A TOUCHSTONE REVIEW *:

Hands of Light: A Guide to Healing Through the Human Energy Field **

Bantam, Reissue edition (1988)

Light Emerging — The Journey of Personal Healing **

Bantam (1993)

Core Light Healing— My Personal Journey and Advanced Healing Concepts for Creating the Life You Long to Live

Hay House LLC (2022)

by Barbara Brennan

* Sherry Pae was consulted for this article to add and correct biographical details from her personal experience and to avoid misstatements on Brennan’s chakra theory. She had a twenty-six-year close relationship with Barbara up until the time she died. Originally a student of Brennan, she became a friend, advisor, and personal healer to Barbara while developing curriculum, teaching, and serving as School Dean within the Barbara Brennan School of Healing.

** For this review, I have mined information on the history and influence of this book from Kurt Leland’s Rainbow Body: A History of the Western Chakra System from Blavatsky to Brennan (2016).

The Author: Barbara Brennan (1939-2022)

As a child growing up on a farm in Wisconsin, Barbara Ann Brennan learned to see the energy fields of trees and small animals and noticed that everything was connected by these fields. In adolescence, she stopped going out into the woods and began being interested in how things worked. She went on to college, received a Master’s degree in atmospheric physics, and spent the years 1965-1971 working at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center near Washington, D.C.

While working for NASA, she became interested in the Human Potential Movement that was being developed at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur. She also enrolled in courses on the human energy field and got involved in humanistic psychology, joining contact groups, interaction groups, Primal Scream groups, and Gestalt Therapy groups.

During this same time, she also visited and briefly lived in several alternative or new age communities. There she saw which aspects of those communities worked and which did not. At spiritual communities led by gurus, she found the energy in meditation wonderful but a lack of knowledge about psychological and human interactions. (The experience later led her to organize her energy healing practice as a school rather than a religious organization in the attempt to avoid focus on the leader.) During this time, she was also frightened in the middle of the night by dark entities. She held on to the divine worlds she had experienced and she prayed for help, which came first in the form of an Edgar Cayce meditation group and later the Pathwork Center.

Soon she became more interested in “inner space” than outer space. Her exploration of her own inner space became so interesting that she decided to study it formally. She resigned from her NASA research position and undertook a two-year Bioenergetic Training program, became a bio-energetic counselor, and studied at Luther Rice College to become a licensed massage therapist.

Once she had decided to dedicate herself to the healing path, she was carefully led by her higher self and spiritual guides through a step-by-step process designed to help her learn spiritual law. During the time she lived in Washington, D.C., training to be a bioenergetic therapist, a wonderful guidance event occurred. On an Easter morning, she went to West Virginia to witness a miracle in the sun like that at Fatima. Since that time, whenever the sun was at a certain angle in the sky, she would hear a clear verbal message instructing her what to do. She would hear a voice, as if it were coming from the sun. The sun would reflect upon her and get her attention, and she would get a message. These communications through the sun continued through the years.

After her training, she worked at the Community of the Whole Person with a full-time practice in Washington D.C. While giving bioenergetic therapy sessions and groups, she saw auric fields around people as well as visions of her clients’ past lives and amazing auric interactions that no one could confirm for her. During this time, she learned a lot about people’s habitual energetic defense systems that eventually caused physical health issues.

She also began to remember her secret childhood experiences in the woods. She realized those experiences were the beginning of clairvoyant vision, what she later came to call High Sense Perception (HSP). (She coined the term High Sense Perception to describe what others call “psychic” abilities because she discovered that abilities like clairvoyance and clairaudience are simply expansions of our normal senses to broader ranges and could be taught.) She was shy, embarrassed, and afraid, and so kept what she observed to herself for many years.

A short time after the Easter event, she found the Pathwork Center in Phoenicia, New York. The Center was a retreat in the Catskill mountains where residents did private spiritual practice of meditation and self-purification work with the intent to align the self with Truth, Love, and Divine Will. There was a spiritual leader, Eva Pierrakos, who channeled the Guide Lectures, and there was a leader of the community, Dr. John Pierrakis, who was involved in research and created and taught Core Energetics, a therapy designed to help people release blocks from their auric field through focus and physical exertion. She didn’t know what to do with the information she had been receiving until she met Dr. John Pierrakos, who could confirm what she was experiencing.

At Pathwork, she found more of a balance than in other communities and moved to its center in the Catskills in New York in 1975. She stayed there for nine years. She measured the chakras of thousands of people and learned how they change with personal processes. Her experiences there were the seeds that slowly grew into the form of her own school of healing.

At Pathwork, she immediately found herself faced with the issue of truth. After two years of concentrating on living by truth, she realized she was having trouble with her personal will and spent the next two years learning to align her personal will with Divine Will. The exercise of aligning herself with Divine Will led her to concentrate on giving love for the following two years. After these six years, great changes had taken place within her. She realized that it is the healing of the soul that the healer works for.

During her time at the Center, Brennan also studied with other clairvoyants. One of them was Rev. Rosalyn L. Bruyere, an ordained minister who founded and directed the Healing Light Center Church in Glendale, California. (She had become its pastor so she could lay hands on people and not risk being charged with practicing medicine without a license.) Bruyere set up a clinic and school in the basement of the Maryland Hotel in Glendale, where she taught a generation of healers who now practice across the country, including Brennan. The system Bruyere practiced bears similarities to the one Brennan herself would develop.

Brennan completed the three-year program in Core Energetics at the Institute for Core Energetics in New York City in 1978 and the five-year program in Spiritual Healership at the Phoenicia Pathwork Center in Phoenicia, New York in 1979. From 1977-1978, Brennan had also gotten into science again and became the head of the Energy Research Group at the Center of Living Force, where she did experiments with John Pierrakos investigating the HEF. By 1978 she had compiled a lot of information from her aura observations in laboratory settings and spent a couple of years doing healing workshops, which grew quickly by word of mouth. After that, Brennan developed her own private practice.

At one point during her transition from practicing massage and bio/Core Energetics counseling to healer, she went through what she called “the tunnel test,” in which she was guided by an angel through the tunnel between life and death. Within three months from the time she passed the tunnel test, she was overwhelmed with requests from new people who wanted healings. As more people began requesting healing rather than therapy, the counseling practice slowly became a healing practice.

As her HSP developed, her observations revealed that most diseases are initiated in the subtle energy fields and that they are transmitted to the human body through time and living habits to become a serious illness. These experiences led her to diagnose and heal the critically ill.

The first High Sense she developed was kinesthetic while spending many hours doing body psychotherapy, touching people and their energy fields. Next she began to “see” things that correlated with what she was feeling. After a lot of practice, she began to have direct access to higher information through hearing as well. She found that when high sense vision is coupled with high sense hearing, the information received is even more useful. And the information she was receiving about the source of illness seemed to be coming from what appeared to be an intelligence higher than herself.

Once she opened her HSP to what she later came to call the fourth level of the human energy field and above, she began to perceive spiritual guides and guardian angels. In the beginning, she thought she was having a vision or making something up. She would be giving a healing, and an angel would walk into the room. Soon they were putting their hands through hers as she worked on people. She could see and feel their hands working. Then they started telling her where to put her hands, and what to do in healing.

A big change came when she decided to ask the guides questions. They answered with things she did not or could not have known. Their interactions became relational. She could see, feel, hear, smell, touch, and interact with them. They became just as real to her as anyone in a physical body.

After some time, she became friends with a particular guide who remained with her throughout her life: Heyoan. Early in Brennan’s career as a healer, Heyoan explained to her that he was her oversoul, that she and he shared the same core star – that she was the incarnation of him in her lifetime, that he “was who she was becoming.” She spent many years healing with Heyoan and the guides of the patients who walked into the healing room with them and always come to healings and assist.

In 1982, she closed her private practice in New York City and focused on teaching healing.

In that year she established in Florida the Barbara Brennan School of Healing (BBSH), an educational institution designed to train professional healers.

Heyoan and the Council of Light led the school from the beginning. All the healing techniques (except chelation, which originated with the clairvoyant Rosalyn Bruyere) were taught to her by Heyoan, channeled during her fifteen years of private healing practice. She first learned about the four dimensions of healing – physical, the energetic, hara, and core light essence – from the channeling she did while teaching healing. Brennan had

While she slowly developed HSP over her years as a counselor and healer, she compiled her observations. She started writing papers about the aura in order to not have to keep answering the same questions over and over. And for a time, she also sat for guidance every morning at sunrise.

Information came so quickly that she went from handwritten notes to typing to tape recording. And she began painting the auras she was seeing. In 1988 those papers became the chapters of her first book, Hands of Light, and the paintings became models for the professional artist who illustrated the book. But writing the book itself had been difficult. She worked on it for fifteen years. A lot of time during those years was spent in self-doubt and avoidance, not believing that she could be doing important work.

After Hands of Light was published, Brennan became more intensely interested in the deeper questions of why people get sick. Around that same time, she met the energy researcher Dr. Valerie Hunt, who validated her HSP experiences. She also started channeling what she first described as“Goddess energy” and later came to recognize as “the holy spirit.” This energy would come through at the end of each class week and at the end of major healing events at the School.

While Sherry Pae was on the faculty there, she had the privilege of being one of the two who would assist Brennan in channeling this energy, which Pae experienced as a “wall of energy” that came from behind them on stage. Pae said, “It was very specific and there were always geometric forms that manifested in the center of the ballroom and seemed to be ‘built’ upon one another as the years progressed. They clearly had something to do with the creative forces of healing and the embodiment of divine will, love, and knowledge. Personal and collective healing happened for everyone who was present at these healing meditations.”  Barbara, Pae, and the other person who  was present on stage as the primary vessels for this healing energy remained in a very expanded state for hours afterwards. “The impact on one’s entire body and energy field was quite extraordinary and it took many times of sitting in this energy for one’s system to be able to function afterwards.”

Brennan’s second book, Light Emerging, came out in 1993. By that time, she and Heyoan were teaching the healing classes at her school. She would lecture for a while, then go into an altered state and “channel” a lecture for Heyoan. Each year from 1998-2009, Brennan compiled and published the school lectures she had channeled from Heyoan in volumes titled Seeds of the Spirit.

After the final volume of lectures was published, Brennan came to realize that the work was all about collective transformation. She felt the School was under a dramatic shift and wanted to redesign the curriculum. Rather than concentrating on individual personal fields through  the Pathwork lectures, she wanted the School to concentrate on higher field phenomena using Seeds of the Spirit as the foundation of the curriculum.

Brennan shared her vision of the School with her colleagues, knowing she would not be able to bring these changes to fruition herself. Decades earlier she had been diagnosed with an unavoidable genetic predisposition to dementia. She began to feel the effects in 2006. She grew progressively ill until her passing in 2022. After 2014 she stopped teaching completely.

Brennan’s third book, Core Healing, came out in 2017. By that time she was unable to complete the book herself owing to her condition, so much of the writing is not her own but that of the editorial team at the School.

Brennan had intended to pass the School into the hands of Laurie Keene, the long time Director of the School, and her colleague and friend Sherry Pae, the School Dean. Pae had developed the same high level of HSP as she had, and it was to Pae that Brennan went when she herself needed personal healing.  But when the School was put up for sale, Pae and Keene were unable to meet the sales price. In 2016 the School was sold to its present director.

The course materials of the School have been modified somewhat, and the training now takes place in small satellite groups around the world rather than in large central gatherings, but the School remains a source of information on the healing of the human energy field.

The Books

Hands of Light Video Introduction

Hands of Light PDF

Hands of Light: A Guide to Healing Through the Human Energy Field

Hands of Light: A Guide to Healing Through the Human Energy Field is Brennan’s first book. It is considered a classic in the field of spiritual healing.

Brennan wrote this book primarily as a reference work for professional healers and a textbook for students. It provides detailed drawings and paintings of auras and energy fields, and descriptions of how human energy fields interact with each other. Several chapters provide exercises on how to see and feel auras. Throughout, Brennan is careful to identify her sources for the terms and concepts she uses to describe what she sees and works with. And she is careful to acknowledge her teachers and the healing methods which she learned from them

The first half of the book includes brief case studies. The second half supplies lengthy descriptions of healing sessions. She also lists her healing session format and provides a healing session analysis to help the reader analyze where they need to practice and where they need to do their own personal growth work. The latter part of the book defines the causes of illness and their connections to energy disturbances in the aura according to her metaphysical concepts. She also describes healing past life traumas which, according to her, cause congenital defects.

Each of the six parts of Hands of Light approaches the human energy field from a different direction. Part I deals with the place of the auric field in the reader’s personal life. Part II deals specifically with the human aura and energy field phenomena. Here Brennan shows how the scientific view of reality supports a holographic view of the universe and the idea that we are composed of energy fields. Here she also provides the scientific evidence that shows matter, including our physical bodies, is slowed down or crystallized energy.

In this section, Brennan also looks at what spiritual tradition and experimental science can tell us about energy field phenomena. Her energy-field observations clearly point out the connections between illness and related psychological problems and illustrate her discovery that the process of changing one’s belief system and thought forms redirects chakra movement.

Part III presents the author’s findings on the relationship between the human energy field and psychodynamics. In this section, Brennan deals extensively with blockages in the auric field. The later chapters in this section explain how these blockages become stagnated “blobs” of energy-consciousness that are cut off from the rest of us and eventually cause illness in the physical body.

Brennan categorizes her observations of blockages in people’s fields into five general types of energetic defense systems. Because the kinds of blockage that develop in a person depend on a variety of things, including personality and childhood development, she describes the energetic appearance of the five character types in people, their characteristic actions and defense mechanisms, and the nature of their higher selves. She also provides advice on what each type needs to do in life.

Part IV deals with perceptual tools and how to increase one’s perceptual ranges. Here Brennan describes the various forms of healing and provides exercises for the reader to enhance their own higher sensory abilities. One entire chapter, ostensibly about how energy blockage leads to physical disease, discusses in great detail how the aura works as the medium through which impulses from higher realities precipitate into physical reality and how these levels or planes of higher reality appear to people. More importantly, this chapter explains how aligning the highest planes of reality with the divine leads to maintained physical and mental health and how imbalanced energies in the higher bodies eventually lead to physical disease.

Part V deals with the process of spiritual healing and how Brennan works with her spiritual guides or teachers. To provide an example for readers who want to become healers, one full chapter in this section describes what she does as a healer during a healing session on all nine levels of the aura.

Part VI explores healing techniques for the various layers of the aura. Here Brennan also presents exemplary case studies of healings to illustrate all the levels and phases of healing and techniques for the self-care of the healer. The final chapter of the book reaches out to readers who have found that being a healer is their true path.

Although the author is a trained physicist and psychotherapist, in this book she primarily recounts her subjective experiences as a healer and what these experiences mean to her. Her extensive training allows her to speak coherently and with understanding about all the subjects she brings into the discussion, from holographic modeling to energy fields to disease and illness. When describing generalities, she speaks in the third person; when giving advice, directly to the reader; when recalling her own experiences, in the first person.

Like the books of Anodea Judith, this book expands upon Wilhelm Reich’s concepts of psychosomatic identity, which Brennan’s teacher John Peirrakos used to analyze character in relation to the chakras. Brennan extends the discussion further into how these character types and their defense mechanisms function in relationships on the level of the chakras.

Throughout this book, Brennan shows how energy events within the auric field are primary and always precede a physical event – that an illness shows in the field before it shows in the physical body and can therefore be healed in the field before it is precipitated in the human body. Brennan illustrates with examples her claims that she receives intuitive information about her clients during sessions, and she describes the repetitive patterns which she sees in the energy fields of her clients that indicate common roots underlying their difficulties. She also provides details of her thoughts on incarnation, birth, death, and life purpose as well as information she received on these topics from her spirit guides.

Light Emerging Introductory Video

Light Emerging – The Journey of Personal Healing

Like Brennan’s first book, her second book, Light Emerging – The Journey of Personal Healing, was a bestseller and published worldwide. She wrote it after twenty years of healing experience and thirteen years of teaching.

Light Emerging expands on certain topics mentioned only briefly in Hands of Light: the holographic universe, the process of personal healing, and healing techniques using color and sound. In Light Emerging, Brennan devotes an entire early chapter to the holographic model as a new way to see healing. And she continues the metaphor throughout the book.

Light Emerging presents a new way of looking at health of mind and body, healing, and illness. Consciousness and the “essence” that preceded it are the basic realities upon which this book is based. “Essence,” she says, “is found within the core star level of every living creature.”

Brennan explains what the healer perceives visually, audibly, and kinesthetically, and how the person being healed can participate in every stage of the healing process. Her prime focus is to help people understand the creative process that originates within one’s core and its significance with regard to physical and mental health and healing. She gives advice on living and personal healing that does not appear in Hands of Light, and she refers often to the methods and practices of her school, describing how healers work with the human energy field during healing sessions. Later in the book, Brennan relates the personal healing process to the seven layers of personal life experience found within the human energy field in her chakra system.

Because Brennan sees the auric field as composed of energy-consciousness, she sees a block in the auric field as a coagulation of energy-consciousness formed around a deep early-life trauma, a block that is frozen in psychic time and so does not mature with the rest of the personality. Brennan found that much of illness is a result of such blockages in the natural flow of an individual’s creative energies. Illness, she says, comes from shrouding and disconnecting this part of ourselves from the core of our being. Her book tells how to reverse the vicious cycle of separation from parts of ourselves and separation from God through love and connectedness.

Part I addresses healing models in our time. Because Brennan considers the energy field to have existed before the physical human body, she speaks of the basic cause of all illness as stemming from forgetting who we truly are and of the healing process as remembering our deeper self. She promotes the idea that physical health is secondary to health of spirit and soul. The process of “light emerging” is remembering your divinity.

Part II discusses healing techniques. An entire chapter in this section goes through what to expect during a healing session in which healers work directly with the energy field of the patient to balance it with the highest spiritual reality to which the patient can expand at that time. “The main job of any healer is to educate the patient back into a state of familiarity with his or her balancing systems, that deeper place within us that remembers who we are, what we need, and how we heal ourselves,” she says. The final chapter in this part provides a discussion of objectives to reach in healer-physician cooperation.

Brennan claims to perceive and treat directly on four dimensions of the human self. Parts III & IV discuss the personal healing process and the creation of a healing plan for these four lower levels of the auric field on the way to experiencing divine love and divine mind. Two of the most important chapters in this part discuss how to approach the self-healing process. One from the perspective of the seven stages of the healing process. The other from within the framework of the seven levels of healing, in which each level of healing relates to a level of the auric field.

The opening chapter of Part III provides advice on how to change one’s health and life. The chapter that follows discusses the fulfillment of the natural human needs that will bring about physical and mental health. After that, the remainder of the book gives specific and detailed information on how to balance one’s life. “In the process of your recovery,” she says, “you discover that you have uncovered parts of yourself that have been buried for a long time. Perhaps new parts you have never seen emerge. There will be plenty of light emerging from within you.”

The focus of Part V is healing relationships. According to Brennan, relationships are central to our physical and mental health and the cause of every illness is always connected to our relationships. This part of the book expands the discussion of the five basic psychological character types into a description of characteristic defense mechanisms that appear in relationships. An entire long chapter focuses on new ways to look at each character structure and the energetic defense systems used by each of these structures.

Part VI deals with healing through higher spiritual realities. The opening chapter in this part tells the story of the spiritual guidance Brennan received throughout her life to provide an example of how HSP and the ability to get precise information come from following guidance over a long period of time. The chapters that follow introduce two new healing concepts that Brennan calls “haric healing” and “core star healing,” both advanced forms of healing work. Parts V and VI also provide brief lectures on various healing topics which Brennan channeled from Heyoan as well as sample transcripts of conversations held between Heyoan and those who had come to be healed.

Core Light Healing Introductory Video

Brennan’s third book, Core Light Healing, completes the trilogy and further explores the nature of the creative process from the human energy-consciousness perspective. The book uncovers both how the blocks in our energy fields are formed and what the process is to clear blocks and release our creative potential.

Brennan’s first book, Hands of Light, focuses primarily on the structure and function of the first seven levels of the human energy field. Her second book, Light Emerging, focuses on clarifying the healing process that moves through the four dimensions of the human energy consciousness system – the physical body, the energy field, hara, and core essence – and introduces the concepts of hara healing and core healing. Core Light Healing concentrates on these two new healing processes and describes how to understand, heal, and utilize the creative life energies that arise out of our core essence. Core Light Healing is very much a self-help book, but a self-help book intended to help readers realize that they are in actuality beings of light.

The book presents to readers a process they may practice to aid their own healing. But readers need to keep in mind that the entire book is written from the ultradimensional perspective that our individual souls choose to incarnate through selected parents with an intention or longing for what we want to accomplish in this lifetime. Throughout Brennan refers to the practices of her school, and each chapter ends with a self-review exercise related to the chapter topic.

In Core Light Healing, Brennan recounts in her own words the most important moments in her life as a healer and focuses on the deepest levels of her healing practices. In doing so, she shares one of the greatest gifts that makes her different from other healers: her ability to bridge seen and unseen worlds and take the reader with her.

Part I deals with the four major aspects or dimensions of the human energy consciousness system which she has developed over forty years and includes new information on healing the blocks in this system. The first chapter discusses the HEF in great detail, which makes this chapter a valuable source of Brennan’s chakra theory.

In the remainder of Part I, Brennan describes the creative process and discusses healing the blocked creative process. She also gives specific examples of distortions in the chakras. The concepts of emotional reactions which Brennan presents, and the vicious cycle that forms these distortions, were originally described in the Pathwork Lectures channeled by Eva Pierrakos. Brennan’s work adds the dynamics of what happens in the HEF to hold a block in place. She discusses how blocks are formed when something frightens us and explains how blocks are created as we progress through life, from the womb and beyond.

Since the early 1980s, Brennan has channeled lecture material from Heyoan that has become the spiritual foundation for Brennan Healing Science. The final chapter of Part I presents edited transcripts of lectures channeled from Heyoan on balanced, unitive concepts that intend to set a foundation for personal and global healing.

Part II deals with healing on the fourth level of our field, which Brennan calls the “astral” level, and the astral worlds in which this fourth level of our field lives. This, according to Brennan, is the level of relationships, and so involves cords of connection. And the blocks on this level, she says, stop the creative process by forming what she calls “time capsules.”

The first half of Part II deals exclusively with the fourth dimension. The opening chapter provides theory on how energy enters the chakras through “seals” and into their sensors to impart information. This chapter also provides practical advice and exercises on how to use HSP. In this chapter, Brennan assigns a particular HSP sense to each chakra and differentiates between information perceived from reflected light through the eyes in physical vision and the light which HSP perceives beyond the visible light range from the generated light of the HEF, hara, and core star.

Three of the chapters in Part II include details of Brennan’s childhood experiences and her experiences of fourth-dimensional worlds during her healings, while also giving advice on accessing fourth-dimensional experiences like seeing visions, hearing guides speak, and feeling the presence of angels.

Other chapters describe details of fourth-dimensional reality which Brennan has experienced. Brennan discusses how the fourth-level world functions and gives advice on how to orient oneself in this otherwise confusing world. She describes the fourth-level-reality world, and the beings that inhabit these worlds, and discusses various types of fourth-level-reality objects.

She also summarizes important information about how the fourth-level reality works. She gained this information over many years of exploring these realities and channeling information from Heyoan about it – the “physics” of fourth-level reality. One chapter lists twenty-seven major aspects of the astral world and gives suggestions on how to get out of lower fourth-level reality and “into the light.”

Following her description of fourth-level reality, Brennan discusses the various types of fourth-level or astral phenomena: attachments, power, objects, forms, beings, black magic, and the nether worlds called “hell” and “purgatory.” She also describes some of the fourth-dimensional objects she has removed from people’s fields. In a chapter that provides an overview of how black magic and hexes work as forms of negative intention, Brennan explains how and why what is called “evil” is simply “profound forgetting.”

The second half of Part II discusses healings on the fourth-level of reality. Here is provided an overview of “past-life” healing: the various types of lifetimes that are related to one another by unresolved personal issues carried on into subsequent life experiences as well as “time-capsule” healing, which releases the bonds of the past. Brennan discusses dying and life after death in relation to the human energy field and provides her own HSP experiences around death.

She discusses at length the five major types of cord connections that exist on the astral level in our human relationships and in our relationship to the earth and to higher spiritual worlds. In one chapter, Brennan provides an unusual and useful perspective on healing our ancestral cords and roots, which to Brennan actually “look and feel like they are made of tar.” She sees our ancestral roots as damaged genetic cords that connect us to our ancestors and carry false belief systems that perpetuate through multiple generations: “They literally create blind spots in the HEF where the traditional ancestral roots damage the seals of perception [in the chakras]!” All this leads into a discussion of the healthy need to surrender to the will of God and an explanation of what such surrender actually means.

The final chapter in the book is a meditation on the healing of the world that reflects on living in two worlds at once in alliance with Godly forces. But the meditation is made from the perspective that the universe is benign. And from that mistaken perspective, how-to advice is given based on the principles revealed during Brennan’s channeling of Heyoan.

In this final chapter, Brennan refers to “Light Workers” and to the “Community of the Sacred Human Heart.” Both are terms that do not appear in her earlier books. She tells her readers:

You are the light bearers. You and many like you all over this planet are doing light work everywhere…. In this century there is the challenge to live the mystical life while living the mundane … but live your life among humanity. Bring spirit to humanity.

Brennan’s Chakra System

Brennan’s experience of the chakras is presented in the first half of Hands of Light, throughout Light Emerging, and in the first chapter of Core Light Healing. Because Brennan describes her chakra system in such detail, it seems appropriate to point out some of those details in this review.

Let’s begin with a few clarifying generalizations Kurt Leland makes in his history of the Western chakra system Rainbow Body:

The most advanced correlation I have seen between chakras, aura layers, bodies, and planes, occurs in the writings of Barbara Ann Brennan…. I would argue that her correlations represent the final stage in the evolution of the Western chakra system – a codification of its esoteric dimension.

Her system was built up by validating the observations of others with her own, then consolidating these observations by means of her own intuition, resulting in an innovative synthesis. Based on personal testimony and passed on to readers and students, Brennan’s system is also experiential. Furthermore, she scrupulously noted and thanked her sources. Though Brennan borrowed [Rosalyn] Bruyere’s terms (and acknowledged the debt), she synthesized this information with material from other sources, such as Jack Schwarz’s Human Energy Systems (1980)….

“Hands of Light uses the familiar names and locations for the chakras. The chakra colors are the same as Bruyere’s. It lists the endocrine gland associations from [Alice] Bailey’s Esoteric Healing (cited in the bibliography), with the pituitary in the sixth and the pineal in the seventh positions. However, Brennan’s list of chakra qualities diverges significantly from that of the Western system…. These qualities are in some respects closer to those of the bodies and planes described by [Annie] Besant.

The astral body turning point in Brennan is similar in function to what Blavatsky called the psychic plane, a combination of the upper astral and lower mental planes, as described by [Annie] Besant. On the other side of the psychic plane in Blavatsky, the spiritual planes begin – just as, in Brennan, they begin on the other side of her astral plane. While the nomenclatures differ, the functions are the same.

In addition, Leland points out that Brennan uses Bruyere’s system of identifying layers of the aura, and that there are a number of similarities between Brennan’s chakra system and the chakra system portrayed in Theosophical literature – where the nomenclature differs but the functions are the same.

For the most part, Brennan avoids the use of symbolic information in her chakra system. She prefers the literal and avoids theosophical and ancient Sanskrit references in her descriptions, associations, and correspondences. In this way, she is able to provide detailed analyses of what she sees and experiences in terms that might be called scientific. Brennan’s observations and experiences are very much her own. However, her ideas and concepts, the terms she uses, and the perspective or point of view she developed are in many cases learned or borrowed.

  • Human Energy Field

Brennan speaks of the Human Energy Field (HEF), usually called the “aura,” as a manifestation of universal energy, “a luminous body” that surrounds and interpenetrates the physical body and is composed of bioplasma.

According to Brennan, the HEF consists of many levels or “frequency ranges” of energy, the most well-known of which are the seven spinal chakras. But the HEF is not layered like an onion: “The frequency range of each level goes all the way through and extends from the physical body. Each consecutive level of higher frequency range extends further out from the body.”

  • Chakra Development

In the 1970s John Pierrakos used basic character structures to read Dychtwald’s body at Esalen Institute, an event Dychtwald memorialized in the opening chapter of his book Bodymind. Anodea Judith used the same structures in the 1990s to meld modern psychological issues with the Western chakra system in her book on psychological chakra theory Eastern Body, Western Mind.

Brennan uses the same structures in her books to discuss the energy movements of characteristic defense mechanisms. But she gives new names to the five basic character structures identified by Wilhelm Reich and used in bioenergetics. Her names are derived from those developed by Dr. Alexander Lowen, with whom her teacher John Pierrakos worked. Also like Anodea Judith, Brennan depends upon Erik Erikson’s delineation of stages of psychological growth and development to describe more precisely what she visualizes in chakra development from birth to death.

Figure 8-2: Adult and Child’s Chakras, Hands of Light, p. 65

  • Chakra Function

Like so many other chakra theorists, Brennan attributes specific functions to each chakra.

She associates each chakra with one of the five senses, a specific psychological function, an endocrine gland, and a major nerve plexus. Peculiar to Brennan’s system is the concept that each spinal chakra on the front of the body (chakras two through six) is paired with its counterpart on the back of the body, and that together they may be considered the front and back of one chakra – the frontal aspects related to a person’s feelings, the rear ones to the person’s will. Leland notes that, in this way, Brennan maintains the concept of feeling and will energy centers, but carries John Pierrakos’s system to its logical conclusion.

Figure 7-3: The Seven Major Chakras, Front and Back Views (Diagnostic View) Hands of Light, p. 46

According to Brennan, the chakras have three major functions: to take energy consciousness into each level of the energy bodies, to serve as sensory organs for HSP, and to govern the level of the HEF to which they correspond. Since the chakras are points of maximum energy intake, they are important focal points of balance within the energy system.

The chakras function as intake organs for energy from the universal life energy field that metabolize HEF bioplasma. They receive and process universal energy. They absorb universal energy (orgone or life force or prana), break it up into component parts, and then send it along “energy rivers” called nadis to the nervous system. Brennan notes that the vortices of each chakra on each level metabolize a different frequency of energy consciousness.

  • Appearance of Chakras

The images of the chakras which Brennan observes as a clairvoyant and describes in her books resemble the observations that clairvoyant Charles Leadbeater described sixty years earlier as “flower-like funnels that open into circular vortexes.”

Leadbeater’s Chakras—Side View (reprinted from C. W. Leadbeater’s The Chakras, 1927) Note the “stems” attaching the chakras to the spine and the vortices or “flowers” showing at the front of the body.

However, Brennan’s observations, as displayed in her book’s drawings, show the seven spinal chakras to be much larger and truly conical or funnel-shaped:

Each funnel has its wider opening on the outside of our body, about six inches in diameter, one inch from the body. The small tip is inside our body near the spine. The vertical power current lies through the center line of the body. It is the large channel of energy into which all the chakras release the energy they take in from the universal or health field all around us. The energy from all the chakras laces up and down through the vertical power current. Each color is woven together, somewhat like a rope made of beautiful pulsating light of all colors.

It is perhaps worth noting as well that Brennan’s HSP perceives the side channel or “nadi” Ida as red and the side channel Pingala as blue.

Each chakra, she says, is composed of several smaller vortices neatly set inside the overall cone shape. Brennan perceives four vortices in the first chakra, a number that corresponds with Hindu tradition. As one ascends up the chakras, she says, these vortices become smaller and more difficult to count.

The Seven Layers of the Auric Field. Brennan observes seven layers of the auric field: “Each chakra exists on each level of the field and is composed of the same type of energy consciousness of that level…. Each of the seven chakras has seven layers, each corresponding to a layer of the auric field. Each chakra looks different on each of these layers.” This is to say that “the color of each chakra will vary according to the specific HEF level you are on.”

Brennan describes the appearance of the chakras on each layer in detail, verbally and in drawings and color figures, in health and in various states of dysfunction. The first, third, and fifth levels are highly structured, “like standing waves of light patterns,” while the second, fourth, and sixth layers in between “appear to be composed of colored fluids in constant motion.” On each structured level of the field, “one can see a three-dimensional view, both the outside and the inside of any part of the body.”

The first level is structured as blue lines of light with particles of light flowing through them. The third has fine, scintillating yellow lines of light with “fine particles of light flowing through them.” The fifth level “looks more like the negative of a photograph” and provides a kind of blueprint for the first level. The seventh is composed of “very strong gold lines of light.”

The even-numbered levels are all fluid levels. They look like “blobs or clouds of fluid in motion” that flow “along the standing light lines of the structured layers.” The second level has the appearance of “a gaseous substance … like colored clouds of light.” The fourth is fluidlike, thicker and heavier than the second level, a “thick colored fluid, like gelatin before it hardens.” It is “the bioplasma that carries our feelings about others.” The sixth is like the diffuse light around a candle flame “composed of beautiful amorphous beams of diffuse [iridescent] light radiating out from our bodies in all directions.” It is the unstructured levels of the energy field that Brennan relates to plasma and has dubbed “bioplasma.”

This is how it all works according to Brennan:

The energy consciousness taken in by each chakra on each structured level is sent throughout the HEF on that level along the lines of light that lead to all parts of the body. The energy consciousness taken in by the chakra on the unstructured levels of the field also follow the lines of light of the structured levels, but flow more like bioplasma. All the energy consciousness taken in by the chakras on all levels of the HEF flow to each limb, each organ, as well as each cell. Thus all parts of the physical body receive energy consciousness from each chakra on each level of the HEF. The HEF and physical body work together as an intricate system of bioenergy consciousness and physical living flesh.

Blockages. What is popularly referred to as a blockage in the chakras is “dark accumulated energy consciousness” according to Brennan.

These accumulations occur only in the second and fourth levels of the field – the unstructured, feeling aspects of the HEF. It accumulates because one or more of the structured levels (one, three, five, seven) that guide the energy flow through the field has become disfigured with tears, tangles, thickness, or fraying thinness.

The blocks are the stagnated energy consciousness of various unresolved emotional experiences.

“We create a block when we experience something that frightens us,” she says. On the second level, the block becomes “dark clouds”; on the fourth it becomes “thick, gooey mucous.” Brennan’s observations show that disease takes the form of these blocks of dark energy on the even-numbered layers of the field. On the structured layers of the field, disease takes the form of disfiguration, disruption, or entanglement.

Figure 15-5: Chakras That Have Been Disfigured, Hands of Light, p. 144

Colors. The chakras appear differently depending upon which level of the field a clairvoyant is looking at. According to Brennan, the rainbow colors so often spoken of are found only on the second level of the field.

But her color assignments vary slightly from the now standard Western rainbow spectrum model and are more similar to the color assignments made by Rosalyn Bruyere. The number of chakras and the names Brennan uses to indicate the seven layers of the auric body system in Hands of Light she also adopts primarily from her teacher Rosalyn Bruyere, whom Brennan credits as having a chakra system close to her own.

Leland points out that Brennan dropped Bruyere’s terms in her second book, Light Emerging. “However,” he says, “she was still working with Bruyere’s template – the terms and descriptions are different, but the energetic functions are the same.”

  • Location of the Seven Spinal Chakras

Brennan locates the seven standard chakras near the major nerve plexuses of the body along the spine.

In Hands of Light, Brennan makes special note that that Dr. David Tansley (in his book Radionics and the Subtle Body of Man) states that “the seven major chakras are formed at the points where the standing lines of light cross each other at 21 points.” This statement sounds like a measurable observation made by someone, presumably by Tansley. But it is not. This statement is something that Tansley quoted without attribution from Alice Bailey’s Esoteric Psychology, Vol. 2.

This is a single example of “chakra theory” in Brennan’s books that is based not on what Brennan herself experienced through her HSP but on statements of other authors, teachers, or clairvoyants who at times did not make clear the origins of their “facts.” There may be other terms and concepts which Brennan adopted from others without attribution or personal experience, but these have not been investigated for the purposes of this review.

  • Levels of Reality

Brennan introduces her experiences of the different levels of reality, and the beings who exist on each of these levels, in Chapters 7 and 15 of Hands of Light.

In Chapter 19 of Hands of Light, she points out the principles she sees at work in these different levels:

There are doors or seals between the chakra levels deep within the hearts of the chakras … that must be opened in order to move from one level to the next. This is done by raising the vibrational level of your energy system. To increase and maintain your field at a higher vibrational level means purification work….

Each level represents another octave higher in vibration than the one below it. To bring your conscious awareness to a higher level means to increase the vibrational rate at which your awareness functions. This is not an easy task, for … every increase in energy in the system knocks loose blocks that take you through experiences that you have buried in your subconsciousness….

Opening the chakras on levels above the fourth also means that you will start to perceive beings on other planes of existence.

Fourth-Level Reality. Brennan goes into details of her experience and perception of fourth-level realities in Chapters 6-12 of Core Healing.

Here is a general statement on her experience of it:

As an energy consciousness world, the fourth level contains objects and thought forms as well as beings, ranging from angels to devils. It exists beyond the physical three-dimensional world, yet also, in a sense, surrounds the physical. The fourth-level world is full of beings that range from very highly evolved, and therefore very light, bright, and angelic, to beings that are not yet as evolved as the normal human being.

Brennan points out that all the dualistic, energy consciousness life forms in the astral worlds create a shell or “noise band” around the earth that promotes manifestations of energy consciousnesses in opposition to each other.

In this fourth-level reality, according to Brennan, “guides appear in different shapes and forms, according to the culture and belief systems of the people with whom they wish to communicate…. Guides are beings that have incarnated many times, and so have a different relationship with physical earth life than angels do…. Angels live in the realms of higher vibration of the fourth-level worlds, as well as the higher spiritual worlds above the fourth level.”

Of angels, Brennan says, “I don’t always understand what they are doing.”

Reason, Emotion, and Will. In Core Healing, Brennan often refers to reason, emotion, and will as the three aspects of the psyche, which is the standard western textbook perspective.

These three aspects of the psyche also figure strongly in theosophical descriptions of the psyche under the terms feeling or emotion, will or volition, and thought or mind.

In Brennan’s chakra system, will relates to levels 1 and 5, reason to levels 3 and 7, and emotions to levels 2, 4, and 6. Brennan constantly refers to the balance of these three aspects in relation to intention. And in her system, intention is related to the fourth chakra, which gives access to fourth-dimensional or astral experience and is a controlling factor of astral experience.

Core Star. Brennan considers the “core star” to be the internal source of the divine.

It looks to her HSP like a star, a “brilliant light of many colors.” Kurt Leland remarks that a concept similar to Brennan’s core star has precedent in Theosophical literature in Ivah BerghWhitten’s Initial Course (1932) and in Charles Leadbeater’s The Master and the Path (1925), where Leadbeater speaks of a “tiny silver star of consciousness that represents the monad.”

Brennan locates the core star literally in the center of the body, about one and one-half inches above the navel on the center line of the body. At its center and all around it, she perceives a “black velvet void … teeming with un-manifest life” that is “full of unimaginable power” which she equates with the zero point field concept of quantum physics.

“Allowing the light to emerge from the source of the core star,” Brennan says, “is the healing process.” She says that after working with and observing the auric fields for many years, she could see that “a change in the intentionality completely changes the balance of energy in the auric field as well as the type of energy that is released in the bioplasmic streamers.”

Hara. According to Brennan, the next dimension in which we exist after the core star is the hara dimension.

Hara is a Japanese term which Brennan adopted that traditionally refers to the quality of focused power in the lower belly. Within the hara region of the lower abdomen is a central point located on the hara line about two or three inches below the navel called the [lower] tan tien. It is the “focal point of power in the hara.” To Brennan’s HSP, it appears as “a hollow sphere.”

The hara dimension or haric level is one “quantum leap” deeper into what Brennan believes is the fourth dimension – the “level of intentionality” – the foundation for the human energy system known as the auric field or energy body.

She locates the main tube of the hara inside the vertical power current. A healthy hara, as she perceives it, “extends from about three and one-half feet to four feet above the head all the way down into the center of the earth…. At the top of the hara is a small upside-down funnel [a funnel pointing upward] where it enters other dimensions that reach toward the Godhead.” The point of the funnel is where the hara line originates, she says: “It represents our first individuation out of the core star dimension into this incarnation, and through it we have our direct connection to the Godhead.”

Going Further

Brennan has shown that higher perception is possible and shows readers how to develop this ability. And there is no doubt that she was an authentic healer. Through her heightened sense of awareness, she has been able to help a great number of people and teach others how to do the same. The books she has written will continue to help people to understand that there are unseen worlds around us and that it is possible to awaken higher faculties within us. She was clearly aware that consciousness was continuing to evolve and that the human energy field would change as a result. Yet there is more to the spirit and soul than she seems to be aware of, or at least more than she speaks of in her books.

  • How to Look at the Various Chakra Systems

Kurt Leland has come up with a classification system to identify the various chakra systems according to their purpose.

His classifications identify systems as they relate to the various bodies recognized in Theosophical ideology: etheric, astral, mental, causal, buddhic, nirvanic, or monadic.

The standard Western chakra system, he says, “is tied to the ganglia and glands of the physical body. It has to do with healing and self-development along the lines of personal happiness.” Thus it “reflects an etheric-body chakra system.” An astral-body chakra system “would deal primarily with healing ourselves as emotional beings.” The “social dimension” of other chakra systems “reflects the chakras of the mental body.” The Eastern system’s focus on liberation through self-transcendence may be a “version of a causal-body system – or even a buddhic-, nirvanic-, or monadic-body system.”

Leland reasons:

If we accept the notion that each subtle body has its own chakra system, then it is no stretch to realize that differences in chakra systems may reflect differences in the body being described. But most teachers, students, writers, and readers assume there is only one chakra system and become confused when there are differences in clairvoyant observations, terminology, and descriptions, Even the formulators of such systems may not realize they may be describing part or all of the chakra system of a particular subtle body or a hybrid of more than one.

His conclusion:

It is no wonder that etheric, astral, mental, and causal versions of the chakra system may not be recognizable when compared. Indeed, the differences between Eastern and Western systems may be derived from a similar problem of distorted perspective.

Leland recognizes that Brennan’s chakra system is very different from other Western systems: “Brennan’s placing of the causal body at the crown of her chakra system may indicate that her system maps the chakras of the causal body, as defined in Theosophical teachings.” However, according to Leland’s requisite attribute, it seems Brennan’s system, whose primary purpose is “healing ourselves as emotional beings,” might be better classified as an astral body system.

According to the attributes contained in Leland’s categories, the eight minor energy centers or force centers of Cosolargy’s System might be considered as forming the full psychic body, which subsumes the other bodies distinguished in Leland’s categories and is distinct from the higher spiritual Light Body.

Brennan’s chakra system and Cosolargy’s system of eight force centers share some similarities. Both systems associate colors and plexuses different from those of the standard Western seven-chakra system. Establishing clear correspondences between Brennan’s system and Cosolargy’s system may make it possible for those who work with Cosolargy’s eight-chakra system to apply the healing therapies Brennan presents in her books as well as her exercises to enhance their own higher sense perceptions.

In order to make these correspondences, the diagram below identifies the chakras in her system using the locators she provides rather than colors or numbers. Brennan locates the seven spinal chakras specifically by the places where their tips seat into the head or spinal column.

The splenic plexus is not mentioned in the current standard chakra system of the West. Both the clairvoyant Theosophist Charles Leadbeater, who is cited in Brennan’s bibliography, and David Tansley, the chiropractor and radionics specialist who Brennan refers to in locating the seven spinal chakras, recognize the existence of a spleen chakra. But Brennan mentions no experience or perception of it. In the System of Cosolargy, the splenic plexus is one of the eight minor force centers and is associated with the drive center of the psychic body.

  • Multidimensional Chakra Systems

Kurt Leland proposes that the ideal Western chakra system would be multidimensional: “The bodies and planes would be related to one another in a developmental or evolutionary continuum.” Brennan’s system, he says, “suggests some basic principles … that could support such a system.”

The System of Cosolargy works with the eight minor force centers of the psychic or fourth-dimensional body that emanate out of the four major force centers of the spiritual or fifth-dimensional Light body. When an adept in The System of Cosolargy sets in motion the eight and the four spheres within their being, these centers harmonize with celestial spheres, and that person is then regulated by superior forces outside of their person and being, something that could not have been possible without the spheres being set into motion. Thus Cosolargy’s system of force centers can be said to be both multidimensional and related to one another in an evolutionary continuum.

  • Brennan and the Sun

Brennan states that the universal life-energy field that feeds the human energy field “appears to be charged by sunlight” and “is visible as tiny globules of orgone” that “seem to be tiny white balls … conspicuous above all others which may be seen floating in the atmosphere…. While the force that vivifies these globules is quite different from light, it nevertheless seems to depend upon light for its power of manifestation.”

Her description bears a clear resemblance to Charles Leadbeater’s description of vital energy or prana, which he called “vitality globules” and which she saw “pouring forth from the sun continually.” Both Brennan’s and Leadbeater’s descriptions resemble what are called Christons in the System of Cosolargy.

The writings of Leadbeater suggest that he practiced solar techniques of some sort. Brennan’s writings do not. Neither do her writings mention how to access the universal-energy field as an energy source except to say that the chakras rotating clockwise absorb energy.

Brennan does tell readers in passing that she communicated with the sun at sunrise over decades since the early 1970s and that she received information through these communications which she recorded and published in her books. But she says no more than that. She doesn’t mention any particular solar practice. Neither does she suggest that these regular solar communications activated her energetically or were conducive to higher forms of consciousness. Nor does she suggest that Heyoan, her “oversoul,” is a fourth-dimensional solar being. Yet her description of her relation to Heyoan and her constant references to light in her therapies would suggest that all these things are true. It appears she was privy to knowledge which she did not wish to make public.

The book Project X: The Search for the Secrets of Immortality by Gene Savoy Sr. contains a passage describing the author’s own early experience with the sun that may serve to explain how Brennan came to receive her heightened faculties of perception:

Exposure to sunlight had apparently led to an enhancement of acuity: the greater receptivity of the retinas, perhaps because of the emergence of more sensitive rods and cones, had given me hypersensitive sight. I had gained an expanded eyesight with new images of the external world…. I sat looking at the forms within my visual perception and beyond these to the color bodies which envelop all living things. It seemed to me that these colored forms or fields were more active than the physical forms to which they were attached, giving off arcs of electrical current, expanding and contracting as impressions imposed upon the physical forms altered their natures….

           Thus, the fields around my body were speeded up enough through the intake of solar energy to allow the impressions of another dimension to register on my new-found sensory makeup. Time and energy could be manipulated to give me an entirely new impression of existence—a higher reality…. I was perfectly content to observe for myself, as if I were the discoverer of a new world, and felt it was my right to explore its wonders.

Cosolargy teaches what is required for activation of the chakras or force centers in order to transform them energetically to a state that is conducive to higher forms of Consciousness. The first year of Cosolargy’s Academy Program presents psycho-physical solar techniques to energize the eight force centers of the psychic body (chakras) and optimize their performance. The second year of the program explains the effect of such techniques on the force centers of the spiritual body and presents higher psycho-spiritual techniques.

  • Brennan’s Experience of Fourth-dimensional Reality

According to Brennan, the law that dominates the astral worlds of fourth-dimensional reality is “like attracts like.”

Brennan experiences fourth-level-reality worlds as “spaces whose nature is determined by the belief systems of the fourth-level-reality beings that inhabit them.” She refers to these spaces as “belief system territories” or “bardos” that “range all the way from heavens to hells and everything in between.”

If this is true, we might assume that the belief systems of those who visit these realms would affect their experience of them as well. And so, we may ask how Brennan’s own belief system has affected her experience and descriptions of fourth-level reality, and how much more there is to this level of reality than what Brennan herself experienced.

Brennan does make this important statement regarding the interrelationship of our third-dimensional world and fourth-dimensional worlds: “The future of the fourth-level-reality worlds depends on how well we are able to learn to regulate and then resolve our erroneous images and belief systems about reality.” There is much truth in this statement because we all possess a fourth-dimensional nature, a fourth-dimensional body and mind – a Dark nature.

The fourth-dimensional psychic body, or “rainbow body,” together with the mentality that accompanies it, form what adepts of Cosolargy, and mystics of the ancient Hermetic Schools, call the “counterfeit soul” – the soul under the influence of Darkness. And it is this counterfeit soul, a miscarriage generated out of the fifth-dimensional Worlds of Light, which can be and needs to be redeemed while we exist here in our third-dimensional world.

With regard to this soul and enlightenment, Brennan quotes Carl Jung: “We do not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.” How true.

A still higher nature can be expressed if one goes on to exercise the arts and sciences of being –  using the energy of the sun and the Intelligence within it – that bring about the regeneration of the immortal Light Body together with its spiritual Consciousness to form the true soul.

Being immortal, the true soul doesn’t receive any intelligence of a physical or cosmic nature. It works with transcendent energy. And to work with transcendent energy, you need to have the faculties to be able to put that energy to work. You need a Light Body because energy cannot manifest without a body. You need a Light Body to be able to receive and utilize transcendent energy from the higher dimension we call Heaven or the Worlds of Light. And when a spiritual rebirth is generated, that preexistent soul comes alive in us in our third-dimensional world and begins to involve itself in the divine.

  • Building a Coherent Energy Field

Brennan recognizes the possibility of an individual possessing a “coherent field”:

One of the most powerful, healthy, and rare configurations of the HEF is a coherent field…. To make one’s fields coherent, it is necessary to make all your chakras on each level of the field the same size as all the others chakras on that level…. Creating coherency … is the result of working on the self.

Yet Brennan claims she never saw one. (Her colleague Sherry Pae describes it as transparent.) The coherence and balance Brennan speaks of – “to make all your chakras on each level of the field the same size” – is one of the goals in the System of Cosolargy. It is accomplished in the System by first developing the eight force centers or chakras to their optimal strength or potential. Ultimate balance of the chakras comes from nourishing each chakra through the energy of an outside spiritual force until they all operate at optimal strength. It is achieved through proper solar practice. This is the first step toward rebirth of the immortal Light Body.

  • Spiritual Healing

In Hands of Light, Brennan provides physical exercises, kundalini breathing exercises, and grounding exercises to charge and open chakras. In Light Emerging, she introduces color breathing meditation, a practice first discussed in print by Roland Hunt in his book The Seven Keys to Color Healing (1940). And in Core Light Healing, Brennan’s healing methods involve channeling different levels or vibrations of light in a process she calls “chakra charging,” in which the healer holds the specific color of a chakra that is being channeled through her until the chakra is charged. But nowhere does she suggest color irradiation to charge chakras or mention exercises related to solar practices, though both practices are mentioned by her predecessors.

Brennan notes in her books that blocks in the chakras are not easy to clear or unblock by oneself. Because a block was “originally created by separating the mental memory from the feeling experience of a painful life situation” and because it “has less energy than the surrounding HEF,” “new integrated energy must be carefully run into the block to give it enough energy to integrate the feelings with the memory.”

The “new integrated energy” Cosolargy recommends is acquired through proper practice of solar techniques, by absorbing and circulating light-energy and the consciousness it carries. Spiritual Community provides a womb of energy that protects the individual going through the process of healing or spiritual rebirth. At times, however, an individual does require the arts of the healer to aid in the process of personal healing.

In Hands of Light, Brennan discusses the clockwise and counterclockwise spinning of chakras (that is, clockwise or counterclockwise from the perspective of someone looking at the person) in relation to a person’s positive or negative perspective on life. In Brennan’s system, all chakras should spin clockwise for health. She considers counterclockwise motion to be a blockage “interfering with metabolism” and a dysfunction.

She relates clockwise spinning to drawing energy from the universal energy field into a chakra and metabolizing it, and counterclockwise spinning to energy flowing outward from the body: “If the chakra is counterclockwise, the individual is projecting. If the chakra is clockwise, the individual is perceiving.” The System of Cosolargy recognizes the same thing. But for a different purpose. Absorption of solar energy through the clockwise motion of a force center nourishes the energy body. Reflecting or projecting through the counterclockwise motion of a force center completes the flow of the energy circuit by sharing or sending energy to other beings or to the sun.

Brennan’s concept that healing is really a process of remembering who you are can be extrapolated to the spiritual level. She speaks of a lower or shadow self and a higher self. She doesn’t directly say that the lower or shadow self is what we would call a “counterfeit soul” or that the higher self is what we would call the “true soul,” but that may very well be what she intends. Brennan’s work inspires her readers and students to become Light Workers aligned with truth, love, and the Divine Will.

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