The root chakra, where the spirit of fear of the Lord lives, is also where my wounded inner child is constantly screaming, and where my healthy inner child looks on the world with fascination. My dysfunctional background means that, for years, I've been able to focus only on the wounded inner child. It helps me see where my own impairment comes from. Fear and defensiveness are often the emotions I have easiest access to, but feelings of humor and serenity are possible too--if I would only allow for a softening of heart.
The sacral chakra, where the spirit of knowledge is, is also where my growing inner child either stifled his potential, or allowed it to flourish. The cynicism I've looked at the world with--the part of me that thinks playing is "dumb"--makes me think I've payed more attention to the stifling than the flourishing. This has wounded my ability to be basically intuitive. Creativity is about waiting for the answer to occur to me, and waiting for realization is something I really struggle with. I'd rather supply a series of my own answers, so that getting by happens by process of elimination. I need to learn to wait.
The solar plexus, where the spirit of might descends and remains, is where I've either learned or neglected the gentle and focused use of power. Of course, I can see the dysfunction more than the healing. I feel deficient in my ability to call forth positive intentions, to rouse gentle attention. I feel impaired in my ability to work for the sake of working, without ego supplying a really drastic narrative that makes the whole thing seem more risky than it is. It's never just "go to work." It's always "go to work, try not to get fired, or else you'll be homeless and that'll be terrible." It's never "feel all your feelings, and let them go." It's always, "feel the feelings that don't threaten high functioning. Neglect the rest, you don't have time for them." Developing the ability to more carefully use intention and attention is part of the class I was mentally absent for.
The heart chakra, where the spirit of counsel is--this is where I negotiate taking responsibility. The spirit of counsel assumes I've already taken that responsibility, that I've so completely crawled into problematic and uncomfortable situations that I've learned to see them as spacious and inhabitable, learned to sit still at their center. A "problem" is just an echo chamber, off of whose walls my own voice eventually echoes until I hear myself talking. When Jesus said things like "Father, why have you forsaken me" and "I thirst", when he said "forgive them, they know not what they're doing" and "today you'll be with me in paradise" he was reflecting this process: first, taking responsibility to feel his own pain and naming his own vulnerabilities instead of running from them. Second, reaching out to those similarly afflicted with compassion.
The two thieves crucified with Jesus give voice to degrees of "not taking responsibility." The one cynically questioned Jesus' status as the messiah and wanted to be saved from the cross entirely, the other accepted Jesus as the messiah, but thought he'd be saved later. Jesus corrected both by saying "Today you will be with me in paradise." It's as if he was saying "when your eyes shift from someone else's cross to your own, the cross transforms. You're not a few moments away from the kingdom, you are a few degrees of responsibility away from it."
This is a long way of saying that I can give voice, and I have given voice to the different degrees of shirking responsibility. The more I dodged, the more anxious I became. Those liabilities took on, in a metaphorical but very real sense, lives of their own. Calmly learning to take responsibility is a part of the curriculum that I missed, and serenity's to be found only in relearning the lesson.
The throat chakra, where the spirit of understanding works, is the spiritual muscle of straight talk. Wisdom faces us with problems like sin, suffering, death, and moral choices--all of which we negotiate in a solitude so drastic God seems absent from it. Ego layers blame and resentment and shame over those problems, and it keeps us from naming the problem, or working with it. Remember that, in a spirit of understanding, Jesus said "I thirst." Not "I thirst for affection or acceptance, this or that spiritual goal." Our difficulty isn't an inability to configure the world as we wish it to be, or in a way that would make us less vulnerable. The trouble is we can't even be honest about our vulnerability in the first place. The problem is within, not out in the world.
Every human alive, including myself, has missed the boat in terms of being honest. We've all seen others and situations as problems when our own habits escape our notice. I have blamed others, God, fate and the weather for my lack of ability to sit with discomfort and take responsibility. Maneuvers like those aren't free. They come at a cost we don't know we're paying. Learning to straight talk is important: the voice is the first indicator of the serenity, or lack thereof, that fills the heart. And the "person that I am" when I speak dishonestly is part of the whole crowd inside me--exuberant one minute, calling for blood another--and always needing redemption.
The part of me that stands distant as I write this has a real problem with the third eye chakra. This is where the spirit of wisdom lives. But the question I have is "what's the wisdom for?" Know this for certain: when I am flashing spiritual insight around like it's cash that I won in some high stakes spiritual lottery, that's ego and it's toxic. Ennobling such a display of spiritual wealth by saying things like "this will help others" only makes it more problematic. And I need to admit that I am the guy who has done all that. I may be doing it as type right now. Grief: a mourning as deep as my broken heart can manage, is the only solution here. Only grief is rooted in the truth: wisdom is impermanent, and the world is passing away, and all that I know of myself is dying. Accepting this is the only route to peace.
In the crown chakra, where the spirit of the Lord is, everything that is my "self" has the opportunity to finally dive into restful silence. If the toxic self creates a persona, claims to have spent lifetimes as a god or a devil, claims to be living all possible incarnations at once (in invisible dimensions, of course), then the flow of divine energy gets obstructed. (Full disclosure, the examples in the last sentence are all things I've wondered, and sometimes voiced aloud, about myself.) The fact is, whether our "selves" are many or they're one, they're impermanent. Impermanence is the truth of divine revelation, the greatest gift of God's Word.
Life's learning is in coaching the masks we wear to accept impermanence. Dorothy Day, quoting Charles Peguy, said that when we get to heaven, God will ask us "where are the others." It certainly applies to heaven and social existence, but it also applies to the movement of the holy spirit up the body's central channel. In other words, it's true of the voices in our psyche as well. The infant showing fascination, the toddler learning to play, the young person learning to do things for their own sake, they all have a place in the beatific vision. The young adult learning to take total responsibility for his own burdens, the sufferer learning to access non-defensive emotions, they all have a role to play in moving gently on the earth. Both the honest man and the old seer will die. But God's divinity is eternal. And eternality is a stillness from which you and I never depart.
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