Root Chakra Healing and Atonement with the Father

Root chakra work includes our relationship to security. One key issue around security for many people is the issue of money. The root chakra is, however, related to abundance. Abundance, as I have written before in this blog, is the way in which the individual is in alignment with and allows the life force to flow and freely express through them as it is intended. Abundance is not simply an issue about money and wealth. One might be extremely wealthy but from an energetic point of view they could be the living dead.

I have issues around money. Some of my more materiality focused friends have asked me if I have ever taken a vow of poverty. In a very real sense part of me did and finds it hard to let go. My Reiki master tells me that in relation to this issue I should cut the ties but not the love. I have always resisted that advice and now at the age of sixty one years I am getting ready to do what I have resisted. This willingness to let go has been prompted by a dream I had last night. In this dream I am running with another man. We are running in a wide open field. He is supporting me. He lets me go and says that I must now run on my own. This dream man is a kind of mentor.

I have root chakra issues I need healing around the issue of my father and money. The longer I live the more loving of him I become and my focus on what we had together is now more on gratitude rather than on loss. I realise that in many ways I am very like him. I used not to want to be anything like him. Now I appreciate who and what he was and the best of who he was. In some way that begins to mirror how I feel about myself.

I have an image that I keep in my mind that connects me to my father and my relationship to money. This is an image that I do not want to let go off. It is one image that when I recollect it connects me to my love for him. Even as I remember this recollection now a tear comes to my eye. My father was a working class man from the tough side of Liverpool in England. He fought for the rights of the working man. In his heart, however, he was an artist but he was forced to work at a job that was essentially soul destroying. He made money wherever he could and worked all the hours that he could in order to make ends meet. I never remember us, as a family ever going without except that I always remember going without the love I longed for him to express to me but never did. He was not a demonstrative kind of man. In that sense he and I are not alike.

My remembered image of my father takes place late one night. I had come down from my bedroom to use the bathroom. There was a light on in the living room and I look in. My father sat at a desk counting money. He was counting union dues from the men whose rights he upheld as their union representative at the place he worked at for most of his life. I remember most of all that he looked tired and sad. I remember too that I wanted most of all to take away that tiredness and sadness because of my intense love for him. He wasn’t aware of my watching him. I didn’t disturb him but left to go back upstairs to bed.

That memory connects me to him still, and in healing the root chakra and the sense of abundance, I have begun to let it go. I have, as my Reiki master advises cut the ties but not the love. This image is one connected to working in the dark late at night. It is an image of counting little sums of money that becomes a symbol of the men who, in a very real sense, are fighting for their souls. My father becomes a kind of guardian of that energy. I don’t want to let that go of this image of him but in a sense it keeps me tied into a relationship to money that does not serve what I am here to serve.

Like my father I am a union man. I am a writer who invites the ultimate union. I do not fight for this union. I invite surrender rather than fight. I pay my union dues through the spiritual practices that are part of my real work in the world. I work in the dark out of choice. I choose to work in the shadow lands of the human mind. I choose to do and practice dreamwork. I work to align the invitations from my dream life into the life that I express in this everyday world of form

Root chakra healing is about healing your sense of security. Money and security are deeply related. As a child my images around money are ones about struggle, doing work you hate, not earning your livelihood by giving up what you would love to do. It includes images of counting pittances that allow a struggle for the rights of the working man to go on. All of these images are a representation of my father doing his best with the situation that he was presented with. There are many such fathers in the world who are doing their best.

The question for me is how do I run on as the image of the dream invites me to do. It invites me to run into the wide open field. In this regard I am reminded of a poem that invites union within a field. It is by my beloved Rumi.

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
there is a field. I'll meet you there.

When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase each other
doesn't make any sense.

---Rumi

The answer is that I let go the connection to the images of struggling in the dark with too little light. I let go the images of struggle but not the love that is and was inherent within that struggle. I change the image to one of honouring what was given by my father even if it wasn't given in the way I most wanted. My father was a provider. He wasn’t a lover. He was too wounded by the blight of his own fathers alcoholism and the times through which he lived. Although in a way I see how he, in his own ay, late into the night, worried and sorrowful, risked for Love in ways I am privileged not to have to do.

This atonement with the father is root chakra work. It is the work of healing the roots of your family dynamic that will in all likelihood impact you throughout all of your life. I am beginning to open up to a real sense of abundance. I have learned new skills that I intend to take into the marketplace. I have learned new skills that I will take into my community. My community is everyone who reads this blog and all the various healers who are connected to each other through an invisible thread of intention.

I am intending to bring a union of the masculine and the feminine into the world of healing in the way I seem most graced to be able to do. This involves the work of teaching technological skills to healers so that they can promote their work to the world and in the process learn to integrate the power of the masculine as represented by the Goddess Techne with the power and grace of the Divine Feminine. This is my work. It is soul work. It is work that I am able to do and in doing it I am able to honour the sacrifice that my father made on my behalf and others so that we might be more empowered to follow the life we love. My father eventually got to do the soul work his heart longed for. He founded an art club that is still in existence long after his death.