I Take Off The Mask!

Balancing the Sacral Chakra for Health and Creativity

The sacral chakra located at the lower abdomen is the chakra responsible for creativity, procreation, intimacy, emotion and desire.

(For a brief background about chakras, read my article BALANCING THE CHAKRAS FOR HEALTH)

Symbolized by water, the sacral chakra is a chakra that speaks of letting go, and of going with the flow. It allows us to experience the many emotions of life – of joy, of change, even of tears. When this chakra is blocked, we repress what already is. We defy reality. We even reject who we are.

Following are the parts/ organs of the body ruled by the sacral chakra:
1.hips and lower back
2.the reproductive organs
3.kidney
4.spleen
5.pancreas
6.bladder

If not balanced properly, an imbalanced sacral chakra could result in the following diseases:
1.Infertility
2.urinary tract infection
3.kidney and bladder problems
4.anorexia/ bulimia
5.dysfunction of the reproductive organs such as the uterus and ovaries

Before said imbalance could result to a physical ailment, we must be able to read some early warning signals alerting us of a problem in this chakra:

Try to answer the following questions:

1.Do you find it hard to adapt to changes happening in your life, e.g. a new job, letting go of a person?
2.Do you feel guilty whenever you indulge on healthy pleasures pampering yourself?
3.Do you feel uncomfortable with intimate emotional relationships?
4.Have you become addicted to food or other pleasures that run your life and destroy your relationships?

If you answered YES to any of these questions, you may be suffering from an understimulated or an overly stimulated sacral chakra.

UNDERSTIMULATED CHAKRA

When the sacral chakra is understimulated, you feel repressed emotions within you. You have problems in letting go and in letting life BE. You may have problems in putting too much demand on other people and yourself. You resist change. You can’t easily go with the flow and you may be stuck in a BORING job because you are afraid of change. You are afraid where this change will take you.

OVERSTIMULATED CHAKRA

When your sacral chakra is overstimulated, you can’t seem to stay put in one place or in one relationship. You have no direction but always yield to where circumstances take you. You may also be addicted to physical pleasures and let them rule your life instead of you ruling them.

ACHIEVING BALANCE

When the sacral chakra is in balance, you are in the right FLOW of your life whether in your career or in your intimate relationships. You have no problem letting go because you TRUST who you are and you trust the God who loves you and takes care of you wherever you may go. At the same time, you don’t feel like a lost leaf who gets tossed about by the wind. You enjoy pleasure but you know that there is a deeper meaning in your life other than allowing yourself to serve those pleasures.

There are different methods in balancing this chakra:

1.By sound
2.By color
3.By element
4.By visualization
5.By exercise
6.By taking off the mask

I will try to describe the first five methods in future articles and we’re going to be focusing on the last one here.

TAKING OFF THE MASK

TAKING OFF YOUR MASK means knowing yourself, knowing the true condition of your soul and shedding off disguises, pretenses, social conditioning and stereotypes that fail to tell you who you really are and what will really make you happy.

Taking off your mask, do you feel guilty of engaging in the simple pleasures of life like eating delicious food, sleeping late, shopping or enjoying a beautiful scenery?

You must have been obliged to take on a big responsibility at an early age. You must have seen many people suffering and lacking so many things in life. But does it mean you must also suffer and not love yourself anymore?

If you suffer too and live a sad life, what will you share to others then? Isn’t it better to be able to share your joy?

Taking off your mask, have you ever felt you had to repress your beauty and sensuality because some people told you that in order to appear good and respectable, you have to appear ugly, boring and without any charm at all?

Deep inside you however, have you felt left out and older than your real age? Haven’t you had that sense of longing that someone may notice you and desire you and love you?

It isn’t a sin to be beautiful. It isn’t bad to be desired. What’s wrong is to hide that beauty of yours or to believe that physical beauty is all that really matters in life. Both extremes are wrong.

What are you depriving yourself of these days?

The 10 PRINCIPLES OF HEALTH

1. HEALTH simply means BALANCE

2. Your body has a natural capacity to HEAL itself.

3. It is the mind that rules the body. Therefore, to achieve a healthy body, work on a healthy mind.

4. A healthy mind stems from a firm belief in Unconditional Love – for others and for the self. Without this love, anger, fear and all repressed negative emotions create an imbalance within the mind.

5. Laughter heals what the mind fails to understand.

6. Tears release the excess grief of one’s heart and brings back balance to the soul.

7. Movement is as necessary to health as it is to life.

8. A person needs healthy food – both for the body and for the mind. (Man does not live by bread alone.)

9. Health respects the natural rhythm of life. There is a time to rest as there is a time to toil.

10. Breathing reminds us how dependent our health is to our connection with the Infinite Source that sustains all life.

BALANCING THE ROOT CHAKRA FOR HEALTH AND STABILITY

The root chakra, which is located at the base of the spine is the chakra responsible for stability, security,survival, safety, protection, being grounded and for having our higher desires manifest in the physical world where we live in.

Our previous article on BALANCING THE CHAKRAS FOR HEALTH gave a short background about the chakras and their role as energy centers of the body. It also gave a brief insight on how the balance of these chakras are important for the health of the physical body.

I would like to start by explaining the root chakra because this is the chakra most often neglected by many, especially those in search of higher knowledge and powers. Each chakra has a role and the role of the root chakra in our health cannot be discounted as this is the chakra that affects the following parts/ organs of the body:

1. feet/ legs
2. blood
3. bones
4. colon
5. rectum
6. immune system

Hence, when there is an imbalance in our root chakra, the body becomes prone to the following diseases:

1. chronic fatigue
2. knee problems
3. constipation
4. diarrhea

Before it manifests in the physical realm however, there are hints or redflags that can alert us to do something and avoid the consequences of an imbalanced root chakra.

Try to answer the following questions for a start:

1. Do you feel unsure of the future and anxious of your financial position?
2. Do you lack the confidence that you can handle the situations you will encounter in real life?
3. Do you feel lost and without a real life purpose that could give meaning to your life?
4. Do you find it hard to feel grounded and to connect to people around you?
5. Do you feel so attached to material possessions that you feel you couldn’t survive without your current properties and bank account?

If you answered YES to any of these questions, you could be suffering from an IMBALANCE in your ROOT CHAKRA. Your root chakra could either be UNDERSTIMULATED OR OVERSTIMULATED.

UNDERSTIMULATED

When your root chakra is understimulated, you feel detached and ungrounded. You feel lost, like you have nothing concrete you could hold on to. You feel uncertain. And no matter how GOOD or PURE your intentions seem to be, you can’t seem to manifest them in the real world.

OVERSTIMULATED

When the root chakra is overly stimulated, you feel that the material things around you are everything that matters to you. You may have a lot of money already, but you are never satisfied and always crave for more. Your peace of mind is dependent on the size of your financial wealth.

ACHIEVING BALANCE

When balanced, the root chakra is meant to give you stability and security. You feel confident. You are well grounded and connected without feeling too attached in material things. You can make things happen in real life. You are still guided by our good intentions but you are not self righteous nor cold.

There are different ways of balancing the chakra:

1. By sound
2. By color
3. By visualization
4. By exercise
5. By the use of elements
6. By taking off the mask

I will try to discuss the first five ways in my next articles because I would like to focus on the last one here.

BEGIN BY TAKING OFF YOUR MASK

TAKING OFF YOUR MASK means knowing yourself, knowing the true condition of your soul and shedding off disguises, pretenses, social conditioning and stereotypes you’ve followed and believed in all your life but does not really tell you who you are.

Who am I? What is the real state of my soul? Why am I doing what I’m currently doing in my life?

EXAMPLE:

1.  WHO AM I?

I’m a nobody, a sinner cursed to suffer all my life.

2.  WHAT IS THE REAL STATE OF MY SOUL?

I am angry at God because He made me this way. He made me poor. I can’t be rich because rich people are greedy. But I hate it that God allows those rich people to do bad things and abuse the poor.

3.  WHY AM I DOING WHAT I’M CURRENTLY DOING?

I’m sabotaging my own success because I’m afraid that if I succeed, I would turn to be like those successful people I hate.

In taking off your mask, in being true to yourself, you find out that you are NOT SATISFIED with your PHYSICAL REALITY. You may also find out the you BLAME GOD for it. But what if God says He won’t stop you from succeeding because He knows you will be a good person and that you an help many people? Can you now allow yourself to ACHIEVE that success?

The SELF may answer:

I’m afraid I CAN’T. I’ve avoided it for so long I don’t know if I could transform my intentions into reality. I don’t know if I have the strength. The fact is, I feel weak right now. I never realized this weakness until now.

You can start from that answer. You can start BELIEVING in yourself.

Your will be done on EARTH as it is in HEAVEN.

It will not be a matter of magic to gain the strength needed to develop the root chakra you have neglected for so long. But you can begin now.

Jesus says, “Come, take up your CROSS and follow me.”

Balancing the Chakras for Health

The Chakras which are the natural energy centers of our body need to be balanced in order for us to achieve good health. This is totally free and needs no amount of cash from our pockets. In this series, we continue to discuss How To Heal Our Body Without Spending Money.

This is the second article in our series. To read our first article Why Do We Get Sick, click here. Basically, we’ve identified the cause to all our diseases in one word – IMBALANCE. In this article, we continue to discuss ways on how we can achieve this BALANCE.

Some people may feel skeptical about chakras, it may sound so New Age or beyond the realm of normal people. But chakras are there and chakras continue working whether we accept them or not. And it’s not really difficult to understand them once we learn the practical things to which they apply to, in our health for instance.

I too had reservations about chakras. At first I thought they only pertain to “opening the third eye” and seeing great visions, or to achieving some supernatural powers. I’ve realized however that this is not quite true. This isn’t the complete and realistic concept about chakras.

My awareness of chakras deepened further when some of my chakras got imbalanced, an imbalance that lead to unfavorable physical conditions. When my heart chakra was unbalanced, I’ve experienced heart palpitations and hyperventilations. I felt I couldn’t breathe almost as if I’d die. When my solar plexus wasn’t balanced, I felt throbbing pains in my abdomen. When my third eye chakra became unbalanced, I had a terrible headache and even got problems with my eyes. That’s how it manifests! I’m even fortunate enough because I could have experienced worse manifestations.

If you can stay with me for a while, I shall try to guide you towards a simple understanding of the chakras and how by balancing them, we can achieve good health.

WHAT ARE CHAKRAS?

The word CHAKRA comes from the Sanskrit word meaning wheel or disc. They are discs of energy in specific energy centers of the body. There are seven major chakras located in the following:

1.Root chakra – located at the base of your spine
2.Sacral chakra – located below your navel
3.Solar Plexus – located at the lower abdomen
4.Heart chakra – located at the heart area
5.Throat chakra – located at the throat
6.Third Eye chakra – located in your forehead between your eyebrows
7.Crown chakra – located at the top of your head

Why are chakras important? Being energy centers, they connect our bodies to our etheric source and keeps the balance of the Universal Life Force circulating in our body. Without balance, as we have discussed in our first article in the series, we get sick.

Just imagine your power supply. Without electricity running in your office, you’ll be in the dark. You couldn’t do a thing, even a simple task like encoding and printing your reports. When there is no energy or when the energy is blocked, that’s the result. Now imagine a surge of electric current beyond what is required. Could you imagine it causing fire and severe destruction in your office? That’s the same with chakras. If these chakras are understimulated or overly stimulated, physical manifestations of the problem occur.

(There will be more about the detailed explanation of each chakra and their relationship to our physical health in the next articles.)

Remember the last time you got sick? What caused your sickness? A virus? Too much stress? Generally, we can classify the root of all sickness into the following:

1.External disturbance such as a virus or a germ
2.Internal disturbance such as inability to cope with stress of intense emotions

If we want to classify it further, we can identify the culprit for all diseases in one word: IMBALANCE. The reason why we get sick is because there is an imbalance in the body’s system caused either by external disturbances or by inner problems we’re not able to deal with fast enough before the problem occurs.

Take a look at the following scenarios causing imbalance:

1.You eat only junk foods. You hardly exercise. You don’t get enough sleep. Hence, your immune system becomes so weak that when you encounter a virus, your body immediately succumbs to it. The imbalance in your body’s immune system causes your body’s inability to fight off the virus.

2.You’re always anxious. Your job is so stress-related you hardly give your mind and body the chance to relax. You also take in more and more coffee because it helps you stay awake and live your stressful lifestyle. As a result, you have heart palpitations. You also have digestion problems because your body is always in a fight or flight mode.

3.You sit infront of the computer all day. When weekend comes, you sit infront of your TV screen. You eat nothing but fries, burger and fatty foods. As a result, you get obese. Your arteries are clogged and you suffer high blood pressure.

4.You take in more drugs than prescribed. Your liver can’t process all those drugs and eventually gets affected.

The body was meant to be healthy and in balance. When it is in balance, the body is able to heal itself. Take away this balance and the body’s natural processes fail, its healing abilities hindered. This is the reason why we get sick.

Can you now see the many factors contributing to your body’s imbalance nowadays?

1.Pollution
2.Toxic food
3.Nutritional deficiency
4.Lack of rest/sleep
5.Lack of exercise
6.Stress
7.Emotional issues
8.Germs/viruses

Can you also appreciate the role of thought in keeping the very important balance of the body? It is our thoughts, our mind that rules the many functions of our body. Take away a disciplined mind, take away hope and the will to survive and the physical body would surely follow in disintegration. I leave you with an excerpt from the book of James Allen “As a Man Thinketh”:

EFFECTS OF THOUGHTS ON HEALTH AND BODY

The body is the servant of the mind. It obeys the operations of the mind, whether they be deliberately chosen or automatically expressed. At the bidding of unlawful thoughts the body sinks rapidly into disease and decay; at the command of glad and beautiful thoughts it becomes clothed with youthfulness and beauty .

Disease and health, like circumstances, are rooted in thought. Sickly thoughts will express themselves through a sickly body. Thoughts of fear have been known to kill a man as speedily as a bullet and they are continually killing thousands of people just as surely though less rapidly. The people who live in fear of disease are the people who get it. Anxiety quickly demoralizes the whole body, and lays it open to the entrance of disease; while impure thoughts, even if not physically indulged, will sooner shatter the nervous system.

Strong pure, and happy thoughts build up the body in vigor and grace. The body is a delicate and plastic instrument, which responds readily to the thoughts by which it is impressed, and habits of thought will produce their own effects, good or bad, upon it.

If you would perfect your body, guard your mind. If you would renew your body, beautify your mind. Thoughts of malice, envy, and disappointment, despondency, rob the body of its health and grace. A sour face does not come by chance; it is made by sour thoughts. Wrinkles that mar are drawn by folly, passion, pride.

I know a woman of ninety-six who has the bright, innocent face of a girl. I know a man well under middle age whose face is drawn into in harmonious contours. The one is the result of a sweet and sunny disposition; the other is the outcome of passion and discontent. As you cannot have a sweet and wholesome abode unless you admit the air and sunshine freely into your rooms, so a strong body and a bright, happy, or serene countenance can only result from the free admittance into the mind of thoughts of joy and goodwill and serenity.

On the faces of the aged there are wrinkles made by sympathy others by strong and pure thought, and others are carved by passion; who cannot distinguish them? With those who have lived righteously, age is calm, peaceful, and softly mellowed, like the setting sun. I have recently seen a philosopher on his death-bed. He was not old except in years. He died as sweetly and peacefully as he had lived.

There is no physician like cheerful thought for dissipating the ills of the body; there is no comforter to compare with goodwill for dispersing the shadows of grief and sorrow. To live continually in thoughts of ill-will, cynicism, suspicion, and envy, is to be confined in a self-made prison hole. But to think well of all, to be cheerful with all, to patiently learn to find the good in all–such unselfish thoughts are the very portals of heaven; and to dwell day by day in thoughts of peace toward every creature will bring abounding peace to their possessor.