It's All Connected - Part 3
Written by Stacy Berman
When Did I Become So Angry and Defeated? Let’s Talk.
Been feeling a lack of creativity and vitality? Lack of motivation? No sense of play or fun? Are you detached from your feelings? Overly angry or numb? Always staying busy? Feeling a general lack of energy for life? At the same time, emotionally, you’re all over the place. Feeling afraid or completely disinterested in taking risks or trying new things? Or rather, are you a workaholic? Feeling greedy, obsessed, or easily addicted to activities? And what about your sex life? Non-existent? No desire for pleasure or being touched? Or is it all you ever think about? And when you do get it, it isn’t enough?
If any of this sounds like you--whether you have been feeling this lately or have felt it your entire life--these are all symptoms of an unbalanced SACRAL BIOENERGY field.
The first article in this series discusses bioenergy fields: What are they, how they function, and how when out of alignment, they can cause real health problems.
Feel free to check out this article to learn the science behind developmental stress and how it is stored in our nervous system. For the purposes of this article and every article in this series, we’ll crash course it:
Between the ages of 0-7, trauma, conditioning, or stress that happens to humans is called developmental stress.
Developmental Stress is stored in specific regions of the body known as bioenergy fields.
Our last article discusses your base bioenergy field. In this article, we are going to examine our sacral energy field, signs it is out of alignment, the different types of information stored there, and what we can do to create congruence and heal.
SACRAL BIOENERGY FIELD: AN OVERVIEW:
Our sacral bioenergy field is the “birthing center,” both physically and emotionally. Sacral is where we find our sex and procreation organs, our elimination (pee and poop, guys!), water regulation, and our adrenal glands. Located about two inches below the navel in the lower abdomen, it is movement, flow, and balance. In the storage unit analogy, consider sacral bioenergy field where sensations, feelings, emotions; and the inherent needs for vitality, passion, and sexual desire. Because of the sacral’s direct relation to and nurturing from the root bioenergy field, it also includes emotional needs: love, touch, connection to other humans, etc.
Physically, the sacral bioenergy field includes lumbar plexus, reproductive organs, lower back, hips, pelvis, and urinary tract.
QUICK ASSESSMENT: IS MY SACRAL A MESS?
A preliminary examination of any bioenergy field can be assessed through a few standard questions. For your sacral bioenergy field, ask yourself the following questions:
- Are you overly emotional?
- Ae you obsessive with your attachment to other people?
- Do you have poor boundaries?
- Are you emotionally all over the place?
- Is your sex drive completely low or non-existent? Is sex unpleasant for you?
- Do you feel hyper-sexual? Is it all you can think about and never enough?
- Are you fearful of pleasure?
- Are you emotionally numb?
- Are you stuck in your ways and rigid?
If you answered yes to at least 4 out of 8 of these questions, you most likely are out of alignment in your sacral bioenergy field.
Physically, misalignment in the sacral can manifest in multiple symptoms:
- Lower back and/or hip pain
- Urinary tract issues
- Reproductive issues
- Uncharacteristically rough periods
- Kidney issues
Of course, consult your doctor for any of these issues, but whether you are just now experiencing these symptoms or have wrestled with them for awhile, it is worth exploring.
CONNECTION: WHAT STRESS DISRUPTS THE SACRAL?
Consider this: there are 100 million nerve endings all over the body, but 10 trillion synapses in the nervous system alone. Our minds, therefore, are more attuned and sensitive to what’s going on within as opposed to the external world (Anodea Judith, Charge and the Energy Body, page 129).
Why is this important? Remember we’re discussing developmental stress. The human body first understands its universe through sensations: pain, sound, pleasure, color, temperature, etc. are all received from the external world and processed by the nervous system. The nervous system responds positively or negatively to these signals.
Consequently,experiencing extra unpleasant sensations causes the nervous system to “numb out,” distract, or get away from the negative sensation.
This is the beginning of our emotional stories that are based on childhood experiences. When those sensations are collected together in consciousness, they form emotions. In other words: individual sensations are characters. Together they form a cast of characters. That’s emotions. And how they interact? Those are the emotional stories that we tell ourselves and how we perceive the world.
Anything that “threatens” the processing of sensation within the body is likely to disrupt the sacral bioenergy field. Again, these traumas can have occurred recently, been carried and stored in the sacral for years, or, regrettably, a lifetime. Note: almost all of these traumas can cause additional problems besides misalignment of our sacral, so if any of these traumas have happened to you, if you haven’t already, talk to someone and get help.
- Sexual abuse
- Emotional abuse
- Volatile situations
- Neglect, coldness, rejection
- Denial of children’s feelings states
- Restricting normal movement
- Religious severity
- Physical abuse
- Alcoholic families
- Inherited issues
REALIGN: HOW DO WE HEAL OUR SACRAL BIOENERGY FIELD?
There is no quick fix for realignment. Like any healing process, it takes practice, focus, and dedication. many of these issues have been with us our entire lives. But here are some tips to realign, focus up, and heal.
TIPS FOR REALIGNMENT
TIP 1: Movement therapy - Remember we discussed our nervous systems being “stuck” or “playing dead” from overstimulation to negative sensations or trauma. Movement therapy is an incredible way to free up blocked, locked, or frozen energy stuck in the sacral bioenergy field. Dance/movement therapy (DMT) is defined by the American Dance Therapy Association (ADTA) as the psychotherapeutic use of movement to promote emotional, social, cognitive, and physical integration of the individual, for the purpose of improving health and well-being. Google “movement therapy” and a ton of stuff comes up. Ecstatic dance classes can be a TON of fun!
TIP 2: Boundary work - Partnered exercise. Boundary work and partnered exercises are an excellent way to realign the sacral bioenergy field, particularly when dealing with trauma that involves boundaries being violated and/or choices have been taken away from us. Here is an example of a boundary exercise:
Have the Person 1 stand in the center of a room and Person 2 at the perimeter of the room.
- P2 tells P1 that she is going to walk towards them and that P1 can do whatever comes naturally to her when P2 walks towards them.
- P2 walks slowly towards P1 observing how P1 reacts.
- Sometimes P1 takes no action and basically gets pushed back.
- Sometimes P1 may say stop or put their hands up.
- The important thing is for P2 to observe the subtle signals of arousal or freezing.
- P2 tells P1 what she observed as she came closer and closer to P2. Example, “I saw you tense up when I was standing here, and I saw you flinch when I stood here, and you visibly drew back when I stood here, but you never said stop.”
- Repeat this exercise giving P1 feedback on the subtle arousals and signs.
- This allows P1 to observe their bodies natural sensate responses to invasions of boundary and the opportunity to respond accordingly.
TIP 3 - Work on a balanced sexual self. Whatever this may mean to you. This may be exploring your sexuality more deeply, journaling, masterbation, sexual adventures in a way you haven’t explored before. This may also mean pulling back sexually and exploring celibacy. Whether partnered or not, the best advice is to be authentic to yourself, read a lot, and be safe.
WHAT’S NEXT?
I’d love to learn how your realignment is going. Feel free to share. The bottom line is all of this work takes time, so be patient. The fact that you are reading this means there’s a willingness to do the work, which is super important.
Sensations are the building blocks of our emotions. Being sensitive to those sensations are elemental or a balanced sacral chakra. Being sensitive may get a lot of negative attention. But consider: feeling and experiencing yourself is living life in its fullest expression.
In our next article we will be going over our solar plexus bioenergy field.
Stay tuned...
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For over 20 years Stacy Berman has been teaching people how to get in shape, eat healthy and create balance. Her extensive training in Tae Kwon Doe, Capoeira, kickboxing and bootcamp drills have led her to a deep understanding of the body and its movements. As a student of the world, she has learned to combine an intense physical practice with movement meditation for an elevated state of health.
Soon after her creating Stacy's Boot Camp, the first boot camp in NYC, Stacy realized food was the foundation for creating a sound mind in a sound body. She threw herself into nutrition with a passion, became a certified nutrition specialist and worked with thousands of busy New Yorkers to figure out what worked and what didn’t. With feet on the ground practice Stacy created The System by Stacy Berman to help herself, her clients, and the world at large achieve a higher, more meaningful level of health and fitness.
Since creating The System, Stacy has gone on to receive a PhD in Natural Medicine and is presently writing a book Love Yourself Naked: The Science of Self Perception, Spirituality and Weight Loss that combines over twenty years in the health and fitness industries with scientific research to reveal how our thoughts affect the way we feel. Stacy is truly a forerunner in the mind - body holistic health movement with tens of thousands of hours of real life experience.
