CHAKRA SEVEN : SAHASRARA
Name: Sahasrara (meaning “thousandfold lotus”)
Element: Consciousness and thought
Color: Violet or white
Body: Head, brain, nervous system in general
Balanced: Grace, enlightenment, bliss
Essential Oils: Frankincense
In the seventh and final chakra, we awaken. This awakening, according to author Anodea Judith, is not a sudden moment of enlightenment that overtakes us during meditation on a bright morning, though elements of it may occur that way. Nor is it in awakening that happens inside your head, or alone on your mat in isolation to everything else. Rather, it is a gradual process, a little awakening that takes place each day.
Think of awakening as a gradual sense of wholeness. As our inner world transforms through our practice, our entire life changes. The quiet contentment we find on the mat leads to a longer lasting inner peace, and we begin to feel more persistent presence of grace.
Recalling back, the first chakra was very physical and grounding. It was all about our environment and money and stability and organizing things. Fast forward to today and we’re in a pretty ethereal realm, and it is the lower chakras that ground us as we move into this more expanded time and space.
We’re in the realm of making the unconscious conscious. This month is a focus on a finer quality of attention, a listening so quiet that only our most settled self can hear it.
Other than getting to your mat and meditation practice this month, one thing to think about in daily life is “can I stay with myself, but also with this other person at the very same time.” So often in interactions we lose ourselves completely, or we stay so solid in who we are that we forget that we are in fact in an interaction with another living breathing person. The work is to stay with both. If there was a place in the middle of you and this other person, that’s where the conversation would be taking place. How to do this?
· Keep an awareness at your center as you listen mindfully to what they’re saying
· In meditation, practice this by keeping an awareness of the ground while working with thought
· Imagine a neutral spot between you and another person and imagine/sense that you’re meeting them there while communicating
To close…from one of my favorite books, Belonging, by Toko-pa Turner:
“Emergence never happens all at once. It is a slow stepping into the expanded capacity of your next self. When the time to remain hidden comes to its natural end, you must begin to inhabit your new dimensionality. We’ve spoken a good deal about bearing suffering in the body and heart, but as much as we may be challenged by our darker nature, sometimes learning to emerge from pain into pleasure is the greater work. By pleasure I don’t just mean the sensual kind, though the comfort of a good meal and a hot bath are important. I mean pleasure as a state of being at home in your own skin, of feeling well where, when, and with whom you find yourself.”
Let’s journey, my friends.
xoxo