As a Soul, you are light. You go in and out of lifetimes, and in each lifetime you create and absolve karma. You overcome something. You grow and evolve. From a state of expanded consciousness, you were born into the human experience to do this.
The root, or first, chakra is located in the tailbone area of your body. It’s the power centre that holds the consciousness of our safety, survival and attachment to our material existence. The root chakra is the doorway to your ability to ground your energy into the Earth and represents the Earth element in your body.
Find out more about all seven chakras here»
It governs your physical health; physical structures, such as your bones; your central nervous system; and your home life, which includes both your physical home and a sense of belonging or attachment to this world. It also governs innate love, often experienced as fullness and abundance, and attachment to your family of origin or chosen family.
This is the power centre that houses deeply subconscious programming and information about your patterns, belief systems and how you’re going to operate in this world. Much of the energy held in the root chakra is part of your hard-wiring, formed from the time you’re in utero until the age of seven.
For empaths, it’s crucial to understand the consciousness that’s held at the root chakra. It’s the foundation for your entire energy system, the patterns you repeat and what you’re holding on a subconscious level. That consciousness affects your ability to be connected to yourself deeply and to have strong, clear boundaries.
We’re going to take a journey into the root chakra consciousness to unpack what is held in this region of the body.
Our incarnation in the womb
Before birth, we incarnate in the womb. Because we’re sentient beings who feel energy and operate through feeling, our empathic intuition is the first sense that forms. In the womb, our bodily systems and senses begin developing after the empathic sense is already established. We aren’t able to see, but we can hear somewhat as the ears form.
While we’re in the womb, the instinctual and sentient aspect of life is the primary state of being. With that comes a sensing of emotions as vibrations from our mother, father, family and their history of beliefs and feelings.
Love and feeling wanted at deep levels are a primary form of bonding for an empathic or sensitive child, even while still in utero. Despite whatever emotions the mother experiences during pregnancy, the deeper bond of love for her child creates an attachment.
After being born the empathic intuitive can feel what they have absorbed in the womb. If being unwanted is the deeper feeling here, this energy also forms part of a child’s attachment in the world.
Our birth and growth
When we’re born, we meet our family of origin or our adoptive family. We’re awake in the world. In that experience, the empathic intuitive or sensitive child feels what is going on around them in a newfound, expanded space: being held, loved, fed, cleaned and so on.
Survival programming forms from how well we’re attached to our family and feel the bonding. This attachment includes how we receive love, how safe we feel, whether there is peace, et cetera.
As we grow from infant to toddler to adolescent, we orient ourselves in our environment. We become attuned to our familial and cultural beliefs, whether they’re spoken or enacted. If I’m a sensitive child, I take that information in and bond to my family accordingly. As I internalize these beliefs, they become the beliefs I hold about myself. This is the foundation from which I’ll begin developing my belief systems.
In this environment, very sensitive beings can feel so much. The consciousness during a particular era influences familial and cultural beliefs. For example, 50 years ago, virtually no one was talking about how to nurture an intuitive child. Instead, parents were typically operating from beliefs and attitudes rooted in survival, social norms and order, such as:
- Children are to be seen, not heard.
- We keep quiet in this house.
- Don’t make noise.
- It’s not OK to have feelings.
- Don’t trust anyone.
These beliefs become part of the energy we marinate in as sensitive beings outside the womb. People in the household having beliefs and feelings isn’t unusual. What affects the sensitive child, though, is when an adult doesn’t provide repair from trauma or upset, permission to be, or the sense of safety that comes from the child understanding that their feelings are warranted and true.
The child begins to lose a sense of belonging with the world—not always in the family, but in themselves. The energetic imprint is that the child, to survive, closes down to themselves in order to feel everyone else’s energy around them. The loss of connection to self and to a sense of belonging is deeply subconscious in the root chakra. It innately forms the beginning of the overly empathic experience.
You must reclaim your power
To be an empowered empath, you must reclaim the power that exists in your root chakra. No longer are you a victim to the universe and to energy around you. The protection mechanisms you developed in childhood kept you safe and were appropriate for the time in life when you were vulnerable.
Thank those protection mechanisms! Thank the disassociation, thank the fight-or-flight response, thank the pattern of overeating or whatever other repetitive pattern you adopted. These coping mechanisms were helping you during a time when you lacked power and love in your root chakra.
As a spiritually progressing Soul in a human body who is on this Earth to continuously grow and evolve, you are safe now, and it’s absolutely OK for you to take back your power on behalf of your inner child.
Healing inherited belief systems
Belief systems form deep in the energy body—imprinted in our spiritual DNA and connected to our human experiences. Positive belief systems form when we have bonding experiences in early childhood that make us feel safe and loved at a profound level. Positive bonding experiences can also help us recover from trauma.
If a child experiences some form of repair that allows them to recover and regain a sense of safety, the experience will be less likely to become embedded in the energy body or evolve into complex trauma. However, when no repair or recovery occurs or the child isn’t protected or kept safe, the root chakra becomes imprinted with the experience, and fear-based belief systems may form as a result.
Fear-based beliefs are also referred to as negative belief systems. Some examples:
- I’m not good enough.
- I’m unlovable.
- I’m not important.
- I’m not safe.
- I can’t trust anyone.
- I’m inadequate.
- I’m a failure.
These belief systems can be inherited from our family of origin, society and/or culture. They’re also born out of experiences that harm our sense of safety, validation, trust or worthiness.
Once we begin to understand the origins of our belief systems and how they come to form in our body, we start to uncover the history of our emotional and energetic patterns. This path of inquiry leads to a deeper exploration of trauma and its influence on our lives—and on our empathic intuition.
For now, I want to pause and give you a moment to journal about insights that have come from this chapter. Getting these insights out of your head and down on paper is part of processing them.
A 6-step journaling exercise
This book is a journey into finding your power as an empath by understanding the subconscious patterns held in your energy field that contribute to your feeling disempowered. Below are some questions to support you in getting clear on who you are in your essence.
Once you’ve read the questions, close your eyes, lean into your back body and receive from your higher Self. Tune in and see what answers come from your intuition, then write them down.
- What were the qualities of your true essence as a child? Were you a natural-born leader, creative, playful, full of joy or something else? Describe the essence of you.
- Did you feel seen, heard and valued as a child?
- What are the aspects of intuition that resonate for you most? For example, do you see intuitively, feel, hear or know?
- When did you learn that you were intuitive?
- When did you learn you were an empath?
- Do you feel seen, heard and valued today?
Wendy De Rosa is the author of Becoming an Empowered Empath: How to Clear Energy, Set Boundaries & Embody Your Intuition. As the founder of The School of Intuitive Studies, she has been helping people develop intuition and experience personal transformation for more than two decades. Visit her online at SchoolOfIntuitiveStudies.com.
Excerpted from the book Becoming an Empowered Empath. Copyright ©2021 by Wendy De Rosa. Printed with permission from New World Library—www.newworldlibrary.com.
