Being a human is no joke. It’s this strange mix of breathtaking and brutal all at once. One moment you’re watching the light hit the mountains just right or laughing with someone you love, and the next you’re juggling responsibilities, expectations, relationships, conflicts, grief, work, kids, finances, the news, and the constant, consuming noise of the world. When you really stop and look at it all, the roles we play, the anxieties we carry, the conflicts inside our own lives layered on top of everything happening “out there” …it can become impossible to hold it all. In the world of yoga, the chakra system offers us wisdom about wherever we may find ourselves on this spectrum of feeling unsettled. In yoga, our most essential needs — safety, belonging, and the basic right to exist — are associated with the root chakra, Muladhara. And if I’m being honest, this first chakra business has felt out of balance for much of my life. Trying to feel grounded in a world that feels chaotic, overwhelming, and absurd can feel continually out of reach.
Muladhara is connected to the element of earth. It governs stability, safety, and the deep sense that the ground beneath us is solid. When this chakra is balanced, life tends to feel steady. We feel at home in our bodies, able to move forward, and able to trust that we belong and are loved. But when the root is unsettled, the mind and body can do some interesting things. You know the moment. It’s 3 a.m. and you’ve spiraled into anxiety. Your mind is relentlessly searching for worst case scenarios, for any and everything that could possibly go wrong. The world is most definitely unraveling, no one likes you, everyone hates you, and your life is out of control. This is what happens when the mind is trying to make sense of a body that doesn’t quite feel safe. When Muladhara is wounded — when the nervous system never really learned that the world was fundamentally safe — the mind reaches for control like a lifeline. If I can understand everything, anticipate every outcome, organize enough systems, get enough people to like me, then maybe I won’t have to feel the fear underneath.
The controlling behavior- aka anxiety- isn’t the problem, it’s the symptom. The root chakra is asking for something much simpler, which is the deep, cellular knowing that you are safe and that you belong here. That the earth will hold you.
And for many people, there’s an even quieter feeling sitting underneath those last layers of fear. A sense that some of you may have carried for most of your life — the feeling that you don’t quite belong here. Like you somehow arrived on the wrong planet, into the wrong life, into a world that doesn’t quite have a place for you. It’s the deepest root chakra wound there is — the right to exist, to take up space, and to be here at all.
Working with Muladhara doesn’t ask us to fix ourselves overnight. It asks us to slow down and listen. Sometimes it even asks us to stay in our jammies a little longer, journal honestly about the things in our past and present that still hurt, and get curious about what our nervous system has been trying to tell us all along. It invites us to choose a different pace — a gentler, more grounded way of moving through a world that can often feel wildly unbalanced. Ultimately, working with the root chakra is about rebuilding our foundation. It’s about learning how to be the kind, calm, steady friend, lover, and parent to ourselves that we may have needed all along. To advocate for ourselves. To cheer ourselves on. To practice loving ourselves even in the messy, imperfect moments. And in doing so, we begin to remind our bodies that it is safe to be here. That the earth will hold us. And that our existence was never a mistake.
