Guilty pleasures

The second of the Main Seven chakras is the Sacral chakra, named after its location close to the sacrum (Dutch: ‘heiligbeen’, or sacred bone). The chakra has two horizontal funnels, one facing forward and one facing backward. It is the chakra of emotions, lust, pain, movement, change, sensory awareness, pleasures and fluids – so yes indeed, also sex.

It’s beautiful Sanskrit name ‘Swadhisthana’ means ‘sweetness’ and here we enter the world of temptation, joy and connecting or melting together. And yet this chakra is also about detaching or letting go. This paradox reveals another major theme of the Sacral chakra: duality and polarity. The so called demon of this orange chakra is ‘guilt’.

Development

The chakra is developed when we are between 6 and 24 months old, and it is during this time that we also develop a sense of binary awareness: up and down, good and bad, right and wrong, safe and dangerous, etc. We learn how to walk and thus move further than we’ve ever done before. This introduces mixed feelings, such as ‘I feel so proud’ vs ‘I’m shit scared’ (sometimes too literally, ey?). Both true at the same time.

Walking totally changes the way children use their senses to observe the world. It changes from mostly feeling to now also very much seeing. Change is movement and movement is change. E-motions are moving energies, or ‘energies in motion’. Movement by itself introduces two poles, because a thing moves from one place to another.

Healthy lust versus addiction

Swadhisthana is very much about lust for life. Lust and desire make us want to go out and explore, they set us in motion. Healthy lust is characterized by paying attention to our true feelings and needs, and moving into the world to have them fulfilled. A healthy Sacral chakra therefor means being in touch with our inner body and its pure sensations. When we neglect our true needs, we fall prey to less healthy surrogate needs and the door is opened to addiction. For example, the healthy need for affection might be replaced by a porn or drug addiction.

If we feel guilty about acting on our desires, whether it’s having sex, eating chocolate or taking the next sniff of cocaine, guilt prevents us from truly enjoying. These actions may then become compulsive because lust gets us there, but guilt prevents us from getting true satisfaction. So we want to come back for more, and more, and more, ever seeking the satisfaction that will never come – nor last.

Whether we pursue the wrong things, or the right things while feeling guilty, a ground rule is: healthy pleasures lead to satisfaction, where addictive ones lead to craving (quote from Anodea Judith in her excellent book Western Body Eastern Mind).

Water

The element of the Sacral chakra is ‘water’. Water is highly flexible and can take multiple forms. A healthy Sacral chakra involves understanding that nothing in life is immutable and that the world, like our own feelings, is never black-and-white.

Thus an unbalanced Sacral chakra can be recognized by rigid thinking. When we believe that things are either right or wrong we are at risk of becoming polarized or even radicalized. We don’t move an inch anymore but rather judge others. Interestingly enough, those we judge usually look a lot like us and we often judge the suppressed and ignored parts of our own personality that we subconsciously recognize in the other. Life has a funny way of making us attract the same type of people over and over again, until we learn to break this pattern.

The key to breaking the pattern, is learning to be flexible like water, without giving up on our morals and values. We need to accept our own flaws and emotions, especially the ones we don’t like, so we can stop condemning those same aspects in others. We need to understand that our entire world, quite literally, exists between the poles.

Swadhisthana and the body

In the physical body Swadhisthana correlates with: fluids (blood, urine, sperm, etc.), the reproductive system (let’s say ‘the sex organs’ for easy remembrance), the skin (think of touch), the kidneys (they ‘clean’ your blood) and bowels (or ‘colon’, which reabsorbs fluids to eliminate them from your body).

Remember, chakras intensively interact with the body. This means that problems in the body show up in the chakras and vice versa. Treating the body will cause healing in the chakra, healing the chakra will have a positive effect on the body. Holistically treating body and mind, the chakras included, is the way to go.

Emotions

The second chakra is all about emotions, but what exactly are they? Anodea Judith writes “Emotions are instinctive responses to sensory data”. According to Judith, emotions originally are “unconscious organizations to avoid getting hurt and to seek lust”. Emotions are energies in motion, and they cause us to move. When we see something beautiful, it moves us. When we express our emotions, we always move. Sometimes unconsciously, by trembling or tapping with our fingers, sometimes deliberately by dancing or singing or shouting.

Fortunately, this goes both ways: moving can also release blocked emotions, with traumas at the very extreme end. There is a great book about releasing traumas this way and it’s called Waking The Tiger, Healing Trauma by Peter A. Levine.

The emotions that surrounded us during the development phase of the Sacral chakra, are imprinted in our bodies and they have a huge impact on our emotional identity. Analyzing and acknowledging them is a great step towards improving that emotional identity.

Proactively working with the Sacral chakra and balancing it out involves examining and listening to our emotions, and being able to choose how we respond to them. A healthy Swadhisthana chakra means we are aware of our emotions and their meaning, yet our emotions don’t control us.

Sex

In its truest and purest form, sex truly is a divine and endlessly powerful tool for spiritual development. It can be a wonderous instrument to resolve and even transcend the challenges of the first and second chakra, and to free the way for the next major chakra theme, that of the third chakra: power (do notice how often this order gets mixed up in modern day society).

When revisiting the entire Chakra Development Loop, as most of us do in our lives, sex can even take us further beyond the veils of earthly limitations, leading us to an even higher fusion. I intend to write a separate article on this kind of sex in the future.

Needless to say, that the wrong kind of sex can be disastrous to the healthy development of the Sacral chakra and in line with that all of its themes. Trespassing into the Sacred Temple is not without consequences. Sexual abuse has huge impact on the entire Chakra System and its damage usually appears in all aspects of our lives.

Feeling the Swadhisthana chakra

In my own personal experience, the Sacral chakra is one of the easiest chakras to feel. Swadhisthana can be felt in action as a tingling energy in our groins when we foresee or think of sex, and also when we get creative inspiration (which moves us to make a painting or write a song). I personally notice the same flow of energy sometimes before I relieve myself (which by the way is also an orgasmic event) or when I reach deep relaxation during meditation (usually right before inspiration makes new concepts appear in my mind).

Healing

Healing the Sacral chakra means to move, in a form that will restore balance. Blocked emotions need to be set in motion again. This doesn’t necessarily mean you have to cry all day long, it simply means energy needs to flow again so the natural healing process of the body can begin. Maybe walking, singing, dancing or acting crazy when nobody is watching is what you need. If you feel stuck in your life without motivation, move! Go out into the world, expose yourself to new people and new ideas. If you think you are right and everybody else is wrong, move your point of view and reevaluate your rigid opinions. If you are kept hostage by guilt, move out of your self maintained prison.

Healing from sexual abuse is a particularly delicate process. Go out and seek a professional therapist specialized in this, you can be helped and you surely aren’t alone. But you need to make the first move.

If you are in the fortunate circumstances that you have somebody in your life with whom you have a healthy sexual relationship, move your bodies! And make your next play as conscious as possible, truly celebrating your existence and that of your partner, and use your body to convey this message to your partner: “I love you, I feel you and I accept you, with all of your flaws and emotions – that are so similar to mine – and from our own separate positions we will meet and melt together.”

Affirmations

The Swadhisthana chakra is about the right to feel and to have fun. Therefore three good affirmations to work with this chakra are: ‘I deserve pleasure in my life’, ‘I love moving and can do so effortlessly’ and ‘My sexuality is sacred’.

Please let me know in the comments below if this article brought you any joy and satisfaction! If you have any further reading tips or suggestions for healing strategies regarding the Swadhisthana chakra, feel welcome to share them with your fellow visitors and myself. Thank you so much for reading and see you next time!