Cross Stitch and Chakras: Muladhara

   A couple of weeks ago I attended a baby shower for my boyfriend's friends.  As a gift I made them a customized cross stitch piece featuring the parents and the baby. That sparked a conversation with one his friends about the different things I cross stitched. Some how the conversation turned to chakras and I excitedly mentioned one of my ideas was to cross stitch the different lotuses and symbols for each one. She also got excited and mentioned that if I did do that, she could see about displaying them at the yoga studio she works at.

   So I started making the patterns. I had looked up various lotuses and thought to myself "this should be easy". I had already made a handful of custom cross stitch portraits so how hard would it be to create these patterns.

  Like the head strong fool I am, I tried starting off with the crown chakra or Saharsana, which translates into thousand petal. I had decided to start off this daunting task with the freakin' thousand petal lotus. I had bitten off more than I could chew. But when meditating you don't start off by focusing on the crown chakra, you start with the root chakra or Muladhara, which translates into root support. That grounding helps support all the other chakras as you move your up (think back to the butterfly of light visualization in the last post). Already I had learned my first lesson, if I was going to complete this task I needed to build a solid foundation. So I started from the bottom with the root chakra.

  The pattern I created was not perfect but I did learn A LOT from it. Because I had decided to use one single color, it made it that much harder to keep track of where I was on the pattern. I kept getting lost in all the red. I spent a lot of time taking out rows and rows of stitches, and adjusting the pattern as I went.  This meant that when making the pattern for the next chakra, I was really careful to make sure that I paid close attention to the number of stitches in each row. By making sure the pattern was correct before stitching, I would be spending less time taking out stitches due to pattern error.

  The finished product is not perfect and I can see all the mistakes. But I don't think perfection is what this is all about. While working on this piece I started to learn more and more about chakras. About two years ago I got a basic understanding but I never went into depth. I had felt a couple of my chakras where closed or blocked, but didn't have the tools to really do anything about it. Now I feel like I'm building my own spiritual root support. I'm still a long way away from unleashing the true power of my crown chakra, and I'm still a long way from making that pattern, but I've made the first step/stitch and that's what counts.

Here it is in all it's imperfection.