Which Chakra Fuels Your Activism?
Feeling Outraged? Scared? Disenfranchised? With the change in politics, are you called to act? Check yourself so that your activism is conscious, clear and coherent.
I hold myself and my practitioners accountable for being the change. Collapse is not an option. Yet, lashing out is not an option, either. Meeting hatred-laced vitriol with hatred-laced opposition is not an option.
Make no mistake. We’ve passed the time for ranting. So, while you have your rage, despair, grief and terror, stay conscious of how you use that fuel. Your feelings matter, deeply and fully. They are your catalyzing fuel.
Ranting emerges from the lower chakras
Chakras are energy centers. They metabolize energy for the actions and activities created and actualized. The lower chakras are in the lower half of the body – located at the base of the spine, below the navel and where the ribs come together beneath the heart. The lower chakras are about getting needs met, emotional context and volition. All good things.
However, when you operate through your lower chakras in extreme times, your efforts are less integrated and sophisticated than they could be, because the lower chakras are often laden with the energy of trauma stories, childhood drama and unmet potential.
Ranting is a lower-chakra phenomenon. Much as matching someone’s negative behavior as a way to fight back is also a lower-chakra phenomenon. Furthermore, these efforts don’t tend to produce quality outcomes.
Ranting, attacking, spewing and raging waste your energetic fuel. They use energy that resonates most deeply with past story and unresolved pain to lash out. As a result the energy gushes out of the front of your body like a geyser.
Geysers fascinate us. They propel hot water from deep within the Earth, into the air before collapsing back to the ground and receding. They certainly demonstrate the power of nature. However, they cannot sustain their force.
Ranting expends your power. It’s active, but it’s not activism. And because lower chakras drive this action, a fair amount of unconscious material spews out, adding momentum.
Conscious Activism
Conscious Activism is integrated and sustainable.
The upper chakras begin at the heart, the fulcrum of the body’s energy system. Rising up from the heart chakra in the center of the chest, into the 5th chakra where autonomy and individuated awareness are expressed and actualized. From there, the 6th chakra metabolizes thinking-awareness using belief systems as a template. The chakra system culminates with the 7th chakra, a gateway to divinity, Source, spiritual integration is engaged.
Imagine you take a stand on an issue that you find meaningful and imperative. Most noteworthy, those words, ‘take a stand’, imply a head-to-toe perspective, upright and all-in. Hence, when you take a stand, your entire being moves to support that stand. Energy coalesces and aligns behind the stance, the strategy and the actions.
Integrated energy (sourced from all of your chakras) is sustainable; hence you gain the ability to stay engaged, creative, innovative and productive, regardless of setbacks, diversions and backlash.
Conscious activism does not flame out. Rather, it rises up, adheres and serves as a force for change and evolution.
What does Conscious Activism look like?
Who exemplifies Conscious Activism?
Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, John Oliver – these hilarious characters unmask and upend our political paradigms. They are consistent, action-oriented, and use their enormous wit coherently to deliver messages that awaken, inform and inspire.
Standing Rock & the Indigenous Water Protectors – standing in sacred alignment, speaking to issues of sovereignty (their tribal lands, treaties, sacred sites being desecrated by the pipeline) and national interest (clean water, decreased dependence on oil, expanding alternative energy technologies), they model civil disobedience and nonviolent protest for all of us. We’re not used to nonviolent protest. So Watch. Listen. Learn. Then stand up in alignment and act.
Marianne Williamson – a spiritual author, teacher and lecturer turned thoughtleader and politician with a consistent message about the essential integration of consciousness, spirituality and politics through vehicles such as her Sister Giant Conference.
Roshi Joan Halifax – founder of the Upaya Zen Center, and currently posting as a #buddhistnastywoman on social media, her work consistently points to unifying themes, invites compassion and even provokes, nonviolently.
Integrate
Conscious activism integrates your beliefs with your actions. It brings the whole self (wounds and beyond) to the task of protecting, protesting, standing for, standing against. It is nonviolent. As a result, your activism becomes unified, aligned and coherent.
If unhealed wounds or unresolved story prevent you or someone you love from rising up to conscious activism, please share this post.
And I’d love to know, where do you find yourself rising up?
Image credit: Fibonacci Blue
Thank you. This is excellent and helpful. It is quite a challenge to act from the higher aspects of ourselves while the lowest seems to be taking over. You are outlining a clear way to think about that.
Elene, I’m so glad the information is useful to you. I share your concerns about the lower aspects of our collective unconscious driving the show and running the storyline we’re creating. It doesn’t have to be like this at all. I do believe that this is a call to action, a time where the dominant paradigms are so exacerbated and in our faces that complacency is no longer an option. As we find our way to ourselves, to rise up and kindle the flame of Conscious Activism, we can find deliberate, authentic actions we can take, to respond locally, nationally, internationally. These Now Times are a profound opportunity to rise up. Thank you for showing up and speaking out! I stand with you, Elene.