The Hayden Model. Introduction of the BOX.

Imagine there would exist something like a toolbox, which you can open again and again on the way to a self-efficient life, whenever you need it, and which you can use for yourself in a meaningful way. I will call it quite simply, the "BOX". Now imagine that this BOX consists of a beautiful design, so that it easily fits into your home. Imagine that it gives your home and the whole interior as well as all your flatmates or visitors a new look as soon as they come into contact with it. All remains the same and everything changes in the same moment. Because, obviously, the BOX, your new companion, does not simply decorate the place for you. Much more, it supports you in changing the way you perceive the place. And that is surprisingly a different, a new, an entirely never before experienced view upon things.

Our mind holds an infinite capacity of creative power. Only with the pure imagination it is possible for us to let wishes and visions become reality. The BOX which you have just visualized together with me, it already exists. It has been developed in that very moment when you thought it into existence. Long before I decided to invite you into this thought experiment.

And this BOX has magical abilities. It supports each and every one of us to come to our inner center, to make friends with ourselves, to love who we are. It takes us on a journey that allows us to grow beyond self-love and to encounter our innate wisdom and magic. It connects us to our inherent powers of self-healing and helps us activate them for the recovery of the entire world. It gifts us with a profound access to ourselves that goes further than conventional medicine and allows us to dive deep into the oldest writings of the world. Science blends with spirituality. And we get a living proof that everything is interconnected with each other.

In other words, the BOX that you have envisioned is now part of your reality. We call it the Hayden Model. And it inspires you to ask new questions of life, "ffor example how it might feel to be accompanied by ourselves and our inna- te wisdom on the path to self-healing. How could we not only hear our bodies talking to us, but rather understand what they really wanted to tell us? Just imagine them communicating with us through the expression of discomfort, pain, or even suffering. Would that mean that we were healt- hy, in those moments when we felt sick? If our cells are individual and at the same moment interconnected parts communicating with us, making us function and live as human beings, then who are we as parts of the larger world? What role does the health of those around us play for our individual development? What does the community do to us, and what happens to the community through us?" (from the manual)

You move past the understanding that with every feeling, thought, word and action you have an impact on the health of the entire world. You even become one with the health of the whole world through every feeling, thought, word and action.

What is the Hayden Model. And how does it function?

The foundation of the Hayden Model is the spine. This is because besides being the stable and flexible column that carries the body and keeps it upright, it also has a symbolic meaning as the pillar of our life as a whole. It forms the center of our humanity and through the individual vertebral bodies it connects our entire system from the brain to the most distant body part. Life-sustaining information and substances are exchanged through it. In the model, the spine therefore serves as a representative of the physical body, which serves as something like the movie screen of our film "Life".

You do not have to be a therapist or doctor to understand the spine in the Hayden Model. This is because it provides you with a small map that explains and names each vertebral body as what it represents.

Vertebral bodies carry letters and numbers depending on where they are located. Under the skull (cranium) is our cervical spine. It has seven vertebral bodies. Originating from the Latin word cervix for neck, the seven cervical vertebrae are referred to as C1 through C7 from top to bottom. Located below is the thoracic spine, thorax. It consists of twelve segments and consequently the following number-letter combinations arise as T1 to T12 (in other models also TH1 to TH12). The lumbar spine follows with five vertebrae. We count from L1 to L5. Below it are the sacrum (sacral bone), which consists of five vertebral bodies S1 to S5 that have grown together in the course of evolution, and the coccyx ("tailbone"), which has almost disappeared in human development and still exists as a tail in some animals (CC1 to CC5).

From every vertebral body individual nerves emerge. They supply specific muscles or organs. In addition, there are entire nerve plexuses that bundle a certain number of individual nerves and group them together, allowing the organization of a more widespread supply to the certain regions of the body. They are called plexuses in conventional medicine and we also know them from TCM as fires or wheels and from Hinduism as chakras. They behave like energy vortexes and the exciting thing is that people in the past sensed this energy with placing their hands on them and could conclude certain physical and mental imbalances from them. These energy vortexes can be found exactly there, where nowadays a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) shows us such a nerve plexus.

From top to bottom these are the choroid plexus which resonates with the crown chakra, the cervical plexus which marks the third eye chakra, the brachial plexus which is in line with the throat chakra, the cardiac plexus, which stands for the heart chakra, the solar plexus amidst the navel chakra, the lumbar and sacral plexuses at the level of the sacral chakra, and the sacral and pudendal plexuses, forming the lowest, the root chakra.  

Each energy center interacts with specific structures or muscle and organ groups and even further. When the spine is in balance, each of our physical structures can benefit from its full potential, we are in an energetic and mental equilibrium. Once imbalance occurs, it affects all other levels through the body. For example, if a spontaneous trauma hits the spine, a nerve can get blocked and as a result the supply to the according muscle or organ is no longer at the usual measure. This has an impact on our energy balance because we may take a protective posture due to a pain and use more energy resources than we normally would during movements, while at the same time we have less of it available because the organ associated with the affected spinal segment has difficulty supplying the body system in a balanced manner. When we have a limited amount of energy available, we quickly become exhausted, tired and often unfocused. This affects our psychological and mental condition. We make mistakes, we lose patience. We get angry with ourselves and we appear unbalanced to the outside world. The world around us changes due to our actions.

There are innumerable chains of effects that the complexity of our entire system can create. The imbalance can start at any level, for example, a psychological injury can affect the energy balance or lead to physical pain.

These innumerable chains of effects are given an easily comprehensible image in the Hayden Model, with the help of dividing our complex system into so-called Koshas.

According to the ancient Vedic tradition, koshas describe our body shells. They coat our body like onion skins, are semi-permeably connected and inseparable with each other. They expand inward to Atman, our true essence, and outward to the pure soul, the Light.

The Symptom Catalog

The Hayden Model deals with the outer layers. They are called Annamaya Kosha (the physical body), Pranamaya Kosha (the energy sheath), Manomaya Kosha (the mental layer), Vijnanamaya Kosha (the wisdom body) and Annandamaya Kosha (the body of bliss). These five bodies are comparable to the concept of the five worlds from the Kabbalah teachings.

We can detect and identify imbalances in the physical body, in the energy shell as well as in the mental layer and name them as symptoms. They are for example pain, movement restrictions, skin conditions, digestive disorders, breathing problems, heart rhythm disturbances, mood swings, fears, or nightmares. You can find a detailed list of these symptoms in the Hayden Model manual. We call the list "Symptom Catalog" and it is the heart of the BOX.

Based on this, you can select the symptoms that concern you at the moment. These symptoms will lead you to the letter combinations of possibly involved vertebral bodies. All you have to do next is pick out one of them. At best, the vertebral body that catches your eye because it appears several times.

The Kosha Ringbooklets

In the Hayden Model, each of the five external koshas is assigned a ring booklet. This means that for each body shell there is a unique piece of work, in which the entire letter combinations of the spine are associated with the corresponding kosha.

The first three ring booklets belong to Annamaya Kosha, Pranamaya Kosha and Manomaya Kosha. They are assigned a blocked state (the possible symptoms in case of imbalance), an awakened state (the functioning in the balanced state) and an exercise that can restore the balance.

The next ring booklet deals with Vijnanamaya Kosha, the collective subconscious. The Hayden Model does not deal with the social symptoms, because the manual is a little too narrow for that. Therefore, the Vijnanamaya Kosha ring booklet does not contain any blocked states. Rather, it holds wisdom in terms of answers and solutions. You will find positive psychology, affirmations and intentions appropriate to the vertebral bodies, which you can integrate into some of your other exercises.

The fifth ring booklet is called Anandamaya Kosha, the body of Bliss. We cannot really describe this kosha. It is the Light from which we are born and into which we return when we die. In the Hayden Model, it is designed to be filled with light, and therefore it has been given its own content. Anandamaya Kosha gets filled with the teaching of the tattvas, which, similarly to the koshas, come from the thousands-year-old Vedic teachings, the Upanishads.

Tattvas are described as the building bricks of life. They are earth, water, fire, air and ether (space). Kasmir Shivaism interpreted and expanded the five in a very special way, portraying them in images like a column similar to the spine. There are 36 tattvas in total and they can be connected precisely with the individual vertebral bodies and their meanings. They describe the development of life, human consciousness, and the higher consciousness, starting with the five elements. With them, the Hayden Model includes another dimension, attempting to describe life in its entire beauty.

The Tattvas (from bottom to top):

The Five Elements (Coccxy), the Tattvas of Sensory Experience (Sacrum), the Tattvas of the Organs of Action (L5-L1), the Tattvas of the Sense Organs (T12-T8), the Tattvas of the Inherent Instruments (T7-T5), the Tattva of Self-Expression (T4), the Tattva of Universal Consciousness (T3), the Tattvas of Limitations (T2-C5), the Maya Tattva of Illusion (C4), the Tattvas of Pure Essence (C3-C1), and above the spine in the Crown, the Siva/Sakti Tattva, the Cosmic Energy.

Now, once you have figured out a letter-number combination, you can take any ring booklet of choice, or all of them, look them up in the corresponding vertebral body and find out about that area, pick out what is most important to you, and make it your own in order to regain the balance within yourself.

A sixth ring booklet serves to keep your personal notes. You are the owner of your story and can change it in your own way according to your new insight and therefore make your contribution to the world from a completely fresh perspective.

You move past the understanding that with every feeling, thought, word and action you have an impact on the health of the entire world. You even become one with the health of the whole world through every feeling, thought, word and action.