Thoughts on…The First Chakra, The Base
BACKGROUND: Most of my knowledge of chakras comes from a series of lectures on the Tibetan chakra system by Joseph Campbell, mythology expect and author of a Hero with a Thousand Faces. In my early twenties, I obsessively listened to everything he had on this topic. As in, until the cassette tapes warped because I listened so much. The recordings went out of circulation for a while, and are now available again for audio streaming on Amazon. Yay!
CAVEAT: Campbell was a brilliant scholar, but you couldn’t exactly call him a trailblazer in terms of feminism or Judeo-Christian relations. It doesn’t feel right to celebrate the positive sides of his work without acknowledging his less-attractive attributes. So, consider them acknowledged.
Okay, back to Chakras. The first Chakra is called the Base, and its energy comes from the base of your spine. The base is an animal level of spirituality, and there’s nothing wrong with that. At any chakra, you can find enlightenment (which to me is defined as a profound sense of peace.) There’s also a whole school of thought about activating your chakra through physical movement (yoga), but I know dick about that, so I’m not going to talk about it.
At a Base level, spirituality is a relationship with your Almighty in exchange for survival, or as Campbell put it, for ‘health, wealth and progeny.’ Learning about the first Chakra freaked me out. I realized that (for me anyway) I’d seen the spiritual plane as a kind of cosmic catalog where I stored up credits in form of good deeds and then cashed them in for health, wealth and progeny. I was stumped. Was there anything more to the whole spiritual journey thing than giving and getting? I couldn’t even imagine what it could be.
Well, fortunately for me, there were a shit-ton more chakras that I could learn about. Go me! Next up: the sexuality chakra, woo hoo!
Coming Soon: Chakra Two
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