If you're going through a transformation or transition period right now this book will inspire and uplift you!

I want to share the chapter of the book on our Twelve Strands of Power because it is so powerful and perhaps you will be inspired to make the balancing of them into a practice with poses like I have. Whenever a friend visits me I teach her my version, done in the ocean, but everyone can make their own unique interpretation, of course, for maximum benefit!

He says there are 12 strands - 7 of them we call 'chakras' but he calls them 'strands' - and we know those 7 well. Bartholomew says: "The seven chakras or strands that are most easily observed in the body are in the spinal area, and you are most aware of them when power is moving through them. These seven chakras concern survival, sexuality, balance, emotion, heart, will, and visionary perception, which move you into a higher state of consciousness. That which you call a higher state of consciousness is only the beginning of the movement into the next 12 strands. In truth, you are an energy field that has 12 points of power. When you move into a state of harmony, it is because those strands are balanced. Once they are balanced and you leave the earth plane, more strands are then added to you. I can testify from my own experience that bliss can become even more blissful. Think of the increased power and joy you will feel when you have balanced another 12 strands. It is an ever-expansive, exciting extension, where you are given more and more power to balance. But you cannot leave the earth plane until you have the present 12 strands taken care of. If these were not balanced and you were given additional power, you can imagine the chaos that would take place. You would not be a danger, not to "yourself" but to "others". So, to move from one state of awareness to another, you must have those powers in balance."

"The five additional chakras or "strands of power" I have been talking about have movement as an attribute. They activate and move through the seven more stationary "centers." They are in a state of constant motion and do not fit into the "straight line" pattern of the seven chakras. When these powers move, they activate and interact with different parts of you at different times. The survival chakra and the strand of Trust, for instance, will have their turn at balancing each other. Thus, the strands and centers present many combinations and opportunities for you to balance your energies."

"No matter how it looks, this is not a random universe. Freedom comes from the knowledge of this as an illusory world and knowing that whatever illusions you have created will die. The wonder of the strands is that they are eternal. The balance of them is what you take with you to the "next world," and out of that balance comes new life, with new opportunities for more growing and sharing. Illusions die; only the Real remains."

After I read the following chapter about these 5 strands they seemed to just beg me to be brought into form somehow. So, back in 2005, while standing in the dynamic, alive ocean, my body took on a pose that, to me, complimented the energy of the strand that I was balancing. I do the pose in the ocean while holding the thought-feeling of the strand in my mind and heart....one leads into the next. They are simple poses...my favourite is Trust when I simply fall back into the ocean and let her take me where she will! See what comes to you. I suggest creating your poses in nature....it's just so much more powerful when you're surrounded by the beauty, power and healing energy of Nature - mmm mmm!

Soooo...here are Bartholomew's words on the matter:

"We have often spoken of the fact that you are on a journey. In your everyday life, you would not climb a mountain without the proper equipment, but you have forgotten that when you set out on your life journey, you also came prepared. And so, I would like to remind you of the availability of your equipment.

Science is becoming more aware of the fact that you are energy in motion, and that motion embodies in it various colours in lighter and darker bands. Part of your basic earth plane "equipment" includes 12 strands of power. Since these 12 energy strands are also a part of your awareness, they can be readily identified if you will take the trouble to look for them. The difficulty is that you are accustomed to viewing these strands as "problems," rather than as "strands of power." One of the tasks you came to accomplish on this planet was to recognize these 12 strands and observe that they have been split, each into two parts. Your job is to merge them together and bring them back into balance and harmony. The difficulties in your life come when one or more of these strands moves through you in an unbalanced state. When the job of balancing them is finished, you will be free to explore other areas of consciousness where there are powers not available to you on the earth plane.

As you begin to bring the 12 strands into balance, you will experience feelings of love without personality, wisdom without superiority, power without arrogance, and aliveness without speciality. All of this results in that wonderful state of Awareness that you call "bliss." The body resonates with a knowingness of its own wonder, but the wonder is not personal, for you understand it is shared throughout creation. So, in your life, you must learn to acknowledge the power that moves through you, identify which strand is out of harmony, and go about the business of balancing it. This is not hard to do. Being in balance brings a feeling that many of you have known - that all of life is as it should be. (Yes! This was my Grandmother's message to me after she died!) This does not mean that you will never have conflicts, it means that it will not matter what kind of difficulties you might have. As you may have observed, there are some of you who are in states of great physical difficulty whose being still resonates with acceptance, wonder, love - and even joy! Do not look to your external situations, but to your inner feelings, to find your areas of imbalance.

Many descriptions of the 12 strands have been presented over the years. They can be found in your spiritual literature and enshrined in old myths and legends. These writings can point the way, but the balancing of the strands are not beyond your own wisdom. Let us begin, then, with the strand you would call Aloneness. You have, in your present culture, lost the power inherent in the wisdom of being alone. You have confused this state with loneliness. When this strand is in balance, you will know that you contain all that you need within yourself and you do not really need anyone else. This does not mean that you cannot enjoy, fully participate with, and admire others, but you will know that you have created the balance within your own being to stand powerfully and blissfully alone.

For all of the photos I am standing just outside the water so you can see my poses. Normally I am in as far as I can go without falling down :)

Aloneness: I stand straight and tall, anchored down into the earth, totally grounded and stable. Then I let the feeling of being exquisitely and powerfully Alone fill me up. I am independent, strong, capable, here as the only Tracey like me on Earth and it feels good to acknowledge the fact that I am here, alone, and standing in the power of my unique Self.

You make your lives very difficult when you ignore this strand. This has being the age of "togetherness." You are together all the time, and even if no one else is around, you almost always have that universal mandala, the television, available to take the place of people. You need to experience the bliss that comes from being silently alone with yourself. If you ignore the power of this strand, you will stay in a state of needy imbalance in your world, constantly looking to others to make you feel all right.

Even those of you who have been so wise as to construct your lives so that you are alone are in a state of ambivalence about it. You think there is something you are doing wrong, or you would not be alone. This very ambivalence is what impedes your learning.

Instead of stating that you are alone because it is only by being with yourself you can learn about yourself, you go around feeling lonely and left out. Continuing relationships that are no longer meaningful because you are afraid of being alone creates the fear that brings about the imbalance that can keep you "stuck" on this strand for lifetimes. To learn about your unbalanced strands, look to the fantasies that come to you and fill you with anxiety. Look to the things you fear. The phantoms reside in your psyche, and they represent your imbalances.

For example, you might have anxiety about money. Some of you worry if you don't have it, and some of you worry if you do! Money is just today's symbol for security. What is the strand that lies behind the symbol of money? The ability to Trust life is the strand that stands behind these anxieties. You have a deep feeling that "people are not to be trusted," that they do not have your best interests at heart. I would suggest an alternative view. Since you are all an ongoing flood of entities, moving, extending, creating, and becoming Aware, it would help to realize that you are all doing the best you can. You do not move in random patterns, and with limited ego vision you cannot see the beauty of the overall design. If you could acknowledge that you are not moving at random, you would be able to see that others also are not.

If someone moves out of a pattern of intimacy with you and into another with someone else, be aware that this is not a haphazard movement. You are afraid that your lfie might become difficult when any of these patterns are broken. And so to feel safe, you try pulling whatever represents security back into your life. I am not asking you to trust that others will remain in your life forever or that you will never experience pain. I am asking that you trust that your universe is moving precisely in accordance with your own deepest needs. Whatever is here is present in power, and what is present is needed. If your patterns never changed, you would become very bored. You are here for the power of the ride, not for the sameness of the scenery. Please, learn to enjoy the changing scenery! Trust that everything is exactly as it should be. So many of you cling to the past to prevent changes in your lives. You talk about events long gone to avoid the new and "frightening" changes you are afraid might come along. These fears are only in your mind. Your deep Self will move you to where you need to go for the maximum experiences of your lifetime. I would ask you to trust that this is so. This strand has the power to make your life ever new and exciting!

Trust: I love this one! For trust I move from the Alone pose into totally relaxing my arms and then falling back into the water. I let the ocean take me where it will and I just float around, get splashed or dunked...all the while saying to myself, "I trust Life completely. I trust that my guides and my higher self are guiding me well. I trust myself to see the road signs. I trust the Universe that my life is exactly how it should be and that I am exactly where I need to be. Aaaaahhhh relaxing into Trust feels so good!

How can you approach any strand with power, rather than through weakness? The answer is by claiming another view of yourself. Originating with the Source from which all of these strands arise, you were created in a movement of multicolored rays. You have chosen to slow down the Divine energy, so that you appear as form, as a body. You are feeling Life with a capital L as you move through it, whether in positive or negative ways. That life is the movement of the "strands." That awareness of movement is what you need to approach any strand with power. When "death" of the body comes, the strands move on. If you wish to approach the balancing of these strands with mastery, be aware of the kinds of movement within your body. Resistance to positive or negative movement is an indication that you have come upon one of your unbalanced strands.

After you have identified this strand, ask yourself what needs to be done to bring it back into balance. Do not act as though you don't know because, in fact, you do. Ask what needs to be done, NOW! Not at a more convenient time, but at the moment when you are feeling the pressure of the imbalance. Be aware of your refusal to accept given situations and solutions. Do not try to protect, defend, or rationalize. Just ask, and the answer will come. It will come as a knowingness or insight or feeling. The message may be as simple as "just let go." or "don't make it so important." There are any number of messages and solutions you can give yourself, but you will get no answers unless you address the question. With the problem there always arises the solution. Then you must have the courage to act upon what you have told yourself.

The reason you find all of this difficult is because you have given up your personal mastery. You have given it to other people, who can help you in part, I agree, but who are not in a position of knowing what is best for you. Because their strands are not in the same degree of balance/imbalance as yours and they have not had the same life experiences, they cannot really answer your questions for you. You live in the century of authority, the authority of other people. You have lost your own power, and so when the time comes that you need it, you don't believe you have it! Please recognize one thing: you did not come into this life without the equipment necessary for the journey. You do not have to live your life out of balance. It is your responsibility to discover what is best for you and to bring peace and harmony into your life.

Another strand that many of you have difficulty with is the strand of Wisdom. You do not have to be an intellectual genius to balance this strand, because the balancing of wisdom has nothing to do with information you have spent a lifetime accumulating. Stored knowledge depends only on how much brain power you have decided to use. The balancing of this strand has to do with understanding that true wisdom is the ability to observe and accept everyone's point of view with equinamity. No judgment! Real "wisdom" is the inner knowingness that each individual is presenting his own truth from his own perspective. The wise one accepts this without challenge and feels no need to defend his or her own position or to destroy that of another. You do not feel threatened by the wisdom of others when your wisdom is in balance!

Wisdom cannot be experienced through words of information found in any book, even in the greatest of them. Wisdom has to be lived. It is your own sense of what is totally appropriate for you, this moment. What is wise for you on Thursday may not be wise for you on Sunday because you are not the same. Wisdom unfolds itself deeply within you when you begin to be responsible for finding your own truth, and do not impose it on anyone else. You are not being responsible when you feel what is true for you must then be true for all, and your job is to reveal that "truth" to everyone else. People have a hard time deciding who is the "wisest" among them, and many relationships are built on this struggle for "one-up-manship." Wisdom is something to seek, and I highly recommend it, but I ask you not to measure its lack or abundance in other people's psyches. You do not need any outer agreement to validate your own wisdom. Trust your own inner feelings to show you your truth.

I would speak also of the strand that we will call Responsibility. This is a concept that confuses many. You are told that you are responsible for your life and for all that happens in it. You are also told that you are responsible for not causing any inconvenience or discomfort to others and for moving with harmlessness through your world. This word responsibility and your concept of it can be frightening. You are afraid that things you have done will end up hurting other people. It is a great burden to feel responsible for all of the ultimate chaos that might arise from one of your decisions. You have a child, and you feel responsible for all that the child does throughout his entire lifetime. The child gets into trouble and you feel it is your fault. You have a car accident that injures or kills someone, and you feel guilty. You give advice that does not turn out well, and you feel responsible. It is endless.

That is not the kind of responsibility I am talking about. I will tell you again that you do not move in random patterns. You move in one cohesive, beautiful, exciting, extending pattern of power. The responsibility of which I speak is the realization that, if you observe the movement of your life and do not like what you see, it is you who must make the changes in it. Growth comes through change: exciting growth comes through responsible change. You may not like your life, but you hesitate to make changes because you are familiar with the old patterns and comfortable with their predictability, even though the patterns are no longer satisfying. I would remind you, that you have, within your own being, the ability to make responsible choices, choices that will create a life pleasing to you.

Responsibility: Here I am in a powerful position of action. My sword of discernment is slicing away that which is false. I say to myself, "I am always at choice....if I don't like something in my life I can always make a change. I am the only one responsibile for my life. I am at choice every second."

There are two extremes within the strand of responsibility. One side presents a person who wanders through life claiming no responsibility, and the other presents a person who feels responsible for everything. Both are out of balance. How do you know when you need to make new choices? When you look at your life and see that parts of it are not rewarding to you or others, you are responsible for becoming aware of what new choices would restore that balance again. That is not what usually happens. Usually, you try to find some justification for continuing your old pattern, blaming other people for the way it is. Growth comes when you assess your life, see there is need for change, and go within yourself to make that change. Any choice you have made, you can change. Accepting responsibility of making your own choices in your life will give you the power to move in your world with strength and confidence.

There is one other strand I wish to mention - that of Power in the manifest world. When faced with difficulty, some people tend to get depressed and discouraged, and some tend to feel falsely optimistic. This is the area of power or powerlessness as it manifests on the physical plane. When you are in a state of depression, balance can be restored when you realize that depression comes from power you possess, but have not used (wow!). When you begin to feel depression, it is a signal to ask yourself what it is you feel is threatening you. You feel threatened because you are again afraid of change, and yet, depression can be an exciting signal that deep changes are about to be made. The changes you are most comfortable with are the happy and pleasant ones. If you were to live a life where there were only pleasant changes in it, I think you would get bored. Changes you have labeled unpleasant often move you more quickly to new areas of your life. It is the balancing of those strands of power that make life on the physical plane exciting.

Power: I stand straight and tall for this one. My hands, tight together, like an arrow pointing to the sky, are an antennae, receiving a big blast of wonderful personal Power! I am Empowered!

The person who is addicted to seeing only the happy side of life and admits to no negative experiences is avoiding an important teaching - the balancing of negative and positive polarities. You cannot balance something you cannot feel, and if you refuse to feel your fears or your so-called negative side, you cannot life life to its fullest. Those people who insist that "nothing is ever wrong" do so out of the unconscious fear that they would not be able to handle what might be "wrong." Balancing for them would mean willingness to examine ALL feelings. In so doing, they will find deep reservoirs of courage and abilities that they have kept hidden from themselves. With this discovery comes the power to move in the manifest world with grace and beauty.

When you feel that something unpleasant is happening, simply acknowledge it and ask yourself, "What am I afraid of? What is being presented here, and how can I work with it?" You are programmed to be the first to know what is "wrong" with you through the feelings recorded in your body. And through those feelings, you can recognize power, both when it is blocked and when it is moving. With the aid of your senses, you have set the game up for maximum awareness, but only if you pay attention to what is going on. When you are presented with any difficulty, the solution is always contained within the balance of the "12 strands."

Excerpts from "I Come as a Brother - Remembrance of Illusions" by Bartholomew as channeled by Mary Margaret-Moore

You can read more excerpts here

I hope you enjoyed this!

Tracey Gendron