Activating the Full Energetics of the Body
The Vayus: The Somatic Cross
Hello beloved friends and colleagues,
I’ve been offering daily programs for 6 weeks straight and it’s been magnificent, from Marin to Mexico, and back to the land in Hawai’i.
Adam Bauer and I hosted a beautiful group—from ages 23 to 75—gathering to inquire into the nature of Bhakti-Tantra. Each day centered on a deity archetype, an energy we could feel and move with. In the soft early light we arranged flowers, sang, and prayed the day awake. We explored when to call upon each energy, learned the mantras and yantras, and moved into a full breath and asana practice designed to open the body and anchor those principles.
At midday we shifted into more personal connection, applying the quantum-tantric understanding of vāsanā to our own lives, weaving in scholarship, conversation, and lived experience. Near sunset we walked the lava fields; in the evenings we gathered for dance, singing, candlelit storytelling, partner massage, and deeper journeys into the inner landscape.
As always, the land astonished us. Its layers of light, sound, and weather were a constant orchestral teaching—regulating, uplifting, and reminding us of our belonging to the earth. By the closing ceremony, the warmth, love, and genuine connection had become a radiant field. Everyone softened, opened, and touched more of their own divine essence—cracking a piece of their personal code and discovering the life-hacks the ancients have been pointing to all along.
Sending immense love, and wishing you ever more spaciousness and freedom in the bodymind.
Christine Marie
Announcements and general news:
Rosebud Woman is doing a big holiday promotion of 30% off sitewide through 12.1.25.
If you’ve been wanting to take my foundational course and have beeen waiting for the right time, the next Living Tantra cohort will begin March 10, 2026 - registration is now open.
The rough pass 2026 calendar of immersions, intensives, and retreats is now up, if this is something you feel called to step into.
Today’s writing is on the cosmic cross as it applies to the human form, which dovetails perfectly with the yogic concept of the vayus, or energetic directions in the body. Tapping into the vayus brings more aliveness into our whole being, and can set our connective body into a new electric reality.
The Column of Light: Practicing Awareness of the Vayus
Sometimes when sitting in stillness, I become aware of the column of light running up and down the spine, a column of energy. I become aware of it moving laterally from the spine into the channels and tributaries of the nervous system, all the way to the edges of the body envelope, my electrical mycelial embodiment, awake, alive, perceptive, conducting, transmitting.
The awareness extends: down below the body into the earth, above the crown and toward the heavens, radiating out from and pulling into the body in all directions. Receiving, perceiving, transmitting, attuning. Bumping into other energy bodies and forms. A deep pulsing bliss overtakes the feeling body. I rest at the center of a cosmic egg surrounded in light, as light. It is a supremely blissful sensation.
When I shift from a formal sit into the activity of everyday life , I invite this awareness to move with me. Keeping this sense of the light body helps me be as direct a perceiver as possible, with more data streaming to and from me, with fewer cognitive filters and short cuts applied.
For the scholars among us, we are lucky to have the deep fine parsing, the deep noticing and documentation by the ancients on this movement of energy in and around the body. It is documented in tantra, but also in other esoteric and land-based traditions from around the world.
In this essay, I am sharing some scholarship on the Vayus, or the flows of energy, in yoga, and accompanying philosophies on the cosmic cross, overlaid on the body (which in fact isn’t a 2D cross, but a 4D spinning torus, as we shall see together). But even given these pointers, the intention as always is to go to direct experience: what do you feel in your own self, in your own body, when you bring attention here.
The Global Echoing of the Solar Cross: A Geometry of Integration
In ancient Europe, the solar cross or sun wheel (a circle quartered by a cross) mapped the turning of the seasons, the movement of the sun, and the wholeness of the cosmos revolving around a still point. Bronze Age carvings across Scandinavia and Britain show this geometry etched into stone, marking life’s eternal movement through light and darkness. Later, the Celtic cross fused Christian and pre-Christian insight: the vertical beam as divine connection, the horizontal as the human community, the encircling ring as eternity and the turning sun.
In Egypt, the ankh joined a cross and a loop, uniting heaven and earth, masculine and feminine, eternal and temporal. In Central Africa, the Kongo cosmogram (a cross within a circle drawn in white clay) mapped the soul’s passage through life, death, and rebirth.
Across Asia, the mandala and the yantra carried the same grammar of intersection and containment. The mandala’s circle and square, its four directional gates, and its central bindu (the still point) mirror this cosmic order. In my tradition, the Śrī Yantra, with its interlocking upward and downward triangles, expresses the mutual seeking of Shiva and Shakti: consciousness descending into matter, matter rising toward consciousness, again with the bindi at the center. Among Indigenous peoples of the Americas, the medicine wheel or sacred hoop has similiar geometry.
The teaching is remarkably similar world wide: wholeness is found at the integration ove light and dark, seasonal cycles, spirit and body… by standing in the center where everything meets.
The 4D Somatic Cross
Every one of these cosmic diagrams is also a mirror of the human body. In the yogic tradition this is explicit: the body is a microcosm of the universe, with the breath, pulse, and energy channels echoing the larger cosmic order. The spine becomes the axis mundi. The breath becomes the movement of the heavens. We are the divine architecture made visible.
Through this lens, the cosmic cross is not just an external symbol but a somatic structure. The vertical axis is the inner channel of breath and awareness running from crown to root. The horizontal axis extends through the heart and arms, connecting us with others and with the world. Their meeting point at the heart is the radiant center, the circle of integration, the bindi.
In the tantric sciences, this living geometry is articulated through the five vāyus, the vital winds that move prāna through the subtle body. These five are: Prāna Vāyu: the inward-drawing current, Apāna Vāyu: the downward-flowing current, Udāna Vāyu: the upward-rising current, Samāna Vāyu: toward the center, the gathering and integrating current, Vyāna Vāyu: toward the edges, the all-pervading currentThey form an inner cross, mapping how spirit moves in and through us: rising and descending, expressing and receiving, cohering into presence.
Prāna Vāyu: the inward-drawing current, Apāna Vāyu: the downward-flowing current, Udāna Vāyu: the upward-rising current, Samāna Vāyu: toward the center, the gathering and integrating current, Vyāna Vāyu: toward the edges, the all-pervading current
When these currents harmonize, the human body becomes a stable and radiant field: grounded yet uplifted, expressive yet centered, individual yet woven into the whole. Imbalance in any direction leads to distortion: too much ascent without descent leads to disembodiment; too much grounding without inspiration leads to stagnation. In the tantric body, that still point is the heart. The circle at the center of the cross glows as the awakened heart-field—open, grounded, luminous, free.
To practice with the vayus is to return again and again to that heart, the living axis mundi within the body. It is to realize that light is not only above but within; that divinity is not distant but incarnate; that freedom is not escape but full participation.
If you want to experiment with this, here’s an exercise to try.
If you’re able to, stand up and spread your feet hip-width apart. Let your feet be directly underneath your hip bones. Open and spread the toes, lift the arches, and really feel your feet on the ground.
Roll your shoulders up, back, and down. Spread the collarbones wide. Let your arms hang easily by your sides. Gently draw the belly toward the spine, just enough to bring awareness to the midsection of the body.
Begin to feel a little energy circulating in your fingertips, maybe even a ball or spiral of energy in the palms of your hands.
As you drop in here, close your eyes for a moment and let your body really settle. Begin to notice the subtle shifts, crisscrossing attention from ankles to shins to knees, scanning up the body and down the body. Feel the subtle hum beneath the skin, the quiet movement of energy that is always there.
We’ll move now through the five vayus—the energetic directions we can inhabit.
Bring your attention first to the heart and upper chest. Notice how, when you inhale, you draw life force toward the center of the body. Inhale now through both nostrils, up to the third-eye point, down into the sinuses, down into the lungs, down into the belly. Notice how the inhale gathers itself and draws life force to you. Let yourself feel what it’s like to receive your own breath, to feel the presence of breath entering you.
This is Prana Vayu, the wind that invites life in. It’s also the place where we remember we are never separate from the atmosphere that is coming into us and going out of us. Without that, we are not alive. We are utterly dependent and interdependent on the prana, the current that surrounds us. Notice your breath now: big, deep inhales, big, deep, round exhales.
Let’s move now to Apana Vayu, the downward-flowing current. Let your awareness drop into the pelvis and the lower belly. Feel the exhale descend and ground you, widening your presence. Sense how the body knows how to release. It knows how to release tension, story, and waste. It knows how to let go of what you no longer need. This is Apana Vayu, the directional force that roots you to the earth.
Feel the body from the waist down pressing into the ground, grounding into the earth—from the waist through your hips, thighs, knees, shins, and feet, all the way down into the center of Mama Gaia. Apana.
Next, Udana Vayu. Feel the body from the waist up through the torso and all the way to the crown, reaching for the sky. Bring your awareness to the torso, the heart center, the throat, and even the space behind the eyes. Feel the natural lift of the inhale, the upward buoyancy that carries your energy toward clarity.
Notice the impulse to speak—to speak truly, fiercely, clearly. Notice the impulse to rise, to step forward, to step up and out. This is Udana, the wind of expression and ascent.
Now we move into Samana Vayu, where everything is drawn toward the center. This is the gathering and integrating current, the inner alchemical fire. Here we pull all of our muscles toward the bone. We pull all of our energy back to ourselves. Feel the breath move from the edges of the body toward the center point, gathering and condensing.
Rest your attention in the navel center, in the center of the body. Here all experience, emotion, and energy is drawn inward to be digested. Feel how you’re pulling toward the center, toward the bone.
And now we go in the opposite direction: Vyana Vayu, the all-pervading current that radiates toward the edges. Now sense the whole body at once. Feel prana circulating through every channel, reaching outward and drawing back inward in a single unified field. This is the connective intelligence.
Feel the envelope of the skin. Expand all the way out to the edges of the skin, and then even a little beyond. You are both pulling in—Samana, gathering and integrating—and pulsating out toward the edges—Vyana, radiating and connecting.
Now feel it all together: downward, upward, inward, outward, exchanging prana with the environment around you.
As you stand in this potent, enlivened state, bring your attention to the four-dimensional cross in the body. It’s not just up and down, in and out. Notice the vertical axis inside you: root to crown, Apana to Udana. Notice the horizontal axis: shoulder to shoulder, heart radiating into the world. Feel their meeting point in the chest, the luminous center where everything converges. This is the form.
Now let it become dynamic energy, spiraling through the crown and out and around you like a big moving donut shape. It spirals down through the feet and up around you so that you are in a bi-directional toroid—dynamic and circular—going up and around and over and under in a beautiful spiraling force that surrounds you.
You become, in this way, a conduit, a living node on the vast grid of energy and consciousness that is our material reality. Feel yourself now, right here—right here—you, a magnetic force between heaven and earth, your field connecting with other fields.
Stay here for a moment, fully activated, breathing, listening, and receiving yourself as a microcosm, a micro-cosmos. These are the five vayus, alive in your own body.
Rest here. Rest right here. Enjoy.
