Do you engage in negative self-talk? Struggle with low confidence? Do you feel inadequate or not enough compared to others?

Are there situations where you reject yourself before others can reject you? Do you wish you were more kind to yourself? Do you feel stuck in a cycle of self-doubt & frustration?

If you said yes to any of these questions, then you are in the right place. In this blog post, I’ll share three negative ego programs keeping you stuck from healing the Lower Chakra.

When you heal your lower chakras, you can manage your negative thoughts & emotions. Why? Because you finally understand where your emotional pain is stemming from. Note that I said ‘manage’ your negative thoughts & emotions, and not control them.

Transcending your negative thoughts & emotions doesn’t work in the long run either. Because the underlying root cause isn’t addressed,

Lower Chakras Introduction

Chakra 1, 2 and 3 form the personality matrix, also called the Ego. The first chakra houses the Subconscious mind. The second chakra houses the Instinctual mind. And the third chakra, the Conscious mind. Together, the first three lower chakras dictate the quality of your everyday thinking.

On an average, we have both positive & negative thoughts.

Let’s call the part of the personality matrix (or ego) which gives rise to positive thoughts as the Positive Ego.

And let’s call the personality matrix giving rise to negative thoughts as the Negative Ego. When a person has an ego problem, or they have a big/inflated ego, they are operating from their Negative Ego.

What keeps you stuck in Negative Thinking

Your negative thoughts don’t appear out of nowhere. Painful experiences stored in Chakra 1 and 2 become the source of your negative thoughts.

On a typical day, your thoughts are a mix of both positive & negative thoughts. So by extension, your ego is a combination of both, positive ego & negative ego. The latter is what keeps you stuck in negative mindset & what you must heal.

It’s easier said than done. Because healing this negative ego means:

• You can no longer deny or suppress your emotional issues
• You will have to accept the negative aspects of your personality & learn to work through them

Your emotional pain exists for a reason. And it loses charge only when you stop running away from it.

Why common suggestions to let go of ego don’t work

If you were to look online on how to handle your negative thinking, you’ll come across suggestions like –

• focus on your strengths & not weaknesses
• Improve your social skills
• And the quintessential, let go of your ego & comparisons

While these are excellent suggestions, they don’t work in the long run. They don’t address the root cause of your negative thinking; which is the negative ego construct.

Healing the negative ego means healing the pain in your lower chakras, that’s the first three chakras.

An analogy for understanding negative programs running in lower chakras

Think of the lower chakras as separate software programs.

Say Chakra 1 is Abode Photoshop, Chakra 2 is MS Word and C3 is MS Excel.

If there is a bug in any of these software programs, you know these programs won’t function as designed.

Using this analogy, consider there are inbuilt bugs in our lower chakras. Every single human has these bugs unless cleared from the lower chakras. And these bugs will undermine your efforts in healing your negative ego.

Program #1

The first bug impacts the second chakra. The key themes connected with the sacral chakra are sex, sexuality, and relationships. The bug exists to perpetuate the misuse, and abuse of our sexual energies.

What keeps this bug in place is our social conditioning. For example, reflect on the blatant use of sex in advertising, and social media. The rampant availability of pornography material. The normalization of things like child abuse & trafficking, genital mutilation, and non-consensual sex.

All these factors color our perception about sexuality and give rise to:

• Sexual predators, sexual slaves & victim,
• Unhappy marriages. Because there’s a disconnect b/w your exposure and lived reality

Trauma & Abuse in their sexual relations creates blockages in the Sacral chakra. And this inherent pain keeps men & women at war with each other.

Most of us on this planet are not taught that our sexual organs are sacred.

Our sexual beliefs get formed through exposure to online forums, movies & even friends. We rarely explore what healthy sexuality entails.

Know that the Sexual Misery bug exists to siphon & manipulate your sexual energy. Sexual misery is a sensitive topic & you want to address it with tenderness & compassion.

You can heal & reclaim your sexual energies through a dedicated self-inquiry process. And in the process, neutralize this negative program running in your second chakra.

A good place to start exploration is to reflect upon questions such as:

• Where in your life – you have consented to misuse of your sexual energies?
• How has it served you?
• What must you heal in your sexual history?

Program #2

The second bug impacts the third chakra. This bug tricks you into inferiority or superiority thinking. Why can this bug manipulate you? Because of the pain logged in your emotional wounds.

Our brain processes data instantaneously, so most of us are not aware of how our thoughts come into being.

Say your spouse or boss overlook you before making an important decision. How would that make you feel? It might trigger feelings of low self-esteem, or not good enough, or even unworthiness.

Another name for Inferiority or superiority complex is Victim/ Victimizer thinking. Both of which are polar opposites & abusive to your soul. Worse, this level of thinking perpetuates the existence of the negative ego construct.

The default victim/ victimizer mindset polarizes your thoughts. Meaning, your default thinking is either good/bad, higher/lower, right/wrong, etc.

Your thoughts are no longer in harmony or neutral. And you’ll find it challenging to make space for creative ideas.

The best antidote to heal the victim/ victimizer program is to

• Become aware of your thinking from a moment to moment basis.
• Reflect on how you think, especially in charged situations.

Program #3

The third program impacts both your first and third chakra. This program’s #1 agenda is that it keeps the fear program running in your nervous system.

For example, many scenarios can trigger fear. Such as news about the end of the world scenarios or WW III. Evening news blasting news about economy crashing. Or the reality of the food prices going through the roof, can trigger any sane person into fear.

When our sense of safety is threatened, our body automatically goes into fear. And worse, we have no awareness that our nervous system has activated the fear response.

When fear becomes our default state of being, it creates inner violence & suffering.

The best antidote against this bug is to:

• befriend your nervous system,
• become aware of people, places, things, times & events that trigger fear.
• learn to regulate your Nervous System

These three programs/ bugs come preloaded in our chakras when we are born on this planet. And they continue to negatively impact us, until we address them.

Practical Steps for Healing Lower Chakras

Number One, Awareness is the Key. First step is to educate about the existence of these bugs & how they keep you stuck in negative thinking. 

Number Two, commit to observing & inquiring the source of your thoughts & behaviors. Reflect on where are your thoughts stemming from? Are you simply reacting or thinking through things?

Number Three, create a daily meditation practice to reclaim your body, mind & spirit.

Recap

• Learn about the three inbuilt programs in your Chakras. As they undermine your psychological & spiritual growth. Whilst keeping you mired in negative thinking.
• If you want a sovereign mind, then healing your Lower Chakras is non-negotiable.
• A dedicated self-inquiry process will raise your self-awareness. And it will help you shift out of negative mindset & patterns.

Additional Resources

Negative Ego & Personality: https://tinyurl.com/3kbkvut4

Facing sexual wounds: https://tinyurl.com/6hkcu7va

Sexual Misery: https://tinyurl.com/4kkpused

On Victim Victimizer Program: https://tinyurl.com/mryvcu5e

On Warring & Competition Program: https://tinyurl.com/bdhxmb7e

Introduction

Your predominant thoughts are a telltale sign of the workings of your lower chakras.

Want to know how a person thinks?

Simple.

Observe their behavior.

Your thoughts & behaviors go hand in hand. Both, in turn, shape your personality.

In the Chakra framework, the lower chakras (that is, Chakra 1, 2, and 3) form your personality matrix (or ego). In other words, how you think & behave is intimately tied and connected to the health of your lower chakras.

If the majority of your thoughts are negative, so is your behavior.  You are likely to have a big/toxic ego. Your positive thoughts feed into positive behaviors. If you have balanced your lower chakras, you are like to a healthy ego.

How do you change your default thinking patterns? Commit to healing your lower chakras.

The Core Reason for your Negative Thoughts

There are three mind matrices connected with the lower chakras. These are the Subconscious mind, the Instinctual Mind & the Conscious mind. Together, these three matrices are responsible for the quality of your thinking. So if you get struggle with fear or anxiety, then the lower chakras are what you need to work with.

Of the three mind matrices, we are only are somewhat aware of the Conscious Mind. That’s because we live in the third dimension (3D reality). 

The first step in healing your lower chakra is to cultivate self-awareness. Because that’s how you become aware of the content stored in the mind matrices. As you learn to quiet your mind, you will become present to how you think. You will become familiar with your emotional encumbrances, and coping mechanisms. Your addictive tendencies become glaringly obvious.

For example, overeating was how I dealt with feeling afraid, confused or vulnerable. Perhaps your choice of addiction looks different. The billion-dollar question to ask is Why the Addiction? Why we struggle with shame, guilt, fear, worry and other negative thoughts?

Dr. Gabor Mate says, Addiction is a response to Emotional pain. I’d go a step further & assert, Negative Thoughts as a response to Emotional Pain.

Where does your Emotional Pain stem from?

In the Chakra framework, Chakra 1 is the storehouse of your emotional memories. And Chakras 2 houses the emotional pain. The tragedy is we have zero awareness of the information stored in these two lower chakras.

Your emotional pain cam stem from varied experiences. For example,

• Having experienced abuse or trauma at a physical, mental, emotional & spiritual level.
• Having experienced heartbreak.
• Bad things happening. And also good things not happening.
• Issues connected with the second chakra. That is, relationships, emotions, intimacy, bonding, childhood pain & trauma.
• Issues connected with the base desires. That’s everything related to sex and sexual energy. Including themes of porn, strip clubs, and dating sex-hookup websites. When there’s misuse or abuse of your sexual energies, it adds to inner pain & disconnection.

Without awareness of emotional pain, you get stuck in negative thoughts & addictions.

Why Positive Thinking (alone) doesn’t work?

The first line of defense against negative thinking for most people is to think positive.

Do you go out of your way to be generous? Or have you become obsessed about discipline as a way to get a handle on your thinking? Or you try to be kind to random strangers. These strategies, while admirable, don’t offer permanent relief.

To get rid of your negative thoughts, you must commit to deep dive into your psyche.  You must commit to befriending your shadow.

If you struggle with chronic negative thinking, you are likely to have a bloated ego. People might nudge you to tame your ego. They’ll tell you to humble yourself, or to not brag about your success, or learn to put others first. These suggestions don’t work in the long run because they don’t address the source of causation.

Why you get stuck in your Negative Thoughts?

Do you struggle to get a handle on your negative thoughts? Overtime, chronic negative thoughts become permanent fixtures in your psyche. Like house guests that refuse to leave.

Everything you think or feel becomes colored by your negative thoughts. Once your negative thinking becomes hardwired, negative spirits can become attached to your aura.

Do you remember the Tuning Fork experiment from high school? In this experiment, a vibrating tuning fork makes sound, and causes other things to vibrate with the same frequency.

Using the tuning fork analogy, when your predominant thinking is negative, you magnetize negative situations towards yourself. As within, so without

What is Predator Mind Thinking?

Your hardwired negative thoughts and emotional pain make you think like a predator. Like a wild animal, a predator mind preys on the weak and vulnerable, instinctively. For example, domestic violence & child abuse is a manifestation of the predator mind.

The core ideology of the predator mind is that it’s superior to everyone else. So it plays out the Superiority complex of the polarity, and projects inferiority on others.

Without awareness, your inner pain & disconnection can manifest as untrustworthy behaviors. Such as lying, cheating, gas lighting, lack of empathy for self & others. Acting entitled, exploiting others and not respecting their boundaries.

How to heal your Unhealthy Ego?

Let’s discuss practical steps you can take to heal your unhealthy ego.

Solution #1:

Identifying the superior & inferior thinking in everyday life. Make an inventory of your thoughts and classify them as Inferior or Superior thoughts, Love thoughts or Fear thoughts.

Superior Thinking includes: Intolerance, Impatience, Arrogance, Manipulation, Attack, Anger, Judgmental thinking.

Inferior Thinking includes: Worry, Low Self Love or Esteem, Jealousy, Guilt, Hurt, Fear, Attachment, and Martyrdom.

Reflect on how do these thoughts serve you? What would it take to cultivate neutral mindset? The best antidote to the superiority complex is emotional & psychological centering.

Solution #2

Commit to addressing any & all repressed pain. Be it from your childhood or adult years.

Your emotional pain is the root cause of your negative thinking. You can’t escape this pain, not if your goal is to change your thinking & mindset. Healing your emotional pain will also contribute to healing your lower chakras.

Solution #3

Contemplate on the positive polarity thoughts. Such as, purity, generosity, patience, generosity, kindness, discipline and humility.

Often, reflection alone can nudge you to act and think in positive ways.

Gentle Reminder

To make headway with inner work, you’ll need to learn to quiet down your busy mind. If it feels supportive, consider cultivating a daily meditation practice.

Being angry, or judgmental, is a manifestation of the unresolved ego. It means more work needs to be done in the lower three chakras.

Healing your lower chakras takes time, effort, patience and devotion. So please be kind towards yourself. Healing the 3 lower chakras is like running a marathon. It is highly unlikely you can run 26 miles overnight. The same applies to healing your negative ego & your lower chakras.

In Summary

• Addiction is a response to Emotional Pain. Negative Thoughts are a response to Emotional Pain. If you heal your emotional pain, you are FREE.

• Emotional pain is Invisible. And we have zero awareness of it. Without self-discipline, your negative thoughts will become hardwired.

• Chronic Negative Thinking + Emotional pain makes you think like a predator. Predator Thinking feeds into the Superiority Complex

• If you want to heal your lower chakras, you must learn to slow down your busy mind and cultivate self-awareness.

Do you struggle with prioritizing things in your life? Do you fear making wrong choices and decisions? Feel the need to be doing ‘something’ to feel fulfilled and don’t know what it is? Do you secretly feel like giving up on your job/marriage/work? Chances are, if you said yes to any of the questions above, you might lack clarity on your core values.

Consider a hypothetical scenario. If you were to choose between a bag of gold vs. a bag of joy, chances are you might be tempted to opt for gold, even if what you value is Joy. How does one identify what is it that they truly value on the inside? Read on to learn more.

Why Values matter?

A few months ago, I came across a book titled ‘YouMap,’ authored by the LinkedIn Legend, Kirstin Sherry. Thanks to this book, I understood, perhaps for the first time, why you need to know your core values, and why you Must align your work & life around them.

At the most basic level, your values define who you are.

Your core values dictate your motivating behaviors and actions.

Want to know why you think or act the way you do? Look at your values. They will tell you why.

As an example, say one of your core values is authenticity. Perhaps you believe that all relationships must be grounded in authentic communication. But when you don’t speak up your mind with your friends and family, you might feel disappointed in yourself. Or maybe you value kindness. You jump at the chance to help other people, and you’re generous in giving your time and resources to worthy causes. Those are just two examples of personal values out of many.

Values & fulfillment

In the book ‘You Map,’ the author Kristin says, that if you want to know your values, take time to reflect on your life’s experiences when you were happiest or most fulfilled? What thing/ activity were you engaged in? What did engaging in that activity provide you? Let’s say you were your happiest when you were playing the Piano. Now ask yourself, what did playing Piano offer that you valued most? Was it Creativity? Beauty? Pleasure? Or something else? You can also identify your values by reflecting upon behaviors that inspire you. What do you deem as important in life? If money weren’t an issue, what would you do and why? Your answers here will reflect what you value most.

As you contemplate your life’s experiences, make a list of 5-10 core values that speak most to you. Everyone has their own personal values, and they can be quite different. There are over 200 values that you can choose from. If you Google ‘List of Common personal Values’ in the search bar, you will readily get this list. Alternatively, you can download a list of top 50 personal values here.

How to Identify your Top Values?

List your top 5 –10 values, and prioritize them. Say your top values include Honesty, Health, Kindness, Service, Adventure, and Growth. If adventure is your #1 value, then a trip to Alaska or the Amazon forest might rank higher in your priority list than volunteering or going to the gym. If Health is your #1 value, then perhaps, working out and being fit might precede all other endeavors.

Your #1 value dictates what’s most important to you and hence, why you ‘value’ it the most.

Take time to prioritize your top 5–10 values. Score each value on your list and keep going until you end up with a final order that makes sense to you.

When you prioritize your values, you will clearly understand what is most important to you in your life and why. Then you can align your life around those key values. Needless to add, you will naturally find yourself living a meaningful life.

There will be no ambiguity in your decisions. You will know exactly why you say yes to some things and no to others.

Best of all, you will find yourself investing your time and energy in activities that bring you the most joy.

Incorporating Values in my life

I have to admit that ‘YouMap’ quite literally changed my life. I saw firsthand how living a life in sync with your core values brings out the best in you and aligns you with your soul. As I zeroed down on my core values, I was not surprised to find that my #1 value is Spirituality; it made perfect sense.

In the past few years, every time I hit rock bottom, I would ask myself – if I had to strip away everything from my life and keep one thing – what would that be? And the answer was always – my meditation practice.

The beauty of hitting rock bottom is that you get honest with yourself. When your life is hanging by a thread, you cut through your BS pretty quickly.

I always knew that my Spirituality was important to me, and yet, I never related to it as my #1 value or value around which I needed to build my work and life. Thanks to my newfound clarity, I immediately started incorporating my Spirituality into my daily work. I started experiencing a level of satisfaction and fulfillment that I didn’t know was possible. Knowing my values also helped me to commit to a consistent practice of meditating 2 hours each day, a habit that I had struggled to keep up with for many years.

The gifts of living a life aligned with your core values are truly endless. Your life will become simple, easy, and effortless. You will be able to show up as your most authentic self in all aspects of your life. You will get to experience a heightened sense of happiness, creativity, and synchronicity. Work will feel effortless as you choose to devote time to what’s a natural extension of who you are. Joy will likely become your default state of being. Who wouldn’t want to tap into that? Right?

Summary

You deserve to live your best, most fulfilling, awe-inspiring life. If dissatisfaction has seeped in your life, then commit to identifying your top 5 values. Is your life aligned with your core values? If not, what can you do to sync them up?

* * *

Link: You can get a copy of ‘YouMap’ here

Are you someone who yearns to have a picture-perfect career, home, and marriage? If so, chances are you have a loud inner critic that has convinced you to set unrealistic goals for yourself and others. You might struggle with making mistakes, and think in terms of extremes. You might also get easily depressed by your unmet goals. Perhaps, you tend to be obsessive and analytical because you can’t stand anything less than perfect. If you can relate to any of these patterns, chances are you might grapple with perfectionism from time to time.

Why you struggle with perfectionism?

Brene Brown describes perfectionism as wearing a 20-ton shield that you lug around, thinking that it will protect you, when, in fact, it’s really preventing you from being seen and taking flight.

The obsessive need to get everything just PERFECT stems from your inability to handle your challenging feelings of pain, discomfort, or even, rejection.

Brene says that “Perfectionism is not about striving for excellence or healthy striving. It’s a way of thinking and feeling that says this: If I look perfect, work perfect, and live perfect, I can avoid or minimize shame, blame, and judgment.”

The downside of perfectionism

At the most fundamental level, perfectionism saps your vitality and creativity. It stops you from living your best life. Because living your dreams and your calling could lead to a potential failure; which a perfectionist mind is not equipped to deal with.

I struggled with perfectionism all my life, and thankfully, found a way to break away from this mindset.

Here are my top 7 recommendations to overcome perfectionism, easily and, effortlessly:

Suggestion #1 — Allow yourself to feel your feelings

Think of perfectionism as a coping mechanism to evade challenging emotions of fear, uncertainty, anger, sadness, shame, guilt, and the likes. As a perfectionist, you might run away from challenging emotions because they don’t appear perfect. Labeling moments as perfect or imperfect will keep you stuck in a vicious loop of perfectionism.

The best way to heal emotions is to allow yourself to feel them. Like they say, ‘If you can feel it, you can heal it.”

There will be times when people will disappoint you, and times where you will disappoint yourself. That’s quite alright. It’s all part of being a human. Commit to living a real (and not a perfect life). A real-life is messy, chaotic, and beautiful, and it makes you experience all range of emotions.

Suggestion #2 — Say hello to a life of experiments

A perfectionist mind is designed to protect itself from any potential pain or failure. However, when you tell your perfectionist mind that you will try out something new for only 30 days as an ‘experiment,’ chances are you might face less resistance.

In my own experience, a 30/60/90 days experiments can do WONDERS to get a mind unstuck from the tight hold of perfectionist tendencies. Depending on your level of fear, and perfectionism and what you want to master — set out experiments for yourself that take you out of your comfort zone.

As an example, take on a 30-day experiment to intentionally embarrass yourself. Sounds silly, I know. But I assure you that it will do wonders to help you overcome perfectionism.

Suggestion #3 — Always focus on taking baby steps

Your perfectionist mind’s primary goal is to keep you safe and protected from any potential disappointment or ridicule that could come your way. If it sniffs even an iota of potential shame or judgment, it will do everything in its power to convince you not to try out new projects.

That’s why if you take on too much too soon, it will overwhelm your system and shut you down. An example of taking baby steps would be — say you want to learn to make videos, start with 30-second videos, then move to one minute and so on.

Suggestion #4 — Commit to Inner Child Healing

Perfectionist tendencies get formed in early childhood. Chances are as a little person you didn’t know how to deal with your challenging emotions, and you took to perfectionism as a coping mechanism. The aspect of you that felt hurt or unheard in your childhood needs to be healed. How? By giving yourself permission to feel.

If you are someone who has never permitted yourself to feel your emotions, then journaling and meditation are both excellent tools to get you started. Your willingness to explore your feelings is half the work done and will propel you into a journey of wholeness and healing.

Suggestion #5 — Dare to make imperfect art

Art is one of the best ways to bypass an obsessively, overthinking perfectionist mind. Pick an art form that you love. Create for the sheer joy of creation, and next share your masterpiece with the world (even if under a fake name or a fake account). It doesn’t matter what medium you choose to express your creativity.

A few months ago, I started posting my super imperfect (think grade 3 art) on Social Media and was shocked that there were people in the world who liked it. My perfectionist mind flipped when that happened because it couldn’t fathom how anyone could give a thumbs-up to my imperfect art! This experience taught me to accept imperfections — first in my imperfect art, and then in myself.

Perhaps, what makes you or your art imperfect is also what makes you beautiful and unique.

Suggestion #6 — Cultivate a mindset of serving and helping others

One of the most potent ways to overcome the perfectionist streak is to serve and add value to other people’s lives. When you are focused on serving others, the spotlight is no longer on you. Your inner critic won’t feel incessantly loud because your focus is on making a difference, rather than being perfect. And even when you make mistakes, you will find it easier to let go and forgive yourself (a huge challenge for a perfectionist mind).

In my own experience, the more I tapped into the feelings of serving others, the more I could let go of my perfectionist tendencies. My mind no longer shut down in brand-new circumstances. I could act in unknown situations and still maintain inner balance.

Suggestion #7 – Examine your Beliefs

Many times deeply rooted beliefs cause us to act a certain way. Consider asking yourself, “What would happen if I didn’t have to be perfect all the time?” The answer might surprise you if you let it bubble to the surface.

If you are willing to explore your unconscious mind, you might be able to unravel a series of incidents that led you to forming a perfectionist mindset as a coping mechanism. For majority of us these memories have emotional triggers. Consider using your journal to write down thoughts and insights as you explore your unconscious beliefs.

Suggestion #8 — Embrace these three mindset shifts:

• Choose to view life from a place of Wonder. Make the phrase “ I Wonder” your best friend. When you think/speak/act from a place of Wonder, you allow yourself to stay connected to what’s possible. It’s like telling a part of yourself, let’s try this (experiment/ adventure/ project), and let’s see where it takes us.
• Lean on Humility.This virtue will keep your perfectionist mind in check. Further, it will help you appreciate the brilliance in other people’s work and allow you to accept where you are in your journey.
• And finally, know that you don’t have to be perfect to be loved. Many perfectionists equate perfection with love, and this negative thinking damages their self-esteem. Sincere, genuine love will never demand perfection from you; if it does, it’s probably not the real deal.

In conclusion,

Rachel Hollis says, “Can you be humble enough to suck for as long as it takes to get better?” This quote couldn’t be more befitting for a perfectionist mindset that often wants to get everything perfect in one shot. Allow yourself to be humble, to be human, and stay Real to overcome perfectionism.