Root Chakra: The Right to Be Here

The first centre, which is called the root chakra, holds two rights: to be here, and to have. How to tell whether you were given them, plus a grounding practice to do this week. has two rights attached to it. The right to be here, and the right to have.

That sounds almost too basic to need saying. But a lot of people have never actually been given either one. They were born into a household where their arrival was inconvenient, or where there wasn't enough of something, or where the adults were too occupied to notice a small person needing things. It gets transmitted through tone and timing and what happened when they asked for something, long before anyone has words for it.

This is the ground floor of the whole system. It deals with the body, with safety, with having enough, with whether the world feels like somewhere you can put your weight down. Everything else in the seven gets built on top of it, so this is where the series starts.

Trust, or the lack of it

The program running in this centre is trust or mistrust. Whichever one got installed becomes the foundation every later program sits on.

Here's the thing I find useful about it. Fear is a belief that something awful might happen. Faith is a belief that something good will.

Both of them are beliefs, formed early, and you walk around inside yours without noticing. It feels like how the world is.

With trust, the survival instinct settles down. There's a general sense of being okay that doesn't need a reason for it. Without it the scanning goes on all day, and it costs you something even when nothing is happening.

How you can tell the root chakra is off balance

This one shows up in the body and in small ordinary behaviour, so thinking about it will only get you so far.

When the right was given, you can rest. You take up room without apologising for it, and you can stay in your body for long stretches without needing to leave. Money and food and shelter stay practical problems.

When it wasn't, some mix of this: a low hum of bracing for something bad. Trouble staying still. Never quite feeling at home anywhere, including in your own body. Either hoarding or being unable to hold onto anything. A sense that you're here on sufferance and should probably be useful to justify it.

Your posture carries a lot of this, by the way. Watch how you stand when nobody's looking and you aren't thinking about it. That's the honest version.

Enough

This is the part I think gets missed most often.

If your lower needs were met, you're not afraid to set a boundary. You can say enough food, enough to drink, enough of this relationship that's going nowhere. The word comes out without a crisis attached to it.

And when your own boundaries aren't working, the world sets them for you. It will do it through your body, your bank account, or someone leaving. That's usually less comfortable than setting them yourself.

There's a second thing here about limitation. Anything you want to actually build needs a boundary around it, because a boundary is what lets something collect instead of leaking away. People who are very attached to staying free, who won't accept any limitation at all, often can't get their basic needs met. Nothing stays still long enough to become real.

The practice

Grounding. It's not glamorous and you can't really overdo it. Our whole way of living pulls us off the ground. We hold the body and the physical world in fairly low regard, and that shows up as people living from the neck up.

Stand with your feet about shoulder width apart. Turn your toes slightly inward. Soften your knees so they're not locked.

Now bend and straighten them, slowly, several times. Inhale as you bend. Exhale as you straighten. Don't make it big, this isn't an exercise.

What you're after is the feeling of the ground pushing back. Most people notice it somewhere around the fourth or fifth time, as a kind of buzz or weight through the feet and legs. If you don't feel anything, that's information too, and it's common. Keep going a bit longer than feels necessary.

The rest of the week, the unglamorous version: walk, get a massage if you can, take long hot baths. Things that put you back in contact with having a body and liking it. There are stronger routes into this, holotropic breathwork among them, but those want a facilitator in the room with you. Here is one I truly recommend!

This week

One thing to watch: where in your day you say yes when you mean enough. No judging. Just notice where it happens and with whom.

And do the grounding most days, even for two minutes. This centre doesn't respond much to thinking about it.

Rewriting a program you got as a child is slow work, and you have to do it while still living your actual life. No pause button. It does move though, usually from the bottom up.

Next week, chakra two. The right to feel and want.

Hi, I'm Vlora. I work with hypnosis, breathwork, yoga and visualisation, usually with people who have lost contact with what they want and want to find their way back to it. The work is about changing what's running underneath, so that creating something becomes possible again.

If one of the seven caught you while you were reading, that's where I'd start. You can work with me here.