Day 9

Enthusiastic joy!

Doesn’t that sound like a beautiful, impossible thing?

Not just living in joy (which is another way of saying gratitude), but enthusiastically, with vim and vigor, as my grandfather would say.

That’s the emotion of Svadisthana, your sacral chakra.

It lives behind the navel, glowing a sunset orange and soothing your adrenals.

You know about your adrenals, right?

You know adrenaline?

Adrenaline?

That’s the hormone produced by your adrenals.

(See, anatomy isn’t so confusing.)

Adrenaline increases bloodflow to your muscles (that’s why your body produces it when you exercise) and decreases your pain receptors. It also dilates your pupils, so you can see better.

But, like all things, it’s a temporary and depleting effect.

Evolutionarily speaking, we make adrenaline to give our body the get-up-and-go when we feel threatened.

This is very helpful when we were being chased by lions and boars on the regular.

We got to physically release the effects of adrenaline through the act of running or fighting (thus: the fight or flight response).

What we’re learning now is there’s a third option for the nervous system being constantly flooded with adrenaline:

Freeze.

That’s the deer-in-headlights thing.

Nowadays, the adrenal response is triggered by anything that causes fear.

In our traumatized world, this could be anything from waking up to driving in a car to getting ready for a big meeting to being vulnerable with a partner.

Boom.

Stress.

When your system gets really overwhelmed and flooded with adrenalin with no outlet, it turns into a full-blown panic attack.

So what do we do?

Here’s what I did when my panic attacks were a daily occurrence:

I meditated.

I practiced yoga.

I spent an hour a day doing something nice for myself or for someone else.

That’s why I put together this program.

This is all the stuff that helped me heal from a long phase of daily panic attacks,

from the kind of depression that drained my bank account and lost me relationships,

from carrying around 50 extra pounds.

It took a few years to heal.

It had taken a few years for things to get to the point where I couldn’t deal with my shit anymore.

It had taken a few years to gain that much weight.

It had taken a few years to save enough money that I could live off it for awhile.

It had taken a few years for my adrenals to finally say, ENOUGH ALREADY GEEZ.

But it healed.

It rears up again when my meditation practice slides away, when I’m not as strict with my yoga, when I’m focusing on the tedious minutiae of humanity rather than the miraculous improbability of the overarching moment.

And I go through work like the stuff I’m sending you.

I go through my chakras and have a little conversation with them.

I ask them what they need, and then I give it to them.

Here’s what you can give your chakras today:

Hooray! Let’s practice ways to calm tf down.

Sweet! I’ve got an energizing flow designed to give your sacral chakra a big hug.

Glorious! Let’s clean that thing that’s been driving us crazy!

 Keep in touch, y’all!