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.