Fencing Bear at Prayer

Undoubtedly the best gift (okay, one of the many great gifts) that I got from my husband this Christmas is a banner of the seven chakras which I have seen every Monday for the past six or seven months at the coffee shop where he and I go after our counseling session. How did he know that that was the very thing that I most wanted this Christmas? A sign of his and my continuing commitment to work on being together, as well as a sign to me to allow myself to continue my spiritual exercises, beginning, as we must, with the ground. I've been thinking a lot about things that I need to do in order to help balance my muladhara chakra, wondering how I ever allowed myself to get this badly out of balance while at the same time trying to learn how to recognize the signs of further things that I need to work on with respect to my feelings of stability, grounding, prosperity, right livelihood and physical health (as per another of my "Christmas" gifts to myself, Anodea Judith an...

I wish that I felt comfortable writing more about God. I believe in Him (now, there's a loaded statement!), so why don't I? I've certainly read a lot about God or, rather, about what others have thought about God. And it's not like I don't have my own opinions. So why the silence? Why the fear? Pride, I suppose. I don't want to sound simple, and yet I know I do. I'm not a theologian, I don't seem to have that calling. How could anything that I say about God hold a candle to the great meditations of Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, von Balthasar--to name only a few? I am, as Hildegard herself often protested, but an unlearned woman. Who am I to try to play with the big boys deciphering the mysteries of the divine? But nor am I, as a woman, interested in developing a peculiar "feminine" theology. In part, because I don't really think it is necessary. More important, because I think it would be wrong: God created human beings ma...

Just as last month's self-help flavor was learned optimism , so this month it looks like it is going to be chakra work . Appropriately, I kept myself up until 3am this morning denying my body the sleep that it most definitely needed and instead reading in a book that my sister recommended, Anodea Judith's Eastern Body, Western Mind: Psychology and the Chakra System as a Path to the Self (revised edition, 2004). Based on what I have read thus far, I am (as, it seems many of us in the modern world are) most definitely blocked in a number of ways in my first chakra (the red one at the bottom). According to Judith, this chakra is located at the base of the spine at the coccygeal plexus and is typically associated with our physical identity and feelings of self-preservation. When it is open, we feel ourselves grounded, comfortable in our bodies, and able to relax and be still. We trust the world to provide us with the things that we need to exist and generally feel safe and sec...