Healing sexual assault through the lens of the chakra system

I experienced it all first: the trauma, the aftermath, high highs and low lows, turbulence, struggle, ego deaths, shifting world views, emotions that seemed to come out of nowhere, and emotions that clearly came from triggering experiences. A trauma like sexual assault is completely jarring. I experienced it like a death, the death of the girl I was before the assault. In fact, mourning her sudden and unexpected demise were some of the hardest parts of healing. But maybe I’ll dive deeper into these different aspects in another post. In this one, I’m going to share the enlightening new lens I gained through taking a yoga teacher training (YTT) course in 2019.

The YTT

Each week of the course we dove deep into a different chakra, starting with the first, and continuing through the seventh. We would read about it, focus on yoga poses that opened, connected with, and stregnthened it, discuss our experiences around it, and learn philosophical and spiritual components. Some weekends were just learning and diving into poses, but some weekends were transformative. Everyone experienced them differently depending on which chakras needed healing. The process brought deep emotions to the surface to be felt, looked at, released, and healed.

In between the third chakra weekend and fourth chakra weekend, I travelled to Mozambique to visit my cousin who was working there at the time. We had an incredible trip; safaris in Kruger National Park, visiting beautiful landmarks, scuba diving in a small beach town, drinking South African wine, and bonding through once in a lifetime adventures. During my long and arduous travels to and from Mozambique, I did my reading homework of the fourth chakra chapter. The book, Eastern Body Western Mind by Anodea Judith, is extremely potent. The amount of wisdom, intention, varying schools of thought, and lived experience combined into one transformative book tends to work on you while you read it. Through my divinely timed travels and reading, I had a major epiphany while preparing to enter the fourth chakra immersive yoga weekend.

Suddenly, I saw my entire trauma experience through the lens of the chakra system. It all made sense. The past three years of my life all experienced, thought of, remembered, in a new way.

Me in South Africa in 2019

My trauma through chakras

I knew the second chakra weekend might hit hard for me, as that is the chakra of our sexual organs, our emotions, and our creativity. But what I didn’t fully expect was the fourth, or heart chakra, weekend to smack me ten times harder. The night I returned home from my travels was the night before the fourth chakra yoga weekend began, and I was already having intense emotional releases while voicing this epiphany.

The epiphany

When I was raped in my sophomore year of college, everything changed. It was a complete shock to my entire chakra system. Everything had to reboot. My second chakra (emotions and sexuality) immediately shut down. I remained somewhat numb to the trauma in order to survive, to keep the “happy face” plastered on, to get through school and day to day life. I had completely lost my “right to feel” associated with the second chakra.

Skip forward to my senior year. Within the same week, I found out two classmates I knew had also been raped, and the knowledge cracked something in me. I saw myself reflected in them. I saw their need for healing. I saw them trying to act like everything was okay, like they were okay, but they weren’t. I wasn’t. They needed to heal, I wanted them to heal. I was them. I needed to heal too. I deserved it too. That weekend, the dam that had been holding everything in, hiding it from me, allowing me to carry on pretending all was well, broke and I was flooded. This was me reclaiming my right to feel. It was perhaps the most significant shift in my healing journey.

I cried all weekend. I was drowning in an extremely dark place. All I could see was the bad, the ugly, the injustices of the world, the pain. How could such terrible things happen to good people, innocent people, all the time, all over the world? How could I live in a world like this? It’s like feeling such pain within myself awoke me to the pain people could be experiencing in objectively worse situations and experiences, and I couldn’t fathom or understand how the world could be so unfair and terrible.

My school counselor immediately recognized the shift in me and prescribed me anti-depressants to help me get through my senior year. She also sent me to a more specialized local therapist where I could dive deeper, now that I was feeling it all. That’s where I learned the power of feeling in healing. I learned that it’s vital. For almost two years, I was repressing all of these feelings, doing my best to avoid them. When in order to heal and move forward, I needed to be doing the opposite. In order to fully heal from trauma, you have to feel all of the emotions related to it. That was a wake up call for me. And from the time I reclaimed my right to feel, I did all I could to face the emotions that had come rushing to the surface.

My healing journey eventually led to the yoga teacher training, which helped me uncover more emotions, gave me tools like meditation, and deepened my spirituality and understanding of the healing process.

The heart chakra

When I came in to my yoga teacher training that weekend, I was already a little raw from my emotional epiphany, and tired from travel. Each student took turns going in front of the class and teaching a short yoga sequence related to the heart chakra, complete with a theme. My theme had been inspired by my travels. Since graduating, my infatuation with the rainforest had grown. While in South Africa, we’d visited one and I had the same familiar feeling of peace, interconnectedness, and wonder that I’d experienced in other rainforests. It was pure magic. My theme related the heart chakra to a rainforest, how it endures the rainstorms and grows stronger because of them. While beginning to explain my theme before teaching my yoga sequence, tears kept stinging my eyes no matter how hard I tried to hold them in.

The other women in my YTT course asked me what I was feeling. Many had experienced healing emotional releases already, and had yet to see me experience the same. Being the safe space it was, I decided to share. It poured out of me; my story, my trauma, and this new understanding I’d gained.

The magic

The women listened. They heard me, they saw me, and they supported me. Many expressed surprise, not expecting me, with my calm and steady demeanor, to have experienced something like that. All expressed support. Several said they’d been wondering about me as I’d been the last to open up, quiet up until then. I’d never been one for vulnerability, even during my senior year, in the thick of my trauma healing, I only opened up to my therapist. Never had I shared so vulnerably with a group of people.

After sharing and feeling such support, I felt high. Like the weight of the world had been suddenly lifted off my chest. I literally felt the walls around my heart come crashing down. I felt amazing. After our lunch break, a breathwork expert came in. He had clearly done the work. He had this light about him, behind his eyes, and his aura radiated this joyful energy, like he was holding back a laugh at all times. As he ran us through multiple different breathwork exercises, I couldn’t help myself, I kept giggling. A giddiness kept rising up in me. The support I’d been met with, the safety, the freedom I felt in sharing so openly, I’d never felt anything like it.

The power of vulnerability

I still accredit this yoga teacher training course, and particularly this day, as the reason I was able to enter my first relationship with the man who is now my husband.

Before this day, my heart had unknowingly been surrounded by thick walls. They protected me, but they also kept me from the life I desired.

After this life-changing heart-opening, I reached out to him for the first time, and (not without struggle) expressed feelings for him. I realized you cannot feel for someone without opening up to them, without being vulnerable. Being vulnerable held a lot more power than I’d known, and even though it was hard, it was necessary for me not only in my healing, but in falling in love and moving forward in life.

As they say, the rest is history. I moved into years of healing, being in love, and utilizing the tools I’d learned.

Now I’m feeling a little like a beginner again, feeling similar struggles and trying to utilize the same tools in order to heal from a traumatic birth. I’m rereading the book that I truly believe everyone should read at least once, Eastern Body, Western Mind, both for my own healing and to ensure I’m doing what I can to support my son’s healthy development.

The main lessons from this story I’d love to share are:

1. Feel your feelings my friends.

2. Be vulnerable with those you love and those that feel like safe space.

That’s all for now.

Much love to you. Xoxo