The power of hunger will make you do things you didn’t imagine. Hunger has many forms. There’s hunger for food but there’s also hunger for anything that we can feel fed by.
Food, sex, love, validation, credibility, validation, belonging. The list is long.
Without hunger, there is no drive to seek anything in life. If we ignore its intensity, which is the driving force to manifest here on earth, life will usually shock us at some point with an experience that we were unprepared for.
“When you’re thirsty is not the time to dig the well,” as they say.
Many manage this intense hunger and need through food, pornography, codependency and many other shadow activities. While the activities aim to soothe us, they also reinforce the sense of lack and desperation that go with hunger.
Instead of seeking real ways to nourish ourselves, we go for the “fast food” version that never truly satiates.
This is why the first region of self, the Dantian, is so important to harness and train. Owning your deepest, most raw hunger is an energy you need to live a fuller and more meaningful life.
The biggest problem people have is the integration of the spiritual and material. It’s in the Dantian where we can bridge the spiritual and material because it’s the intensity of that hunger that is ultimately a spiritual thirst to fulfill what we have come here for.
To get into your Dantian is to get into your center and wake up the raw power of your hunger.
The Dantian is your literal center. The Chinese named it 5000 years ago and it’s right there in your sex center and your stomach.
When my teacher first talked about it or referred to it, I couldn’t feel anything there. I certainly couldn’t move it or move from there as a center.
Years later, when I began teaching, I discovered that while everyone has that area within the body, it doesn’t exist until you create it. So yes, it’s a region, but it’s like an empty field. It doesn’t automatically provide abundance and sustenance.
The Chinese characters for Dantien are Dan 丹, which means pill and Tian, 田, which is land. The Taoists believed that you could concentrate this area so much that you could take it and live forever, just like it was a pill. If you look closely at the character for land, it’s a square with a cross in it.
田
It’s basically an empty area that is the target to be cultivated. It is the land where you need to grow something.
The function of the Dantian is to integrate spirit with raw desire and breath and refine it into a usable life force energy.
Who doesn’t want that?
The animal the bear, with its profound gigantic size, is a metaphor for this hunger or desire. As I discovered on a camping trip once, a bear wants food. And you are not going to stop it from taking it from you.
When you start to develop yourself personally, how to allow, harness and eventually use this intensity you won’t find much to help you in spiritual or psychological settings. There is also a lot of shame and therefore repression around sexuality and anger.
The bear is the movement to focus on to move through the integration of that desire.
The first step, however, is to get that connection clear with Spirit. That is how you get in touch with the “spiritual thirst,” that desire you have for what you’ve come here to do.
If you’re ready to move forward on that part of the journey, join our next Effiji Breathwork class.
Come to experience a breakthrough. Our intention for you is nothing less than that.
