Answers...

Knowing what we know now should allow us to grow serene and wise into our old age. Yes as I indicated in the previous articles, not everyone chooses to follow that path.

As we grow from childhood, the primary move away from dependence requires us to separate from our mothers. In doing that we form a sense of our individual-ness. We learn where our body ends and another's starts. Although the separation from the mother can be stressful, for the most part we navigate it with little recall of the challenges.

From there we embrace the aspects of our culture that help us feel as if we are full members engaged in the normal stream of life.

But as we reach adulthood and move into our middle years, we begin to sense in some sort of quiet way that the journey has an ending and for some of us it will come unexpectedly. That separation we navigated so long ago from dependence to independence has undoubtedly left an imprint of the terrors and struggles we met with in that journey. Those emotional memories are stored in our second chakra.

The chakra system came out of a Hindu system of anatomy that maps the subtle body. It is composed of 7 primary chakras. Each chakra intersects with different physical and non-physical aspects of our being.

The first chakra is located at the base of the spine and is often known as the root chakra. It is responsible for survival of our being.

The second chakra is located at the level of the sacrum and pubic bone and is known as the sacral chakra. It governs our emotions and the unconscious.

The third chakra is the solar plexus and is located at the level of our naval. It is involved with digestion and our ability to move powerfully in our world.

The fourth chakra is the heart chakra and is associated with love and selfless compassion. It is the bridge between the lower three chakras and the higher three chakras.

For the purpose of this article (to answer the questions raised in the previous two posts) the healing of the second chakra will be further explained as it relates to healing our ability to transcend the fears that arise at the juncture of the second half of life which vibrate the feelings of separation we faced as children.

When awareness of our survival begins to surface somewhere in the middle of life, the root chakra begins to vibrate. As the vibration escalates, as it surely will since we not well equipped to alter our life passage, it stimulates the subtle energies of the 2nd chakra. When the second chakra is stimulated the emotions stored in the unconscious are stirred up and begin to manifest.

Most of the time we feel a sense of low grade anxiety, melancholy or irritability. In some cases the emotions border on panic attacks, depression and bouts of anger or rage. The most common treatment for these symptoms in the West is the use of medication. Depression and anxiety often go together in the elderly. Instead of treating the symptoms perhaps we can understand why they occur and seek to transcend them instead.

The following is a model I discovered in working with my own arising emotions. I call it The Three A's. They stand for Attitude, Acceptance, and Appreciation.

In beginning to heal these arising emotions we first have to become aware of them. Becoming aware of them can include naming the emotion, understanding how it makes you feel, locating where it is most strongly felt in the body, or simply having a sense of what is trying to surface. I call the the Attitude.

Once we are aware of the Attitude we must work on giving it the full space it requires to fully express. This does not mean that we collapse into the feeling with outward behavior. What it does mean is that we find a place where we can retreat from the outside world and sit or rest in quiet and cultivate silence. In that silence we give ourselves permission to feel the emotion and to give it the freedom to move through us fully. We move with it in a state of Acceptance.

When we are able to do this every day for a few moments we are ready to move on to the third stage of Appreciation. Appreciation does not usually come quickly or automatically but with the steady practice of Acceptance, Appreciation will eventually come. And when it does, we will find that our anxiety and depression transform and release an energy that frees us to enjoy the remainder of our lives and to recapture that most vital aspect, our joi de verve, for the second half of our lives.

More Questions...

In my last article, I began with a statement of how hard I was, as a child, to put down. The article morphed until I was in the midst of another topic that is close to me heart - healing. And, I think, as this article goes on, you may come to see that there is a relationship with the entry statement in the last blog and the end result of healing through the chakras. So, reader, if you will, bear with me...

As a child, my memory of those weekend nights at the Hoffman's were of parents talking, playing Euchre, and enjoying each other's company late into the night. With the exception of the isolated event where I was terrorized, my memory of these times is of fun and laughter.

Late in the evening the other kids would eventually wear themselves out, curl up in a corner or on a couch, and fall asleep. That I, on the other hand, would still be running around, full of life and energy and fun, still baffles me. It is one of the stories that has always made me feel different. One of the stories that has made me wonder why I was noticeably unlike the others.

I have always been fun-loving, cheerful, a good sport...yet deep inside there was something else that lurked beyond the eyes of the others. The face that I carry in the world is strong and true. But, the energy that lays beneath feels powerfully strong as well.

At one point in life, it seemed that life had sent me too many losses...enough to make me wonder if I had the energy to go on. Still, the smile rose to my face and I met the outside world with the grace of a ballerina at the top of her career. Subtly, inside, things were shifting.

Fears and losses seem to conspire to cause a deep, unsettled load of grief. Somewhere in the middle of life, people seem to face a shift in perspective. They begin to realize the pain and loss of the past and wonder about the remaining years they have to accomplish whatever they might have thought life was supposed to bring.

Having worked for years in hospitals and with sick or dying people, I've seen two kinds of people...those who manage to navigate the awakening reality of a finite life on this earth...and those who become bitter and ask 'Why me?'
I would put forth the idea that either of these types of people still face a choice point when they arrive at midlife with this awakening. And the choice is simply this: which path will they take for what remains of their time on the planet?

For those who live in the finite world of a concrete, tangible reality there may be little left to enjoy. But for those who look deeper inside there just may be a wisdom that can be tapped that will lead them into the second half of life with a joi de verve.

Looking back, it becomes possible to tease out the threads of a deeper undercurrent that was running through our lives from the earliest memories. Despite the losses and fears that may have marked our journey, we can begin to find the path that has undergirded our steps along the way.

And, for some of us, like myself, that path has been sourced by an energy current laden with gifts that were double edged swords. Gifts of intense sensitivity to the feeling and emotional realm...gifts of sensory awareness that was greater than our peers...gifts that may or may not have been understood by our families and friends.
In my journey through life, I came face to face with an entirely new world when I reached my 30's...it wasn't mid-life, yet, but it was the threshold of mid-life...and it brought me through a doorway I had no conscious idea existed.

As I became more aware of the underlying wounds that had been sustained during a full and incredible life, I struggled with my purpose and my gifts, of which I had felt certain, when I was coming of age.

Those struggles took me first on a journey toward the deep investigation of each and every event...every wound. What I found was incredible. The more I studied the wounds the more there were. Ultimately it dawned on me that if I continued I could spend the rest of my life dealing with the pain and sadness of my life. Ugh!

About that time, I happened across a focus in my work that gave me an entirely different direction to explore...that of healing and ultimately healing systems in other cultures.

As I mentioned in the last blog post, I recently ran across material on the chakras again. And in my time of struggle was, once again reminded that there is a way of focusing away from the wounding and into the higher realms of our being.

It is these levels of reality that I will take us to next, dear reader. And if, this seems to have delayed what was promised in my last post, I ask your acceptance of my apology. In bringing all the pieces of this journey together I see it has required this segue from my life experiences through the transition in understanding to reach the outcome of an ancient Indian system.

............to be continued

Questions...

When I was a child, so the story goes, I was hard to put down.

On weekends my family would spend a Friday or Saturday evening at The Hoffman's...family friends of my parents from when they were younger. The adults would play cards, laugh and carry on conversation around their kitchen table while the kids did any number of kid-things...like watching TV, playing with Lincoln Logs, and running around outside playing tag or hide 'n seek. On one occasion I even remember watching their cat have a litter of kittens.

For the most part it was a grand time...childhood fun...though I do remember a slightly darker incident. We had been running through the house...for who-knows-what reason...laughing and chasing each other. As memory serves, we were running down the hallway toward the master bedroom when suddenly one of the older kids pushed me into the basement stairway, turned out the lights and slammed the door shut yelling "The boogie man's gonna get you!" The others, in childlike glee, threw their bodies against the door preventing me from getting out.

I was terrified...I remember crying and hollering 'let me out'...pounding on the door and eventually begging, in tears to 'open the door.' I was in shambles when they finally let me out and remember feeling embarrassed that I had been so scared. There were four of them in all...three Hoffman kids (two older than me) and my younger sister. I don't remember if they were all a part of this.

As I write of this incident, the fear and terror of a young girl trapped in the dark floods back. And, I wonder, do these things that scare us as children leave residual scars? And if they do, how do we move past them and truly resolve the emotional trauma?

When I first wrote this article I was stuck in the turmoil of the feeling world. You know, that place where feeling moody and emotional weighs us down for the better part of a day or more. Since then I have moved to a deeper and more spiritual place. Returning to the wisdom of Hindu chakras has allowed me to move beyond the emotional self by understanding the 2nd chakra that governs these emotional wounds. In my next post I will take a deeper look at the chakras and how they helped me transcend these wounds.