The Green Light District

Keeping Witness

Recently I purchased a chakra poster (pictured left) at the wellness center where my acupuncturist practices. The chakras are part of an ancient spiritual tradition that discerns seven energy centers in the body, which run in a line basically up the spine/nervous system. They are represented by the colors of the rainbow: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, purple.

I have not done much specific chakra work on myself. I was introduced to the system three years ago in a course with one of my spiritual teachers. During that course the teacher specifically brought my attention to the second/orange chakra in me. This chakra is said to be the seat of emotions and sexuality, among other things.

On the poster now hanging on my wall, the Affirmation for the second/orange chakra (also referred to as the sacral chakra) states the following:

“I welcome and acknowledge all of my feelings and desires, easily discerning the appropriateness of acting on them.”

Well, I can certainly appreciate the importance of that. While it strikes me as more poignant than funny, it appears so painfully obvious to me that this statement has NOT been reflected in the historic tendencies in me that it is nearly laughable.

The sacral chakra column on the poster also shares that “if we do not keep a witness to our emotions,” it may result in an extreme of either “a constant need for pleasure or rejection of pleasure due to fear or shame.”

Some of the central patterns of the personality structure in me have been specifically geared toward not acknowledging either feelings or desires in me. “Easily discerning the appropriateness of acting on them” frankly didn’t even seem very relevant for much of my life because the feelings and (especially) desires were not acknowledged or recognized enough to consider acting on them consciously. Unconsciously, of course, these things would still be there and would be influencing me in ways of which I was unaware since they were suppressed and kept in the unconscious or subconscious, but consciously it seems there was simply a rule to not act on such things in general because they were not even supposed to be recognized. Frequently, I likely did not even realize they were there.

So I feel certainly famililar with the “rejection of pleasure due to fear or shame” component of the sacral chakra imbalance. When the orange chakra was first brought to my attention during the aforementioned course three years ago, it came to my attention that the question, “What do you want?” elicited little more than a blank look from me. It was almost as though I didn’t even understand what the question meant. What does “want” have to do with anything? You do what you’re supposed to, what you should do, what you’ve said you would do, what’s “right,” etc., etc., etc. Want doesn’t really enter into the picture. That was truly what the habitual patterning in me seemed to see.

Sexually speaking, that historical pattern seemed to reign in me up to about my mid-twenties. When an emergence of consciousness occurred in me and that shifted, I won’t claim the pendulum didn’t seem to swing to the other side, so to speak. That has not seemed unusual in my experience — a tendency toward extremes/”all or nothing” has been characteristic in me historically. “Feelings and desires” that may have been so suppressed and ignored in me suddenly allowed to come forth may have done so in a manner similar to that of a caged animal suddenly being set free.

Presently, I wonder if the second part of the Affirmation is emerging in my experience. The part about “easily discerning the appropriateness of acting on them.” Acknowledging and staying with feelings in me has been a colossal part of the Work I have done and continue to do on myself. Acknowledging want is actually a front and center issue for me currently, and it occurs to me that as I start to see it, the discerning/acting part of the equation does become relevant as the historic rigidity of the simple strategy of suppression and indiscriminate restraint dissipates.

Perhaps now for me, as on one level things seem to balance out more (i.e., I recognize want within me), I am presented with a different challenge on a deeper level. This of course is how growth works, so it is not a surprising occurrence. In this case, it may be that when feelings and desires are allowed, the question of whether and when to act on them comes forth as an opportunity for me. While for some people that might be an area that has seemed long familiar or to some degree understood, for me it seems brand new and thus unsettling at times.

I had a dream a few nights ago right before I woke up to go to an acupuncture appointment. It was a dream that involved intense sexual yearning, and in the course of talking about it with my acupuncturist, we/I surmised that the yearning seems representative of something within me that is asking to be or ready to be developed. In other words, something that is within me that I have not yet recognized fully (or maybe even very much), and something I am to provide for myself rather than look outwardly to find.

The sexual desire in the dream seems to me an attempt by the part of me not interested in growth to simply project it outside and try to get this from someone else — which authentically speaking may not be done. This kind of phenomenon has occurred to me before, as I mentioned in my post about (the outrageously beautiful) Billie Joe Armstrong, and reflecting on this dream it once again struck me how seductive the urge to project things outside of ourselves may be. This invitation to develop a capacity within me manifested in this dream as an incredibly magnetic attraction to something outside myself — a strategy to get me to ignore or avoid the recognition that it is something that I must provide for myself (and is already within me whether I see it consciously or not) and cannot be obtained from the outside. I deeply appreciate seeing this information via this dream.

In Five-Element acupuncture, we are currently in the season of Winter, which holds unknowing, mystery, stillness, silence (yes, obviously in this culture we have managed to skew that a bit by throwing in what tends to be a hugely non-silent “holiday season,” but regardless, those are gifts of Winter according to traditional Chinese medicine). The element of Winter is water. I noticed the description of the second/orange chakra on my new poster includes, “It holds the spectrum of emotions from the depths of silent dark waters . . . .” The main corresponding organ to the Winter season/water element is the kidneys, which are housed in the sacral chakra.

Sexuality once again strikes me as such a beautiful, awe-inspiring gift to us. In its fundamental connection to life it holds so much potential and energy, manifestable both authentically/supportively and inauthentically/destructively.

Authenticity is absolutely the aim in me, and right now there seems once again to be an invitation for me to recognize this within the realm of sexuality. Since all of the service I offer around sexuality, including erotic writing, is an offering of this invitation as well, it seems not only appropriate but imperative that I answer that call myself.

Love and Namaste,
Emerald

“Let your clarity define you, in the end we will only just remember how it feels…”
-Rob Thomas “Little Wonders”

Posted by Emerald | Filed under: Sex+ Spirituality|