Inside this chapter you are going to explore seven issues the sacral chakra deals with on a consistent and ongoing basis. These seven issues each have their own section in this chapter, as they all have important information for you regarding the health and well-being of your sacral chakra. You will also be selecting significator cards for each of these sections as you did in the previous chapter. This chapter will round out with a tarot healing session for your sacral chakra, for which you will need the cards you have selected as significators in the sections in this chapter.
The sections are as follows:
1. Creativity
2. Birth and Rebirth
3. Grief
4. Desire
5. Memory
6. Pleasure
7. The Past
The sacral chakra, or svadhishthana, as it is known in Sanskrit, is the second chakra. It is located in the pelvic area, and it affects your reproductive system, hips, bladder, kidneys, and your entire lymphatic system. Energetically speaking, this is where your emotions reside, which makes the second chakra the control center for your emotional body. It also governs your body’s water and the many waterways flowing under your skin. Needless to say, a large majority of people have profound and deep issues in this chakra, because very few humans have any sort of mastery over their emotions. I know I don’t, and I’ve been working on my emotional body for over a decade. If we were all nice, emotionally stable people, authors like Brené Brown and Anne Lamott and the entire spiritual and self-help industries would be out of business. Generally speaking, humans are horrible with emotions, even though we are emotional beings. Everything about being human is an emotional experience, which makes what we learn here in this chakra so vitally important. Yet, just like the root chakra, so many skip this chakra and are in too much of a hurry to get to the top of the chakra pillar. But not you, right? You know you have to work slowly, build your inner energy, gain resilience, find your grit, and take it one chakra at a time.
I’m not going to sugarcoat it. We deal with some pretty deep, dark crap here in the second chakra, for it is not only where life begins but also where it ends. We deal with both death and birth in this chakra, not to mention all the emotions that each of these trigger. It is here in the second chakra that we decide what stays with us, what gets pushed up into the next chakra, and what we delegate to our shadow side. The shadow was a term first coined by Carl Jung to explain the parts of ourselves we reject or disassociate with. These are the parts of who we are that we like to deny and feel do not align with the core of who we say we are. This is not to say that we only put negative traits in our shadow vault. On the contrary, we also put positive traits there and parts of ourselves that could actually make our lives better. It may seem unbelievable that we would do such a thing, but we do. We never allow any part of ourselves that does not align with what we believe our self-image to be to come out of the shadow, and all of this gets decided upon right here, in the second chakra. As I said, deep stuff.
I totally understand why people want to avoid this chakra, as there is nothing light and fluffy about it. We have to face some pretty hard issues here. Just be warned that if you have spent a good part of your life pushing away the dark side of yourself or if you didn’t want to see hard truths being reflected back to you by your sacral chakra waters, you will possibly struggle with this chakra. It is in this chakra we first learn to be kind to ourselves as well, which will be helpful since, to put it in second-chakra terms, there are times when doing the work with this chakra that you might find yourself drowning. It can be tough here in the second chakra, and we need to be able to show ourselves just as much nurturing energy as we would other people. The choppy emotional waters of the second chakra need to be learned, and you can’t control them, so don’t even bother. However, you will learn to ride them and navigate them. Just know you might get smashed on the rocks of your memories and swept away by the powerful undercurrent of your emotions.
Exercise
Before you strap on your flippers and snap your googles into place so that you can dive into this chapter, you need to find a significator for your second chakra. You are going to choose this card strategically, and by this, I mean you are going to have your cards out in front of you, face up, and deliberately select your significator. This card needs to have a hint of strength, a dash of flexibility, a good dose of flow, and the ability to stand on its head while underwater. Yes, your card needs to be upside down. Recommended cards are Temperance, the Star, the Moon, Judgement, the Queen and King of Cups, the Two of Wands, and the Six of Swords.
Once you have selected your card, take a moment to connect it to your second chakra. To do this, place the card in your line of sight, upside down of course. Place one hand over your lower pelvis area, as this is where your second chakra sits, and take a couple of nice, deep breaths. Imagine an orange light coming out between your fingers and wrapping around your card. Stay like this for two to three minutes, and then just shake your hands out as you take another nice, deep breath. Next, do some automatic writing in your journal about your upside-down card. Just write whatever pops into your head and, like your second chakra, let it flow. Don’t try to control it, don’t try and make sense of it, just go with it. When you have run out of inspired words to spill onto the page, pick up your favorite tarot books and dig a little deeper into the card that will, for the rest of this book at least, be your major second chakra influence. Once you are done writing, it’s time to dive in, slide in, or perhaps just dip your big toe into the waters of your second chakra. Come on, be brave. I am right here holding a life preserver, and I won’t let you drown, I promise.
We are all, every single one of us, creative. Creative energy is interwoven into every human, without exception. The issue is that most people have very limited ideas about what creativity is. First of all, creativity is not artistic, though art and art forms are one form of creativity. However, they are not the only way to engage in creative energy, and it is this confusion that has closed people off from exploring their creative potential. People tell me all the time they are not creative, but what they are really saying is that they are not artistic, and it is not the same thing. Steven Jobs once said, “Creativity is just connecting things.” 3 It’s just a way to connect one thing to another, which makes creativity a form of problem-solving. You might be creative with numbers like an accountant, you might be creative with contracts like a lawyer, or you might be creative with strategy like a gamer. There are literally thousands of ways to be creative, and being artistic is just one of them. Therefore, stop saying you are not a creative person, because you are, and denying this part of yourself is not only damaging your second chakra, but it is causing problems in the chakras above this one as well.
When we are not harnessing our creative energy in the second chakra, we stunt our ability to express ourselves in the third chakra, which in turn causes frustration and makes us feel like we are not being heard in the fifth chakra, which can then shut off our intuitive senses in the sixth chakra, and make us close our connection to the divine self in the seventh chakra. In other words, settling here in the second chakra sets you up for mediocre and unfulfilled experiences further up the chakra pillar. To be honest, this is one of the reasons I love tarot so much, because for me it is a form of creative energy. It allows us to explore information in a very creative way. Whether you like to dive deeper into the numbers, the elements, the astrology, the Kabbalah, or the deeper Christian religious elements on the cards, or even the way the cards themselves create patterns, there is something very creative about using them. How we use, read, store, spread, shuffle, and select our cards is a second-chakra process. Yes, I know, you thought it was a sixth-chakra issue, which is a common mistake. However, we are not talking about intuition here, although it feels similar, but instead we are talking about tapping into creative energy. Your actions with your cards are dictated first by the second chakra, then the fourth, then the fifth, then the sixth, then the seventh, then the third, and down to the first. We use the cards to problem-solve and to give us answers and insights into areas of our lives that perhaps we can’t see or don’t want to see. This is creative energy.
Let’s get creative and select a card, shall we?
Exercise
It’s time to select a significator for your creative energy. This time around you are going to select a card from the court cards and only the court cards. The reason for this is you want to see yourself as a creative person, not an artistic one. You want to be able to see yourself as a cocreator with the universe, playing your part in the larger creative web of humanity, connecting dots, and getting things done in ways that are unique to you. Go ahead and remove your court cards from your deck and place them in front of you face up. Pages represent childlike energy because they use their sense of wonder to be creative. The pages think less about what they can’t do, and instead they strive to try as many things as possible. Knights are explorers and seekers, like routine, and will often use creativity to form new habits, achieve new personal goals, and go on as many adventures as possible. Kings and queens have a level of expertise, and they harness their creative energy for very specific reasons. They always have an end in mind, which drives their creative fires. You could say at this level, creativity is linked to desire. They want something, and they will connect as many dots as necessary to get it.
The suits will let you know how your creative energy presents itself. Cups (water) tend to show up in people who are physically moved by their creative process, and they feel the creative energy in them and move through their bodies. Wands (fire) tend to show up in people who often find themselves fired up with sudden bursts of inspiration. This sort of creative energy tends to come and go quickly. Swords (air) show a very cerebral, creative process through thinking, analyzing, and sorting information inside one’s mind, whereas pentacles (earth) are a tactile form of creative energy and tend to show for people
who like to have all five of their senses involved in the creative process.
Which one are you?
If you don’t intuitively and instinctually know which of these cards you are, flip them over so you can’t see them. Shuffle them around a bit, and then scan your hand over the tops of the sixteen cards. Just hold the question “Who am I as a creative being?” in your mind as you scan the cards. Once you notice a response from the cards, be it heat, coldness, or a tingle in your fingertips, select your card. If you selected a page, it means you are at your most creative during play. If you selected a knight, you are most creative when you have a routine. If you selected a queen, your creativity comes alive when you are networking and socializing, as you need to be in a group flow situation. If you selected a king, you are your most creative when you are planning, building, and conquering your goals. Next, journal with your card and think about how the person in this card acts and how they may, or may not, problem-solve. Knowing how you engage with your creative energy is important, and this significator card just gave you the key to open that creative door even further.
For those of you already familiar with the chakras, I am sure hearing that birth is an essential part of the second chakra isn’t a new idea for you. For those of you new to this whole chakra business, remember that both the male and the female genitals are surrounded by the sacral chakra, meaning all our reproductive organs are in this chakra’s domain. However, the idea of death and rebirth in the second chakra is not so widely taught. Stillbirth, miscarriage, sterility, and menstruation all happen in the second chakra, literally. The second chakra is where we learn that death and birth are one and the same, which is why we tend to talk about the concept of rebirth in regard to the second chakra. Rebirth is the cycle of life and death. It is the continuous creative energy that happens in the second chakra, and oftentimes this can be traumatic, because in order for something to be born, something must die. Rebirth is both simultaneous and cyclic. It can happen in the moment or over time. It is probably one of the most difficult issues to deal with in this chakra, and that’s saying something, considering what else lives here.
Generally speaking, Westerners aren’t that great with death and letting go. We tend to wrap a lot of guilt and shame around walking away from things, setting boundaries, saying no, and waving goodbye. Admitting something is over, done, or dead is just not something most people are comfortable with, which is why some people continue to water dead plants, take forever to throw out dead flowers, and leave holiday decorations up long past the holiday season. Hoarding is a growing first-world problem. I think the popularity of the TV show Hoarders and the success of Marie Kondo’s book The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up are proof that we might have issues with this second chakra issue of rebirthing.
Like it or not, in order to bring life into the world, be it physical or creatively metaphorical, something needs to die, a cycle needs to end, and you have to say goodbye to something. Birthing a new baby kills the cycle of pregnancy, and you have to say goodbye to sleep and the life you knew before this constant eating and pooping machine took over your life. If you are starting or birthing a new job, your old job and everything that was tied to it dies. If you are birthing a business, then the idea of consistent weekly paychecks has to die. However, what the rebirthing energy brings to you is so much better than what you have said goodbye to, as long as you allow it to grow and thrive. Just like a new baby needs the right food, love, and conditions to grow and thrive, so to do all the other things you birth. If you do not acknowledge the stages, steps, and process of the rebirthing energy, you will stunt the energy in the second chakra, for you will either be focusing only on what you don’t want to give up or only be thinking about what you have to gain. Whether we like to admit it or not, bringing new ideas, new energy, new things, and new people into our lives is exciting. We all love bringing new things into our experience, but what we don’t like is how that new energy changes our lives, and you can’t experience rebirth without change. It is this change that most people will rebel against. You may not even be aware of what energy you are rebelling against in the second chakra. Thank goodness we have a way of checking in.
Exercise
Grab your tarot deck and start to shuffle. As you shuffle, close your eyes and take a couple of nice, deep breaths. In this respect, the shuffling of the cards is a meditative process. As you breathe and continue to gently shuffle your cards, ask yourself the following question: “What rebirthing energy am I rebelling against?” As you ask, see orange light come up from your second chakra, move through your hands, and infuse with the cards. Once the cards feel energized, fan them out in front of you face down. Ask your question one more time, then select three cards. Your spread will look something like this:
• Card 1: What you are rebelling against.
• Card 2: Why you think you need to hang on to this energy.
• Card 3: What will happen when you let it die.
When you look at these cards, I want you to notice if you automatically assume some cards are good and some cards are bad, and if you think you got bad cards in places you thought you would see good cards. For example, did you get something like the Sun or the Ten of Pentacles for card 2? These cards might make it seem like doubling down and digging in your heels is actually a good thing, but let me ask you this: Is being in the sun all the time good for you, or will it eventually burn you and everything around you to a crisp? What if that Ten of Pentacles costs you something more meaningful, like true love or true connection? Is the price of your rebellion worth it? Now think about getting bad cards like the Ten of Swords, the Three of Swords, or the Tower in the last position. Actually, I think these are fabulous cards to have here, as they show exactly what needs to happen for you to move on from the death of an old, worn-out idea or an unhealthy way of life. I guess what I am saying here is to dig deeper before you decide what cards are having a positive or negative affect on your rebirthing energy, because in chakra work, nothing should ever be taken at face value.
Now that you have explored this rebirthing energy a little, it is time to pull a significator for it. Think about what this energy does, about how it both creates and destroys, and about how it can be in the moment but also stretched out over a long period of time. Cards that would work well here might be Death, Temperance, Ace of Wands, Five of Cups, Eight of Cups, and Queen of Cups. Keep in mind that this card has to align to how you see rebirthing energy working in you. If you already know what card you want as your significator, pull it out of your deck and start doing some journal work with it. If, however, you have no idea what card you want to align to this position, then hold your deck to your heart, take a couple of nice, deep breaths, and steady yourself. Next, fan your cards out face down so you can see them, and hold your hand over the cards just for a couple of seconds. Before you scan them, take another deep breath. Now select your card. We are keeping this card upright, so if you selected it in the reversed aspect, please turn it the other way. Now take your card to your journal and begin your deep dive into your card of birth, death, and rebirth.
If the energy of rebirth is found in the second chakra, then it can’t be much of a surprise to see grief down here as well. When things die, we grieve for them, or more to the point, we should. Grief is one of the more complex emotions we deal with as humans. Grief is both an individual and collective process. Grief is intimate and shared, and like most things that blur the lines, we tend not to handle it very well as a society. Instead, we tend to push people through the grief process, which can lead to violence, anger, and hostility. If you have ever lost someone you love, there is a good chance you felt some sort of pressure to get back to life, get over your loss, and pick up where you left off, even though that is impossible, from both an emotional and energetic level. Grief is such an important part of being human. It is what allows us to connect and be connected, not just to ourselves, but to humanity at large. There are no time limits for grief, and in fact, we are constantly in different states of grief throughout any given day. It is natural to grieve, yet we have made it something that we only allow in extreme circumstances and only for as long as it is socially accommodating.
Here in the second chakra, we grieve for everything we have ever had to say goodbye to—people, jobs, animals, clothes that no longer fit, abandoned dreams, and versions of ourselves that never manifested. We are perpetually creating conditions to grieve, which makes perfect sense, since we are also in a constant state of rebirthing. Life, death, and all of death’s complicated emotional spin-offs live right here in your second chakra. It is a messy chakra, and as we continue to make our way through this chapter, you will start to see why. However, we need to learn to work with this chakra, embrace all of it, and keep it moving in a healthy and beneficial way. This is why we need to learn about grief. Thankfully, the tarot is prepped and ready to help us, as it holds several cards that are especially designed for this emotion.
Off the top of your head, the tarot card you might automatically say represented grief would be the Three of Swords, but there is also the Five of Cups, the Five of Pentacles, the Tower, Strength, Death, the Devil, the Ten of Swords, the Nine of Wands, the Four of Pentacles, and even the Eight of Cups. All these cards deal with grief in one form or another, because grief is so normal that it continually pops up throughout your tarot deck. You have probably pulled one of the above cards recently and not even connected it to a grief state you may have been experiencing, or maybe one of the above cards has been stalking you, as the cards do when they really want to hammer home a message. If that is the case, which card was it? If you haven’t been paying attention to your cards or just can’t remember which of these cards has been present recently, don’t worry. We are going to do an exercise right now to see which of these grief cards has a message for you.
Exercise
Grab your deck and start to shuffle slowly, taking nice, deep breaths as you do. Connect to the energy of your second chakra by shifting your attention to the area in your pelvis. As you breathe, see an orange light moving up from your pelvis into your hands and spreading into the cards as you continue to shuffle. When you feel your cards are ready, stop shuffling. Then, just start flipping them over one on top of the other until one of the grief cards mentioned earlier shows up. Stop when you first come across one of those cards. This card is your grief significator. Remove the card, place it in front of you, and put the other cards you flipped over back in the deck. Next, you are going to pull four more cards around this grief card to get a picture of the grief energy that is currently in your life. Your spread will look like this:
• Card 1: Your grief significator.
• Card 2: What area of your life this grief pertains to.
• Card 3: What support you require to assist you with this grief.
• Card 4: The energy being blocked by not allowing yourself to grieve.
• Card 5: The gift this grief brings into your life.
Take your time with these cards and allow yourself to sit with them before you even start writing in your journal or try to read them. Just gaze at the images for a few seconds, taking them in as you slowly breathe in and out. Be gentle with your grief and move at your own pace.
When you feel ready, pick up your journal and start making your notes and comments about the cards, starting with the first card, your current grief significator. This card will constantly be changing, but for now, this is your point of focus. Move slowly into card 2 and explore the area of your life this grief has shown up. Is it in your relationships (cups); in your career, money, or health (pentacles); an idea, project, or belief (swords); or a bit of a spiritual crisis (wands)? If you got a court card, know that this could be a person in your life or a part of yourself that you are grieving for. If you have a major arcana card, you may be experiencing a life shift. Move into the third card and allow yourself to be open to the support. See if you can make a commitment to getting more support for your grief work. Card 4 might be a surprise, as you may have had no idea grief was the reason this energy was not flowing. Last, honor the gift, whatever it may be, even if it is a card you don’t consider much of a gift.
Once you have journaled all you can, head to your favorite tarot or spiritual books and dig a little deeper. Don’t be afraid to stay with this spread for a couple of days or even a couple of weeks. Remember, grief has no time limit, and you can take as long as you want working through its complicated energy.
What is desire? I ask this question a lot, and I get a lot of different answers. Most people think of desire as a sexual energy, and there is no doubt that desire and lust are likely partners in crime. However, not all desire is sexual, and not all sex involves desire. Like most of the issues in the second chakra, desire is complicated, mainly because it tends to be different for each of us. How you experience desire will not be the same as how I experience desire. Things that you strive for while riding the wave of desire won’t be the same as your partner’s or your kids’ or your best friend’s. We are not all driven by the same desire energy. Each of us has our own desire triggers, and when we are out of alignment with them, we can cause harm to the second chakra. Desire is not just something we actively experience; it can also be something that is used as a weapon against us. Sexual assault is just one of those forms. Desire tends to also be socially regulated. As women, we are often taught that our desire is not important, that we are merely tools or vessels to fulfill the desires of men, part of living in a patriarchy. This has caused tremendous harm in the second chakra for a lot of women. I have seen many damaged second chakras in women who have been abused, who have been afraid to ask to have their own desires filled, or who have tried to shut down desire altogether. Throughout my work over the decades, I have found that most women, especially those over sixty-five, are uncomfortable discussing desire and will be quick to shut down a conversation when the topic arises.
Yet desire is natural. We all have it in one form or another, and we all need to learn how to explore, experience, and enjoy it. When we understand that the energy of desire is connected to the heart and that it can show up in many different ways, we can take the pressure off our sexual selves. We don’t always have to be performing sexual acts to experience desire, since wants and needs can also be very heart-based. However, repairing this area may very well result in sparking your sexual self back to life.
Exercise
There is something in your life that is channeling your desire energy, so what are the things you currently desire? Is it a new job, a new car, a new lover, a vacation, or maybe more money?
Be honest here and know there is no wrong or right answer. Your desires are your own, and you don’t have to justify them. Pick up your deck and let’s find a significator card that represents your main desire. If it’s money, perhaps you want the Ten or King of Pentacles. If it’s a new lover, perhaps you want the Lovers, the Two of Cups, or even the Devil. Do you desire fame or more recognition? Then maybe you need the Star or the Six of Wands. Find the card that is right for you, pull it out of the deck, and put it face up in front of you. Then pull a card to answer the following questions:
• DS: Desire Significator
• Card 1: Why do I desire this?
• Card 2: What do I think this desire will bring me?
• Card 3: What is this desire blocking?
• Card 4: What will this desire cost me?
Lay the four cards out in a row under your desire significator and take a good look at the story of your desire. Are you seeing this desire for what it really is, or have you been romanticizing it and how it will make you feel? In other words, are there a lot of cup cards or dreamy cards in your answers? Oftentimes we confuse fantasy for desire, and they are not the same thing. Desire is an energy that drives people toward something that they would not normally do. It starts in the second chakra with your center of creativity and desire, hatching a plan, and is then trumpeted to the heavens through the heart. In many ways, creativity and desire work hand in hand to help us achieve our goals and dreams. Desire pushes us, keeps us motivated, and lights a fire inside us. Can you see that in the cards you have drawn, and are there any wands? If not, then there is a good chance your current source of desire is not serving you, but instead is binding you, especially if you have mainly swords in your answers. This is true also if you have pentacles, which can be heavy and weigh down the energy of your second chakra.
Take your time with these cards and journal with them. Let them talk to you in second-chakra language of desire, wants, and needs. When you have gone as deep as you feel you can, add your sacral chakra significator card and your creativity significator card to the spread.
• SS: Sacral Chakra Significator
• CS: Creativity Significator
This will give you a seven-card spread and show you how your current desire is playing with your center of creativity and how it is affecting the overall well-being of your second chakra. With more cards in the mix, you will have an even better view of what elements are dominating your center of desire. Keep in mind the second chakra is already made of water, so an abundance of water in this spread may mean you are starting to feel pulled down or swept away by your desire energy. What I really want you to focus on is if there is a missing element or one that is so lacking in representation that it may as well not have bothered showing up. This missing or lacking element will hold the key to balancing our desire energy and bringing it into power. Write about this in your journal and think of ways that you could bring more of this element into your wishes, dreams, wants, and needs. If, however, everything seems fairly well rounded, then congratulations! Your center of desire is doing okay.
I know many of you who are familiar with the chakras are looking at this section scratching your head. What on earth is memory doing all the way down here in the sacral chakra? Memory, as we deal with it energetically, holds an emotion that has either caused great pain or great joy. Emotion is what the second chakra is all about. When we do healing work for trauma, we work on the second chakra. When we do healing work for abuse, we do it here in the second chakra, because the waters of the sacral are both deep and expansive. It holds every memory you have had since the time of your conception. It may even hold memories your soul was clinging to before it manifested into the cluster of cells that eventually formed your human body. How we respond to things in our lives depends on what emotional charge we have wrapped that memory in. When you send information to your brain, it searches for a connection, and that connection is kept right here, in the waters of the sacral. That is pretty deep, pardon the pun.
Every time a situation arises in your life, an emotional memory is triggered. This will then send information up to your brain, and you will respond in accordance with that emotional charge. Let me give you an example. Let’s say your partner, the love of your life, has a habit of just leaving the house without telling you. They don’t say goodbye, they don’t give you a hug or a kiss, and they do not acknowledge you in any way. They just up and leave. Now, if you have a memory of being abandoned or neglected, this will trigger your second chakra like a raging storm, and before you know it, this simple act of leaving the house becomes about your partner leaving you, not loving you, or dismissing you. The event will make you view the situation through the lens of your emotional memory. You can see how this might distort your perception of what might really be happening and what you are imagining happening. Hence, because your partner does not share your emotional memory trigger, they will be left wondering what on earth you are getting so upset about. This will end up causing conflict, as you will feel like you are not understood, which will just hook you to that emotional memory even more, dragging you deeper and deeper into the murky waters of the sacral. Things can spiral out of control pretty quickly.
Through my work with clients, I have learned they usually are not fully aware of what emotional memory hook they are viewing the world through. This is why I am such an advocate for therapy and energy work, because we are just too close to ourselves to see how we have bent our perceptions. Thankfully, tarot also gives us a way to explore this issue as well.
Exercise
Grab your deck and start slowly and gently shuffling the cards. Take some nice, slow breaths and see that orange light in your pelvis. As you take each breath, see the orange light expanding upward and coming up into your arms and down into your hands, where it now infuses with your tarot cards. Just visualize this orange sacral light filling up your deck and turning each of your cards into an emotional memory. Relax into your shuffling, and when you feel your cards are filled with enough energy, stop and fan them out in front of you face down. Take a deep, cleansing breath, gently move your hand over the cards, and ask the following question: “What emotional memory am I currently viewing my life through?” When you find a card that feels warm or cold or makes your hand tingle, flip it over, and make sure you have it in the reversed aspect. Yes, this card needs to be upside down. It’s a topsy-turvy issue, so we need a topsy-turvy card.
What card did you select?
This card is the current significator for your memory issues in the second chakra, and it is the card that is influencing you right now and your interactions with the world around you. Spend some time with this card, take it to your journal, and answer the following three questions:
1. How is this card a gift?
2. How is this card a burden?
3. Is this card true or imagined?
There is a reason you and this card are currently having a journey together, and it will help you to explore that journey in its positive and negative forms. It is also important to answer the final question, which is “Is this card true or imagined?” This question is really asking you if this card is actually happening in your life or if you are just imagining it playing out on your life screen. It is important to see if you are allowing emotional memory to trick you. For the most part you are, but not all the time. The three questions are not easy to answer, and if you feel like you need more information from the cards, pull a card for each of them and journal those as well.
Once you have done the journaling exercise and feel you have a better grasp on this issue, memory, or perception, meditate on it. Just do a small, simple meditation in which you see the issues you journaled about being washed out of the second chakra. See the waters of your sacral chakra clean, calm, and free of this issue. Watch as the light dances across the water of your second chakra, skipping and playing, as a light breeze brushes against your skin, making you feel peaceful and calm. See yourself sitting at the water’s edge admiring your memories, knowing that you can release any and all of them whenever you wish. Smile as you do this meditation so that you can make new emotional memories, filled with gratitude and love. Memories are what you make of them, and here at the water’s edge of the sacral chakra, make them life affirming so that they can effortlessly assist you in vibrational growth and expansion.
I feel it’s important to start this section describing the difference between pleasure and desire. For one thing, desire is something we wish to experience, whereas pleasure is how we allow ourselves to experience it. Desire drives creativity, and pleasure is how we engage with that journey. Pleasure, much like desire, however, is not something a lot of women are taught, and they are instead trained that they are a vehicle for someone else’s pleasure. It is this suppression of our natural pleasure state that does damage to the second chakra. By denying ourselves pleasure, we can stifle the energy that moves in and out of this chakra, and this can lead to all sorts of sexual problems, not to mention it can severely damage how we engage with positive experiences in our life. Our ability to explore, engage, and experience pleasure trickles up to the rest of the chakra pillar, creeping its way into every aspect of our lives. That is how important pleasure is.
Let’s get one thing out of the way first, pleasure is a sexual energy, but that doesn’t mean sex is the only way to experience it. Pleasure activates the healing sexual energy of the second chakra, which is energy that does positive and life-affirming work in and throughout our bodies. We are sexual beings, even if we don’t participate in the act of sex, and playing with pleasure allows us to keep that energy active and flowing. Desire may let you know what turns you on, but pleasure is all about allowing yourself to take that feeling over the edge into a state of bliss, harmony, peace, and creativity. You could say pleasure is the orgasm center of the second chakra. I can always tell the state of someone’s relationship with pleasure by the way they react to the Devil card. There seem to be only two responses people have when they see the Devil card come up in tarot. They either see that card as something that liberates them or something that binds them. That is also how people see pleasure, either as a form of freedom and expression or as a gateway to sin.
Exercise
Let’s pull the Devil card out of your deck and do some journaling on how you view the role of the Devil in your life, and how you respond to it when it shows up in a reading. As you begin to write out your responses to the Devil card, consider starting your statements with “I am the one who …” For example, you might write, “I am the one who is bound by all of my mistakes,” “I am the one who sees the world as a smorgasbord and does not feel guilty about exploring it,” “I am the one who feels repressed and full of shame,” or “I am the one who feels liberated and free to be who I am.” Write as many “I am” statements as you can while you do your journal work. The statements you write here will give you an insight into how you are allowing yourself to experience pleasure. You either see it as something that hooks you to guilt, shame, and judgment, or you see it as an energy that frees you to experience the world without being hooked at all.
When you have done all you can with the Devil card alone, let’s build a spread around him and take a closer look at how pleasure, desire, and creativity are driving the energy inside your second chakra. Place these cards as follows in front of you in a simple three-card spread:
• Card 1: Desire Significator
• Card 2: Creativity Significator
• Card 3: The Devil
Now, let’s take it one step further. Pick up the rest of your deck, leaving the three cards lined up in front of you, and give them a shuffle. Take a couple of nice, deep breaths as you focus on the Devil card. Let the energy of the Devil dance into your cards as you gently shuffle them. Take another deep breath and ask the following question: “How can the Devil teach me to engage more actively with pleasure in my life?” Visualize the question going into the cards as you shuffle, and when you feel ready, fan the cards out in front of you face down and select a card. Place this card directly on top of the Devil card.
The card you have selected is showing you the end result of activating your desire, creativity, and pleasure. This card is also going to become your pleasure significator card. Now don’t get upset or put off if you happened to get a card like the Tower, the Three of Swords, Death, the Five of Cups, or any other card that you may not be happy to see. Know that this is okay, correct, and still a good sign. In energy work we do not expect everything to be roses, butterflies, and unicorns. It’s kind of the point that there are things that will come up for healing, and pleasure may be that area for you. Just sit with your card and view it from a point of nonjudgment. This is a lesson card, a card that brings with it illumination, and it will open the door to something amazing if you allow it to. If, on the other hand, you got an amazing card, fabulous.
Take this spread to your journal and explore it further. If something has presented itself for healing—and you will know this if it makes you uncomfortable—then write about how working through this block, pain point, or trigger will free up your center of pleasure and allow you to more deeply engage in playing with desire and creativity. If something came up to be celebrated, then journal about that, as it is always important to praise our good work and acknowledge our personal wins. Keep your words kind, compassionate, and loving, and you will be well on your way to moving healing energy in and around your second chakra.
Considering this chakra is where memory, grief, and death live, it should not be a surprise that the second chakra is predominately influenced by events of the past. The present may live in the root, but the past lives only one door up. This is one of the traps of the second chakra. It can keep you hooked to a life, to a world, to a version of yourself that no longer exists. It can create fears, doubts, and paralysis from events that are long gone, and it can stop you from embracing the here and now. As chakras go, the second one is pretty heavy. I guess we should not expect anything less from the emotional center of the body. Living your life from a past energy experience means you will never truly grow, and opportunities to thrive will be missed or ignored. You will create a version of yourself that is always either trying to recreate something or trying to escape something. The past is a murky place, where ghosts of the former versions of our lives haunt the emotion-lined shore of our sacral lake. Who you were then is no help to who you are now. What you used to do, or how you used to act or react, is not helpful to what needs to be done in this moment. What has happened is long dead, and you can only ever deal with what is currently happening.
We all allow our past to influence us in some ways. We all have moments when we hang on to some pain or wound that has been inflicted upon us, be it as simple as being stuck in bad traffic or being betrayed by a friend or lover. We offer rent to these situations in our mind and give this energy permission to contaminate the entire chakra system. Some of us don’t allow this energy to linger for long: we become aware of where our mind is and we take steps to shift feelings and emotions, moving ourselves back into the moment. This, for the most part, is the natural cycle of dealing with an emotional charge. We sit in it for a short period of time and then move on. Sometimes, however, we let that energy take up permanent residency and give it permission to drive the bus of our lives into a very long and dark tunnel.
There are cards in the tarot that let us know right away if we are living in a past emotional state, and the ones that stick out in my mind include the Four of Pentacles, the Devil, the Tower, the Ten of Swords, the Knight of Cups, the Six of Cups, the Nine of Swords, and the Ten of Wands. When these cards show up in a reading, you can get a sense of how the past is influencing things around a person. The Ten of Swords lets me know a situation has moved on but the querent has not. The Ten of Wands shows someone literally carrying their past around with them. The tarot is wise in the ways it alerts us to how deep the waters of our past have become.
Exercise
Now it is time to select a significator for your past. Choose a card that is a visual cue that you have your head behind you and are not focused on what’s in front of you. This card may have an image you connect with, or perhaps you are connecting to the meaning of the card. Either way is fine, as long as the card will always prompt you to know you are being influenced by the past. Consider using one of the cards listed in the previous paragraph. Once you have your card, lay it face up in front of you in the reversed aspect. Yes, this card needs to be upside down, even if you didn’t draw it that way. Just take a few nice, deep breaths before you pick up your journal. If possible, see if you can identify the past emotional charge that this card triggers in you as you view it. Write these emotions down as they pop up. Circle the very first one on your list, as this is the one that may very well be driving your emotions. Keep writing until you feel you have emptied the well of triggers or responses to the card.
Now, let’s go back to the first memory or past experience you listed, the one you circled, and explore it further by pulling a card for the following questions:
• S: Past Significator
• Card 1: How does this past emotional charge hook me?
• Card 2: What is this past energy blocking?
• Card 3: How do I release this emotional charge?
• Card 4: What will I feel like when I let it go?
As you shuffle, visualize an orange light coming up from your second chakra, moving up through your body and into your arms. See this light, as it moves down your arms and into your fingers, slowly infusing the cards you shuffle in your hands. Move the cards slowly and keep your breath nice and steady. Focus on only one question at a time, and see it as it writes itself on the screen of your mind. Once the question is fully formed in your mind’s eye, fan your cards out face down and select a card for your question. Repeat this process until you have all four cards. You should now have five cards in total lined up in front of you, your past significator card and the four cards you chose in response to your four questions:
Take these cards to your journal and spend some time with them. Really be open to how the past may be influencing the decisions you make and the way you are currently living your life. Write off the top of your head first, then dig deeper into your tarot books. Allow this exploration into your reading to help you see the triggers finally unhooking from you and allowing the past to drop away. This small exercise will move a lot of energy through your second chakra as it releases toxins from the past emotional energy you are working on, so make sure to ground afterward and drink plenty of water to flush your kidneys. When you are done with your journal work and are fully hydrated, just close out this section by placing your hands on your pelvis and sending your sacral chakra some loving energy. You can say the words “I love you” out loud or just imagine loving energy pumping out of your palms and into your sacral chakra. This will help ground you and assist in balancing out any and all energy you have shifted in this chapter.
Now that you have worked through the seven key issues of the second chakra, it is time to do some energy healing work on all that you have discovered, all that has bubbled up, and all that has presented itself for cleaning and clearing. Grab your tarot deck and get out the significator cards for the issues covered in this chapter. Select your significator card for the sacral chakra and place it in front of you. This card is going to be the middle card in your sacral chakra healing mandala wheel.
Your card order is as follows:
• Card 1: Sacral Chakra Significator
• Card 2: Creativity Significator
• Card 3: Birth and Rebirth Significator
• Card 4: Grief Significator
• Card 5: Desire Significator
• Card 6: Memory Significator
• Card 7: Pleasure Significator
• Card 8: The Past Significator
Your center card is going to be the energy you will see flowing in and out of the other cards, as if a beautiful orange smoke wisps out of the card and starts to tickle the other cards around it. As we move into the visualization part of this exercise, move your hands over the cards as you say the following affirmations for each of the cards surrounding your sacral chakra significator. The tarot mandala helps anchor your energy healing work and allows you to engage more fully with the overall process. Your affirmations are as follows:
• Card 2: I am a creative person.
• Card 3: I am constantly birthing new energy into my life.
• Card 4: I am allowing myself to grieve for things when they end.
• Card 5: I am actively seeking things I desire.
• Card 6: I am improving my memory each and every day.
• Card 7: I am allowing myself to seek and enjoy pleasure.
• Card 8: I am learning to use the past as a tool to move myself forward in my present everyday life.
Find somewhere comfortable and quiet, where you won’t be disturbed for up to twenty minutes. Place your cards where you can see them and start rubbing your palms gently together as you focus on your breathing. Rub your hands together for about forty seconds, activating the energy centers in your palms. You might start to feel some heat in your hands, and this is good. Now place your hands on your pelvic area and focus on your breath, inhaling through your nose. Feel the breath as it hits the back of your throat, fills your lungs, and expands your belly. As you exhale from the mouth, feel the breath leaving your body and notice the depression of the abdomen. Let the breath work become automatic, and shift your focus to your cards, starting with the center card, which is your sacral chakra significator. Visualize the orange smoke gently rising from the card and twirling around the wheel you have created around it. Each time you exhale, the smoky wisps extend farther and farther. Sit like this for a few minutes, just doing the breath work and keeping your hands on your pelvic area as you feel your chest rise and fall, and visualize the smoky orange energy infusing your spread.
When you feel ready, move your hands to your tarot mandala and move them along each card as you speak the corresponding affirmation statements out loud. Read through the entire list three times. Once you have finished, just relax and focus on the breath work, placing the hands back on your knees. As you inhale, feel the smoky orange energy coming into your nose, hitting the back of your throat, filling up your lungs and moving into the base of your pelvis, infusing the sacral chakra. Relax into this, as you inhale all this lovely infused energy, and let this energy clean and clear your sacral chakra as it embeds your affirmations into your chakra. When this feels complete, remove your hands and just breathe normally for thirty to forty seconds. Thank your cards, and you are done.
You can repeat this simple tarot healing session anytime you want, and by all means, journal about how the session made you feel or any revelations you had during the session. The more you know, the more you inquire, the more you heal.
3. Steve Jobs, “Steve Jobs: The Next Insanely Great Thing,” interview by Gary Wolf, Wired, February 1, 1996, https://www.wired.com/1996/02/jobs-2/.