On Power and the Solar Plexus ~ Join me tomorrow (Tues) for a Coming Home meditation from 9-10am EST
Dear friends,
Join me tomorrow for Coming Home meditation practice. We’ll spend the next two weeks focused on the solar plexus chakra. The practice will build on what we’ve explored at the root and the sacral chakra, but please feel free to come even if this is your very first time meditating with us. It’s a lovely community-of-practice and we’d be happy to welcome some new folks. We gather from 9-10am EST on Zoom for a brief talk and then a 30-minute sit.
Come for the community and sharing. Come for the discipline of sitting in the morning. Come for the learning about your own subtle body. Come for the healing. Come because you’re curious! If you’ve never experienced my style of leading a guided meditation, below is a link to last week’s practice. Prior to this sit, we talked for about 30 minutes. For me, the talking part is as meditative and healing as the sitting, but I don’t record that part. I want people to feel free when they share.
Maybe you feel you know the chakras already. I did, until I was humbled. I thought I was rooted and then learned I wasn’t. Thought the second chakra was flowing and then felt it wasn’t…It seems they take steady and regular attending. Each time I return to attend to them, I learn more, liberate more, and integrate more. There is an ideal flow of energy through the chakras—you might equate this to optimal health. This is what I am seeking without stress or strain. I want to find my way to a healthy and open expression of my energy body. Where there are blockages, I want to find release. Where there is over-compensation, I want to relax. I want this vessel to be finely attuned…the beautiful instrument it was meant to be.
I used to read simplistic descriptions of the chakra system is new age books and feel like they were true, but flat—almost cartoonish. As I explore the chakras in my life and practice, I find they have a profound role to play in our development, evolution, and health—physical, psychological, emotional, spiritual. I am humbled by how little I know and how arrogant I was about what I thought I knew. This series has given me a chance to go deeper and to share what I am learning with my community.
This week we focus on the solar plexus. If you are interested in issues of power (or powerlessness), control, ego (healthy and unhealthy), aggression, boundaries, the sense of self in the world (the “I” in the “we”), force, agency, will, strength, enactment…then you are interested in the solar plexus. Let me share with you some of what has been coming up for me, specifically around POWER.
The solar plexus is located below the ribs and above the navel, right where you might feel a gut punch. But, also where you might source your power in a martial art or feel a gut feeling about someone or a situation. It is said to be yellow in the Hindu tradition (like the sun) and resonates with the seed syllable, RAM. It is the seat of the fire element and is linked to the quality of radiant power and being seen, feeling seen, recognized and presumably appreciated. The solar plexus, when activated or triggered, can feel like a clinched fist. It is often activated around issues of power or powerlessness and also boundary violations.
Power issues are centralized at the solar plexus, though of course they draw on the lower chakras and sometimes invoke the heart…even tricking the heart into playing games the heart knows are wrong (this hurts the heart). Power plays are usually about safety or security. They can be about belonging and even about sensual enjoyment or craving.
Human beings are suffering from a massive addiction to a bad kind of power, a dominator paradigm, that feels like a high, that feels like cocaine. It’s an addiction beyond any pharmaceutical crisis or the imaginings of the most evil drug cartel…in fact, it is causal to these. It is the underbelly, the air we breathe, the norm. Sadly. It is a disease of the human condition at the present moment and we have to address it if we’re going to grow beyond it.
A healthy solar plexus helps us feel radiant, strong, capable, like a force in this world, clear about who we are and comfortable in our skin, with strong boundaries. A dysfunction in the solar plexus can lead to sucking, draining, hungry energy…insecurity, not feeling seen, overcompensating, being a bully, aggression, using people or being used, addiction…being caught up in victim and perpetrator stories. Whether you over-index on the side of too much power or too little, an imbalance here will throw you off your center.
I have a lot more to say about power. I will say some of it tomorrow, and I will write it in the coming days. I really wanted to write it tonight, but I had a new addition to the family (see below) and she needs my attention. Goodnight for now, hope to see you tomorrow.
