This arti­cle is part of a series of arti­cles on Chakras. Read about the first two.

The Third Chakra is at the solar plexus, just below the Zyphoid Process.

The third Chakra is the home of self esteem. This is the place where we feel anx­i­ety.
It’s “in the pit of your stom­ach.” Anx­i­ety, then, is a self-esteem issue. It is you that is anx­ious, after all.

This place is also home to your good feel­ings about your­self. As Snoopy used to say, “Hap­pi­ness is a warm tummy.” Block­ages will show up as mid back prob­lems, stom­ach and diges­tion prob­lems, and that “queasy feeling.”

The Devel­op­ment of a Self

The Chakras are metaphors, in addi­tion to being energy cen­tres. As we work our way through the seven main Chakras, we will be return­ing to the devel­op­men­tal stages one can con­nect to each of them.

Back on the intro­duc­tory page, there’s a chart that lists the seven Chakras, Maslow’s hier­ar­chy of needs, and Car­olyn Myss’ ideas of the psy­cho­log­i­cal and phys­i­o­log­i­cal mean­ing of the Chakras. If you take a moment to look at the chart, you’ll see that there is a pat­tern of devel­op­ment that we ignore at our peril.

The strength of the third Chakra depends upon the suc­cess­ful devel­op­ment of the first two.

The First Chakra

As was sug­gested by Maslow, the first order of busi­ness for an infant is to become con­scious of his envi­ron­ment. (Chakra 1) This is a rudi­men­tary con­scious­ness made up of sen­sory data (hunger / cold / wet / hot / sleepy /full, etc.) This is the pri­mary state for infants for per­haps six months.

The Sec­ond Chakra

The sec­ond stage (cor­re­spond­ing to the sec­ond Chakra) is iden­ti­fi­ca­tion of me / not me. The infant begins to dif­fer­en­ti­ate from ‘mother.’ The object that feeds me goes away and comes back. This is rudi­men­tary relating—as the child devel­ops social skills and begins to read facial expres­sions, tones of voice, etc. and to mod­ify him­self to have his needs met. This is also a pri­mary self-exploration stage, as the child gains suf­fi­cient motor skills to explore her body, again dis­cov­er­ing ‘me / not me.’ Not coin­ci­den­tally, the gen­i­tals become objects of fascination.

The Third Chakra

The third stage, which goes on for some years, (and is the key to the third Chakra) is the birth and estab­lish­ment of a per­sonal self-concept. We’ll short­hand this to “the ego self.”

In Chakra the­ory, the first three Chakras are the phys­i­cal Chakras, and the remain­ing four the spir­i­tual Chakras. From a prac­ti­cal point of view, the top four deal with being and enact­ing, while the first three are about inter­act­ing with a phys­i­cal reality.

Devel­op­men­tal Stages

We do not nor­mally think about the inter­re­lat­ed­ness of the stages of our devel­op­ment, because we actu­ally do not remem­ber much of it. Most of us only have fleet­ing mem­o­ries of our­selves prior to age 6 or so. What is going on, how­ever, is that par­ents and tribes are giv­ing the child an ‘ego-self.’ This is done by tribal bless­ing of socially approved of behav­iours, while con­demn­ing behav­iours the tribes frown upon.

Bear in mind that such dif­fer­en­ti­a­tions are not ‘right’ or ‘wrong.’ They are beliefs held by the peo­ple in charge of the the child (in a very real sense, in charge of whether the child lives or dies.) The child has noth­ing to com­pare the tribal deci­sion to; there is no choice but to comply.

It is from within this milieu that all of us arose as ego-selves. We learned sex-appropriate con­duct (The eas­i­est way to think about this is to con­tem­plate the way women are raised by var­i­ous cul­tures. There are quite bla­tant dif­fer­ences, again not right or wrong, but cer­tainly different.)

It might be said that the emer­gence of an ego-self is actu­ally a tight­en­ing down of the first two Chakras. Sex­ual and rela­tion­ship rules replace the easy-going feel­ing of hav­ing a sen­sual body. Rigid beliefs of tribe and cul­ture replace the wide-eyes won­der of child­hood. Right/wrong, good/bad dichotomies arise, and for many, never go away.

Third Chakra Tensions

The cre­ation of the ego-self is com­plete by age 12–14 or so. It is also at this time that ‘stom­ach trou­bles’ flare up—I remem­ber being given ‘stom­ach med­i­cine’ to treat a sick stom­ach that coin­cided with a rough grade six expe­ri­ence (I later dis­cov­ered the liq­uid in the bot­tle was cherry sugar water given to me by a wise doc­tor…) Many are the teens who begin a life-long famil­iar­ity with queasi­ness related to self-esteem-busting things like speak­ing in pub­lic, nudity, argu­ing, etc.

The queasi­ness might be thought of as a war going on between the ego-self and the true-self. Teen rebel­lion is noth­ing more than the per­va­sive feel­ing of uneasi­ness that accom­pa­nies the real­iza­tion that ‘some­thing isn’t quite right here.’ Who I am told I am, and how I am expected to act, does not ‘match’ who I intuit myself to be.

For most, the bat­tle is short-lived. Most sur­ren­der to the tribe, behave, clamp down, tighten, freeze the pelvis, and live stunted and incom­plete lives, com­plete with tons of ‘some day I’ll change this’ lies.

Open­ing the Third Chakra

I’ve found that the region of the stom­ach, below the zyphoid process and above the navel line, con­tains much repressed mate­r­ial. It’s tricky for some clients to even let me work on this area. I find, how­ever, that pres­sure under the ribs and squeez­ing of the stom­ach mus­cles them­selves often brings about quite dra­matic releases of age-old repression.

Breath­work is another tool that can help, espe­cially if it is coör­di­nated with a pelvic tilt.

I urge my clients to thor­oughly ques­tion their pre­sup­po­si­tions. I cov­ered a plan for iden­ti­fy­ing these pre-suppositions in my book, “Liv­ing Life in Grow­ing Orbits,” which is now avail­able as a down­load­able pack­age. I’ve scanned two of the key pages for you to use to check out your beliefs!

Per­haps one of the most impor­tant self-explorations is to iden­tify one’s core beliefs—the items that make up the ego-self. This tends to be a scary process, as let­ting go of long held beliefs brings up exis­ten­tial anxiety—will I be shunned, dri­ven out, killed, once my tribe finds out?

One of our friends is on her 40s. She’s never had a func­tional rela­tion­ship with her par­ents, yet keeps head­ing off to remote places, try­ing to “bond” with her mother. It doesn’t work, but her core, or ego-self belief is that she ‘should’ love and like her mother. The other day, she was talk­ing about get­ting older and how her body is doing. She said, “I’m not as flex­i­ble as I used to be.’

I said, “And that’s your present life issue. You are not as flex­i­ble as you could be, and it’s not about your body.” Per­haps flex­i­bil­ity would be let­ting go of her belief regard­ing a rela­tion­ship with her mother. Hmm.

Have a look at what beliefs you are hold­ing on to. Ques­tion every­thing. Ask your­self what you want to be, accom­plish, exper­i­ment with, and ask your­self what is hold­ing you back.

Then, breathe, let go, and give each thing a shot.

You may amaze your­self with the results.