maria mison: integrated awakenings

Hi. So, here’s the thing about physical bodies and spiritual healing: we love to overcomplicate them. When we’re not yet deep in our healing processes, we pick up a lot of patterns, postures, and energetic frequencies just by existing in our environments. It’s very monkey-see, monkey-do. We mimic the people around us.

But what happens when you start feeling off? Like, physically, deeply off?

Someone could be prone to migraines, or feeling like they’re lagging naiinitan—just sweating buckets and running constantly hot. Someone else might experience their body as lethargic, heavy, and wet from the inside. The spiritual community is quick to pathologize these experiences as “ascension symptoms” or chronic trauma. But what if we took a step back and just read them as an elemental map?

If you are always running hot, that is Fire. It might be trapped anger, or it might just be a forceful, masculine output of energy with nowhere to go. In When the Body Says No, Dr. Gabor Maté brilliantly maps out how unexpressed emotional stress physically manifests in the body’s organs. You don’t always need to go on a massive, tear-filled, trauma-mining mission to fix it. Sometimes, you just need to balance the alchemy. You mentally and physically invoke a cooling lake. You bring the wind down.

In holistic kinesiology, Paul Chek refers to the human body as a “system of systems.” Physical, emotional, and environmental stressors do not exist in isolation; they pull from the exact same biological battery. When you experience a surge of heat or lethargy, your entire system of systems is reacting to an elemental imbalance. Your body is telling you the internal climate is off.

So, what do you do if you don’t have access to a literal cooling waterfall? You use your mind and your energetic anatomy to transport yourself there. Your cells remember the times when you were soothed. You don’t need to be physically wet to drink in a cooling, watery nature.

One of the most foolproof things you can do when you are overwhelmed is to work directly with your spine. In Taoist esoteric arts, Master Mantak Chia mapped this out beautifully in Awaken Healing Light of the Tao. Chia introduced the West to the “Microcosmic Orbit,” a profound practice of looping your vital energy up the Governing Channel (the spine) and down the Conception Channel (the front of the body). By establishing this continuous loop, you are essentially cooling the engine and digesting your own excess energy safely.

Your spine is your physical and energetic motherboard. All your nadis and your nervous system plug directly into it. Before you try to awaken your kundalini or fly off into the cosmos to escape your discomfort, you need to learn how to drive the vehicle you are already in.

The next time you are overwhelmed, just brush your energy up and down your spine. Feed it space. Feed it lusciousness. Breathe a simple, grounded “yes” into the base of your tailbone. Notice how the fire settles.

If you want to get fluent in this kind of body alchemy, my course Integrated Energetic Bodywork is basically a cypher for navigating your physical and spiritual vehicles.

Enrollment is open. Check the link in my bio to book a session.