I have been studying the chakras for, oh man, 30 years or so now. This winter I’m doing behind-the-scenes work for a large-scale chakra project I am hoping to release in the Spring of 2021. Right now my focus is on the first chakra.

Chakra 1: Muladhara ~ Root • Survival • Tribal Power • The Right to Have, To Be • Earth

The 1^st chakra is our energetic body foundation. Without a strong sense of grounding, we have a difficult time in the physical world. This is where our most basic needs get met, and development of this chakra begins at birth (some say before birth, when we choose to manifest on the earth plane), with the most rapid development happening in the first few years of our lives. If we felt safe and nurtured growing up, we have a good chance of having a balanced first chakra. If we had dysfunctional families, we might need to do a little work (or allow ourselves a little play) to feel safe, grounded and balanced.

The first chakra is also about our connection to our “tribe”. The first tribe being our families, then perhaps school, friends, work, country.  The tribe helps us to build our foundation.  The tribe should eventually help us to create relationships with others and to build a strong sense of self.

First Chakra Quotes

The following quotes are from an ever-growing collection you may also find under Projects: Chakra Quotes. After doing so much research, when I read, my brain automatically says, “Oh, this is connected to such-and-such a chakra,” and, so, I started collecting and categorizing them.

~ ~ ~

“It’s being here now that’s important. There’s no past and there’s no future. Time is a very misleading thing. All there is ever, is the now. We can gain experience from the past, but we can’t relive it; and we can hope for the future, but we don’t know if there is one.” – George Harrison

“If you end up with a boring miserable life because you listened to your mom, your dad, your teacher, your priest, or some guy on television telling you how to do your s**t, then you deserve it.” – Frank Zappa

“The United States government is perfectly capable of escorting trespassers out of the White House.” – Andrew Bates

“I realized that I don’t have to be perfect. All I have to do is show up and enjoy the messy, imperfect, and beautiful journey of my life.” – Kerry Washington

“We must resolve, even more firmly, to build nations within which people of different communities can coexist and enjoy equal rights.” – Kofi Annan

“You don’t have to teach people how to be human. You just have to teach them how to stop being inhuman.” ~  Eldridge Cleaver

“Dear Earth I love as much as my birth, please resurrect our lives together.” – Rob Brezsny

“It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but it can keep him from lynching me, and I think that’s pretty important.” – Dr. King

“A people without the knowledge of their past history, origin, and culture is like a tree without roots.” – Marcus Garvey

“I prayed for twenty years but received no answer until I prayed with my legs.” – Frederick Douglass

“What wonderful experiences occur when you listen to yourself and consistently and diligently work your natural way with embodied care and attention to your experience within? What wonderful experiences within occur when you do? Is it like amending your own soil?:  ~ Jordan Hoggard

“The impatient idealist says: ‘Give me a place to stand and I shall move the earth.’ But such a place does not exist. We all have to stand on the earth itself and go with her at her pace.”  – Chinua Achebe

“My humanity is bound up in yours, for we can only be human together.” – Desmond Tutu

“To announce that there must be no criticism of the president, or that we are to stand by the president, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but it is morally treasonable to the American public.” ~Theodore Roosevelt

“You are the living prayer of the ancestors.” ~ Magali Boehlen

“You’re not to be so blind with patriotism that you can’t face reality. Wrong is wrong, no matter who does it or says it.” – Malcom X

“The impatient idealist says: ‘Give me a place to stand and I shall move the earth.’ But such a place does not exist. We all have to stand on the earth itself and go with her at her pace.” – Chinua Achebe

“The challenge of the 21st century is not to demand equal opportunity in the machinery of oppression, but rather to identify and dismantle those structures in which racism continues to be embedded” Angela Davis

“No matter how much it gets abused, the body can restore balance. The first rule is to stop interfering with nature.” – Deepak Chopra

“Competition is the law of the jungle, but cooperation is the law of civilization.” – Peter Kropotkin

“Don’t waste trouble.” – Jordan Hoggard

Yes, let us hold life sacred, more sacred than ever. Death teaches us that. Let us hold each person, young or old, sick or well, as the sacred, precious, beloved being that they are. And in the circle of our hearts, let us make room for other sacred values too. To hold life sacred is not just to live long, it is to live well and right and fully. – Charles Eisenstein

“Totalitarianism – the perfection of control – is the inevitable end product of the mythology of the separate self. What else but a threat to life, like a war, would merit total control? ” ~ Charles Eisenstein

“War against a foreign country only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit from it” – george orwell

“Always show up for yourself, even if it isn’t pretty. Keep getting up and when you can’t, let others help you get back on your feet. And then you wake up one day and it all lays at your feet, the richness that was hidden within the uncertainty.” ~ Jill Carstens Sans

“To validate the body is to identify with it. If my chest is hurting, I admit that my emotional heart is hurting. To consolidate ourselves at this level, we must make peace with our body so that we can then be at peace in our body. It is through the first chakra that we gain our physical identity, which gives us solidity as human beings.” ~ Anodea Judith, PhD

“Outside of society, that’s where I want to be
Outside of society, they’re waitin’ for me
I was lost in a valley of pleasure
I was lost in the infinite sea
I was lost, and measure for measure
Love spewed from the heart of me
I was lost, and the cost
And the cost didn’t matter to me
I was lost, and the cost
Was to be outside society” – Patti Smith

“The planet does not need more “successful people.” The planet desperately needs more peacemakers, healers, restorers, storytellers and lovers of all kinds.” – Dalai Lama

“To be average is to lack purpose in your life. It’s to be apathetic, and to not really believe in anything with enough conviction to sacrifice for it, invest in it, and fight for it.” – Benjamin Hardy, PhD

“We have been in a stone cold yet lovely silent curfew until the call of empty pots banging in the chill night air created this symphony of solidarity throughout the country!” Chris Rials-Seitz, Ecuador, October 12, 2019

“Fuck shame, make art.” ~ Amanda Palmer

“Love the world and yourself in it, move through it as though it offers no resistance, as though the world is your natural element.” ~ Audrey Niffenegger

“Do not be daunted by the insurmountability of the world’s grief. Do justly, now. Love mercy, now. Walk humbly, now. You are not obligated to complete the work but neither are you free to abandon it.”— The Talmud

“The Madman goes to the World to get linked to it. When you are linked to everyone, there are no enemies.” ~ Alejandro Jodorowsky

“One needs no strange spiritual faith to worship the earth.” ~ John Cowper Powys

“Once there was a tree, and she loved a little boy.” ~ Shel Silverstein

“We’ve got to stop burning fossil fuels. So many aspects of life depend on fossil fuels, except for music and love and education and happiness. These things, which hardly use fossil fuels, are what we must focus on.” ~ Mayer Hillman

“Walk as if you are kissing the Earth with your feet.” — Thich Nhat Hanh

“We are all guests in the life, we are all refugees, we are living . . . so we should be nice to each other.” ~ Ahmad Joudeh

“It isn’t by getting out of the world that we become enlightened, but by getting into the world…by getting so tuned in that we can ride the waves of our existence and never get tossed because we become the waves.” ― Ken Kesey, Kesey’s Garage Sale

“Enjoy your body, use it every way you can. Don’t be afraid of it, or what other people think of it. It’s the greatest instrument you’ll ever own.” – Kurt Vonnegut

“Take time to stop and be the flowers.” ~ Albert Hoffman

“To be well adjusted to a profoundly sick world is no measure of health.” ~ Krishnamurti

“I’ve been on the top. I’ve been on the bottom. Both places are empty.” ~ Nico

“Don’t just ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive and then go and do it, because what the world needs is people who have come alive.” – Howard Thurman

“We could have saved the Earth but we were too damned cheap.” ~Kurt Vonnegut

“Wilderness needs no defense,
It only needs defenders.”  ~ Edward Abbey

“If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution.” – Emma Goldman

“There’s only one question worth asking anybody and that question is ‘What are you going through?’ “ ~ Simone Weil

“Memento Mori (Remember That You Will Die)” – Latin Proverb

“The lesson that life constantly enforces is ‘Look underfoot.’ You are always nearer to the true sources of your power than you think. The lure of the distant and the difficult is deceptive. The great opportunity is where you are. Don’t despise your own place and hour. Every place is the center of the world.” – naturalist John Burroughs

“I wanted the whole world or nothing.” ~ Charles Bukowski

“I do not understand how anyone can live without some small place of enchantment to turn to.”  ~ Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

“There is no earthly power greater than the power of women gathering with conscious intention.” ~ Heather Bleasdell and Sarah Entrup

“When other little girls wanted to be ballet dancers I kind of wanted to be a vampire.” ~ Angelina Jolie

“The Wild still lingered in him and the wolf in him merely slept.” ~Jack London

Earth, isn’t this what you want? To arise in us, invisible?
Is it not your dream, to enter us so wholly
there’s nothing left outside us to see?
What, if not transformation, is your deepest purpose? ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“I am the poet of the body. And I am the poet of the soul.” ~ Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

“My genes, my love, are rubber bands and rope – make yourself a structure you can live inside.”  ~ Aimee Bender

“Life, for people, begins to crumble on the edges; they don’t realize it.” – Dorothea Lange

“And the rest is rust and stardust.”  ~ Vladimir Nabokov

“The Vagina and the brain are essentially one network…the vagina mediates female confidence, creativity, and sense of transcendence”– Naomi Wolf in Vagina: A New Biography

“Everyone should have themselves regularly overwhelmed by Nature.” ~ George Harrison

“Look at the sky: that is for you. Look at each person’s face as you pass them on the street: those faces are for you. And the street itself, and the ground under the street, and the ball of fire underneath the ground: all these things are for you.”  ~ Miranda July

“This is the world as it is. This is where you start.” ~ Saul D. Alinsky

“National humiliation is long in gestation and violent in resolution.” – Roger Cohen

“The purpose of life is to be alive.” – Charlotte Kasl, If the Buddha Got Stuck

This is the fight our generation was made for. You know enough. And you can learn. If this happened in the future, there may not have been people around who lived the fight. Holocaust survivors, Vietnam and Iraq war veterans. AIDS activists. People who have seen what happens when ghouls come in and try to destroy government. We will turn their ridiculous plans into puddles as the sun comes out. ~ Matthew Kohn

“You only live once, but if you do it right, once is enough.” ~ Mae West

“Take care of your body. It’s the only place you have to live.” — Jim Rohn

“The whole point of Jesus’s life was not that we should become exactly like him, but that we should become ourselves in the same way he became himself. Jesus was not the great exception but the great example.” – Carl Jung

“The opposite of addiction is not sobriety. The opposite of addiction is connection.” – Johann Harri

“The last taboo is the myth of civilisation.” –Paul Kingsnorth, The Dark Mountain Project

“Few men realise that their life, the very essence of their character, their capabilities and their audacities, are only the expression of their belief in the safety of their surroundings.” – Joseph Conrad

“When the forms of an old culture are dying, the new culture is created by people who are not afraid to be insecure.” – Rudolf Bahro

“Why don’t we have a little game? Let’s pretend that we’re human beings, and that we’re actually alive.”  ~ John Osborne

“The American lawn uses more resources than any other agricultural industry in the world. It uses more phosphates than India and puts on more poisons than any other form of agriculture.” – Bill Mollison

“The greatest change we need to make is from consumption to production, even if on a small scale, in our own gardens. If only 10% of us do this, there is enough for everyone. Hence the futility of revolutionaries who have no gardens, who depend on the very system they attack, and who produce words and bullets, not food and shelter.” – Bill Mollison

“The Thing To Remember ~ we all chose to incarnate to go through the times ahead together.” ~ Anne Ortelee

“You are one of the ones of the One…” ~ Bill Attride

“I feel like a citizen [—] it’s time to go and come back a drifter.” Jean Michel Basquiat – from The Notebooks

“We are this close — this close! — to losing our democracy to the mercenary class. So close it’s as if we’re leaning way over the rim of the Grand Canyon waiting for a swift kick in the pants.” – Bill Moyers

“We’re only truly secure when we can look out our kitchen window and see our food growing and our friends working nearby.” – Bill Mollison

“Young folks today . . .  are placed on a conveyor belt and expected to achieve as quickly as possible, to make big life decisions before they are ready.” – Penny Arcade, New York Times, Penny Arcade is Still a Force in Edinburgh

“In every out thrust headland, in every curving beach, in every grain of sand there is a story of the earth.” ~ Rachel Carson

“You are your own forerunner, and the towers you have builded are but the foundation of your giant-self. And that self too shall be a foundation.” ― Khalil Gibran

“And forget not that the earth delights to feel your bare feet and the winds long to play with your hair” ― Khalil Gibran

“Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself” Khalil Gibran

Khalil Gibran”I’ve had a problem feeling real all my life.” – Amanda Palmer, The Art of Asking

“PLEASE BELIEVE ME. I’M REAL. NO REALLY, IT HAPPENED. IT HURT.” – Amanda Palmer, The Art of Asking

“I don’t know what belonging means… I can only use my brain and intellectualize. I really wouldn’t able to tell you from the heart what belonging means… My memories of that place are my link to the place — memories of your experience in a place is your link… All people belong to the world. There is no exclusivity in that… The soil from America can differ from the soil in Malaysia, but its soil, it’s still the same. And the color of people’s skin can differ from place to place but it’s still skin. And, in that regard, there is no difference. People must belong to the earth and a traveller must belong to world somehow and the world must belong to her or him somehow. But, you know, then there’s the social level — that’s just the archetypal level, people usually live in the social level.” —Jeff Buckley

“We do not exist in isolation. Our sense of community and compassionate intelligence must be extended to all life-forms, plants animals, rocks, rivers and human beings. This is the story of our past and it will be the story of our future.” ~Terry Tempest Williams

“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”~ Emma Lazarus

“Enjoy your body, use it every way you can. Don’t be afraid of it, or what other people think of it. It’s the greatest instrument you’ll ever own.” – Kurt Vonnegut

“Security represents your sense of worth, your identity, your emotional anchorage, your self-esteem, your basic personal strength or lack of it.”  —Stephen Covey

“If kids grow kale, kids eat kale. If they grow tomatoes, they eat tomatoes. But when none of this is presented to them, if they’re not shown how food affects the mind and the body, they blindly eat whatever you put in front of them.” ~ Ron Finley

“Poetry is my native land.” ~ Marina Tsvetayeva

“We travel like other people, but we return to nowhere/We have a country of words.” ~ Mamoud Darwish
Institutionalized rejection of difference is an absolute necessity in a profit economy which needs outsiders as surplus people. As members of such an economy, we have all been programmed to respond to human difference between us with fear and loathing and to handle that difference in one of three ways: ignore it, and if that is not possible, copy it if we think it is dominant, or destroy it if we think it is subordinate. But we have no patterns for relating across our human differences as equals. As a result, those differences have been misnamed and misused in the service of separation. ~ Audre Lorde Sister Outsider (1984)

“It is in the shelter of each other that the people live.” ~ Irish proverb

“Our cities with their swollen populations and cliff dwelling high-rise buildings are breeding places for loneliness . . . In a world of wheels, old and comfortable groupings of people have disappeared.” ~ Allan Fromme

“The biggest disease today is not leprosy or tuberculosis, but rather the feeling of being unwanted, uncared for and deserted by everybody.” ~ Mother Theresa

“’Should’ is a bad place to live, but boy, do we set up a lot of tents there.” ~ Saul Bass

“One has just to be oneself . . . The moment you accept yourself as you are, all burdens, all mountainous burdens simply disappear. Then life is a sheer joy, a festival of lights.” ~ Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh

“If all you can do is crawl, start crawling.” ~ Rumi

“The important thing is to be able at any moment to sacrifice what we are for what we could become.” ~ Charles Dubois

“You have a right to experiment with your life. You will make mistakes. And they are right too. No, I think there was too rigid a pattern. You came out of an education and are supposed to know your vocation. Your vocation is fixed, and maybe ten years later you find you are not a teacher anymore or you’re not a painter anymore. It may happen. It has happened. I mean Gauguin decided at a certain point he wasn’t a banker anymore; he was a painter. And so he walked away from banking. I think we have a right to change course. But society is the one that keeps demanding that we fit in and not disturb things. They would like you to fit in right away so that things work now.” ~ Anais Nin

“Shame is the lie someone told you about yourself.” ~ Anais Nin

“Our entire biological system, the brain and the Earth itself, work on the same frequencies.” – Nikola Tesla

“Here is your country. Cherish these natural wonders, cherish the natural resources, cherish the history and romance as a sacred heritage, for your children and your children’s children.” ― Theodore Roosevelt

“I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure of the landscape-the loneliness of it-the dead feeling of winter. Something waits beneath it-the whole story doesn’t show.” ~ Andrew Wyeth

“If anything is sacred the human body is sacred.” ~ Walt Whitman

 “Your life is a sacred journey. It is about change, growth, discovery, movement, transformation, continuously expanding your vision of what is possible, stretching your soul, learning to see clearly and deeply, listening to your intuition, taking courageous challenges at every step along the way. You are on the path… exactly where you are meant to be right now… And from here, you can only go forward, shaping your life story into a magnificent tale of triumph, of healing, of courage, of beauty, of wisdom, of power, of dignity, and of love.” ~ by Caroline Adams

“Yoga does not remove us from the reality or responsibilities of everyday life but rather places our feet firmly and resolutely in the practical ground of experience. We don’t transcend our lives; we return to the life we left behind in the hopes of something better.” ~ Donna Farhi

“Enjoy your body, use it every way you can. Don’t be afraid of it, or what other people think of it. It’s the greatest instrument you’ll ever own.” – Kurt Vonnegut

“I have no money, no resources, no hopes. I am the happiest man alive.” — Henry Miller Tropic of Cancer

“You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.” — Jim Rohn

“Welcome to the world—I’ve been waiting for you!” — John Bradshaw

“Happy Birthday!”

“I CELEBRATE myself,
And what I assume you shall assume, for every atom belonging to me
as good belongs to you.” — Walt Whitman

“When I was five years old my mother told me that happiness was the key to life. When I went to school they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I wrote down ‘happy’. They told me I didn’t understand the assignment, and I told them they didn’t understand life.” – John Lennon

“Life is a beautiful magnificent thing, even to a jellyfish.” ~Charles Chaplin

“STAY IN SHAPE! SOMETIMES A MUSICIAN WAITS FOR A GIG, & WHEN IT COMES, HE’S OUT OF SHAPE & CAN’T MAKE IT.” – Thelonious Monk

“You begin saving the world by saving one man at a time; all else is grandiose romanticism or politics.”  ― Charles Bukowski, Women

“Hard times require furious dancing. Each of us is proof.” ~ Alice Walker

December 6, 2020 – 12:45 pm
Flagstaff, AZ