Abraham Maslow was a 20^th-century American psychologist. He was one of the fathers of the humanistic psychology paradigm, which centers the concept of self.  The individual perceives the world according to their own experiences and this shapes their personality and behavior. For Maslow, foundational needs must be satisfied before an individual can seek to fulfill higher levels of existence.

The bottom tier of Maslow’s hierarchy is physiological needs – food and shelter, followed by safety, then love and belonging (personal relationships, sense of community, and affiliation with both formal and informal social groups). Esteem, the fourth level in the hierarchy has to do with self-respect and self-confidence as well as the desire to be valued and recognized by others.

The hierarchy is not rigid, one does not need to be completely fulfilled one tier in order to move on to the next level. It is also not absolute – someone may be at the point at which they are striving to fulfill their self-actualization needs and may experience a deficiency in their love/belonging or even physiological needs.

The top tier if Maslow’s hierarchy is self-actualization. This has to do with striving to achieve our potential and satisfying out creative goals. For Maslow, self-actualization is a state in which one is able to transcend ego (this reminds me of our chakra series). It is an interesting paradox.

Scott Barry Kaufman, a professor at Columbia University has revisited and been researching Maslow’s concept of self-actualization.  On his “about” page, I noticed that he refers to his “past life” which made me smile, because I have taken to speaking about the years that I was dancing as my past life.

You can take Dr. Kaufman’s Characteristics of Self-Actualization test (in case you don’t like my hyperlinks, here is the url: https://www.scottbarrykaufman.com/characteristics-of-self-actualization-scale/). I mean, who doesn’t love a good internet personality test? This one is free and anonymous; you don’t have to put in your email address to get the results or anything. I really liked what the questions made me think about.

For Dr. Kaufman, the characteristics of self-actualization are:

1. Continued freshness of appreciation
2. Acceptance
3. Authenticity
4. Equanimity
5. Purpose
6. Efficient perception of reality
7. Humanitarianism
8. Peak experiences
9. Good moral intuition
10. Creative spirit

You don’t have to have a high score on most (or even many) of these characteristics to be self-actualized.  Different things are more or less important to different people, I can think of lots of people (or maybe it’s just me) who aren’t even interested in having an efficient perception of reality. But someone who scores low on all of these characteristics may be functioning in the little hunger zone, rather than taking advantage of an opportunity to address their big hunger.

Anyway, I thought this was something fun to think about on a Monday.

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“By meditating thus on her who shines within the muladhara chakra, with the luster of ten million suns, a man becomes lord of speech and king among men, and an adept in all kinds of learning.  He becomes ever free from all diseases, and his inmost spirit becomes full of great gladness. Pure of disposition by his deep and musical words, he serves the foremost of the devas (divine beings).”

Muladhara – The Root Chakra

The first chakra, the lowest chakra, is muladhara – the root.  Think about it like you are sitting on the ground, cross-legged, like the guy in the picture.  You can feel your “sit” bones (the official name for these bones are the ischium) against the ground.  Muladhara is not in contact with the ground (also remember that it doesn’t physically exist) but energetically, it is creating a connection to the earth.  You are “grounded.”

For Jung all of the chakras are symbols, right?  So muladhara, being the root, is a symbolic representation of our conscious world, of our everyday existence.  The mandala of muladhara contains multiple symbols of earth: the yellow square symbolizes the four corners of this earth, the Sanskrit syllable “LAM” relates to the earth, and the elephant is the largest land animal.

The Chopra Center describes muladhara as the chakra that relates to the things that ground you and create stability for you in your daily life, things like food, water, and shelter.  These are also the elements of the first level of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs – the physiological needs.

For Maslow, the needs of one level must be met for an individual to have the motivation to pursue the elements of the next level much in the same way that Kundalini ascends sequentially as the chakras are activated and aligned.

According to Jung, we all exist within muladhara, although we may not be conscious of it.  What does that mean?  Here’s what I think it means: there was a period of time where I was existing in the world and going about my life, but in a very unconscious way.  I would go to work, come home late, go to bed and then wake up the next day and do it again.  I was “busy” and tended to react to things around me.  I was so busy doing that I didn’t take time for learning (research, reading, whatever) or physical activity, much less reflection.  I felt like things were happening to me.  I didn’t exist beyond being busy doing.  A Kundalini practitioner might say that I had a blockage in muladhara.

In Kundalini lingo, when muladhara is “activated” you become aware of yourself as an entity distinct from the world around you.  You become aware that things are happening around you, not to you. You have some psychical distance between yourself and your environment.  It is the first, baby step toward individuation, the attainment of self-realization that is the goal of Jungian psychology.  To me, another parallel of muladhara being activated, is this fundamental tenant of Stoic philosophy: you cannot control what happens, you can only control how you react. 

I realize that today’s post is a bit of a potpourri of philosophy, but I find the parallels fascinating.  Maybe it just reinforces Jung’s concept of the collective unconscious.

The post An Intro to Chakras – Muladhara appeared first on Cynthia Gellis.

The first thing that I found was that there was a great deal of interest in this subject among all sorts of different people who I know.  One friend mentioned that he thought that there was something in the air that made this idea have a lot of resonance with people at this time (hold that thought, we’ll be coming back to it in a bit).

As I mentioned, the term chakra describes a series of energy centers within the Kundalini yoga paradigm.  Kundalini yoga is a branch of yoga that comes out of Tantric philosophy.  In some usages, Tantra and Kundalini are used interchangeably to describe the style of yoga practice; however, Tantra refers to an entire subset of the Hindu/Buddhist cannon.

It is a rich tradition, full of iconography and symbolism.  It is also complicated, and the classical Tantric texts are intentionally opaque.  I’m going to try to strip things down as much as possible without simplifying the concepts too far.  You’ll have to let me know how I do.

Kundalini an aspect of the goddess.  She exists within everyone in the form of a serpent that is coiled three and a half times at the base of the tailbone, asleep.  The object of Kundalini yoga is to “activate” the various energy centers (chakras), waking Kundalini and allowing her to rise through the body, ultimately connecting an individual’s consciousness to the universe.

In the course of conducting research for my speech, I re-read a book called The Psychology of Kundalini Yoga by C.G. Jung.  This book contains the transcription of a series of seminars that Jung gave on the subject of Kundalini yoga in 1932.  Jung had already established his ideas on the collective unconscious and archetypes and reading the ways that Jung relates the concepts and symbols of the chakras to universal themes gets really interesting and overwhelming.  One point though did feel like a sort of life-line, when the way that Jung was explaining the chakras related directly to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs (even though Maslow was much later).  I’m really interested in exploring this idea more after laying the groundwork by spending some time considering each chakra, I hope you’ll bear with me.

I’m listing the sources from my research so far here, but I will also tag references in future posts.

Sources:

• Description of Six Centers (a classic Tantric text, translation from The Serpent Power is available online)
• Encyclopedia Britannica: Tantrism, chakra
• Fruge, Knekoh (yoga master)
• Kaufman, Scott Barry (Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, Self-Actualization)
• The Chakras (Leadbeater)
• The Psychology of Kundalini Yoga (Jung)
• The Serpent Power (Avalon)
• Yogic Chakra Symbols: Mirrors of the Human Mind/Heart, Journal of Religion and Health, Volume 32, No. 1 (1993) (Meadow) *I downloaded this article using jstor

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