Published in the Idaho State Journal and Blackfoot Morning News week of July 3, 2011
The other day, I started playing around with my baby’s Chakras. Chakras are, for those who believe, energy centers/channels that line up along the human spine and head—starting at our tailbone and launching off the top of our noggin into the heavens. This exercise in my kitchen was inspired by the pyramid-of-colored-plastic-donuts-on-a-stick toy. Come to find out, my baby is quite adept at balancing these plastic rings all over her body while laying on her back. For like, 10 seconds, she had the blue and yellow rings balanced on her forehead before she got distracted by the cupboard and flung them off.
The ring stack itself is organized with the biggest, blue ring on the bottom, followed with smaller rings of green, yellow, orange, and red, like a rainbow. But on my 6 month-old baby girl, laying there with her vast, un-imprinted consciousness and her mystic and physical energy flowing up and down and all around perfectly inside her body, I tried to arrange the colors to best align her for the life’s adventure of keeping that system organized and healthy.
The green ring sat low on her tummy. Green represents the earth, terra firma, Gaia. On grown-ups, this lowest Chakra at our tailbone is that which grounds us, reminds us of that biological, global connection. Further up her belly was orange—because orange is the only color that we eat. We don’t eat anything called a yellow, we don’t eat anything called a purple. Orange, in our ring-balancing game, represented that which physically nourishes the body.
Right in the middle was red. Now, when I was playing with this classic toy many, many years ago, this smallest ring was a solid red. In the new millennium version, half this ring is red, and the other half is clear, revealing a swirly, shiny design with plastic beads that rattles when it is shaken.
The center of the body, approximately our torso area, is sometimes referred to as our “power core;” where we feel emotions, where we have “gut” intuitions, where our heart beats and spirit lives. So this spangly, bright, center ring is my baby’s good stuff—who she knows herself to be, and where she connects with whatever transcendent force lives beyond her fairy eyelashes and tiny toes. Since she’s maybe 2 feet long at the moment, this red ring also covers her mouth—where she voices her opinions about her senses, often sounding like a Pterodactyl.
Then we have the blue and yellow rings, in succession. The yellow ring on top is what the red ring wants to connect with. This yellow ring is our inner light, it is life and illumination, it is what lies beyond, it is God, it is Nirvana. And in-between is the largest, blue ring—for the vast, blue sky. Ideally, that sky is crystal clear, and the red and yellow rings have no problem being aligned with each other. But sometimes, as grown-ups, that sky gets dark and polluted, and our bright, bedazzled selves lose sight of who we are and where we want to go. This will happen to my child at some point, it happens to everyone.
But hopefully she’ll absorb the lessons of the plastic donuts, and live a life that is tall, energized, and balanced. And when she does flip or jerk, and the colors scatter all over the place, hopefully she’ll know that she’s got what it takes to get everything back in order—which is also true of everyone. Onward!
Nancy Goodman is a licensed counselor with an emphasis on life and career coaching. She can be contacted at goodnanc@yahoo.com or 208-406-3234. http://vocatusidaho.blogspot.com.
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