When I first discovered the chakra system, back in the early 1970s, the prevailing attitude was that the entire purpose was to climb to the lofty realm of the seventh chakra, find bliss, and remain there ever after. The lower chakras were nothing but evils to be avoided, representing our baser instincts, like survival, sex, and power.
From my first exposure to these ideas, I knew something was wrong. Why do we have a system of seven chakras, only to deny the first three or four? It didn’t make sense to me.
I later saw that same bias in most spiritual traditions. The mind holds the glory, while the body is a trap. Heaven is above, while the earth is illusion. This reflects a deeply ingrained split between spirit and matter.
Instead, I saw the chakra system as providing a profound formula for wholeness. If we align our lives and our consciousness to the values and functions of each one of the chakras, we have a good shot at becoming whole.
And that whole spans from Earth to Heaven. In doing so, it unites them.
For a tree to grow tall, it needs deep roots. Those roots sustain it, ground it, and bring vital nourishment to feed its growth.
It would be silly to think that we could make the flowers in our garden grow taller – simply by pulling them up toward the heavens. Instead, the Heavens are a natural pull when the ground is solid and fertile. In fact, the flower would quickly die without roots, burning up in the power of the sunlight.
If anything, Heaven falls, like sunlight, penetrating the earth. That wondrous union creates the miracle of life.
Roots hold us down. They anchor us into substance, simplicity, and truth. Without that anchor in our fast-paced world, we may spin out of control – personally or collectively.
For the individual, this can lead to fragmentation, getting lost in the infinite, with difficulty manifesting on the earth plane. When one spins out of control, they may find their healing by entering therapy. Here the roots of the psyche are explored through discovering how one’s history shaped their beliefs and behaviors. In doing so, they become less split off from themselves. They become more whole.
American culture, unmoored from its roots, is rapidly spinning out of control. We have denied that we are a nation of immigrants, founded by immigrants. We deny that we took land from the Native Americans, wiping out their culture and moral balance. And now there are those denying the history of African Americans and their journey through slavery.
As a culture, this denial of the roots creates multiple crises. Denial of the body leads to health crises; denigration of the planet leads to environmental crises. An economic system that fails to honor the earth, from which everything is taken, is bound to go bankrupt when nature’s warehouse can no longer provide.
Civilization in general has denied that our roots began with a worship of the Great Mother, and that cultures, like individuals, emerged from the Mother. Without an acknowledgement of the Mother Goddess, we are living in a broken home, raised by a single father, cut off from his roots. We have a spiritual imbalance.
As we grow up, moving away from our roots is natural. It reflects the archetypal Hero’s Journey, as described by Joseph Campbell and reflected in many myths and stories.
The hero initially leaves his roots on a quest for adventure, and faces the learnings and ordeals of initiation. But the final step of the Hero’s Journey is the return home, bringing the new-found elixir of healing back to the ailing community. In this act, it is not only the community that benefits, but the hero himself becomes whole.
It’s time for us all to come home and become whole again. It’s time to remember our roots. It’s time to come home to the body, home to the earth, home to the ground of being that supports life.
But the answer isn’t to stay in our roots. They aren’t the destination. They are simply what holds us, what sustains us, and what makes growth possible.
Earth and Heaven aren’t opposing directions. They are two ends of a single unity.
The chakras are the jewels that bring them together.
Anodea, 'roots are not the destination, they are what sustains us' is going to stay with me. It maps almost exactly onto something I see in my own work — the armor people build to survive leaving home in the first place often becomes the very thing that keeps them from ever really coming back to it. The hero's journey isn't complete until the elixir gets carried home, but so much armor is built for the leaving and never gets renegotiated for the return.