Calibrate Your First Chakra

Q: How might an unbalanced or misaligned first chakra impact my ability to live my best life?

A: In truth, any one of the chakras that is consistently unbalanced or misaligned can affect your overall experience of your life and impact your ability to authentically create and manifests your ideas.

The first chakra is a particularly interesting and powerful chakra, because more than any of the other chakras, it has and will track with every moment of every day of your life, from birth until your last breath. This is because as an infant, the first chakra was the energetic mechanism for understanding your needs and communicating them through your different types of cries.

An infant’s awareness is centered on very basic and primal needs: food, rest, nurture and comfort. Mothers and primary caregivers become quite facile at discerning the difference between an infant’s sleepy cry and their hungry or soiled diaper cry.

As an adult, your first chakra in the Astral (emotional) body remains centered on awareness of your needs. You have needs for income, emotional, mental and physical stimulation, companionship, leisure, as well as the basic need for food, shelter and clothing. The sophistication of the first chakra evolves as you do, so that you can focus on and actualize a broader range of needs.

When a young infant or toddler does not get basic needs met, perhaps because of neglect, trauma, poverty or other variables, it may be difficult to develop resilience and agency to take care of him or herself as an adult. He or she may also pull on others to solve problems because of a feeling of helplessness and perhaps victimization.

First chakra issues are complex and multi-faceted. Often the imprints have no verbal context, as the individual experiencing them was too young for language.

Compassion, patience, gentleness, perseverance, and validation help each forward step anchor in and become part of the integrated ability to recognize and meet the needs that emerge throughout life.

When struggle is a factor in someone’s early experience, it’s not unusual for an energy practitioner to discover that their clients first chakra is vibrating out of relation to the rest of the chakras. In the system that I teach, all chakras rotate clockwise. An out of relation chakra will rotate counterclockwise. When a first chakra consistently rotates counterclockwise, the person has a great deal of difficulty identifying and owning his needs.

Additionally, the first chakra may be closed down more than is appropriate to generate the energy to meet those needs.

Working with the rotation and opening of the first chakra will help increase energy flow, and will support the bubbling up of awareness of emotional, non-verbal content that can be released to invite deeper presence and connection.

It may not be enough to simply shift the rotation and energy flow of the first chakra, though in some cases, that can truly get things moving again. If the implications of early experience haven’t been identified, and the awareness that the individual can be the master of his or her destiny, the chakra evolution may not fully resolve the issue.

Knowing that the first chakra is also an intimate part of our grounding to the Earth is often a place of deep comfort. Grounding frequently throughout the day, especially after shifting the rotation of the chakra to clockwise, and setting the chakra opening to 30% (from perhaps 15-20% open), helps the energy body to gradually and incrementally make the shift to a deeper inner connection and alignment.

Adjust the chakra rotation.

To adjust the rotation of a first chakra, trace a clockwise circle on the open palm of your hand, to see and relate to the direction the chakra needs to rotate as you imagine resetting its direction.

Adjust the chakra opening.

With a vegetable steamer as a prop to connect with chakra openings, use your hands to open the vegetable steamer from tightly closed (15-20% open) to 30% open. Notice that it’s not a huge adjustment. It won’t create vulnerability or flooding of energy. As you play with the vegetable steamer, you’re mimicking the methodology you’ll imagine to open and adjust a chakra opening.

Ground the energy body. (pdf download)

Bring awareness to the first chakra (base of the spine in men, between the ovaries in women). Imagine a ball of bright green energy as wide as your hips rotating in the first chakra. Let the ball drop, forming a cord of energy that extends into the center of the Earth. Grounded. Connected. Integrated with the energy of the Earth. Observe, notice and validate your connection to this beautiful planet and claim your right to thrive in your body and your life.