How To Heal With The Power Of Vital Force

Rajshree Patel 

Thank you so much, so happy to be here with you.

Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C​

You have a very compelling story, that many of us get to where we are because of stories that take us down paths we never would’ve expected before. And yours is really particularly beautiful. Can you talk about the power of vital force and how this might link to autoimmune disease?

Rajshree Patel 

Yeah, so maybe I could start with a little personal story. I myself, my two brothers, and my nephew, have been diagnosed with variations of ulcerative colitis to pancolitis. And we’re not even sure, one of them might actually have the small bowel disease, you know? So there’s definitely genetic conversation that’s going on. My grandfather had it, I have it, my two younger brothers have it, and so does my nephew. And it’s interesting, my brothers had it, maybe when they were like 16, 17, and they’ve been living with it lifelong. I must have had it around the time I met Sri Sri, 1989. ‘Cause that’s when I started to notice a lot of digestive problems that I didn’t have before, but I was never diagnosed with it. And one of the things I attribute that to is vital force. Now we understand vital force in so many different ways, but if we really look at it, it’s the word Shakti, or the power called yin, the feminine force. And if you think about the feminine force, you’re talking about love, nurturing, kindness, support. It is the essence, the foundational essence of what matter is consisting of. So our body, underneath it has this power of Shakti. And underneath that is consciousness. What we would call the silent father principle. 

And the father principle is active in the mother form. And that’s the manifested world. So the higher our Shakti, our yin or that power, the better our body, our mind, our emotions, vibrate at a higher frequency. And everything we know, we’ve known it all along, it’s basic physics, everything is energy. But we get our energy through artificial, external sources, whether that’s coffee or sugar or even food. I’m not saying none of those are good or bad or not needed, but there’s a power that we’re born with. And that is life force, that is vital force. And the more we up level that, the easier, the faster we heal our body. And I think, I assume a lot of our listeners know this, but who we are is different layers, right? There’s the body, physical. But before that there’s the environmental sheet or body. And then when we go a little further, there’s the mental body, subtle body, causal body, and so on, where we hold our habit patterns, where we hold our conditioning. And in between this body and this mind, I’m calling it mind, there is the pattern or the link of energy, life force. And holding all those pieces together is the divine force. What I’m calling consciousness, what we refer to as the field or the force.

Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C​

And Anandamaya kosha.

Rajshree Patel

Exactly, an Anandamaya kosha. So I think the trick that I discovered in my health is the more I up leveled my life force, the lesser the symptoms were there. And I actually never ended up on any sort of medications, not steroids, not anything, which is very different for my brothers who didn’t necessarily believe in all of this or practice all of this, you know? So I can honestly say, up leveling our identity from being a body or our thoughts or our emotions, to being a force of life, that is actually the creator of our body, that can transform and heal us from the inside out, in its really truest essence.

Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C​

Yes, that’s beautiful. This is why the summit is named Healing the Energy Body, because we are going from on Anandamaya kosha to Pranamaya kosha. Ans so we’ve talked about trauma in another summit and how it goes through that energy body and influences how our genetics express themselves, how our microbiome is balanced. What goes on in terms of holding onto toxins or not, because these other sheaths, these other layers of us, are so instrumental in how the physical body expresses itself, yeah,

Rajshree Patel

Yeah, and actually it’s even more than instrumental. It’s the foundation, the wave and the ocean. The ocean is not instrumental in creating the wave. The wave is the ocean, it just is individuated. And the same is true in terms of our body, the gross, our makeup, our identity, the more we appear like we’re separate from the whole and the more subtle our identity, the more we really realize that, ah, I am life. I am light. I am consciousness. I am whole, I am complete. And on the surface, I’m separate, you know.

Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C​

So how do we increase our vibrational frequency then?

Rajshree Patel

So the simplest is to find a way to shift our identity. You know, I often tell people, when you are washing your face in the morning or when you’re getting ready to go to bed, you look in the mirror, it’s right there in front of us. We often look at our physical, external form, if you will, but we never really look directly into the eyes, pause a moment and say, wait a second. I am housed in this thing called body. Who I am is pure intelligence, awareness, made up of love and light. That reminder in itself already changes your intention, which changes your frequency. So it’s a simple thing for any one of us to do, which is again and again throughout the day, if not, at least in the morning and at night, when you’re looking in the mirror and washing your face, remind yourself that you’re more than what you’re seeing in the mirror. You’re actually the unseen power, the intelligence, as I said, the love, the light. And that starts to change, on a cellular level, our frequency. It’s one of the things.

Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C​

Do you have some others?

Rajshree Patel

Yeah, the other thing is, it’s obvious, you may have already discussed this, and that’s the breath. Because we speak about Chi or we speak about Prana with the breath. And we often think of it as a concrete element, like oxygen and CO2, which is in the breath. We think of Chi as something that’s concrete, but actually Chi is Shakti, is life force. It is animated. It is alive. It gives life and animation to everything around us, including us, right? If you don’t breathe in, you’re not animated, you’re dead. If you don’t have the next breath by itself coming in and it was dependent on you, then you know you are in charge and it’s not that other power, the power of grace, if you will, that’s moving everything through. So the thing with breath, a lot of people talk about breathing exercises, but they don’t tune themselves into this notion that breath is more than O2, CO2. It’s more than energy, because energy also sounds a little mechanical. What we say is, it is the power of Chi, meaning it’s animated, it’s alive. It has consciousness. It has intelligence. 

So when you do the breathing techniques, if you put your attention on where the energy is not flowing, and that’s what disease means, right? Energy, for whatever reason, is stuck. It’s not moving. It’s not flowing. If you put your attention there, wherever it might be, the digestive system or heart or headache or shoulder ache, doesn’t matter. And then you breathe with this awareness that I’m taking in life, which is creative and creativity itself, the intentionality helps, not to treat the breath mechanical, but treat it with the awareness that it’s alive. And therefore it makes me live, vibrant, happy, healthy. So that’s another thing, do breathing techniques. It’s something I teach a lot. Even in the book, you’ll find lots of different techniques, small, small techniques with breathing. But in this case, when we’re talking about health and healing, I’m adding this one additional element, which is attend to it with a sense that you’re taking in something that is alive. And therefore it is adding more life to you, to your body, to your mind, to your consciousness. Does that make sense?

Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C​

Yeah. So what about thoughts and the vibrations of those and feeling?

Rajshree Patel

So it’s interesting. You know, our thoughts have taken on form for us, right? Body without the life force is inert, it’s not alive. That we can grasp. You pull the fish out of the ocean, it’s not a fish anymore, it’s the body of a fish, a dead fish. Similarly, if we pull our body out of this ocean of consciousness, force field of Shakti and Shiva, energy of mother and father, yin and yang, we are just a body inert. Thoughts are also inert. If you can imagine, like when you go to Times Square in New York, and you see that building with the ticker-tape parade that says, you know, “2 million made it home safe, 20 million died from smoke and cigarette smoke,” or something like that, like this, they’re words, letters that get created into words. And it gets animated by the force of life. The life force that we’re discussing, energy, that comes in through our breath, that we’re surrounded in, that comes in through our identity to it. So thoughts, we know, create emotions. Emotions create similar thoughts. If you have positive thought, you’ll create positive emotions, which in turn can create positive thoughts, again. Now the thing though is, every thought, every emotion creates a waterfall of sensations in our body. 

Like if we’re angry, we feel heat and contraction and throbbing, for instance, right? If we’re sad, we have tightness in our chest. It really contracts. So we don’t address the sensations. We get lost in the thoughts, we get lost in the emotion, and those sensations, that waterfall of restriction, lower vibrations, lower frequencies of energy, start to settle in our weakness. So like in my case, if I think of the genetic sort of availability that I had, the propensity, not that it necessarily has to manifest itself, but the propensity is there in my gut. And so when I’m unconscious, when I’m unaware, when I let my thoughts run me versus separating myself from the thoughts, guess what happens? I accumulate more in my gut. And suddenly my immune system is triggered. My digestion weakens, inflammatory response goes up, cytokines, all the different incidents, everything starts happening, so it’s not easy. But the thing about thought is to recognize and realize, I am not my thoughts. Thoughts get generated based on what I’ve eaten, the company that I keep, what’s happening in the environment, the habits that I have been conditioned with. Many things trigger what thoughts we have, but we have identified who we are based on our thinking. Now this is not a small lesson, what we’re discussing, It’s really not a small lesson. 

But we must interject that, when we’re gonna talk about energy healing, when we’re gonna talk about inviting that divine force of light into our healing, along with all the other things we’re doing, we have to address, to your point in your question, thoughts, because they drive our actions. They drive our perspective. They drive our choices. They drive how we view ourself, with the disease or without the disease. If we are self deprecating, we’re gonna invite disease, if we don’t have it or make it worse, if we have it. So breath, amazingly enough, is a direct source of controlling thought. When I say direct source of controlling, you can change thoughts, you can reduce thoughts. You can allow thoughts to disperse. You know there are people who have this like surge of thought. And they can’t find a break. And they get completely lost in it. If we play with our breathing, hold the breath, elongate the breath, restrict the breath, breathe out in spurs, then what we do is change our thinking because body is connected to mental state through this bridge of Prana. Prana Kosha, energy Kosha, connects the physical and the mental world. And how do you control your energetic breathing pattern? That’s partly voluntary and partly involuntary. So it’s kind of like flying a kite. 

If you consider the kite your thoughts and your mind and your mental frame, and the ball as the body, the way you control the both is by playing with the string. So the string between the kite and the ball is your breath. And we can do so many things with breathing. You know, recently breath has become the topic of conversation. I can tell you, 35, 36 years ago, when I used to teach breath work, it was so woo woo, because that’s before yoga was cool or meditation was cool. So breath work was way out there. But it is anecdotally, in terms of time tested, and now science tested, one of the best way to transform our emotions and our thoughts. And therefore we generate the vibration in our body more towards healing, positivity, optimism.

Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C​

Beautiful.

Rajshree Patel

Yeah.

Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C​

Have we spoken enough about the five sheaths, the pacha kosha, or do you want to speak more to that?

Rajshree Patel

I think it’s enough, probably. I think that your audience, given how much other things you’ve done, they probably know about it, don’t you think? That’s what I thought. I just thought it’s enough to mention that there’s layers. Like our environment is part of our body, but we don’t pay attention to our environment, for instance.

Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C​

Right.

Rajshree Patel

Everything from chemicals to plastics, to water, the quality of air, the ambiance of your home, where you sit to eat, where you sit to meditate. That’s not something out there, that’s a part of you. You know, you notice you walk into any place, sometimes you just shift the flower vase a little left to right, and you go, that’s perfect, because the feeling, the essence within us, which is the love and the light, suddenly goes, “Ah, wow.” We recognize beauty because we are beauty. And we sometimes treat the external or the environment as if it’s not us, it’s something other. And I think energetic healing means paying attention to your environment, how you groom, how your physical hygiene is, dental hygiene, mental hygiene. And that also means vibrational hygiene, which means up level your vibe, your frequency and intention, thought, attention, transforms all of that very quickly. We say, I AM technique, you know. This idea of I am, intention, attention, manifests what you wish, you know? So I think that that might be sufficient for them, but if you want, we can talk more.

Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C​

No, that’s good. I did a masterclass for this particular summit on the pancha kosha, so I think this will be perfect.

Rajshree Patel

Yeah. Yeah.

Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C​

And then how about if we talk a little bit about how increasing the energy build connects us to our higher self?

Rajshree Patel

Yeah. That’s a good idea. So, the other thing, increasing the energy field trans-mutates into what we would call our higher self. So I gave the example of the ocean and the wave. The wave individuated, we could call energy. And the ocean we could call our divine force, our essence, our field. And it’s very natural by itself, without us doing anything, waves keep coming, rising and falling, rising and falling. But we haven’t figured out that we’re both energy and ocean. And the way to connect to both is to respect both. So oftentimes when we’re sick, when there’s a physical problem, what do we do? We’re trying to fix it with a subtle judgment around this is not okay. Why is this happening to me? This shouldn’t be happening to me. Well, guess what we’re doing, we’re changing our vibrational field. We’re changing our energetic frequency on a downward cycle, which means we’re changing the field of consciousness around us. The way it could nurture us goes down. Does that make sense? Is that clear?

Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C​

Yep.

Rajshree Patel

We are raised to compartmentalize life, you know, and I suppose it’s necessary. I’m not saying it’s something we shouldn’t be doing. The moment our intellect starts to develop, which is around two or three, we start to see the world as many, instead of one. And many, if you are the one, you know, three year old, four year old, there’s so much of many. Number of people and things and objects and places and situations. So what happens to us is we feel separate, which means what we call like the original wound of separateness, this idea that we feel alone, somehow. We are one, but we feel alone in this big, bad world of the many. And so our survival mechanism kicks in, our conditioning kicks in. It’s necessary for survival of the body, health and fitness of the body. But simultaneously, we’re not taught to remember, as subtle we go, the more united we are. The idea of love, there’s no such thing as my love field and your love field, love is love. How it expresses itself is in the many, you know. Air, one day, what you are breathing in Seattle is going to enter me and go out and enter somebody in India. On the subtle level, it’s all one. Like we’re made up of stardust, as they say. 

It’s one stardust. And so this conditioning of separateness actually makes healing the most difficult. In fact, if you look from a psychological perspective, if you were to talk about the wound of spirituality, where we feel separate, unwhole, compartmentalized, those mindsets often have more disease, more illness. And so we wanna invite this sense of being part of the whole. It’s not theoretical, though intention is a lot. It’s just to recognize, oh, you know, somebody grew my vegetables and somebody picked them and somebody washed them and somebody put them in the supermarket. And then I bought them and I cooked them or somebody in my family cooked it. And the digestion is happening by its own power. It’s designed. We are not digesting it, it’s designed. So when you start to look like that, things change. I tell people often going to nature, especially if you’re dealing with gut issue, because gut is your second brain. As you know, it’s your limbic brain talking to you, gut response. You know, and it’s signaling, it’s a two way communication. So somewhere we disconnected to essence, to life, to the greater whole. And I say, go to nature, you know. 

Learn to see the connectivity in nature. Like if you look at a tree, you would say, oh, well, where does this tree actually start? And where does it end? It’s not just in the soil, of course the roots underneath. But then you realize, well, wait a second, the sky is as much part of the tree because it needs the space of the sky to bloom and grow. Oh, and the rain. Oh, and the sun and the moon. And, well, even the mountains, it’s just the land that’s kind of elevated itself, but it’s still the soil. We call it valley or mountain or earth or rocks, right. So go to the ocean, look at the ocean. Where’s the sand? Where is the water? What is the foam? What are the bubbles? What are the waves? It’s one throbbing entity. And from time to time in nature, it’s easy to invite this idea. And when you do, then close the eyes and see that, oh, I’m part of this same thing. Like all the fish in the ocean are part of the ocean, the sharks, the pretty gold fish, you know, everything, it’s part of the ocean. And that mindset, that thought process changes our energy field. It changes our consciousness. It invites life to support us in what we intend.

Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C​

Sometimes it’s called the invisible sap. That consciousness that connects all of us, yeah. What are some of the tools that we can use to clear any kind of stagnation that we might have in our energy body?

Rajshree Patel

You know, there’s quite a few things I’m sure people know, but one very simple thing that my grandmother used to do is she would take some salt in her hand, you know? And she would just go around her whole body in the evening, especially with young kids. ‘Cause kids are kids, and it’s like a dog and a kid, everybody’s attention goes there and they take a lot of energy. And even the energy of praise is still a lot of energy. “Oh my God, it’s so beautiful.” That’s a burst of energy that comes at us, right? And 90% of the energy at us, we’re not even conscious of. You’re walking around in the streets, in the grocery store and shopping. And there’s always somebody looking, somewhere energy is moving. So one simple thing is salt. You take it around all your body, you know, a few times, and then toss the salt down. It should go down the water, like, we say drain it. So that’s one very simple thing to do. I’m sure people know about camphor. You know what camphor is?

Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C​

Mm-hmm.

Rajshree Patel

Yeah, so burning camper is something that really changes it. And the third thing is when you’re out in public, breathe conscious breath. Means deepen your breath, consciously beyond what it is in that moment. So in breath brings you Prana, life force, energy. Out breath, as you know, releases, not just CO2, but toxins. What are toxins? For the mind, the toxins are negative emotions, negative thoughts, self-judgment or judgment of others. That which takes us away from our natural force is a toxin for the mind. Well, because your breathing is connected to your body and your mind, it removes the toxins from the body, CO2, pollutions, et cetera. But it also removes the toxins from the mental, emotional state. That’s why we say sigh of breath, sigh of relief. You know, I feel so relieved. You’ll see that your body naturally seeks to exhale. 

And the thing is, under stress, under a lot of energy that’s compressing us, our breath gets shorter and shorter. And so the trick is to elongate the breath when we feel that compression. These are very practical things you could be doing as you’re moving about. So I will consciously do that. If I’m out shopping or whatever, you could call it a pause if you want, but I’ll stop, I’ll look at the vegetables and so on. And suddenly I remind myself, elongate Raj. So I just elongate my in breath and then I release. And suddenly you see, oh, some life just entered, not all the crazy and all the stress or the anxiety, but something uplifting entered my system. So those are some very simple tools that people can use, you know.

Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C​

Beautiful. Thank you so much for sharing your wisdom with us today.

Rajshree Patel

Absolutely.

Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C​

It’s been a delight to listen to you. Is there anything else that you wanna say before we sign off.

Rajshree Patel

I guess you’ll tell them about the free course, to go on my website and all of that, right?

Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C​

They’ll here as a free gift. Absolutely, yeah.

Rajshree Patel

Okay, and I will go through the email and constant contacts and all those sort of things. We’ve delayed our interview a little bit, so I’ll make sure that I follow through before the launch and do that, so.

Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C​

Okay, all right, thank you so much.

Rajshree Patel

Thank you so much. Thank you, God bless you.

Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C​

Until next time everyone, be well.