Layer Nineteen, Week Four – Sunday

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Sunday’s Focus

Make a list of the things that you love or appreciate about yourself. No really, write it down. Feel for the resistance to begin and any resistance that comes up during the process.

Sunday’s Concepts

This week, you will get to know the second major chakra and the prevalent energies it manages. Understanding the function and responsibilities of the chakras will help you stay balanced. It will also help you understand why other people aren’t.

*Lots of written content this week. Each of the weeks exploring chakras could easily be given several weeks, but none are more involved and important than the second. Bear with me and know that this, while wordy, is just scratching the surface of the influence of your Svadhisthana Chakra.

Each chakra will have a primary benefit and deficit potential. How those impact you, your environment, and your relationships is the next level in understanding your potential, communications, fears, relationships, and resistances.

Let’s look at the second chakra and its predispositions:

Common Name: Sacral Chakra

Vedic Name: Svadhisthana

Number: Two

Location: In front of the tip of coccyx, above the perineum

Vortex – Forward and back, perpendicular to the hips

Primary Responsibility – Connection and relationship to self

Body: Physical

Component: Flexibility

Healthy Configurations: Fluid, Centering, Expansive

Unhealthy Configurations: Bleeding, Compressive, Percolating, Accumulating

The second chakra, Svadhisthana, is generally located at the base of your central power channel. Its vortices (vortexes) point forward and back, perpendicular to your hips. It manages your relationship with yourself, your sense of self, and the foundational beliefs you hold about yourself.

Energies that are preferentially absorbed by your Svadhisthana have to do with how you value yourself and any confirmations or threat to those values. Confirmations would be things that corroborate your Hara and Essence. Threats would be anything that communicates with the internally held fears you have and hold onto – the habitual ways you devalue or mitigate your self-worth, the dramas and traumas that limit your fluidity, and self-judgments. Self-judgments are the primary initiator of resistance.

Why it matters: A healthy second chakra will ensure that you are fluid, centered, expansive, and powerfully connected to the energies and people in your environment. The healthier your second chakra, the more present and self-confident you will be.  

Your second chakra has the most potential for fueling your Hara and Essence. If you want to be resolute, driven, and captivating – grow and maintain the health of your Svadhisthana Chakra.

Everyday Usability: Maintaining a healthy second chakra will greatly increase your ability to connect and tolerate distraction. It will help you manage your subconscious mind and drastically reduce environmental discord and dysfunction. Acceptance abides in your second chakra. Your ability to be determined, motivated, and enchanting is directly related to the enervation and health of your second chakra.

Progression: As you gain awareness of the energies moving through your second chakra, you will be able to sense the held energies as well. Undigested emotions about your self-worth, will to live, and lack of innate potential all live in and around your second chakra. As you become aware of them, you can choose to release them and free up the energies they are holding hostage.

Layer Nineteen, Week Four – Monday

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Monday’s Focus

Look at yesterday’s list and add to it. What did you resist putting on the list because you deemed it too much or yourself not enough? Even if it is uncomfortable, add it to the list.

Monday’s Concepts

Your second chakra is the area of confluence and convergence for each of your bodies except the ethereal. This is a bit counter-intuitive but see if you can feel what I describe.

The physical body is fairly obvious. The second chakra is located very close to your center of gravity. It is around where your torso meets your hips and legs. Every athlete understands the necessity of keeping his or her core strong and supple. They know their strength and balance rest, reside, and rotate around their hips and low belly. Most sports and martial arts focus on this area of the body. It is proven to be the center of not only balance but power and fluidity.

The mental body is divided between your subconscious mind and conscious mind. Your subconscious mind is primarily concerned with survival. Your subconscious mind efforts to create distance between you and everything it believes, thinks, is not you. It is constantly trying to differentiate you from your environment and to some degree from yourself.

Your subconscious mind wants you to believe that your thoughts are separate from the collected or aggregate thoughts of others. Your subconscious mind wants you to believe that mental union, profound intimacy, is impossible. It tries to convince you that you are special and different in substantive ways. It tries to convince you that you are something other than balanced and fluid. One of the ways it does this is to shift your energy from your second chakra upward toward, into, or above your head. This is destabilizing … which helps sell the lie that you are in danger.

When your subconscious mind is idle and the chatter stops, your mental body centers around your second chakra.

Your conscious mind is inherently balanced. When you are centered and aware, you recognize the frivolity of your subconscious mind, disregard it, and follow your Hara and Essence. That is a sign of an active and healthy second chakra.

The feeling of being mentally balanced and fluid will always have an accompanying sensation of fullness and density in your low belly.

Layer Nineteen, Week Four – Tuesday

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Tuesday’s Focus

Review your list. As you do, read one thing and feel where it resonates in your body. Give it a minute. Repeat or reread the appreciation and allow your energy to begin to move.

Tuesday’s Concepts

Can you remember a time when someone said something, and you feel like you had been gut-punched? The energy from the words and the intention behind the words hit you in your second chakra where they trigger energy held in limiting beliefs about yourself – which flood out causing a swirling confluence of fear, doubt, and reaction. Most people feel the energy from the reaction migrate upward toward their heart and throat causing tightness and possibly pain. You might also feel it stop at your diaphragm.

Your emotional body has active and reactive components. The active emotional body is empathetic, internally and externally. It seeks to connect, collaborate, and conjoin with other emotional bodies. It fearlessly seeks energies to commingle with. It wants to bond and exchange energies with the intention of creating a shared momentum, expansion, and growth. It looks for ways for you to be more you. Your second chakra helps facilitate this by radiating and engaging compatible energies. A healthy, active, and developed second chakra will help you confidently radiate your Essence without fear.

The reactive component of the emotional body is in constant threat detection. It is looking for ways to distance and differentiate your emotions from the emotions around you. It pushes and pulls you to be some emotional label like afraid, stressed, angry, depressed, or jealous. It does this to confirm to you that you are not your surroundings. And since you are different, and not a part of the collective – you can’t be safe.

By maintaining a healthy second chakra, you are keeping your energy centered in your low belly where it can aid in fueling healthy emotional relationships.

Your environmental body connects to and radiates from your second chakra when you are healthy and balanced. Your subconscious mind tries to disconnect your environmental body from your second chakra. When it is disconnected, you are hypersensitive to external influences. The subconscious mind has a me and them preference. It is looking to create separation, tension, and disengagement. What is separating is your internal relationship from your external relationships. We will discuss this more in the third and fourth chakras.

People who stay in unhealthy relationships disconnect their environmental bodies from their second chakras. They lose their sense of self and the conscious awarenesses of self-preservation, fulfillment, happiness, and growth in that part of their lives.

A healthy environmental body is centered in your second chakra when your self-expression is authentic, fluid, and active – when it is not limited by fear, judgment, and intolerance. You are being you and not projecting yourself to be anything other than yourself – there is no push, pull, or stop by your second chakra. A healthy second chakra fluidly metabolizes and expends energy without regard to the fears of the subconscious mind.

Consciousness is fearless presence in any environment.

Your Gravity Body centers on your second chakra when healthy. This is a critical understanding to maintain. Where do what you value and how you value yourself intersect? Where do they diverge or conflict? Kindness is a good example. Do the degrees you are kind to yourself and kind to others align? Can you allow yourself to be just as kind to people with harmonious and conflicting values?  If you answered yes to both of the previous questions, your gravity body and second chakra are aligned and healthy. If you are like me, you probably have some work to do.

When your actions, intentions, and trajectories optimize your self-development and self-expression, you will do the most beneficial things and be the best version of yourself … while curiously wondering how you can be more of the things you value.

When your second chakra and gravity body are aligned, they support and enliven each other. When you love everyone as much as you love yourself, when your actions, intentions, and trajectories optimize your self-development and self-expression, you will maintain balance and momentum.

Over this last winter, I lost sight of this. Central Oregon had a much higher snowfall than normal and I was still trying to maintain my weekly running mileage. To do this, I ran in the snow and on ice covered roads and trails. The value I was prioritizing was getting out and running … which would have been great if I had also prioritized maintaining my flexibility, mobility, and posture. And most importantly, remembered that being healthy was the most important thing.

Instead, as I ran, I compensated for the perilous conditions by statically contracting my core, chest, adductors, psoas, and hip flexors. I was afraid of slipping and falling, so I tensed my body in anticipation of any loss of traction. While I ran, I looked down which brought my head forward and caused my shoulders to roll forward resulting in additional torquing stress on my low back. Over a few months, my front body shortened as the muscles adapted to the way I was running. This was exacerbated by sitting in front of the computer for several hours a day.

With my front body shortened, I had to contract my low back to stand erect. Tight front and contracted low back causes compression of the lumbar spine’s intervertebral discs.

In February, we got a few feet of snow in a short amount of time. Lots of snow shoveling ensued. Since my body was out of balance, the additional torque on my low back resulted in an injury. I realized the folly of my actions and made some changes that reprioritized my functional health. I began a stretching, decompression, and mobility practice while refocusing on my running form and posture. I am gradually regaining the health and balance in my low back. To regain and maintain balance, I look to the components and see that endurance needs to be balanced by flexibility, stability, and strength.

My value was misplaced and not in line with my intentions. I lost the plot. It isn’t about running; it is about using running to get increasingly healthy. I can’t do that if I am injured. To align my second chakra and gravity body, I will value my long-term health first.

Layer Nineteen, Week Four – Wednesday

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Wednesday’s Focus

Continue or repeat the read and feel exercise from Tuesday. If you aren’t able to feel energy moving, do the square breath and repeat the appreciation on each side of the breath. Give it five minutes.

Wednesday’s Concepts

The Ethereal body isn’t connected to the second chakra in most people. It exists in babies and children up to a certain age. At some point in our youth, the subconscious mind and the influences of parents, friends, and environments convince us that the world is not a safe place. Our subconscious mind tries to prove that we are unique, fragile, and oppressed. Fear becomes a focal point and separation happens.

We separate from others and begin monitoring safe distance and the Ethereal body disconnects from the second chakra. When that happens, the Ethereal body drifts upward and loses its ability to easily and readily fuel itself.

Every esoteric meditation ideology I have studied has a practice where the intention is to unite the energy in the low belly with the cosmic energies of the heavens. In yogic terms, this is known as Samādhi. The secondary practice this week, Ascending and Descending, is my version of this. I see it as a reunification rather than a unification. This is a powerful practice and can completely rock your world if you haven’t experienced anything like it before. Please send me a text with the times you plan on practicing and I will monitor your energetic vitals the first few times. I am also available if you want to practice it as a guided meditation over the phone.

The Ascending and Descending practice is the union of the Gravity and Ethereal bodies at or around the second chakra. It is also the union of Hara and Essence, Inner and outer, and the elimination of me, not me. It is the expansion of your differentiated self to include everything around you and eventually, everything in the universe. It is a place where your individuality expands to the point where you become everything and everything becomes part of you. When that happens, your self disappears because it lacks differentiation – there is nothing that is not you.

I have glimpses of this and can find and hold the state for very short periods of time. It is quiet, calm, and clear. It is fearless, without demand or judgment, and the past, present, and future don’t seem to exist. There is a presentless presence – I exist and am not able to place myself. I feel like I have full awareness without any specific awareness. And I guess that all makes sense. If I am everything and everything is me, I wouldn’t have a border or a specific location. If I don’t have fear, I wouldn’t preferentially value anything. I could be aware of everything without any single thing getting my attention.

Layer Nineteen, Week Four – Thursday

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Thursday’s Focus

Review your list and spend some time feeling the things that you had resistance to writing. Create a relationship with those things by feeling acceptance and tolerance of imperfection.

Thursday’s Concepts

The primary component of the second chakra is flexibility. When you have a high degree of self-worth and self-appreciation, you are open to change, growth, and opportunity. When you are fearful, defensive, and lacking self-confidence, your ability to be flexible will be severely restricted. This will be true in each of your bodies.

Mental flexibility can only happen to the degree that you are not afraid of every possible decision. When you mentally limit your options, you are hampering your ability to find the most beneficial solutions.

Emotional flexibility can only exist when you have sufficient self-confidence to be undefended. When your baseline self-worth is very high, emotional flexibility, connection, and intimacy will feel natural and fluid. Conversely, when your self-confidence is low, the ability to be connected, intimate, and opportunistic will feel really hard and threatening.

Anxiety is the result of mental, emotional, and/or energetic inflexibility.

The value you hold within your Gravity Body is largely based on how you value yourself and the fears that you hold. An active and expanded second chakra will provide fuel to enliven your Gravity Body … which will help keep your second chakra healthy. A healthy Gravity Body will have the flexibility to fluidly change values to optimize growth and benefit. The flexibility to change values will help you maintain your intentions, confirm your Hara, and stimulate your Essence.

Environmental flexibility in the second chakra happens when you allow yourself to coexist with the people and things around you without resistance, self-judgment, or fear of rejection. To me, it feels like a viscous liquid. As I am able to flexibly engage, I quietly and smoothly flow, filling the nooks and crannies, allowing myself to merge and connect to everything that is available.

In uncomfortable social situations, especially in a large group, I tend to get quiet. Energetically, my second chakra gets still, and I limit the amount of energy coming in and going out. Overall, I don’t get smaller. I am still present, but my expansion is general and not specific. Usually what happens is that someone will come up and begin to tell me their life story and share their most closely held secrets. I feel neutral to them, large but not oppressive, and without an agenda.

Things are different if I am speaking or in an authority or support role. At running events as a volunteer, I am very gregarious. It feels like my job to get people involved and keep the energy up and flowing. To do this I need to open and expand my second chakra, to increase its influence, to assist in the connection and engagement. When I use my second chakra, it comes across as encouragement. If I was to use my other chakras, it might come across a push, judgment, or disparaging.

The lower body energy (first and second chakra) is much less likely to provoke a fear response. It isn’t usually targeted and tends to be more general. The exception is when energy from the second chakra is configured in a sexual or manipulative way. An open and welcoming second chakra soothes the energy of the environment.

Layer Nineteen, Week Four – Friday

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Friday’s Focus

Feel for the things on your list in others. Do they feel different? If so, how and where are you experiencing the accompanying sensations?

Friday’s Concepts

Healthy Configurations associated with the second chakra: Fluid, Centering, Expansive

Unhealthy Configurations: Bleeding, Compressive, Percolating, Accumulating

Your second chakra can lower your ability to be optimal when it is out of balance. Your energy can bleed when you habitually judge your self-worth. It can compress when you contain your self-expression. If you severely limit your self-expression without completely stopping it, the energy will percolate out in situations where you feel comfortable, familiar, and safe.

Anxiety about self-expression will cause your second chakra to accumulate energy. These less than optimal scenarios typically happen when your bodies have conflicting configurations. If you are emotionally vibrant but your mind is fearful, the energy will build but not be allowed to flow.  

Your degree and range of intimacy powered by your second chakra. The other chakras can limit it, but the power resides in the second chakra. Intimacy’s default is to be completely open. Intimacy is opportunity and potential. Limiting those opportunities limits the energy coming into your body and limits your self-expression. You are at your best and the most compelling when you are open, transparent, and welcoming.

Sexual energy is also metabolized and radiated through the second chakra as the default. Most people allow their minds to wrestle control from the second chakra and bring it up into the third, fourth, and sixth chakras. When sex has an aspect of control, coercion, manipulation, fear, expectation, and seduction, you can be assured that energy is coming from the higher chakras. Stay tuned for more on in the following weeks.

Layer Nineteen, Week Four – Saturday

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Saturday’s Focus

As you are able to feel your appreciations in others, feel for them specifically in your second chakra. Does it feel like you can connect to them from or into your low belly?

Saturday’s Concepts

Your Hara point is located near your second chakra but on a different plane of existence. Hara is your personal ability to remain focused, determined, and motivated. When you are relentlessly pursuing your goals, intentions, and aspirations your Hara is strong. A strong sense of self helps to bolster your Hara. It will feel much easier to remain dedicated to a task or objective when you like, admire, and respect yourself – all things an enervated second chakra will enable.

Essence is the energetic expression of your self-love, humor, curiosity, and wonder. When you radiate your Essence, you are radiating your passion and the passion for who you are. The more energy you can bring to your self-worth, the more fuel that will be available for Essence radiance.

This week is dense and intense. Please consider spending more than one week on this content. There is a lot here. Do the Focus. Reread the content and practice the movement until you are feeling what I describe.

Next week, you will skip the third chakra and explore the fourth, Anahata, or heart chakra. The chakra most responsible for how effortlessly you maintain relationships. The third chakra will be explored in the following week.

Second Chakra Awareness

 

Ascending and Descending

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