…and let’s focus on the Crown Chakra

I’m hoping everyone had a lovely holiday season, filled with love, connections, and relaxation. I sure did. I spent most of the time with family and friends and enjoyed some long days of relaxation and rejuvenation. Now it’s time to get back to a bit of structure and routine. Many of us focus on resolutions or changes they wish to make in the coming year. I avoid setting resolutions and tend to spend a bit of time reflecting on the past year and coming up with some intentions that are realistic. Mainly I choose a general area that I’d like to focus on for the year. Last year the focus was Gratitude, which helped  create a daily routine of contemplating the many things and people I’m grateful for. This year, I decided that the focus would be  Mindfulness.

And lucky for me, the wonderful yoga instructor, Mirta Romberg, did a New Year’s presentation on Mindfulness last Friday, which fit nicely into this year’s intent.

Mirta reminded us of the importance of mindfulness in everyday things, such as when we are eating, and doing regular tasks. She talked about the need for concentration and working on the ability to focus inward, in order to quiet the mind. Spending time in meditation seems to be the most important activity we can do in order to be more mindful, focused, and generally happier in life.

Today while doing Finding Balance on Monday’s weekly chakra card reading, I was not surprised when I picked #48: I Know, which is one of the Crown chakra cards in the deck I created. The crown chakra is all about knowledge, wisdom, spirituality, enlightenment… and meditation and mindfulness.

As I recognized it was time to update this website and add a new blog post, I realized that it was also time to start adding posts about the chakras.  How perfect.  Let’s start the new year off and focus on the Crown Chakra.

Chakra #7
Sahasrara, the Crown chakra, is purple or pure white, and thought is its element. Enlightenment and being  connected are the Crown chakra’s main issues, and its goals are wisdom, knowledge, awareness, and spiritual connection.  Crown chakra energy is a catalyst for you to see the big picture, to have and to use your intellect, and to be a spiritual being who feels connected to the universe and others. A healthy Crown chakra allows you to explore abstract concepts, to attain higher levels of education, to have a spiritual life, and an awareness of being connected to and in unity with others. Through this chakra, you develop an understanding of issues greater   than yourself and a belief in an entity greater than your earthly self. Higher levels of consciousness and awareness come through this chakra.

Signs of a deficient Crown chakra can include depression, lack of inspiration, materialism, apathy, and rigid belief systems. If you have deficiencies in your Crown chakra, you may be less interested in philosophical, spiritual, and intellectual pursuits. You may tend to prioritize your own needs while neglecting the needs of others. Some physical issues related to deficient Crown chakras are learning disabilities, concrete thinking, dementia, autism, and headaches. Poor sleep can also be a sign of a problem with the Crown chakra.

Conversely, if you find yourself immersed in spiritual studies, meditating for hours daily, spending excessive time worshipping or over-intellectualizing, you may have an excessive Crown chakra. Although monastic lifestyles and spiritual gurus likely benefit from excessively open Crown chakras, life in the modern world requires a balance of earthly (lower) and spiritual (upper) chakras. There is also a risk of losing touch with reality if you become too obsessed with finding enlightenment and the pursuit of spiritual experiences, at the expense of living in the real world.

If you have an open, balanced crown chakra, you are intelligent, aware, present, open-minded, wise, and enlightened. You are grounded, but you have the serene and blissful awareness of spiritual connectedness.

A balance between practising grounding exercises and other activities that balance the Root chakra with activities such as meditation, spiritual and intellectual studies, learning a new language, creating abstract art, reading, and learning to play an instrument will help achieve a healthy, open seventh chakra.

“Creativity is intelligence having fun.”
Albert Einstein