Using 5th Chakra Healing To Find Your Voice
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The most terrifying thing is to accept oneself completely. —Carl Jung
This 5th chakra is called the throat chakra and is symbolized by the color blue. The Sanskrit name is Vishuddha, meaning “purification.” Since it is centered around the throat, the 5th chakra is commonly associated with self-expression, finding your own voice, and being heard. Sometimes problems with this chakra can manifest as overexpression — being domineering or pushing others around — but more often, people with 5th chakra issues are repressing their voices, unable to speak their minds or make themselves heard.
5th chakra issues are so common that it is rare for someone to have never experienced any symptoms. It isn’t a coincidence that more frequent and serious 5th chakra issues in women, since for so long we have been taught to push down our feelings and opinions, and look, speak, and feel a certain way in order to make others happy. This pressure starts at a young age, with girls encouraged to be thin, not get dirty, and take care of others.
I am very happy to say that this is beginning to change, as more parents, myself included, are encouraging their children to express their feelings and opinions, be creative and think differently. Many parents understand the serious consequences of squelching the authentic voices of their children, because they have experienced the damaging effects in their own lives.
Possible Physical Emotional, And Spiritual Root Causes For 5th Chakra Issues
- Trauma
- Rejection, abandonment
- Lack of self-esteem
- Pushing down your feelings
- Not expressing creativity
- Not enough movement and stress relief
- Being a control freak (It’s important to be able to let go and trust the universe when you need to.)
- Being too strong willed and not flexible
Expressing Your Feelings To Support Your Thyroid
The thyroid gland is located in the throat and thus is associated with the 5th chakra. Symbolically, issues with the thyroid reflect difficulty with expressing feelings or authenticity. I often see thyroid disease in people, especially women (who have more thyroid disease than men) who do not feel empowered in their relationships or careers. They push down their feelings and words, usually because they were not listened to, valued or respected as children. Thyroid disease, especially autoimmune related, can run in families but genetics is not a sole determinate of health.
You cannot express your feelings if you don’t know what they are, so the first step is allowing yourself to feel, without judgment or fear. You are probably thinking, “Easier said than done,” and you are correct. One of the most difficult parts of recovery from bulimia for me was giving myself permission to feel and think, since I had become an expert at pushing everything down. I was afraid of being ridiculed by others and afraid that they would reject me or think I was weird if I allowed my true self to be seen. Too many of us have faced ridicule, rejection, anger, and even abandonment from our families and those around us starting at an early age. If the people who are supposed to love you don’t accept you, how can you possibly feel safe expressing yourself alone or with strangers?
You Cannot Live This Way And Be Happy
When you are in a place where you feel safe, take a moment to bring a situation or person to mind and allow yourself to feel the emotions that are tied to it —whether they come as physical sensations, thoughts, memories, or in another form. You may not feel safe allowing these emotions, especially at first, but not feeling or expressing those feelings results in a kind of death of yourself. You begin to act, think, and feel the way you perceive that others want you to, in order to achieve love from an outside source rather than from the most important source — you. Your true feelings become buried in your body, and eventually become expressed as physical and emotional symptoms. Your self-esteem, creativity, and connection to intuition all suffer as well. You cannot live this way and be happy or healthy.
You do not have to act on or share every feeling or thought. They can just be there, in your conscious mind. Try not to judge them, just allow them. It can be very useful to work on this with the help of a therapist or trusted friend. There have been so many times in my life when I thought that what I felt or thought was weird and that I must be the only one with such a feeling, only later to find out that neither was true.
Once you allow your feelings and thoughts, you can decide what to do with them. You may want to just write down some of them for yourself, and you may feel compelled to share others, which might or might not be appropriate, safe, or beneficial. For example, the anger and hurt you have stored up as a result of the addictive behavior of a family member is valid, but might not even be heard or processed by that person. They likely will not change, and telling the person how you feel could make the situation even worse. Remember that your feelings do not require recognition or acceptance from another person in order to be valid. Your process of healing and stepping into your own authenticity is your journey alone and doesn’t depend on the approval of others.
Regardless of how other people react, it’s still important for you to process those feelings and to take action in ways that benefit you. That might be in the form of stress relief, talking to a therapist or finding a self-help group, removing yourself from the person’s life or creating distance between you, along with other forms of self-care.
We often think that we can’t handle the pain and fear of our feelings, but that is seldom true. You are so much stronger than you realize. The more I allowed myself emotional and spiritual growth and faced my fears, the more I realized that I had created the fear in my head. Take it one step at a time; this is a process, not an overnight accomplishment.
Keeping Family Secrets
Keeping family secrets is a common way to create and perpetuate 5th chakra issues. They do more than just withhold information or things no one talks about because they prevent everyone directly or even indirectly involved from being authentic and vulnerable. Whether it’s the uncle who committed suicide, the mentally ill sister who was eventually committed to a mental institution, the bachelor male cousin who never dated women, or the alcoholism that everyone pretended not to notice, family secrets are ultimately based in unnecessary shame.
These secrets not only impact the people in the generation in which they took place, but also subsequent parenting styles, relationships, and much more for many years into the future. Such was the case in my own family.
Shame and the fear of being her authentic self, caused my mother to withhold a secret from almost all of the people she knew, including me, for the majority of her life. This same secret, I believe, was the spiritual root cause of her paralysis and ultimate death related to a flu vaccine reaction, because it was the only way she could escape her shame and the person who tied her to that shame.
Generational trauma is incredibly common. It can be transmitted by unprocessed sexual abuse or assault, mental illness, suicide, addiction, poverty, and more. Since these issues can be so difficult to talk about and are often the subjects of family secrets, you may not even realize that generational trauma has impacted your life.
It is important to remember that we are not responsible for anyone else’s actions other than our own, and that what happened in the past does not have to negatively impact the future. After everything I’ve learned from my own experiences, I know that when we don’t listen to our intuition and our feelings, those emotions don’t just go away. Hiding the truth and suppressing our emotions simply doesn’t work. The repercussions of that negative energy can be devastating for us and those around us. The only path forward is honesty and authenticity, finding the courage to use your voice and follow your intuition.
From Heal From Within: A Guidebook to Intuitive Wellness by Katie Beecher. Copyright © 2022 by the author and reprinted with permission of St. Martin’s Publishing Group.
Katie Beecher, MS, LPC, is a medical and emotional intuitive with over thirty years of experience helping people all over the world transform their lives and their health. Heal From Within: A Guidebook to Intuitive Wellness is her first book. Visit www.katiebeecher.com.
