This website is nearly finished, my healing studio almost complete, every single detail mere centimeters from perfection. So it’s on to phase two of my business venture.
Marketing.
I could write a book of all the reasons I hate marketing. My personality, for one, is so incongruent with capitalism I’ve often doubted I’m even human. Complicating matters is my lack of friends – something I’m generally OK with, unless I have to “spread the word.” Certain calls to activism can feel downright guilt-trippy for this reason. And my novel (God rest its soul) has been swallowed by the very same silence that allowed it to be written to begin with.
Topping the list of “my most hateful work” (to borrow my 2nd grader’s term for math) is social media – that sizzling hive of grating noise, the screamed opinions of others pulverizing your own thoughts until you lose sight of truth and meaning and forget who you even are. Instagram, I’ve never touched. Twitter, I’ve abandoned. In the right hands, it can be a boon to social justice work and outreach – but I don’t have the right hands. I don’t even have a smart phone.
Then there’s facebook.
My ultimate nemesis.
Few horrors compare to the fractured, chronic anxiety of checking and re-checking and re-re-checking facebook, making sure you didn’t say the Wrong Thing. Diluting your whole being to appease the masses. Nothing has ripped me from the present quite like it. And that sense of being watched, always – by relatives, by acquaintances, by advertisers and Russia and the NSA. Watched by people who, by and large, don’t give a damn about you, yet are listed as “friends” – gaslighting you to madness, unsure what a “friend” even is. No bones about it: I have full on PTSD from facebook. Depression, OCD, sheer panic – these are Mark Zuckerberg’s gifts to the world (among other things).
But I’m stuck with it. E-I-G-H-T of swords, STUCK.
Thanks to COVID, capitalism, and modernity as a whole, I’ve got precious few resources beyond pure Kryptonite. Re-enabling my facebook page to share my precious baby – my newborn business! – with a sea of turned backs, passive shrugs – if not sarcastic jeers – is the last thing I want to do. But it’s one of the only things I can do.
And, what’s more, it’s maybe something I should do.
As I’ve discovered with my other chakras, anxiety and other ailments are not as mysterious as I once thought. They’ve got clear origins, and demand nothing but action. Paranoia sprang from my root, desperate for a foundation I felt I didn’t deserve. Nervous tension ran electric through my solar plexus, demanding I self-actualize. And my throat chakra built social anxiety from bricks I laid on my own inner truth.
So many times I’ve been made wrong for speaking, and so many times I’ve tried to correct myself to please others. But guess what? My truth – my knowing, my wisdom, my natural disposition – it didn’t give a damn how much I wanted to fit in. It kept right on being me. Infinite. Immutable. Just strangled. So disempowered, it could only come through as chaos.
Riots are the language of the unheard, after all. And what’s more riotous to the throat chakra than a panic attack?
But there is so much more to the fifth chakra than what I’m making of it. After all, not every throat chakra is covered in scars.
From Wheels of Life:
Throat Chakra
Chakra five is the center related to communication through sound, vibration, self-expression, and creativity. It is the realm of consciousness that controls, creates, transmits, and receives communication, both within ourselves and between each other. It is the center of dynamic creativity, of synthesizing old ideas into something new. Its attributes include listening, speaking, writing, chanting, telepathy, and any of the arts – especially those related to sound and language.
As written or spoken words, as musical patterns, omens, or electrical impulses in the brain, the fifth chakra is the center that translates these symbols into information. Communication, due to its symbolic nature, is an essential key to accessing the inner planes. With symbols, we have the means to represent the world in a more efficient way – through the symbolic representation of perceived patterns.
As stated earlier, the lower chakras are highly individual. Our bodies, for example, are clearly separate, with our edges defined by our skin. As we climb up the chakra column, our boundaries become less defined. When we reach pure consciousness, the ideal of the seventh chakra, it becomes impossible to draw a border around this consciousness and say, “This is mine, and that is yours.” Information and ideas are like the breath we breathe – an invisible field surrounding us, from which we take what we need. There are no separations in this field. Each step upward decreases boundaries and separation and takes us closer to unity. We arrive at this unity through the ability of the consciousness to make connections.
Operating from the fifth chakra, a person becomes aware of things on a vibrational level. We may respond to the tone of a voice more than the actual words spoke. The effect of the more “abstract” plane upon our consciousness is subtler than that of the grosser actions, yet is no less profound. Unfortunately, most of us are not consciously aware of our actions and reactions on this plane.
What many of us lack is resonant rhythm, the integrating aspect that connects us from the very core of our being to the heartbeat of the universe. Consequently, we are at odds with the world and with ourselves. We lack coordination, cohesiveness, and grace.
We all affect each other, as well as everything around us, by the vibrations we carry within our minds and bodies. We don’t pay much attention to them – for the level is subtle, difficult to pinpoint or describe – but they affect us profoundly, nonetheless. Few people make a conscious effort to temper these vibrations.
People who live in the same household become rhythm entrained to each other’s vibrations. It has long been known that women who live together long enough will tend to menstruate at the same time of the month. Couples married for a long time often come to look alike, and their speech exhibits similar rhythms. As a culture, we become rhythm entrained to our neighbors, friends and peers. We are influenced by our environment, not only in visual, psychological, and physiological factors, but on a deep, subconscious level of inner vibrations.
If we are unable to entrain with the vibratory frequencies around us, we cannot experience our connection with the world. If we cannot entrain, we cannot communicate. Without communication, we are isolated, separate, and cut off from the nourishing energy so vital to health. Without it, we die, both spiritually and physically.
Telepathy is the art of communicating across time and space without using any of the “normal” senses. There are relatively few people adept at this form of communication, yet it is something we all respond to at a subliminal level. With a well-developed fifth chakra this type of communication becomes accessible.
As we learn to refine our chakras, calm our minds, and quiet our thoughts, the fabric of consciousness becomes smoother and smoother. Our vibrations become steadier and our perceptions more direct. In this state it is far easier to become aware of the subtler ripples of vibrations in our energy field. The quieter levels of telepathic communication become apparent when the grosser vibrations of our lives are no longer creating interference.
While few people are really adept at this form of communication, there are even fewer people who have never experienced it at all. Two people saying the same thing at the same time, finding a busy signal because your friend is simultaneously calling you, or getting the psychic hit that a family member is in danger are a few examples of the common ways telepathy can occur.
While many people have associated creativity with the second chakra (since that’s where we make babies), I believe creativity is ultimately a form of expression, related to chakra five. Creating life in the womb is not a conscious process. We do not decide to make fingers or toes, blue eyes or brown. While the emotional states of the second chakra may fuel creative impulses, it takes will (chakra three) and abstract consciousness (upper chakras in general) to create.
The process of creation is a process of inner discovery. In creating a work of art, we open ourselves to the very mysteries of the universe. We become channels for spiritual information, learning a language more universal than human tongues.
The process of creativity is a delicate one. Regimented lives do not lend themselves to it, and are instead threatened by it. Creativity releases our inner power much as language “releases the unknown from limbo, making it so the whole brain can know it.”
Art forms are generally more abstract than any other forms of communication. Leaving room for the imagination, they invite participation of the most innovative components of our consciousness. Saying less, perhaps we can hear more. As we approach the more abstract planes of consciousness, it is only fitting that we turn to our more abstract means of communication in order to embrace these planes.
Media is the most potent means we have of cultural transformation. Media can be a potent feedback system, allowing us to see ourselves as we are – in our beauty and our ignorance. It was the pictures on the news of the Vietnam war that allowed people to get in touch with its atrocities, while it was still going on, and create anti-war protests. Media lets us know the state of of the planet’s ecology, the condition of people in other places, and helps wire up the global brain.
Media can also show us ways of being different. A movie can make a hypothetical reality seem so real that our imagination is filled with new possibilities. Media can express creativity, communicating from the depths of the collective unconscious. Media can show us the fronts of cultural transformation by bringing the hidden innovators to light and letting their voices be heard.
It is important to demand integrity of those who control the media. If it is the cultural nervous system most influential to the ways we live our collective reality, then it is imperative that we keep media from being polluted with mindless garbage, sensational gossip, propaganda, and lies. Otherwise we risk being collectively manipulated. If the fifth chakra name Vissudha means purification, then our collective fifth chakras must be purified with the resonance of truth that can enlighten us all.
Well, I’m going to go post on facebook now. I guess. It’d be silly to not use every avenue available to me. And I shouldn’t be so afraid: I’m not hurting anyone by wanting to heal. Anyone who says otherwise has their own issues.
Just like I’ve got mine.
But this is just another lesson. Another hurdle, another stitch in a wound. Even the most uncomfortable of things feel easier when you see them as growth.
And I’ve got a lot of growing to do in this regard. My throat chakra’s damaged AF.
