Sarah Hope: 0:13

Welcome to Roots of the Rise with me, sarah Hope. Today we're diving into the programming that affects our sense of safety and security, specifically through the lens of the root chakra. If you've ever struggled to feel safe, tend to experience a lot of anxiety or find yourself constantly preparing for the worst, this episode is definitely worth a listen. On Friday, I introduced you to the chakras with a general overview of what they are, where they're located in the body and what they represent. If you missed that episode, I'll link it below. Today we're diving into our first week of exploring the chakral system, one chakra at a time. That said, I want to emphasize you don't need to fully believe in or accept the concept of chakras for this to be a meaningful and worthwhile exploration. Absolutely all of us have a relationship with security, with feeling safe, with the levels of fear or worry we feel on a moment-to-moment basis, and really that's all the root chakra is about. So, while I'm going to give some information today related to an energetic understanding of the root chakra, you could always just ignore all that and focus on the more mental, emotional side of things, but do try to keep your mind open to the rest. So let's just go over some basics and this is what I'll cover with all of the chakras. So the Sanskrit name for the first chakra is muladhara, which means root. Every chakra has a color associated with it. Many see the first chakra as red. I have had some people tell me that it's more of a brown, more of an earth color for them, because the element that the root chakra is associated with is the earth element. But most commonly people view it as red. It's located at the base of the spine. To be more specific, it's kind of the base of the spine slash, perineum. It's midway between the anus and the genitals. It's at the coccyx where the I cannot say this word coccygeal, did I get it? Spinal ganglion and the lower lumbar vertebrae are.

Sarah Hope: 2:25

The basic issue for the first chakra is survival safety. It's developed in utero to about six months to one year of age. So as we go through and we talk about the chakras, I'll be talking about the developmental stage of them. Let's be clear that we all have all of these seven major chakras from you know the beginning. It's not like you don't have the second when you are in the womb. But the major focal point, the major focal time of development is from in utero to about six months or so. This is important to think about because for the fetus, the uterus is your first experience of body and home and environment.

Sarah Hope: 3:12

We all know from a scientific point of view that the mother's nutritional balance and emotional states during pregnancy play a role. The first heart energy we're exposed to is that of our mothers. When pregnant she generates an electromagnetic field that's 10 to 100 times stronger than anything emanating from the outside world and that's a shield against negative energies. But think about what happens if the mother feels trepidation or fear or doesn't want the baby. Think about all that negative energy that you're being exposed to. I think about this and I think about all the emotional challenges that she must have gone through. The heartache and the heartbreak while pregnant with me and that was my first exposure to the world was to the sense of being unwanted. But I'll talk more about that on Friday when I'm going to kind of tell my life story and all the various ways that the root chakra became dysfunctional in me. But anyway, let's get back to broad strokes.

Sarah Hope: 4:32

So first chakra, right From for the first, you know, six months or so after birth, the baby remains in the state of fused identity. It does not see itself as separate from the mother. You know, therefore, like the mom really does become so wrapped up in the baby's own sense of self. If the mother, you know, is warm and gives lots of attention, if the home is comfortable, then this is how we experience ourselves. But if our primary caregiver is cold and neglectful, if the environment is painful, then our first experiences of self are negative. If you know the reflexive gestures like crying produces relief, you know, for you know we are hungry, we get fed. If we're cold, a blanket gets put on us, if we have a dirty diaper, it gets changed Then this continuity between how we feel internally and our external environment kind of remains unbroken and everything kind of feels stable and safe for us.

Sarah Hope: 5:41

But if our needs aren't meant, then this child, the baby, develops this distrust of the outer world, a disassociation from the inner world and a really deep sense of helplessness. You know, if our instinctual impulses don't get us the things that we need in order to survive, we learn to either distrust or ignore them. So, as a baby, getting your needs met it's completely beyond your control. Yet you need everything. So whether these needs are met kind of creates your psychological foundation for relating to the world. Do you trust or mistrust? This is your first vague sense of like. Am I happy to be here With trust? The survival instinct is satisfied. You have a sense of like. Am I happy to be here With trust? The survival instinct is satisfied. You have a sense of emotional well-being, but without trust. When your survival feels constantly threatened and because there is nothing you can do as an infant to meet the threat, the anxiety is unbearable. You're also completely without boundaries At this point.

Sarah Hope: 6:47

This is pre-verbal, pre-conceptual. It's reflective, it's instinctive. You are energetic beings, so your consciousness isn't developed enough to block any flow of energy. You're utterly open. You're utterly exposed to your environment and the kind of energy that's blowing your way. So what we need at this stage is obviously love. We need nourishment, we need safe attachment.

Sarah Hope: 7:14

Consistency is important. It helps us reconcile this dilemma of trust or mistrust. We also need help with physical embodiment, to transition from being purely energetic into recognizing our physical selves. The identity we're developing here is our physical self, so we need that to be promoted by touch, by being held. There's a lovely Hawaiian tradition that one of my mentors was telling me that of the child's feet doesn't touch the ground for the first year. I don't know whether that's still followed, but that's kind of the you know, indigenous tradition and that's just lovely. It's this idea of always being the safe kind of container and support for this child as they kind of come into their own body. And you know we need healthy nourishment. Obviously we need to make sure that the baby's needs are met. So that's with physical touch and that's with healthy food and that's with the environment being welcoming. You know it's no fun being stuck in a dirty diaper for hours on end, right?

Sarah Hope: 8:22

So the orientation of the root chakra is self-preservation and also we need to recognize that our roots also represent where we come from. They represent our ancestors, our family history. We can't simultaneously deny our past, deny where we come from, and maintain our roots. And the other kind of brief tangent I'll go on is for, personally, I was adopted, so I was ripped away from my roots. Now, look, I was adopted for good reasons. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with adoption, but I am saying that we need to recognize that there are some deep psychological, emotional, mental, energetic wounds that come from being taken away from the only thing you recognize at that stage of life as being safe, which is your birth mother. All right, moving back, the right, the right of the root chakra is the right to be here, our right to have to have our needs met. Okay, is it okay for me to have things like time to myself, you know? Okay, is it okay for me to have things like time to myself, to have pleasure, to have things? The illusion here is that I don't have the right to be here or to have the things I want.

Sarah Hope: 9:38

As I mentioned in the introduction for the chakras, the demon of the first chakra of the root is fear. You know, fear is what happens when something threatens our survival. So what we can see is this creation of hypervigilance. And the problem with fear is that it dominates all other functions. You cannot solve math while you're running away from a tiger If survival threats are a constant occurrence. So that's, you know, things like violence, things like poverty, food scarcity, you know, our consciousness kind of becomes fixated at this level, at this level of fear. It's the only. We can't alter the hypervigilance. The hypervigilance becomes the only state in which we feel safe. So, given all that, you know we've touched on some of the things that cause major dysfunction in the first, anything that threatens survival. So while the root chakra is formed at this early stage of life, recognize that we can get faulty programming. We can get that damage done to the root chakra at any point in life.

Sarah Hope: 10:45

So something later in life that may cause this instability to the root chakra could be something like parents getting divorced, a destabilization of the home life. It could be something like having a parent or a sibling experience a life-threatening illness. I got a double whammy with this because my adopted mother was diabetic and she had a very labile form of the disease and I can't tell you how many times throughout my childhood I was told oh, this is it, she's going to die. She didn't until she was 59, but that was very destabilizing. And then my father, when I was 10 years old, got diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. He had a 3% chance of living. He also beat it and didn't pass until much later in life, but that was very destabilizing throughout my entire childhood.

Sarah Hope: 11:40

Okay, what else do I want to say about this? The younger a child is, the more likely the threats that they experience will undermine chakral formation. It's much scarier when things happen as a child because you're not capable of dealing with the threat yourself. Typically you need someone else to help you handle it. As opposed to when you're older, when you're an adult, you're much more self-assured, you're much more capable and independent. So some other potential origins of damage to the root chakra, things like birth trauma. So, as I mentioned, things like adoption, can be very difficult.

Sarah Hope: 12:20

Also, think about C-section. With C-section, instead of this very beautiful, intentional process of bringing a child into the world through labor, they go from being in this very safe, warm, dark environment to all of a sudden being in bright lights, being kind of manhandled, being taken away from the mother. I mean, it's a very clinical process. That's what happened with my son and this can be really jolting for the child. Abandonment also would obviously be a big problem for the root chakra. You know whether that is a child not being touched enough, whether it is, as I said, the case of adoption, because, even though that's not quote unquote abandonment, the way that we think about it, because the child is hopefully going to a loving family, it is abandonment in the sense that the child feels ripped away from the only sense of home quote unquote that it really knows, ie the birth mother.

Sarah Hope: 13:25

Physical neglect can be a problem because, again, you know, there is this lack of basic needs being met which can lead to this sense of kind of helplessness and mistrust. This also can result in shame, which impacts the third chakra. Of course, any type of violence is going to be deeply traumatizing to the root chakra. You know the physical abuse or a violent environment creates anxiety, obviously, and that produces stress. And the problem with this is that this heightened state early in life can become addictive. It produces this need to create crisis conditions later in life. It also causes pain and this can teach children to disassociate from their bodily sensations, to disassociate from their physical body, and so later in life that can manifest with either being kind of obsessed with the body maybe being overly sexual and really having a kind of an obsession or a focus on the body or the opposite. It can create disassociation and an irreverence for the body.

Sarah Hope: 14:38

Other things that can affect the root chakra are major illnesses and surgeries or accidents, and we also can't ignore inherited trauma. We can inherit trauma without ever experiencing it ourselves and any resolved survival issues of any kind might unconsciously pass fear onto the children. So you know, children of the Great Depression, food scarcity, needing to hold onto things. That's an example. Now, when the root chakra is balanced, we see good health. There's a vitality, well-grounded, being comfortable in the body, trusting the world, this ability to relax. When it's out of balance, we see it.

Sarah Hope: 15:22

I've mentioned some of these things already disconnection from the body, fearfulness, anxiety, a restlessness. Sometimes we see, actually very commonly we see obesity, overeating, hoarding, material fixation, greed, because, again, how do we stabilize a sense of instability? Well, we make sure that we have extra of everything, and so we can see this kind of fixation on creating kind of backup after backup after backup. Just in case you know, we can also see someone constantly plagued by health or financial issues because, again, physical orientation and finances, you know, they keep us safe, money keeps us safe and make sure that all of our needs are going to be met, and so we can have either a healthy relationship with that or not. So much, all right. So how do we heal? That's, I know, what you're waiting for.

Sarah Hope: 16:26

Okay, important point recovery from these traumas is distinctively not an intellectual process because it has a non-intellectual origin. This is why talk therapy, while incredibly useful and I'm not down on psychology or clinical therapist or psychotherapist they have so much to offer. But what I am saying is that trying to kind of talk your way into healing an energetic problem, it can be very, very difficult. So what can we do? Physically oriented? So we need to focus on the physical. We need to notice, okay, when you feel scared, what does your body do? What happens to your body, where do you feel it, what happens to your breathing? So anything that's going to help you reconnect with your body, that would be things like abhyanga, which is Ayurvedic massage. I'll link to that practice below Pachakarma. So purification practices, dance, weightlifting, strength training exercises the more physically strong you feel, the more energetically, emotionally, mentally strong you feel.

Sarah Hope: 17:33

Massage, doing certain types of yoga, going back to the talk therapy model, doing inner child work, focusing on the relationship with the mother. You also want to make friends with your fears. I'll talk about this later this week, but being able to really kind of understand your fears, to help them lessen. Always, meditation. I'll link to the heart-based meditation episode. Meditation is such a catch-all for healing, especially when you do it in a supported way. You can also overcome the illusion of lack of safety with affirmations, things like it is safe for me to be here. I love my body and trust its wisdom. I want to be here. So those are some affirmations. You can try Finding a tribe, so being an active part of a family, a club, a group, anything like that.

Sarah Hope: 18:32

There are some key questions that you can ask to kind of start off your root chakra week and your investigation into how you personally, you know, relate to this type of programming, this set of programming. So here are some questions for you to ponder. From whom do you need permission to take care of yourself? Do you have fear of standing on your own two feet? Who is responsible for your survival? How was your survival provided for you in your childhood? By whom and at what cost Are you connecting with your body, listening to it, administering to its needs? Do you think you have the right to be here, to take up space, to have what you need in order to survive?

Sarah Hope: 19:21

The rest of this week we'll be talking about themes related to the root, so like fear and control. If this sounds interesting to you, make sure you follow or subscribe so you don't miss any of the upcoming episodes. You can also email me at rootsoftheriseatgmailcom or click the text me link if you're listening on Spotify. If you have any first chakra questions you'd like me to answer this week. Please, please, please, send them in. I love questions, so, please, please, do. I hope you have a wonderful rest of your day. Do ponder those questions I gave you and remember, know who you are, love who you've been and be willing to do the work to become who you want to be.