011. Root Center Work: The Pelvis, The Throat & Reciprocity with Earth
Root Center Work: The Pelvis, The Throat & Reciprocity with Earth
A transmission on somatic grounding, anatomical parallels, and learning to receive support from the land
Settling In
Take a moment to land here in the space with me. Notice what’s around your body. Notice what’s supporting you. Then notice the body itself.
Bring your awareness inside, into your headspace. Let any tension release from the body.
I have a spot that’s been bugging me for decades, and I finally figured out why the other day. My right piriformis—a deep muscle of the hip that sits above the glutes, underneath them—is never relaxed. It just doesn’t know how. It’s always clenched.
I’ve been learning this past week, since making this realization, how to send it the signal that says: Hey. It’s safe to chill out.
It’s hard to rebuild these motor pathways that are so deeply ingrained in our bodies, especially as we enter middle age, solid adulthood, looking at our Uranus oppositions whether they’re coming up or in the rearview.
It’s a challenging time to be in relationship to the flesh. Up until now, there’s always been the possibility of something improving. Now it’s like: well, you just got to keep what you got. Sure, you can improve in aspects, but... I’m learning to make peace with starting to be over the hill, I guess.
With age comes wisdom, of course. It’s not all bad. Just reframing.
For me, the answer is to subtly engage the pelvic floor and the deep muscles of the inner core—especially the lower transverse abdominal. I don’t have to clench them. I just have to say hello to them. Just gently say: look, we can support this structure in another way. Because I think that piriformis has been holding all of that energy this whole time.
The Root as Foundation
I’m spending time with those subtle movements, those micro-movements of the pelvis. Accepting that being upright means there’s never going to be full relaxation, because something has to hold that base.
This is where the grounding cord attaches—the root chakra. This is where the Earth presses up against and gives support to the body, to the torso. Whether that’s directly through sitting (pelvis on the ground) or through standing (where the bones of the legs come into the pelvis and the sacrum becomes the keystone of that arch).
I’m really checking in with that today and allowing myself to be surprised by these waves of emotion bubbling up as I’m connecting with my root.
A Baby’s First Cry
I was having a conversation on Threads today with Ashley Stinson [https://ashleystinson.com], and she mentioned something that came up in one of her sessions: whether a baby’s first cry is the impetus for—or coincident with—the activation of their root chakra at birth.
My gut says: yes, absolutely.
I have a conscious memory from my daughter’s birth of this liminal space after she came out. Childbirth is a portal, so of course you’re in liminal space. But I remember being given my baby, putting her on my chest, and there was this moment of uncertainty—not medical emergency, just the inherent pause in the process.
She had taken a breath (the midwife made sure of that before handing her to me), but there was this moment where she took a deep breath and let out a good wail.
And we were all like: Yes. Get it.
The energy shifted within her little body at that moment. I could feel that she landed in her flesh at that point. Like: Oh, I’ve landed. I’m here. Okay.
Embodiment is an entire process that isn’t finished until adulthood, truly. But that moment was the beginning.
Integrating the 7 & 9 Center Systems
A lot of my work, especially on an inner level, is doing this integration: figuring out how to take all the things I’ve learned about the 7-chakra system and apply them to the 9-centered Human Design framework.
I’ve been integrating and experimenting with the 9-centered model to determine how relevant it is for me. On the whole, I’m pretty sold on it. There are techniques and practices I learned through a 7-centered lens that, when I apply the 9-centered framework, work better for me.
For example: energy healing through the Berkeley Psychic Institute lineage. When I tune into the centers instead of trying to use a chakra model, I get better results—both within myself and in energy readings and healings.
Another area is the 9 Rites of the Munay-Ki from the Q’ero Inca lineage, which I received more than three years ago. One practice is receiving the rites into your chakras as seeds of energy, then feeding them by pulling elemental energy (fire, air, water, earth) into your centers.
I’ve been feeding my rites again for the first time in a couple years. But instead of pulling the energy into the seven chakras, I’ve been pulling them into the 9 centers. It feels so much more solid and aligned. Like: Oh yeah, that’s right. That’s the way it works. At least for me.
The Root Center: Where Radical Safety Lives
This root center—this root chakra—is where so much of the work is.
I speak from the experience of being a white person with European heritage, living in the United States, growing up in a middle-class secular family. There’s an aspect where that root chakra is the last one to truly align as you go through spiritual awakening.
So much of our heritage, so much of our inheritance, is about being torn from and alienated from the land. Being made to feel unsafe in physical reality. Needing to build artificial walls around ourselves—whether physical or mental. Needing frameworks of logic and structure to create a predictable world.
When we really truly anchor into that root and look at what’s beneath us, what’s supporting us, we often find that there’s nothing there. It feels empty.
So finding that safety? That’s the radical act. That’s an act of rebellion. Allowing yourself to be in this space of embodiment, in relationship with the Earth, with reciprocity.
The Root as Interface
The way I see the root center and root chakra: it’s an interface. It’s the place where our body (which exists in the physical world but also has aspects that are not physical—our connection to spirit and soul) meets 3D reality in the starkest way.
We interface with 3D reality primarily through the root and the throat. Not exclusively, but primarily.
The root is the foundation. It’s the place everything else is built upon. There’s the element of downward motion from within the body: release, descending chi, elimination (pooping, peeing, childbirth). But there’s also an element of bringing back up from there—taking from the earth in the give and take.
This is one of the Munay-Ki practices I never actually connected with but need to start doing consistently: sourcing energy from the Earth through the pelvic floor using a practice called Breath of Fire.
Our root holds so much more than just our connection with the material. If there’s a leak at the root, none of our somatic chakras or centers are going to be able to hold their energy. That energy just drains down.
The Throat-Root Parallel
I dropped a pin earlier when I mentioned that the root center and throat center are the places where we primarily interact with the three-dimensional world. And I can tell there’s a question popping up: Wait, the throat?
Yes. Because the two primary places where we interact with Earth are our hands and our feet. And our rear end.
Your throat center is attached to your arms and your ears. Follow those nerves up into the spinal cord—where do they meet? At the throat.
Your ears have the physical tunnel that goes into the throat behind the eardrum. There’s this hole in the side of your skull, then a drum, then an outlet into your throat. That’s all part of your throat center energetically.
So the throat is the other place where you interact with the 3D world predominantly.
And here’s something amazing: there’s a striking parallel between the anatomy of the vocal cords/throat and the anatomy of the pelvis/pelvic floor muscles.
Credit to my childbirth educators, including the incredible Siobhán Diores [https://motherofpearl.online] for this comparison. Both are places where we’ve developed this interesting apparatus of creating tension while also letting flow.
The pelvic floor is a series of muscles centered around orifices that can pull tight to shut them or relax to open them. The throat and vocal cords have a very similar anatomy—we just don’t see our vocal cords that often.
A lot of people associate the pelvic floor with the sacral chakra because of its role in childbirth and sex. But I think that’s not necessarily correct. The pelvic floor is synonymous with the root center. The root is where those muscles are—where our energetic being comes into contact with that which exists outside our bodies.
So it makes perfect sense that when a baby comes out and goes “Ah!”—that’s part of their root chakra activation. I’m not sure if it’s cause and effect or if they’re coincident (happening at the same time). But that first scream, that first cry, and the anchoring into the body are deeply connected.
Because to really put your back into it, to create the bellows that move air through the vocal cords with force, you close the pelvic floor.
The Glove Box Metaphor
Each of us is a collection of particles, single-celled organisms, and a coalition of more sophisticated cells that continue to decide to be a self, to form a body, to hold together.
Our mind and soul open the door to the glove box for God to come in.
When I say glove box, I don’t mean the one in your car. I mean the type you’d find in a laboratory setting—where there’s a sealed window with gloves built into it. You’re looking into a space with extremely good ventilation and filtration, very specific environmental conditions for whatever experiment is happening inside. You put your arms into the gloves and manipulate the experiment through that interface.
You can think of yourself as a glove box for God. For whatever form your supreme being takes—soul, universe, source.
The root center and throat center are where God’s hands enter the glove box. Where spirit manipulates matter. Where consciousness interfaces with the 3D world.
Reciprocity with Earth
What I’m really getting here is understanding the sacrum as the keystone of the arch. The give and take of the left and right legs, the left and right sides of the pelvis, doing this dance—almost like a figure-8 or infinity movement, weaving energy across the centerline where the energy center is.
Especially in pelvises of people who have (or had) physical wounds, or who are more estrogen-dominant: there’s a lot of empty space in the pelvis, in the root center. It doesn’t correlate to a place where there’s bone. It correlates to a place where there’s no bone.
As the place our energetic foundation is built upon, this can feel deeply unsettling to someone who is Saturn-dominant and needs things to be rock solid, hard, concrete.
This goes back to work I’m doing right now—work the collective is doing—as we come into the Saturn-Neptune conjunction early next year.
Realizing that our bones are Saturn. They’re the places where the field of standing-wave potential (governed by Neptune) has coalesced into solidity, into Earth element. The bones are the earth of the earth within the body.
The rest of the body—the waters, the sound waves, the harmonies, the frequencies, the standing waves—that’s largely Neptune. (Uranus is in there too as the zaps and electromagnetic potential.)
Neptune is not just how our bodies produce bone at the junctures of standing waveforms, but also how our bodies come into being. How particles decide to keep being “you” so that mind and soul can open the door for God to work through you.
The Missing Piece: Receiving Through the Root
One thing that’s been missing from my energy work practice—and the way I learned from my teachers—is that we usually just leave the grounding cord releasing all the time. We never really talked about receiving back.
In the lineage I’m trained in, we run earth energy up through our legs. We source earth energy through there. But the grounding cord itself is always a drain.
I think having the grounding cord be reciprocal—really leaning into the support and allowing it to also be a source of energy, not just a sink—could help with chronic pain problems. And also with the energetic reciprocity problems we have with the land as children of colonizers and colonized people ourselves.
So I’m taking a moment to feel into what it looks like to feel more held, more supported by the earth at the root.
Not just elimination. Not just release. But reciprocity.
Closing: Golden Sun Replenishment
I’m going to replenish myself from the crown using the golden sun technique.
Imagine a golden sun right above the top of your head, right above the crown center. Allow that golden sun to grow bigger and brighter, sourcing all the energy you need right now. Call in anything you’ve released that’s ready to come back to you. Anything meant for you. Anything you need at this moment.
Let the golden sun grow bigger and brighter. When it’s very large and full and bright, allow it to make contact with the top of your head and spill its entire contents down into your energy body, into your physical body.
Feel this warm, gentle, golden syrupy sunlight flowing through your body—physical and energetic. Allow yourself to bask in that energy.
And feel that it’s not just immediately leaking out through the root.
This transmission took on a different flavor than previous sessions. Let me know what you think. I’ll see you next time.
Good night and good luck. 🌙
Get full access to Cosmic Abundance at cosmicabundance.substack.com/subscribe [https://cosmicabundance.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]
