- The reason I wanted to do these as recordings is so that a transmission can (hopefully) occur, which is how most of us best learn this stuff – connecting mind to mind, beyond language. I am doing the techniques as I talk, and the idea is that this will help you better connect to your own chakras. Although I also talk about the chakras during the walkthroughs, I am never dropping my chakra focus, so just keep your own chakra focus and hopefully the talking will not get too bothersome!

- I call these chakra ‘yoga’ instead of chakra ‘meditation’ because they are very active visual and sensory techniques. Even if you already have a meditation practice, these are a great clearing and preparatory technique, just as physical yoga is a preparatory technique for formal sitting meditation.

- I wanted to expand a bit on the distinction I made in the 2nd Chakra Motherhood and Creating post between chakra healing vs. spiritual techniques. I think the chakras are best discussed as mind-body-spirit intersection points. When doing healing work you are usually pulling energy from the spiritual/energetic realm through the mind/awareness level into the physical body, i.e. the movement is spirit->mind->body. In what we’ll call ’spiritual’ techniques such as what I’m doing in these recordings, you are moving in the opposite direction, i.e. body->mind->spirit. Focusing on a physical location helps you connect with the state of awareness associated with the chakra in that area, and that in turn allows you to go through the doorway of that chakra into spiritual planes it connects with.
(And I don’t really like to talk in terms of spiritual planes, because it implies something separate from reality, but I am trying to use terms everyone is familiar with.)

- I don’t know much about digital audio files, so if  you have problems with these let me know. From what I understand, you should be able to just click on them to play them from your computer, or right click and do a ’save page as’ to download them. On some computers you may have to start playing them first and then do a ’save as’.

Chakra Yoga MP3s

7 Chakra Cycling, 9 minutes – Technique for cycling through all 7 chakras to awaken the kundalini and move the energy up through them into the upper chakras (the traditional focus of chakra meditation techniques.)

7 Chakra Lotus Variation, 4 1/2 minutes – A variation on the first technique, but with a lotus blossom pictured in the 2nd chakra, which is particularly relevant for women.

4 Chakra Core Meditation, 11 minutes – A classic core chakra meditation technique using the navel, heart, third eye and crown chakras. Time in each chakra can be expanded to make a longer meditation.

Bliss Bubble, 3 1/2 minutes – Visualization designed to awaken a uniquely feminine ‘bliss’ energy, activated through the 2nd and heart chakras.

Protection Visualization, 3 1/2 minutes – Visualization for learning how to use the navel chakra energy to create an energetic shield. Note that in the 21 ways post I described a red sphere of light, and I didn’t use that in this recording (I just used white), but you can use red or red-orange if you like, as that has a martial flavor.

Please feel free to leave any comments, questions or requests for other techniques in the comments.

I never really considered this a teaching blog, but these recordings were made from my ‘teaching’ aspect, so I wanted to offer a traditional blessing at the end, customary in many traditions, but particularly Buddhist ones:

May these recordings represent light, power, and truth.

May they serve to empower, enlighten and awaken all who listen.

And, just to help you connect energetically even more, here is where they were made:

Zion Rainbow

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This turned into quite the thesis, which I hadn’t intended. I have mixed feelings about the size of this list, because most women don’t need any more ’should’ or ‘to-do’ items added to their busy lives (not to mention that many of you probably don’t even have time to read this!) I am very anti-guilt. So understand that I was just trying to be comprehensive, and you should determine – with your intuition of course! – what is relevant to you. As you read the list you will probably be drawn to some and not others, and that may change over time.

Also, I feel like I should add a disclaimer along the lines of those medical ads that say “This is not meant to replace a diagnose from a qualified medical doctor.” While I am a firm believer in our ability to each heal and develop ourselves, sometimes a guide or helping hand is essential. So if you really feel like you have some deep-seated 2nd chakra issues, or want to delve further into the chakras themselves, consider finding a therapist, energy healer, meditation teacher, astrologer, Akashic record reader, past-life regressionist, or whatever resonates with you, to help you do so. Let your intuition guide you to the right approach and practitioner (some of the blogs in my blogroll are written by practitioners of various types.)

Along those lines, I realized I couldn’t post this without including some of my own favorite meditation techniques related to the 2nd chakra, and those are not normally relayed in print. I decided to include some basic instructions anyway, but I have also made mp3 recordings of them, as that is often a more effective way of learning these kinds of things. I have to be in a certain ’space’ to do that, and am not sure exactly when that will be, but I’ll get them up as soon as I can.

THE LIST: 21 Ways to Care for Your Sacral Chakra

The first part of this list has to do with healing any damage that may have been done to your 2nd chakra, or any latent discomfort you may have with your own sexuality, sensuality, or reproductive issues that could lead you to shut it down in some way. I hesitated about including this section, but in the end I had too, because I think it is the #1 problem facing many women. From my perspective, if you are a woman, owning your 2nd chakra energy is owning your personal power, so the cost of not facing these issues is high, and long-term, far outweighs the discomfort of doing so.

1) Face and release any past sexual abuse or assault. ‘Face’ is a vague term, and could mean different things depending on the extent to which you have already examined these events from your past. Of course professional therapy or counseling might be needed, or, if you have already done some work in this area, a briefer revisiting, with the intent of really releasing the past. Details on this are beyond what I can do here, but the important thing is, don’t ignore it. Don’t say ‘it was a long time ago, it was just once, it doesn’t matter anymore, etc.’ if there are ANY unresolved feelings of disempowerment, guilt, shame or fear, it will impact your ability to access your 2nd chakra energy. Of course, there is also always the danger of over-identifying with the past, and taking on a permanent victim-mentality, and that’s problematic too. So work with these ideas of facing and releasing.

2) Review your romantic and sexual history (not always the same thing!), and deal with any continuing attachments to your past, particularly to unhealthy or disempowering relationships. Sex, and even romantic attachments without sex, build some of the strongest possible energy bonds, and if you are holding on to past relationships in your awareness, it can impact your 2nd chakra. Taisha Abelar gives an extreme view of this in her memoir The Sorcerer’s Crossing, and recapitulates every encounter she has ever had, working to reclaim the energy lost in each one. While this method isn’t for everyone, focus on cutting past ties inwardly, and reclaiming attention dispersed in this way. You can even create a ritual to this effect, where you picture yourself cutting a line between yourself and a visualization of the other person with a pair of scissors, and then the energy that was flowing out from you through this line coming back into your own body.

3) Face and release any pain you may be holding onto regarding past miscarriages, abortions, or fertility issues. This is similar to #1, but instead the focus is on issues related to procreation. There are multiple issues here – the first is properly mourning whatever perceived losses  you have suffered, and working at letting them go. The second is letting go of any misdirected self-blame or shame you may be harboring. And the third is the more general issue of sorting out your identity relative to procreation. Women receive so many societal messages tying our worth to our ability or decision to procreate (or not), that we can end up ‘hanging our hat’ on this aspect of ourselves. Own your life and your decisions – this is particularly important for women who decide not to have children, or for whom it just never works out, because there are a lot of ridiculous social messages implying that this leaves us somehow ‘incomplete’.

4) Look at your overall comfort level with your body, sexuality, and sensuality. Do you feel comfortable with your sexuality? How do you use it with others? Do you try and hide it? Do you use it to attract attention? What’s your relationship with your own body? Are you comfortable with it? Look at parental imprinting too – did you ‘inherit’ a generational discomfort with sex and related topics from your mother? Try and unpack your own relationship to your sexuality, and make sure it feels healthy, honest, balanced, and clear.

5) Look at your overall attitude towards being a woman. This is really about facing your own feelings about being a woman, and any negative conditioning that you may have picked up regarding what it means. Are you out to prove something? Have you adopted, or been determined to rebel against, any particular female stereotypes? Face and release any anger you have regarding any situation in which you have been prevented or discouraged from doing something because you were/are a girl/woman.

6) Own your sexual choices. If you are celibate, own it. If you are sexually active, own it. Don’t just let things happen, one way or the other. Of course, these things aren’t 100% within our control, so part of working with this one may be accepting the situation you are in, and trying to work with the benefits it has. From an energetic standpoint, celibacy has the benefit of helping you consolidate and clear your energy field, because you are not dealing with the powerful energy lines to another person that sex creates. Sexual activity, in a healthy situation, has the energy benefit of helping you clear and activate your 2nd chakra through release. Own your situation, whatever it is, and work with it. And, if it’s possible, consider working with periods of one or the other by choice when you need to.

The next few items have to do with the absorbent nature of women’s energy bodies, because of the centripetal action of our 2nd chakras, as discussed in the Intuition post.

7) Work to refine your awareness of the energies you absorb from others. This is very important, because otherwise over time your awareness will just get more and more dispersed from the constant stream of energies you are absorbing, and you will not be able to focus well or draw on your personal power (let alone access your intuition.) Developing this awareness is mostly a matter of just starting to pay attention to it. Monitor how you feel before and after group situations, and before and after individual encounters. Review times when your mood or mental state dramatically shifts for no apparent reason, and see if you can identify an energy source for the shift. Don’t get paranoid about ‘negative energies’ (this is a slippery slope that leads downhill fast!) The goal isn’t to become a hermit – the goal is to develop your ability to recognize when this unconscious absorption is happening, so that you can halt the absorption, or use the awareness of energies to foster your intuition.

8 ) Protect your subtle body. Over time, you can learn to make your subtle body less absorbent when you need to – to shield it in a sense. One simple way to develop this skill is to try the following exercise, which is available as an mp3 file here:

- Sit quietly with your eyes closed, and place your hands over your navel chakra, about one inch below your navel. This is the 3rd chakra in the system I use, not the 2nd as in some systems, and is associated with will, intent and personal power. Some systems place the 3rd chakra higher, up by the solar plexus, so experiment with what placement feels right to you. Belly breath for several breaths.

- Imagine a red-orange sphere of light sitting right under your hands.

-Visualize this sphere growing larger and larger until it surrounds your entire body. Sense how you are holding this protective shield in place with your awareness.

Because the 3rd chakra is associated with intent and personal power, a more yang energy, by focusing on it in this way you can learn to ’solidify’ your energy field a bit. Eventually, the visualization will not be not necessary – you will be able to trigger this sense of protection in an instant. Try this whenever you are heading into a crowded place or potentially difficult situation. (And BTW, this is closer to how most men’s energy bodies feel all the time.)

9) Establish regular routines for clearing your subtle body. Everyone has different ways of doing this, but the two biggies are nature and exercise. The elements from nature that I personally most associate with the 2nd chakra are water and trees. So spending time near one or the either is great (and yes, a nice warm bath is a mini-version of clearing in this way too.) In terms of exercise, intense aerobic exercise can really help push out negative energies you have absorbed. And then of course yoga is entirely designed to clear and open the chakras, although it is not always explicitly taught that way. So find a combination that works for you and your life – when I worked in Manhattan and dealt with a lot of abrasive energies on a daily basis, I needed more aggressive forms of exercise (martial arts and aerobics) to clear my subtle body. For most energy healers of psychics, this kind of intense clearing is usually essential. Now I am more into walking and yoga, and that works for the energies I am dealing with.

One technique associated with physical pelvic health that can also be useful is Kegel exercises (here’s an explanation of how to do them.) Although often associated with childbirth preparation, Kegels are simply one way to exercise and strengthen the pelvic floor muscles. They are also part of many yoga asanas (although not usually called Kegels), and even chakra meditation techniques taught in some traditions.

The next few items have to do with learning to work with your natural cycles and life phases, many of which are ruled by 2nd chakra functions.

10) Recognize the life phase you are in, and contemplate how you can work with it. As women, the phases of our lives are driven by our reproductive phases in a way that men’s are not. Each of these phases draw on and challenge our 2nd chakra energies in different ways. I talked about this a bit in Women’s Energy Bodies – Cycles and Phases, and a book mentioned in the comments on that post, Joan Borysenko’s A Woman’s Book of Life, has a lot of interesting material along these lines.

11) If you are a mother, routinely assess your energetic balance. Recognize the phase of mother/child relationship you are in, and think about pacing, balance, and energy access issues as discussed in the Motherhood and Creativity post. Allow yourself solitude.

12) Learn to recognize, accept and work with your personal cycles of going inward and outward. A lot has been written about women’s menstrual cycles, and how that impacts our energy field and awareness. The general theme is that during the first half of our cycle, from the end of menstruation to ovulation, we are more externally focused, yang-driven, and intent and creation oriented. Then during the second half, from ovulation to the start menstruation, we are more internally focused, yin-driven, and intuition and incubation oriented (and more absorbent.) But I think many women have other larger personal cycles too, of going inward and outward in phases (and of course, if you don’t menstruate or are irregular, your cycles may be different also.) So the point is, try and look for these cycles of naturally turning inward and incubating vs. moving outward and creating. Learn what you need to provide for yourself during each phase, and communicate with those around you regarding them, to the extent possible.

There are thousands of different techniques and methods for balancing and clearing the chakras. Here are just a few to consider in relation to the 2nd chakra.

13) Experiment with different food choices that are associated with a healthy 2nd chakra. There are lots of different theories on what foods contribute to the health of each chakra. But guess what one of the most commonly sited signs of a 2nd chakra imbalance is? An unhealthy level of craving for sweets and carbs. The 2nd chakra is partly about desire, and when it’s off balance, we can attempt to fill the resulting void with a ‘quick fix’ of sweet satiation. Although I hesitate to recommend just one chakra food system, a recent book that I did like was Chakra Foods for Optimum Health, by Deanna Minnich. If you feel you have food-related issues, this book is worth your time (and it has recipes!) Some of the foods she associates with a healthy 2nd chakra are: Water, healthy oils and fatty acids, fish, seeds, tropical fruits, nuts, and orange-colored foods (orange is associated with the 2nd chakra in many chakra systems.) Here’s some of the associated recipes: Honeyed Papaya with Raw Coconut flakes, Grilled Salmon with Apricot Orange Sauce and Baby Carrots, Yam Pecan Bake, and Walnut Pesto. Yum!!

14) Explore other chakra balancing/healing/clearing methods. There are lots out there, so explore what resonate with you. They all work on the same principal – each chakra is associated with a certain vibration, and when you come in contact with elements of that same or a supporting vibration, you strengthen that chakra. Some popular examples are essential oils, crytals/gemstones, sound vibrations, and color therapy.

The following items all have to do with supporting feminine power and yin in your life and endeavors.

15) Explore your creative power. We don’t often put ‘creative’ and ‘power’ together, but for women, this is exactly what it is, as explained in the Motherhood and Creativity post. So make sure you have a creative outlet in your life, of any type. Sometimes you may love it, and sometimes it may torture you, but that’s the muse for you. When you create, you are drawing power through your 2nd chakra, and since that is the seat of the kundalini or life force for women, you are in fact empowering all your chakras, and your entire being.

16) Have some activity in your life that forces you to draw on your personal power, as distinct from creative power. This is especially important for women who are too yin. It is possible to become so absorbed in intuitive and creative processes that you end up swinging your 2nd chakra too far in that direction. Signs of this might be difficulty focusing, difficulty completing projects, chronic indecision, or difficulty manifesting change in your life. If this is so, you actually need to bring some power through your 2nd chakra and up into your 3rd chakra, associated with will and intent. Challenging exercise, concrete goals and target dates, a goal-oriented career or project, and martial arts are all examples of activities that can help you draw on this.

17) Compile a selection of powerful and iconic female images. This might be pictures or statues of favorite goddesses, female symbols, deities, or female saints. As i talked about in a recent Art and Mysticism post, art and symbols are doorways, and we can use them to connect to energies we need. My own favorites are pictures of Tibetan Buddhist female teachers and deities such as Yeshe Tsogyal (called the ‘Bliss Queen’) and Green Tara (deity of compassion.)

18) Consider the yin/yang balance of your surroundings/decor, clothing etc. Does your decor and.or clothing reflect a healthy balance of yin and yang? Do you feel nurtured and supported within it? Do you find it beautiful? Experimenting with color can be very helpful here – red-orange is traditionally associated with this chakra, but I find a healthy dose of colors we often associate with femininity – yes, I actually mean pink – can be nice in this regard. One week when I lived in NY and was feeling particularly stressed and off-balance, a friend into color therapy told me to surround myself in pink all weekend. I wore pink, bought pink roses, burned pink candles, ate pink food, and more. It actually worked. I have occasionally done this with red-orance too, when I felt the issue was more about feeling depleted. So experiment. Everything is vibration.

This last part is the most esoteric, and has to do with the principles behind Tantric sprituality and sexuality. As I discussed in the Tantric Sexuality and Spirituality and Bliss posts, technically this is about 1) going into the 2nd chakra, as a doorway to bliss, and 2) bringing the kundalini up through all our chakras. It is really about transmuting the energy of desire into bliss. While teaching how to do that is entirely beyond the scope of this post, here’s a few meditations you can experiment with along these lines (and here’s an mp3 recorded walkthrough of each too)

19) Meditation 1: 2nd Chakra Bliss Bubble – First a note on location. I mentioned in the Tantric Sexuality post that I use the 2nd chakra location that is low, at the cervix, or bottom of our uterus. But it is a plane of energy, and encompasses our entire lower belly or womb area, and the lower part of our spine, 2-3 inches from our tailbone. So you can use any of those locations to access it, and in fact, I usually recommend that people use either the belly or lower spine locations as a point of focus during meditation, because the internal focus can trigger strong sexual energies that are difficult to redirect. But it’s up to you, so experiment.

- Place your hands over your lower belly and take several deep belly breaths.

- Imagine a sphere of gentle white light centered in whatever 2nd chakra focal point you are working with.

- With each breath in, imagine this sphere getting slightly larger, covering a little larger area. Hold the size on each exhalation. Gradually expand the sphere until it engulfs your entire body.

- See if you can feel a blissful energy emanating outward and engulfing you through this meditation. At the end you may want to move directly into a few minutes of the next meditation, your heart chakra, or another meditation form that you like, because staying with your full attention on your 2nd chakra is often not a good idea.

As an aside, this is a great meditation to do while holding your children, pets or another loved one when they are sick, stressed, or otherwise in need of balance and nurturing. Include them inside your ‘bliss bubble’.

20) Meditation 2: Kundalini Rising – An aside here: Kundalini rising techniques are often considered risky because of the energy that can be released, and lineages that teach them often say that they should only be transmitted through direct student-teacher interactions, so that the teacher can assess if the student is ready. For various reasons, in this day and age, I have decided that I think that is complete rubbish, at least in the context of basic meditations like this. All the same, if you experience any discomfort, stop.

- This actually requires picturing light at all the chakras, so if you are not familiar with them, look at some of the resources listed in the next section, and/or the diagram in the Tantric Sexuality post.

- Picture a white sphere of light at your tailbone (root chakra). On the inhalation, imagine it getting slightly larger, and then on the exhalation, imagine a white column of light streaming up your spine and out the top of your head.

-  Picture a white sphere of light at your 2nd chakra (use focal points described above), and do the same thing – on the inhalation, imagine it getting slightly larger, and then on the exhalation, imagine a white column of light streaming up your spine and out the top of your head.

- Do the same thing with each chakra moving your way up: navel, heart, throat, third eye, and crown. For all the chakras after the 2nd, I usually use a focus point on the front of the body, instead of the spine, but either is fine.

- Repeat, 2-3 times.

- Center yourself in your 2nd chakra for a moment, picturing a white sphere of light there for a minute or so there.

- Repeat for the navel, heart, and third eye chakras (note that you skip the root, throat, and crown.)

- Transition to another meditation form that you like, or just sit in stillness and/or silence. It might take a moment to quiet down your awareness after this, because it activates the kundalini. So sit with it a bit.

As an aside, some form of this meditation is taught as part of Tantric Sexuality – i.e. trying to activate the kundalini rising during sex. So experiment with that if you feel so inclined.

21) Find your bliss. ‘Nuf said.

Other Resources

The 2nd chakra is just one chakra, and I chose to write about it because I think it so central for women. But if you want to learn more about all the chakras, this site Chakra Energy is one of the better ones that I found. It is coming from a healing perspective, which is different from my own, as I discussed at the start of the Motherhood and Creativity post. Also, the site uses the more common 2nd and 3rd chakra locations, as described in the Tantric Sexuality post. But I think it is a good general resource.

As I mentioned in a comment, one of my favorite intro books about the chakras from an overall healing perspective is Anatomy of the Spirit, by Caroline Myss, because she discusses them from a physical, psychological and spiritual point of view (this book has been mentioned in no less than three blog posts I have read this week, so I am not the only one that likes it!) And of course, I’ve already reviewed Cyndi Dale’s The Subtle Body, although that is more of a reference book for healers. (She mentioned in our interview that one of her other books is being re-released this summer, so I might review it at that time.)

I listed some other relevant books at the end of the Women’s Energy Bodies – Cycles and Phases post, and wanted to add a couple more here:

The Chalice and the Blade, Riane Eisler – If you are interested in delving into how yin/yang imbalance gets expressed in our culture, and how it got that way, check this classic out. While I’m not comfortable with some of the historical statements she makes, the premise itself is compelling and a great read.

Liquid Light of Sex, by Barbara Hand Clow – This is an astrology book that discusses several key life passages, particularly the Uranus opposition, which occurs around 42, and is associated with mid-life crises. The author believes Uranus is associated with the rise of kundalini (the energy said to move up through the chakras) and that a spontaneous rising of this energy is what is partly going on during this transit.

Energy Medicine for Women, by Donna Eden. I have not yet read this book, but the outine and premise sounds very interesting, and it has a forward by Dr. Christiane Northrup, whose books I like and listed on the Energy Bodies post.

If you’ve gotten this far, you’ve invested a lot of time, so you might as well comment! I always love to hear feedback and questions…

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I was trying to decide how to start this post, and finally settled on the question, what is bliss?

I ask this because in the yogic and meditative traditions that address women’s 2nd chakras, it is associated with a certain kind of bliss. Not happiness, or connectivity, or mindfulness, or love, or clarity, or even epiphany, but specifically bliss. So what is bliss?

I’m not sure it can be described by a non-poet such as myself, but mystics in virtually every tradition have described a kind of bliss, or rapture (St. Theresa of Avila’s choice of word), where all boundaries, all sense of a limited self, fell away. A dissolution really, into the pure light – or pure love – of existence. It’s like being a wave in the ocean (I know I’ve used that phrase before, but I warned you I’m not a poet, so my metaphors are limited!)

All of that sounds a bit cliche, and bliss really is very different from other spiritual experiences. Bliss is an integrated mind/body/spirit experience – it isn’t only a physical sensation, or an emotion, or a mental realization, or spiritual transcendence ‘outside’ the body. It is simultaneously experienced physically, emotionally, mentally and spiritually, because it is touching the essence of all of those planes.

In meditative traditions that address it, women’s 2nd chakras are specifically associated with bliss, as is the entire female, or yin, aspect of existence. Men can of course experience it too, because any human can experience any state, but energetically women’s 2nd chakras are the most direct access to it. In fact, as I mentioned, this is one of the approaches within Tantric Sexuality – a man and woman both travel with their awareness through the doorway of the women’s 2nd chakra during sex. This bliss is really associated with creation, and as I’ve already discussed in the last post, the 2nd chakra is energetically the root of creation.

I think almost everyone gets glimpses of this bliss, ‘nectar’ it is sometimes called in Eastern writing, throughout their lives, particularly anyone that is actively seeking in some way. And interestingly, the word ‘bliss’ is sometimes used to describe two distinct female physical experiences that are associated with the 2nd chakra – the aftermath of orgasm, and nursing a baby. Of course both of these release hormones that ripple through the uterus and contribute to these sensations. But considering the link between the uterus and the 2nd chakra, it’s fascinating to me that I see that word used so often in that context.

There are all sorts of other spiritual experiences we can have, bliss is just one. In fact, there are distinct experiences associated with each of the four paths I described in my Four Paths to Freedom post, and each can be tied to a chakra: Service is associated with the navel chakra, devotion with the heart, inquiry with the third eye, and yoga/mysticism with the crown. You don’t have to be aware of your chakras at all for this to happen – it just does. Exploring the chakras is just a way for understanding it in a new way, and may open up new experiences.

As I mentioned in the first post, meditative traditions that revolve around the chakras focus on one of two approaches: 1) Raising the kundalini, or life force, up through all the chakras into the crown, or 2) Going through one particular spiritual ‘doorway’, usually the heart for devotional paths that revolve around the realization of divine love, or the third eye for those that revolve around recognizing the true nature of reality. And of course, Tantric sexuality uses the 2nd in a unique way. Of course all paths, and all of life, use all the chakras, because they are the nervous system of our energetic body. Just as we can’t really do much with just one part of our body, we can’t do much with just one chakra. But different paths do ’specialize’ in different ones, much like different forms of exercise use one part of our body more than others.

Regardless of what ‘path’ you consider yourself on (and even if it’s not explicit), if you are a woman I think there is special value in understanding your 2nd chakra, and of caring for and exploring it in certain ways, because of the unique role it plays in our energetic body. That unique role is part of what I’ve been trying to outline in the last three posts. But from a meditative perspective, it has an additional role, if you buy into the idea (as I do) that it is really the primary seat of our kundalini or life force, rather than the 1st chakra, as is usually taught for both men and women. This means that the health of our 2nd chakra is essential to any spiritual experience or realization, because the kundalini can’t move up into our other chakras otherwise.

In addition, because our 2nd chakra is so essential to our being, bliss is a special proclivity of ours. It’s a spiritual doorway uniquely available to us. So find your bliss!

And don’t get me wrong – spiritual experience is not spiritual realization. A good chakra meditator can get very proficient at opening their heart chakra (for example) during meditation, and feeling great waves of love, and then get up from their meditation cushion and still be a jerk in real life. I have been in and out of spiritual communities my entire adult life, and I see it all the time (and have to admit, experienced this myself too!) Opening a chakra, and experiencing its energy, is a technical skill, and translating that into wisdom requires an integrated practice. So I’m not trying to say bliss – or any other spiritual experience – is the be all and end all. But it can sure help open your awareness and loosen your attachments to heavier states. And who doesn’t want to experience bliss?

I’ll talk about caring for your 2nd chakra in the final post tomorrow, but I did want to talk about one way that I think the centrality of our 2nd chakras influences women’s journeys, and that is that we are much more cyclical. We of course have monthly cycles, and as I discussed in my Women’s Energy Body post, we also have life cycles. But I think most of us also have natural energy cycles of incubation and creation, even in our daily lives. This is sometimes wrongly labeled as ‘moodiness’. Banish that word! I think we just naturally move in these inward and outward cycles related to our 2nd chakra energies, and learning to honor and work with that is essential. I’ll talk a bit more about this later too.

I welcome your thoughts and suggestions…

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The final post in this series is 21 Ways to Care for Your Sacral Chakra.

Also, these posts are all long I realize, so don’t worry, they will be here to come back to later (that’s the great thing about the internet.)  And I’ll be returning to my once or twice a week posting schedule when this is done:-)

I wanted to speak a bit more about working with the chakras from a healing perspective vs. ‘using’ them, the latter being what this series is about. I think most Western writing on the chakras is related to balancing, healing, clearing or repairing them, and this is the focus of the various techniques involving crystals, music, oils, clearing sessions, etc. But the occult traditions I am drawing on here focus more on how do you ‘use’ the chakras to develop unique skills – such as seeing, healing, manifesting and more – or for gaining spiritual insight (which is the next post.) It’s like the difference between healing your body vs. using it in sports. Just like professional athletes have refined their use of their body to a level most of us never attain, adepts in chakra traditions have refined the use of their chakras to a high degree. And we can all learn from their skills I think, even if we are not looking to go pro.

I also wanted to say that I do think all the chakras are involved in all these functions, just like all the muscles of the body are involved in almost any physical activity, but some draw on one muscle group more than others. The reasons I am focusing on the 2nd chakra are: 1) I have been getting strong intuitions to do so (and I’ve learned to ‘follow orders’ on this kind of stuff at this point!), and 2) the 2nd chakra is the defining ‘different’ element energetically between men and women, just like the reproductive organs of our body (which are related to the 2nd chakra) are our primary physical difference. So why not write about the 2nd chakra in men also? Because frankly it’s already been done – most of the surviving historical writing on chakras was written within traditions that were predominantly male, and they didn’t think much about how it was different in women. With the exception of the few traditions I have mentioned, there isn’t much on women’s 2nd chakras – most of it has been written in the last 50 years or so in the West.

OK, finally on to the target topic for this article – Motherhood and Creating. This topic is the flip side of the last article. Creating (including procreation) is a yang or outward-moving aspect of the 2nd chakra, while intuition is a yin or inward-moving one. While for intuition we absorb energy or ‘data’ into our energy bodies (which is partly pulled in by the centripetal nature of our 2nd chakra), while creating a life, a painting, or composition, or anything else, we push it out into the world, apart from us.

Of course in any type of creation, this inward and outward movement work together: In procreation, our body first has to pull the fertilized egg into the womb, nurture/germinate it for 9 months, and then push it out. Other acts of creation are similar – we have to sense/intuit an idea, then germinate and develop it, and then actually manifest/execute it in the external world apart from ourselves. This creative process is traditionally associated with the 2nd chakra  – in men also. (Of course the energy of other chakras might be involved along the way, such as the third eye for insight/ideas, the throat in terms of self-expression, the heart if we are trying to create something as a message of love or out of love, or the navel in terms of the will and intent required.)

So then, when the process is complete, and we’ve created something outside ourselves, what’s our relationship to that which we’ve created? With most artistic creations or other physical things that you create in the world, a bit of your energy goes into it and stays with it forever. In many occult traditions you find this idea of ‘transmission’, and the idea that a piece of spiritual art, or a spiritual text, can transmit a specific lesson non-verbally, directly into our awareness. (In fact, this kind of learning is the ‘real deal’ in these traditions – words and philosophy are considered a very limited form of knowledge and teaching.) This is the energetic aspect of a created object – the transmission from the creator.

Ideally, we let go of what we create – we ‘close’ the line, so to speak, between us and the object, letting it exist separately from ourselves. But motherhood is different. It takes eighteen years (or so) for the creation to be ‘finished’! And really it never is. So there is an energetic line from us to each of our children, for the rest of our lives. Cyndi Dale told me she thinks of this as an energetic cord between mother and child. Others have talked about it though – particularly in the Carlos Castenada traditions, some of the Tibetan Buddhist Tantric texts, Elizabeth Haisch in Initiation, and even Dr. Christine Northrup in some of her books (I’ll put a book list in the last post.)

This energy connection is extremely intense at birth – really for the first three months after birth our children are energetically still part of us – and gradually lessens in intensity over time. But managing it is tough, and initially the energy shift, and particularly the energy outpouring to the child, can be extremely tough to handle and accept, especially for women who have some 2nd chakra issues anyway (and again, prior sexual abuse is a main cause of this, but there are others, and Anatomy of the Spirit is a great book to consider in terms of delving into this.) I think this can be a contributing factor to post-natal depression as well. Then, the sense of dispersion increases with each additional child. Women who don’t learn to manage these lines well can get really wiped out, and lose their own manifesting abilities and vision entirely.

That’s the reason motherhood – and even sexual activity (which I’ll touch on again in the next post) – was considered an eliminating factor in a lot of these occult traditions. It just wasn’t considered possible for a woman to manage these energy lines and pursue Tantric or kundalini yoga practices, or to be a seer, energy healer or Shaman in some indigenous traditions (and I already mentioned the Oracles of Delphi in a prior post.) Of course, women had a lot more children in the past, and could lose up to half of them in early childhood, so the energy connections they were managing were very different. They also typically had much fewer options available to them to pursue their own creative and manifesting abilities, so the power associated with their 2nd chakras might have been less developed.

So personally, I do not believe those restrictions have to apply anymore, but it can be a challenge to strike the right balance. The main point is, managing motherhood and our other pursuits energetically (let alone the time factor!) is not easy. On the one hand, that energetic connection is the root of the special mother/child bond, our empathic and intuitive connection to our children, and our abilities to energetically soothe and heal them (and just holding them, at any age, is one way to really feel and activate this connection.) On the other, the energy line is another outpouring of our energy, and can leave us feeling drained, dispersed, or unmotivated.

I think just having this knowledge can be tremendously powerful, and start to shift how we subconsciously relate to this line. Then, there are three main concepts to keep in mind:

Pacing – Recognize that the energetic needs of your children will lessen over time (as long as you let go naturally, step by step, as they grow.) So whatever you are trying to manifest or create, or whatever occult skills you practice, pace yourself. Yes this means you can’t necessarily have it all, right when you want it. Welcome to real life! Personally, I don’t know any women who believe in that old maxim anymore anyway (and if you do, make your case in the comments!)

Balance – Paying attention to what both you and your children need on a daily basis, and as it evolves over time, is essential. If you hold too much back, that’s hard on your kids (and you are missing out.) But if you give too much, particularly more than they need at a given point, you exhaust yourself, and potentially hold them back from developing their own power too. Balance is an ongoing practice, a day-by-day, week-by-week, thing. It’s just like physically trying to balance on one leg – it requires constant attention, constant adjusting.

Access More Energy – The above two points are both based on the idea that you have a limited amount of energy, and on a certain level, that’s true at any given point in time. But it’s a fundamental teaching of any occult tradition that energy (or power) doesn’t come from us, it comes through us. So learn to access more. How? Volumes have been written on that! And I’ll try to cover some of them in my last post, but some are obvious – taking care of yourself, yoga, meditation, time alone, etc. But also, think about what already energizes you, especially any creative or manifesting type activities you enjoy. That’s something that is already pulling on your creative powers, your 2nd chakra powers, and understanding what it is about that activity that energizes you will offer you clues as to how you personally access your energy/power, and thus how you can increase it. Ultimately, it’s unlimited.

One final point I wanted to mention is that many women say that they feel more creative after becoming a mother, and I found some teachings on this by a contemporary spiritual teacher too. I think this definitely happened in my case, after an initial difficult adjustment period. For me personally, I think this was due to my accessing my 2nd chakra in a way that I hadn’t done before. Procreation helped me tap into those creative forces in a way that my prior life activities had not. Maybe someone who was already well-connected to their creative energies before becoming a mother would not experience that, I don’t know.

And just as a final aside, this post is NOT meant to be a case for or against motherhood, or for or against any particular parenting choices (please do NOT pull me into the ‘Mommy Wars’!!!)  I’m just trying to look at it from a technical, energetic perspective. This knowledge can really help us work truthfully with the life we have, and recognize both its gifts and challenges.

Your comments and questions are always appreciated.

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Also, check out the nexy post, Spirituality and Bliss.

This article and the next one,Motherhood and Creating, are complementary posts, covering the inward and outward aspects of the 2nd chakra respectively, particularly in women. These can also be seen as the yin and yang aspects – intuition and seeing are related to the yin, receiving, or inward movement of 2nd chakra energy, while manifesting and creating are related to the yang, acting, or outward movement of its energy.

Intuition is often associated with the third eye, or 6th chakra, just above the brow midpoint, but I think all the chakras are involved to a certain extent, because they are all part of our energy ‘data collection’ system in the form of our energy body (or various energy bodies, depending on which mapping system you are using.) And speaking very broadly there are at least two steps involved in intuitive insights of any type:

1) Data collection – observations and energy imprints, structures, and momentums, all picked up by our energy body/chakras and subconscious

2) Data Processing – the ability to discriminate between useful and irrelevant pieces of data, see patterns, and process them into some form of conscious knowledge

I am definitely of the school that everyone is intuitive, and everyone can learn to be more so, but I also believe in true ’seers’ – individuals born with special gifts, just like some are born with innate musical or artistic talent. Regardless of which type someone is, I think most individuals need to focus on developing one or the other of these two steps if they want to develop their intuition: Some need to focus on data collection – becoming more sensitive to ‘raw’ energies and impressions – while others collect plenty of raw data, but don’t process it into knowledge (in which case all those impressions and energy just tend to clog up their own energy system.)

In general (and of course one always has to be careful with generalizations!), more men tend to fall  into the first category, and more women in the second. And I believe the reason why is at least partly because of the difference between men’s and women’s 2nd chakras, and how that affects our energy bodies. Many different traditions describe the differences between men’s and women’s energy bodies, and while they use different language, the basic difference comes down to this: Women’s are more open, absorbent, and fluid, while men’s are more solid, fixed, and protective. Another way of putting this is that women’s are more receiving, and men’s are more emanating. Which of course corresponds exactly to the primary physical difference between women’s and men’s bodies, in terms of the form and function of our reproductive organs.

As I talked about in the first article on Tanric Sexuality, women’s 2nd chakras are viewed as a doorway directly into creation. No other chakra is discussed in those terms except the 7th, which is literally the doorway between life and death, and the seat of spiritual awakening. So women’s 2nd chakras share many properties of the 7th chakra, by virtue of being this doorway. The connection to that doorway creates a centripetal force, as opposed to men’s 2nd chakras which are more centrifugal. Our second chakra literally pulls other energies towards and into it. One obvious use of this in some women is sexual allure – allure means to pull something towards us, and some women are very adept at it. Men tend to attract through emanating out – showing off is the most basic form. (If you have any doubt about either of these statements, just go to a bar with lots of singles, or anywhere there is a pick-up scene, and observe. If you have any energy sensitivity at all, the difference is not subtle.)

So the 2nd chakra plays a special role in women’s intuitive and seeing abilities, a role it does not play in men’s. It is an additional and very powerful data collection system. It is also a very direct connection to life source. It’s not that men can’t be intuitive – some of the world’s most famous seers have in fact been men – it’s just that the process functions differently in them. This may be the root of the phrase ‘women’s intuition’ – the sense that there is something different about how women access and develop such insight.

Of course having this additional data collection system has no benefits if you can’t process the data. And I see this as a problem for many women. I think many of us absorb a lot of the energies around us – the thoughts and emotions of others particularly – and own them, instead of processing them. Meaning we take them on as our own thoughts and emotions, not realizing they weren’t generated by us, that they came in from the outside. This is particularly true for women who have some 2nd chakra imbalances already – often from past sexual abuse – or for mothers who have a hard time managing the energy lines that extend from them to their children, which is largely managed by the 2nd chakra (more on that in the next post.) Many women’s awareness becomes increasingly scattered or disassociated over time – in fact, I think this is part of the myth that we lose brain cells with each child we have, or at menopause (and yes, I recognize that science has found hormonal links for some of that also, but our phsyical and non-physical work together, and often parallel each other.)

The ancients had an acute knowledge of the relationship between women’s 2nd chakras and seeing. In the traditions where there were female seers – the most famous being in Ancient Greece (the Oracles of Delphi), but many others cultures had similar traditions – they were all virgins, and if a women chose to marry and have children, she left her post. It had nothing to do with moral purity, just energetic purity (Christianity really messed this up later on.) The more ’stress’ a woman had on her second chakra, the more difficult it would be for her to collect and sort through all the energetic data.

So, you might be thinking, what can I do about this? What’s the point of knowing all this, if I don’t plan to sit in a cave and meditate on my 2nd chakra all day? Well, in the final post I’m going to cover some specific 2nd chakra care and development points, but I think even just an awareness of the link between the 2nd chakra and intuition, and the other ideas discussed here, can really help you develop your intuition if you want. I think it’s particularly helpful to just start noticing when you are being impacted by the energies of others around you, and to practice shielding yourself with your intent when you don’t want that, or to try processing what you are feeling when you do. Trying to become more aware of how you use your sexual energy is also useful, and trying to feel the energetic line between yourself and your children, if you are a mother. And more on that in the next post, on Motherhood and Creating…

I know many of you reading this have powerful intuitive skills and knowledge, so please share your thoughts…

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I usually only post once a week or so, but I’m planning on doing these one a day over the next 5 days. So for those of you that subscribe, sorry if I back up your Reader or Inbox, and don’t worry, it’s not a permanent change!

As background, I talked a bit about why I wanted to do this series in this post, and about women’s energy bodies in general in this one. I don’t think you need to have read those posts to follow this series, but I do want to repeat one theme from those posts: I think anyone, and particularly any woman, can benefit a lot from some contemplation and understanding of the 2nd chakra, even if your own chosen spiritual path does not address chakras.

I don’t want to get bogged down with too much background on the chakras, but I do think it’s worth mentioning that current Western chakra writing primarily focuses on chakras from the perspective of health – mental, emotional and physical health. That’s a relatively new development in the history of chakras, because classic sources (which are mostly Indian and Tibetan) were interested in them for occult and spiritual purposes. I feel both are valid, but my focus here is more on the latter, and thus some of what you read might be quite different from sources that are more health oriented.

One of the differences you find between the traditions is the chakra mappings themselves, particularly the placement of the 2nd chakra. Here’s the map I use, which corresponds to that used in most Tibetan lineages that address chakras (and sorry I couldn’t find a picture of a woman, or at least a cuter guy – for some reason these mappings are always very unattractive!):

Chakra Mapping

As in most chakra systems, the 1st chakra is at the tailbone, and you work your way up to the 7th at the crown of the head. The mapping most Westerners are familiar with places the 2nd and 3rd chakras differently from this picture – the 2nd is typically at or just under the navel (where the 3rd is here) and the 3rd is at the solar plexus (where there is just a black dot here designating a minor energy node.)

As Cyndi Dale discussed when I interviewed her, there are actually many different chakra mappings that have developed around the world, and even pretty profound differences in mappings amongst classic Indian and Tibetan sources. How to account for these differences? I think of them in terms of different types of maps: You can have a roadmap, a geologic map, a hiking map, a natural resources map, and more, all for the same area. They are all equally valid, they are each just meant to serve a different purpose. And none of them is the place itself. So various chakra mappings are tools for helping us identify and work with energy patterns and structures within our non-physical being. And they are each slightly different depending on the purpose for which they evolved.

The chakras are often described as mind/body/spirit nexuses, or intersections of our physical and non-physical energies. Within the Tantric traditions, of which there are both Indian and Tibetan Buddhist lineages, they are often also described as awareness vortexes. Some people describe the shape of them as spheres, others as cones, others as planes. Don’t get caught up on the shape. The important thing, for women especially, is understanding the centerpoint of the 2nd chakra in this system. It is at the cervix, the opening of the uterus. In some women, this corresponds to the g-spot, the semi-mythical point of maximum sexual arousal (hopefully that sentence won’t get me boycotted by the search engines, which a friend warned me about!) Assuming this location, this chakra is associated with some pretty amazing experiences and functions in our physical body: It is associated with internal orgasm, with holding a baby into the womb during pregnancy, and with opening to bring that baby into the world during the birth process.

Is it any wonder then, that as a spiritual doorway, it is pretty intense?

In the meditative systems that utilize chakras there are two different themes or ‘purposes’ to chakra meditation that you find: 1) Bringing the kundalini, or life force energy, up through all the chakras into our crown chakra, and 2) Going through the ‘doorway’ of each chakra into spiritual dimensions of awareness (I don’t like that phrase ’spiritual dimensions’ but the words used are usually something along those lines.) What fascinates me is that the experiences described by mystics from pretty much any tradition – Christianity to Zen to Sufism to Eckhart Tolle to Kaballah to Vedanta – correspond to one or more of those described in the classic chakra texts. So, one of these two things occurs spontaneously whenever we have an experience that we classify as ‘mystic’ or ’spiritual’ – either some kundalini has risen up our main spinal energy channel or we have ‘walked through’ the doorway of a particular chakra. We may not describe it that way, but ‘under the hood’ of our energetic system, that is what is going on.

Ok, on to Tantric sexuality. You may be familiar with this term from the numerous ’sex aid’ books on the market bearing this name. These have little to nothing to do with true Tantric sexuality. Most of these books have just borrowed a few positions and ’sex is union’ or ’sex is sacred’ type themes from the original texts, and repackaged them as methods for attaining maximum physical and emotional pleasure from sex. Which I have no problem with. Life is short, have as much fun as you can. BUT, this is not Tantric sexuality.

I also feel duty-bound to mention that most modern Tibetan Tantric Buddhist traditions do not incorporate actual physical sex into the practice. All those robed Tibetan monks that you see are not secretly having orgies behind monastery walls. Tantric Buddhism does work with themes of desire differently than other Buddhist branches, and often visualizations of male and female deities in sexual union are one of the meditative techniques used, but for most that’s as far as it goes. The best introduction to Tantric Buddhism in this regard that I have found is Lama Yeshe’s Introduction to Tantra: The Transformation of Desire.

For those lineages that do practice Tantric sex (and there are Hindu yogic lineages that do so also, not just Buddhist ones), the same approaches are described as in meditative techniques: The ‘goal’ is either to bring the kundalini up through all the chakras into the crown, OR to catapult through a particular chakra, using it as a vortex into pure awareness or source. The difference is that you are using the incredible energy of sexual desire – one of the most powerful human urges – to drive this process. Properly directed, you use this energy to catapult yourself into experiences that could take years to reach sitting on a meditation cushion. Basically, you are using rocket fuel instead of plain old gasoline. In formal lineages, it takes years of preparatory training before you’re allowed to try this, and even then it’s considered a challenging practice.

So why am I talking about this?

Because the biographies of some of the female teachers within these lineages, and some other completely unrelated traditions (like some pagan texts, the Carlos Castenada books, and the books of female ’sorceresses’ within his group), elude to another possibility within this kind of sexual practice. They discuss the womb – or really, the 2nd chakra, NOT the associated physical organ – as a doorway into creation itself. It is in a way the ultimate vortex, a doorway directly into the creating aspect of the universe/God/Goddess/the tao/nirvana/whatever-name-you-want-to-use. And both partners can walk through this doorway – the doorway of the woman’s 2nd chakra – during sexual union.

This aspect of the 2nd chakra in women – as the ultimate vortex into creation itself – is the background I wanted to provide for the rest of this series, and the only reason I wanted to cover Tantric sexuality at all. I went through all this to support the idea that women’s 2nd chakras are fundamentally different from men’s. (Other contemporary women writing about chakras have said this also – Cyndi Dale mentioned that she believes the 2nd chakra is the true seat of women’s kundalini, rather than the 1st chakra, which is the traditional teaching.) So this is the technical case for why, if you are a woman, you should view your 2nd chakra, and an understanding of it, as particularly important.

Hopefully that didn’t leave you blurry-eyed, and peaked your interested enough to read the next post on Intuition, which should be a little less theoretical…

Please feel free to comment, dispute, or ask any questions you have in the comments, so that I can address them as the series progresses…

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This series is really to organize my own thoughts, which I felt it important to do this week because my birthday is this Sunday (42 for those counting!) and birthdays are a great time to initiate new things. My birthday coincides with International Women’s Day, so what more perfect time could there be to initiate a series for women? This particular post is kind of a Table of Contents – I will add in the links to each post as I complete them. Needless to say, the order and titles may change as I go along, but I wanted to give regular readers a sense of where it is headed.

This series is personally important to me, because it is the result of my own research (through reading and my own intuition) into this area after the experiences I had with the birth of my first child. Although I integrate different forms of meditation into my practice, my core form is chakra meditation, which I began as part of my Vajrayana Buddhist studies, and later evolved through my studies of other mystic traditions that include the idea of energy bodies and chakras. At the time I had my daughter I had been doing  chakra meditation daily for almost fifteen years, and teaching it for three.

While I won’t go into the details here, to put it simply, one of the goals of chakra meditation is to raise the lifeforce or kundalini up through all of the chakras. I noticed while pregnant that it became more and more difficult to do this, and from the reading I did I understood this to be normal, as both my physical and energetic body directed most of its resources to the new life. But what I didn’t expect was how hard it would be to re-establish my ability to raise the kundalini after my daugher was born. And I also didn’t realize the extent to which my energetic connection to my child (and later children, with my twins born 19 months later) would impact this.

For all of you that don’t study chakra meditation, you may be wondering ‘why should I care?’ There are lots of spiritual paths, why not just embark on one that doesn’t involve the chakras? Well, to that I would say that the vibrational and energy patterns and practices associated with chakra work are really the underpinnings of all spiritual experience. Many paths don’t work with the chakras explicitly, but the shifts that happen at that level still occur. When I read St. Theresa of Avila’s descriptions of her ‘union with Christ’, Rabia Basri’s poems on experiencing the beloved in nature, or even Zen abbess’ Mugai Nyobai’s satori moment, I see the shifts described within chakra meditation texts, even though none of these traditions work with them. I view writings on the chakras and other spiritual energy systems as ‘looking under the hood’ of mysticism, at the technicalities of what occurs when you have a mystic moment. And while you don’t have to understand what occurs under the hood of your car to drive it, some of just like to know:-)

Both the Are You A Mystic and Women’s Energy Bodies – Phases and Cycles posts might be good prequel reading for this series, but you’ll be able to follow this series without them (in fact I am going to try to make them each self-sufficient, but we’ll see how that goes.) Also, one thing I ask as you read this is that you remember this is a blog, not a master’s thesis. I am going to try and reference sources when I have them, but some of this is just my own POV. I’m happy to entertain debate on any of these issues in the comments, but just want to say up front that I DO know some of what I am saying does not jive with traditional chakra teachings.

Ok, here’s the topics, which I’ll start next week:

The Four Mystic Paths – Overview of the four types of spiritual paths as outlined in the Vedas, which I think is the best way for understanding all the world’s religions and spiritual traditions, and the different types of spiritual experiences. They are bhakti (devotion), jnani (inquiry), karma (service), and raja (combines all the others with occult and energy studies.)

Vibrational Spirituality: Under the Hood of Mysticism – A high-level look at the traditions that explicitly focus on energy bodies and chakras as part of spiritual practice, including kundalini yoga and Tantra.

The Second Chakra and Women’s Energy Bodies – The second chakra corresponds to the physical location of our reproductive organs, and therefore functions differently in men and women. How does this impact our paths to mystic experience, regardless of what tradition we are coming from?

The Second Chakra and Seeing – The unique receptive qualities of women’s second chakras make it a powerful force in our intuitive abilities – essentially, we ’see’ differently than men.

The Second Chakra and Motherhood – We energetically nurture our children through our second chakra, long after birth. How can we manage this in a way healthy for both us and our children? And how does this impact our mystic sensibilities?

What’s It All Mean? – How does all this information impact how women approach spirituality and mystic experience, i.e. how can we use all this information?

I welcome questions and comments on specific areas you are interested in related to each of these topics…this is a very fluid series (and that feedback is partly why I find blogging so valuable in helping me sort through my own ideas.)

Please: this with anyone you think might be interested.

So how do you know which approach is best for you? Like in most things, it takes some exploration and experimentation. One of the easiest ways to start is to clarify for yourself why you want to meditate - that is, what are you hoping to get from it? To help you get started, here is a list of some of the main benefits of meditation, with links to resources that provide more info and instruction related to each (disclaimer here: some of these links are to my own teaching site www.TheMaatInstitute.com ).

Health and Stress Management: Studies have shown that regular meditation is effective for lowering blood pressure, boosting immunity, improving sleep quality, and managing chronic pain. The leader in health-related meditation research and techniques is the Benson-Henry Institute for Mind-Body Medicine. Their website provides both meditation instruction and published medical research on its benefits.

Psychological Therapy Complement: An increasing number of therapists incorporate some form of meditation into their therapy practice, believing that quieting the mind is an important complement to exploring the mind. Techniques vary, but the relaxation response(the same technique as from the health-based listing above) is a common one, because of its proven medical benefits. For a thorough overview of the different views on meditation within the psychological community, try this article from Buddhanet.net (jump to the Conclusion and Summary section at the end if you want to skip the mind-numbing academic detail.)

Concentration/Focus Improvement:Everyone from Olympic athletes to poker players have begun to incorporate some form of meditation into their training regimes, because it helps them detach from distractions and hone their focus. For the same reason, Zen meditation was incorporated into martial arts training centuries ago, and Zen meditation is still one of the most common forms used for this purpose (and championed by such illustrious sports figures as Phil Jackson, coach of the LA Lakers.) Although there are many Zen variations, try this overview to get started.

Intuition Development: Many occult and spiritual traditions teach that we all posses an intuitive level of knowledge within us, but that we can only tap into it when we let go of our ego-based thoughts and emotions. For this reason, meditation is a big component of most intuition-development training programs. There are thousands of such programs, so it is difficult to recommend just one, but Dr. Mona Lisa Schulz offers a grounded, modern approach in her book Awakening Intuition (here’s an excerpt.)

Creativity Development: Artists of all types use meditation to trigger their creativity and help them work through blocks. One of the most popular books to explore this is The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron. Here’s a Q&A on this book, or try this video for an overview.

Energy Body Strengthening: Many ‘alternative’ healing traditions are based on the idea of an energy body, or that the flow of our non-physical energy (or lack of flow) influences our physical health. Acupuncture and reiki are both based on this idea, but even within Western medical traditions, there is growing awareness of the role our mind plays in our physical health and ability to heal. Here’s an intro to a very basic form of chakra meditation, a common form of energy center meditation. Another common  form of meditation used in energy healing is visualization; here’s an intro to using visualization as an aid to healing.

Spirituality: Meditation has been and is part of virtually every world religion in some form. From St. Theresa of Avila’s ‘mental prayer’ to Rabbi Issac Luria’s Kabbalah symbol visualizations, and then to better known Buddhist, Sufi and Hindu meditation techniques, mystics within every tradition have practiced meditation as a means to exploring the forces and spirit beyond themselves. If you are interested in exploring meditation as part of a specific religious tradition, try this book list for some suggestions.

However, spiritual meditation is about shifting your awareness – shifting it away from your usual thoughts and emotions and towards a larger force (whether you call that force God or something else.) In that sense, the technique is less important than your intent. It’s important to remember that the meditation technique you select is a means to an end, not an end in itself, and that the ultimate goal is to change the way you relate to the world and your mind even when you are not meditating. So feel free to explore, but don’t let yourself get too caught up in finding the ‘perfect’ technique.

Good luck in your meditation journeys!

Here’s some info on Meditation Medical Research, or, if you are interested in how meditation is incorporated into the world’s religions, try Meditation within ALL the World’s Religions. For more posts on Meditation, try the meditation page. Or, if you are interested in another main theme of this blog, motherhood, try the Spirituality and Motherhood posts.

The chakras are best described as energy centers in the body – part of our energy anatomy. They are sometimes also described as intersections of mind, body and spirit, and thus operate on all of these levels.

Chakra systems and mappings exist in many different cultures and spiritual traditions, including Tibetan Buddhism, Indian/Hindu Yoga systems, Native and Central American Shamanic traditions, some Sufi (Islamic mystical) traditions, and Kabbalah (Jewish Mysticism). Some Christian Theologians also feel there is veiled reference to them in the writings of certain mystics.

Chakra mappings are used for both energy healing and spiritual realization. In many traditions, they are associated with particular colors, chants, and elements, but these vary between traditions, as do the exact locations. Because of the prevalence of yoga in the West, most of us here are first introduced to the Indian/Hindu Yogic chakra system. The one I use in my own teaching aligns more closely with Tibetan systems, although I use and teach techniques from a variety of different traditions.

There are 3 main modes of working with the chakras:

- Clearing and balancing individual chakras, through color visualizations, mantras, rituals, foods, and various energy healing techniques.

- Yogic breathing (pranayama) and visualization techniques designed to raise the kundalini up from the lower into the upper chakras.

- Meditation on particular chakras as a ‘doorway’ into a particular state of being.

The picture below is of a chakra mapping common to many Indian and some Tibetan traditions. It differs slightly from the system many people are familiar with in that the 3rd chakra focal point is just below the navel, instead of at the solar plexus. However, in both systems this chakra represents the same themes and energies. The winding ’serpents’ are nadis, or channels, that the ‘kundalini’ energy travels through as it rises from the root to the crown. To the right I’ve listed the location and major themes and drives associated with each chakra (it’s actually best read bottom to top, from #1 to #7.)

Chakra Mapping

7. Crown Center – Top of head towards back; Connection to divinity, spirit, bliss; Drive to transcend.

6. Third Eye – Slightly above midpoint between eyes; Intuition, metaphysical wisdom, stillness; Drive to know.

5. Throat Chakra – Center of throat; Self-expression, speaking truth; Drive to communicate.

4. Heart Chakra – Center of chest at breastbone; Love, compassion, beauty, joy, balance; Drive to connect.

3. Navel Chakra – Just below navel; Personal power, self-definition, boundaries; Drive to act successfully.

2. Sacral Chakra – Internal reproductive organs; Sensuality, creativity, abundance, passion; Drive to create.

1. Root Chakra – Tailbone; Connection to earth, nature, physicality; Drive to survive.

The introductory meditation technique below combines the principles of all three of the modes listed above for working with the chakras into a basic approach anyone can try on their own. Feel free to combine it with other meditation approaches that you enjoy.

1. Start with 10 minutes and gradually increase the time if you feel OK with it.

2. Find a position in which you can sit with a straight back. Although the traditional position is cross-legged on a floor cushion, use a chair if needed.

3. Close your eyes and take a few deep breaths through your nose.

4. Divide your meditation time into thirds. Spend the first third picturing a white light about 1 inch below your navel (navel chakra). Spend the second third picturing the light in the center of your breastbone (heart chakra). Spend the last third picturing light between your eyebrows and a little above (third eye). If you like, you can end with a couple minutes on your crown chakra.

5. Each time you find your mind has wandered, gently pull your attention back to the vision of the white light.

6. If you feel a sensation in any of the centers, you can focus on that instead. The visualizations are just meant to be a tool for connecting with the chakras, and work better for some than others.

7. Don’t force it! Try to relax into the concentration.

8. Don’t worry about the thoughts you have, or judge yourself – it is all part of the process. Each time you pull your mind back, you are building awareness.

For guided meditations using other visualizations, and involving more chakras, try my Guided Chakra Meditations. Or for guided mantra (chanting work) with the chakras, try the first book on my Chakra Booklist.

Feel free to post any questions, and happy meditating!