Last week we talked about how holding onto the past affects your physical body, specifically, we talked about how you hold onto the past in your joints, digestive system, and shoulders. This week I want to share more about how we hold onto the past in our chakra system.
When we experience suffering, like holding onto the past, most people donât take into consideration how it affects their energetic system. So when you find yourself still holding on to the past, looking at where holding on is stored in your energetic system can be the key to finally letting go.
The chakras are one of the many maps of our energetic systems. They give us a tool and language to talk about our energetic body and how energy moves throughout our system. Recently, Iâve begun working with the 9 centers in human design. These 9 centers expand on the chakra system in a way that I believe is more accurate and specific to each person. The two additional centers in human design are the G-center, which broke off from the heart chakra, and the Spleen, which broke off from the Solar Plexus.
Why are you still holding onto the past and how is that showing up in your energy centers?
Your root center governs safety, security, and your existence in the physical world. The root center is most affected by trauma that you have been through in your life. When you experience anything that threatens your safety this sends a message to the root chakra to shut down. It cuts off your ability to be grounded in the physical world and sends all your energy upward. When in balance, the energy in your system should be cycling through your centers smoothly. When the root shuts down this energy becomes pinched off and that energy can no longer cycle through your centers so all that energy sits in the upper chakras.
The root stays blocked when we canât move past our trauma and learn to communicate with our system that it is safe to exist. To overcome the past, we have to acknowledge that we are safe now and work to calm the nervous system so that our stress response is no longer activated. This way, we can finally relax and allow ourselves to exist in the present moment instead of in hyper-vigilance, waiting for the past to come up and stab us in the back.
The sacral center is responsible for our creativity, sexuality, pleasure, and joy. Being stuck in âI canât have itâ mode is a clear sign that youâre holding onto the past and that your sacral center is out of balance. It is here that we hold onto past versions of ourselves that were deprived of pleasure and joy. We hold onto patterns of self-denial that keep us from experiencing joy in the present moment.
Energetically, this center needs flow, we need to let things flow into us and allow them to flow out. When we gain something that brings us joy, we must let it flow through us and release it back into the Universe. Otherwise, we risk filling up that space so that we are no longer able to receive.
Your spleen center is where you take in information and process it. Itâs the center of our bodyâs intuition. It is also where we process fear. If you are holding onto the past in this center it will show up as allowing your fears to keep you stagnant or in making decisions from fear that keep you small. Holding onto the past here can also show up as an inability to listen to or trust your bodyâs intuition.
The key here is to learn to trust. Learn to trust your body and the messages it sends you. You can do this through intuitive practices such as intuitive eating, where you listen to your bodyâs messages about what to eat to nourish your body. This can be an involved process where you track how the food you eat makes you feel throughout the day. Another way to let go of the past is to take risks, to let ourselves get uncomfortable moving out of our comfort zone so that we can grow and become who we want to be instead of staying who we once were.
The solar plexus is your emotional center. This is your emotional guidance system, it becomes blocked when we hold onto our emotions and let them build up. I always imagine this center as a pressure cooker. If we donât allow ourselves to experience our emotions and instead shove them down and hold onto them, they build up like a pressure cooker. That pressure has to be released at some point, so if your pressure cooker builds up too much it manifests itself as random outbursts of emotion.
If youâve been filling up your pressure cooker of emotions for far too long without releasing the pressure. Then, in order to let go of the past, you have to release the pressure, you have to allow yourself to move through all the emotions youâve been building up and learn to experience new emotions as they arise. When you do this, youâll be more able to deal with the present moment.
Your G-center is where you derive your sense of self and identity. This center becomes blocked when we hold onto past versions of ourselves or versions of ourselves that others have shown or told us to become. To me, this center isnât so much about fighting to discover who we are and what our purpose is. Rather, itâs about choosing who we want to be and allowing ourselves to just be ourselves in any given moment. Our purpose in this life is to be ourselves, we all came here to be who we are and that in itself is a gift. Our purpose isnât some grandiose thing beyond ourselves that we have to discover.
The heart is where we give and receive love. It is the way we relate to others. The heart is also where we hold our self-worth. Here we hold onto grief and feel undervalued by others. Imagine your heart as space in your chest. This space has the ability to expand and contract based on what we fill this space with. When we are holding in the heart, this space becomes restricted and contracts limiting our capacity to experience feeling valued and loved.
The way to be present in the heart is to make space for love to come into our hearts. We do this by filling ourselves with self-love and treating ourselves as valued human beings. We can also utilize the breath to physically make space in the heart. The more space we make, the more the heart expands and the more capacity we have to experience love. The space that we can create in the heart to experience love is vast and infinite.
Your throat is your center for speaking your truth. It becomes blocked by the past when we hold onto voices from the past that ring in our heads as negative self-talk. Speaking or thinking negatively about yourself is never your truth, no matter how much it feels like it is. The truth is that you are a perfect being just as you are. Just like the heart, the throat becomes restricted when it is blocked. This can feel like a choking feeling, tightness in the throat, or a lump in the throat.
The key to opening the throat center is becoming aware of how you speak and think about yourself. It can also be helpful to pay attention to how you speak and think about others as this is often a reflection of you. Here it is best to adopt the principle, âIf you donât have anything nice to say, donât say anything at all.â This doesnât mean that you should never express negativity. However, you should strive to focus on the positive aspects of yourself and others and clear away the negative voices.
The third eye is the center where we take in information in the form of thoughts and beliefs. It takes in your thoughts, ideas, and beliefs and connects them to your past and present so you can use this information in the future. The third eye becomes blocked when we focus too much on the past. When weâre focused too heavily on the past, the past becomes our future, we see the past reflected in every present moment, and it becomes impossible to move forward.
We can overcome this by clearing the space in our minds through meditation so that we can begin to take in new information from the present moment. We can access our archive of the past when we need to, but only when it serves us. When we are present our minds are clear and we are inspired by our experiences.
Your crown center is your center for spiritual connection. It is how we make sense of the world around us. When this center is balanced we feel connected to something bigger than ourselves, to the world and the people around us. This connection can come in a variety of different ways. However, when this center is blocked by the past, we hold onto experiences that tell us that we are separate from our higher power, that we are separated from others and the world around us.
To open this center, we have to allow ourselves to experience a connection with something bigger than ourselves. It doesnât mean that we have to believe things that arenât true to us. However, we do need to see that we are not the center of the Universe, that there is a purpose to our existence, and that how we show up and interact in the world matters.
When we hold onto the past it blocks our energy centers and keeps energy from flowing smoothly through our energetic system. We may still be holding onto the past because these energy patterns have been so built up over time that they can be difficult to correct. Overcoming these blockages can be a lot of work and takes conscious involvement in our healing process. Balancing our centers canât be done in an hour, it takes consistent effort and dedication to keep things in balance. Learning to balance your centers is a practice that can last a lifetime.
If youâre interested in learning how to balance your centers and where your specific blockages are this is exactly what we do in Intuitive Healing Sessions. After an intuitive healing session, you will have clarity about how your energy system is operating and how to bring it back into balance. Over time, your centers flow and change and new blockages may arise, so it can be helpful to revisit how your energy is operating and discover new ways to bring yourself back into balance. You can book an Intuitive Healing Session online or in person!
With love and light,
Natasha
