Sunday’s Focus

Spend the day trying to feel the urge to talk before you begin speaking. It is harder than it sounds. Focus on your first words in a conversation. What is going on in your system? What is the impulse? Where do you feel your fear(s)?

Sunday’s Concepts

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. This week, your Vishuddha Chakra.

Common Name: Throat Chakra

Vedic Name: Vishuddha or Vishuddhi

Number: Five

Location: Lower throat, just above the sternum, and just in front of the spine

Vortex – Forward and back, perpendicular to the spine

Primary Responsibility – Portal for the conscious and subconscious minds

Body: Mental

Component: Speed, Flexibility

Healthy Configurations: Fluid, Accumulating

Unhealthy Configurations: Percolating, Explosive, Scattered

The fifth chakra, Vishuddha, is generally located at the back of your throat, above your sternum and just in front of your spine. Its vortices (vortexes) point forward and back, perpendicular to your spine. It is the doorway where internal and external stimuli interact with your subconscious and conscious minds.

The throat chakra is the listening chakra. It absorbs the information that your minds use to form opinions, assess threats, and evaluate opportunities. It creates Truths that corroborate fears and legitimize biases.

Your throat chakra is the most reactive of the chakras in most people. It is the primary fueling port, voice, and listening station for your subconscious mind. An unhealthy fifth chakra shuts down connection, unity, and intimacy. It creates derision, judgment, and intolerance. It provokes conflict, distancing, and divergence. It is your accountant, spy, and police officer. It is the witness to every action, reaction, response, and opportunity. It is Chicken Little and Mahatma Gandhi. It is the instigator of riots and the confessional. Your fears live in the barracks of your Vishuddha Chakra, waiting anxiously for their next deployment.

Your “Truths” are the compromise between what you want, what you believe can happen, and the sum of your fears.

Why it matters: Being able to feel the influences and results of your throat chakra energy will alert you when your subconscious mind is trying to take control, when you are leaning into your biases, and when your fears limit your ability to absorb energy and potential.

Everyday Usability: As you discount your fears, you will become a better absorber of ambient energies. You will listen better, longer, and more deeply. You will connect without projection. Intimacy will feel more relaxed and fluid. You will be able to feel the difference between your Truth and actuality. You will feel the pull and push of your biases and intolerances as destabilizing imbalances.

Progression: Your desire to talk will continue to decrease. Connection with others will happen without communication. Your ability to listen will transcend sound and language. Your propensity to project your energy into your environment will be replaced by the harmonious radiance of your Essence. Forced engagement will become elegant enchantment.

Monday’s Focus

Feel your energy when listening. Feel the building of the urge to respond while listening. Where do you feel the urge? Does the urge pull or push you forward, sideways, back, or parallel toward some comparison?

Monday’s Concepts

Your Vishuddha Chakra is the main interchange or railyard your energy system uses to decide if potential is friend or foe, opportunity or threat, benefit or deficit, and all the other words like good/bad, should/shouldn’t, can/can’t, will/won’t, etc.

Your throat chakra absorbs energy to its capacity – until it gets overwhelmed – and then it goes into reaction. A lump in your throat is the feeling of energy accumulating.

Most of us were never taught to tolerate the energy absorbed by listening. We were taught to interrupt, distract, sidetrack, discount, or agree … so that the other(s) would stop talking … so we could start talking … and diffuse some of the energy we accumulated while listening.

This happens non-verbally as well. It is easiest to feel, sense, and acknowledge verbally, but more energy is resisted non-verbally. Consider what your response is when people are emotionally vibrant around you. How easy is it for you to remain centered, balanced, and absorbing? How long can you continue to absorb?

What about when people are expressive? How long can you be around someone who is overtly happy before you say or do something to relieve the overwhelm? You may not realize how often you do this until you start to notice it. Do the Focuses this week. Get to know the limits your subconscious mind imposes.

A few years ago, Kelly and I had some extended family that had recently moved to our area over for dinner. Mom, dad, and two teenage daughters. Through dinner, the mom regularly shushed the older daughter in a number of ways. She would interrupt her, use hand gestures to mime lowering her voice or stopping. She would come right out and say that she was being too loud. The mom seemed really uncomfortable by the exuberance of the daughter.

Kelly and I loved the girls immediately. We loved their vibrancy, chutzpah, and Essence. They were happy and full of life. They were authentic and enchanting. We didn’t need the mom to moderate their energy.

As the dinner progressed, the mom asked what I did. I deferred a bit and she pressed … so I offered to give her an example. I outlined and highlighted the nature of her relationship with her daughter and how she had made a habit of trying to restrain her daughter’s exuberance. I tread softly and the mom was able to take in what I was suggesting without getting triggered. The daughter was whole-heartedly agreeing with me.

In all future get-togethers, the mom let loose of the reigns and allowed her daughter’s full expression without trying to moderate it. Her efforts to moderate her daughter’s energy had become habitual. Once she made them conscious, she was able to change them.

Tuesday’s Focus

When listening, which fear response is present most often – fight, flight, freeze, fix, or fornicate? Does it change from the beginning to the end of the conversation? Is your fear response different for shorter and longer conversations?

Tuesday’s Concepts

Johnny is a hellion on the playground. He runs, jumps, climbs, and stomps without rest. When he is in full Tasmanian Devil mode, he is happy and balanced. When his ability to romp is curtailed, he balks. He starts to feel trapped, the energy builds, and his throat chakra starts funneling energy to his head where his subconscious mind takes over and creates huge amounts of fear. Johnny goes into fear reaction and lashes out at those he perceives are responsible for the caging of his inner monster.

The Vishuddha (5th) Chakra is directly connected to your mental body and secondarily to your emotional body. It is the connecting chakra between your brain and your heart. The third chakra connects your low belly to your heart and referees internal and external way of being. The fifth chakra connects your heart and your head. It tries to make peace between what you think and how you feel.

The fifth chakra judges and adjudicates. It determines energy flows toward or away from the mental body and emotional body. It is one of the primary ways you decide whether to think or feel, act or react, and respond or interrogate.

An imbalanced or dysfunctional throat chakra is a major contributor to feelings of anxiety, stress, and overwhelm. It is the primary generator the subconscious mind uses to usurp control from your reasoning, balanced, and neutral mind.

Delila is a drama major in the college of life. She emotes like Old Faithful, regularly and fervently. She makes mountains out of molehills. She has trouble finding and maintaining any sort of neutral or objective configuration. Her pattern is to absorb energy from her environment and then channel it to her emotional body where it erupts.

Her throat chakra colludes by funneling energy away from her conscious, reasoning mind and toward her irrational and reactive mind. What probably started as a fear response in her youth has become a habit and part of her personality. The payoff is the emotional and chemical release she gets when she vents. The downside is that her system isn’t given the chance to evolve and adapt to larger energy capacities.

Wednesday’s Focus

Which fear reaction is your go to when listening/absorbing gets uncomfortable. What does it feel like before, during, and after? Identify the familiar.

Wednesday’s Concepts

The odd-numbered chakras are balancing chakras. They work to create and maintain balance between the chakras above and below them.

The first chakra connects your sense of self, your incarnation, to that of the Earth. It strives to remind you that the connection exists and is always a resource.

The third chakra seeks to balance your authenticity, in and out of relationship. It reminds you when you are not acting and responding in ways that mirror your inner nature.

The fifth chakra performs a few critically important balancing tricks. When healthy, it keeps your subconscious mind in check and equalizes the energy being directed to your mental and emotional bodies. It helps to maintain the balance between your gravity and ethereal bodies. It maintains the equilibrium between your environmental body and physical body.

Let’s look at the fifth chakra’s bag of tricks individually.

First, it channels energy to your subconscious and conscious minds. When healthy, your subconscious mind directs your bodily functions and works as the auto-pilot for repetitive tasks. When unhealthy, your subconscious mind diverts energy away from your conscious mind toward projected fears, judgments, and intolerances. It prioritizes mental projections and habitual fears over reasoned actions and beneficial responses.

Thursday’s Focus

Identify times when someone’s radiance makes you uncomfortable. How does that discomfort differ from normal conversational discomfort? How do your fears and reactions differ?

Thursday’s Concepts

Secondly, it distinguishes and classifies the current value and absolute potential of ambient energies. The lower chakras deal with actuality while the upper chakras explore projections and potentials. The fifth chakra is a bridge from the present to the future.

Margaret is a politician in Orodruin, Mordor. One of her constituents wants to sell the energy from a local volcano to sorcerers. Her gravity body assesses the current value of the endeavor – tax revenues, tourist dollars, growth potential, and infrastructure costs. It takes into account the costs and benefits both personally and to her community. Her ethereal body would compile the future potential – the potential for good and evil that might come from having a bunch of sorcerers casting spells in and about her shire. Her fifth chakra would work to find a consensus. The consensus will ring true to her current energy configuration.

Your gravity body absorbs ambient energies and assesses their extant (currently existing) values. Your ethereal body feels for the underlying and intrinsic potential. The fifth chakra works to find the balance between the current and potential benefits.

If Margaret’s bodies are balanced, she will make a healthy choice for the people in her district. If any of her bodies are out of balance, her decision will also be out of balance … although it will still ring true. The desire for tourist dollars will feel more precious if her gravity body isn’t grounded. If her Ethereal Body is out of balance, she will preferentially see one possible outcome, rather than being able to see opposing or tangential results.

If she is enamored with the idea of sorcerers, she will overlook their ability to create havoc and death. Her truth will be that sorcerers are good. As a girl, if a neighbor’s teenage son turned her favorite stuffed bunny into a flesh-eating wombat, she will probably have little desire to promote the endeavor. Her truth will be that sorcerers are bad.

Truth doesn’t exist as some perfected reality or absolute. There isn’t a Divine-inspired set of conditional beliefs to mimic into a faultless existence. Your and everyone else’s “Truths” will always be a conglomerate of demands, conceivability, and compounded fears cemented into place by the subconscious mind.

Friday’s Focus

Be aware of your throat chakra while listening. Try to feel the energy build as you absorb the conversation. See if you can feel where the absorbed energy goes.  

Friday’s Concepts

Thirdly, the fifth chakra helps to bring balance to your inner and outer worlds. When healthy, the Vishuddha Chakra lubricates the channels between your physical and environmental bodies. It assists in lowering the defenses between what you perceive as you and not you.

As you listen deeply with each of your bodies, you will recognize that the differences you perceive between your inner and outer realities are actually distances you are creating to maintain the sense of autonomy. When you stop creating contrasts, they cease to exist. A healthy throat chakra overrides your biases, demands, expectations, and fears. It encourages acceptance, tolerance, and unity.

Tommy Mx is gender-neutral and gravitates toward the looks, attitudes, fashion, and manner of Goths. Tommy is drawn to a look, a way of being, a set of biases that will limit and expand the expression of energy. How comfortable Tommy is physically and environmentally will have a lot to do with fifth chakra health and balance. If completely comfortable physically and environmentally, Tommy will fluidly conjoin with the opportunities and alliances available.

Physical and environmental energies will become unbalancing if Tommy is defensive, reactive, or lacking self-esteem and confidence. Tommy’s fears will create a propensity toward conflict and rejection, judgment and condemnation, or exclusion and intolerance.

One of the characteristics of people that are drawn to non-traditional ways of being or dress is that it can provide a sharp contrast between being accepted and judged. Tommy feels safe and accepted when in the Goth community and tends to be hyperreactive when in more diverse communities.

Saturday’s Focus

Stifle your urge to agree, contradict, or argue in conversation. Gently ask for additional information and continue to listen. Feel what happens in your system and observe the reaction in the speaker.

Saturday’s Concepts

The primary components of the throat chakra are speed and flexibility. The ability to blend your inner and outer worlds requires that you be elastic and responsive. The faster you can adjust to changing opportunities, the more fluidly you will blend with proximal potential.

Some chameleons have the ability to change the color of their skin as camouflage or as thermoregulation. It allows them to absorb light to warm themselves and to blend into their surroundings and make it harder for prey to find them … and eat them. Chameleons have two superimposed layers within their skin. The top layer contains a matrix of nanocrystals. The spacing between the nanocrystals can be manipulated, which in turn affects the color. In a relaxed state, the nanocrystals reflect blue and green. In an excited state, the reflected wavelengths are yellow, orange, green, and red.

The successful chameleon will be able to quickly and efficiently transform to create maximum benefit between his/her inner world and outer world.

Healthy Configurations: Fluid, Accumulating

Unhealthy Configurations: Percolating, Explosive, and Scattered

As you’ve read, the throat chakra balances. When it is unhealthy it unbalances. Balanced energy is fluid and accumulates as it absorbs. Unhealthy energy in the fifth chakra has the tendency to percolate. Percolation usually takes the form of non-beneficial conversation, recurring low-energy draining habits, over-thinking, worrying, and stress.

Explosive energy configurations happen when energy overwhelms the fifth chakra and is expelled quickly through angry outbursts, emotional eruptions, and long mental diatribes.

Frenetic thoughts, emotions, and movements are examples of scattered energy configurations of an unbalanced Vishuddha chakra. Energy is ejected piecemeal into familiar diffusions.

Next week, the sixth chakra, Ajna, the third-eye of myth and legend.