Continuing with the lesson on the first chakra and foundation:
If your first chakra is weak or off balance, you will not feel grounded and secure. Rather than feeling like a solid rooted tree in the forest, standing strong and well supported, you will more likely feel like a cut flower in a vase, vulnerable, threatened, even doomed. You may unconsciously feel that you draw from a diminishing or limited supply of resources. You may fall into a fearful state of existence.
An imbalanced or weakened foundation leaves a person insecure and anxious, struggling with feeling ranging from mild uneasiness to full blown paranoia. People who do not have a well-grounded foundation or root chakra find it a tremendous struggle to meet life's basic needs. They often worry that they are not entitled to the things in life that allow them to feel secure, such as a warm home, financial security, and safe emotional connections with others.
Sometimes, in an attempt to correct a weak foundation, a person can overcompensate, causing their first chakra to become overactive. If this occurs, your focus on survival will become exaggerated, leaving you feeling as though everything potentially threatens your sense of safety and support. You become aggressive in your efforts to take care of yourself. Not surprisingly, this painful state causes one to assume a "me first" attitude and become pushy, manipulative, greedy, or insensitive to others in order to survive, taking what you can when you can, no matter what.
Telltale signs of an imbalanced first chakra are nagging and persistent psychic insecurities and anxieties, especially those centered on your basic survival, security, safety, and support needs. If you worry excessively about money and security, especially when you have adequate financial means, you have an imbalanced foundation. Other signs of imbalance are failing to connect with others, feeling isolated and self-conscious, having no sense of community, being unreasonably suspicious of others, and feeling that the world is not a safe place. Symptoms include nervousness, anxiety, feelings of abandonment, and most of all, worry, worry, worry. An imbalanced first chakra leaves you feeling unwelcome, unworthy, unwanted, and afraid.
Checking your foundation. (Questions you can either answer on this thread or in your own personal journals as you read the lessons at your leisure)
Do you feel anxious, overly concerned with survival?
Fearful, not sure-footed in the world?
Worried, scared that you can't handle life?
Threatened, afraid something terrible will occur at any moment?
Insecure or inadequate?
Isolated, like you don't fit in, don't belong?
Suspicious, thinking the worst of others?
Needy, believing you cannot take care of yourself?
Unsatisfied, unfulfilled, no matter what you do?
Stingy, afraid you will not have enough?
Paranoid, like you can't trust the world?
Financially in trouble?
Preoccupied with food, money, control?
Unworthy, undeserving?
Remember, even if you do not believe in the idea of the chakras, for every shadow the idea of a balanced foundation is still important. Set aside the idea of the power centers on the body if you must but don't throw away the idea of foundational balance. It is where all else is built from.