Opening to greater intimacy

Dr Christiane Northrup talks about the intrinsic link between the low heart of the sacral chakra and the high heart of the heart chakra. Yoni yoga, a practice I developed inspired by Uma Dinsmore-Tuli’s womb yoga, is centred on this because it is my experience that this connection and relationship between these two energy centres is very real; when the energy of the low heart is blocked through trauma or abuse then the high heart is also affected.

Those of you who read my book Namaste will know already that I suffered trauma in my sacral chakra in my mid-twenties as a result of a destructive relationship that negatively affected this area of my body. The greatest harm done through was not so much what happened to me physically, although there was a significant energetic imprint, but more so the repression of my experiences and the attached emotions.

There was an encouragement to continue life as normal, to put one of the experiences into the shadows and pretend it hadn’t happened. This approach alone brought with it intense feelings of guilt and shame, let alone confusion that arose because of the conflicting feelings of relief and loss and sadness. This based on a cultural expectation that we must keep going, linear, brave face, everything is fine, I’d learnt from the best, the stiff British upper lip so deeply ingrained.

I went out of my body with the second destructive experience (and yet later I would come to reframe this, as we must with our painful experiences, for they are a treasure, a blessing, an opportunity to learn and awaken), fragmented, tried to pretend it never happened, didn’t mention it to a single person because for all intents and purposes I had forgotten about it and I didn’t know how to process it or make sense of it, and yet it informed who I was to become and defined the level of intimacy that I would allow into my life after then. 

As we know, that which is repressed into the shadows, which we try to ignore, will find a way for expression, will have an impact on our present. It was this relationship, which brought me to my knees, which shut down (I would later realise) my lower heart and my upper heart, and cause me to contemplate taking my own life, and I am writing a manuscript about this at the moment, about the depression that followed, although I had been dipping in and out of depression for a few years before then.

What I have become aware of over the years is the manner in which so many women suffer with the effect of trauma and abuse within the sacral chakra, whether this be from casual sex, rape, non-consensual sex-doing what’s expected in a relationship, unintended pregnancy, termination, miscarriage, challenging pregnancies, internal examinations, birth etc. So much of this goes unsaid, not talked about or given expression. Sometimes the words are difficult to find because there is shame and guilt and worry about being judged, and often the hurt is too much, and the vulnerability too great, and this all impacting on our heart chakra and our ability to love (ourselves especially).

I feel vulnerable even now sharing this, but there is a part of me that is tired of it not being said, and yet there is a part of me that questions boundaries, raising questions about what needs to be voiced and what doesn’t, about how much of my life experience needs to be shared in the quest to help others, and to help myself. It feels sometimes that these things need to be voiced, because it is one thing finding forgiveness and quite another clearing it out from our psyche.

 For many years I suffered with PMS and it was this really, and the depression that accompanied it that led me to yoga, Reiki and Ayurveda and helped me to change my life. The quest was always about healing the PMS, changing my diet and my lifestyle, taking potions and doing energy work. I knew that I had issues in my sacral chakra around relationship with self and with significant others and especially around intimacy, but I didn’t realise the extent to this until it became clearer earlier this year, almost twenty years on from the wounding done. 

There has been signs along the way, a yoga pose practised one day that brought back a memory that literally floored me (fortunately I was on the floor) reminding me and causing me question the nature of the harm, so repressed and hidden was it in my body, yet the body never forgets, more fool us for thinking that we can bypass it. Then there was EMDR that was intended to resolve residual issues surrounding disordered eating and up it came that memory again, central to everything, so that I could no longer ignore it and I recognised that how much of my life had been spent skirting the edges, trying to do the work on myself but ignoring the gem in the middle, in the shadows of the solar plexus.

I did not want to spend the rest of my life denying my femininity yet this scared me because it took me to a deep place inside, and it asked me to step more into my sexuality and my Goddess nature and this in the past had only caused me pain. Yet it was impacting in immeasurable ways in my life, in my relationship with myself, with those I love and with my ability to surrender to those deeper places of sexual and spiritual bliss, simply because of the confusion between pain and pleasure and the residue of those experiences; the energetic imprint and emotional repression that didn’t know how to express itself without me feeling as if I might fall apart or drop into an abyss.

I had spent all those years keeping myself safe by building my armour (albeit unconsciously) and escaping into my spiritual practice, so that I wouldn’t have to feel all those things again. PMS was my body’s way of trying to get my attention, of reminding me of what lay in the shadows, simply because every cycle there was a rage that would come with the pre-menstruation, in that dark phase. Like the dark moon, every month I was taken into that thin void where you have the opportunity to see more of your truth, yet I couldn’t see it because I was so caught up in it and had learned to settle so comfortably into my denial and yet the comfort was killing me.

I don’t suppose I mean killing in the sense that I was dying, although there was some part of me dying inside for recognition, dying to be set free, dying to take me to that deeper place, to the ecstasy that lay below the scar that had grown thick over the wounding, dying to make me surrender into the edges of my awareness, and let go, let go, let go. Always it is about letting go, and this is the toughest thing; to let go we have to let go of something mentally, some attachment, often the attachment to our pain and the victimhood and blame that comes with this.

Unconscious as it was, I held on to my wounds and allowed them to continue to play out; there was my relationship with ahimsa (non-harming) and the harm caused in my quest not to harm (there is always such paradox and contradiction), and there was the trying to make myself invisible and deny my feminine attributes for fear of…I’m not even sure what the fear was, fear of actually being kind to myself, fear of allowing all of myself, fear of falling apart when I let go into all that I am…

Even when I stared to work with menstruation consciousness as a spiritual practice, the darkness was too dark for me to see, or perhaps it was just that I wasn’t ready, because we can only handle so much in our healing, and there are layers and all the hardness of the armour to dissolve and that itself is tricky because we have put it there for a reason and it has a narrative and a story and there is that blame and victimhood already mentioned, and always some stubborn unforgiveness.

 I thought I had dealt with it, and yet I hadn’t even started, it wasn’t that I was spiritually bypassing but most definitely my spiritual practice allowed me to avoid it, and the EMDR took me deep into the wounding, and I felt my energy moving from sacral chakra to heart, but really it was the solar plexus that kept grabbing my attention. Here is where we might hold onto our undigested life experiences, like food that has been undigested by our stomach and small intestines, and it creates problems, not only physically but mentally, emotionally and spiritually too. 

By then I hadn’t experienced PMS for years, not really, I had managed to heal much of the harm done by then, at least I had healed some layers. Yet there are always more layers, for we are not linear any more than life is lived in a linear fashion, and healing isn’t linear either, you only have to think of the depth of the chakras and the roundness of the earth, the moon and the sun. The PMS symptoms re-appeared from no-where, grabbing my attention, and this when my ability to surrender to intimacy had already deepened and yet still the body was crying for my attention. 

It’s a process that I now know well and I can be with it more calmly, spot it quicker, settle into with greater ease, make space and create stillness for it after all these years, and people will think me crazy, this obsession with healing, but there is a reason; I want to feel life moving through me, I don’t want my energy to become stagnant, I do not want to invite dis-ease into my being because the energy cannot flow – e-motion is energy in motion. Plus there is a motivation towards opening to spirit and increased consciousness, stepping into the truest of self, oneness and peace then.

I do not want to repress my emotions as my culture has at times demanded and my breasts were getting my attention, telling me that there was still some repression in the heart chakra and I know the link with the sacral – the sacred. I want to be all that I can be in the present, not weighed down by my past, settling for second best, not experiencing the feelings of spiritual bliss that are inherent in all of us if we can allow ourselves the vulnerability that this demands, that I spoke of in my previous blog post when I wrote about Scaravelli-inspired yoga.

It is this really and Ayurveda, Reiki and TM, that has helped to take me to this deeper place, to feel the holding in my sacral chakra and in my heart, so that I cannot ignore the connection between the lower heart and the higher heart. I went outside and I ran to make sense of it, to get in the body, move the energy, out my head, and there was rage that found me screaming into the air, the half-moon above me, dusk settling, bats flying around, and this calmness that held me, and I felt my heart about to burst with the pain of the stubborn unforgiveness.

I battled with it in my head, why could I not forgive? It hurt and I had been harmed by this story of needing to hold on, of the inability to express those old emotions, of denying my most soft and vulnerable parts, and I was angry, angry at being told that this was the way, at being sold a lie, and I wanted those that fed this story to know how much they had harmed me. Yet here was the inability to forgive, the stubbornness, and the realisation that accompanied this; as it always does, that the inability to forgive was now the bit hurting me.

If we hold on to resentment and anger then it is likely it will lead to dis-ease be that of the body or the mind because of the tension it creates and the inability to be at ease within ourselves, peaceful then . I know this and so I asked myself these questions; why did I want to be a victim of this? Why did I want to hold onto blame? Oh the gut wrenching awkwardness and discomfort that comes with knowing you need to let go but the power of the need to hold on. 

This sense of being harmed and being hurt and needing to blame someone else is the cause of so much disharmony in this world. I know this too. Yet still we hold on. I ran some more and I thought about how it might feel to let it go and I played out the scenarios and I knew I had no choice, not really, not if I wanted to set myself free, be free, release the burden from my energy body, find greater ease in my sacral chakra and let go of the pain and the sadness and the heaviness in my heart that was causing me physical sensation. 

I passed an old abreuvoir that had called to me during lockdown but then it had been completely overgrown. Now it has been cleared and I was able to sit in the quiet space, with the trickle of water and the mosquitos that hovered, and I noticed the half-moon shining in on me, and I remember the crystal oracle card that keeps appearing around ‘ancestors’ and I surrendered to them. “Show me the way”, I asked, “you keep calling to me and now I call to you, help me to move on”. 

I ran on some more, and I attempted a half-hearted effort at forgiveness, but I could sense there was still resentment; I’ll forgive you but I need you to know how much it hurt me type approach, which means you’re not quite there in making peace with whatever has happened (for a reason, as part of the need for the soul to experience and come to know itself). I dug deep, it felt so uncomfortable, because I had to let go of the story and all that this meant and then who would I become and what of the story? 

Yet I was done, and I noticed the sky tinged orange and clouds turning red as the sun set deeper below the horizon and the airplane trail moving away into the distance, and the half-moon still there reminding me that the light will shine brighter into the shadows in days to come, that there is nowhere else to hide, not when you have become conscious of what needs to go; and also that there is always duality, black and white, right and wrong, love and hate, and it is only in recognising this and embracing both, seeing that we hold all aspects inside ourselves, killer, pacifist, that we might settle into the peace of the oneness of it all.

I knew I had a choice, airplane flying away from me, it’s path clear and I know I could do the same, I was at the top of donkey hill, the path ahead was clear, I had to let go into it, and as I ran down the hill, I finally found the courage, because I felt held, the earth was calling, and I called back to her and I finally managed to find the words, stuck in my throat for too long now, gave voice to that which needed to be said, to be heard by the earth and I forgave those who needed forgiving and I forgave myself.

At the bottom of the hill is another abreuvoir and I felt called in here, as if these are the portals, the ancient way that we might connect more deeply into all that is, with its mystery and wisdom, that is beyond time, because the past greets the present and creates the future all in one, reminding me of the distance healing symbol in Reiki – no past, no present, no future. 

I sat here and I talked to the ancients, connecting to my root, to the solidity of the earth and I put my hands and wrist joints into the water as if I was letting go into the flow of the water of the sacral chakra, the element of water of the sacral chakra, breathing the air of the heart chakra and the fire in my solar plexus was cooled and there was an ease to the space of the throat, now the words had been spoken, and I smiled and I congratulated myself because that has been a long time coming and I knew then without doubt the connection between the low heart and high heart.

If you are reading this then I suspect you will understand and be tiptoeing in your shadows too, dipping in and out, and knowing that the full moon is due and she is asking us to look at our wounds, and to come to know our cycles as she too cycles through our life and brings with her the light so that we might go deeper to set ourselves freer. I’d also like to share this article with you, I came across it by chance and feel it might be helpful for those also exploring this path - https://www.drnorthrup.com/energetic-breast-and-heart-disease-prevention/

 The morning after the letting go and the forgiveness, and the releasing of the residual tendrils of the repressed emotions and stuck energy, I picked up a nerf gun and I played with my youngest in a way I have never done previously. As I heard his squeals of delight and his laugher as I chased him around the kitchen tablet pretend shooting, his favourite game, I realised that I hadn’t allowed myself to play in a very long time, not really, not properly, I had even killed my own joy (kill-joy) in my mental imprinting of what I considered right and wrong, and the hangover from my past experiences around killing and joy, pleasure and pain. 

I was reminded that we never know what might shift for us when we do the releasing into the deeper places; the idea of being more alive and intimate with the self, will manifest in ways we could never have imagined (often what we resist: playing guns!) and yet those ways will always bring more joy, because our hearts will be more open. It’s not only our ability to feel joy and bliss that becomes positively affected, but also our ability to be in relationship with those we love, and with the earth, and ultimately with our self.