The leaves have finally fallen. Trees are bare and stark. Strong, cold winds make the outdoors look uninviting. A sense of loneliness sweeps the landscape, inspiring deep yearnings to gather with family and friends. Affection and time with loved ones will warm your heart on cold days.
The fall season gently urges you to return to your roots. Yearly home bound journeys for Thanksgiving and early winter holidays fulfill your need for safe, secure, familiar surroundings during the harsh winter months. Families in small towns gather. Transient wanderers flock to airports and return home for their yearly visit. Those without a place to go often hope to be invited to a friend's house. Have you ever been far from home and asked what you're doing for Thanksgiving? It's almost instinctual for distant acquaintances to invite you into their home for Thanksgiving dinner when they realize your home and family are far away. Our cells seem to all know that this is not the time to be alone.
Colors of Thanksgiving are harvest colors that grace the feast table. Deep reds and oranges abound. Red is also the color of the root chakra in yoga and ayurveda, symbolizing the center of your body and world connected to your family, where you come from.
How Deep Are Your Roots?
Explore your concept and ideas of home, which is the stuff of the root chakra. Sometimes, home and family are associated with stress, grief, rejection, or anger. For some, going home is very stressful, but worth it nonetheless. For others, home means an open door, an open heart. How can you heal your idea of home? Do you create a peaceful home for yourself, or your own family? Forgiveness, empathy, and compassion are powerful tools that can help you reconnect to your familial roots. Perhaps you have a chosen family of friends, or a favorite uncle, aunt, or cousin that evokes the heartwarming feelings of the season. Finding your way back to your roots this time of year amounts to recharging your batteries and feeling grounded. Reflecting on the concept of home offers a good grounding during the fall season when it becomes so easy to feel flighty, anxious, and lose your sense of belonging.
Take a moment to recall experiences of your childhood that seemed wholesome and heartwarming before the age of 7. Your roots are the identity you were born into. If your life feels scattered, or you feel far from home, finding ways to return to your roots can be a peaceful, restful practice. Most people naturally expand their horizons in their teens and 20s. Reclaiming your identity after these two decades of exploratory living is an essential but difficult challenge, which can include anything from relocating to your home town, reconnecting to the religion of your ancestors, rebuilding old friendships, or re-establishing traditions from your childhood. Rebuilding your foundation will give you a sense of satisfaction, belonging and confidence unachievable through other means. A prominent sign of deficient root chakra is losing touch with old friends.
Create a Nest / Build a Home
Nurturing activities support the root chakra, such as serving a warm meal in your home, taking a hot bath, or meeting up with friends for a meal or cozy game night around a fire. The sense of belonging doesn't have to be reliant on other people. Acts of self-care and care of your home are ways of putting down your roots and strengthening your sense of "I belong." It can take twelve years or more to become rooted. Oil massage at home, or abhyanga, is one of ayurveda's great gifts to make you feel at home in your body and your world.
Practices to nourish your root
- Baking bread from scratch
- Visiting your home town
- Having a faith/going to church
- Spending time with your grandparents
- Keeping your pantry fully-stocked
- Any kind of sustained commitment, whether to a skill, a person, or a craft
- Spending time in nature
- Eating root vegetables, sweet potatoes, and other comfort foods from nature
- Re-connecting with old friends
- Traditions - holidays, pancakes every Saturday, etc.
- Gardening, doing crafts and things with your hands
- Keep a routine
- Repetitive Prayer
- Financial stability
- Staying in the same home
- Eating the foods of your childhood
On MeWe
On Pinterest
On Facebook
On Twitter
On WhatsApp
On Email
