Decades ago, my work group was involved with a company that did new-agey, borderline religious retreats designed to unblock our leadership skills by addressing things like emotional trauma, hard-coded beliefs and assumptions, and using activities like fasting and meditation to free our thinking. It was perhaps a little woo-woo, something that those outside of our work group might have raised an eyebrow about, but it was interesting and at times illuminating. In one session, we did a singing meditation that felt like endless torture to me. In another, we danced like whirling dervishes (turns out I had incredible dervish game and could switch direction and back without a misstep). We did a guided breathing meditation (kind of like doing math in a different base than ten, but with breathing) to experience rebirth (I think I fell asleep during this one). At one point, a participant at the seminar stood up and rebuked everyone as participating in Satanism and inviting demons into our bodies. He chose to leave rather than proceed. If some of the meditations seemed silly, they seemed far less silly than his declaration about demons, at least to me.

One activity that stuck with me was a Reiki massage. Reiki is a Japanese form of “energy” massage that is mostly scientifically debunked in which the practitioner’s hands hover over your body. Even though there was no physical contact during the massage, I experienced different physical sensations at different times. The “massage” was supposed to release the energy in the seven Chakras of the body:

  • Root. This is located at the base of the spine and represents safety, security, family, material needs.
  • Sacral. This is in the lower abdomen and is associated with pleasure, sexuality, creativity, and emotion.
  • Solar Plexus. This is in the upper abdomen and represents personal power, boundaries, autonomy, confidence, will-power and control.
  • Heart. Located in the center of the chest, it represents love, compassion, connection, forgiveness, empathy and grief.
  • Throat. This is in the throat and is related to your ability to communicate, express yourself, speak your truth, be authentic and clear.
  • Third Eye. This is in the space between the eyebrows, and represents insight, intuition, perceptiveness, imagination and discernment.
  • Crown. This is the top of the head and is related to spirituality, meaning, transcendence, faith, higher awareness.

Now, if any of you has been to a yoga class, you are probably familiar with the ideas behind Chakras. These are ancient ideas in Indian spiritual traditions that reflect an embodied view of human life. It’s very common in Western culture to think of concept like spirituality and expression in a disembodied way, something that happens in the mind that is separate to the body. We think of the body as something to be mastered, not as an integral part of our lived experience. Chakras show how our feelings exist as energy in the body, that we feel in areas of the body. They are part of everything we experience, our thoughts, feelings, memories, desires, and processing.

Back to the Reiki massage. When the practitioner hovered over my heart, it suddenly felt like butterlies being released into the sky. At the throat, it felt like a blockage was gone and I could sing like a Patty LuPone (I didn’t, but I felt like I could, or like Alma when he said “O that I were an angel, and could have the wish of mine heart, that I might go forth and speak with the trump of God, with a voice to shake the earth”). On the third eye, it felt like a cool cloth had been lifted from my forehead and a prism was showing the world around me through all the different colors of the rainbow. On the crown, it was like when the skyscraper in Ghostbusters blows upward, leaving a big hole in the gathering clouds. So, whether it’s all BS or not, I at least imagined I felt those things, although my eyes were closed and covered, so I couldn’t even see what the practitioner was doing at a given time.

Here’s the weird part. When the massage ended, the practitioner and I discussed our shared experience. He said that the strangest thing was that on the solar plexus Chakra he felt nothing. No energy at all. It was like it was completely empty or blocked. There was nothing there. That kind of shook me a little bit, like I failed the test, but I also wasn’t really sure what that even meant. He asked me why I thought that might be, and I had to take it away to think about it. Was I dead inside? Did I literally have no idea what I wanted in life?

Later in life I learned that the Solar Plexus Chakra is the one most commonly associated with religious trauma. If you had said to me at that time, decades ago, that maybe I didn’t know what I wanted in life, how I personally felt about things, because I was in a high-demand religion, I would have said “No way. I make my own choices. Nobody is the boss of me.” But I might have also suspected deep down that it was a little more complicated than that.

These are the themes associated with the Solar Plexus Chakra that are linked to religious trauma:

  • Loss of agency
  • Fear of making independent decisions
  • Shame about personal desires
  • Obedience over self-trust
  • Difficulty asserting boundaries

That’s because a high-demand religion (one that consists of rules and norms around behaviors and personal choice that are dictated by authority figures) emphasizes submissiveness, authority, and sin-consciousness. These are things that diminish your personal power and can be associated with conditioned feelings of shame as well as externalized moral authority. It’s moral, not because you believe it’s moral or because you know what your values are and live by them, but because the authority figure says it’s moral. Your job is to obey the authority figure and to justify their position to yourself and others, whether you believe it or not. In fact, that’s psychologically imperative particularly when you don’t believe it.

I have sometimes joked that menopause is particularly dangerous because as the hormones in your body shift, at some point this new radical idea pops into your head: “YOU matter.” Once that happens, you can’t go back to the way you were living before. That’s probably why the medical treatment for menopause up to a few hundred years ago was to burn her as a witch and marry a teenager.

I looked into the link between religious trauma and the other Chakras, and there are connections to several of them:

Throat. This could be fear of speaking doubts (doubt your doubts?), difficulty expressing anger, suppressing your authentic beliefs, fearing social rejection for questioning doctrine. People who experience this kind of religious trauma have learned silence, fear of confrontation, and social anxiety around dissent.

Heart. This can occur when someone has experienced conditional love (you are only good enough to be loved if you obey and/or believe), fear-based teachings about damnation, loss of community after leaving a religion, attachment wounds. They might experience difficulty trusting, guardedness around other people, confusion about unconditional love (due to lack of experience) or grief over lost relationships or social rejection.

Crown. This can manifest as existential dread or disorientation, loss of meaning in life, spiritual distrust, fear of divine retribution or identity collapse. People feel disconnected from a higher meaning, resulting in anxiety, cognitive stress as they restructure their understanding of their place in the universe, and identity reformation.

Root. This can occur if someone’s trauma is related to familial rejection, social shunning, financial instability or housing insecurity. A family that kicks out their LGBTQ child, for example, is creating this kind of trauma. A parent who withholds financial support based on the child’s remaining in the church is another example. The themes include survival instincts, fear of abandonment, loss of communal identity, and nervous system hypervigilance. This is extremely damaging to the individual.

To me the most interesting thing about Chakras is that they provide a contrast to the disembodied way we relate to the world in western culture, particularly western religions. Western culture either ignores the body or sees it as something to be tamed, disciplined or overcome. “The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.” This is a completely different approach from the Chakra framework. The body & spirit are working together to understand situations, other people, our own reactions, and our beliefs. In western culture, we sometimes imagine that beliefs reside outside of us and that we have to find the “right” ones and adopt them. It’s a completely different way of interpreting things. According to Chakras, authority is internal to you. The body not only keeps the score but it tells the truth. In Western thinking, authority usually resides outside of us or in institutions, clerical figures, or traditions. The body is not seen as a source of spiritual knowledge–it’s often viewed as unreliable, fallen, dangerous.

  • Do you find that western religion feels disembodied or at odds with the physical body?
  • Have you learned to understand your own physical reactions as a way to understand truth? Do you see this at odds with western culture or LDS teachings?
  • Do you relate to any of these Chakras in terms of religious trauma?

Discuss.