The connections are becoming easier to make. The primary, most accessible focus points are still the head/crown/third eye and the gut. The spotlight clamps onto my forehead and launches on like a stadium light. Then it's only a matter of relaxed concentration, allowing and not reacting to the intensity, letting my stomach knot du jour become felt, and settling into a deeper sensation of that area until it's like my forehead is directly touching my lower abdomen and/or pelvis (again, while lying flat). Once this connection is made, if I can stay present without breaking into laughter (it's quite a peculiar and intimate feeling!), then the energy flow will develop into a channel that I can feel all the way up and down my spine or front torso, even if it's still twisted or contorted.
If it develops this far, that's usually when I start to encounter the protection around my heart, sometimes from above, as the energy descends down my neck; and sometimes (as is the case more often lately) from below, as the awareness of my abdomen grows, and the light of the channel, like a flame that's slowly building, comes up against the wall beneath my heart. Before that happens (if at all), the heart space is dark, unfelt, and the light, even if it makes a full circuit, somehow finds a detour around it. But I now know that the light can and does want to stream directly through the core of my heart; this has started to happen at times. Like a clean, fresh, powerful river made of luminescent air.