Muladhara, The Root Chakra

The Muladhar
© Chandi Devi 2007 All Rights Reserved

The premise in Tantra is that there are seven energy chakras, along the spine in the subtle body. These are often described as petals of a lotus, with each chakra owning from four petals at the first chakra to one thousand petals in the seventh.

At the base of the spine is the first chakra called the muladhar. This is the root of our survival, our most base instincts. This lotus stores our samskaras, or early impressions imposed by family, friends, society, and religion during this incarnation as well as stored samskaras from past lives.

This chakra is our sex center. Within the lotus is a triangle pointing down-- the three points depicting oral, anal, and genital functions. The lowest point of the triangle represents our earliest oral experience. It is the “lowest” and the most primal point.

Our first experience in life is oral. The breast is food, comfort and security for the newborn, but the baby usually does not get enough to satisfy, and he or she spends the rest of their life seeking oral fulfillment by smoking, over-eating, drinking and popping pills. He also becomes fixated to the female breast, while tithe unfulfilled woman is also fixated on the size of her breasts, placing all her value as a human being into these two glands. In her delusion, small breasts might mean she is not “enough” of a woman, so she gets the largest silicones she can possibly get to stretch her old breast skin over. Bigger, to her, means she is worth more as a person.

Osho was totally dismayed at this whole idea of breast preoccupation in the west. He said, “And now in America, where every foolish thing goes to its extreme, they are injecting chemicals into women's breasts, silicon and other things; they are stuffing breasts with silicon so they become bigger and can get the shape -- the shape that ungrown-up (immature) humanity wants to see. This childish idea! But man remains somehow oral.”

This immature fascination with breasts and anything oral is the lowest state of the muladhar chakra, and the lowest state of man. Yet, sadly, here is where the majority of people are stuck.

The next part of a child’s development is toilet training. Child and parent have a power struggle, and children are pressured into using the toilet before they are ready, as parents desperately try to control the toddler to trade the diapers for underpants. So the child, trying to avoid being reprimanded for soiling their pants hold on to their bowel movement, and resist their toilet training. And an anal-retentive human is created. As adults it manifests as constipation, holding on to everything--their bowels, their past, money, material objects, and getting a lot of sex partners. They become “hoarders”.

Only humans suffer from constipation and become anal-retentive. No other animal suffers from this condition. Toilet training should be done with conscious deliberation, or it very unhealthy and dangerous to one’s development as a human being.

This fixation at the anal is very damaging to the muladhar because individuals get so stuck (pun intended) they cannot move on to the genitals nor its enjoyment. If they are able to move to the genitals it is with apprehension and guilt and therefore they can never fully enjoy sex. They may pretend and go through the motions (like they do in porn) of the sex act, but there is no authenticity in their moves. Their pelvis is locked and they cannot move the pelvis independent of the body. When they are having sex, the moves are staged imitations of what they see in the movies; there is no genuineness, no honesty, no purity or beauty.

Their early childhood experience (from the church and family) has ingrained in them the notion that sex is dirty and sinful. They are told that sex is the original sin from which all of man is descended; therefore all of mankind are sinners, guilty, wretched and shameful. In fact, it is so bad, that they have to create a story that Jesus was born to a virgin.
How can anyone really experience bliss in union with this kind of predisposed background?

To fully embrace Tantra, one must get the muladhar in optimum health, which takes discipline and diligence. Spiritually mature individuals who have gone beyond the oral, anal and genital fixations can benefit from Tantra. It is possible that a young person of twenty will be far more qualified to practice Tantra than a man sixty years old who is still stuck with an immature fascination of sex.

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