If you’ve talked to me about tarot readings before, I’ve undoubtedly mentioned the “Energetic Signature” reading. This is because when I begin doing shadow work with clients who have been truly struggling with something for years, there are usually repeated patterns that are played out over and over. It can be helpful to understand what is causing someone to get so stuck. For the most part, being stuck is usually due to a combination of our internal processes and emotions, as well as what is happening in your environment.
The first step to shadow work is learning to build emotional awareness in "the lower triad" of chakras. This is the root chakra, sacral, and solar plexus. The goal is to understand where the emotional blockages are, or to put it another way, where your biggest obstacles are. Then realizing what caused them. For those who've done enough shadow work to know what their blockage is, even if their Ego is disguising it - they can begin working on opening these energetic pathways immediately. For those who haven’t, the road is tricky. Getting to the point of knowing what is actually bothering them can be a pretty big journey. To get this point you can speak to a reiki practitioner, a medium, or a traditional therapist. It really depends on what you prefer, but also what type of issues you are dealing with. If it is more on the physical side, I highly recommend traditional medicine or reiki. If we are talking more psychological or spiritual, reiki often works as well, some prefer a traditional therapist - or I use a mixture of mediumship and cartomancy (tarot cards) and then therapy.
The next logical question, once you’ve identified the stumbling block, is how to go about tackling it. It’s important for you to understand the basis of shadow work through the chakras, which you can watch my video here. Hermetic Qabbalah is a modality where we view the possible solutions through different lenses. We’ll go through those lenses here:
The Root, Sacral, and The World
Root Chakra - Everything begins with the root chakra. This is a the lens which you define and filter information about yourself. Issues with this chakra deal with the family environment you grew up in as well as your current immediate family later in life.
Sacral Chakra - This is the next energy center where we process how we feel about ourselves, the world, our creativity and our sexual health. A great many of folks who have been through severe trauma or abuse see obstacles with the root and the sacral. According to this modality, and it has worked for a good number of the people I’ve worked with, to bettwe open up the energy between the Root and the Sacral, we deal with the 32nd pathway, which in ancient Hebrew is Tau. This is best represented by the Tarot Card “The World”.
It doesn’t matter what card is turned to represent the root and sacral, when you have come to terms with the initial obstacles, and you want to work on coming to terms with how you are feeling about things, the World is saying you need to seek closure.
Closure can mean different things to different people. Sometimes we might not be able to achieve closure due to physical distance, economics, or sometimes the passing of the person involved. However, what is closure if not the understanding, awareness and empathy for a situation? (Not necessarily for the parties involved, but rather the event.) Often when we think of closure we think of an emotional confrontation. If you personally need this, then give it a shot, but the World is saying you need to widen the scope of your emotional lens in life in order to get the understanding, awareness and empathy necessary to know how you feel about all the things in your life.
Humans are meant to have a large range of emotional aspects. When we are emotionally shut down, we feel cut off from most of the range of things, and this is either caused by the environment we are in, the way we view the world, or emotional narratives that have been forced upon us.
Even if widening your scope of emotional focus in life doesn’t completely solve your personal obstacle, its definitely a good start.
In the next article I will talk about opening up the pathways between the Sacral and the Solar Plexus.
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