Opening Your Throat
Our sense of self protection and agency shuts down very early. But we hold onto a deep somatic memory about how to balance our nervous system.
Once we learn it is not safe to have a voice (due to family and collective oppression and trauma), we quite literally shut our throat chakra. The throat center is the most powerful chakra in our body. It is the only one not protected by the skeleton. It mediates the heart and brain. It needs to be open.
A healthy, open throat center flows not just out of the mouth. That energy flows over our shoulders and down our arms and out our hands. As human beings this is how we then embody our creative purpose in this life. The throat chakra is a masculine polarity and governs protection, boundaries and clear guidance.In healthy systems this is guided by wisdom and sensitivity of the Feminine Heart.
When our throat shuts down that sends an immediate message to the body that we are not safe. The heart then shuts down. Our heart knows that her vulnerable feelings and longing are not safe if the throat is not open to both openly express and protect her. So, quite brilliantly, we stop feeling. We numb out. And this shuts our entire system down. It’s like the lights go dim from the top down. We also get health, emotional and mental problems because of this.
It is no mistake that my trauma clients almost all stopped making art or music or singing or dancing after their trauma. Or that they get lung and heart conditions such as heart palpitations, asthma like symptoms or finding it hard to breathe. Our culture holds zero space for healthy grieving and keeping the heart and throat open. Luckily we at least exercise and are told to do so. The breathing involved keeps our throats slightly open.
If I had to attribute every human ill to one spot of the body it would absolutely be the throat center.
Being a victim is a throat issue. Being a perpetrator is a throat issue. And going numbly through life is also a throat issue.
I always tell my mother clients that a silent child is one I am worried about and is in danger. If their child is still whining, “acting out”, throwing tantrums, singing or talking they have every reason to feel hopeful.
How To Open Your Throat:
Immediately accessible: sing, tone, hum, talk to yourself, talk to someone else, laugh, yawn, digging in the earth and gardening, walking.
Not quite as easy ways: cry, scream, shake, hit pillows, make a tone as long and as loud as you can, repeat! Yoga, Kundalini yoga, heavy exercise.
Subtle, more in-depth ways: drawing, painting, music making, clay, spontaneous and authentic movement, somatic therapies such as Bio-energetics, Breath Work, Family Constellations, Parts Work, Somatic Listening.
Grid Work is a form of Breath Work in an amplified and accelerated Field that goes far beyond normal Breath Work.
The most efficient and sustaining way to open your throat is combining the above.
THE ESSENTIAL ELEMENT TO ALL HEALING IS A LOVING WITNESS.
As you can see this is THE vital part of true healing.
Trauma = Isolation
Healing = Connection
We must have a neutral, agenda free and unbiased witness as we open our throat. This is the one ESSENTIAL ingredient to moving from Trauma to Essence.
The loving witness is what we did NOT have as we went through trauma.
Art specifically does many things:
-Opens the channel of the hands, heart, throat.
-Opens the subconscious and reveals the hidden answer.
-Opens the right side of the brain allowing for balance in our over linear world.
-Opens the Feminine polarity safely in a Masculine Shadow world.
-Opens a secure container for focused trauma work by giving specific frames to work
within (a paper rectangle, a clay mound, an iPad, a wall and floor).
-Opens witness consciousness, even if the art is not shared (though it’s way better if it is).
-Allows different parts of us to express
-Allows our Core to stabilize
-Expresses preverbal parts of us
-Expresses the largely non verbal Essence
-Show us our Purpose and Essence when we can’t see it
-Verifies the polarity of the belief or feeling we are having
-Mirrors our inherent goodness
-Extends a natural connection between the nervous system and body
-Soothes trauma states
-Regulates the nervous system
No one EVER needs prior experience or training to do art. We came in with that human intelligence and creativity fully loaded! Creativity is what makes us human. There is no better time to make art than during a threat to our species. It is THE radical and rational act against social oppression and collective trauma.
Open Throat = Embodied Purpose and Essence
All art intuitively apprehends coming changes in the collective unconsciousness. (Carl Gustav Jung)
Colors express the main psychic functions of man. (Carl Gustav Jung)
From the living fountain of instinct flows everything that is creative; hence the unconscious is not merely conditioned by history, but is the very source of the creative impulse. (Carl Gustav Jung)
