This year my coven has decided to quietly embark on a couple of intermediate lessons for ourselves. It’s been a long time since we’ve been able to do more than just teach the class, and it feels really good to get into new things. Daystar is making salves for the wheel of the year; Cynnamon is teaching some of the live classes .  .  . and I’m heading up a series of lessons on each of the seven major chakras.

Muladhara (Root)

We’re spending a few weeks here in March doing some prep work: mainly looking at our chakras as a whole, meditating on them in their myriad rainbow forms and looking for places of deep imbalance: too open or too closed, ‘muddy’ in color, or shaded in some fashion as to seem ‘off’.

I, because I am me, am also starting to do the actual work on my Foundation chakra. It’s my least healthy chakra (no surprise) and likely the one that will require the most effort on my part to balance.

The first chakra represents our relationship with our physical bodies and with the material world. It grounds us in physical existence. When balanced, its energy helps us to blend the physical and spiritual, and to eliminate that which is no longer needed for growth; we enjoy physical existence. When unbalanced, we may be afraid of life, feel like victims, withdraw from physical reality, or operate in our own interests only. Physical symptoms can include any difficulties with feet, legs, or lower back. Our deepest sense of well being originates with this chakra, it is literally the foundation for our journey through life. This chakra establishes our personal access to all that we need to survive and grow, providing us with a basic, crucial, sense of security and safety. On a practical level, the first chakra governs our desire to eat, be sheltered, warm, comfortable, and protected.

My upbringing was such that I have had to do a lot of work just to get to a place that resembles balance with this chakra. I still have a persistent poverty mentality and it took an enormous effort to trust that my husband not only loves me dearly, but will never leave me. I have had ‘back problems’ since my teen years and actively use my body size as a protective measure. All of these are indicators of an imbalanced root chakra.

So in this last week I’ve started to go for walks in nature. (My dogs are big fans and encourage me to do this more often!) My feet have had a couple of massages, and I think I’m going to try giving them some kind of attention almost daily. The really big change requires my husband to enact:  we’re going to make a conscious effort to eat better. We already do ok, and often sit down at the table rather than the TV . . . but we’ve drifted a bit from that in recent months. So it’s back to making meals, from scratch, and adding in more veggies and taking out the meat. (He’s been contemplating going vegetarian for ethical reasons, so our decision comes at a good time.) We think that if we treat the meat like a condiment most of the time and increase the number of no-meat meals we will see an overall improvement in our health.