The kidneys are tucked up under our lower three ribs next to the spine in the back of the body. Anytime they go into distress, the muscles over them go into spasm and stay spasmed, which is the main cause of low back pain. There are three pairs of muscles, psoas, iliacus and upper trapezius that make the electrical energy the kidney system needs for its operations. When part of the system has difficulty, the whole system suffers.
The kidney meridians—which run from the top of the torso to the ball of our feet—run their energy most intensely between 5 and 7 PM. How you feel at that time is a direct reflection of the health of your kidneys. This is traditionally the time when we eat our dinner meal and discuss family issues.
Each kidney has between 15,000 and 25,000 filtration units called glomeruli, which filter 20% of your blood per hour for your entire life. That’s how you make urine. The glomeruli are completely lined with grey matter (the thinking portion of your brain). For over a hundred and fifty years, anatomist have known that our kidneys are some kind of brain.
The kidneys are actually our higher mind. The brain is our lower mind, the greatest servant anyone could ever have. But when left in charge, the worst master anyone could ever have.
Like any good servant, the brain needs a clear job description. It should never be left in charge of your consciousness. On its own, it stops at critical/linear thinking, confined to the past, future or some past/future construct and is incapable of creating the world of our dreams. That’s our heart’s job.
We need to give our brain the job of constantly maintaining “the seven habits” and keeping the triangle upon which you stand (cherishing, being truthful and being decisive) in balance—for our entire life. For our whole lifetime, these habits are of sufficient difficulty to fully keep our brain focused on its tasks. When it is, our whole life is enchanted.
If we don’t give our brain a difficult enough job, it will focus our attention, our creational power, on problems and issues (outside of us). And every moment that our attention is drawn away from creating our own unique world—our kingdom suffers.
The Four Things that Really Freak the Kidneys Out
Being in the present moment is realizing that we are creators within the Greater Dream of Creator. As creators, there are four things that really freak our kidneys out.
The first thing that freaks your kidneys out is wondering what's going to happen to you. If you put this into a skit, you see it more clearly: So, imagine you are driving your car about 40 miles per hour in the foothills on a lovely country road when you see signs that say “Curves Ahead," "Slow to 25” and “7% Downgrade, Use Low Gears.” You throw your hands in the air and yell, “Oh my God, now what’s going to happen to the car?”
When we put “wondering what’s going to happen to us” into a skit, it helps us see how silly it is. And yet, how many times has a problem come up and we’ve heard our self say, “Now what’s going to happen?”
Remember: Our bodymind is completely literal and it freaks out every moment we are out of truth with life. Acting like we are powerless when each person creates his or her own unique world is such a lie that it instantly and continuously causes our kidneys to inflame, to overheat. And that causes the para-spinal muscles over the kidneys to be spasmed, causing approximately 90% of all the low-back pain we experience.
Through the kidney system, we develop the “vision” of our plans, dreams and ideals. As creators, the part of our consciousness residing in our kidney system—under the guidance of our heart—commits to higher truths, noble dreams and ideals. Once we commit, our liver uptakes all the energies we will ever need to make our visions happen. No commitment means no energy and no future.
The second thing that freaks our kidneys out is worry, or some would say “concern” about another person’s problems. If we work out the unconscious motivations of our concerns, we fear that their problem is more than they can handle; that they don't have what it takes to get it done; that they are going to screw it up; and that, somehow, it's going to fall back on us.
On the spiritual level, the person we are concerned about grasps our low opinion of them. Most people are not evolved enough to actually hear our thoughts, but they get our judgement of them. They react as if they heard what we were thinking. And they resent our opinion of them, unconsciously sabotaging our noble efforts. We’ve all experienced this reaction to our efforts and probably wondered why that person was acting so weird. This is the mechanism.
Remember, we are all powerful spiritual beings who are living in the material world, whether we are being in truth with who we are or not. When we feel sorry for them or are concerned about them, we have demoted them to third-class citizens in our world. We no longer see them as who they are: powerful beings that have every tool and asset they would ever need to handle every problem that would ever befall them.
Believing in injustice, that people are somehow victims, is just another form of feeling sorry for people, or ourselves. There is no injustice. Everyone is exactly where they need to be to learn the precise lessons they need to learn. Everyone!
Having said that, there are millions of people who live large portions of their life in victim or punisher mode, not realizing that, at any time, they could step out of that toxic projection of life. Consciously or unconsciously, we all just make our life up out of thin air.
The third thing that freaks our kidneys out is making excuses for someone, or ourselves. Again, our assumption is that we, or that person, because of prior conditioning, does not have enough personal power to handle that particular circumstance. Our bodymind acts like a lie detector. Our kidneys displays distress when we give our power away, or consider someone else powerless.
The fourth thing that cause kidney distress is bitter disappointment about how things have turned out for us. This way of thinking is the cause the worst kind of disabling low back pain, pain that builds to a nine or ten on a one-to-ten pain scale. This is when your back feels broken.
Remember, our organs take everything we think personally. If we are disappointed with how things turned out, our kidneys firmly believe they failed us, that they let us down. They can go into such utter distress that we suffer terrible pain.
If you have ever experienced this pain, you remember how disabling it was. So, when your low back feels broken, especially on both sides of your sacrum, get in touch with what your spirit is so disappointed about. Let yourself experience the depth of the emotional pain you have been ignoring. Actually feel those feelings. Then the pain rapidly dissolves.
Developing Intuition, Our Seventh Sense
Our spirit is not constrained by the time/space continuum. To our spirit, everything is happening here and now. For example: the instant we meet someone new, our spirit is taking in the full measure of that man or woman. Our first impressions are our spirit’s appraisal of that person. If someone invites us to a function three weeks from now, as they start talking about it, our spirit is actually standing there, experiencing it as if it were happening here and now. To our spirit, it is.
Our first impressions are the way our spirit communicates with us, mostly in feelings. Paying attention to our first feelings and impressions informs us of the greater truths, guiding us toward our heart’s desires and safely around dangers and situations that would otherwise do us harm. This is why the fourth habit is “Trust your gut.”
Because our kidneys are where we interface with our spirit, when we let ourselves experience and ponder our feelings, the insights from pondering those feelings develop our sense of intuition. Our kidneys, with their intuitive connection to our spirit, send this wisdom to our heart in real time. That allows our heart to create our own unique world wisely and in the most loving manner.
Feelings are much more important than thoughts. Learning to feel our feelings—instead of just thinking about them—makes us more spiritually evolved. We more than double the world we were previously aware of.
A huge part of mindfulness is paying attention to all our feelings, especially our first feelings when we think about doing something. If we reflect back, we had a bad feeling before every bad thing ever happened to us. We often did it anyway, and when it went wrong we said to ourselves, “I knew it would go bad.” We also had a good feeling before every good thing that ever happened.
When we think about something that’s coming up and we get that warm fuzzy feeling in our heart, that’s our intuition telling us that we are really going to enjoy it. Our first feeling can be intense, but it doesn’t linger. It only lasts a brief moment before it’s gone. Yet it contains the wisdom of our spirit. Everyone is psychic. Everyone! There are three main ways we receive wisdom from our spirit, and it varies from person to person:
If you are more kinesthetic, your spirit communicates with you mostly through feelings and body sensations. You often know what you need to do or not do. When you don’t do what you know needs to be done, it always turns out badly. When you do what you know needs to be done, magic happens and you seem so insightful.
At different times in our lives we have probable received information from our spirit in all three ways, but we tend to predominantly be one or the other most of the time. Trusting our intuition gives us greater advantage in every area of our life. Every day we can get better at listening to our inner feelings. The learning curve never ends.
Remember, each one of us is a spirit having a human experience. Paying attention to our feelings during a typical day gives us the clarity to handle all life’s difficulties more easily. As we get better at these skills, we move with more grace through life.
When we move in the directions that make our heart happy, the whole spiritual kingdom has much more opportunity to lend their assistance. Grace is the result.
How Worry Negatively Affects Everyone
Worrying about others is like throwing a wet blanket of your gloom and doom over the top of that person’s already difficult situation. It does absolutely nothing to make their situation better or help them in any way. Worse, the great power of our attention directly influences their outcome by collapsing all the possibility and probability waves that do not coincide with our low opinion of them.
Because we are creators, worry’s effect on others is so destructive that it’s like we’re doing voodoo on them. The black joke is: it turns out the way we worried, justifying our worry; enabling us to worry more.
For you personally, worrying about yourself or others causes the muscles over your kidneys to go into spasm and stay spasmed. Kidney pain radiates into your low back and sacrum. People who constantly worry or wonder what is going to happen always have those muscles spasmed. Their low back is a constant source of distress.
There is a better way. When you catch yourself worrying about a loved one, or yourself, take a couple cleansing breaths (fast deep breaths) to break the pattern, the unconscious the spell. Then go over a checklist of that person’s strengths and assets. Every time you think about their positive attributes, those attributes light up in that person’s consciousness, helping them to see their own better qualities.
That actually helps them to see a way out of their difficulties. As they start seeing their attributes instead of only the problem, they start to see the next steps they need to take. As soon as they see their next step, they start seeing the light at the end of the tunnel.
If you catch yourself worrying about a loved one twenty times a day, go over a checklist of that person’s strengths and assets twenty times a day. Recruit other loved ones to help in the process. During the times you and others are going over a checklist of their strengths, your thoughts influence their awareness toward positive steps they can take.
That is real help. My patients and I have done this for a great number of people during difficult times. The results are impressive. You really help people this way, whereas worry is always destructive.
Your Wellspring of Superhuman Strength
Classic Chinese philosophy considers the kidneys your storehouse of ancestral life force, an exquisite energy passed down from your parents. Ancestral energy is considered one of the “three treasures.” Your spirit and qi (the life force that animates all life) are the other two treasures.
Ancestral energy is very much different from the energy you make and use every day. You tap into the wellspring of ancestral energy during your most difficult moments. During adrenaline rushes, times when you mightily exceed the limits of your everyday abilities, you draw directly from this energy. During these moments, time can slow way down. You can muster clarity and power beyond anything you normally possess. You can—and most likely have—performed superhuman feats.
When danger comes up, your rational mind’s version of reality, fate, is what will happen if you deal with this emergency with your normal consciousness. You access this reservoir when you say “NO!” to fate. In these moments, who you are—and what you are capable of doing—is leagues beyond the limitations your brain considers to be reality.
In times of danger, when you say an emphatic “NO!” to the dire fate your brain presents, you access this powerful reservoir of superhuman capacity. In a moment of clarity, you see or know what must be done, and then single-mindedly commit to the reality our spirit points up.
You have entered an altered state. The normal laws of gravity and physics are reduced to suggestions that can be transcended. You seize the moment and save the day.
