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People who "see energy" can describe with some precision the anatomy of the energy body, and their descriptions tend to corroborate one another. These descriptions are now backed by electromagnetic measurements, and they also correlate with descriptions of subtle energies found throughout the world, understood in each culture’s own terms and concepts. The meridians, chakras, and aura are three terms that have entered our language, but other energy systems have been identified as well. One of the individuals known for being able to "see" or clairvoyantly read the body’s energies, Donna Eden, describes nine energy systems that impact body and mind.

1. Meridians
2. Chakras
3. Aura
4. Basic Grid
5. Celtic Weave
6. Five Rhythms
7. Triple Warmer
8. Radiant Circuits
9. The Electrics

The following descriptions of the nine systems are built around nine analogies, each designed to give you a more concrete sense of the nature and function of one of these invisible systems.

1) The Meridians: In the way an artery carries blood, a meridian carries energy. As the body's energy bloodstream, the meridian system brings vitality and balance, removes blockages, adjusts metabolism, and even determines the speed and form of cellular change. The flow of the meridian energy pathways is as critical as the flow of blood. No energy, no life. Meridians affect every organ and every physiological system, including the immune, nervous, endocrine, circulatory, respiratory, digestive, skeletal, muscular, and lymphatic systems. Each system is fed by at least one meridian. If a meridian's energy is obstructed or unregulated, the system it feeds is jeopardized. The meridians include fourteen tangible channels that carry energy into, through, and out of your body. Your meridian pathways also connect hundreds of tiny, distinct reservoirs of heat and electromagnetic energy along the surface of the skin. These are your acupuncture points, and they can be stimulated with needles or physical pressure to release or redistribute energy along the meridian pathway.

2) The Chakras: The word chakra translates from the Sanskrit as disk, vortex, or wheel. The chakras are concentrated centers of energy. Each major chakra in the human body is a center of swirling energy positioned at one of seven points, from the base of your spine to the top of your head. Where the meridians deliver their energy to the organs, the chakras bathe the organs in their energies. Each chakra supplies energy to specific organs, corresponds to a distinct aspect of your personality, and resonates (respectively, from the bottom to the top chakra) with one of seven universal principles having to do with survival, creativity, identity, love, expression, comprehension, or transcendence. Your chakras also code your experiences in their energies, just as memories are chemically coded in your neurons. An imprint of every emotionally significant event you have experienced is believed to be recorded in your chakra energies. A sensitive practitioner's hand held over a chakra may resonate with pain in a related organ, congestion in a lymph node, subtle abnormalities in heat or pulsing, areas of emotional turmoil, or even tune into a stored memory that might be addressed as part of the healing process.

3) The Aura: Your aura is a multi-layered shell of energy that emanates from your body and interacts with the energies of your environment. It is itself a protective atmosphere that surrounds you, filtering out many of the energies you encounter and drawing in others that you need. Like a space suit, your aura protects you from harmful energies. Like a radio antenna, it brings in energies with which it resonates. The aura is a conduit, a two-way antenna that brings in energy from the environment to your chakras and that sends energy from your chakras outward. When you feel happy, attractive, and spirited, your aura may fill an entire room. When you are sad, despondent, and somber, your aura crashes in on you, forming an energetic shell that isolates you from the world. Some people’s auras characteristically reach out and embrace you. Others keep you out like an electric fence. A study conducted by Valerie Hunt, a neurophysiologist at UCLA's Energy Fields Laboratory, compared "aura readings" with neurophysiological measures. The auras seen by eight practitioners not only corresponded with one another, they correlated with wave patterns picked up by electrodes on the skin at the spot that was being observed.

4) The Basic Grid: The basic grid is your body’s foundational energy. Like the chassis of a car, all the other energy systems ride on the energy of the basic grid. For instance, when you are lying down, it would appear to a seer such as Donna that each of your chakras sits upon this foundational energy. Grid energy is sturdy and fundamental. But severe trauma can damage and deform the grid, and when this occurs, it does not usually repair itself spontaneously. Rather, the other energy systems adjust themselves to the damaged grid, much as a personality may be formed around early traumatic experiences. Repairing a person’s basic grid is one of the most advanced and intense forms of energy therapy. If a grid’s structure or a car’s chassis is sound, you never notice it is there; if it is damaged, nothing else is quite right.

5) The Celtic Weave: The body’s energies spin, spiral, curve, twist, crisscross, and weave themselves into patterns of magnificent beauty. The equilibrium of this kaleidoscope of colors and shapes is maintained by an energy system known by different names to energy healers throughout the world. In the East, it has been called the "Tibetan energy ring." In yoga tradition, it is represented by two curved lines that cross seven times, symbolically encasing the seven chakras. In the West, it is seen in the caduceus, the intertwined serpents ­also crossing seven times­found on the staff that is the symbol of the medical profession. Donna uses the term Celtic weave not only because she has a personal affinity with Celtic healing, but also because the pattern looks to her like the old Celtic drawings of a spiraling, sideways infinity sign, never beginning and never ending and sometimes forming a triple spiral. Like an invisible thread that keeps all the energy systems functioning as a single unit, the Celtic weave networks throughout and around the body in spiraling figure-eight patterns. The double helix of DNA is this pattern in microcosm. The left hemisphere’s control of the right side of the body and the right hemisphere’s control of the left side is this pattern writ large.

6) The Five Rhythms: Your meridians, chakras, aura, and other essential energies are influenced by a more pervasive energy system. Donna does not see it as a separate energy but rather as a rhythm that runs through all the others, leaving its vibratory imprint on physical attributes, health patterns, and personality traits. Mapped long ago in traditional Chinese medicine, all of life was categorized into five "elements," "movements," or "seasons" (there is no perfect translation­all three terms have been used, suggesting qualities of being both cyclical and substantial). These energies were considered the building blocks of the universe, providing a basis for understanding how the world works, how societies organize themselves, and what the human body needs to maintain health. Metaphors for describing these five distinct rhythms have drawn from concrete, observable elements of nature (water, wood, fire, earth, and metal) and from the seasons (winter, spring, summer, Indian summer, and autumn). Like the background music during a movie, the person's primary rhythm, in combination with the changing rhythms of life's seasons, directs the tone and mood of the entire energy system and sets the atmosphere of the life being lived.

7) The Triple Warmer: Triple warmer is the meridian that networks the energies of the immune system to attack an invader, and it mobilizes the body’s energies in an emergency for the fight-or-flight-or-freeze response. In carrying out these critical functions, it operates in ways that are so beyond the range of any other meridian that some consider it a system unto itself. Although the exact reasons for the term "triple warmer" are lost in antiquity, its energies work in conjunction with the hypothalamus gland, which is the body’s thermostat. The hypothalamus is also the instigator of the body’s emergency response. Like an army, triple warmer mobilizes during threat or perceived threat, coordinating all the other energy systems to activate the immune response, govern the fight/flight/freeze mechanism, and establish and maintain habitual responses to threat.

8) The Radiant Circuits: The radiant circuits function to ensure that all the other energy systems are working for the common good. They redistribute energies to where they are most needed, responding to any health challenge the body might encounter. In terms of evolution, the radiant circuits have been around longer than the meridians. Primitive organisms such as insects move their energies via the radiant circuits rather than through a meridian system, and the radiant circuits can be seen in the embryo before the meridians develop. As in the way that riverbeds are formed, it is as if radiant energies that habitually followed the same course became meridians. Where the meridians are tied to fixed pathways and specific organs, the radiant energies operate as fluid fields, embodying a distinct spontaneous intelligence. Like hyperlinks on a website, they jump instantly to wherever they are needed, bringing revitalization, joy, and spiritual connection. If triple warmer mobilizes your inner militia, the radiant circuits mobilize your inner mom, showering you with healing energy, providing life-sustaining resources, and lifting your morale.

9) The Electrics: The electrics are an energy that seems to emerge from the electrical dimension of the other energy systems. They are not an independent energy system like the meridians, chakras, or aura, but they are rather intimately related to all the major energy systems: separate from each but also an aspect of each, something like the way liquid is separate from yet part of each of your organs. The electrics serve as a bridge that connects all the energy systems at the basic level of the body’s electricity. I usually have no idea what will occur when I first hold a person’s electric points. The energy goes where it is needed. There are reports of scar tissue being healed during an electrics session, heart ataxia eliminated, a knee replacement operation avoided, and all manner of emotional trauma overcome. But most important in terms of whole body healing is the way the electrics connect all the systems. If energy fields such as the aura and chakras align the organs and other energies by surrounding them, the electrics move right through them, connecting and coordinating them at the tangible dimension of their electrical nature.