Understanding our physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual selves: always in constant communication, and all need healing, nurturing, and a system of checks and balances.

According to many indigenous cultures across the world, there are four perceptual levels from which one can engage in reality, spirituality, and healing. I first learned this from Alberto Villoldo and the Four Winds Society who teach shamanic medicine from the Laika people in the Andes. Some examples are from his teachings while I’ve collected others mentioned here. I have also shifted this idea a slight bit from my experiences.

The perceptual levels, or states, correspond with heightened levels of vibrations:

• Physical World (our physical body)
• Thoughts & Ideas (our mind-body)
• Feelings (our emotional body)
• Spirit (our energetic body)

These four levels are also associated with the four bodies of our energetic field. They are all settled within each other like nesting dolls, the physical body being the innermost, encapsulated by the mind, then our emotions, and the outermost being our spirit. Each “body” has its own vibratory state, the physical body being the “lowest,” and the spirit body vibrating at the “highest.” The physical body is closest to Mother Earth, so the vibratory state is closer to her (think of giant, low, resounding tribal drums or earthquakes) while our spirit body is closest to the Celestial vibrations (think perhaps of the highest notes of bells, or the tingles you may get when you first meet your soulmate).

This information is key when we’re on a healing or spiritual journey. Knowing how to employ the four in very specific ways can ease life phases and transitions, heighten experiences, and make moving up the ascension ladder much faster.

Healing from a higher body

In Western culture, we tend to address pains and illness from the same perceptual body where it is found or further down the levels. For example:

• Physical: We treat physical pain and sensory discomforts with drugs, exercise, food, knee-jerk reactions, and other physical methods.
• Mental: We treat mental problems with mental solutions such as therapy, or dip back down into the physical level to find drug fixes.
• Emotional: We tend to treat emotional problems with more emotional blocks, or choose lower-rung fixes such as therapy and drugs.

Of course, the lower-rung remedies work, but usually they take a very long time or simply cover up symptoms of the root problem; talk therapy can take years and a lot of money to see resolution to a single psychological issue, and we’ve all heard lists of medicine side effects that may include birth defects, suicide and/or death.

Shamanic cultures across the globe have found that by not reaching down into the lower rungs, but alternatively accessing the higher rungs and filtering healing through them produces a much faster, and usually complete healing. Our life pains and illnesses resolve much more quickly with higher-functioning healing processes. Realizing that healing from a level or two (or three) above where the problem lies brings faster relief of symptoms, true healing of the root problem, and can even make a problem or issue disappear completely, and holistically. For example, when the level of Spirit is activated for a physical-level problem, miraculous healings may occur, and the physical issue resolved immediately, completely, and permanently.

“We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”

Albert Einstein

When we employ a higher perception for healing or understanding our life issues, we maintain the ability to live and work at the lower realm, i.e., the physical or mental body, but the context of the problem we’re experiencing becomes much more expansive, and easier to resolve as we head up the levels. In other words, when we change the context or perception of our troubles, we can heal them with ease. Let’s take a deeper look with some examples.

Physical Level

When operating at the physical level, we work with our “lizard brain.” We’re aware of our physical bodies but not at all of our spirit, creativity, or emotions. Our lizard brain helps us get through the day – it helps us pay the rent, go to work, get an appropriate sleep to wake ratio, or move through a crisis. Survival instincts, in the simplest of ways, live at this level.

Practicality and reality also reside here, but can easily become imbalanced: a lizard-brain sense of financial security can grow into a need for loads of money, opulent vacations for social likes, having “greener grass,” a larger house, and a bigger toy chest than your friends. Only acting from the physical perceptual level also leads us to take poisonous medicines that will get rid of today’s irritating symptoms and ultimately hide a larger medical problem. It could see us having an affair if our current partner isn’t meeting our needs, or giving an unruly child a spanking from a knee-jerk reaction due to our annoyance. Sometimes these solutions work, but mostly they cover up the problem, letting it fester under the surface into something much larger and scarier to deal with later.

Mental Level

Leveling up, we come to the modern mind, including beliefs, ideas, science, and government. It’s the mammalian brain of love, compassion, and family, yet is also aggression, superstition, and psychosis. The mind creates an interpretation of our own reality. We can only see and interpret the world from our personal experiences, traumas, likes, dislikes, and skillsets; therefore nobody has the same interpretation of the world as us. Our mind can spin us down into distress and disease or we can think ourselves up into calm and health. Negative and positive mental attitudes and inner voices filter down manifesting into our physical health. However, in this realm, we can be smart enough to realize our minds can attempt to hijack the show and sometimes things aren’t what they seem to be (see the Never-Never.)

We tend to make decisions here simply if the numbers add up or don’t. Here we stick to “science,” which if not verified, could be faked, bought, or just plain wrong. Science also tends to become more scientific (if you will) each day – today’s whitepaper might look completely different in 100 years when the tools and brilliant scientists have had 36,500 days to make new improvements and discoveries.

In the mind, we are controlled by our experiences. We see the world with a personal pair of glasses prescribed by what we’ve lived through in the past – experiences, traumas, celebrations, beliefs whether true or not. A house at this level could be seen by a contractor as brick-by-brick construction, a mother can see a building within which to watch her children grow, and an investor can see the same home as a knock-down property ready for a condominium.

At the mental level, we can use our mind to think through our lower physical problems. Before we pop an Advil, we can think back to what gave us the headache – did I drink water? Whiskey? Did I bump my head? We can think about what’s going wrong in a relationship before heading to someone else’s door, then decide do something about it before we inflict pain. We can assess our bank statement to make sure that new toy is in our best interest, or if we should just rent one for a day. We can find trusted, double-blind scientific studies to learn about our physical problems, choose the least problematic medicine, and think about what the root of the physical issue is and identify an appropriate response.

Emotional Level

In the emotion’s realm, we’re still wearing those glasses, but we’ve attached feeling them. Backing up, if the mind creates an individual sense of reality, in this realm we’re layering on individual sensory information – as unique as a fingerprint. You can see that at this realm realities become very distorted from each other and that the term “reality” just isn’t … real anymore. Going back to our house example, here the contractor can see the house as a piece of art he wants to improve, the mother can see a home, the investor can see something he is lovingly building for his kids and future generations of wealth.

In the emotional body we can easily have miscommunications if the slight feeling you have around a topic differs from your conversational partners.’ We could also be talking about a simple subject we agree upon yet the matter seems argumentative; the descriptive words and feelings we each use could be different enough to seem contentious. We also tend to make decisions from emotions which can be tricky at best, or we can have gut-level feelings that go against the logic of the mental level and perhaps save our lives.

In this realm, having leveled up, we have the chance to change our minds as well: perhaps a sudden insight gives us a way to break free from past thoughts, negative feelings, and our old mental operating systems. From this level, we experience many more options from which to make life moves and decisions in our complex world.

Spiritual Level

Stepping up and out of the mind and emotions, we find the realm of metaphor, imagery, poetry, art, and pure knowing. This is where solutions we can’t think our way through drop into our minds, and where we understand an idea only if someone “paints us a picture.” This is where we remember our grandmother by a whiff of baking cookies. Where storytelling to children stays with them their entire lives, teaching and enriching through the years. This is where the soul is nourished. We can change our physical illness by listening to the hidden messages our bodies are telling us, we can see the beauty and divinity in our partner, ex, or an unruly child. This is where we see through our adversaries to God/Universe/Source. It’s at this level we begin our spiritual and healing journeys. We are asking questions like what is calling to me? What do I need to release to open aligned opportunities? What fears must I let go to step fully into faith and trust in the Divine? What belief systems aren’t working for my highest good anymore?

The view of the spiritual level is that of 10,000 feet above you. Imagine you’re an eagle taking flight from the problem you’re experiencing – at first you’re at eye level with it, then as you take off, this problem gets smaller and smaller, then you’re above, soaring, seeing how the whole landscape, the whole town, environment, country, and all the different people are influencing your problem. This realm is where the butterfly effect and string theory reside. My teacher calls this the “poof” state, as matter simply disappears here. When I do healings, many times the problem just does this – goes POOF – and disappears. We see problems from a place “upstream,” where we can fix them much easier than the flood below. We may be experiencing a terrible job, but upstream we can see opportunities that fit us much better and are closer to home, with much better benefits and time off. We may be living paycheck to paycheck, but upstream we see how to bring in more income or move to a less expensive and much better home. We may be watching wars on the news, and upstream we see and sense the early turmoil, which is much easier to calm. As a mother to a young child, I see big problems in the future if I don’t take the time to teach basic politeness, cleanliness, and emotional regulation now.

This is the realm of I AM. Speaking and thinking these utmost sacred words transforms you immediately.

• I AM health.
• I AM worthy.
• I AM good.
• I AM wealthy.
• I AM more than enough.
• I AM trust.
• I AM faith.
• I AM Earth.
• I AM God.
• I AM.

Many if not most problems manifesting in the lower bodies have root problems with contracts other than the above statements. They could read, “I’m not worthy,” “I’m not good enough,” or “I’m unable to ___.” When we believe the opposite, that I AM WORTHY, GOOD ENOUGH AND ABLE, we start infiltrating health through our emotions, mind, and physical body.

You are creating your own life from the space of sacred spirituality. We are all dreaming, imagining, and creating our reality every second. If we dream from fear, we will manifest it, as we see when we watch the news and are fed marketing tactics of lack mentality. Practice staying in the higher realm, at the height of a soaring eagle. Watch how the butterfly wings can create the wind creating the tsunami and help heal it your own way before it reaches land.