As we continue our journey with the chakras, we reach the navel chakra, located at or slightly below the belly button for most people. If you missed the root chakra post, you can check it out here.
3 Signs of a Healthy Navel Chakra
- You’re comfortable expressing your emotions. Emotions are the language of the navel chakra, and when you’re okay experiencing whatever emotions arise and sitting with them until they ebb, this is a sign that your navel chakra is working properly. If you resist or suppress your emotions, or you equate experiencing your emotions with acting them out or reacting to them, your navel chakra is calling out for some TLC.
- You have a healthy relationship to your sexuality. This will mean wildly different things to different people, but the bottom line is that you are giving yourself the freedom to express your sexuality in a way that is healthy for you and is not damaging to yourself or your partner(s). In and out of the bedroom, when you navel chakra is healthy you allow yourself to feel pleasure, and you can discern between self-care and self-indulgence, the latter of which can often be self-destructive.
- You can go with the flow. Yes, we all have areas in which we’re a little more uptight than others (stuck in traffic? dealing with your mother-in-law?), but generally speaking, if your navel chakra is functioning properly, you feel connected to a sense of flow, neither needing to control everything nor passively waiting for life to happen to you. You are flexible and able to adapt to changing circumstances while maintaining healthy emotional boundaries (aka, being adaptable doesn’t mean being a doormat).
A Bellyful of Emotions
The following is an excerpt from my eBook, Luminous: Powerful Energy Practices to Make You Glow from Head to Toe.
The navel chakra is associated with water and emotions, and water is all about change. It flows and adapts to whatever container it’s in. Likewise, our emotions also change and flow, and just like water, trying to suppress their natural proclivity to change and flow requires energy, like building a giant dam to hold back water. And also like a dam, when we release that flow, we release an immense amount of energy that we can now channel as we please.
In our pursuit of pleasure and avoidance of pain we often try to block our emotions. When we’re feeling good, we try to hang onto our emotions, to make them last as long as possible. When we feel like crap, we resist our emotions and try to keep ourselves from feeling them.
Both the hanging on and the resisting require energy, and this is energy that could be spent doing something more soul affirming.
Here’s the thing: No matter how bad you think the emotions are going to feel (and yes, emotions can be acutely painful at times), the act of trying to suppress them is always more painful in the long run. We humans will go to very creative extremes to keep our emotions from flowing, and those extremes can be very costly.
In fact, I would go so far as to say that all of our self-destructive habits are a direct result of trying to avoid feeling our feelings.
For example, we might self-medicate with food that doesn’t serve our body, leaving us with myriad health issues; we might engage in destructive relationships that place us in emotional or even physical danger; we might displace our emotions on other people or situations in hostile eruptions, which cause us to routinely lose relationships and jobs; or we might overindulge in substances, illegal and otherwise, to check out of our emotional experience, generating addiction.
All of these things require an expenditure of energy, and when we’re spending our energy reserves on that stuff, we don’t have any left over to do other things that are much more enlivening, like making it to a yoga class, cooking breakfast with our kids, or sitting down to meditate.
On the flip side, when we allow our emotions to flow through us like water, we will be amazed at how they don’t actually want to stick around. We don’t need to do anything to make them go away; they naturally pass through and fade without any effort on our part, as long as we don’t stand in their way.
More About the Navel Chakra
To continue reading, download your copy of Luminous: Powerful Energy Practices to Make You Glow from Head to Toe. (This title is no longer available.)
You’ll learn why a healthy navel chakra helps you tap into a sense of flow and ease, gives you the ability to create a fulfilling sex life, allows you to experience your emotions without feeling overwhelmed by them, and much more.
Each chakra chapter includes a guided meditation mp3 that will help you heal and balance your chakras while increasing your ability to attract and manifest what you want.