Solar Plexus Chakra: The Right to Act

The third centre carries the right to act and the right to be free.

We've had ground, then feeling. This one is fire. Where the first centre is earth and the second is water, the third is dynamic and light, rising upward, moving away from gravity. It's the part of you that does something about what you want.

This is also the last of the lower three. Together they're the gears of the whole system, the ones that keep you grounded, engaged, motivated and active. Everything above connects you outward. These three keep you running.

What power actually is here

Power at this centre comes from the willingness to leave safety and move forward into the unknown.

That's a narrower definition than the one most people carry around. It isn't power over anyone. It's whether you can step off the known path without someone promising you it'll work out.

The mechanics underneath it: desire fuels the will. Last week's centre supplies the fuel, this one supplies the engine. Then consciousness from above gives it direction. Without intention there's no will at all, only whim, and whim is what it feels like when you keep starting things and nothing accumulates.

One more thing worth saying out loud. For a healthy ego, it's fine to make mistakes. A will that can only move when success is guaranteed never moves.

The right to act: Individuating

To enter this centre you have to be willing to leave the way things have always been. Change your habits, set a new course, step out of the familiar and the expected, and then stand in the uncertainty that follows.

The cost of that is other people's disapproval, and it's a real cost.

Hegel put it well: being independent of public opinion is the first condition of achieving anything great. You don't get the second thing without the first.

A lot of this is about unconscious habits that let other people define you. Not dramatic submission, just the small automatic ways you become who someone expects. Overcoming those is most of the work.

Here's the hard test, and it's the most useful line in this whole chapter: if you still blame other people for your problems, you haven't individuated yet. Autonomy is what makes personal responsibility possible, and only once you take responsibility can you actually change anything. Blame feels like clarity. It's the thing keeping the situation exactly where it is.

Shame

When your activity meets shame or disapproval, your sense of power shrinks. That's the mechanism, and it's simple enough that it's easy to underestimate.

A child does something, with energy and enthusiasm, and the response is irritation or ridicule or a sigh. Repeat that enough times and the child learns to move less. By adulthood the inhibition runs on its own, with nobody present to disapprove.

This is where authority comes in. Most of us learned early what happens when you act, and we learned it from one particular person. Punishment, as a method, controls behaviour by taking free will out of the equation, and the effect of it outlasts the person who used it by decades.

So there's a question worth sitting with: whose voice is the one that stops you, and is it respecting the person you are now, or the child it first spoke to?

How you can tell

A healthy third centre looks like energetic vitality. Enjoyment and enthusiasm about your own life, the ordinary kind, not the performed kind.

When it's depleted: poor follow-through. Self-discipline that comes and goes. Responsibility is mostly avoided, and a running commentary about why the situation is someone else's doing. Plans that stay plans...

When it's overfull: constant activity that can't stop. Control. Pushing through everything, including your own body's signals, and calling it strength.

Both ends often run on caffeine, which is worth noticing. It props up the depleted system so it feels normal, and it lets the overfull one keep going.

One question that cuts through quickly: what would I do if there was nothing I was supposed to do?

The practice

Two parts this week, one on paper and one in the body.

On paper. Write about the authority you grew up with. Who held it. What they used to establish it. Whether you obeyed out of respect or out of fear, and whether you obeyed at all or rebelled, and whether that changed at different points.

Then the part people skip: what form does that authority take inside you now, and who is it modelled on. Do you cooperate with it or resent it. Does it have any respect for your feelings, your body's limits, your need to grow.

In the body. Something that makes you break a sweat, half an hour, several times this week. Not (only) for fitness. Fire needs fuel and movement, and a body that builds some tone starts producing a feeling of capability that no amount of insight delivers on its own.

Eat at regular intervals while you're at it. Blood sugar that drops through the floor takes your will with it, which is unglamorous and true.

This week

Watch for blame. Be gentle with yourself, just take your time to catch how often the sentence in your head ends with someone else's name. Each time it does, there's a version of the sentence that ends with yours, and that version is where your options are.

And pick one thing you've been putting off because someone might disapprove. Do that one.

Joseph Campbell has a line I keep returning to: the privilege of a lifetime is being who you are. It sounds soft until you try it, and then you find out what it costs.

Next week, chakra four. The right to love and be loved.

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.