We often associate the second chakra with fertility, creativity and more but it is also connected to one-on-one relationships. This week of Thanksgiving here in the US, so many people are with their families and those one-on-one relationships get a bit tested!! No matter how much we may love our human family, there are old triggers, wounds and often we resort back to behavior from our childhood.
The human-animal one-on-one relationship becomes even more important during these stressful yet enjoyable times. Because they aren’t choosing a political side or bringing their obnoxious partner who drinks too much…….maybe their lover barks too much, but that is manageable!!
This is excerpted from my new book Animal Chakra Healing, Bringing Balance, Health and Joy to our Animal Companions by Joan Ranquet (Findhorn Press/Inner Traditions 2015):
Second Chakra Emotions and Energetics
The second chakra represents reproduction, creativity, sex, and power, and all one-on-one connection. That connection includes romance, friendship, work relationships, and associations. Second chakra is still waters that run deep. Those deep emotions. So deep they are often overlooked because it is so uncomfortable. Emotions so deep that it could also be delicious to bite in and deal with what comes. Those emotions that could be expanding or contracting. The second chakra is also the deep contract that exists between two beings that are in relationship with one another.
Through the school, Communication with all Life University (CWALU), we always say that there are no good or bad, no positive or negative emotions. All emotion is welcome and necessary for every individual soul and our collective growth. Emotions can be expanding or contracting. Contraction is often where we learn the most in order to expand. Think of inhale, exhale. We can’t live in an inhale, and we can’t live in an exhale. We need to experience all emotions for balance, harmony, and evolution. The second chakra teaches us this.
In the second chakra, we bury secrets (contraction). Often, these buried secrets here in the second chakra are later revealed in illness, or sexual or hormonal dysfunction. The shadow side—for humans—is codependency, being too emotional, too sensitive, and promiscuous. It is about shame and blame, particularly about sexuality and sexual activity. Yet most of the emotions here, for the most part, are not exactly secret. The primary emotions here are shock, fear, and anger. Second chakra depth is expressed in pure life force. It is also all about creativity and the birth of a creative endeavor. The physical womb liter ally expresses breath in the form of new life. The second chakra carries that signature charisma that has taken lifetimes to develop. It is that deep personal triumph, the kind that feels like it is a continuum emerging despite tragic setbacks.
For animals the second chakra also represents sex, power, and one on-one relationships with their human, and with all others. This includes their one-on-one relationships with other animals in the home, barn, or field, as well as with their medical caretakers, dog walkers, horse trainers, cat groomers, etc. As discussed earlier in this chapter, that “sex and power” in our domestic animals has its limits.
Second chakra for animals invites us humans to understand how fluid feelings and emotions truly are. Animals can go between fixed emotions, meaning contraction or expansion, in two seconds flat because they live in the moment. If they live in a traumatized zone, that is a different story and then trauma is the lens that they look through.
For animals, the core emotions of the second chakra are shock, fear, and anger. Also, these animals tend to be codependent, fixated, have poor boundaries, tend to be too emotional, and too sensitive.
At the dog park we can see the expansive to contracted emotions at work. We watch as all the dogs are super excited and everything is fun until one dog is a little nervous, then they all turn nervous. Tails are waving back and forth, teeth are showing, a little growling, and it becomes a pack-up situation in a minute, and nobody could have predicted it.
A cat can be in a total seeking mode, blissed out, and then, out of nowhere, hear a startling sound. They turn into a hovercraft with a flat tail running to the nearest hiding place and are shaking in fear within a minute.
We can watch passion turn to anger, even violence, and submission become a demand from a hot and heavy stallion in a matter of minutes. We see animals move between these emotions in seconds flat.
If any chakra takes on the mental, emotional, and physical human story, this is the chakra where an animal may get hooked into our crap. What does that look like? Well, a shaman would say there are cords between the human and the animal that would be unhealthy and need to be cut. Because our animals spend so much time trying to please us 80 The Second Chakra—Exchange of Energy or worrying about us, for them to see us in these states—angry, fearful, shocked, filled with guilt and shame—they might “attach” to our feelings and become hooked.
Remember, animals are feeling into their pack, herd, pride, flock, colony for survival. If something doesn’t feel safe from the leader of the household, well then it really must not be safe. We see this play out in the third chakra more. But the tentacles of codependence and, “Am I safe? Uh oh!!” get installed right into the second chakra.
On the more expanded side of things, the beauty of the second chakra is that animals reflect back to us the amazing, groovy being that we are. They see us as so great, so powerful, so able, so everything. We are the agent of change in their world. They will lift their leg for wound healing because they know we will fix it. They will lay with us because they know we truly “see” them. We are often their world. Or at least the sunshine in it.
When I lived outside of Seattle, you would have thought I ordered the snow specifically for my dog Olivia. I would open the front door to the sight of fresh snow in the morning and she would look at me with sincere gratitude as she flew out of the house to create the first tracks early in the morning as we’d go to feed horses.
