THE ANCHORING CODE: GETTING BACK IN YOUR BODY
4. Now, as you exhale, drop this energy all the way through the central channel and into the ground beneath where you’re sitting or standing
friction in its tracks before it creates conflict. Exercises like this one are powerful for releasing the stuck energy and conditions of the Protective Personality.
Here’s how to practice Drop In, Drop Through:
1. Notice the energy around your head and shoulders right now. (It’s likely more pronounced than in your belly, hip, and leg areas.)
2. Drop all of the tension that you can, all at once, into the center of your head as you take a deep breath into your core. Just let go of everything in the upper half of your body.
external circumstance or validation. Later, in additional Code chapters, you will learn that the power of love acts as a bonfire, transmuting these dense and stuck energies into creativity to be used proactively for enhancing your life experience.
The Anchoring Code Chakra Correlation: Root Chakra
While the work of this Code affects your whole system in important ways, it has a particular influence on the root chakra, focused at the base of the spine. Because the chakras each govern a specific aspect of consciousness, an area of life, and a region of the physical body, improving the function and flow of a chakra will have a specific, positive impact on your health, your experiences, and the way you view and approach life.
The root chakra, also known as the base chakra or mūlādhāra chakra (literally,
“root support” in Sanskrit), is the energy center associated with our most primal level of being. It represents physical survival and security. People with an inactive root chakra are not very grounded in their body or in their physical life and tend to feel anxious, unstable, and unsafe, constantly beset by survival-related issues. They may act materialistic, flighty, or flippant, or simply be externally focused. They often have big challenges with communication, feelings, and self-esteem, and so have serial marriages or jobs. Or they may “stuff” these tendencies deep into their bodies and experience tremendous internal conflict while appearing on the outside to be happy and strong. At some point, their bodies can no longer hold up under this energy drain and they fail to outrun their fears.
Many people with first-chakra issues also suffer from a strong sense that they don’t belong. It’s as though they have one sense of reality internally—behind their eyes—
that doesn’t match the reality they’re operating in. As a result, they tend to doubt themselves, feel crazy, or simply withdraw in order to cope. Because this chakra, and its level of our consciousness, governs our physical presence and well-being at a general level, physical body symptoms can include poor general health, compromised immunity, and low vitality, as well as problems in the body’s structural system, such as osteoporosis, joint pain and weakness, and instability in the legs and feet.
If you’re not in your root chakra, you’re not in your body. And if you’re not here fully, you suffer. The Anchoring Code practices can help!
The following chart offers a summary of some of the key characteristics of the root chakra. Notice how the energetic properties of the chakra mirror the physical body areas.
Due to its location at the base of the central channel—the place where energy (the real us) enters our body from the earth—a wobble or impairment in this chakra can cause a ripple-effect wobble up the rest of the channel, not allowing the ultimate activation of the high-brain centers of creativity. If this is the case, we never get to experience our true destiny. Rather we continue to try to make life work the best we can, from the Back Side of the Model, in survival mode. Therefore, having our essential energy activated in and flowing optimally through our root chakra is fundamental to our well-being.
The Anchoring Code gives us the tools to do that. Using the practices in this Code, you can establish the strong sense of safety, belonging, and well-being that results from integration of the root chakra. You begin to recognize that “this world is my gig” and “I can handle this.” You can cultivate, and sustain, lifelong vitality.
Rather than perceiving the world as something you’re trying to fit into, you see that
this life is yours to play with, to express into creatively as an adventure, and to experience with strong physical health, vitality, and self-mastery.
Yoga for the Anchoring Code
To help facilitate your ability to do the Energy Codes practices and reinforce their benefits, at this point I’d like to add a bit of specialized yoga to the mix. Done with focus and presence, yoga is the perfect blend of mind, body, and soul or breath. It focuses the mind on an area of the body that you simultaneously move and breathe through. This is the collaboration you need to truly land and anchor your essential energy in the body, and thereby gain the ability to steer and manage that energy’s pattern and flow.
My personal teaching practice, BodyAwake Yoga, builds circuits of conscious communication in the body during each pose. If yoga hasn’t been your thing before now, don’t worry. Even if you’ve never done yoga, you will likely be able to do the basic practices suggested here. But don’t let their apparent simplicity fool you;
though simple, they provide powerful cumulative benefits, even to the seasoned yoga student or teacher. Many long-term yoga teachers (thirty years and more) have been astounded at the differences made by these additional instructions. I’m certain they will also help you!
Now, on to the poses for the Anchoring Code.
Chair Pose (utkatāsana), which is simple and accessible to just about everyone, can help powerfully integrate the root chakra and ground your energy at the base of the central channel so you can begin building your presence as the Soulful Self. If standing or balance is a challenge for you, you can also practice Chair Pose by sitting on the very edge of . . . you guessed it, a chair!
CHAIR POSE (UTKATĀSANA)
In Chair Pose, the body mimics the act of sitting back onto a chair. Here’s how to do it:
1. Stand with your feet hip-width distance apart. Plant your heels and the ball mounds of your feet down into the earth. Feel the connection between you and the ground you’re standing on.