Finding My Chakra by Bob Earle
Bob Earle's paper won the essay contest for a free trip to Feathered Pipe Ranch retreat in August. Look for the other two essays in future newsletters by Vicki Moll and Paul D'Azzero that also won. They all three attended the retreat.
In two years of regular yoga practice, I have heard about the seven chakras, or centers of energy in the astral body, that rise from the base of the spine through the crown of the head, but I have never found or experienced them, not even one of them and not even once. Yet this doesn't frustrate or make me especially skeptical about their existence. In a man working on fifty, yoga unfolds slowly; it's a complex process requiring an encounter between the mind and the body which, despite my intellectual interests and athletic pursuits, I have spent a lifetime avoiding.
My first real steps into yoga as union came when I realized the mind is an essential ingredient within a posture. Thinking about a critical facet of a posture is essential to making it my friend. It's not enough to locate myself physically along a set of prescribed coordinates; I must also weigh down my rear foot mentally or take hold of a distant balance point mentally. Suppose, for instance, you were determined to reshape a piece of hardwood. Wouldn't it make sense to soak it before you tried bending it? In yoga, the watery element of reshaping the hardwood body is the mind. Muscular exertion and correct alignment isn't enough to generate flow and vitality in a seemingly motionless pose.
This has always been easier for me when the body parts I am trying to conform within a new mental landscape are limbs, hands, or feet. My wrists react quickly when fish bite. I like hopping from stone to stone to get across a creek. But my anatomical core, where the chakras exist, isn't so subtle and nimble in its perceptions and reactions. In fact, it is a numb, unresponsive area, almost an Antarctica. The back, the kidneys, the hip points...these parts of me are just there; they connect to nothing but themselves; they know nothing but themselves.
From such a starting point, back in my forty-eighth year, it's no wonder that talk of chakras sounded to me somewhat like talk of Shangri-La or Atlantis, but regular practice gradually has introduced me to the possibilities of reconciling my extremities and my core. I have begun to find strength, flexibility and energy to extend outwards from my center to my periphery. My mind has to help me in this because I usually can't feel any possibility of movement through my body alone when I'm attempting a new and difficult posture.
As a result I have felt, coming out of my core, a greater sense of well-being than I've ever known as an adult. This has been sporadic and intermittent, unpredictable and unsustainable, but it's special, it's something different. At certain times in the last six or eight months, I've just felt outstandingly good, whole, alive.
All the existential acids and physical pains that course through middle-age are gone, and whatever wisdom I possess isn't jaded, but fresh. It's as if I were eight years old again, and I know this buoyancy of mind and body is yoga.
But the next day, it's gone. No more sun and green grass in the valley. Just me there again, a good candidate for continued urban renewal and perhaps some gentrification.
I suspect that continued practice of postures, aided by more artful and disciplined pranayama (at which I'm not good) will lead me further in the direction of my transitory intimations of well-being. But I also sense that maximizing my efforts to integrate an engaged mind with an engaged body will require a field that is neither one nor the other. Enter the chakras, or, because it makes sense for a novice like me not to tackle the whole system at once, the chakra, my chakra, a single field and source of energy where the alchemy of mind and body mix together best.
Which chakra will it be?
The one I'm instantly drawn to and would settle for at the expense of all the others is the Ajna chakra, seat of the mind. Why? Because for all my love of things physical, the mind is my natural home. Left to my own resorts I read and write more than half the day, day after day, and sometimes wish that I could somehow read and write multiple books at the same time, all at once. Read Goethe while I was reading Mann; wrote an essay while I was writing a story. That to me would be good enough to warrant sacrificing the Sahasrara chakra, highest consciousness, itself. I wouldn't want more. I've been this way, more or less, since I was a child.
But it's never enough. No matter what I read, or what I write, it's never enough, and it never will be, and the Ajna chakra is probably the worst chakra for me to attend to first. Following the guidance of Jung that you should play to your weakness, not your strength, I think I need to focus on the illiterate seat of energy, the repository of Kundalini, the Muladhara chakra down in the subsexual nethers, inexpressive, hidden, forgotten. This is the chakra, of all chakras, which would make the quietest, most taciturn character in a play, the undramatic, stolid, one-trick pony which only (but astonishingly) acts by releasing its coiled organ of energy so that the other chakras can receive and struggle with the resulting excitement of the Kundaliniís kiss.
Earth, that's what I need, and Kundalini, that's what I suspect I've occasionally and surprisingly felt in recent months. It won't be easy to get there on a consistent basis, I'm sure. From a physical perspective, the postures that open the hips and activate the groins make me feel as though I'm trying to besiege a medieval castle with sticks and stones. From a mental perspective, I am an airborne Dedaelus who doesn't know how to land and sink my talons into the constantly gestating, mysterious, snake-rich soil, the Muladhara ground, generative, vital, and powerful beyond artifice. Clearly, these two perspectives will have to merge so that I can be drawn into the anti-me of the Muladhara chakra and my quiescent energy and bouyancy can rise up out of its yellow lotus. But that's the chakra I'm trying to find, the first one, with the smell of mud in its nostrils and speech that is little more than a hiss.