← Encyclopedia of Embodied Energy · lesson 9/164
Conditioning
Conditioning is the tradition's word for how the open parts of a person's chart are shaped by others. An open centre has no fixed way of working, so it takes its cue from whoever is around — and over time, the tradition says, a person can come to mistake those borrowed patterns for their own nature. Seeing the difference is presented as one of the main uses of the Embodied Energy Chart.
How it is said to happen
When two people are together, the defined centres of each are read as the steady ones in the room, and the open centres of each as the ones that take in and amplify what the other is running. Someone with an open Feeling centre beside someone with a defined one may feel the other person's moods as if they were their own, often more strongly. Someone with an open Vitality centre working beside people with a defined one may find they can keep going for hours — and then discover, once alone, that the energy was never theirs.
None of this is described as harmful in itself. Taking in the world is what open centres do, and it is also how they come to understand it. The trouble the tradition points to is what the mind does with the experience: deciding that a borrowed pressure is a personal duty, and building habits to manage it.
The habits it can build
Each open centre has a characteristic habit. A few examples, in our words:
- an open Will centre can learn to keep proving its worth, and to promise more than it has the energy to deliver;
- an open Drive centre can learn to rush, to get the pressure over with rather than because it is time;
- an open Throat can learn to speak up to be noticed;
- an open Self centre can learn to follow other people's direction and call it its own;
- an open Mind can learn to perform a certainty it does not have;
- an open Instinct centre can learn to hold on to things, people and places past their time.
The tradition calls the life lived by these habits the "not-self", and gives each type a feeling that signals it: see not-self.
Conditioning that comes and goes
Definition can also be lent for a while. When a planet moving through the sky lights the missing gate of one of your channels, the channel completes for as long as the transit lasts. When you are close to someone who holds the other gate, the channel completes between you. In both cases a centre that is normally open can feel defined — energy you do not usually have, or a fixed mood that is not usually yours. We describe these in readings of the sky and of two people together. Naming them is often enough to stop a passing condition being taken for a new fact about yourself.
Seeing it, rather than fighting it
The tradition does not ask anyone to stop being influenced; an open centre stays open. What it offers is a way of noticing: following the strategy of one's type and the inner compass, and asking of each open centre whether a pressure is one's own. It describes that process as taking about seven years to settle. We treat the figure as a frame for a long, gradual change, not a schedule, and our readings never suggest a person is behind on it.
None of this is a therapeutic or medical method. It is a reflective habit: noticing, in the moment, whether what you are feeling started with you.
In your chart
Conditioning is not drawn as such. It lives in the unfilled centres, and most clearly in the open centres with no gates at all, which take in whatever arrives. A reading of the chart gives the open centres the most room and pairs each with a question to try against experience.