01  ·  Muladhara

You would not call it a root chakra thing. You would call it stress.

You cannot sit still. You are checking your bank account three times a day when nothing about it has changed. You sleep and wake up just as tired. And there is that feeling like you are bracing for something, on days when nothing at all is wrong.

It is not stress, and it is not a vacation you need. It is your feet back under you, and most people never get given language for that.

What the Root Chakra Handles

It sits at the base of your spine, and in Sanskrit it is called Muladhara, which means root support. That is a good description of the job.

The root handles the ground floor of being a person. Whether you feel safe. Whether your needs are met. Whether you belong somewhere and to somebody. Whether you can be inside your own body without wanting to step out of it.

It is the oldest part of the system, the survival part, and it is the first thing to go when life gets loud. Everything else is stacked on top of it, which is why you cannot really work on your voice or your intuition while some part of you is still asking whether you are okay.

A Blocked Root Chakra Feels Like

  • ✦You cannot settle. Not tired exactly, not wired either, just unable to land anywhere.
  • ✦Money feels loud even when the numbers are fine, because scarcity is a feeling in the body long before it is a problem on a spreadsheet.
  • ✦You are bracing on a good day.
  • ✦Your body starts to feel like somewhere you are staying rather than somewhere you live, and you take care of it the way you take care of a rental.
  • ✦You sleep and it does not count.
  • ✦You feel a little far from your people. Not in a fight with anybody, just not close to anybody either.
  • ✦You are getting through the week instead of being in it.

You do not need all of that to be true. Two or three of them usually tells the whole story.

How to Find Your Balance

Not affirmations. At least not first. The root chakra listens to your body and to ordinary life, and it does not care much what you say to yourself in the mirror.

Get low. Sit on the floor, walk barefoot, put your back against something solid. This part of you takes its information from the body before it takes anything from the mind.

Handle one real thing. One bill, one appointment, one drawer. Safety gets built out of specifics.

Eat something that took time to make. Root vegetables, soup, anything that made you stand at a stove for a while.

And wear something that reminds you. This is where waist beads have been for generations, and it is not decoration. Something sitting at your waist that you feel every time you move, saying you are here, and this body belongs to you.

Red and black. Garnet, hematite, red jasper, black obsidian. Stones that hold weight instead of lifting it.

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