In my yoga classes we are exploring chakras through a developmental (growing ourselves) and somatic (feeling ourselves) lenses.
We are learning to identify were we get stuck and using movement as an inquiry to unfold.
To open.
Through this I have been jumping back into a book in my own library, Anodea Judith's incredible book Eastern Body Western Mind which interweaves Somatic Therapy and Chakra system healing. The last time I read it I had never heard of Somatic anything.
Yay for the mystery of life.
The second chakra is all about our feelings sensations and emotions. And from a developmental perspective it's about polarity.
Good/bad, Hot/freezing.
When we are not familiar with being able to sense our feelings, polarity becomes black and white.
This OR that with no in between.
There's no range and so we often can't sense or ask for what we really want or what we desire, which is also a second chakra exploration.
Sensations are the gateway between our internal and external experience. Sensations fold into feelings which is where, from a learnt or programmed awareness, we can give a name to our internal experience; then our feelings are expressed as emotions (energy or sensation in motion).
When we are unconscious or we haven't been given the tools to understand this being human experience of feelings and emotions, we express them by default, they just happen, sometimes we don't know why, sometimes that can leave us feeling shame, out of control, fragile. Or we hold them in with all our fucking might and we build massive castles around to contain them.
We often default to the one emotion we feel most safe in i.e sadness, badness or rage (madness).
When we are not conscious to the emotion/feeling it is left unintegrated, and almost 100% of the time, the experience will repeat itself in some way, looking to be integrated.
Seeking love and acceptance. By you (and me).
When we can stay with, we can work our way in, experiencing the emotion, the tears, the tension, we can bring enough awareness to naming the feeling and being with the vulnerability of that, and then we can fall into the sensation, the experience without the story and see it as life force.
Gently, tenderly digesting, integrating, allowing the wholeness.
Feeling the play of life.
This is how become our own greatest ally or friend.
This is how we open to life.
With love always, from my soul to yours.