Second Chakra - Orange

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Second Chakra - Second Day

 

Second Chakra: Svadhisthana/sweetness/Orange

 

Swimming in the Waters of Difference

 

Lose your mind and come to your senses. Fritz Perls

 

As we enter the second chakra, we encounter the watery realm of

emotions and sexuality. Where we have worked for grounding and

stability in the first chakra, we now cultivate feelings and movement;

where we have been concerned with survival and structure, we now focus

on sexuality and pleasure. Our associated element has shifted from

earth to water, from solid to liquid. In this transmutation we

encounter change. Through consistency, consciousness finds meaning;

through change it finds stimulation and expansion.

 

If we think of the body as a vessel for the soul and spirit, then the

element of earth in chakra one provides support and containment for

the fluid essence of chakra two, much like a cup holds water. Without

approprite containment, water flows out and the cup runs dry. With

excessive containment, however, water cannot flow at all and becomes

stagnant and dull. Ideally, we want to have a cup that is capble of

filling, holding, and emptying. The task of the first chakra was to

build this continer. Now we look to its contents.

 

To find consistency within change is to embrace the unfolding flow.

Where we developed grounding, stability, focus, and stillness in the

first chakra, now our second chakra challenge is just the opposite; to

let go, flow, move, feel, and yield. Only by moving does our

consciousness expand, and only through change is our consciousness

stimulated. Movement and change stimulate awakening.

 

Movement overcomes the inertia of chakra one. Through movement, we

extend our field of perception, increasing our sensory input. By

moving the body, we build muscle tissue, increase circulation,

stimulate nerve endings, and generally enhance our flexibility and

aliveness. The flow of pleasure and excitation through the nervous

system bathes the organism in sensation and awareness and awakens the

consciousness within. Movement becomes its own pleasure.

 

By paying attention to the way we move, we can uncover previously

buried issues and feelings. In the first chakra, the structural forms

of the body gave us clues to unconscious process. In the second

chakra we observe the way these forms move and make contact.

 

The senses are the essential link between the inner and outer worlds.

Only through the senses do we transcend isolation and make connection

to a larger sphere. Sensate experience is simultaneously physical,

emotional, and spiritual. The senses are the gateway between the

internal and external world. Sight, sound, touch, taste, and hearing

give us a constantly changing inner matrix of the world around us,

through which we form our basic belief systems, coping strategies, and

thought processes. The senses are the data input of our overall

system. They orient us in the world, allow us to connect, give

meaning to our experience. Through our senses, we differentiate

between pleasure and pain, we expand or contract, move forward or

backward, react or enact.

 

When there is pain or emptiness, our senses shut down. When this

happens, we restrict information entering our consciousness, and cut

ourselves off from the world around us. Senses are the only means we

have of experiencing connection.

 

The complex combination of sensation and feeling gives us the

emotional texture of experience. Senses, as the language of feeling,

form the basis of our values. How we perceive something and how we

feel about it are the ways that we determine value. Without a sensual

connection to what is around us, we lose our sense of values and

distinctions.

 

Second Chakra: change, movement, flow, sensation, pleasure, emotion,

need, desire, the shadow, guilt, duality, sexuality.

 

(The book goes into all of these...great stuff!)

 

Taken from: Eastern Body Western Mind by Anodea Judith