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The astral body pertains to the realm of the soul, to feelings and emotions. The astral body is very sensitive to concrete imagery—to situations, people, and places. The astral body is active, for example, in dreaming.
A dream often produces strong emotions even though the circumstances or dramatic situations of the dream are unreal. You respond as if they are real. The astral body is where these emotions occur. The astral is sensitive, responsive, and impressionable.
When you feel the opposites of happiness and sadness, elation and depression, excitement and boredom, joy and despair, love and hate, etc. these occur within the astral body.
Though all emotions produce sensations within the physical body, at this point we are after the way feelings are underneath, behind, or accompanying physical sensations. With practice and being attentive, it becomes easy to notice the differences between the physical sensations accompanying feelings and the feelings themselves.
The astral body also gives a sense of connection to others. It is full of attracting and repelling forces. When individuals fall in love, it is often an astral experience—they are in the astral plane living a dream that two share in common. When individuals break up, the same intensity of feeling may be present but it may change into an opposite, repelling emotional force.
Just as we all have our own unique physical body, we each have a unique astral body. The astral involves our ability to feel alive and to appreciate the world around us. The elements present in the astral body will strongly influence our ability to feel wonder, awe, and beauty as well as experiences with ecstasy and rapture.
Just as we can discuss the four elements in terms of physical sensations in the etheric body and their applications, for example, in the martial arts, we can also describe the four elements in the astral body. In the astral body, fire is not a physical or etheric force.
It is a feeling relating to enthusiasm, courage, confidence, charisma, etc. Air relates to being curious, playful, artistically sensitive, cheerful, etc. Earth relates to being practical, no nonsense, patient, stable, etc.
I imagine my astral body to be similar in shape and size to my physical body and etheric bodies, but more subtle almost like seeing an image of oneself in a mirror or a dream.
I imagine it again to be empty, without physical substance. Then if I imagine this astral body to be filled with cool water.
In this case, meditating on water in my astral body, I sense feelings specific to water. These are contentment, peace, serenity, and happiness. There is a sense of well-being that is timeless and independent of space, of who you are and where you were born and where you are now in life.
It is just a pure endless sense of peace into which you can let go and simple be without having to do anything to earn it.
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