I’ve been doing some reading, and taking some workshops, on the chakra system. The chakras date back to the Vedas in around 1000 BCE and refer to a system of energy, disks of energy that connect up through your body. These seven key energy centers begin around your tailbone and move up at specific points in your body, culminating just above your head.

Whether understanding the chakras is useful to you is very individual of course. For me it has been another pathway to understanding myself and gaining some clarity and insights into my past, my present and my future.

I was working through a chakra exercise in a book today and a lot of it focused on childhood and on the experiences we had as a young child. What was our personality as a child and what was our fit within our families?

In all honesty, I’ve not reflected much or often on that phase of my life and I had to pause and allow myself to remember. While I remember playing like any other child, I also remember feeling responsible, feeling a need to be watchful. Upsetting my father was not something we wanted to do so I would patch my brother’s scraped knees, fix what I could fix, work to keep the calm.

I was often the “go between” when my parents were at odds. Or, more accurately when my father was angry and would stop speaking to Mom for days at a time. I carried messages from one room to another, trying to make everything okay, trying to restore peace I could never restore.

Dad would treat me as if my opinions mattered while ignoring Mom’s, a fact I grasped but didn’t fully process until I was an adult. I walked the tightrope between them but I didn’t know it was a tightrope. I just knew it as my reality,

I was afraid, often, to say things that I feared would result in conflict. And when I misbehaved, I always apologized in writing, finding more safety in the written word than in the potential confrontation.

It was by no means a terrible childhood. We knew our parents loved us and my brother and I knew that, no matter what, we had one another. There were many times that life was calm and went along smoothly as long as we all knew that there were lines we shouldn’t cross.

So today as I worked through this exercise and guided meditation, the object was to revisit that child I once was, to visualize her and to let my adult self comfort her, support her and forgive her. There is no turning back the clock. We all know that. But there is a value in understanding ourselves and who we have been and even more in letting go of those old behaviors, behaviors that color our lives even now, behaviors that no longer serve us. In this way we can begin again to fill our full hearts.