Do you ever feel like you're trapped on a revolving hamster wheel, forever running to catch up with a life that has somehow morphed into an endless chore list? Our culture has become organized around high-paced, productivity-based lifestyles that give lip service to wellness and self-care but provide few resources and little genuine encouragement to slow down, relax, and not accomplish the next thing on the ubiquitous to do list. Sleep problems, digestive issues, high blood pressure, and obesity are just the beginning of a long list of ailments that many high achievers suffer from in the increasingly driven milieu of our culture. It is possible to shift course and resign membership from this cult of adrenaline-driven performance, but this is a radical act that requires a conscious rejection of the messages emanating through the airwaves. It also requires a concerted and sustained effort to realign priorities in your day-to-day life. This reorientation is based on an assertion of alternative values that involve embracing your inherent right to be. Reestablishing connection with the energy of your root chakra can provide a starting point to transform your life from a human doing to human being.

The chakras are an ancient concept arising out of Eastern culture that integrate embodiment, energy, and spirituality. They can be visualized as seven discs of energetic activity that reside along specific areas of your spine, extending from the base of the spine in the area of perineum (root chakra) to the crown at the top of your head. The higher chakras, which start at the fourth chakra (heart chakra) open you to the energy of love, self-expression, vision, and spirituality. Attempting to align with these higher energies before stabilizing the lower chakras can be frustrating and non-productive. After all, how can you be creative and visionary when you are sleep-deprived, exhausted, and running on adrenaline?

The work begins with your root chakra, which constitutes the foundation of your human self. This chakra symbolizes and expresses your sense of worthiness and safety in the world. It develops out of the messages you received when your life was first forming, from the moment of conception until 18 months of age. It is you before "you," as you experience yourself now, even existed. Instead, you were a pattern of sensation, need, reflex, and instinct. How you were fed, diapered, soothed, and stimulated downloaded the hardwiring of the self you now experience. If you were incubated in an anxious womb and then born into a high stress environment, where your needs for unconditioned safety and care were not honored, the hardwiring of your nervous system will be primed for stress, anxiety, and sleep issues as an adult.

For many people, thinking about childhood, and particularly infancy, feels pointless at best and self-indulgent at worst. After all, there is nothing you can do about it now, so you might as well make the best of things, right? However, giving some thought to how your nervous system formed can motivate you to take steps to correct early messaging that no longer serves you. Knowledge is power, and self-knowledge is a starting point for truly owning your own power in the world. Once recognized, your priorities can be reconfigured as your relationship to yourself realigns from doing to being. The following themes are important principles in this healing process, as they also illustrate the primacy of the root chakra.

Investigate If You Treat Yourself as You Were Treated: Begin by investigating how you relate to your body. Through examining your patterns of self-care, which are likely so habitual you never question them, you may come to realize that you neglect your basic needs in glaring ways. Its not unusual for highly-driven, busy people to go the whole day without eating a meal, instead existing on coffee, snack foods, and processed food powders. If you do the math, you may realize that this pattern of existing on non-nourishing food substances replicates how your need for nourishing food—let alone nurturing attention—was dealt with in childhood. Many children are forced to fend for themselves emotionally and physically. This neglect can then be turned into a virtue as an the adult, wherein one's capacity to exist on air, food powders, and performance signals an ability to triumph over base human instincts. This same false pride can be exerted by going without sleep and rest for extended periods. But with the light of activated consciousness, otherwise known as insight, you may now recognize that your supposed triumphs are merely replicating treatment that is very familiar. You are perpetuating self-neglect and the belief that your body and its needs don't matter and that you aren't worth taking care of.

You may feel this recognition in your sacral chakra (the emotional center) and your heart (the center of compassion and the ability to love) as you realize that this is deeply unfair to you. Feeling this grief need not be debilitating; in fact it can be liberating as you recognize that you have the power to change this conditioning. This recognition can motivate you to take time to educate yourself about nutrition and prepare nourishing food. You might also allow yourself needed breaks at work, where you can enjoy a brisk walk outside rather than scrolling on your phone. Just as important as nutrition and movement, taking time for active rest is also fundamental to sustained physical and emotional health. Allowing yourself rest when you are tired is a gift that only you can give yourself, and it signifies a realignment of your priorities that puts your needs first in a healthy way. Start by exploring the body-based meditations and breathwork practices that are abundant on YouTube. You will likely find that you look forward to these breaks and experience them as a special, even intimate, time that you spend with yourself. Although implementing these changes may sound simple, it is not easy because real change requires the next breakthrough in your consciousness.

Cultivate a Fierce Alliance with Self: There is a tragedy in how frequently people unconsciously perpetuate the neglect and abuse they experienced in early life. But as the anger and grief about ways you may not have been fully loved in your family of origin are recognized and processed, and you take steps to pay attention to your physical and emotional needs in a more attentive way, you come to a fuller appreciation of your fundamental responsibility for yourself. No one is coming to save you, and no one else holds the key to your happiness and well being. If you don't take care of you, who will? That said, it can be very difficult to shake off the messages from others that are endlessly impinging upon you, asking you to do one more thing and criticizing you for not doing enough. You will have to set boundaries at work and with others, who expect you to act in a certain way that conforms to expectations. It takes courage to assert yourself and disappoint others because it challenges the deeply ingrained belief that you are not intrinsically worthy of love, but rather must earn your keep by pleasing others. Trusting in your inherent worth and your right to be cared for is a basic energy of the root chakra. Reestablishing trust in your own body to be your guide gives you a new orientation that you can begin to rely on in your day-to-day life. This will improve your self-esteem as you internalize the fact that you have your own back, and that that is what truly matters. This realignment requires honesty with yourself and a willingness to own and honor your needs rather than abdicating them in order to meet the demands of an identity based on performance and perfection. Paradoxically, taking more responsibility for your own well being, and being more honest with yourself about your needs, affords you the capacity to be more honest with others. This brings us to the next, perhaps most important, aspect of healing your root chakra.

Foster Healing Connections with Others: In an infant's early, preverbal years, before any defenses or coping tools have developed, the tiny, sensate being is completely dependent upon other humans to learn about the world and its own body. A wailing, soiled, hungry infant does not know that it is worthy of care and that its caregivers are not up to the job. There is no distinction between inside and outside at this junction of development, so that when neglect is chronic, or if care is merely inconsistent, the little being decides that it is bad, its needs are bad, and that others cannot be trusted.

Reprogramming a nervous system that was exposed to early neglect and abuse requires cultivating trust in the messages of the body and your own ability to respond appropriately. As this trust develops, it becomes more possible to allow others to see your true self and your needs more transparently. This creates a renewed spontaneity and authenticity in your relationships, where being perceived in a certain way no longer eclipses being genuine. You also come to realize that you deeply depend upon others to delight in your victories and mourn your sorrows. You are not alone, and this realization gives you a renewed sense of connection with yourself as a member of a planetary tribe. This stimulates your seventh chakra, which holds the energy of spiritual connection. A healing, synergistic momentum has freed energy in your root chakra to move upward into your higher chakras. You have renewed capacity to enjoy pleasure (sacral/second chakra) and pull back from your identification with yourself as unit of production (solar plexus/third chakra). Your heart chakra opens toward those who support you as you express yourself more honestly through your throat chakra. Your healing process continues with increased momentum because you are living from your center and are buoyed by a sense of self that is grounded in your fundamental humanness.