Take a moment to send your breath down your spine into your hips. Whatever you have connected to the earth, send your awareness there. Whether it’s your feet, your legs, your butt, feel the earth beneath you. Feel how strong, solid, and firm it is. Notice how, despite flying through the universe, you feel safe on this planet. You feel grounded and held. This is the energy of the Muladhara. It relates to the element earth, and all solid, earthly things, such as our bodies, our health, our survival, our material and monetary existence, and our ability to focus and manifest our needs. It is our most condensed state of matter and the “lowest” end of our chakra spectrum. It is visualized as a deep, vibrant red, the color of beginning, and the color with the longest wavelength and slowest vibration in the visible spectrum.
The Muladhara is the root chakra upon which all our other energies lay and supports all we do. It creates the foundation of our lives and as such relates to our basic needs being met. Like Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, that bottom part of the triangle is the first part of our lives we need to dial in before we can move upward into other areas of life. if we don’t feel safe, if we don’t feel like we have what we need to survive … it’s challenging to focus on dream work and almost futile. The Muladhara represents your most primal level of consciousness, your survival instincts. This drive for self-preservation helps us understand what is required for a solid foundation for our lives. This chakra is the home and resting place of Kundalini. Without a strong Muladhara, we are unable to awaken this energy and activate our liberating and manifesting energies
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Ensuring that you have the framework for a thriving life is part of diving into the Muladhara. It is about embodiment and grounding. It holds the element of earth and teaches us that we have a right to be here and we have a right to have what we need for self-preservation. This chakra relates to our physical body and caring for the one vehicle we have for this lifetime … something we know we will have for the rest of our lives. Here we learn that we have to grow strong, stable roots in order to rise. If we do not balance this chakra before we progress to others, our growth will be without roots, ungrounded, and will lack the stability necessary for true growth. Trees that receive too much water in their early growth stages are unlikely to thrive over time. Because they never have to push their roots down to find water, they remain shallow, shaky, and vulnerable to destruction. In the same way, we should expect the process of grounding and shadow work to be challenging. It is through this work that we grow the strong roots, the assuredness of our values, and the tenacity to withstand the challenges that the future may throw at us. Consider this as we work in this space. While there are times when self-nurture is needed, there are also times when we need to dig deep, and do the work. Exploration of the Muladhara awakens us to a deep knowingness of ourselves so we can establish habits and systems that support our needs.