Mooladhaara: the descent into Prakrithi

Photo: Geoffrey Dunn

Have you watched an elephant walking? She sinks into her weight, using her hips to yield into the earth with exquisite gentleness and grace. The Mooladhara chakra, the lowest of the seven chakras as proposed in Indian philosophy, is described as the domain of the large elephant. Moving the physicality of the elephant to descend into our weightedness and attending to the sensation of yielding to gravity is the invitation of Mooladhara.

We value the ascent, and so it is that with the seven chakras we are eager to rush from the Mooladhara towards the thousand petals of the topmost Sahasrara where we think enlightenment is situated. However, the descent is the movement of contemplation. We descend into the body, senses, earth and the moistness of the Mooladhara region of our bodies. Many Vedic hymns celebrate the moistness of the earth as the source of life, insight and wellbeing. In fact moistness is deified as the son of Shri, or the Goddess of prosperity. The calling of joy, the movement of pleasure, the holding of that pleasure within and the release of bliss—these are the “sounds” of Mooladhara. It is the descent into the nether regions of the most primal of our drives—pleasure.

The Mooladhara is also Apana or the exhalation. It is the movement of removal, of ejection and of birthing. The intimacy between all these domains is something we avoid considering. However when we move these most basic truths of our body, we are brought to rest in the moist earth of our humanity.

The Mooladhara is the cosmos. When we cease resisting the weightedness of the earth in us, we become the simplicity of the swaying of an elephant as it rests in the shade of a tree. When we can move the primal arc of pleasure, we know the nature of pleasure and, as one of the women in my class put it beautifully, we know the nature of nature itself. This is Prakrithi.

It is in this earthy, moist darkness that we move so long as we are in the body and senses. It is here that we practice coming into presence through the elements and principles that infuse all the rest of nature. There is no flight from here, but like the balloon, when we are tethered in the weight of the earth in us, we can safely float in the skies.