If you haven’t already read the previous introductory post, I encourage you to read it here:

https://sevendensities.com/chakras-introduction/

In no way is the following text intended to undermine or replace professional medical opinion. My intention is to make you curious and encourage you to look at the phenomenon of illness, bad health, yourself and the world around you in a different way. This content may encourage you to work on your distortions (shadow work/programs/learnings/traumas), but it is not and never will be the only method for the examples described below. Nor am I suggesting that you have to do anything to find what you are looking for. Nor am I suggesting that you are looking for anything.

What I write is not the absolute truth. These are my personal conclusions supported by my experience, which was then confirmed by various books and during meetings and conversations with other people. Whatever your reaction after reading this is entirely your own interpretation. Accept, please, what resonates with you, and leave out the rest.

In writing this text, I will try to isolate the base chakra as much as I can, but because of how complex humans are and how the processes within them are interdependent on many different factors, certain aspects of the first chakra will be intertwined with others. I encourage you to look at the base chakra more broadly and see how its functions affect our entire being.

The base chakra governs the major organs and glands responsible for survival. To make it easier to understand, I recall the vital functions of organisms. These key ones are:

1. Survival – on different levels. The ultimate kind, it’s run or fight. So most of the sympathetic nervous system is managed by this chakra. This is its most important function – to survive. In crisis situations, the hormones adrenaline and noradrenaline take care of this, in less crisis but equally stressful situations – cortisol. These hormones are released by the adrenal gland.
2. Moving – skeleton (bones), tendons, joints, legs.
3. Excretion – rectum and large intestine.
4. Reproduction – sexual organs.
5. Respiration – in this context it will be the delivery of oxygen through blood, so it is worth paying attention to blood and serum.
6. Nutrition – feeding the body with physical food.
7. Growth – the reproduction of body cells.
8. Response to external stimuli – the five senses of the physical body.

Any sense of insecurity, especially long term, can significantly affect the health associated with this particular chakra. Note that I’m writing a lot here about a sense of security or a sense of threat. The word ” sense” is key here, because a threat does not have to actually exist at all, and someone may still feel a threat expressed as fear or anxiety. Such fear may be so deeply rooted that the person doesn’t even know he or she feels it. Such an emotion, quietly sitting in the background, distorts everything you perceive. Hence, it is worth paying attention to physical health in specific areas that may carry valuable information.

By paying attention to diseases that may affect the above-described organs and glands, we can more easily understand what problem we have in the emotional area. Usually the cause of the problem is more complex, but the characteristic “survival difficulty” occurs in many people. This manifests itself in the form of financial problems, lack of stability, lack of a stable and safe place to live, or a sense of insecurity arising from the external environment. Such emotional oppression, if not worked through in time, will manifest itself in the form of a specific physical illness. It’s the aching joints, back problems, constipation, etc. that are supposed to remind us that we haven’t done our homework. The physical symptom is the final stage of expression of the internal conflict.

A fairly obvious issue, but one that is often overlooked in the context of “self development” (I wrote “self development” because development implies that someone may have some deficiencies, which in fact is not the case) is the neglect of the basic needs of the body, including: healthy sleep and the right amount of it, proper diet and physical activity. These are really simple matters, but as simple as they remain, they are so often overlooked in everyday life. A rational daily rhythm will help you ground yourself on a regular basis and assimilate smaller or larger blockages. This keeps energy from being held back for physical reserves and prevents reactions that are harder to control/understand. This also doesn’t mean that a disordered physical rhythm completely prevents you from maintaining attentiveness or a higher perspective – it makes things much more difficult, but after all, it doesn’t block experiencing completely. In crisis situations, we still have the ability to assimilate and create something wonderful, but it is much more difficult. On the other hand – taking care of only the physical realm of life will not keep you 100% healthy if you build conflicts on the emotional or mental realm.

This reverses the view of the disease, and makes the disease a warning sign, a clue, and in some cases even a rescue, because otherwise we would have gone too far in degrading ourselves. It imposes a certain constraint on us, that we nevertheless ultimately have to face what we have inside us. You can understand it precisely as a constraint or as an invitation or opportunity. Living here (despite this omnipresent suffering, because this is the argument cited most often) is a certain privilege. Just as you must take care of the physical body, you must also take care of the emotional and mental body. “This constraint” is rewarded for the persistent with the reward of a new perspective, closer to a harmonious perception of the world as a whole.

The base chakra in the energy of the body is the first pump, which, being negatively polarized, attracts energy from outside, directing it upward. Every experience begins first by verification in the context of survival for body, mind and spirit. This means that in the first place we automatically verify if the experience serves us as survival. Of course, our definition of survival will be unique and how it is distorted will define whether the experience serves us or not. This instinct is the strongest of all and, when balanced, opens up new possibilities for seekers.

Sexual energy also begins in the first chakra, which at this stage desires expression in a typically animal form in order to prolong the species. This sexual energy can also reach the higher chakras – that is, it can be used in a different way, at a higher vibration, as I will describe with the other chakras. A particular difference in experience can be recognized by a man who chooses not to release this energy too often. There will then be a need to use sexual energy in a different way.

I will use an example to show how a difficult experience that is not related to survival has been interpreted by us as one that threatens our life.

One of the lowest possible vibrations for a person is shame, which tells you to hide and remain in humiliation. Let’s say a person close to you made you feel ashamed of your behavior. So you accepted the outside opinion as valid (it’s hard, for example, for a young child to suppress the opinion of one of the greatest authorities – a parent) and thus automatically allowed it to affect you. You are so afraid of another confrontation that it affects your sense of security and poses a real threat to you. Going out among people arouses feelings of dread in you and you would most likely curl up in a ball and stay in your corner alone. At any contact with more people, your heart beats like crazy, your muscles tense up in readiness to escape. Your state looks as if you are about to run away from danger. In fact, you don’t pay much attention to it, but your muscles have been so clenched for a long time. They have been on standby for a long time, and especially when you are among other people. You notice that your stomach hurts then, too. After a long time, you realize that you have problems with your joints, on top of which you often get a sore throat.

Shame makes us fear and expose us to the opinion of others, which is so painful for us, because we automatically identify with it and do not allow any other solution. Shame for existence is the most intense form of the lowest vibration of energy that wreaks havoc on the body at a fundamental level. If you are ashamed of the way you are and it causes you to struggle to survive most of the time, then you are most likely traumatized by an experience that has not been fully lived and the blocked energy warps your interpretation of the world. This reworking/reliving to the end of the experience can be very intense, so I encourage it to be done at least in the presence of someone close to you, and preferably someone who has experience with it. When we experience unpleasant emotions in an environment/situation where we are safe, and look at them as something that happens inside us, chances are we can learn a lot from it and heal our distortion.

The above two paragraphs are just an example of how such a course of events can unfold. It also shows that the base chakra was not the cause of the distortion in this case. This distortion was taken in by an underdeveloped third chakra (outside opinion) at a young age, which affected the second chakra (understanding oneself and identifying with oneself, knowing one’s worth), and because this was false (had a faulty foundation) and was not assimilated in time, it descended lower into the first chakra. On top of that, a sore throat often signals that you are not able to express what you want or are not allowed to. That’s why it’s so important to loosely combine facts in your search for a solution for yourself. Hence, if you were expecting a lecture on recall healing here, you may be disappointed. I am far from charts in which you can dissect a person like a multiplication table. You can be inspired by a piece of text, a conversation, music, therapy, but if you don’t see that it brings some recognition and understanding, go back inside.

I will now outline some steps on how this approach can be put into practice.

1. The first step is to recognize and understand that there is indeed something wrong in this field. This is a basic principle of any work on yourself. Realize that what you are feeling in the background is indeed present. Track the feeling. For this you need inner silence and concentration. This does not mean absolute silence of thought. It is about tracking – listening to yourself and naming what is incompatible. If you can learn from observing your thoughts, thoughts will not be an obstacle, quite the opposite. Focus on your body, shift your attention there. This is a conscious observation of what you are feeling. What is moving your body?
2. Recognize that what you just tracked is not a part of you. It’s a reaction to some experience. And that’s probably the hardest part of the whole process. We love the drama of this world and what happens to us. To play a leading role in a movie. Even more so when it’s a medium to be the center of attention. Thus, we attach ourselves even more to our role, which, after all, in our minds, is the most important, because it is us. So what – you are a conglomeration of different experiences and rationales that make up you? Well, then you have a lot of work to do to keep this conglomeration in check and not let anyone try to violate it. However, you can do things differently. You can let go of identifying yourself with what you’ve known over the years and stop building extensions of yourself. You have 100% for being you. You can discover that most identifications were flawed, because they didn’t stand on the right foundations. You are not what you think you are. I am not disregarding your person here and who you think you are, but I am encouraging you to change your thinking about yourself. In contrast, I might say that you are more than you think you are. Once you grasp that everything you think you are is an illusion, a happening, you will be able to identify and assimilate lessons from a deeper and deeper area of the subconscious on an ongoing basis.
3. Allow yourself to change and think differently. You can live and think completely independently. You don’t know how yet, but give yourself the opportunity. You’re probably looking for a reason to do it. You can be grateful that you got to this point and that all those difficult experiences brought you here. You may in your mind thank all the people who made you get here. You’re probably thinking this is absurd – “what do you mean, you’re supposed to be grateful for the hardship that those closest to you have caused you?” This is easier than constantly adding oil to the fire in the form of regrets. After all, it was the experience that made you who you are. You identified with it for so many years, and now you’re waking up from a dream. Isn’t that a good reason for gratitude and forgiveness? You decide for yourself, of course.
4. It’s time for a little death. This is the last moment, the last line of defense for our ego, which tries by all means possible to hold the conglomerate together. The fear of giving up of one’s identity is the last stop, and that fear can be considerable. I use the word death because the feeling is sometimes as if you are about to die, as if a certain part of you is about to cease to exist. Everything is falling apart. You’re losing ground, but death in this context is not all bad. Let this disintegration happen. Let it fall apart – it’s a stage of transformation. By releasing the old, stuck energy in this way, you give room for a fresh new perspective. You give yourself a chance to discover your own nature.

The main difficulty in this practice is recognizing ourselves from a different perspective. We are complex beings because we interpret the world in different ways. As you can see, a sense of security or insecurity can come from many different factors. For one person, survival will mean staying on the run, while for another it will mean fighting. Why? Because one person will eliminate threats by fleeing, and another by fighting. Such “ideas” about survival are learned in the first days of life. That’s why one person’s knees will hurt, and the other, his hands. One keeps running away, and the other keeps fighting. The question is, how soon will both of these people realize that this is the case? This is what mindfulness practice is all about. If the particular method you’re using doesn’t work, it means that it doesn’t support you in knowing yourself, or more to the point, in being yourself, consider then whether it’s worth looking for something else. If you stubbornly persist with what you’ve come to know, it may be hard for you to move forward. We change because it is the natural rhythm of life. The only constant is change.

This will lead you to verify what you can put your security on. You may find that despite having a home, family, acquaintances, friends – you still don’t feel safe. Or, vice versa, you may wonder if your security really depends on all of that.

Can “I am just being here and now” alone be a reason for you to build a sense of security?

Have a great weekend.
Stay aware

Chris