The Ancestral Call to Harmony; First, Find Your Home (part 2)
Across cultures and epochs, our ancestors spoke not of endless seeking, but of coming home. Their wisdom traditions are replete with calls for balance, harmony, and right relationship with all of existence. The Chinese sages devoted their lives to understanding and aligning with the Tao—the harmonious, ineffable Way of the universe. The Dine (Navajo) people strive for Hózhó, a complex and beautiful state of being that encompasses walking in beauty, harmony, balance, and everything that is good and positive. The ancient Greeks inscribed “Nothing in Excess” at the sacred temple of Delphi, a universal principle of moderation.
This universal principle of harmony is the direct antithesis of modality chaos. It offers us a simple but profound directive: Before you jump back into the wide river of knowledge, you must first choose a place on the bank to call home. It is there that you must build a dwelling, plant a garden, and learn the subtle seasons of that one chosen place. This act of commitment is the first and most crucial step toward genuine balance.
In a practical sense, this means consciously selecting one primary path—be it the chakra system as elaborated in Tantra, the mindful Eightfold Path of the Buddha, the symbolic architecture of the Kabbalistic Tree of Life, or the earth-honoring practices of a specific shamanic lineage—and committing to it as your foundational map for a significant period. This is not an act of closing yourself off to other streams of wisdom, but rather one of establishing a coherent center of gravity, a home port from which to navigate the vast ocean of knowledge. Your chosen path becomes your “home”. From this place of stability and cultivated depth, you can then look out at the wider river of knowledge with discernment. Now, when you encounter a teaching from another tradition, you can do so from a place of integration, asking, “How does this illuminate or complement my primary map?”; rather than the desperate, rootless question, “Will this finally be the thing that fixes me?”
The Architecture of the Self: Ancient Maps for the Journey Home
To undertake this deeper healing, we must first apprentice ourselves to the universal architecture of the human being as meticulously described by the ancients. The chakra system, far from being a mere New Age concept, is a precise cosmological map originating from the Tantric and Vedic traditions of India. It describes nothing less than the journey of consciousness itself—the sacred ascent of Kundalini Shakti, the coiled spiritual energy, from the root of material existence (Muladhara) to the crown of divine union and realization (Sahastrara). It is, therefore, a map of spiritual awakening, where healing is redefined as the process of purifying and clearing the blocks to this innate, evolutionary flow of energy and awareness.
Simultaneously, our modern understanding of the subconscious mind finds its profound echo in ancient concepts. In Yogacara Buddhism, it is the Alaya-vijñana, or Storehouse Consciousness, a foundational layer of mind that stores all karmic seeds (bija) from which our experiences sprout. In the mystical Jewish tradition of the Kabbalah, this is the realm of Nephesh, the vital soul that houses our instinctual and conditioned nature.
The Maya shamans spoke of accessing the Nagual, the non-ordinary, potential reality that underlies the world of everyday form. Across these traditions, a unified understanding emerges: beneath the surface of our conscious, egoic identity lies a vast, formative, and powerful realm that actively shapes our perceived reality. The critical insight for healing is that these two systems—the vertical axis of the chakras and the hidden depth of the subconscious—are intimately and dynamically linked. The chakras can be understood as the sacred stations where cosmic energy and personal karma interact; they are the precise points where our subconscious conditioning becomes crystallized into tangible energetic patterns, which eventually manifest as our physical, emotional, and mental states of being.
Tune in next week for part lll
Deirdre Leighton
Gaia Natural Therapies
info@gaianaturaltherapies.com
deirdre.leighton@gmail.com
O: 250.585.4432 C: 403.651.1867
