FIGURE 2.4
Knee to Chest.
FIGURE 2.5
Bridge Pose.
Feel the support of your legs and feet in this position. Feel the spine connected and energized by this support. Breathe deeply and hold for at least three complete breaths.
Return the spine to floor, again one vertebrae at a time, at last relaxing the buttocks and allowing the feet and legs to relax. You may keep the knees bent in preparation for repeating the pose, or allow your legs to lie flat on the floor and feel the relaxation coming into your lower chakras.
Half Locust and Full Locust (Shalabhasana)
Lie face down on the floor with your arms beneath your body, palms touching the front of your thighs.
Keeping the knee straight, point the right leg out along the floor, making it as long as possible. As you continue to push down toward the right foot, begin to lift the right leg a few inches off the floor. (See Figure 2.6, page 91.) Feel the first chakra working to make this pose happen.
After a few moments (depending on your strength) lower the leg and repeat on the other side.
If this was easy for you, do the Full Locust, lifting both legs at once in the same fashion as described above. (See Figure 2.7, page 91.)
Head-to-Knee Pose (Janus Sirsasana)
Sit up straight with your legs extended out in front of you. (Dandasana) Bend the right knee and bring the right foot in to your groin.
Lift the pelvis up out of the groin, lifting the chest and turning the sternum directly out over your extended left leg. Inhale. (See Figure 2.8, page 92.)
With an exhale, bend the hips and trunk downward and stretch the arms forward, reaching for your left foot, keeping the back as flat as possible. This will stretch your hamstrings and the back of your knee, as well as extending the spine.
FIGURE 2.6
Half Locust.
FIGURE 2.7
Full Locust.
Go to the edge between what is comfortable and what is tight, and stop at the edge and breathe deeply, sinking ever so slightly deeper into the pose with each exhalation. Stay for fifteen to twenty seconds or as long as you can comfortably hold the pose.
Sit up on an inhale. Lift the back. Then change legs and repeat on the other side.
Deep Relaxation
This hatha yoga practice is also called conscious relaxation. It essentially involves grounding and relaxing each part of the body, one at a time. It is nice to record on audio tape or have someone read the instructions in a smooth, hypnotic voice, but it is also easy to do at your own rhythm without any commands.
FIGURE 2.8
Head-to-Knee Pose.
Lie flat on your back and get comfortable. Make sure you are warm enough, for the body gets so relaxed in this exercise that it often gets cold. You may need a light blanket.
Begin breathing deeply, and keep the breath going in a comfortable, steady rhythm throughout the whole meditation.
Raise your left leg a few inches off the floor. Hold your breath for a few seconds and tighten each muscle in your leg. Then, with a gush of released breath, let all the muscles relax and let the leg fall into the floor like a dead weight. Give it a small shake, ground it, and let it be. Repeat for the right leg, tightening, holding, then letting it go.
Move on to your right arm, making a fist and tightening all the muscles as hard as you possibly can. Release. Now tighten the left arm: lift ... tighten ... hold ... release.
Roll your head from side to side, stretching all the muscles in your neck. Raise the head slightly off the floor, hold, tighten, release.
Curl up your nose, purse your lips, and scrunch your eyes together. Hold, tighten, release. Repeat with your mouth open, tongue out, and face stretched. Hold, tighten, release.
Mentally go over each part of your body, one at a time and check to see if the parts are really relaxed. Begin with the toes, the feet, the ankles, the calves, knees, and thighs. Check to see that your buttocks are relaxed, your stomach, and your chest, breathing in and out, in and out, slowly and deeply. Check to see that your neck is relaxed, your mouth, tongue, cheeks, forehead.
Now allow yourself to observe your body, peacefully breathing in and out, in and out, deeply relaxing. Observe your thoughts, letting them come and go effortlessly. If you wish to make changes in your body, now is a good time to make silent commands or affirmations. Keep them positive, such as "I will be strong," rather than "I won't be weak."
When you are ready to return, begin flexing your fingers and toes, and wiggling your legs and arms. Open your eyes and return to the world refreshed.
Movement Exercises
Nearly anything that makes contact with the Earth is grounding. Moving the energy into the feet is the first step. The following bioenergetic exercise is excellent for this purpose:
Stand comfortably, arms at your sides. Rise up on your toes and come down hard on your heels, bending your knees as you do. Pretend you are sinking into the floor. Raising and lowering your hands with the rise and fall of your body can help to emphasize the downward flow. Repeat this several times for a good warmup.
Basic Grounding Stance
Stand upright with your feet hip-width apart or slightly wider. Allow your feet to be just slightly pigeon-toed, with the heels wider than the toes. Bend your knees out over the feet just slightly.
Press into the floor as if you were trying to push two rugs apart from each other with your feet. Feel the solidity and strength it gives you in your lower body.
Hold this pose a few moments and imagine holding your ground in a difficult situation.
If you wish to get even more charge into your legs, breathe in and bend the knees, breathe out and straighten them slowly, but not completely. Repeat for several minutes. Never allow yourself to "lock" your knees, as it cuts off the grounding circuit.
The Elephant
This is designed to bring even more energy into the legs.
With feet parallel and hip-width apart or wider, bend over with your knees slightly bent and touch your palms to the floor. Move your hands forward if this is difficult. (See Figure 2.9A, page 96.)
Inhale and bend your knees to about forty-five degrees. Exhale and straighten your knees until they are almost straight, but never locked. (See Figure 2.9B, page 96.)
Repeat until you feel a shaking or streaming of energy in your legs-usually within a few minutes if done correctly.
Slowly come back up, spine curved and belly relaxed, until you are standing. Be sure to keep your breathing full and deep during this exercise, and let out any sound that feels natural.
Flex your knees a few times, shake your legs out, and stand comfortably, feeling the effects.
Repeat as often as necessary.
Pushing the Feet
Also a bio-energetic exercise.
Lie on your back and raise your legs, with knees relatively straight, but not completely straight.
Push your legs into the air with your feet flexed, your toes pointing toward your head. Push into your heels. (See Figure 2.10, page 96.)
FIGURE 2.9
The Elephant.
FIGURE 2.10
Pushing the Feet.
If you find a place that makes your legs vibrate, stay at that point and let the vibration continue as it energizes your legs and hips.
Common Sense Grounding Exercises
Stamping
This is excellent to do after getting out of bed in the morning, and is nicely followed by a foot massage from a "footsie roller," tennis ball, or lover, when possible.
Stamp one foot several times and then the other. This helps to open the foot chakras and make contact with the solidity beneath us.
Jumping Up and Down
This helps us make contact to the Earth plane, both by pushing against gravity and by sinking into it. This exercise also helps to energize the legs. It is best done on an earthy surface rather than pavement or a hard floor, due to the impact on the legs.
Pretend you are a little chi
ld and jump up and down, letting everything relax and become very loose. Each jump down should be accompanied by a bending of the knees and a sinking into the Earth.
Kicking
Kicking removes tension from the legs, as long as it is not kicking into anything solid.
Lie on a bed and kick your legs rhythmically. Try it with knees bent and with legs straight, experiencing the results of both.
jogging
Jogging energizes the feet, legs, and torso, steps up the metabolism, and increases the breathing rate.
Jog on dirt outdoors for a wonderful grounding exercise.
Riding
This is an interesting grounding exercise for the urban environment.
Ride a bus or train, standing up, without hanging on to anything. Bend your knees and keep your weight low to maintain your balance. Learn where your center of gravity is.
Resting
Very little is ever said about the extreme benefits of just slowing down, sitting in a chair, relaxing, and doing nothing. This is the most common grounding practice in America today.
Massage
Massage of any kind helps to relieve tension and reconnect the psyche to the body. A foot massage is especially helpful in grounding.
Eating
Many people eat to ground themselves. This is because it works. Overeating, however, puts one out of touch with the body and can unground them.
Sleeping
Sleeping is bringing the body to rest and to stillness. It is the grounding at the end of each day that regenerates us for the following day. Pleasant dreams!
ENDNOTES
1. Some say the related first chakra gland is the gonads because they are physically closer to chakra one, but the adrenals are the glands that get triggered in the "fight or flight" syndrome when survival is threatened. Adrenals also relate to the third chakra in that they flood the body with energy.
2. Itzhak Bentov, Stalking the Wild Pendulum, 53.
3. See Judith and Vega, The Sevenfold Journey: Reclaiming Mind, Body, and Spirit through the Chakras. A book of exercises and practices for chakra development.
4. For a more thorough description of this exercise, see Judith and Vega, The Sevenfold Journey, 71, 72.
5. Vegans, who eschew eggs and dairy as animal by-products, would deny that these foods are necessary. The argument here is not whether one can survive without them, but whether a diet supports grounding. A vegan diet practiced for more than a brief period is not a grounding diet, even though it may be very good for purification purposes.
6. Quoted in M. Capek, The Philosophical Impact of Contemporary Physics, 319.
7. For a deeper discussion of Eastern mysticism and Western science, see Fritjof Capra, The Tao of Physics.
RECOMMENDED SUPPLEMENTAL READING FOR CHAKRA ONE
Anodea Judith and Selene Vega. The Sevenfold Journey: Reclaiming Mind, Body, and Spirit through the Chakras. Freedom, CA: The Crossing Press, 1993.
Capra, Fritjof. The Tao of Physics. New York, NY: Bantam Books, 1975.
Couch, Jean. The Runner's Yoga Book. Berkeley, CA: Rodmell Press, 1992.
Haas, Elson. Staying Healthy with Nutrition. Berkeley, CA: Celestial Arts, 1992.
Keleman, Stanley. The Human Ground: Sexuality, Self, and Survival. Berkeley, CA: Center Press, 1975.
Keleman, Stanley. Your Body Speaks its Mind. Berkeley. CA: Center Press, 1975.
Myers, Dr. Norman, ed. Gaia: An Atlas of Planet Management. New York, NY: Anchor Books, 1984.
Sessions, George. Deep Ecology. Salt Lake City, UT: Peregrine Smith Books, 1985.
CHAKRA TWO
Water
Change
Polarities
Movement
Pleasure
Emotions
Sexuality
Nurturance
Clairsentience
Chapter 3
CHAKRA
TWO:
WATER
OPENING MEDITATION
lungs. It ebbs and flows, as evenly and gracefully as waves upon a shore. Back and forth ... empty and full ... in and out.
Inside, your heart beats, your blood pulsates, a river of life connects each and every cell within you. Blood flows outward ... blood flows in toward the center again. Your cells expand and contract, ever reproducing, dying. Wiggle a finger back and forth. Impulses of nerves run down your arms. Your breathing continues ... in ... out ... in ... out.
Deep in your belly you become aware of a warm glow of orange, pulsing through your pelvis, through your abdomen, through your genitals. Pulsations of orange light move in rivulets down your legs, up again through your thighs, flowing through your belly, and up through your back to nourish all of you.
You are alive. You are a wave of motion. Nothing within you is truly still. Nothing around you is still. Everything is constantly changing at each and every moment. Every sound, every ray of light, every breath is an oscillation, back and forth, constantly moving, swaying, flowing. A flow of constant change, changing every moment from the last. By the time you finish this meditation, both you and the world will be different.
Within your body is a river of change. Find the subtle inner flows of movement and thought, moving up, down, around, and through. Find them and follow them. Allow them to gain momentum-removing obstacles by easing any tension you may find. Exaggerate their flow with outward movements: sway in your chair, rock back and forth, creating a rhythmic motion. Let the rhythm build until you feel like getting upeven with this book in your hand get up and move around, swaying on your feet, circling with your hips, bending your knees, always keeping the flow even and steady ... remembering roots below. You sway, back and forth ... up and down ... in and out... expanding, yet ever returning to your core self once again.
You move with the flow of water, sometimes slow like a great river, sometimes quickly like a spring stream, sometimes languishing like a quiet lake, sometimes passionate like the waves of the sea. Raise an arm and imagine water flowing down through it. Feel the wet fluid run down your back, your buttocks, your toes.
Think of the water as it flows from the sky, caressing the mountains, running in rivulets to its various pools. Imagine water raining down on you, caressing your body, running in rivulets down your pelvis and legs, down to soften the Earth below. You are the rain as you fall effortlessly from Heaven to Earth.
You are many droplets as your thoughts fall from your mind. In tiny movements, the tides within you grow and move faster as they plunge downward, cascading over pinnacles of earth-then slowly as they slither serpentine across great valleys of your fertile fields.
Until, as one, you ebb and flow with the tides of the sea, pulled by the moon in its dance of dark and light. Your oceans, vast and deep, abound with life. Your passion reaches outward, spills onto the shore, and returns again within you. You drink in all the change around you, pulling its movement through you as your life ebbs and flows. In ... and out ... you breathe.
From the vast depths of ebb and flow, you reach. You touch. You find your body. Sensation flows into your hand across your skin. Sensation known to none but you. Your hand moves across curves of flesh and follows lines of movement You sway to the sensuality of your touch. Inside you rise emotions-churning, yearning, flowing, bubbling. They reach and touch and rise, becoming movements, waves change, the water flows, within, without.
You are alone, yet others are around you. They, too, ebb and flow, and change and touch and yearn. Your movements flow to join them, desiring to unite, to merge, to move toward something new. Your hands long to touch, to pull the oceans closer, to feel the flow of other tides mixing with your own.
Your belly heaves, your sex awakes, you thirst for touch, and reach beyond yourself. You find your "other"-different yet the same. Exploring, you begin to merge. The movements build within you, exalting you, expressing you, caressing you. Your passions swell in ocean waves to crash upon the shore and satisfy your needs. The waters ebb and flow, nurture, cleanse and heal, as they
flow with each yearning, each movement, each breath. Ecstatic in uniting, you merge, complete within yourself and completed once again within another. You dance, and rise and fall ... and rest.
You are water-the essence of all forms, yet formless. You are the point from which each direction flows, and you are the flow. You are the one that feels, you are the one that moves. You are the one that embraces the other.
Shall we flow together and join our souls in this journey down the river of life? Shall we flow together to the sea?
C HAKRA TWO SYMBOLS AND CORRESPONDENCES
CHANGING LEVELS
We often think that when we have completed our study of one we know all about two because two is one and one. We forget that we still have to make a study of "and."'
-A. Eddington
We began our upward journey through the chakras by going downinto the Earth, into stillness and solidity. We gained an understanding of our bodies, our grounding, and things associated with one. We are now ready to introduce a new dimension: that which comes about when one meets another and becomes two.
Wheels of Life Page 9