Root Chakra Healing and the Atonement with the Father
Root chakra healing includes our relationship to security. One key issue around security for many people is the issue of money. The root chakra is, however, related to abundance. Abundance, as I have written before in this blog, is the way in which the individual is in alignment with and allows the life force to flow and freely express through them as it is intended. Abundance is not simply an issue about money and wealth. One might be extremely wealthy but from an energetic point of view they could be the living dead.
I have issues around money. Some of my more materiality focused friends have asked me if I have ever taken a vow of poverty. In a very real sense part of me did and finds it hard to let go. My Reiki master tells me that in relation to this issue I should cut the ties but not the love. I have always resisted that advice and now at the age of sixty one years I am getting ready to do what I have resisted. This willingness to let go has been prompted by a dream I had last night. In this dream I am running with another man. We are running in a wide open field. He is supporting me. He lets me go and says that I must now run on my own. This dream man is a kind of mentor.
I have root chakra issues I need healing around the issue of my father and money. The longer I live the more loving of him I become and my focus on what we had together is now more on gratitude rather than on loss. I realise that in many ways I am very like him. I used not to want to be anything like him. Now I appreciate who and what he was and the best of who he was. In some way that begins to mirror how I feel about myself.
I have an image that I keep in my mind that connects me to my father and my relationship to money. This is an image that I do not want to let go off. It is one image that when I recollect it connects me to my love for him. Even as I remember this recollection now a tear comes to my eye. My father was a working class man from the tough side of Liverpool in England. He fought for the rights of the working man. In his heart, however, he was an artist but he was forced to work at a job that was essentially soul destroying. He made money wherever he could and worked all the hours that he could in order to make ends meet. I never remember us, as a family ever going without except that I always remember going without the love I longed for him to express to me but never did. He was not a demonstrative kind of man. In that sense he and I are not alike.
My remembered image of my father takes place late one night. I had come down from my bedroom to use the bathroom. There was a light on in the living room and I look in. My father sat at a desk counting money. He was counting union dues from the men whose rights he upheld as their union representative at the place he worked at for most of his life. I remember most of all that he looked tired and sad. I remember too that I wanted most of all to take away that tiredness and sadness because of my intense love for him. He wasn’t aware of my watching him. I didn’t disturb him but left to go back upstairs to bed.
That memory connects me to him still, and in healing the root chakra and the sense of abundance, I have begun to let it go. I have, as my Reiki master advises cut the ties but not the love. This image is one connected to working in the dark late at night. It is an image of counting little sums of money that becomes a symbol of the men who, in a very real sense, are fighting for their souls. My father becomes a kind of guardian of that energy. I don’t want to let that go of this image of him but in a sense it keeps me tied into a relationship to money that does not serve what I am here to serve.
Like my father I am a union man. I am a writer who invites the ultimate union. I do not fight for this union. I invite surrender rather than fight. I pay my union dues through the spiritual practices that are part of my real work in the world. I work in the dark out of choice. I choose to work in the shadow lands of the human mind. I choose to do and practice dreamwork. I work to align the invitations from my dream life into the life that I express in this everyday world of form
Root chakra healing is about healing your sense of security. Money and security are deeply related. As a child my images around money are ones about struggle, doing work you hate, not earning your livelihood by giving up what you would love to do. It includes images of counting pittances that allow a struggle for the rights of the working man to go on. All of these images are a representation of my father doing his best with the situation that he was presented with. There are many such fathers in the world who are doing their best.
The question for me is how do I run on as the image of the dream invites me to do. It invites me to run into the wide open field. In this regard I am reminded of a poem that invites union within a field. It is by my beloved Rumi.
Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
there is a field. I’ll meet you there.When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase each other
doesn’t make any sense.—Rumi
The answer is that I let go the connection to the images of struggling in the dark with too little light. In order for root chakra healing to take place I let go the images of struggle but not the love that is and was inherent within that struggle. I change the image to one of honouring what was given by my father even if it wasn’t given in the way I most wanted. My father was a provider. He wasn’t a lover. He was too wounded by the blight of his own fathers alcoholism and the times through which he lived. Although in a way I see how he, in his own ay, late into the night, worried and sorrowful, risked for Love in ways I am privileged not to have to do.
Atonement with the father is root chakra work. It is the work of healing the roots of your family dynamic that will in all likelihood impact you throughout all of your life. I am beginning to open up to a real sense of abundance. I have learned new skills that I intend to take into the marketplace. I have learned new skills that I will take into my community. My community is everyone who reads this blog and all the various healers who are connected to each other through an invisible thread of intention.
I am intending to bring a union of the masculine and the feminine into the world of healing in the way I seem most graced to be able to do. This involves the work of teaching technological skills to healers so that they can promote their work to the world and in the process learn to integrate the power of the masculine as represented by the Goddess Techne with the power and grace of the Divine Feminine. This is my work. It is soul work. It is work that I am able to do and in doing it I am able to honour the sacrifice that my father made on my behalf and others so that we might be more empowered to follow the life we love. My father eventually got to do the soul work his heart longed for. He founded an art club that is still in existence long after his death.
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Root Chakra Healing – Real Embodiment
I write about the various maps and stages of personal and spiritual growth. For many, the key reason for such an interest in personal and spiritual growth is, for reason of success, the reason of health or for the reason of transcendence. Spiritual growth, I believe is, for the most part more easily developed if you are physically, emotionally and mentally integrated. This process of integration is the work connected to the development of the personality. It also includes the work that is to be done in aligning the energy centres in the body known as the Chakras.
The integration of the personality is concerned with the first three chakras. These are
The flowering of human potential begins in the body. One has to be able to say, “I am.” One has to be able to affirm their existence on this plane as an embodied being. You are able to say, “I am of the earth and I have my feet on the ground.” Full embodiment is the first spiritual task on this journey called life. There are many people, and many religious institutions, that have promoted and are still promoting a form of body hatred.
Many individuals have given over their authority in matters of spiritual growth to institutions that have taught them in one way or another that they are, “Prey to the sins of the flesh.” In this way sensitivity, sensuality and especially sexuality are considered resistances to the higher realms of the mind and the spirit. Women’s sexuality and especially the sexuality of gay people throughout most of history has been demonised in some way or another. Throughout the history of the world women and their bodies have been seen as somehow unclean. Our modern form of body hatred is the promotion of the ideal shape that fills the pages of so many magazines for men and women.
This promotion of the ideal body tends to also promote the disease called narcissism. Narcissism is so common in our culture that to be non-narcisstic is seen as being abnormal. Narcissism is a form of ego implosion. It is where one is so concerned with one’s self image that the image becomes the meaning of one’s life. The result is, that over time, there is nothing left except the image that has no foundation within the true Self. Narcissism, and the increasing development of narcissism through television and the media, is a major disease of the 21st Century. Its most damaging effects are seen in the increasing incidence of eating disorders and obesity.
In writing about personal and spiritual growth I invite a path to fulfilment. This path of fulfilment means that you take authority for the maintenance of your physical, emotional, mental and spiritual health. You do this as an integral practice and you do this each and everyday. Each and everyday you engage with several activities that promote integral health at personal and transpersonal levels. The foundation of this practice routine begins with paying attention to the needs of the body. Many of us lead a very sedentary life. We eat food on the go. We rarely grow our own food. We might tend to microwave instant meals. I have a family member, who when she visits our cottage, will say, “Oh yeh, I forgot you cook your food.”
I write this blog for a certain kind of individual. This is the individual who is interested in real spiritual growth. Many individuals who I have met are interested in spiritual growth from a wish for transcendence. They tend to be attracted, as I was attracted, to groups that invite them into higher states of consciousness.
Such individuals already have a desire to transcend their sense of separateness of the body. This wish for transcendence has much to do with the pain of their past emotional experience. Many of these well intentioned individuals, who are already disassociated to some extent from their bodies and their emotions, then begin using various spiritual techniques that further disassociate them from their bodies and feelings.
I have personally met with students of wisdom teachers who are not fully there when you meet with them. They kind of float around and are so detached, both physically and emotionally, that the suffering of others does not impact them. They will assure you that detachment is a key part of spiritual growth. While detachment is a key aspect of spiritual growth being detached from your emotional body is not real detachment. This kind of emotional detachment tends to be a result of the avoidance of an earlier stage of spiritual growth that involves the integration of opposites.
There are those who are so attached to their practice of detachment that all they are focused on is their personal pursuit of bliss. Should any one of them attain to such a state of bliss it will not be from an embodied state but from a disembodied state. They will in all likelihood become like Icarus who flew to close to the sun on wings of feathers and wax that they melted and he fell to earth. They will not be able to stand the heat of the sun, which represents the higher state of consciousness, because they have not at each stage of the journey kept their feet on the ground.
The teachings of the sins of the flesh from a spiritual growth point of view causes, and has caused, untold suffering. The more modern teaching of the narcisstic image of the flesh as promoted by the media also causes untold suffering. There is another way. This way is beautifully invited in the lines from a Mary Oliver poem.
Wild Geese
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
from Dream Work by Mary Oliver
published by Atlantic Monthly Press
© Mary Oliver
The key line here is “You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.” This is the way of sensitivity, sensuality and sexuality. It is not the way of narcissism and the cultivation of an image that will eventually mean that at some stage along the spiritual journey you fall to earth. Sensitivity in the body means that you discover how sensational you are and are intended to be. This is why I invite you to practice awareness of the body as a key foundational practice for spiritual growth.
This is ground work. This work is foundational to spiritual growth. This is the work of the 1st Chakra. Allied to this body awareness is the awareness of the breath. Most resistance to personal and spiritual growth is through a breath that is being held in subtle and not so subtle ways. This holding of the breath leads to what has been termed body armouring. In this way the individual armours themselves against feelings that are too painful to acknowledge.
The first step along the spiritual journey is the learning of embodiment. The spiritual journey is not about transcending the body but transforming your awareness of the illusory sense of separateness that embodiment creates. You don’t do this by hating the body but loving it. Love is the energy that transforms and transcends all along the way. This experience of love is not a disembodied experience where one becomes emotionally detached from the suffering of others and from ones own suffering.
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You will not move to the higher stages of spiritual growth by being a narcissist but in developing a sensitivity to the life force that dances the form of the body that you are. You have to learn how to trust this process. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. This is true self loving and not the love of the image that you wish to promote. The key body practices that will help keep your feet on the ground and that I recommend as some part of your daily spiritual practice are either Yoga, Tia Chi, Pilates, and when and if you are able, gardening.
Summer by Walter Crane
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Here is some other material that will further your personal and spiritual development and your understanding of the various stages of spiritual development.
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THE HERO’S JOURNEY – Video that outlines the personal and spiritual development called the Hero’s Journey
MIND PERK – More personal and spiritual development articels from leaders in the field of spiritual development and spiritual growth
KARMA TUBE is a collection of inspiring videos. This website brings inspirational stories to light, using the power of video and the internet to multiply acts of kindness, beauty and compassion