You are your energy body – be aware, be careful

(Energy Express – Marilynn Preston, Tribune Media Services)

"The energy body is a body with anatomical structure. It has organs, a respiratory and digestive system and extremities as well. Of course, everything looks a little different from the physical body." – Christine Schenk, author, energy therapist.

I've come to believe, after many years of writing about physical and mental health, that one way to improve both is to understand that you are both a physical body and an energy body. The energy body has to do with chakras, auras, meridians, acupuncture points and other sites of energy collection and distribution. The energy body depends on the physical body to make its presence felt. A felt presence of the two bodies is possible if you work at it, there are subtle, sensible things you can do to keep the two bodies in balance.

When the two bodies are not in balance, according to the rules and principles of Energy Medicine, havoc can rule. You feel out of sorts, not yourself. You might feel weepy, severely depressed or chronically exhausted. You might even feel that your life is spinning out of control.

Summing up thousands of years of reported study about these two complementary systems, Christine Schenk, energy therapist and founder of the Institute for Human Energetic and Biodynamic Analysis in Vienna, explains: When your physical body and energy body are IN BALANCE, your life is experienced as better, more harmonious, less traumatic.

Schenk has spent the last 20 years concentrating on the interactions between the physical body and energy body. Three years ago, she opened up The Schenk Human Energetic Institute in New York to spread her teachings and techniques to a wider audience of both health professionals and ordinary folks who want to experience energetic healing in a responsible way.

"Everybody can learn to experience their energy body," says Schenk, who has devised a simple and straightforward method for teaching people how. Developing a felt sense of your energy body is an important step toward bringing it back in balance, she explains, and once that happens, healing can occur.

She's not promising it will occur – "I am promising nothing!", she is quick to say – but she is certain her method has merit because for the last 20 years, all over Europe and now in America, she's been using it to help thousands of people whose doctors and therapists had given up on them. They range from CEOs suffering from corporate stress to housewives coping with sexual and emotional abuse.

Schenk calls her method the Cellular Harmonizing Regenerative Integration System, or CHRIS. It's a system of "grounding" and "cleansing" techniques to help her students integrate their energy bodies and physical bodies. The two exercises are done by you, at home, in a chair, no equipment is necessary.

You can read more about the CHRIS method in Schenk's very interesting little book, "The Marriage Between Physical Body and Energy Body: A Guide For Better Understanding" (Oiri Edition). Check out www.christineschenk.com.

"I teach people to tap into their own energy body and heal the breach between the two selves," she says. And the beauty of learning to do it yourself, says Schenk, is that you won't become prey to the many shoddy and untrained practitioners of Energy Medicine, charlatans and gurus and well-meaning others who may wind up doing more harm than good.

In her book, she gives you dozens of specific questions you should ask yourself and outside providers of healing services. Here's a sampling: Do you personally know what kind of energy work is being done to you? Do you have the feeling you are dependent on someone? Are you intimidated or deprived of the safety of the group if you behave differently, don't toe the line or ask too many questions?

You may have questions for Christine Schenk, too, and that's good, Go find her book or her Web site and fire away.

Do you have any energy body stories to share? Is the needle on your Hocus-Pocus Detector suddenly in the red zone? E-mail me at mp22@aol.com.

For further information please see Christine Schenk's website - http://www.christineschenk.com