Orange You Glad (You Have a Second Chakra)?

What to blog, what to blog...? With our new website and the built-in blogging mechanism I've been wracking my brain to think of topics to blog about. Silly me. As per usual, I've been using the wrong chakra for the job, my 3rd chakra intellectual orientation. From my 3rd chakra, everything I already know seems "old hat," so why would anyone want to hear about that?

But at Pathways For Healing we've accumulated 25 years of wisdom, or at least knowledge and experience, about energy and energy work. So maybe there are a few items that, while they may seem old hat to my self-critical and intellectual consciousness, may be news to our readers. We'll see.

Working with clients this week I recognized that much of what we understand about the nature of emotional 2nd Chakra energy, might seem counterintuitive to some. The 2nd Chakra is generally understood as the seat of the emotional body, and its orange energy is the base-frequency for the flow of our emotional experience. When I first was studying energy healing, especially being a psychotherapist, it seemed logical to me that if you pump more orange energy into a person they will become more emotional. Makes sense, right? More emotional energy equals more emotions. Except it was usually just the opposite.

Not infrequently I see clients who are in an emotional state: overwrought, hypersensitive and emotionally reactive, feeling over-stimulated and flooded by everything that happens around them. They may report feeling “skinless,” as if everything gets in and they have no barrier to the feelings of others, especially towards themselves. Is this too much emotional energy? Far from being evidence of having too much emotional, 2nd Chakra energy, this is actually a sign of too little 2nd Chakra energy.

Why? Because adequate amounts of that orange frequency 2nd Chakra energy gives us an emotional cushion and social buffer, something between our skin and the outer world, as well as gives us a sense of ease and comfort we need for our day to day functioning. 2nd Chakra energy is identified with the nature of water: it has flow and is liquid in nature. It moistens dry things such as overly dry body tissues, especially the joints. It dilutes the “mud” of stagnant energy and emotion so it can be flushed from our system. It gives us “squish” and cushion that eases tautness and creates a buffer zone between our body and everything else. If there is not enough watery, 2nd Chakra energy, we have no cushion, no flow, little comfort, and are dry, taut and irritated as well as more easily “set off” emotionally.

It’s interesting to watch someone who starts in that dry and overwhelmed state, transform as one runs thus juicy, orange, 2nd Chakra energy into their body and energy field. You can see them settle into the table. Their limbs ease and unfold as if taut internal strings have been soaked in water and slackened. They describe a sense of flow and movement in their body. You can actually see, and they can feel, the cushion of energy that grows around them, and this cushion makes them feel safer and more at ease, full and replete. One person said “I feel puffy and light as a cloud!”

Now, at about this point there might be some emotions that float to the surface, especially if lack of 2nd Chakra energy has prevented feelings from flowing naturally, so that they’ve been hidden inside. Assuming there is not something traumatic about the nature of emotion itself, most people can be usefully supported to simply allow the wave of feeling to flow through them, knowing that like all water this feeling is a wave that rises, crests, and ebbs. So if they can allow the natural flow of the wave (or two) the feeling will emerge and flow out into expression. And then be expressed and gone. If there is something challenging for them to face in these feelings, then having more cushion of emotional energy helps support them to be able to address it.

One of my favorite memories of the impact of 2nd Chakra energy was in an energy healing class we were teaching at Pathways. We were having people practice a pattern of treatment that involved running orange, watery energy into the joints of the body. One small group consisted of three students who collectively were perhaps the most dry group of people in the class, two psychologists and one an engineer, all intellectual, serious and heady by habit. As they generated more and more of the orange, wet, emotional frequency, they seemed to reach some critical mass—and began to giggle! One person started giggling, and that triggered another, until all three of them were laughing and slapping the table in hysterics. They were literally “ripped” on orange. It was clear that their giggles were not stimulated by anything anyone did or said, just their being full of ebullient orange energy.

Sound good to you? We could all use a little more of this. Maybe those monks wearing orange robes aren’t so solemn after all.

Blessings,
Jim