than just a body in a human form, the nine chakra model makes so much sense. You are so much more than your body. I know it is hard to think like that sometimes. I often feel like I am bound by this lifetime but I am not! It is human to feel like I have these limitations, but they are figments of my imagination!

The eighth chakra is about who you are throughout your soul experience.

Once you start defining yourself as beyond your human form, you can start to ask yourself, “What has my soul been up to?” Think about that. What has your soul been up to?

Your soul experience weaves through your family, your culture, many lifetimes. You have generations of family patterns. You have cultural history. You have the history of your gender, your race, your species. So many ways to look back at your experience over the span of time. This part in our series is about becoming aware of that part of your soul experience.

As you explore the eighth chakra, you have this lifetime and all your other lifetimes which influence your current experience. If you have experienced abuse in one lifetime, for example, there might be disturbances of that on your eighth chakra, a disturbance at the soul level. Maybe in a different lifetime, you do not directly experience abuse but perhaps you find yourself facing it from a different direction in order to heal your soul.

The work of studying the Tao Te Ching brings us outside of our tiny little lives. Our tiny lives are so little a part of who we are in our experience. What am I talking about here when I say we? I am talking about we as humankind, as beings. Not even humankind, because humankind puts us in the form of the body. What I am really talking about here is the spirit, or energy that is us – collectively.

The eighth chakra does not go through time because time does not exist at that level.

One way to think of this “psuedo-time” distinction is to think of the layers of an onion and each lifetime as a layer, each lifetime that your soul has experienced life. Think about those experiences and how those experiences have evolved.

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Evolution is the movement of our collective spirit through experience.

Evolution can be defined as experiences building upon experiences. We share a lot of experience with other beings. I think that we limit ourselves when we think in terms of our own [body] experience because our experience is more like the water inside a bucket. The bucket is like our human form. If you have two buckets overflowing in a tub of water, who is to say what is one soul and another soul? You may have a different perspective on it, but you share energetic expressions with other people.

As a culture, we have these shared experiences.

We have these shared experiences and we call them “reality” because our neighbor agrees with us. We define something as truth when someone agrees with us or it matches our understanding of that belief. What about other cultures? What about their beliefs, their truths? You might wish to think that they are in a different tub altogether. On some levels, they may be.

There are lots of ways that you can explain the layers.

You can look at it in terms of the soul and the soul layers and how many lifetimes you have lived or you may think of it in terms of family dynamics that live through your spirit…things that are taught from parent to child or grandchild.

They say it takes seven generations for a pattern to dissolve.

If a parent abuses a child, then a child has remnants of that abuse on their soul, then it passes down to their child, and so on. That is assuming that that the behavior stops after the first generation! Many times, the behavior just continues indefinitely. When a parent has suffered trauma, they often do not want to pass it down to their children, but no matter what they do it shows up again to be healed in later generations. Many of us can relate to having some exposure, even indirectly, to these experiences and feeling a deep desire to have them healed.

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People want to be helpful and move others forward! But sometimes we can’t help ourselves. It is like your hand is being dragged into the cookie jar! We are drawn to do certain things. We know that it is not right, but it is just part of the pattern fulfilling itself. If we can become aware, that is a great start to healing. That is what the Tao Te Ching is all about. It is about becoming aware of how we live in the world, of how we BE in the world in such a way that we disturb the world for future generations as little as possible.

In studying the Tao Te Ching, we try to live in such a way that our influence in the world is a positive one, that we move the world forward. If you ask people what they want out of this life, improving the world would probably be on many people’s lists.

We can all support each other in moving forward.

We can see the vision of potential in our loved ones. That is what we are here to do. If you think about the eighth chakra and your lifetime as just being one layer of the onion, what is the plan for your soul? Are you going to stretch it and grow it? Are you working on damaging it? (Some people are!)

I know that I have done some things in my lifetime that have damaged me in some way. It is just a part of my experience. This work is a big part of my healing. This work inspires me. I have been so inspired by Master Ni, Deng Ming-Dao, Wayne Dyer, Jonathan Star, Byron Katie, and many others. People who have made their incredible work available for us. My blog readers inspire me. Whenever I get a new comment from someone who tells me their story of how this work has impacted them, I know that I am on the right path.

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Awareness of your soul’s path is an important part of your development. Where is your soul headed? Spend some time with this idea and threads will appear before you that have woven throughout time.

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9: The Universal Chakra

You are the Universe.

The Universe/Tao/God is you, but at an entirely new level. This is not about your everyday YOU. This is about the part of you that is Tao (or God, Allah, however you choose to define it). We are not used to thinking of ourselves like that. We are used to looking at our selves as a human beings, in a body. We know inherently that we are not the body as we look at someone who has died. We know that who they are has left the shell behind.

We know about the spirit. We know that our body can change but we are still the same person inside. We understand this. There is a layer of who we are that stretches throughout our experiences. (This is the eighth chakra, as we discussed earlier in part 8.) For the ninth chakra, we go beyond that to ALL things, all creation.

A Taoist Exercise

Close your eyes. Sit silently and picture that you are everything. You can practice this on little things, like a bird. Watch a bird and visualize that you are that bird. People are able to become animals because they understand that, on a deep level, they are the same. All of this is just a big play. We are all just actors in a play. We are also the director of our play! We don’t have to just be the actors, playing our little parts. We can be the director.

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The Director /Observer is Tao

The observer is YOU on some level. That is the ninth chakra. When you are healing the ninth chakra, you are healing the Universe. On one level, there is really nothing to heal. Tao is perfection. Healing does not exist at this level as there is no need for it. This chakra is about getting to that space. Most of us are not there. I can explain it, but I am learning. It is a matter of just doing our best, moving forward, having moments of recognition. Can you be the awareness of a tree? What would it be like to be a tree? Picture the awareness of that. We can access that understanding, anytime. When you need it, when your life is crazy and chaotic, just be the tree. There’s tremendous power in that.

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Conclusion So that is the nine chakras. Each one unique in its pattern, but together they make up the framework that is your life. More than that, these nine chakras make up your being, which expands way beyond this life. It is my hope that you have found some nuggets here to move you forward. The next guidebook can be found here.

If you have read this guide and still have not signed up for the ecourse, you may want to do that here.

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Resources Here are a few resources that I think are really helpful on Awareness...

What We Say Matters (book) - I SO loved this book. The authors, Judith & Ike Lasater, offer wonderful advice on living your word. Dr. Judith Lasater is the founder of the Yoga Journal magazine and has been teaching yoga practices since 1971.

Jon Kabat-Zinn (Video, 1:12 min.) - Jon Kabat-Zinn has a wonderful simple approach to mindfulness. He is author of numerous books on awareness and is a founding member of the Cambridge Zen Center.

Mindfulness Bell (app) - Years ago, my husband thought it would be cool if there was an app that generated random chimes so that you could remember to stay mindful. This is that app. (Available in Apple & Android.)

Women, Food & God (book) - If you have ever struggled with food, this book is a good one because she teaches you to use awareness to get a better understanding of your relationship to food.

Buddify (app) - This little app helps you to stay on track with your meditation and to keep track of what you are experiencing.

Mindful.org (website) - An online community of resources and articles by the makers of Mindful magazine.

Byron Katie (website) – Byron Katie’s work has helped me through many pickles in my work on relationships. She has such a beautiful and simple way to inspire forgiveness in both yourself and your relationships. She has lot of videos that you can watch for free online if you have never experienced her work. I highly recommend the audio versions of her books as she records the actual sessions and you can listen to the people as they move through the process. I’ve added a good one for you to watch below… you can get copies of her “Judge Your Neighbor Worksheet” on her website here.