Crowning moments

Wow! Today was largely an exercise in staying deeply connected. Workday: hectic, with one project replacing another before the first could be finished (I'm still in the middle of editing the same article I started the morning with!). Errands after work, a stop at the grocery story, a forgotten bill needing paid...and I got home, parked my car, walked to the mailbox, picked up the mail (including a replacement phone that I hoped to activate online tonight, but no, that will be another errand to run tomorrow), walked back to my apartment, walked to my car to get groceries from the trunk...uh, oh. Car was listing seriously to one side. Sure enough, I had a flat tire. Called the tire place (I'd just had work done on the car last week, so the phone number was handy.). They'd just closed, and I definitely needed a tow (they'd have stayed if I could have driven over).

So the point...sometimes, staying connected to purpose, to the divine, to the path requires conscious attention to the connection. Not just during meditation or energy work where we're focused on strengthening the connection, but in the middle of what-kind-of-crazy consciously stepping back, breathing, opening the crown chakra to balance the craziness with divine sanity.

This is the role of the crown chakra. No, not balancing the craziness, per se. But as a portal--it's kind of like the outlet in the wall. Plugged in, electricity flows. It connects us to the divine, to the bigger picture. The crown chakra is where Reiki practitioners draw in energy. It's not just being aware of connected, it IS the connection. Whewwwwwwwwww. Yeah. It's the deep breath you take in when you close your eyes and raise your face to the sun. It's finding the purpose, the seed of your sanity in the middle of other people's priorities. Enlightenment, transcendance.

The color associated with this chakra is purple. One way to strengthen a chakra in general is to bring more of the color associated with it into your life. I'm not sure that means you should be wearing all the colors of the rainbow at one time (a bit dizzying, perhaps?), or one for every day of the week (I've meditated that way, but I'm not sure about dressing that way...perhaps a bit too eccentric!), but perhaps adding more purple tones to your sacred space, maybe wearing more of it if you're going through an extra-stressful time.

For clearing, though, we'll still on visualization. Tomorrow (which post will be rather earlier in the day!) I'm going to give you a couple more clearing/strengthening exercises. Today / tonight: the visual. You'll cast your inner eye to the crown of your head for this one. You'll probably find the spinning chakra more visible just a half inch or so above your skull, rather than inside, simply because of your viewpoint. Purple, as I said, probably around the violet range. Purple is an interesting and beautiful color. If the color you see or sense is, say, eggplant, you're probably a bit blocked (this chakra generally doesn't get polluted in the way that others do, although I wouldn't rule anything out, especially given the things some people do...you just can't imagine their spiritual center to be anything but mucked up!...but probably 99.999% of the time, the energy flow is simply being choked off. If the color is light, it may be that you're very open, and if it's causing problems for you, the answer might simply be some grounding (isn't energy cool?).

For meditation/clearing purposes, amethyst is the classic choice to associate with the crown chakra. In geode form, it's a great tool for meditation for any purpose. Another stunningly beautiful choice is selenite. It's a form of crystalized gypsum, and kind of looks like a cross between those ribbon hard candies you used to see at Christmas time and blackboard chalk. Moonstone can also be used.

Just breathe!