The Sacral Chakra

The second chakra, our sacral area, is our right to feel and experience pleasure. It’s located at our sacrum and can affect our hips, low back, lower abdomen, genitals, bladder, and kidneys. The challenge of the second chakra is guilt. The second chakra is creation. Literal creation of life, but also this is where our creativity resides. It’s the spark of creation, an idea, an expression we want to put out into the world.

I really struggle with the second chakra. I have struggled with bottling up feelings for longer than I’d like to admit. I’m not so great at expressing myself or coming up with creative ideas. I don’t consider myself artistic, but mostly I really experience guilt. I feel guilty if I go out and have fun, I feel guilty for decisions I’ve made, and decisions I haven’t made. I grew up Catholic and I’m sure most of you have heard of Catholic guilt and for me it was true. My internal work is working past not feeling guilty about every little thing. I think this contributed to me shutting down my feelings and not knowing how to express anything I did feel for the longest time.

One of the biggest things I learned from my 300-hour yoga teacher training is how important it is to feel our feelings. To not resist the feelings, but to let them flow through our bodies so we can experience them and then let them move on. When we don’t let ourselves feel sadness, anger, happiness, joy, and everything in between we start to store those emotions in our body. I’ve heard them called ‘undigested experiences’ and that has proven to be true in my life. These undigested experiences get stored a lot of the time in our hips. Again, for me this was true. I have tight hips and when I started to do more hip openers I found myself in tears…a lot. It was an emotional release I was having that these yoga poses brought up for me. I sometimes would know what the tears represented. They were old situations, thoughts, and memories. Then there were times I had no idea why I would be crying in pigeon pose, other than my body and soul were ready to release an old memory I had forgotten of. I always felt better after having these releases. I find my hips are more open in poses than they have been in the past. I also now have more feelings of happiness.

I learned that when you block experiencing the negative emotions, then you are also blocking the positive emotions. When I first heard this concept, everything fell into place for me. I heard this at a time when I was numb to feelings. I had just quit a job that was really stressful and was in the process of deepening my yoga practice and training. I was desperate to feel something and couldn’t understand why freeing myself from the job didn’t bring that.  I couldn’t have that until I had processed everything I had been blocking and shoving to the side for years. Hearing this gave me permission and a goal to start experiencing everything that came up for me. If I felt anger, I would feel it. Not act on it. Not acting on all of our feelings is a very important part of this process.  To not just act on all of our feelings, but to feel them in our bodies and minds and share them with others if it was appropriate. I would allow myself to cry if I needed to cry. Feel sad if I needed to be sad. And all of these feelings eventually passed in regards to those specific situations. Then the spark of happiness, joy, and excitement started to come back. Sometimes they would only be for a few seconds, but that gave me hope that I was on the right path and connecting to myself. I was starting to listen to myself and allow these human feelings to be there and to be experienced when they needed to be.

The sacral chakra can be a very hard chakra to work with because it will most likely bring up all that you’ve been resisting to deal with, but will make you feel so much better if you do. Remember, what you resist persists. We can’t always go around, under, or over everything…sometimes we do have to go through it. It may be hard, but it’s worth it.

I’m here for you if you’d like to learn more, continue, or start on your journey of self-healing.

Sending love, hugs, and smiles,

Laura