By Lisa Ericsson
The following is excerpted from Chakra Empowerment for Women: Self-Guided
Techniques for Healing Trauma, Owning Your Power & Finding Overall Wellness published by Llewellyn Worldwide. It presents one of the twelve chakra ‘Empowerments’ offered in the book, Feminine Pathway, an energy tool particularly useful during life transits – both those brought on by circumstance and those tied to our reproductive life cycles, such as pregnancy, post-partum, perimenopause, menopause and post-hysterectomy.
Your feminine energy is exquisite and powerful. When it is fully activated, your inner beauty is fully on display. As women we are bombarded by outlandish ideas of beauty, all physically based. The kind of beauty I am talking about is a glow, a dynamism, a centeredness, and perhaps a charisma that emanates from a woman when she is in her feminine power. It is indefinable, and yet you know it – and are likely drawn to it – when you see it. It has nothing to do with whether a woman has symmetrical cheek bones, a wrinkle-free forehead, toned abs, or even a bright aura (although feminine power certainly shines through our aura.) Her Feminine Pathway is alight, plain and simple.
The Feminine Pathway multi-chakra tool is a culminating Empowerment in that it utilizes all seven of the chakras we have been working with. It is also a culminating Women’s Energetics Empowerment, because it focuses primarily on the flow between our feminine or yin pathway chakras – the second/sacral, fourth/heart, and sixth/third eye. It is an Empowerment designed to support you during particular phases of your life – transition periods, and when you are working to manifest an idea. To use it in these ways, you will activate it daily for a few days, a few weeks, or a few months, depending on the phase.
Because the Feminine Pathway is based in Women’s Energetics, it is particularly useful during reproductive-related transitions – those tied to our cycles and phases, such as pregnancy, post-partum, perimenopause, menopause, and post-hysterectomy. It also has an upward and downward version. The upward pathway is associated with personal growth and spiritual development. Many spiritual traditions with practices based on the chakras focus on bringing the kundalini energy up from the root chakra to the crown to facilitate spiritual realization. The Feminine Pathway triggers this upward flow as it relates to personal change, and shifting into a new
‘version’ of yourself. Whenever we undergo big transitions in our life – a new job, marriage, a new child, divorce, a move – we are called upon to adjust. We can dig our feet in and resist, or we can go with the flow and grow as a result. Often as we adjust, we will be asked to develop new skills or call upon parts of ourselves we hadn’t been aware of before. In a sense, we ‘upgrade’ almost like an upgraded software version of ourselves.
At other times we feel as if we are actually going backward. Facing a divorce, illness, or job loss certainly doesn’t feel like an upgrade. In terms of your day to day life, it may not be. But inwardly, any situation can foster personal insight, the development of new wisdom, the discovery of a new resources within yourself, and more. It can become an inward turning point. In this sense the upward variation of the Feminine Pathway can help support you in whatever type of transition you are experiencing – one you have chosen and are looking forward to, or one you have not and are suffering through.
While the upward Feminine Pathway is about transition, the downward version is about manifesting – specifically the kind of manifesting we do when we seek to make an idea we have reality. Think of planting a baby tree – you create a hole in the earth and plant the roots and support them with water until they take root. Whether your idea is for a business, a product, a book, a home, an event, or something more abstract, it starts in your head (or becomes conscious there) and needs to be brought down into reality, the earth. The downward Feminine Pathway supports you when you are in a phase of your life in which you are manifesting in this way.
Thus far our focus has been on single-chakra Empowerments, but the flow and balance between chakras is just as important. If one chakra is overdeveloped and another underdeveloped, or if you have blocks in one that keep energy from flowing, it impacts the entire flow – in other words, it impacts both your ability to bring about and process change (upward flow), and your ability to manifest an idea (downward flow.) You get stuck. The Feminine Pathway is designed to help you get unstuck – to literally get your energy moving.
The Feminine Pathway also helps with stabilizing and balancing the flow between your chakras when they have been triggered into lots of movement on their own. This happens when we are thrust into sudden change and are forced to adapt quickly. Sometimes, too, such changes may trigger energetic instability – erratic bursts of energy in our energy body – and in this case the Feminine Pathway can help to smooth them. Perimenopause is an example of a time in our life when bursts like this can occur spontaneously, and the Feminine Pathway can help to stabilize us.
