What Happens When Energy Gets Stuck
Today, we’re going to talk about energy chakras. Even that word, “chakras,” might set off alarm bells in your head. As a church going girl who was raised to believe this stuff isn’t real, I get it.
But like most things, learning about chakras isn’t nearly as helpful as experiencing their truth.
For some people, that could be as simple as going to an acupuncture appointment and feeling the release of pent-up stress for the first time in decades. For others, it could be doing yoga and learning to breathe into the solar plexus.
In my life, it’s looked like a friend who had a lot of trouble conceiving. She did all the medical work with a doctor. All the IVF, all the hormones, everything. But nothing worked. One session with a reiki healer to help unblock her sacral chakra, and she was pregnant within a month.
Another friend who experienced sexual abuse as a child developed a female-related cancer.
In my own life, after years of watching Brian’s health unravel before my eyes, and months of hospital visits, colonoscopies, and brutal medications with no improvement a visit to an infamous local doctor (or quack, depending on who you asked), set us on the road to healing when “The Medicine Man” told us Brian had blocked chakras.
We then saw a holistic doctor in California who confirmed the same thing. She explained that Brian had experienced emotional neglect and a blocked solar plexus chakra, which can be linked to feeling unsafe expressing emotions, being responsible for others’ emotions, being conflict avoidant, and people pleasing, all things Brian related to.
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When, as a child, you’re told…
not to cry,
to shove emotions down,
that your opinions and emotions need to be quieted,
that deep conversations aren’t polite,
that you need to be a people pleaser,
you don’t suddenly figure out how to say and even feel those things when you turn eighteen.
I can’t imagine the pressure he felt to not have any needs, to not have any impolite feelings, to keep who he was in many ways, stuffed down.
It’s hard to ignore the effect that had on his soul and his body. Because his emotions did get shoved down. And they stayed there. And those emotions didn’t just go away, they rotted him from the inside out.
It just so happens that the solar plexus chakra is between the navel and sternum, exactly where Brian’s discomfort and medical issues stemmed from.
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Here’s a quick, simple breakdown of how chakras work.
Energy can get locked (and unlocked) in our bodies, and the physical places where this tends to happen relates to where chakras are located.
If this feels scary, remember that we all do this all the time, just with more comfortable language. When something sad happens, you might say that your “heart is broken,” even though the brain and nervous system is in charge of pain perception, not the heart.
When you feel nervous, you might have “butterflies in your belly,” even though that’s not actually possible.
Before a wedding, we want to make sure no one has “cold feet.”
We already relate emotions to physical locations in our body.
With chakras, we’re just giving a name (and centuries of wisdom and practice) to truths we already recognize in how we talk about our bodies and our spirits.
When I first heard Brian’s “non-medical” diagnosis– a blocked solar plexus chakra, I think that was the beginning of me really beginning to ask myself what felt right in my own body as far as what I had been told.
Trusting my intuition and not blindly believing people just because they had a few letters at the end of their name.
Nothing the doctors said had felt right. And it certainly hadn’t done any good. Brian had just gotten sicker and sicker. I believed then and believe now that, had we continued on that course, he would have lost his colon and probably his life.
But the chakra and neglect - that felt true. It was a completely different feeling in my body, a feeling I’ve come to identify as knowing.
I share more of this story in my TedTalk and in my best selling memoir, Sleeping With a Stranger.
So that was the first of many questions around limiting beliefs I would ask myself over the next six years. Slowly, compassionately, gracefully, I sat with things I had been told and asked myself,
“Does this feel true in my body?”
More on that soon. But for today, let’s dive into this:
What are chakras?
Chakras are centers of energy that exist in all of us in specific, but not unique locations. Think of a traffic roundabout. Depending on where you live in the world, the traffic flows either clockwise or counterclockwise. Regardless of which way it flows, all the cars are going one direction and there are no stop signs.
Roundabouts are more efficient because they’re in a constant state of flow. No stopping or starting or wondering whose turn it is. One way, around and around. Constant, fluid motion.
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Each chakra is a roundabout– a place where energy congregates and swirls and is redistributed throughout the body. Each chakra is a focus of specific energy. Different people believe differently about how many chakras there are in the human body, but here are the main ones:
Root Chakra: strength, stability and security
Sacral Chakra: sexuality and creativity
Solar Plexus Chakra: inner power and vitality
Heart Chakra: love, compassion and emotional acknowledgement
Throat Chakra: communication and sense of self
Third eye Chakra: an all-seeing eye for intuition and decision making
Crown Chakra: spiritual connection and well-being
Now imagine the chaos that could happen if a car got into the roundabout and just…stopped. Or worse, went into the roundabout and started traveling the other direction? This is what happens when chakras get blocked, and each chakra is the emotional roundabout for different sets of emotions.
Fear, guilt and shame live in the root chakra. When the root chakra is blocked, everything is blocked. When you’re in fear, your entire nervous system is hijacked by your survival instincts. No one is driving anywhere in a traffic circle if your nervous system is trying to protect you from an asteroid crashing into earth.
If you feel like your energy is blocked or you struggle with pain– physical or emotional– that’s specific to a location in your body, take time to explore some of the helpful resources in The Path Back to You to discover how you can get those energy roundabouts functioning in harmony again.
And if you’re still unsure about chakras… that’s okay! Listen to your own intuition about what feels right for you… But if you’ve experienced months or years or decades of unresolved pain, I encourage you to dig deeper.
Healing could be on the other side.
I share much more on this topic in my new program, The Path Back to You. I dive deep into the individual chakras, what physical pains relate to each one, and steps to take in order to heal them.
Before I go, I’d like to share with you what one student is saying about her own journey on The Path Back to You:
“After I received the first week's materials, I was grateful for the practical application of the information to my life immediately and, if I'm being honest, the aesthetic! It's packaged and presented so beautifully. I love how I'm getting something each Friday. It's something to look forward to and not too much all at once. I am so excited this came into my life when it did! I am so grateful for this course. When I read your beautiful passage about the brightest, clearest, and whitest light, I couldn't believe it. I've been looking for that explanation for YEARS. And immediately, I began to see myself in that clear, bright, white light. And I felt the vibrations. I felt my body change, calm, energized, all at the same time. THIS IS REAL! I am so grateful already for this course. I am positive this is a moment when this has landed in front of me for the exact right season. Thank you. I'm so grateful our paths crossed.” - Katie Stadler Alexandria, Virginia
That’s what Katie is uncovering on The Path Back to You. What will you discover? When this blog post finds you is the perfect day to begin. Join the journey today by enrolling here. You’re ready!
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