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Cyndi Dale: Discovering Your Subtle Body

Tami Simon: Welcome to Insights at the Edge, produced by Sounds True. My name is Tami Simon. I’m the founder of Sounds True, and I’d love to take a moment to introduce you to the new Sounds True Foundation. The Sounds True Foundation is dedicated to creating a wiser and kinder world by making transformational education widely available. We want everyone to have access to transformational tools such as mindfulness, emotional awareness, and self-compassion regardless of financial, social, or physical challenges.

The Sounds True Foundation is a nonprofit dedicated to providing these transformational tools to communities in need, including at-risk youth, prisoners, veterans, and those in developing countries. If you’d like to learn more or feel inspired to become a supporter, please visit soundtruefoundation.org.

You’re listening to Insights at the Edge. Today, my guest is Cyndi Dale. Cyndi Dale is an internationally renowned author, speaker, intuitive healer, and visionary. She has been trained in multiple healing modalities including shamanism, intuitive healing, Lakota medicine, and Reiki. She has written several groundbreaking books on the chakras, including Advanced Chakra Healing and New Chakra Healing, and is the creator of a new online course with Sounds True called The Subtle Body Online Training Program: A Comprehensive Course in the Tools and Practices of Energy Healing. You can visit us at SoundsTrue.com to learn more about Cyndi Dale’s new course.

In this conversation, Cyndi—in a very practical and grounded way, coming from her own direct experience—talked about some pretty far-out experiences she’s had. Here’s my conversation with Cyndi Dale.

Cyndi, I think of you as Sounds True’s subtle body queen with all of the publishing you’ve done with Sounds True on the subtle body—and now, a new online training on the subtle body. I think for many people, of course, they’re familiar with the fact that we have a physical body and maybe have an instinct. Like, “Yes, I probably have a subtle body, but what exactly is it? Can you define it? Its shape, structure, expanse?”

Cyndi Dale: Well, the good news is there is shape, structure, and expanse. However, the subtle body—unless we’re measuring it with certain tools—is invisible rather than visible. So that’s one of the main differences between the physical body and the subtle body. The subtle body is made out of what they call subtle, or spiritual, or intuitive, or quantum information and data. It functions very much like the physical body, but it moves much faster, and it really manages the physical universe that we’re in as well as their own physical body.

But yes, there is structure to it. We can define it. Just as with the physical body, there are organs and channels and fields. The same exists for our subtle body—our subtle anatomy.

TS: You yourself have studied many different traditions that teach about the subtle body, whether it’s Chinese medicine or indigenous healing traditions. But I also know you draw on your own inner sight, if you will—your own intuitive experience. I wanted to start by hearing more about that. When did you first start having your own experience, your own contact with the subtle body? And what was that like for you?

CD: Well, I was really just a small child. I actually have memories in the womb of waking up inside of my mother and perceiving through my physical eyes at that point, I believe. Because I was probably close to being born, I could actually see energy coming in through the womb and the colors of it, the shapes of it. And everywhere that it hit me, I have at some point in my life—I’ve had a challenge or an issue. So that’s not technically the subtle body, but that subtle energy, which is what the subtle body is constructed of.

Then when I was maybe three, four, five, six, I was one of those kids who could see things. So I could see colors coming off of people, I could see colors around them. When my mother was in a certain mood—like if she was angry—I saw this red ball of energy light up. I’ve come to find out that that’s what we call the First Chakra or the first subtle organ.

When she was scared, there’d be a different color in a different part of her body. I could also see these ripples—ripples and waves of energy that just about everybody had. But they moved, and they had different colors, and there seemed to be a slight difference from one person to another.

And so, as kids do, I tried to talk about that to no avail. Because it would be like, well, “Why are you making up this color thing?” Or, “We don’t have balls of energy inside of us,” and, “We don’t have purple colors coming off of us,” or this, that, or the other thing. After a while, I just kept it to myself.

But I was so excited, Tami, when I was in my early twenties and I discovered a book about chakras and auric fields, and I was like, “Finally!” There was other people who were like me. More than that, there were people who knew more than I did about these components of the subtle body. For me, I existed in a subtle universe. I could feel other people’s feelings, I knew what was going to happen—at least at times. I heard ghosts talking in the kitchen one night.

And so the subtle body to me was like an explanation of how it is that we’re able to be intuitive; how we really interact with people; how we’re able to pick up on what’s going on in the other side of the world, or even with the person who lives next door to us; how we can tell what an animal is feeling, or going through, or what they need It’s our subtle body that’s the mechanism for all those connections. I just didn’t have the words for it when I was a little kid.

TS: I think Cyndi, some people who don’t have those kinds of early experiences say, “Well, great for you, Cyndi.” But is it really possible for me to develop that kind of inner knowing if I didn’t have that as a young person? I’ve read all about the chakras, and I read what color they are and what shape they are, but I’ve never actually had an experience of that. What would you say to someone like that who says, “Is this really available to anyone?”

CD: I would say absolutely. For thousands and thousands of years just about every culture, and as I said, across time has understood that we are primarily composed of a subtle body, which means that we’re interacting with subtle energy all the time. We’re always using our intuition, or our spider senses. We have chakras, energy fields, meridians. These are different names from certain cultures to describe the centers—the flow ways of energy within our bodies in the fields around our bodies. Even if you don’t know that these exist, you still have them. Even if you don’t know how to see them, or hear them, or get in touch with them. All of that is possible because you are made out of those energetic bodies. It just takes a little bit of time.

I think it’s really important for people to figure out their own style. Some of us are more kinesthetic. We’re really physical. We might have to get a physical sense of different aspects of our subtle body or our own intuition. Others of us are emotional or are mental. Maybe we’re more pictorial, we’re visual, or we’re verbal.

If you aim at getting in touch with this aspect of you and the so-called reading the subtle energy you’re giving off, or you’re picking up from other people, is going to help put you in touch with who you are uniquely also. Because we all have a different way of sensing the sort of supernatural sort of energies.

TS: What’s the relationship, Cyndi, of our subtle body to our physical body? How are they connected?

CD: They’re absolutely connected. I even make the error of distinguishing sometimes too vehemently between physical energy—which we tend to think of as more concrete and measurable—and subtle energy, which we think of as more infinite, and quantum, and invisible, and inaudible. But the truth is, they flow into each other. If you’re looking at a vase, you’re able to access your physical sense to see something that’s physical. That physical vase and your interface with it through your eyes is probably only going to get you in touch with about one percent of that vase. The rest of that vase is actually subtle—made out of subtle energy, subtle information, and subtle vibration.

And so, physical and subtle flow into each other. Physical can become subtle, and subtle becomes physical. The truth is it’s just too bad our westernized way of thinking so over-extenuates kind of education into studying the physical, because I believe 99.99 percent of all reality is actually subtle and the physical reality is organized based on subtle energy. So your physical body—what appears in it; most likely, a lot of what happens in that body—how your liver is functioning, if you have a tumor or not, how your eyesight is doing—that’s all based on what’s happening with your subtle energy or your subtle body.

TS: OK, so for that person right now who’s trying to get on the same page with us, can you give them an experience right now? Something they can do to attune to their subtle body?

CD: Absolutely. What I’m going to tell them to do right now is think of their feet. We can all do that—breathe down, think of our feet. Most of us actually don’t really feel our feet—even our physical feet—as the day goes on. Right now we’re feeling the feet.

Then let your imagination—let your consciousness—go just an inch under the feet so you can start to sense whatever it is your feet are on or connected to—the carpet, the floor, the soil. Then just inch another two or three, kind of distances beyond that, until you feel like you’re just starting to flow into the earth. Now, what you’re really doing is connecting with one aspect of your subtle body: a field that stretches below your feet into the earth.

We can concentrate on any part of our physical body. Just by really moving our consciousness an inch, two inches, a foot outside of it, start to sense just how vast we are and you’ll start to really feel yourself—that field the view farther away than just your skin. So, that’s the easiest way to do it. It’s just sense the energy around you and start to get used to how much bigger you are than you think you are. There’s another really easy exercise.

TS: Let’s do it.

CD: This is taught in psychic development classes and healing classes all over the world. It involves rubbing your two hands together until you create some friction, and then put your hands palms facing each other about three or four inches apart. You’ll feel that there’s still an energy in between those hands—because there’s chakras in the hands and because there’s fields of energy emanating from the hands.

If you start patting your hands, not touching them, but kind of patting that energy ball. Again, you can bring your consciousness into your hands and pour more energy into that ball that’s being created. All of a sudden, you’re going to feel like your hands are moving farther away from each other. If you turn the spigot down, your hands—in order to feel that friction or the energy between them—are going to move closer together. Then a really fun thing to do is imagine or turn that energy red—it’s not clear anymore; it’s red—and get a sense of how that red energy field can have a certain reaction to red, especially in comparison to blue . . . as we’re now going to turn that energy blue. It’s really different, isn’t it?

TS: [Yes.]

CD: That subtle energy that’s being produced by the energy centers and the energy fields in and around the hand. When you’re done, just kind of shake that free, shake that loose. But that’s basically when people are doing energy healing or hands-on healing—this is what they’re doing. They’re consciously kind of deciding what type of energy might be useful, what might be helpful for them, for somebody else, and they’re sending that.

For instance, if they’re working on another person or an animal, they’re sending that energy into the person. It obviously can get a lot more complicated than that. But you’re creating energy because you are made out of subtle energy. And the actors in that structure that make subtle energy, that receives subtle energy, that can direct subtle energy are the chakras, which are energy centers—or the meridians. There’s also another sort of set of energy flow-ways or river-ways in the body called the nadis.

We communicate with energy, we receive it, send it, and filter it through the energy fields that emanate from our bodies. That’s the subtle body.

TS: We’re going to talk about all three of these that you call the different structures of the subtle body. Let’s start with the energy centers—the chakras. In the way that you teach about the chakras, you talk about a 12-chakra system. I think a lot of people have been introduced to the yogic seven-chakra system. How did you develop this 12-chakra way of teaching?

CD: Well, I have two answers. The first one is that’s what I saw intuitively. Again, ever since I was a little kid, I see these energy balls. They’re not only coming from the body, located in the spine as we’ve been taught in western kind of yoga traditions, but I also saw them around people. Pretty much 100 percent at the time—98 percent of the time anyway—people had these same balls of energy. When I was a kid, these are the energies that I saw. Not only the traditional seven that we typically find in and emanating from the spine going forward and backward in the body, but I also saw them around the body.

When I started to probe when I was probably in my twenties—kind of like, “What am I seeing? Are these really chakras, or what? They seem to work like chakras, they function like chakras.” As I experimented with them, I discovered that they indeed had chakra-like effects. They each managed a physical, psychological, and spiritual set of traits or functions.

I came to understand that our more westernized notion of chakras are really based on the work of John Woodroffe (or Sir Arthur Avalon), where back in the 1920s or so he wrote a book about the chakras. He said—well, he actually he said there are six, to be honest, with an extra one that sort of a light on top of the head. It’s from his work that people decided, “Well, there’s seven.” There’s seven chakras, or these seven energy bodies.

But even in his book he said there’s different systems. Even in India, there’s different systems. There’s systems with three main chakras, there’s systems with dozens of chakras. So there’s nothing really fixed on a universal basis about the so-called “how many chakras there are.” I say that because I don’t think that people even need to say, “Oh, Cyndi Dale is right.” There’s absolutely 12. I do like my 12-chakra system because it affords more power and greater interactions than if you work only with the 7 that are located in the spine emanating from the spine and through the body.

So, that’s why I work with 12—because I saw them, I see them. And other systems have really comparable chakras to not only the seven in the body, which are in Woodroffe’s system, but also to other chakra systems from around the world. There’s almost always a soul chakra that’s way up there. There’s almost always an earth chakra that’s underneath the feet. I think mine is a good compilation to get us going so that we can be the entirety of the human that we are—the human divine being that we are. Not only identify with the physical form and physical body.

TS: OK, so let me make sure that I understand the 12. You’ve talked about the soul chakra that would be above the head in some way.

CD: Right, and I actually see two of them above the head.

TS: OK.

CD: Once we get out of the seventh chakra, which most of us know about—that’s on top of the head is perceived as white, and it’s about spirituality, and purpose and connection.

Right above that is the eighth chakra, and you can even put your hand . . . I encourage everybody to take their hand and kind of contort it and put it palm up. Rise it up about two [or] three inches from the top of your head, and you’ll feel a little resistance. That’s the eighth chakra—that’s the soul or the shaman chakra. So that’s the one that if we were to journey inside of it, we would connect with different time periods, dimensions, planes of existence, what people call the Akashic Records—which is everything you’ve ever gone through or done or thought.

That’s a beautiful, kind of mysterious chakra. It actually locks into the physical body too, but it’s located in the field.

Then raise your hand until it’s really the whole arm’s length above the top of your head. So just keep going straight up, palm up, and you’re going to hit sort of the floor, if you would, of what I call the ninth chakra. Sometimes it’s called the luminary chakra or it has different sort of spiritual names in other cultures like the Aztec, et cetera.

I usually see that one as gold, which I like to say because when people think of gold, we think of connection to the divine. We think of whatever you want to call it—God power—and that’s what that energy center is about. That’s the illumination of that greater spirit. I believe there’s two that are above the head—what I just call the eighth and the ninth, which are the easiest way to talk about them is with numbers.

TS: Believe it or not, I’m sure you know where I’m going. I want to know the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth.

CDYes, you should, because they’re really exciting to know about. To find your tenth, you have to go back to the exercise we were doing earlier—going underneath your feet—because the tenth chakra is actually in the ground. It’s your connection to the earth. You have a lovely grounding cord that goes down through the legs, through the feet, into the ground. Even if you’re in an airplane, you’re still connected to this chakra that’s really underneath the ground. That’s your tenth chakra.

So, that’s your natural chakra. That’s the one that connects you to the earth, to the cosmos, and actually to your ancestry too.

So many of our issues—and even science is saying this—are inherited from our ancestry, from our lineage. Our genetics are really turned on and off basically by what’s happened to our ancestors.

So, there’s a practical applications to all these different energy centers. That tenth one connecting us into the earth, but also that which came before us.

The eleventh, we have to think . . . we have to kind of multitask in our consciousness to do the eleventh. It’s actually around the body. It’s like this lovely rose film, like way out in our energy field, but it’s collected around the hands and the feet. This is the chakra that actually excites me the most. I would love to really have full command of it, because it’s through this energy center we command natural and supernatural forces.

So, the stories of Jesus walking on the water, the guru pulling the coin out of the air, like somebody commanding—a tai chi master kind of breaking a block or commanding somebody to back up and they’re pushed back. Guess what they’re using. The eleventh chakra, because it moves forces around. It directs forces.

TS: Help me understand before we move on to the twelfth. It also builds suspense here, which I’m interested in. How is it that the eleventh chakra is both around the body and in the hands and the feet?

CD: It’s around the hands and the feet, and it interacts with the physicality of the hands and the feet to accomplish tasks, to move physical energy, and to move supernatural energy. That’s why I said, we have to kind of like, be multi-consciousness to think about that, because we Westerners are just so . . . “anal” might be the right word. We like to go, “There’s the liver, there’s the kidney, there’s the first chakra, there’s the third chakra.” But when we’re talking about some of these energy bodies—and there’s certainly more than just chakras, meridians, fields, et cetera—they’re in multi-dimensions. So they’re in different places at the same time.

Quantum physics is starting to say so are we . . . at least potentially. And so it’s actually quite logical from a quantum physics point of view to say, “You know what? You can have an energy center that’s around the body, and also located on and in certain parts of the body simultaneously.”

TS: OK. Now I just want to understand how you see it, because you mentioned that this 12-chakra system is something that you intuitively know—that you see it as these energy balls.

CD: Yes.

TS: When we get to the eleventh chakra, do you see energy balls in the hands and the feet, but then also somehow around the hands and feet?

CD: Yes, I see the energy balls around the hand and the feet. It’s like they root in the hands and the feet—like the soles and the palms. They root there and then they form a ball around. Then if you could see the balls of energy around the hand and the feet, there are threads—luminary threads of energy that extend out of those balls of energy, surround the body, are in the auric field, but they’re also attached to these balls of energy—pink balls of energy, if you would—around the hands and the feet.

TS: All right, let’s go to the twelfth.

CD: Well, the twelfth is really unique to everybody. The twelfth is one of those—now we’re really going to push kind of the mental barriers, because the twelfth is completely around the auric field and it connects into several sub-regions of the physical body. I think of the twelfth as the outer bounds of our own unique essence or our own spirit. It connects to the body, but it’s also simultaneously sort of—not floating around the body, but almost like illuminated around the entirety of the auric field or the fields that come off of the physical body. And it’s really unique.

When I work with the twelfth—and there’s more energy centers, frankly beyond that. A lot of shamans say that we’re surrounded by an energy egg. Well, that sort of encapsulates our subtle energy.

So the energy is just right outside of that whole twelfth auric field, that twelfth chakra. But what’s important about the twelfth is it’s really unique to each person. When I work with the twelfth—which sort of to me looks opalescent or translucent when I’m looking at it with people—what I perceive in it are their individual and very unique characteristics and their really unique gifts.

For instance, I worked with a woman in California years and years ago. It was a really interesting session, a really interesting reading. She asked me to just tell her what I saw about her in general, and I just got this weird story in my head. I was like, “Oh, this is so embarrassing. This is what my intuition is telling me, really.”

So I said, “Well, I think you’re married to a prince, and you got married with a lot of his ex-girlfriends there, and they were really jealous of you.” She goes, “I am married to a prince.” She did get married in a castle over in Europe. So I thought, “Well, that’s really cool.”

And then she wanted to know what her main gift is—what her main spiritual gift is, what her main purpose is. And I said—I looked in the twelfth field, the twelfth chakra, which is where we see what’s really unique and different about somebody. And I said, “When you write a story and you write the end to it, the ending comes true.” Which sounds a bit fairy tale-like, doesn’t it?

TS: [Yes].

CD: She had worked with three different people. One was a little boy with leukemia. She wrote a story for each. She wrote an ending—a happy ending to the stories—and the endings came true.

TS: Are you able to sense—Cyndi—your own twelfth chakra and therefore what’s unique about your gifts?

CD: I can. Yes. I can. I don’t see it the same way that I psychically see others of my chakras, but I can sense it and feel it, and kind of relate to the energy of it.

This sounds really odd, because sometimes there’s not words for what you get when you interconnect with the twelfth chakra. But there’s different words we could use. I mean, when I’m working with certain people and I get this sense of something is supposed to shift, I just say or decide, “This needs to shift,” and it shifts.

I’ve had one client just say, “Well, it’s magic. You just do magic. Not all the time, but sometimes.” I was doing it with a friend who had a problem, and I just said, “Well, let’s just get rid of this.” And she literally saw the building shaking around her. It doesn’t mean I’m always that powerful, or I’m always using that sort of magical shift-gift. But when I’m led to, I will do it and things change.

TS: OK, I want to ask you what is a little bit of a provocative question, if that’s OK.

CD: Yes.

TS: I have confidence in you, Cyndi. I think you’re a person of high integrity. I like you, I like your work. We’ve published a lot of it. I think the way that you teach about the subtle body is tremendously helpful. So that’s my starting point.

And I think a lot of times when people start talking about quantum fields and, “This exists multi-dimensionally,” there’s a little bit of like, “Where are we going and how do I know if there’s any veracity here? How do I know?”

My question to you is: if somebody is looking for a teacher of subtle body techniques and approaches, how do they know if the person has veracity as someone they can rely on?

CD: Well, I would say, first of all, they have to talk a practical line as well as all the esoterics—because in the end, we all have a subtle body, we’re all walking around ,and we’re trying to lead our best lives. And we lead our best lives in the moment, when we’re making a decision about what we’re going to eat, when we’re taking care of our kids, when we’re taking care of somebody else’s kids, when we’re going to work. And we have a choice between being pessimistic and optimistic, or mean or boundaried . . . or whatever it is.

All of it really—it is fun. Talking quantum physics to me is a spin. It’s like, “Oh, wow, and then there’s this world, and this world. And maybe somebody had this past life or whatever.”

But I would say: always choose a teacher who’s going to help direct this information into your everyday life. The second piece, I would say, is if you’re really going to go into all this subtle energy, woo-woo sort of stuff, make sure that you’re working with somebody who’s going to teach boundaries. Because you don’t want to walk into the world raw and open, and honestly just feel everybody’s feelings, or know what they all ate for breakfast, or give all your secrets away. I mean, as much as we’re part of a oneness—which quantum physics would say—we’re also here to live the life that we’re here to live, and that requires boundaries.

It has to eventually and even in the beginning of the teaching be made practical. Like, what can you do with this? How can it improve who you are? How can it help make you more ethical and not less ethical? And how can it help you maintain the sense of individuality and boundaries that you need to have in order to achieve what you’re here to achieve?

TS: Yes, let’s talk about that. How do you help your students maintain healthy boundaries energetically?

CD: Well, I actually do it—here’s where we’re going to kind of wrap the twine around, and around, and around, kind of a Mobius coil. You first have to know what your energy is doing. I like teaching chakras, auric fields, meridians, et cetera because it’s sort of like: how do you move your physical body if you don’t know that you have an arm? How do you maintain boundaries if you don’t know what’s establishing your boundaries? So, auric fields are extensions of the chakras to me. They’re the extension of these energy bodies that are in or just around the body.

So, how do you get control of that kind of infinitesimal, really wild energy unless first you know what the structures are? Second, you have some way to activate or get in touch with those structures. Third, you learn how to direct the energy in and out of those structures.

There’s a lot of discipline involved, and it starts with knowledge . . . like anything. You’re not going to be a good doctor unless you learn the anatomy, and then learn how to use the tools, and then learn how to diagnose what’s happening, and then learn how to respond to a crisis. I think working in or walking in these different esoteric planes of existence starts with some really basic knowledge.

TS: OK. Now you’ve said that the auric fields are extensions of the chakras. So, that would mean that I have 12 different auric fields going on right now?

CD: Yes. Yes, depending . . .

TS: Or everyone does. Everyone does.

CD: Everybody does. Yes, and I have students who never . . . they go, “I’m just going to work with seven chakras and auric fields.” That’s great. I have a student who is a cardiologist who worked with an Atlantean structure, which is fine. I don’t want to get hung up on the numbers. But the important and salient point is we all have chakras and those chakras create energy fields that we typically call auric fields, and were constructed of these extensions of subtle energy.

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TS: Now, because I’m so curious what you actually see—how do you see the auric fields? And when they look healthy to you, what does that look like compared to when they perhaps look shut down, or toxic, or undeveloped, or I don’t know exactly what language you would use?

CD: All right. Well, it’s first of all—even though I’m very visual psychically, I don’t tend to see all 12 all at once. That’s really complicated. I mean, that’s like really a lot when I do see all 12 at once. What I want to see is that they’re roughly the right colors because they’re extensions of chakras, which are different colors, which just represent frequencies—a set of frequencies.

I want to see them . . . each field maybe about three to four inches, three to six inches. Kind of in with—I want to see them glowing, I want to see them separate, but yet exchanging information with each other. I want to see them in sort of like an oval or maybe a full circle all the way around the person’s body. So, you can do an entire diagnostic just looking at these fields.

If somebody has a very thin kind of red field, for instance, which is right next to the body, they’re probably going to have adrenal fatigue. They’re probably going to have very low physical energy because that’s the field that relates to the chakra that’s about the adrenals and physical energy. You can just look at or interact with the fields to see what’s going on with somebody.

I—interestingly enough . . . I don’t even know if that many people would be interested in this. But a lot of times when I’m working with kids with real challenges, or with their moms or dads, sometimes their fields are inverted. Their chakras are in the right place, but the energy fields have gotten mixed up. And so, if you’ve got a kid who we might call autistic on that spectrum and they’re really, really physically sensitive, or they’re really verbally sensitive, I tend to see that the field is outside of where it’s supposed to be. They’re meeting the world with a sense—with a way of knowing—that is really harsh and hard on them.

TS: Cyndi, when I asked you to help our listener get a sense of subtle energy and their own experience right now, you said, “Well, this is a very common exercise they teach in psychic development classes . . .” where you put your hands together and you can feel this energy ball pulsing, I thought to myself, “I wonder what the connection is between beginning to open to our subtle body and developing greater intuition. Is there a direct connection there?” That as we do this work, become trained in subtle body awareness, do we automatically start becoming more intuitive and more psychic?

CD: Yes, because—I’m back to—let’s just go back to the chakras. These are energy centers. They’re in the body or they’re around the body. But even the ones outside of the body have a direct connect to an organ or a hormone gland in the physical body. Each chakra is basically its own ball of frequency, and there are different frequencies. The lower in the body, those chakras are lower frequencies. The ones in the middle are kind of mid frequency. The ones higher are higher frequencies.

Every chakra’s job, especially with this corresponding auric field, is to bring in subtle energies that match it, to interpret or help the brain interpret that information, and to send that same frequency back into the world.

So, every chakra is a communication vehicle. It’s receiving safe physical energy from other people. It’s coming into the physical chakra; the brain’s deciphering kind of what to do about that. Then it sends physical information—maybe it’s subtle, but it’s still physically oriented information—into the world.

Guess what? We’re now talking about an intuitive gift called physical empathy. Somebody with that chakra and have it with its real functional and they’ve learned how to work it where it is, how to support it . . . they’re going to be very physically empathic. They’re going to have the ability to sense what might be happening in the physical world around them. Whether that be in somebody else’s body, or an animal’s body, or a plant’s system or whatever it is.

As we develop our interconnections with each chakra, we develop the gift—the intuitive style that corresponds with that chakra and its corresponding auric field too. So, every chakra has a gift associated with it. That’s the bottom line.

TS: Now, you mentioned that when you’re working with students, you help them have healthy boundaries, and it starts with education.

CD: Right.

TS: One of the things I found not through focusing on developing subtle body awareness, but just through life and opening and meditation practice, is that sometimes I don’t know when I’m feeling someone else’s experience or if I’m feeling my own experience. I don’t know how to sort that out. How do you help people with that?

CD: That’s really common. The truth is most people who come to me or take my classes—they tend to be more what I would call over-intuitive rather than under-intuitive. Most of them are looking for what you’re saying. They’re trying to say, “You know what? I don’t know what’s mine. I don’t know if this is my illness, I don’t know if this is my feeling, I don’t know if this is my idea or my image,” or whatever it is. I tend to get people just more like that just because of what I do for a living, to be honest.

You can learn. I usually start by focusing them on the chakra through which they’re getting the information. Let’s say you’re picking up on—you have an emotion, and you don’t know if it’s your emotion or not.

This is where I get systematized—that second chakra. I bring you in touch with your second chakra and literally it’s your chakra. You can interact with it, you can get a sense of it. Literally have you interact with it and have you ask, “OK, how much of the energy I’m picking up is mine? What percentage? What percentage is somebody else’s?”

Or do a really simple exercise, just pouring white light through the body. Again, that’s a super simple one. Almost everybody’s taught that. Just pouring energy through that chakra or through the entirety of the system with the intention or the decision to let go of any energies that are not your own. And then what’s left will be yours. It’s a lot of sorting.

I even have people come in with major illnesses, and the first thing I do is kind of get a sense of maybe where that’s based in the body. So, liver’s third chakra.

So, you can start to use your brain with this diagnostic process too. The first thing I say is, “You know what? Let’s ask your spirit, let’s ask who or whatever you believe in. Let’s have your inner self, your wise self, just wash out whatever is not yours and see what’s left.” And sometimes the person starts healing right there because it wasn’t even their disease or their illness or their dysfunction.

TS: That’s very helpful.

CD: It’s super helpful, because I think most of what most of us carry around isn’t ours in the beginning anyway. It might be ancestral. I mean, if you studied the science of what they call now epigenetics, which is sort of this chemical soup of RNA and DNA, and it’s around the genes—that chemical soup contains our ancestors’ memories going back at least 14 generations. So how do we know what we’re feeling is ours or our great, great, great grandmother’s?

I typically—when something’s happening or somebody is struggling with something, if normal therapy or taking a bath, or if normal life endeavors don’t seem to be helping, I personally assume we probably have to wash out somebody else’s energy. Then we might also have to figure out why that person is susceptible to carrying it or taking it in also, because you don’t want it just coming right back. You just don’t want to get constantly flooded with people’s feelings.

So, was that a role in your family? We grow up in family systems where we take on roles. Like I have my sister’s history. I literally have their memories in my body. They come to me for me to tell them, “Well, this is what happened when you were three.” It’s not just because I was older and I saw it. It’s because I can kind of see it through their eyes because I took it into my body.

TS: OK. Now, Cyndi, I think for a lot of people, when you start talking about lineage issues, and ancestral healing, they think, “OK, this is tough stuff. This is not easy. This has been in my family line for however many generations.” Right.

CD: Right.

TS: Yet here as you’re describing it, you’re talking about, “OK. Ask if it’s yours. If it’s not, there’s a field of glittery light passing through you, and we’re going to sort of wash our hands clean of this.” But yet, you’re saying it’s not easy. Tell me a little bit more. How do we get to the real root when it comes to something like ancestral healing, which often feels like, God, you just can’t get free of it?

CD: Ancestral is tough, because there are chemical codes in our body holding those memories. We’re talking physical as well as what we might call subtle as well. I really did mean to emphasize that it’s really important to figure out our why—our own personal why. For me, what’s the reason I felt like it was important to hold myself sister’s history? Why am I acting out my ancestors’ pain? Or, why do I have the same alcoholism that’s been passed down? Maybe I’ve inherited it. But what functional goal do I think internally I’m trying to achieve by doing that?

Very typically, we’re going to come up with answers like, “I needed to do that to survive. I had to fit in.” This is tribal, but sometimes for a lot of people is because innately they’re healers and they just want to help. So they have to rethink that internal, soul-based decision of helping by healing other people’s issues inside of their system, healing their ancestors by having all their illnesses.

We could keep going about this, Tami. But a lot of autoimmune dysfunctions—it’s real epigenetic. A lot of times what’s happening inside somebody’s body . . . if they have too many of other people’s problems in them, you can’t heal a problem that’s not your own.

Somewhere—and this is why meditation is helpful, therapy is helpful, energy healing is helpful, EMDR is helpful. But a process that gets you in touch with your inner decision maker, whatever you want to call that—your subconscious-unconscious self. If you can shift the decision how you got hooked in on the decision, then you can shift the pattern. That’s the work that’s hard.

TS: That’s very helpful. Where does the inner decision maker lie in terms of the chakra system?

CD: It depends on the person, to be honest. The easiest place to access the inner decision maker—and this [would] probably be borne out by what most healers say is in the inside of the heart, the heart chakra—not necessarily the physical heart. Because from a chakra perspective, that is your interloper, that’s your connecting chakra. That’s like the chakras from below send energy up—so, information up—[to] the chakras above, which are more spiritual in nature send information down, you bring in information from the world. So, it’s sort of a center point.

Working in the inside of the heart is usually the place to go. You change something in the heart chakra, you can frequently change the programming in the soul, in the body, and other places.

But I do have to bring a caveat up, because some people . . . let’s say somebody is super, super physical and they’re like, “What’s this heart stuff?” Like, “I don’t care about heart stuff.” I would then direct them to find their inner decision maker—if we’re going to talk chakras—more down in the first chakra, which is in the hip area. To some extent, we need to go to where we’re the most empowered and powerful to get in touch with our cognitive self, if you would.

TS: You mentioned when you see the chakras, you—especially as a young person—you saw them as energy balls. I think often—

CD: Yes.

TS: —when we look in books and we see the way the chakras are depicted, they are as geometric formation of various kinds. Did you see the geometric shapes or just these like balls?

CD: No.

TS: Colorful balls?

CD: I think I did. I love to say I could, but I didn’t. I frankly never been good at geometry either. I was great at algebra, but I was never good at geometry. So, it could have just been a failure of my own brain.

TS: That’s OK. I was just curious about it. Something else I’m curious about is: at one point you mentioned this idea that we have an energy egg.

CD: [Yes.]

TS: Now, here a confessional moment: I’ve seen an energy healer for the last several years. At the end of the session, after she’s cleared the various chakras of my body and helped me find my balance again, she’ll say, “Feel the space around your body. Feel your egg and inhabit it.” I’ve always thought to myself, “What is this energy egg?”

CD: Right. A lot of shamans in other cultures—most cultures talk about an energy egg. Carlos Castaneda—whatever, if we believe him or not—but he learned from real people and talks about an energy egg. It’s the outer bound of our auric field. That’s what it is, and I can see them around people. They do tend to be egg-shaped. I always seem to complicate things, of course.

I actually see three layers around the energy egg. It’s sort of our bound—it’s our boundary between who we are and the rest of the universe. I mean, think of it: you need a boundary or you’re just going to float away. You’re never going to know where you end and somebody else starts, and that’s what the energy egg provides.

From my point of view, there’s three layers in it. The one close to us is really helping to regulate our physical self. The middle layer seems to be connected to what we might call shaman realms, or other worlds or kind of enable us to perform really mystical sorts of interactions. And that outer edge—maybe see if your healer is into that at all. The outer edge—my sense is [it] connects us to—I don’t even know what to call it—the more heavenly realms. The really outer realms of existence that are very pure and loving.

And so once in a while when I’m working with somebody, there’ll be so much going on with them maybe physically [that] I just ask for the healing to occur in that inner realm of the energy egg. Because then the healing will just be brought to wherever it needs to within their physical self or their physical body.

But it’s our outer bound. Even the outside layer of that egg connects us with amazing, lovely other realms. I’ve never seen them as bad. I’ve never seen somebody at that level interconnected to something dark or scary. Even though there are bounds, yet they interconnect us. This overall egg or inner layering interconnects us with kind of anything we might need to get connected to.

TS: Speaking of the potential to be connected to something negative or destructive, I think sometimes people have this sense of, “I’m going to do this subtle body work and I’m going to get connected to angels and guides.” But what about this idea that you could through this inner development become connected to something that doesn’t want your own good, doesn’t have your best interest? What do you think about that?

CD: Well, I think it’s true. I think that is how it is, and I think that happens frequently. Typically, say, if somebody is studying with me, I have like a longer program. At some point in that program, almost everybody in there says, “Oh my gosh, I’m connected to something not good.” Or there’s what they call a cord—sort of a garden hose connecting me to a dead ancestor that’s stealing my energy.

I mean, there’s light and there’s dark. I don’t mean light and dark—the color of those. I mean, there’s that which is selfish and that kind of which has integrity. We have that in the human population, so we certainly have it in the invisible realm as well. And so that’s another reason I emphasize boundaries.

I mean, I grew up sort of the beginning of the New Age here, where everything was like, “Just open up and whoever talks to you, you talk to them.” Everything’s just happy happiness.

Like, wham, bam! There’s some not good stuff out there, and that’s why you have to have a sense of who you are, what has integrity for you or not, what boundaries are, and how to not be scared about that which is dark or manipulative. Usually, it’s just manipulative. How not to be scared about that and know how to deal with it.

So we don’t want to give our power away, but we don’t want to make-believe Pollyanna either. Because it’s just like anything else on this planet. There’s stuff that’s good for us, and there’s stuff that’s not good for us. There’s people who have integrity, and there’s people who are manipulative. So, why wouldn’t it be the same if you’re developing your subtle body or your intuition?

TS: It sounds though, like you think that those connections exist whether someone’s aware of them or not.

CD: Yes.

TS: Like there could be some manipulative negative influence in my life. There’s not because I would hope that my own strong sense of sovereignty and inner light wouldn’t allow it. So, I don’t even want to say a sentence like that out loud. But, that for people in general that that could be happening and they don’t know about it. But when they do this subtle body work, they become aware of something that’s actually acting on them that they weren’t aware of previously.

CD: That happens very frequently. Very, very commonly. I remember doing a session with a man. He was from out east, and I think his accent was Bostonian or something, and he was a plumber. He had—I can’t remember what he had; arthritis or something inflammatory—and we were talking. In my psychic senses, I could see this sort of figure—this dark, gloomy kind of figure—connected to him. And I told him that, and then he goes, “Oh my God, I’ve always felt like there’s something on me giving me negative thoughts and impacting me.”

Then I got this story that was probably past life. So I told him this long story, and it was in . . . and there’s my dog deciding he wanted to talk too and go outside.

I told him this story about a once upon a time, and there’s a castle, and there’s this and there’s that. He said to me—and that somebody from that past life kind of hung on to him, and didn’t want him succeeding and it was still in his world, even though he’d moved on and within a different lifetime. He actually said he’d had a dream about that his entire life—that the same story I told was a continual dream. He was excited to hear that there was a hanger-on.

Once he knew the story and he kind of, “Wow, I get it.” Once he kind of gained his sense of power in the storyline, boom, that hanger-on, if you would—the dark energy or entity—disappeared . . . and so did his arthritis!

What was cool with working with him, Tami, is he wasn’t scared. It was like he just thought, “Oh, so that’s what’s doing it.” I like approaching that topic almost with that kind of surgical precision. Like, “What’s here? Let’s not be scared about it. Let’s deal with it. Let’s just deal with it.” A lot of people get scared, and I don’t think . . . it’s just what it is.

TS: And they’re troubled.

CD: [Yes.]

TS: Maybe they’re not terrified, but they’re troubled. Cyndi, can you give any guidance right here to that person who thinks, “God, I think there may be something dark attached to me.”

CD: It doesn’t mean that they’re dark. If you think about it, if I’m like a dark entity, who am I going to connect to? Sure, sometimes really bad people, because I can get them to do what I want. Right? Like, do really bad things. But they tend to connect to really good people because they like their light.

The first thing to realize is it doesn’t mean you’re dark or that you are somehow feeding this thing out of some negative, evil aspect of you. Then secondarily is to go, “You know what? There’s some sort of subconscious agreement here.” Maybe I made it with this thing, this entity, this force. Maybe my family made it, and I just walked into something that’s been in my family for generations. But then the important fact—and it’s a fact—is to know, you . . . I’m going to use your word, Tami. You’re sovereign. You get to decide what you’re connected to and not. So, you get to figure out why it’s there. Even if you don’t figure it out, you get to decide you don’t want to interconnect with it anymore.

Typically, there’s something positive that comes out of doing some thinking about it, or even talking with that entity or that dark force. We want to—any fear that we do have, we get to communicate with it. It’s connected to us, so we want to know why it’s there and what’s going on. It’s like anything. We get to establish the rules of the game, but we want to first (and need to first) find out why it is the way that it is too.

TS: Cyndi, earlier in our conversation when you were sharing some of your childhood experiences of subtle energy, you said that at one point there were ghosts in the kitchen talking.

CD: Yes.

TS: OK. What are ghosts?

CD: Well, there are different kinds of entities. It can start to get complicated because there are angels, there are also beings that people tend to call demons that aren’t in body or maybe haven’t ever even been in a body. Ghosts tend to be . . . when we say the word “ghosts,” we’re tending to talk about souls or beings that have at one time being a person, or an animal, or some kind of a living form. So that typically is what we’re talking about.

For one reason or another that person’s soul is still inhabiting the earth plane, still interconnecting here with the living at one level or another. They’re not all bad. Some of them are just, “I’m going to stay around until my little girl is grown”. Or, “I’m going to watch out after my family.” Or, “I don’t want to be dead, so I’m not going to leave.”

When I was little and I heard these ghosts in the kitchen, I really thought they were living people, to be honest—because I heard them talking just the same way that living people would be talking. We lived in Huntsville, Alabama and there was a railroad behind us. So we typically saw—we called them back then hobos—kind of coming in and out of the railroad cars. And so, I heard what sounded like to hobos come in and cook breakfast in the middle of the night in my kitchen, my family kitchen, and they were talking like, “How do you want your eggs done? How do you want the bacon?” I heard the bacon sizzling. I also know that before they left, they didn’t wash the dishes because I didn’t hear the water turned on.

I’m four. I’m four-and-a-half years old. So I thought they were real people because I could hear everything, and I heard them talking and I saw shadows at the end of the hallway. When they were gone, I heard the door shut. The kitchen door [was] where the railroad was down below that hill out of the back. And so I ran into my parents’ room and I said, “There were hobos cooking breakfast.” Then I said, “Well, and they didn’t do the dishes.”

My mom immediately rolled over and told me to stop imagining things. My dad got up very heroically, and took me by the hand, and took me into the kitchen. There was no pots, no pans, nothing. It was just as clean as it had been after my mom did the dishes after dinner. He said, “Cyndi, you just have to stop making things up.”

TS: But what’s interesting, Cyndi, is that you didn’t then conclude, “Oh, I’m just making it up.” You had some kind of confidence in your experience.

CD: Nobody’s pointed that out to me, Tami. Thank you. I did because I heard it and I saw the shadow.

I think sometimes we do just kind of—we think of these as childish things and put them behind us. Or when other people tell us these things don’t exist, we go along with it to fit in. But I knew what I heard and I knew what I saw. But we do tend to discount the intuitive or the supernatural.

I led a group of women—maybe 17, 18 women; I can’t remember the exact number—to Sedona years and years ago. A women’s retreat. And we had a great time doing this and doing that. We left our final ceremony. It was getting dark, and we all drove off in different cars. So every car went in a different direction, because that was technically the end of our get-together.

Well, it was really weird, because about maybe half an hour later, 20 minutes later, we ended up in nowhere. I have no idea where we were. All in the same place in the desert.

Like, we weren’t way out of city lines, but we weren’t near the city. All our cars convened in the same area and we saw spaceships. I mean: I saw spaceships. There were spaceships. I know there were spaceships. The next morning—some of the women actually left—but the next morning, those who still remained (maybe about 12; only half of them) said or believed that we saw spaceships.

TS: [Yes.]

CD: So, we erase what we don’t understand.

TS: I think that’s true.

CD: And it doesn’t mean everything’s true. I mean, it doesn’t mean if we have a dream and we’re murdered, that that’s going to happen. It takes . . . again, there’s a discipline and a development to going, “OK, is that dream psychological? Is it a vision? Is it an insight? Is it a destiny? Is it a possibility? Is it something I ate the night before?”

We know it’s OK to be skeptical to some extent, and use our mind and use our brain to analyze, “Does it make sense that I would have seen this? Is this something else? Is this fantasy versus an intuition?” I think we have to be rigorous no matter what we’re doing.

TS: Which brings me actually, Cyndi, to my final question. Which is, you’ve created with Sounds True, as I mentioned, The Subtle Body: An Encyclopedia of Your Energetic Anatomy, and you’re this very interesting combination of an intuitive right-brained person, but also someone who’s really quite the scholar and has done a lot of research and put together a lot of left-brain material. My question is: do you see a new form of healing in the future, some 21st century form where science and our intuition come together? And what does that look like?

CD: Yes! Yes, because the core of subtle energy—it still reduces to light and sound. And science really needs to, and should, and does reduce everything to light and sound. So, why aren’t we combining our knowledge to create machines that better use light and sound? Or to enable people to focus their intuition so they can create light and sound along a certain frequency band that could heal cancer or heal a genetic anomaly, or whatever?

We’re already [overlapping]. I mean, there’s bandages now that are sonic, and the sounds are able to push the medicine deeper into somebody’s epidermis so it can deliver the healing at a deeper level. We’re starting to go, “Maybe MRIs could have a healing effect, not just a diagnostic effect.” Maybe people are a little bit more like sonic machines and light machines and MRIs than anything else. I think we’re bringing it together.

I mean, intuition is terrific, but we’re each individual. So when I’m checking in on something, my intuition is still processing through my body, through my history, my memories, my capabilities. So there’s going to be a certain number of potential inaccuracies or problems I may have communicating what I’m seeing, sensing, or hearing in a way that somebody can understand. Machines can be more diagnostically accurate—you know what I mean—and hone in on things, but they’re really . . . stupid. I think they’re not going to look beyond the edges. They’re not going to look into places that an intuitive can. I think there’s going to be a perfect marriage of these two that don’t require us to all become cyborgs either.

TS: Cyndi, I’m so glad we got to talk about ghosts and aliens as part of our conversation. That really took it to the outer edges.

CD: It did, didn’t it?

TS: Just in conclusion, we’ve talked some about the power of knowing the subtle body to help us with healing. You also mentioned how it can help with our decision making—really going deep, deep into our energy centers. But it seems from your work that you believe that every aspect of our life—what our career looks like, what our relationships look like—is actually a reflection of the health of our subtle body. Do you think that’s true?

CD: I do believe that’s true. I do. I think it is. In most cultures, traditionally, the chakras—whatever term they use—they’re seen as vehicles kind of for enlightenment, but also for living the real life. For, “How do we relate to others? How do we know what’s going to happen? How do we make decisions?”

I think the chakras are pretty much almost like—I don’t like the word “computers”—but they’re vessels for every aspect of our being. And so, they’re us. We have them. I think they unfold to some extent, from our soul when we come in the body. They’re tools. Why would we not use them to figure out who we are and make wise decisions, interrelate with others, kind of make effective, kind of spiritual activities, et cetera?

I think we are our subtle body. I think the physical body is probably more of a subtle body than anything else. Our cells don’t touch each other, not really. Atoms don’t touch each other. So where’s the subtle body in that physical body? Where do they really . . . where does one end and one begin? That could be the whole next research that both esoterics and science could be doing.

TS: I’ve been talking with Cyndi Dale, With Sounds True, she’s created a new eight-week online course. It’s called The Subtle Body Training Program: A Comprehensive Course in the Tools and Practices of Energy Healing. We’ve also published three books with Cyndi on The Subtle Body: An Encyclopedia of Your Energetic Anatomy, [The] Subtle Body Practice Manual, and [The] Subtle Body Coloring Book. Cyndi, I really enjoyed talking to you. It was a great, fun romp, and you’re so helpful to people. Thank you so much.

CD: Thank you, Tami. Thank you, Sounds True.

TS: Thank you for listening to Insights at the Edge. You can read a full transcript of today’s interview at SoundsTrue.com/podcast. If you’re interested, hit the subscribe button in your podcast app. Also, if you feel inspired, head to iTunes and leave Insights at the Edge a review.

I love getting your feedback, being in connection with you, and learning how we can continue to evolve and improve our program. Working together, I believe we can create a kinder and wiser world.

SoundsTrue.com: waking up the world.