Living with Intention: The Journey of the Hara and Core Star

Some healings arrive quickly.

An idea appears, the research begins, the threads naturally come together, and before long the healing seems to write itself.

This series wasn’t one of them.

It unfolded slowly. It asked me to live with questions much longer than answers. It invited me to study, to reflect, and perhaps most importantly, to trust that clarity would emerge in its own time.

Interestingly, this journey didn’t begin with the Hara.

It began while writing the Healing for Liberation.

As I immersed myself in the research, I found myself returning to one question again and again.

What does it really mean to be free?

Many spiritual traditions describe liberation as freedom from suffering, freedom from attachment, or freedom from the patterns that keep us repeating the same lessons throughout our lives.

Yet the more I sat with those ideas, the more another question quietly emerged.

What if liberation isn’t simply freedom from?

What if it is also the freedom to become who we came here to be?

That question stayed with me long after the Healing for Liberation had been written.

Within a week of publishing it, one of our healers at Universal Healing, Amy Enoka Alston, reached out with what seemed like a simple question.

“What do you think about a Hara Healing Day?”

At the time, I didn’t have an answer.

But the question refused to leave.

For the next forty-five days it quietly accompanied me.

I studied.

I researched.

I revisited Brennan Healing Science.

I found myself reading about the Japanese understanding of the Hara, not simply as an energetic concept, but as a philosophy of living.

I wasn’t trying to write another healing.

I was trying to understand why this question wouldn’t let me go.

Then, almost unexpectedly, the series arrived.

Not as a single healing.

As a journey.

I didn't yet realize that journey would eventually lead me beyond the Hara, to the Core Star, and to an even deeper question: what is the essence within us from which our deepest intentions arise?

Looking back now, I don’t think I was simply writing about the Hara.

I think I was finally finding language for something I had spent my entire life witnessing.

Healing entered my life when I was five years old.

I began receiving treatments when I was eight, and by the time I was fifteen I was practicing myself.

At the time, I had no appreciation for the lineage I had entered. My teacher, Karen Krieger, was only three generations removed from Hawayo Takata, who introduced Reiki to the West.

As a child, none of that mattered to me.

What mattered was Karen.

She was one of those people whose presence seemed to change the atmosphere around her.

People relaxed.

Something softened.

Hope returned.

Only years later did I realize that what shaped me most wasn’t simply the healing work itself.

It was the absolute certainty with which she lived.

There was never any question that healing was possible.

There was never any question that the body possessed extraordinary wisdom.

There was never any question that people carried within themselves a profound capacity to heal.

Healing wasn’t something she needed to defend.

It wasn’t something she needed to convince anyone of.

It was simply the reality from which she lived.

As a child, I grew up inside that certainty.

Many years later, my path led me to Universal Healing.

I joined only a few months before Manel’s sudden passing, so I never had the privilege of knowing him as Liz, his family, and the many students who walked beside him did.

Instead, I came to know him through the work he left behind.

Through the community he built.

Through the stories shared by those who loved him.

And every now and then I would recognize something that felt strangely familiar.

Not the techniques.

Not the language.

Those were different.

It was the same quiet conviction.

The same trust that healing is real.

The same belief that human beings possess far greater capacity than we often recognize.

The same willingness to dedicate life to supporting that possibility.

That recognition stayed with me.

It wasn’t that Karen and Manel were teaching the same system.

They weren’t.

It wasn’t that Reiki and Brennan Healing Science were saying the same thing.

They aren’t.

But somewhere beneath the different languages, different maps, and different traditions, I found myself recognizing a shared thread.

A deep trust in the intelligence of healing.

A profound respect for the innate capacity of human beings to transform.

I don’t think I fully understood why that mattered until Amy asked about the Hara.

Over those forty-five days something slowly became clear.

Studying the Hara wasn’t changing what I believed.

It was giving me a language for beliefs that had quietly shaped my life since childhood.

That realization sent me back to Japan.

Long before the Hara became part of Brennan Healing Science, it had been honored for centuries within Japanese culture.

Although the word Hara literally translates as “belly” or “abdomen,” its meaning reaches far beyond anatomy.

Traditionally, the Hara is understood as our center.

The place from which authentic action arises.

The place where thought, feeling, and action become integrated.

To say someone “has Hara” is not simply to describe a physical quality.

It is to describe their character.

Their steadiness.

Their integrity.

Their capacity to remain centered when life becomes difficult.

Zen practice reflects this beautifully.

Rather than asking us to escape the body, it continually returns awareness to it.

To the breath.

To the lower abdomen.

To the place where presence becomes more important than performance.

Japanese martial arts express the same understanding.

True power is not generated through force.

It arises from alignment.

Less striving.

More presence.

Less effort.

Greater coherence.

Even modern physiology hints at something similar.

The lower abdomen sits close to the body’s center of mass. It works continuously with the diaphragm, pelvic floor, deep abdominal muscles, spine, and fascia to organize posture, breathing, stability, and movement.

This same region surrounds the enteric nervous system, often called the second brain, communicating constantly with the brain through the vagus nerve.

Science isn’t describing the Hara.

But it does remind us that our center profoundly influences the way we move through life.

Within Brennan Healing Science, the Hara becomes something even more specific.

It is understood as the dimension of intention.

A luminous line connecting the ID Point, the Soul Seat, and the Tan Tien.

The ID Point holds the highest intention of our incarnation.

The Soul Seat connects that intention with love and devotion.

The Tan Tien anchors it into embodied action.

Together they ask a remarkable question.

What is the deepest intention of this life?

As I reflected on that question, another one naturally followed.

If the Hara represents the deepest intention of our lives, how might that intention gradually become embodied through the rest of the human energy field?

That question became the inspiration for the architecture of this series.

Rather than beginning at the Root, I found myself drawn to begin at the Crown.

Not because it is the traditional way to teach the chakras.

But because it became a meaningful way for me to explore how intention gradually finds expression through a human life.

The Crown opens us to something greater.

The Third Eye begins to perceive.

The Throat gives voice.

The Heart brings compassion.

The Solar Plexus offers courage.

The Sacral invites relationship and creativity.

The Root grounds all of it into the ordinary reality of being human.

Only after making that journey did it feel complete to return to the Hara.

And finally…

To the Core Star.

If the Hara asks about the deepest intention of our lives, then the Core Star invites us even deeper.

Not into what we are here to do.

But into who we are.

Within Brennan Healing Science, the Core Star is understood as the deepest essence of our being.

The divine spark.

The place from which our individuality emerges, yet the place that remains untouched by the many roles we inhabit throughout a lifetime.

It exists beneath personality.

Beneath success and failure.

Beneath certainty and doubt.

It is not something we create.

Nor is it something we perfect.

It is something we gradually remember.

For me, that relationship between the Hara and the Core Star is one of the most beautiful aspects of Brennan Healing Science.

The Hara asks us to listen for the deepest intention of this life.

The Core Star reminds us that the one carrying that intention has always been present.

One offers direction.

The other offers essence.

One invites us to ask, “How am I being called to live?”

The other gently whispers, “Don’t forget who is living it.”

Perhaps that is why I found myself returning to this work over and over again while writing this series.

The Hara gave me a framework for understanding intention.

The Core Star gave me a way of understanding why intention matters.

Together they describe a life that is lived from the inside out.

A life where our actions gradually become more congruent with who we truly are.

That word – congruence - has stayed with me.

Not perfection.

Congruence.

Because I don’t think healing asks us to become someone else.

I think it continually invites us to become more ourselves.

Not by adding something that is missing.

But by removing what obscures what has always been there.

Perhaps that is why the people who have shaped my life have felt so significant.

Karen never needed to convince me that healing was real.

She simply lived as though it were.

Manel’s work never asked me to believe in human potential.

It assumed it.

Neither approached healing as something extraordinary reserved for a gifted few.

Healing was woven into the way they met people.

The way they listened.

The way they served.

The way they understood what it meant to be human.

Looking back now, I don’t think the deepest lesson they shared was about a modality.

It was about trust.

Trust in the intelligence of life.

Trust in the human spirit.

Trust that beneath fear, illness, grief, and uncertainty there remains something within each of us that continually moves toward wholeness.

That doesn’t mean healing always looks the way we hope it will.

Life has taught me that much.

Bodies change.

People die.

Our hearts break.

Dreams end.

Healing has never meant avoiding any of those realities.

If anything, it has allowed me to meet them more honestly.

With more presence.

More tenderness.

And a little less fear.

Perhaps that is where the Hara and the Core Star have become so meaningful to me.

They don’t promise a life without suffering.

They invite a life lived with deeper intention.

A life that remembers there is something within us that can remain centered even when everything around us changes.

As I look back over this series, I realize that Amy never simply asked me to write a Hara Healing.

She unknowingly asked me a question that had been waiting for me for most of my life.

A question that began in childhood.

Was quietly nurtured through decades of healing.

Was shaped by remarkable teachers.

And finally found a language.

When I began writing the Healing for Liberation, I thought I was exploring freedom.

Today, I think I understand that question differently.

Perhaps liberation isn’t found in escaping our humanity.

Perhaps it is found in inhabiting it more completely.

In allowing the deepest essence of who we are to inform the deepest intention of our lives.

And then having the courage to live it.

Studying the Hara didn’t teach me that healing was possible.

I’d spent my whole life surrounded by people who never questioned that.

What it gave me was something different.

It gave me a language.

A language for understanding why those people lived the way they did.

A language for understanding why the lives of Karen and Manel, though shaped by different traditions, resonated so deeply within me.

A language for understanding why Amy’s simple question opened such a profound journey.

And perhaps, most unexpectedly…

A language for understanding my own life.

If there is one hope I carry for this series, it isn’t that you remember every detail of the Hara Line or the Core Star.

I hope you become curious about your own life.

About the questions that continue to follow you.

About the people who quietly shaped you.

About the moments that seemed insignificant until years later, when suddenly a thread became visible.

Because sometimes that is how healing reveals itself.

Not all at once.

Not in dramatic moments.

But slowly.

Patiently.

One insight.

One relationship.

One act of courage.

One quiet return to ourselves at a time.

For me, studying the Hara didn’t simply deepen my understanding of intention.

It gave me a language for something I had already spent a lifetime experiencing.