If you have ever been told that one of your chocolates is locked, reactive, or not open enough, and felt confused about what that actually means, this episode is creative. Today we are breaking down chocolate imbalances and practical ways so you can understand what is really happening in your system and what feeling actually looks like. Welcome to Roots of the Rise to fake Terapope, where spiritual wisdom means practical tools and short bite-sized episodes. These are tasters, not deep dives meant to spark curiosity, help you root deeply, rise freely, and remember who you truly are. I just started teaching an eight-week course on the chakras, and it reminded me how much confusion still exists around what people mean when they say a chakra is blocked, open, or deficient. I have not talked about the chakras in the podcast for quite some time, so it felt like the perfect moment to revisit the basics. Let's start with a simple reminder. We are all energy in motion. The chakras are energetic organizing centers for the reception, assimilation, and transmission of life energy. They are also where the patterns and programs I talked about in the last episode are stored. To recap, programming is what we learned was true, and patterns are how we keep proving it to ourselves. You can ask yourself, where in your life do you notice yourself having the same reaction even when the circumstances change? Or what did you learn early on about what is safe, allowed, or rewarded in life? Remember, you don't need to answer these questions perfectly or even consciously. Just notice what happens when you hear the questions that I'm going to continue to ask you as we move through the episode. These questions can help you identify the programs you have installed, so to speak. And once you know the program, you can connect it to one of the seven master chakras, because each one holds programs related to a specific area of life, like survival, emotions, and sexuality, personal power, love, communication, perception, and wisdom. If you want a deeper dive into each of the chakras, you can go back to episode 42, where I explore this in much more detail than I did a whole series on the chakras. But I'm also going to pause here and say that even if the idea of the chakras don't resonate with you, it's still a valid episode to listen to today because you think we can all agree that we all have programs connected to all those areas of life that I listed, like survival and emotions and connection. So even if we're talking about it in terms of whether a chakra is blocked or excessive or deficient, if you listen, I think you still might be able to hear yourself in what I'm describing. The chakras are, after all, just another way of looking at how we function. So that said, if you've heard anything about the chakras, you've probably heard that they can become imbalanced, that these programs can get viruses, so to speak. And these imbalances arise from the way our energy responds to stress. At a basic nervous system level, we cope in two primary ways. We either increase energy and intention to fight, or we decrease energy and attention to withdraw. When these responses are repeated over time, they create patterns of excess, deficiency, or what we often call blockage within the chakras. So you can ask yourself: do you tend to move towards stress with more intensity or away from it with withdrawal? Where do you notice yourself doing more, pushing harder, or staying hyper-engaged? And in what areas of life do you find yourself shutting down, going numb, being avoidant? So let's go over what that looks like in terms of deficiency, excess, and blocked chakras. Deficiency occurs when energy is restricted, withdrawn, or underdeveloped. So this is often linked to flight, avoidance, or collapse. Energy is low, it's unfocused, it's unavailable. The chakra can't fully generate or sustain its function. So that can feel like emptiness, numbing, lack of capacity, chronic avoidance of certain themes or experiences. This is the I don't go there energy. So examples might be something like avoiding conflict. This might be a deficient third chakra, which is our connection to self-will and power. Or you might be constantly fearful, likely a deficient root chakra, which is our connection to safety and stability. What about emotional shutdown? That would be a deficient second. Not enough energy for emotions to express. Could also be a blocked second, and that's why it gets tricky and why sometimes I don't know that it necessarily matters if we're talking deficient or blocked. In some cases, awareness is all that's necessary, but I'm getting ahead of myself. Okay, so back on track. An important nuance is that it is very common for a person to be deficient in one chakra and compensate by overusing others. For example, if someone grows up in a very unstable, emotionally unsafe, abusive household, it is very common to see deficient lower chakras and excessive upper chakras. All the energy that should be relatively evenly distributed amongst the chakral system has gotten pushed upward, which, side note, creates instability. We need roots to rise. And if the roots aren't deep enough, then there's instability. Think about it in terms of a tree, you know, a tree that has very shallow roots, but a lot of foliage up top, that's going to be very tippy. In my experience, and granted, it may just be the types of people who get drawn to work with me, but it is far more common for people to have this problem, this excess energy in the uppers and deficient energy in the lowers, than to be the other way around. When it comes to healing deficiency, the first and most essential step is awareness. I mean, really, that's what it bottom lines down to with everything. You have to recognize that there is a lack of energy in a system before anything can change. Many people miss this because deficiency often feels like numbness, exhaustion, or disconnection rather than something obviously wrong. It's really easy to kind of chalk it up to maybe a physical fatigue as opposed to an energetic one. Once there is awareness, the next step is learning how to receive energy safely and gradually. And that gradual part matters them more than most people realize. If you try to force too much energy into a system that's not ready to hold it, it tends to backfire. Think about an electrical system in your house. If you suddenly push more power through it than it's designed to handle, you blow a fuse. The same thing happens energetically. For example, someone with a deficient heart chakra might try to jump straight into intense emotional intimacy or radical forgiveness, only to then feel overwhelmed, anxious, and most often shut down afterward. Or someone with a deficient throat chakra might push themselves to speak boldly or confront aggressively and then lose their voice, feel really shaky, or deeply regret what they said. In these cases, the issue is not effort or intention, it's capacity. Healing deficiency is less about forcing expression and more about building the system's ability to receive and hold energy. That might look like practicing small moments of presence in the body, allowing brief experiences of rest or safety combined with expressing yourself in low-stakes ways before moving into bigger ones. Capacity is built slowly. When you respect that pacing, energy integrates. When you ignore it, the system protects itself by shutting down. So think about yourself. Where might you be trying to push change faster than your system can actually hold? What would it feel like to build capacity slowly instead of demanding expression? Moving on, let's talk about excess, which occurs when there is more energy than can be used functionally. So this is often linked to fight or overcompensation. The energy is intense, it's cluttered or uncontrolled. The chakra is overstimulated but not integrated. So this can feel like overfocus, reactivity, compulsion, uh, taking up space in a way that feels defensive or driven. This is the I can't not go there energy. It is, it's almost a compulsion, it's a drive, it's a need. Examples might be excessive talking. This would be excess energy in the fifth chakra in the throat, or dominance to cover insecurity. That would be excess third, too much energy in the third. Uh, what about emotional flooding? That would be excess energy in the second chakra related to emotions. The key distinction here is that excess is not health. It's not like, oh, I've got so much extra energy. That's not what this is. It's energy without regulation. So to heal, we need to, again, gain awareness. We need to work on discharging or redistributing energy and then learning restraint, grounding, and containment. I see this so often, especially with the second chakra. People will come in and they'll talk about just having these emotional outbursts. That's excess energy not being regulated. And here's where it gets tricky, and this part is crucial because it's so often misunderstood or overlooked. Excess and deficiency in the same chakra, within the same type of programming, can coexist. A single chakra can be excessive around some themes and deficient around others. It's so common. For example, someone might be highly emotional, expressive, or relationally intense while also being sexually shut down. And that shows both excess and deficiency in the sacral chakra, just in different domains. Another common pattern shows up in the third chakra. Someone might be very dominant, decisive, and powerful at work, yet struggle to hold their ground in personal relationships. That's excess and deficiency in personal power playing out in different contexts. You might also see this in the throat chakra. Someone talks constantly, explains themselves endlessly, or fills silence with words, yet freezes when it comes time to say what they actually need or feel. Again, not a contradiction, but an adaptation. This isn't dysfunction, it's intelligent coping. The nervous system learns where it's safe to express energy and where it's not, and it adjusts accordingly. And it can get even trickier. A block forms when equal or opposing forces meet and remain unresolved. And this is often developed through trauma, conditioning, or rigid belief systems. The issue isn't around the amount of energy, but how that energy moves, or in this case, doesn't. Energy can't be generated, received, or transmitted freely. Important to note any blockage, actually any imbalance in one chakra affects the entire system. You can't just isolate them. Think of a block, though, like a rock in a stream. It collects debris and gains severity over time. It might look like habitual anger leading to isolation, which creates more anger, which creates depression. What about clinging? This is a good self-sabotage one. Clinging for fear of abandonment creates abandonment. And that intensifies the clinging. It is this perpetual cycle of self-sabotage. Example, a wife is afraid her husband is going to cheat, insecurity, deficiency, and the third likely origin is the origin. So she demands he tells her where he's going, like check in constantly while he's away on frequent work trips. So she just is constantly hounding him, even though he's never done anything or given any indication that he would ever be an unfaithful. Well, after years of getting in trouble because he didn't pick his phone up on the first ring or, you know, didn't uh tell her that that one female coworker was going on the trip, might you see how he eventually gets tired of having to constantly reassure her for being punished for crimes he didn't commit and eventually might either actually do the deed because he figures why not, he's already being punished for it, or abandon her, which is the very thing that she's afraid of. I'm not saying it's right. I'm just saying, can you see how her actions, how this programming of insecurity, creating this block against the connection, might eventually lead to the very thing that she fears? Other examples would be chronic fear or submission. That creates a blocked third chakra, difficulty expressing truth, that creates a blocked throat chakra. Side note, it's very, very common for there to be a reflexive interaction between the upper and the lower chakras. So often an issue in the third chakra, this feeling of being unworthy, translates up to a feeling like I don't have the right to speak. So there's this connection here. Um, and that also happens between the second and the sixth chakras, the root and the seventh chakras. Um, but I'm getting into the weeds. So here we go. The bottom line is that we are complicated creatures. Chakra work is almost never about flipping a single switch from blocked to open. It's about understanding how energy learned to move within us, where it learned to pull back, where it learned to be explosive, and gently helping it reorganize in a way that supports the whole person. So ask yourself: are there places in your life where you feel very capable or strong, and others where that same quality feels totally unavailable? Where does your confidence seem situational rather than consistent? And how might this be an adaptation rather than a failure? What I want you to understand is that healing chakras is not about quote unquote fixing a chakra. It's about cultivating awareness of how energy and stress shaped the original programming in the first place. It's about understanding the developmental and lived context in which that chakra learned how to function. And it's about updating the system at the level where the pattern was formed, whether that was in the body, the nervous system, emotional learning. You know, healing restores access to energy so that healthier patterns can actually run. Without access to energy, insight alone, it doesn't change much. There are many ways this work can happen. Tools might include meditation and visualization, contemplation and inquiry, somatic practices, real-world experiments that gently shift behavior and capacity over time. None of these are inherently better than the others. They simply work at different entry points in the system. The key thing to remember is this different imbalances require different approaches. There is never a one-size-fits-all. And often the most sustainable, lasting healing comes from a multifaceted approach. Remember, excess is too much energy, deficiency is too little, blockage is energy that can't move. Healing is learning how to regulate, integrate, and restore flow in a way that your system can actually tolerate and sustain. That's what real balance looks like. I hope this helped you get a little bit more understanding of what people say when they say they have an excess deficient or blocked chakra. If you have any questions about this, please feel free to email me at Sarah at risingwithsarah.com. And that's Sarah with an H. I'll link it in the show notes. Members, your notes and these prompts are waiting for you in the app. Let me know if you'd like me to do a guided contemplation around this for you. I hope you all have a wonderful rest of your day. And remember, know who you are, love who you've been, and be willing to do the work to become who you are meant to be. Just a quick reminder this podcast is for educational and entertainment purposes only. I am not a licensed therapist, and nothing shared here is meant to replace the guidance of a physician, therapist, or any other qualified provider. That said, I hope it inspires you to grow, heal, and seek the support you need to thrive.