Gateway practices · 12 MIN READ · 6 SOURCE QUOTES
The Living Body Map
The Living Body Map is a guided-imagery exercise from Threshold, Wave II of the Gateway Experience. It is the last of that album's six exercises, following Introduction to Focus 12, Problem Solving, One Month Patterning, Color Breathing and the Energy Bar Tool, and it is done in Focus 12, the state of expanded awareness. The publisher's program guide describes it as a way to balance and strengthen the physical self. In practice you hold a mental outline of your own body, picture its major systems in color inside that outline, and use the Energy Bar Tool to send streams of colored energy to whichever part you choose.
The clearest written outline of the technique is in the Army's 1983 assessment of the Gateway process, written by Lt. Col. Wayne McDonnell. He lists the Living Body Map among the Focus 12 techniques and says it provides amplification for the Energy Bar Tool. His reasoning is that colors are light at different frequencies and the body is composed of energy, so adding energy in the appropriate form is assumed to vitalize it. McDonnell presents that as the assumption behind the exercise, not as a finding.
The main group use on record is a two-day Hemi-Sync workshop for people living with HIV/AIDS, described in the Hemi-Sync Journal and at a 1993 Institute seminar. There the Living Body Map closed the first day as a tool for unifying the physical, emotional and mental, and the facilitators said they usually let tired participants sleep through it. An Explorer in a 1989 laboratory session described building the energy body map, cleaning it with the Energy Bar Tool and noticing the stomach relax.
A Focus 12 imagery exercise: picture your body's outline, color its systems, and direct the Energy Bar Tool through it. A practice, not a treatment.
Key points
Where it sits in the Gateway Experience
The publisher's program guide lists Wave II, Threshold, in this order: Intro Focus 12, Problem Solving, One Month Patterning, Color Breathing, Energy Bar Tool and Living Body Map. The map comes last and, in the 1983 assessment's words, amplifies the Energy Bar Tool. The same assessment says every technique it describes before the Focus 15 time-travel exercise, the Living Body Map included, is conducted at Focus 12, the level of expanded awareness. A 1991 Hemi-Sync Journal report lists the exercise as Introduction to Living Body Map; later accounts and the current album call it simply Living Body Map.
The map is an imagined outline with the systems in color
The assessment describes the first step as imagining the configuration of your own body, then envisaging the body's major systems inside that outline in appropriate colors. It names the nervous and circulatory systems as examples. The outline is held in the imagination throughout, so every color sits inside a single, whole picture of the body. Nothing in the description asks for anatomical accuracy.
The Energy Bar Tool does the work
The Living Body Map is not a standalone technique. The assessment says it provides amplification for the Energy Bar Tool, which it describes as a small, intensely pulsing dot of imagined light that you charge with energy and extend into a sparkling, vibrating cylinder. In the Living Body Map you apply the tool to energize, balance and, in the assessment's word, heal in whatever manner you desire, visualizing streams of colored energy flowing from it into the organ system or area you have chosen.
Color is the connecting idea
McDonnell explains the use of color this way: colors are the result of differing wavelengths of light, which is to say energy at various frequencies, and the human body is assumed to be composed of energy. Color Breathing, the exercise just before the Energy Bar Tool in Threshold, also works with color, while the Living Body Map places color inside a body outline. McDonnell frames the reasoning as an assumption the technique operates on, not as a result.
How the Institute frames it
The 2012 Monroe Institute web overview of the Focus levels says the conceptual tools developed in Focus 10 can be used to reduce anxiety and tension, for healing, for remote viewing and for establishing resonance with other individuals. Together with the publisher's description of the Living Body Map as a way to balance and strengthen the physical self, that makes the exercise one of the Gateway tools for working with the body through imagery and intention, alongside the Energy Bar Tool and Color Breathing.
The Positive Immunity Pilot weekend
The most detailed account of group use is the Positive Immunity Pilot program (PIP), a two-day Hemi-Sync workshop for people living with, or close to someone living with, HIV/AIDS. The Fall 1991 Hemi-Sync Journal describes it and says input from Bob Monroe helped choose its first seven tapes, among them Introduction to Living Body Map. Facilitators Barbara Bullard and Kat Carroll described their version of it at a 1993 seminar. In the later version participants worked through Orientation, Introduction and Advanced Focus 10, Free Flow 10, Introduction to Focus 12, the Energy Bar Tool, Color Breathing, the Living Body Map and Free Flow 12.
What the workshop facilitators report
The Journal says the Living Body Map was used at the end of the first day as a tool to unify the physical, emotional and mental states, after the Focus 12 tapes had begun to bring emotional and mental shifts. In the 1993 seminar a facilitator described running the Energy Bar Tool and Living Body Map after dinner, finding participants too tired to wake, and usually letting them sleep with the exercise.
Explorers used the same pairing in the lab
Laboratory transcripts show the same map-plus-tool pairing. In a session dated October 5, 1989, an Explorer reported building the energy body map and cleaning it with the Energy Bar Tool, noted that the stomach had relaxed, and said the next step was to return to the other area. The phrase energy body map is the Explorer's own and matches the structure the assessment describes, though the transcript does not say which tape the Explorer was following.
In their own words
Quotes are checked word for word against the recordings and documents they come from. Bracketed words correct transcription errors; “…” marks an omission.
“This technique provides amplification for application of the Energy Bar Tool as a means of healing specific areas or systems of the human body. The configuration of the participant's body is imagined, and then the various major systems, such as the nervous and circulatory systems, are envisaged in appropriate colors within the confines of the outline being held in the imagination. The Energy Bar Tool is then applied to energizing, balancing and healing in whatever manner the participant desires.”
“Since colors are the result of differing wavelengths of light, which is to say energy at various frequencies, this technique operates on the assumption that, as the human body is composed of energy, it can be vitalized and healed through the additive application of additional energy, provided that the energy is applied in the appropriate form.”
“Building the energy body map and cleaning it with the energy bar tool, and stomach now has relaxed, and I will [go] back into the other area.”
“And then after dinner, we do the Energy Bar Tool and the Living Body Map. … They weren't waking up. So we usually let them go to sleep with the Living Body Map.”
“I think that they do not get as much out of Living Body Map and Color Breathing if they don't get into Focus 12. And one, it is a beautiful experience with these people to have them go, 'Oh my gosh, there is more than my physical body.' It's a really interesting event to be with them.”
“[The Living] Body Map is used as a tool to unify the physical, emotional, and mental states.”
Important things to consider
Work up to it in order
The Living Body Map is the sixth and last exercise in Threshold, and it assumes the tools before it, above all the Energy Bar Tool. Take Introduction to Focus 12, Color Breathing and the Energy Bar Tool before the map. The Positive Immunity Pilot (PIP) weekend for people living with HIV/AIDS also led up to the map: Color Breathing and the Energy Bar Tool came first on day one, and the Living Body Map closed the day. Going straight to the map leaves you without the tool the exercise is built around.
Reach Focus 12 first
The PIP facilitators concluded that participants got less out of the Living Body Map and Color Breathing without Focus 12, and added an Introduction to Focus 12 to their original program for that reason. Use the same logic at home: give Focus 12 several sessions to become familiar before expecting much from the map.
Falling asleep is common
At the PIP weekend the facilitators usually let tired participants sleep through the Living Body Map rather than rouse them, and one facilitator told participants that dropping out during a tape, called clicking out, is fine. If you drift off, you have not failed. If it happens every time, listen earlier in the day, when you are rested.
Make it your own
The assessment's wording leaves the specifics to the participant: the systems are shown in appropriate colors, and the tool is applied in whatever manner the participant desires. That makes the Living Body Map more of a framework than a script. Rough shapes and simple colors are enough to start with.
Keep a record
The PIP organizers encouraged participants to record their individual insights after working with the tapes, and the Explorer transcripts show how much a spoken record can preserve. Keep a notebook beside you and write down what you pictured, which areas drew your attention and what you noticed in your body as soon as the exercise ends.
Setup and a full return
Use stereo headphones in a quiet, dim room where you will not be interrupted, because Hemi-Sync relies on slightly different sounds reaching each ear. Never listen while driving or doing anything that needs your full attention. When the recording counts you back to waking awareness, let it finish and take a moment before standing.
A practice, not a treatment
The Living Body Map is a visualization practice. The assessment calls it healing and rests that on an assumption about energy; the Journal and seminar accounts come from the people who ran the workshop; the lab material is Explorers' own reports. None of these is a controlled trial. Imagined colors and felt sensations are not a scan and do not diagnose anything. Do not use the exercise in place of medical care or to decide about treatment, and speak with your clinician first if you have a serious illness or a mental-health condition.
Imagery, not a sensation scan
A body scan asks you to notice the sensations that are already there. The Living Body Map starts from a constructed picture, an outline of the whole body with its systems filled in with color, and then adds the Energy Bar Tool. Sensations may come, but the exercise is built on imagination and intention.
Common questions
What is the Living Body Map?
The Living Body Map is a guided-imagery exercise from Threshold, Wave II of the Gateway Experience, and the last of that album's six exercises. In Focus 12 you hold a mental outline of your own body, picture its major systems in color inside the outline, and use the Energy Bar Tool, a charged, glowing bar of imagined energy, to direct streams of colored energy to the areas you choose. The publisher describes it as a way to balance and strengthen the physical self. The 1983 Army assessment of the Gateway process describes the same structure. It is a practice with an imagined body at its center.
How do you do the Living Body Map exercise?
The recording guides you, so the work is listening and imagining, but the structure is consistent across the sources. You start in Focus 12, after the usual Hemi-Sync preparation and count. You work with the Energy Bar Tool, which you build in its own exercise. You imagine the outline of your whole body and fill it in with its major systems, such as the nervous and circulatory systems, each in an appropriate color. Then you apply the tool, energizing and balancing in whatever way you choose and picturing colored streams flowing out of it into the organ system or area you are working with. The recording counts you back to waking awareness, and many people write down what they pictured afterward. An Explorer in a 1989 lab session summed up the same sequence as building the energy body map and cleaning it with the Energy Bar Tool.
What did the 1983 Army report say about the Living Body Map?
The Army's 1983 Analysis and Assessment of Gateway Process, written by Lt. Col. Wayne McDonnell, lists the Living Body Map among the techniques practiced at Focus 12. McDonnell says it provides amplification for the Energy Bar Tool as a means of healing specific areas or systems of the human body. The participant imagines the body's configuration, envisages major systems such as the nervous and circulatory in appropriate colors within that outline, and applies the tool in whatever manner the participant desires. He explains the logic by noting that colors are light at different frequencies and that the technique assumes a body composed of energy can be vitalized by adding energy in the appropriate form. In that passage he gives the premise, not a test of it.
What do I need to do before the Living Body Map?
It is the final exercise in Threshold, so the Gateway Experience sequence is the best preparation. Wave I, Discovery, makes Focus 10 familiar. Threshold then runs Introduction to Focus 12, Problem Solving, One Month Patterning, Color Breathing, the Energy Bar Tool and the Living Body Map. The Energy Bar Tool matters most, because the 1983 assessment describes the map as amplifying it. The facilitators of the Positive Immunity Pilot (PIP), a Gateway-based weekend workshop for people living with HIV/AIDS, added an Introduction to Focus 12 to their program because they felt participants got less out of the Living Body Map and Color Breathing without it. If Focus 12 is not yet familiar, spend time there first.
Is it normal to fall asleep during the Living Body Map?
Yes. At the Positive Immunity Pilot (PIP) weekend for people living with HIV/AIDS, the facilitators ran the Energy Bar Tool and the Living Body Map after dinner on the first evening, found that tired participants were not waking up, and usually let them go to sleep with the exercise. Earlier in the same seminar a facilitator said participants often slept through the first hours of tapes, that participants were told this was fine, and that it is called clicking out. Anyone who listens when tired can expect the same. To stay aware through the whole exercise, listen when you are rested.
What do people report from the Living Body Map?
The reports in the sources are modest. Workshop facilitators say participants often slept through it, and that once participants reached Focus 12 some of them realized there is more than the physical body. The Hemi-Sync Journal describes the Living Body Map as the point where the first day's physical, emotional and mental shifts were brought together. An Explorer in a 1989 laboratory session described building the energy body map, cleaning it with the Energy Bar Tool and noticing the stomach relax.
Can the Living Body Map heal illness?
No source shows that it can. The Institute and the 1983 assessment use the language of healing, and the assessment explains the exercise through an assumption that a body composed of energy can be vitalized by adding energy in the appropriate form, but that is a stated premise, not a result. The accounts of its use, such as the weekend workshops for people living with HIV/AIDS, are reports from the organizers about how participants experienced the exercise. Treat the Living Body Map as a relaxation and imagery practice. It does not diagnose or treat any condition, and it should never replace medical care or lead you to change treatment.
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