How My Unexpected Discovery of the Eastern Mind-Body Approach Helped Me Reclaim My Life
The same stream of life that runs through the world runs through my veins.
-Rabindranath Tagore (Bengali poet)
It was a plot twist I didn’t see coming. An audiobook that slipped off the shelf at the public library. I was looking for audio storybooks for my young daughters—anything to help them play independently so I could have a bit of down-time in the afternoons.
I read the title: “The Ultimate Anti-Career Guide: The Inner Path to Finding Your Work in the World” by Rick Jarow, PhD.
I was six years out of a faith crisis that had upturned my life in every way. I’d lost my community, my career and my sense of who I was supposed to be in life. But the truth was, I was only now beginning to process the effects of it—that is, when I had time to think. I spent most days cutting up snacks and placing them in tiny plastic bowls, moving from one task to the next—pre-school drop-off and pickup, playtime and bath time and bedtime and trying to run a floundering creative business. Life was full to the brim. But underneath the fullness, I was deeply struggling.
I toggled between a sensation of floating and feeling as though my limbs were heavy sandbags I could barely lift. Rage coursed through me, then plummeted to grief, then sheer exhaustion. I could barely name my feelings, never mind move through them. And the worst part was the disorientation. I had once had a life I thrived in—life in church, life in ministry. Since leaving that world, it had become glaringly apparent that I didn’t really know how to live in this world very well.
“Your vocation is a pure expression of your lifeforce,” the back cover of the audiobook read.
Lifeforce. I liked the sound of that. Whatever my life-force was, I felt far, far away from it. (Little did I know that my lifeforce was expressing itself loud and clear—in my symptoms.)
Back at home, I put the CD on and felt soothed by Rick Jarow’s warm tone, his faint Brooklyn accent. He approached personal development through a holistic lens, and referred to a cross-cultural energetic model handed down from different traditions, a kind of map for reaching our potential by living in alignment with our life’s energy. In the west, he said, we have the model of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, which is a mere 75 years old. The eastern model—thousands of years old and a more embodied model—is the chakra system.
Now, dear reader…If you’ve ever been in a church meeting of folks praying against “the new-agers,” you will understand this: the “me” six years before would have rebuked the devil from my house, yanked the CD from the stereo and hurled it into the flames of the nearest bonfire (I confess to having burnt a Harry Potter book or two this way. Sorry J.K.).
But I no longer responded to those knee-jerk reactions. I kept listening.
The chakra system, according to eastern tradition, is a kind of blueprint encoded in our bodies, made up of seven centers along the spine that govern the free flow of prana, or life-force through the body. The energy centers correspond to major areas of our lives:
Survival
Emotions
Power
Love
Communication
Intuition
Spirituality
Each chakra contains the programming we acquired or inherited around each area. We can work with each chakra to heal the deep patterns of our life experience. If we developed in ideal conditions, our chakras would be balanced, all wheels turning smoothly (in fact the word “chakra” means “wheel” in Sanskrit). But if we developed in conditions where aspects of one or more chakras were compromised, we’ll need to spend time cultivating the qualities of that chakra. We can do this through mindful breathing, embodied awareness and mantras/phrases that affirm the essence of each quality.
There is not enough space in a blog post to include all the phrases associated with each chakra, but I will share here the essence of each one:
Chakra One: I am safe, grounded and centered.
Chakra Two: I am in touch with my feelings
Chakra Three: I have agency
Chakra Four: I am worthy to love and be loved
Chakra Five:I speak with my authentic voice
Chakra Six: I trust my intuition
Chakra Seven: I am connected to the Source* of all things.
I couldn't help but notice that, for me, each one of these phrases represented something that had been compromised or harmed by the doctrines of my religious upbringing. These spaces taught threatening narratives that I realized also correlated with the chakras:
Eternal safety and security impacted my first chakra
Emotions were shamed or attributed to sinful nature, impacting my second chakra
I was conditioned to distrust my own agency and choices, impacting my third chakra
I was told I needed a pre-requisite to be worthy of love, impacting my fourth chakra
The suppression of my authentic voice was encouraged, impacting my fifth chakra
Religion taught me to fear any mention of intuition, impacting my sixth chakra
And religion taught me my connection to Source* was conditional, impacting my seventh chakra
Something in particular that Rick Jarow mentioned jumped out at me. He said that while the chakras are meant to develop step by step, one building on the next, a person can override the natural process of development and move too quickly into higher energy centers through things like drugs or breath-work or fasting. The lower chakras are meant to be a sturdy container for the higher ones. Without the support of the lower chakras to hold and contain an expansive experience, individuals will find themselves disoriented and groping in the dark.
I couldn’t help but think of some of the church experiences I had—revival meetings, ramped-up prayer services, the congregation getting high on collective energy, the frantic calling out for God. Even if some of it was legitimate—a genuine energetic experience—I knew a lot of people from those days who were indeed groping in the dark, not thriving.
Listening to Rick Jarow’s teachings and doing the gentle practices healed something in me, though I couldn’t have said why at the time. Years later, when I did my somatic trauma training, I heard Peter Levine say this about trauma healing:
“You don’t have to go back and relive the trauma. You have to give the body experiences that contradict those feelings of helplessness, rage, or collapse.”
The affirmations and mindsets of each chakra were, for me, these contradicting experiences. Slowly, I began to replace my old internalized patterns with new, supportive ones.
I…
Grew more rooted and centered
Began to befriend my emotions
Developed self-trust and agency
Internalized my own worthiness to love and be loved
Began to claim my authentic voice
Decolonized the concept of intuition
And came home to my innate connection to Source
In my work as a religious trauma coach, I’ve come to believe that the chakra system is a powerful framework for rebuilding our lives after the loss of a religious framework.
If you’ve read this far, I’d like to invite you into a practice that cultivates the first chakra. Feel free to listen first, then, if it feels right for you, do the guided practice. Do you notice any sense of being more centered and present? If you do, I invite you to do it a few times and notice how the cultivation of grounding affects your life.
*Language for this varies among traditions. You could substitute any term you like to refer to the divine: The Great Mystery/Spirit/God/the Universe…I like “Source”.
Kim June Johnson is a yoga therapist, mindfulness facilitator, somatic coach and associate practitioner at CTRR. If you’re interested in dismantling toxic beliefs and building supportive ones, Kim’s upcoming support group Reclaiming Your Life After Toxic Religion focuses on this and begins Monday, March 17th. Schedule a free inquiry call with her to learn more and register.
To learn more about working with Kim, click here.
