First chakra continuing education

The only way to make a permanent shift in your chakras is to practice working with them. When you do a chakra exercise it can bring you an experience & a temporary change, but in order to change your life and your functioning a little more is required. Things you can do to balance your first chakra on a regular basis aren't hard and some of them are actually pretty fun.

There are tons of grounding/first chakra exercises you can do, such as simply reading about it, doing a cleanse, going outside and lying on the ground, visualization exercises, cleaning your house, and pretty much anything that puts you in your body (feeling that you are present & feeling what your body feels like in the moment).

For me, some of the continuing practices I'm doing include:

• Mediation -meditation practice is one of the most fundamental grounding exercises, also all your other chakras gain energy from meditation so it's a great thing to continue (and also I think the most important grounding exercise, if I had to just pick one, this would be it) -meditation brings presence into your day all day long
• Getting a bike and biking everywhere possible -this brings you closer to the environment, puts you in your body & makes you healthier, and makes you have to know where you're going
• Avoiding using TomTom (my GPS system) as much as possible- it helps me know the area I live in and be present
• Learning more about Portland & current events (local, environmental, political)
• Yoga
• Exercising
  
• Listening to my body
  
• Cooking delicious new meals
• Being outside (going new places to hike/hiking alone)
• Practicing presence (focusing on the person talking, when you eat you should be eating, not doing something else in addition to that, when you drive you should be driving, not paying attention to the cd you're listening to or a person on the cell phone-just giving all your attention to what you're doing at that moment)
• Energetic grounding exercises (setting up energetic boundaries between me and the other people I'm around, not being effected by their state of mind, not taking on negative emotions or pain from people I give massages to-I personally send energy down through my feet to ground myself, sometimes I picture tree roots going into the earth, sometimes I picture/feel the color red, sometimes I surround myself with a white energy "egg" that keeps me separate, sometimes I pray for help with it, sometimes I visualize an anchor going down into the ground, sometimes I just think of my first chakra and it activates it---everyone does something different, play around with different things and see what works for you, lots of people use their breath)
• Being aware of your misconceptions and working through them

Building up your first chakra helps with growth in all your other chakras, it's an important place to start. Strengthening your root chakra will give you a greater sense of presence, get you to notice little things in the moment, help you accomplish more on the physical plane, and will help you manifest what you want. (Be careful with the manifestation thing though, when you're really grounded you start to manifest what you think about the most, so be sure that you're thinking of things you would like to happen, rather than worrying about things you wouldn't.) You will also discover that you're a lot happier everyday when you're present and grounded, you start to enjoy life a lot more and get happy for no reason what so ever.