A Root Chakra Journey: Getting Real About Oneness

Looking back I see that the first months of dancing and feeling into my base or root chakra I barely felt the connection to the Earth energy that we were being invited to experience. I could see the facilitators’ intent reaching down to the to Earth, I could see/feel her pulling that Divine Feminine life force into her own body; when I imitated her movements I knew I was experiencing only a small part of what I witnessed. My body desperately craved more. I knew that if I kept moving and calling and breathing I would connect deeper until the experience was authentically mine, not the mime.

With hindsight I see too much head and not enough groundedness: so much denial of self, a refusal to witness and accept my own need to feel/be part of a tribe. I can hear myself saying over the years that I needed to be a contributing member of humanity. What I remained clueless to was that my humanity was a nebulous over there, anywhere but here where I am humanity. This masked the pain of feeling ostracized by tribe and was felt/expressed as an unrelenting desire to be seen, to be heard, to be special. That need couldn’t be met. I couldn’t hear or see me for me either.

The first time I witnessed my resistance to tribe or community was October 2008 when our facilitator expressed her joy at having the dance tribe gathered again after a hiatus. I could feel her genuine joy against which I found I felt not a drop. That got my attention as it coincided with a discovery that I had been disrespecting and disenfranchising myself from the political sectors of society.

The memory that came up dancing root chakra first day of the retreat was the story Mom told of how when the nurse brought me to her in the hospital she denied that I was her newborn baby because I was too beautiful. Whether I felt the abandonment as a newborn or not, every time I heard the story during my childhood I felt abandoned by the story, not loved and special as Mom intended I feel. Mine are all the classic reasons for avoiding the tribe, fear, distrust, anger/rage, betrayal, this lifetime, other life times. Too, I see now that I lived many classic symptoms of an under active/over active root chakra, with poverty consciousness at the top of the list.

I did not sleep well the first time I participated in a Kundalini Trancen Dance. After three nights of not sleeping well at the retreat, I knew I needed to ask Leyolah for help. I also shared about the newly awakened pain in my left hip (feminine side), a pain that had also come up the first time I danced, a pain I thought I had danced through.

As she laid her hand on my hip she suggested that I needed to focus on grounding myself well and thoroughly before going to bed. As she spoke the words I felt their truth. She instructed me to find the ecstasy in my legs. As she said that I realized that it was true that the goose bumps that for me often signal the ecstatic state never covered my legs, only my torso, arms, neck and head. As I retrieve this memory by writing these words I remember the need to focus on bringing the ecstasy down into my legs these next weeks and months. (I felt goose bumps down my legs at the height of our dance last night. (Dec.8, 2008) Yes, yes, yes!)

During the sixth day of the retreat, when my room mate was pulling out early, the old feelings of not being worthy and being abandoned and betrayed came up full tilt boogie. In the context of the retreat I was able to witness yet experience the grief and anger without getting enmeshed in the old story. I am not a five year old girl, I choose to be the grown woman experiencing another grown woman making a choice that went against the grain of the group. I was able to confirm my initial congratulations to her about her courage to face and make her difficult decision. I did not in the least loop back into my old story of abandonment and was grateful for the validation of my good health as it were, by the whole experience.

I found my little girl, rather she showed up one day this week as I was distilling my experiences with root chakra. In feeling into her, around five years of age, I remembered the anguish and loneliness of not feeling supported, nurtured, loved. I remembered the feeling of not belonging where I was, of being called a bad girl when I knew I was a good girl. I remembered pining for my real family to show up. I remembered meeting my first girl friend the first day of school. I felt I had found a family member. At six years of age, we walked to school together, holding hands, promising we’d marry twin brothers so we could stay close. We named our children. I remembered her death three months later. I remembered being beaten and told to forget about her when I expressed my grief. I had to stop being a good girl to forget her, which I did. I began cracking into pieces.



No matter how clear in my head I was or am about my Oneness with all of Life, as long as the sludge of unresolved “scar tissue” resided at my energetic root chakra I was unable to fold all of humanity into my heart or to use Leyolahs’ words “ecstatically embody the fullness of our Oneness”. Without owning tribe I remained always outside Oneness, separated as it were by divisions within self and unable to truly ground myself. As I explored root I found I had really let parts of myself take up space outside me, forming a mini tribe of parts and components of myself to take up the space left void and empty without an authentic love connection to tribe. No wonder no joy.

Separation beliefs begin in our core/root chakra. For years I didn’t make the connection between using politics, politicians, doctors, lawyers, teachers and such, all part of our/my larger community/tribe as scapegoats in the blame game and the separation ideology I knew needed undoing. My attitudes and beliefs toward sections of my culture have come up to be peeled away steadily this year. It began with committing to meeting with women in sacred ways regularly, which led to the Kundalini dance circle. The dance cycles have insured that the layers of the onion in my being called social conditioning keep coming up to be seen for what is real and released if need be.

My original attraction to the dance came with an unparalleled conviction that I needed the grounding that this work offered as a counter weight for the heady, third eye meditation service with the Vessels of Peace. For me, after years of building an energetic sludge to the dynamic life giving Divine Feminine energies by disrespecting my physical ancestors feminine legacy, it feels perfect to dedicate myself to clearing those blocks/bricks through the cleansing connecting breathes between Mama Gaia and my root chakra. I am made whole and complete in this practice.



If we as subtle activists are to fulfill our creative potential as activists, a journey through our subtle or chakric body can serve to build parameters within which to better utilize the potential of that subtle activity.