Using the lightning network

Can I use the lightning translation funds I invested in opening the channel? Or do I need to somehow additionally get Satoshi to my wallet. I tried to pay an invoice and got the following message “Unable to send lightning payment, self-payments not allowed”

It sounds like you’re trying to make a payment to another wallet hosted on your node? In which case you need to enable circular payments in the lnd conf file:

allow-circular-route=true

Read more here: https://docs.lightning.engineering/lightning-network-tools/lnd/lnd.conf