Emotions, taking us over. How emotions, creativity and sexual energy affect your wellbeing

Following last week’s post about the base chakra, I’m delving into the sacral chakra. This is the energy centre that angel card creator Doreen Virtue calls the "sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll chakra". Oh boy, this is going to get interesting...

Located just below your navel, the sacral chakra is the energy centre in your body concerned with pleasure, creativity, sexual expression and emotions. All the good stuff, in other words!

An imbalance in this chakra shows up for a lot of people, because it governs how you connect with others – which is a pretty fundamental aspect of the human experience. People with poor energy flow in the sacral chakra might be difficult to get close to – or at the other end of the scale, they could be needy and clingy in their relationships. In extreme situations they might battle addictions (and not just to drugs or alcohol; this could include addictions to food, sex , shopping or drama!).*

Emotional balance is a major component of this chakra. Remember that emotions are energy in motion (hence: e-motion), so the way they flow is significant. If emotions fester and stagnate that can result in an imbalance in your sacral chakra. The way to avoid that stagnancy? Learning how to let go... no biggie, then!

Having emotional balance means you don’t hold back with your emotions – which would make you cool and detached – but you’re not overruled by your emotions either. So you can be angry and express that, but you don’t project it onto others. Here’s what an emotional overreaction looks like: if you give someone at work a task to complete, instead of simply telling you that they’re too busy right now but they’ll deal with it tomorrow, they fly off the handle and, in a raised voice, start ranting about how busy they are and no one understands and everyone’s out to get them and and and... (yeah, you know the type).

(Image: the sacral chakra symbol)

While the base chakra’s biggest challenger is fear, the sacral chakra’s adversary is guilt. This shows up in people feeling saddled by obligations, because guilt is stopping them from setting healthy boundaries. Particularly highlighted is guilt around sexuality. For example, at a subconscious level there may be guilt about violating family or societal expectations, such as ‘living in sin’ (Catholic guilt, anyone?!). Even though you may be content with your choices, you may have an irrational guilt playing out in the background around operating outside family norms – particularly for women, who are still expected to be 'good girls'. Sounds weird, but sometimes our desire to conform and our desire to meet our own needs can cause internal conflict that we’re not even aware of.

Other guilt stuff that can result in a block with this chakra – people who’ve cheated on someone or deceived a partner in some way (perhaps by pretending you were still happy in a relationship but you really wanted to leave). 

Sadly, because this chakra concerns sexuality, it is commonly out of balance in people who have been the victims of inappropriate sexual behaviour.

People who have a deficient energy flow in the sacral chakra might have some of these characteristics:

* emotionally distant, and very hard to form close connections with (they put up barriers)

* lack of passion in their lives (no hobbies, no creative expression) 

* martyr mentality (this is all about feeling shackled by perceived obligations)

* dislike of being touched (related: low libido)

* tendency to destroy anything that offers them pleasure (i.e. relationships, household stability)

People who have an excessive energy flow in the sacral chakra might demonstrate some of these qualities (I have worked with a lot of people who fit into this category):

* addictions (this includes people who are addicted to creating drama)

* hedonism

* tendency to blame others for their problems

* unable to be alone (always jumping from one relationship to the next)

* dependent on others (needy)

* mood swings

* tendency to respond with an excess of emotion 

By the way, you can be BOTH excessive and deficient at the same time (weird, I know).

Some ideas to rebalance the sacral chakra:

· Movement and flow are a major focus of this chakra, so exercise is important – particularly in a form that brings you pleasure (surfing, dancing, cycling etc).

· Yoga is recommended (because it includes so many hip openers).

· This chakra’s element is water, so make sure you drink lots of water and spend time around water (ocean, lakes etc) if you’re struggling with emotions.  

· Creative expression will help a lot, so get going on any creative project that calls to you.

· Letting go is important, through whatever means you find helpful – counselling, NLP, affirmations around releasing old hurts etc.

Phew – so that’s the sacral chakra.

If you’d like to work with me to heal any of the issues in this article, you can book energy healing sessions here. More information about how I work is available here.  

All about that base! How your attitudes to money and your parents affect your emotional health

If you’ve done yoga, meditation, reiki, kinesiology or acupuncture, you’ll likely have heard a bit about chakras. Having a bit of extra knowledge about their function can really help you identify where you might be hitting emotional blocks in your life. 

Chakras are located in the energy field just outside your physical body and are the avenues through which your life force (chi, prana etc) flows. Or not, as the case may be.

The first major one is the base chakra, known to some as the root chakra. It’s concerned with our material needs (money, food and shelter), our family, our safety and our connection with our bodies. So people who have an imbalance of energy in this chakra might struggle attracting and keeping money, could be materialistic and struggle to sit still (ie unable to stay grounded).

This chakra is located near the base of your spine and because  it is the first energy centre in the body to develop (up until one year of age), it is heavily influenced by your parents. People who had one or both parents absent in their lives, or whose parents had a volatile relationship, often end up with a base chakra imbalance because that affected how they shaped their concepts of belonging and safety. 

This chakra is also influenced by your parents’ attitudes. If your parents constantly complained about a lack of money you may grow up to be overly fearful about ending up in poverty – or even resigned to it as a fait accompli (the attitude of ‘people like us will never have enough money’). Equally, if your mother was constantly worried about all the myriad things that could go wrong in the world, you may have absorbed that energy in the base chakra (because it’s all about safety).

Just to make it clear, this doesn’t mean that your parents are responsible for your lot in life. Even though you may have taken on their beliefs or been influenced by your upbringing on an unconscious level, you’re not destined to follow your parents’ example – you determine your own path. Your choices are your own. However if a belief has taken hold at a young age it may have created an energy block without your awareness, and energy healing can be a helpful way to shift it.

(Image: the base chakra symbol)

The base chakra is also associated with belonging and how you fit in to the world. If you are not at peace with where you came from – particularly if you are disconnected from your ancestry or ethnic make-up in ways that make you feel lost – that will manifest in the base chakra.

People who have a deficient energy flow in the base chakra often have some of these characteristics:

·        Poor attention span

·        Difficulty sitting still  (the overachiever, who never feels like they have enough or are enough)

·        Refusal to listen to their body (particularly in messages about nutrition and rest)

·        Exaggerated fears about their safety

·        Chronically disorganised lives

·        Lack of boundaries

·        Perennial financial struggles (they can never ‘catch a break’; whenever they come into money they lose it somehow)

Some of the qualities of people who have excessive energy in the base chakra include:

·        Hoarding

·        Obese

·        Obsessed with material items, and constantly upgrading cars, electronic gadgets (FYI there is nothing wrong with enjoying objects, but attaching your value to your material possessions is problematic)

·        Fearful of change

·        Rigid ideas about how the world ‘should’ be

To rebalance your base chakra, here are some ways you can ground yourself and find balance:

·        Spending lots of time in nature

·        Learning how to be still regularly (meditation and yoga are helpful)

·        Addressing your attitudes towards money – remember that it’s great to ask the Universe for more money, but the pursuit of it as a means to happiness is flawed

·        Practising acceptance and learning to let go

·        Using regular affirmations to assure your subconscious that you are safe, you have everything you need, you belong and you are enough.

So there it is – all about that base.

If you’d like to work with me to heal any of the issues in this article, you can book energy healing sessions here. More information about how I work is available here.  

One for the sensitive types. How your weakness can be your strength

Confession: I hate parties. I’m awkward when it comes to small talk because I’m rubbish at ‘playing the game’, and I find meeting new people terrifying. Christmas parties are a battle of endurance for me, and summer barbecues with people I don’t know are acutely uncomfortable. For a long time I labelled this as shyness however I’ve realised that, yes, I am slow to relax in other people’s company and don’t enjoy talking about myself, but I actually don’t fit into the category of ‘shy’. I also attributed this mild social anxiety to being an introvert – which is true, I am – but this doesn’t completely explain my level of discomfort in social settings. 

A month ago I read an article in Elephant Journal that made all the pieces fall into place. My preference for short, one-on-one interactions – or none at all – is nothing to do with shyness or introversion, it’s all about being highly sensitive. It’s about the way I respond to social exchanges on an emotional level.

This is what it means to be highly sensitive:

* You need massive amounts of time alone

* You pick up on other people’s moods instantly, and usually absorb them

* You feel overwhelmed by social situations and crowds

* You feel emotions deeply

* You appreciate and respond to art, music and beauty at a very deep level

That’s a tick, tick, tick, tick and a half-tick for me.

The fact that I’m highly sensitive means I can’t work for long periods in offices that are super bitchy or super negative because that drags down my mood and drains my energy. I can’t have a packed social calendar, because I need lots of time in solitude to recharge. I can’t watch news footage of tragedies or disasters because I am seized by intense despair. I can’t enjoy boxing or sports where violence is encouraged because I find the aggression really confronting. 

In a society that prizes physical dominance and discourages displays of emotion, sensitivity is regarded as a weakness. I vividly recall being told: "Don’t be so sensitive," as an adolescent when I complained about being bullied. (Um, thanks, really helpful. Nothing like a spot of victim shaming to avoid tackling an issue.)

What I understand now is that being sensitive is not a weakness, it’s a strength. It’s what helps me to perceive, via my intuition, when people need help, extra kindness or just space. It’s also the thing that allows me to tune into other people’s energy fields to help them identify emotional blocks – hence my affinity with reiki and angel card readings. (It also means I can be prone to taking those energies on board, but I have measures to avoid that.)

Highly sensitive types are the ones who create dazzling works of art, poetry and performance that allow us to see the world in entirely new ways. They are terrible at dating but excellent at long-term relationships. They have a small group of friends who they forge strong connections with. They listen far more than they speak. They are very protective of their personal space and don't react well to being touched by strangers or people they don’t know well. 

For me, being sensitive means I need plenty of self-care. It’s about lots of sleep, lots of water, lots of exercise, and lots of time on my own. It’s also vital to make time to be creative and to be still. It feels good to be at an age where I don’t have to make an excuse for choosing, and enjoying, these activities. I know I feel better for them. I also do a shielding ritual as part of my daily morning meditation, to protect myself, my physical space and my energetic space. This means I can face the day knowing that no matter who I’m around, I’m not going to get dragged down by their mood or their ‘stuff'’. (Happy to give tips on this to anyone who’d like to know more about how to do this, just drop me an email.)

If this post resonates with you, I hope you can find ways to embrace and nurture your sensitivity too.

Stuck in grumpy mode? There's probably something going on underneath

For the past few days I’ve been really shitty, and despite my best efforts to shake it, I keep reverting to a state best described as the angry love child of Grumpy Smurf and Oscar the Grouch. I’ve found myself replaying old arguments in my head and scripting shouty comebacks. I sent off a series of terse emails. And yesterday on the train, the sound of someone constantly rustling a plastic bag annoyed me so much I had to get up and change seats. (I was also tempted to shout at her for using plastic bags, which is surely the greater crime, no?)

All this irritation had no obvious cause, but it went on for days and I suspected something else was going on internally.
My body was giving me signals that it was experiencing irritation at a deep level. My jaw became tight and painful (this is one part of the body where we hold on to anger), my digestion went out of whack (something which is usually, but not always, associated with emotional stress) and I developed hay fever (which is all about irritation)*.

Anger and irritation are perfectly valid emotions, and me experiencing them is not a problem in and of itself. The issue for me was that they weren’t prompted by a specific event or experience, and they were lingering like out-of-town relatives after Boxing Day. I knew that this was something that needed to be investigated.

When I thought about what is really frustrating me at the moment, I instantly felt that sensation in my gut that I get when I know I’ve identified something significant. There’s the fact I have to move out of my house, which is going to be an exhausting process that will cost me money I don’t have right now (and am worried that I won’t find, despite the angels’ reassurances to the contrary). There’s also the fact that my business is taking a long time to get off the ground. The experience of sitting in an empty room with an empty diary and waiting for the phone to ring is somewhat soul-destroying. 

It wasn’t hard to see the common thread: fear. Namely, fear of failure and fear of not having enough (money, resources, time). So many metaphysical books say that everything comes back to fear. In fact, anger is often referred to as a secondary emotion because it is usually masking another emotion. And often, that emotion is anchored in fear. 

Recognising my fears and calling them out for playing saboteur on my physical health hasn’t made me any less annoyed, but at least I’m aware of what’s really going on – and that’s helping me to put my focus back on what will help me move forward: patience. Accepting that my life is unfolding exactly as it should, and being patient with that process, makes me feel more calm. I hope that that will translate to patience across the board, making me less inclined to react to surface-level irritations. That’s the theory, anyway. 

I can’t, however, make any guarantees regarding the safety of plastic bag rustlers. 

* For the record, this doesn’t mean that if you sneeze you’re afraid of something – it probably just means you should stay away from pollen (lol). Also, sometimes a bad mood is just a bad mood. What I’ve documented here was just my experience of a lot of physical symptoms and emotional triggers adding up to the same thing. 

How trying to be happy can make you very unhappy

Here’s something I’ve noticed about the self-help industry: sometimes it’s not that helpful. 

If you look at the colossal amount of space the self-help section occupies in your bookstore – you guys still visit bookstores, right? Please do; bookstores are struggling and they really need our custom – one theme occupies the most shelf space: the pursuit of happiness.

That makes sense – we all wanna be happy. But if you read the back covers, many of these books are promising a magic formula for designing a life where every moment is happy. I don’t want to criticise books on happiness across the board, because I’m sure they have helped people, but my opinion is that this approach is problematic.

What concerns me is the underlying message – that we should expect to be happy all the time. To me, that idea is dangerous, and I’m not the only one who thinks so.

Last week I went to a panel session at the Sydney Writers’ Festival with the compelling title How To Live. The comments which struck a chord with me the most came from Paul Dolan, a London-based, internationally renowned expert on happiness and behaviour.

“The happiness industry is a distortion of the original positive psychology [movement]. It’s feeding this idea we are entitled to feel happy, that that is the default setting for humans. So out of the full spectrum of emotions that make us who we are – and all emotions, even the dark ones, have something to teach us – it’s saying that if we’re not feeling happy all the time there’s something wrong with us.”

YES! It’s natural to want to maximise your happiness levels, but unless you’re Miley Cyrus, life is not a constant party, and you’re setting yourself up for disappointment if you are trying to make it so. In fact I’m not sure that’s working out too well for Miley either. As much as we might relish the euphoria of graduating from university or the elation (or perhaps despair, depending on your circumstances!) of finally seeing those two stripes appear on a pregnancy test, happy events aren’t shaping you as a person. It’s the agony of rebuilding your life and healing your fractured heart after the demise of a relationship that teaches you how resilient you are, and that you’re capable of looking after yourself. Darker emotional states instil practical lessons too. It’s the despair of blowing your car’s head gasket in peak traffic that teaches you that if you’re driving a car older than Cyndi Lauper’s back catalogue, you need to top up its oil and water frequently. (This example may or may not be inspired by real-life events.)

Fixating on happiness like it’s some magical destination – the finish line of an emotional marathon littered with disappointing boyfriends, menacing bosses and unflattering haircuts – can also have the effect of lowering your self-esteem. Basically, you’ll wind up feeling like you’re doing life wrong when you’re unable to live in a state of infinite happiness. Ugh. We’ve got enough reasons to feel like we’re failing, thank you very much; experiencing normal human emotions shouldn’t be one of them. 

Instead, I think it’s more helpful to focus on contentment. Because gratitude is a core value for me, I spend time focusing on all the good things in my life. That means that when I get hit by an unexpected curveball and my life starts to feel like a giant pile of poo, I don’t pretend that it’s wonderful. I acknowledge the crapery (that is a word now, I just declared it so) and focus on what comes next, because I know it always gets better in the end, and my life is still, overall, incredible. When you’re broke, lonely and desperately overworked, it’s much easier to return to a baseline state of contentment – because unless your life is completely broken, there is always more right with it than there is wrong. Happiness is a beautiful place to visit, and you should go there often, but you can’t build your home there. 

Paul’s approach is to focus not on the meaning of life but the meaning of moments. As an example, he talked about teaching his child to read: “That has purpose, but doesn’t always have pleasure.”

The take-away message: knowing what’s important to you and what you value can be hugely helpful in achieving life satisfaction – even when things are not going so well. If you can focus on the moments that give you purpose, and celebrate moments of pleasure, you might not need to read a trillion books, or even one book, on happiness. And you’ll be better able to recognise and appreciate it when you stumble upon it.