Introduction Guide – Rebalancing the Chakras

Sacral chakra: Swadisthana (sweetness)

The Sacral Chakra is our passion and pleasure centre and it is located in the pelvic area, just under the naval. While the Root Chakra is satisfied with survival, the second chakra seeks pleasure and enjoyment. it is connected to feelings of intimacy. It is associated with reproductive organs and intestines. In yoga poses it is related to the hip and pelvic area and poses include flowing movements. Its colour is orange. Its element is water.

The gift of this chakra is experiencing our lives through feelings and sensations such as pleasure, sensuality, sexuality, intimacy and connection.

The energy of this chakra allows you to let go, to move, and to feel change and transformation occurring within your body. It allows you to experience this moment as it is, in its own fullness. It is related to a three year old child when it learns that he or she has needs that will be met or not. If a child’s needs were hardly met it learns to suppress its needs and the painful process of fear of intimacy starts. The child is not accepted for who he/she is and what he/she needs and either starts manipulative behaviours or tries to become invisible and a people pleaser.
The main challenge for the second chakra is the conditioning of our society. We live in a society where feelings are not valued, where passion, and emotional reactions are being frowned upon. We are being taught not to “lose control”. And we get disconnected from our bodies and our feelings.

As if this was not enough, we also experience the wounds of our collective cultural struggles over many sexual issues of our society. On one hand sexuality is magnified and glorified, and on the other hand it is rejected. This results in either  deficient or excessive second chakra issues. The sacral chakra is also your centre of creativity. Passion is the fuel of creative energy. Everything you create, a poem, a drawing, or a website, originates from the energy of second chakra. It is also where your fertility originates. After all, conceiving a child is a creative process.

A person with a balanced Svadhisthana Chakra is passionate, present in his/her body, sensual, creative, and connected to his/ her feeling, is able to be vulnerable and interdependent in relationships.

An unbalanced chakra shows up as attachment issues, sexual guilt or a destructive behaviour towards our own pleasure, trust issues. Addictions are born from problems in the second chakra. We might have difficulty in saying no, always pleasing other people. Physically speaking, when your sacral chakra is blocked you may experience a range of symptoms that are generally confined to the lower abdomen, back, and reproductive and digestive organs

How do you begin to reconnect with a feeling of passion for life?

• Rumi’s quote explains it all: what do you desire? A desire is a bubbly feeling inside of you that excites you and from that you can create a goal (3rd chakra). So if you desire to feel good in your body, your goal could be to lose some weight, exercise more and eat healthy (1st chakra) and then you will look for ways to fulfill your desire instead of ‘I must do it’ becomes ‘I want to and I see opportunities to make it happen’. 
• Let’s go back to “simple pleasures”. Make a list of all those “little” things that bring you pleasure. Think of things such as a smile, smell of coffee in the morning, sunlight on your face, the feel of hot water in the shower. This is the list of all the little blessings that can so easily be taken for granted and overlooked. You rarely miss them until they are gone. Practice gratitude for them every day. 
• Create ‘A Holiday At Home’. Think about what gives you the most pleasure when you go on holiday. When you take a break from your regular life and mix things up a little. Go have breakfast outside, connecting to sounds of the birds, dressing up or down more than you normally do, taking time to do a little yoga or a walk, talking with your loved ones around the table, making more time to make love or to cook. 
• Plan something different this weekend. See how it makes you feel to inject a little change into your day. It doesn’t all have to be task- orientated and full of have-to-does. 
• Connect To Your Senses – Get “In Touch” With Life. I love to get outdoors and find that Nature is a great cure for all. Create the space to go for a walk and engage all your senses. Smell the air, feel the breeze, see the changes of the season. Blessings surround you everywhere when you are open to receiving them. 
• Stimulate Your Creativity. People become more creative when they just begin painting, or engage in any crafts, maybe something you have had long left behind. 
• This beautiful new energy you can now share with loved ones. This in turn might give you more satisfaction in your relationships as you take care of yourself you have more energy to share with other people. You alone have the power to change a relationship as you spread more sweetness.

When the second chakra is out of balance it can leave us feeling very uncomfortable indeed. Great questions to ask yourself are:
• Am I feeling a lack of desire, passion or excitement in my life?
• Do I love my body? Do I enjoy feeling my body?
• When was the last time you did something just for your own pleasure?
• How do I talk to myself? Am I talking to myself as if I am talking to my best friend?
• Do I deserve to have fun?
• Are you generally bored with life at this moment? Are you feeling you are living by default rather than getting into the drivers seat of your life?
• Do you want to get more creative and yet you couldn’t find the energy to put the effort in?
• Do I have destructive behavior towards my own pleasure? Do put myself in danger in seeking for love and approval?
The Sacral chakra is about like and dislike. This chakra teaches us high and low points, riding the waves of emotion. That it is ok to feel. To learn to accept emotions as they come and go.

I am a recovering co-dependent. For a long time I struggled with setting boundaries, saying no and a lot of my relationships became lopsided. I was the only one doing the heavy lifting and one day I came across an old lady, who out of nowhere said to me: “you cannot be the only person who is holding the handle of the bucket”. I now believe she was an angel guiding me out of my sadness and the empty heavy feeling I had in my heart. I was so busy focusing on the feelings of other people that I neglected myself. This in turn left me with an intense feeling of loneliness. I wanted so desperately to connect with other people emotionally because I lacked this deep connection with myself that I did almost anything for them to like or love me.

It was a difficult trap to get out for me because I kept attracting people who needed healing or were narcissists and I thought I could help them. The day when I could not sustain it any longer was when my boss would not stop shouting and humiliating me how I was of no use to him. I started crying and for the first time in my life I said that his behaviour was hurting me and how unfair I thought he was. I was on the verge of a burn-out. I did not sleep any more, I lost weight and I was constantly in heightened state of alert. I went on sick – leave for three months and put myself on a twice daily yoga, eat, sleep repeat pattern. Cancelled all plans with people and just took time for me.

Through yoga and therapy I learned that I am not ‘needy’. That my feelings mattered. That I have the right to feel and express my desires. I started putting myself first. It was not as if this was a clean cut end of this behaviour. I fall back every so now and then but now I recognize it and can stop myself in my tracks. I think about if this is what I want, if it’s my responsibility to take action or if I have time to do it. If I am not sure I ask for time to reflect. And I stopped asking what everybody else wants but expressing what I want in a kind way. Not expressing what we want can result in repressed emotions and repressed emotions causes sickness in body and mind and can result in passive aggressive behaviour where you might start resenting people for not taking your feelings into account. Obviously, this behaviour has the opposite effect of what we are actually seeking. The moment I realized that if you start doing things for yourself you don’t need others to do it for you brought me so much freedom. I do not need other people to take care of me.

Off course, to fully understand the middle way I had to go through a time where I locked my emotions behind a façade, an armour as my energy healer described it. It was not until Brené’s Brown’s perspective of vulnerability was smacked into my face by a dear friend who told me that the only way to have meaningful relations was to show who I really am. The messy but wonderful humans we all are. What I took away from this turbulent period was that I cannot heal the world as Michael Jackson sang so dramatically. So I stopped helping other people and started healing myself. So every now and then, I just listen and wonder if this is worth my energy, my time and my investment. Finally I stopped taking responsibility for things out of my sphere of influence. I often joke today that “this is not my circus and these are not my monkeys” if something around me goes utterly wrong of which I have no control over or responsibility for. A healthy detachment to things we cannot control lowers stress levels significantly.

Yoga changed my life. It has helped me to find the middle way by allowing for deep self-reflection. The big “Why am I doing all this” is essential. We cannot fix a problem if we keep denying it. Yoga provides a safe space for these kind of reflections. I then educated myself about healthy relationships and trained myself by trial and error. In meditation we learn to observe ourselves, our behaviour, our emotions and our thoughts. Once you truly understand yourself you can start changing it. Yoga also learned me that we have to accept ourselves as we are in the moment. If you push through a difficult pose you might injure yourself. If you decide to be gentle with yourself, one day you will arrive in a healthy way in the pose. If we reject ourselves we will only reinforce toxic behaviour. By acknowledging who we are and accepting ourselves we can let go of shame. The moment you speak up for yourself might feel very uncomfortable indeed. You might feel fear or shame, but you must go ahead. Changing a pattern is difficult. Difficult yoga poses teaches us patience and to trust the process. The more often you practice a pose, the easier it gets.

Are you ready to start trusting your own feelings and your own process?