I may have not talked about it for awhile now, but I've been living, breathing and working through the chakras. A little while ago I wrote about the first chakra, the root chakra. As a refresher, the root chakra is all about your birth family, and safety and security. Today we are going to talk about the Sacral Chakra, or in Sanskrit Svadhisthana.
The second chakra resides just below your belly button if you are thinking about the front of your body, and at your sacrum if you are thinking about the back. The sacral chakra is your centre for intimate relationships, sex, your emotions, and abundance and creativity. The colour for the sacral chakra is orange and its element is water. Water is often associated with your emotions, both are unpredictable and you never know what wave is going to hit you. Satosha or the idea of contentment is very important with the second chakra. Learning to be super okay with emotions and feelings that are unpredictable is hard to do, and requires lots of work. This means learning to observe and experience emotions but not control them.
It is understandable then that many of us need to work on balancing and removing blockages from our sacral chakra. Problems with the sacral chakra can manifest themselves in different ways. You may repeat relations, especially problem relations in your life (e.g. dating the same sort of person over and over again). You may have a lack of intimacy or perhaps are too clingy and jealous. A lack of passion and joy in your life can also be symptomatic of a problem with the sacral chakra. Physically it might start to show up as tight hips, low back pain or problems with reproductive health.
Asana, or physical yoga practices that can help are hip openers such as pigeon (kapotasans), warrior (virabhadrasana) series, lunges, yogi squat (malasana) and the splits (hanumanasana). These poses help loosen the area in the hips and allow energy and prana to flow , starting to heal and balance the chakra. Essential oils that can assist are sandalwood, ylang ylang, clary sage, jasmine, orange, bergamot, neroli, and black pepper. It can be helpful to meditate and repeat an affirmations such as:
I am passionate.
I am worthy of love.
I am creative.
I am the embodiment of joy.
Lakshmi is the deity of the second chakra and she is the goddess of wealth, fortune and prosperity. She is the embodiment of beauty, grace and charm, and to me that resonates with how I feel when I know that my second chakra is all balanced and flowing freely. Like with the root chakra, asana and meditation are tools to do the work to balance and remove obstacles, but the work must be done. Self study and learning about you is the real work, and is never really over.
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