What every woman must know about her energy body

Interest in chakras, reiki and energy healing has exploded in recent years, with many of us turning to these modalities for greater wellness and empowerment.

What is not as widely covered is how women’s energy bodies differ from men’s. Learn how you can get the most out of working with your feminine energy body—including help for healing from sexual trauma.

Rochelle was a new massage therapist having trouble managing enough clients per day to pay her bills. She felt drained after just one or two sessions.

Lauren was a health-conscious yoga practitioner who did everything she could to take care of her mind and body, but because she suffered such extreme fatigue during her period each month, she was effectively sidelined from her life for several days.

Beth was a long-time meditator, but after the birth of her first child she found that her usual meditation practices provided no relief from the heaviness and anxiety she frequently experienced.

Shari was a 50 year old woman struggling with perimenopausal symptoms, questioning the direction her life was headed and fearing she was going backward.

What do all these women have in common? They all experienced shifts in their energy bodies, but did not know how to work with them. While an increasing number of yoga classes and energy body workshops help us connect with our primary energy centers—or chakras—most of the time chakra mappings are presented as the same for men and women. But there are differences in how women’s energy bodies function that women can benefit from by understanding.

Our energy body serves as the interface between our physical body, our psyche and our spirit. Chakra mappings in particular developed within both energy medicine and spiritual traditions around the world, and in the 20th Century were even viewed by psychologist Carl Jung as a way to map different aspects of our psyche. The chakras offer many doorways into healing and empowerment, and hundreds of different methods for working with them, including yoga, breath work, reiki, guided imagery, meditation, mantras, mudras, affirmations, crystals, and more.

But most chakra mappings and tools do not account for the differences in how men’s and women’s chakras function. While at the spiritual level, the energy moving through the chakras is ungendered, at the interface level between the chakras and the body, there are differences that mirror the physical differences between men and women. Trans and pan gender individuals often will experience the chakra patterns associated with the gender they most strongly identify with, or aspects of both.

By Lisa Erickson

While male-female energy body patterns exist on a spectrum, rather than simply being binary, knowing about these differences can really help fine-tune chakra work.

The most important difference is that women’s energy bodies tend to be anchored in their second chakra, located in the pelvis, while men’s tend to be anchored in their first, or root chakra, associated with the tailbone, legs and feet. These two chakras serve as the foundation for everyone’s energy body, and so we all need to work to heal and strengthen both, but the differences in anchoring have real-world implications for women and those who identify as female.

The primary difference is that women’s energy bodies are more centripetal and tend to pull in and absorb other’s energies. While anyone can be empathic, women by default tend to be more this way. This is because the second chakra is receptive and “yin” in nature, so having their energy bodies anchored here means women’s energy bodies are more receptive in general. It also means women’s energy bodies are more adaptable and fluid, which can be a good thing when in a positive environment. But it means women need to pay more attention to energetic boundaries in daily life—something most women resonate with as soon as they learn of it.

Take Rochelle, the masseuse from above. She could not understand why

she felt so drained after just a couple of clients, when physically she still felt strong. The issue was energetic, not physical—she was unconsciously taking on energy from her clients. The reason was partly technical, based on this tendency of the feminine energy body, but also based in personal conditioning. Like many women, Rochelle had patterns of people-pleasing that caused her to open up her energy body to others in a way she did not need to give a good massage. After learning to work with her root and navel chakras to create a simple, but effective energetic boundary, Rochelle was able to change this tendency and work with clients successfully without draining herself.

Women’s energy bodies also experience cycles and phases in sync with their physical reproductive cycles and phases. While we now know both men and women experience hormonal cycles and shifts, for women, it is much more pronounced, in the form of menstruation, pregnancy, perimenopause and menopause. Each of these life events comes with its own energetic shifts. Learning to work with them can be key.

For example, a woman’s sacral chakra waxes and wanes with her monthly cycle, at its strongest and most emanating at the peak of ovulation, and at its most sensitive and inward-facing during menstruation. While most women cannot organize their lives around their cycle, making even small accommodations can be helpful. For Lauren, the yoga practitioner who experienced extreme fatigue, allowing herself extra rest time and additional focus on her navel chakra during menstruation helped her to reduce the fatigue. It enabled her to tap into the deep contemplative energies available to her during this time.

Postpartum is another life phase in which women can benefit from understanding the energetic shifts occurring. Like Beth, even women with good support and self-care routines can find themselves struggling after birth. Not only is a woman dealing with physical fatigue and hormonal shifts, her energy body is adjusting to an additional energy line in the form of the mother-child bond.

While a beautiful form of connection, if a woman leaves this line open all of the time, never learning to close it when she can to experience her energy body’s singular power and integrity, she will often feel ungrounded or uncentered in addition to fatigued.

Because the sacral chakra is a woman’s energy body anchor and mother-child lines are centered there postpartum, a woman may also feel as if she cannot access the energies or functions of her upper chakras, with all of her energy pooled downward. Tools to help close the mother-child line when needed, while still maintaining a healthy loving parental bond, are key to a woman’s postpartum physical and mental well-being.

Perimenopause and menopause too are opportunities for energetic and spiritual growth, but are often not recognized as such. We tend to view them as medical events, or as endings. But perimenopause—the years preceding menopause when a women’s body and energy body are beginning to transition— are characterized by surges through the chakras linked to personal growth.

Each chakra has particular “lessons” and themes associated with it, and depending on where a women’s greatest obstructions to owning her power lies, she may experience discomfort in her body or psyche as these obstructions attempt to clear. If a woman can stabilize her energy body at this time and engage with energy healing and personal growth modalities, she can enter menopause truly feeling like she is coming into her most powerful and fulfilling time.

For example, Shari found herself feeling adrift and unfulfilled in her career, in addition to experiencing insomnia and nightly hot flashes. Once she identified her feelings and stabilized her energy body, she began to feel better. She also began a chakra meditation practice that helped her smooth the shifts in her energy body as they were occurring.

As this unfolded, she found herself contemplating a shift in career that felt positive and empowering, and realized it had been coming for a long time. Her shift into menopause from that point was physically and psychologically smooth.

Chakra work should never replace medical and holistic healing advice, but it can play an important role in a woman’s healing and growth. Sexual trauma healing is another area where this is true. Because the second chakra is linked to sexual energy and is the anchor for a woman’s energy body, sexual abuse and assault can have a particularly damaging impact to a woman’s sense of her own power and chakra functions.

Working gently at this level to clear shame, fear, patterns of hypervigilance and disassociation can be an excellent modality for sexual trauma survivors intimidated by the idea of physical body work, or of talk therapy. In other cases, chakra work can be a complementary method to these modalities. For a woman, healing and empowering her second chakra is instrumental to full body and full psyche healing.

The wonderful thing about chakra work is that anyone can engage in it, and there are multiple access points. Some people relate more to visualization, some to physical triggers like sound, others to affirmations or emotional memory. Everyone can find a connection point with their chakras and, once they do, can work with them anywhere, anytime. For women, understanding these differences in their chakras and energy body functioning in daily life can help unlock the full potential of their self-healing and manifesting abilities.

Lisa Erickson is an energy worker specializing in women’s energetics and sexual trauma healing and author of “Chakra Empowerment for Women: Self-Guided Techniques for Healing Trauma, Owning Your Power & Finding Overall Wellness” from Llewellyn Publishing.

Entrepreneur moms should use cannabis. Here’s why.

By Leslie Apgar, M.D. & Gina Dubbe

Cannabis can help you relax As an entrepreneur mom, you work hard trying to keep your business afloat, and then you come home to the hard work of parenting. You might find time to enjoy a glass of wine after your kids go to sleep, but by then you are too exhausted or anxious (or both) to sink into the moment. That is when you get a ping on your phone informing you that an important client is not happy.

Back in 2016, when we were busy professionals raising children, we never thought cannabis would be the thing that brought balance to our lives. After all, we spent a fair amount of time telling our children why they should stay away from the “gateway drug.” Three years later, we now own two cannabis businesses. In that time, we have studied the science behind cannabis. We have seen it make a huge impact in our patients’ lives. And while our lives are perhaps more chaotic than ever, cannabis has become an important part of our self-care routine, allowing us to be the best moms and entrepreneurs we can be. Here is why:

These worries can seriously cut into your relaxation time or keep you from getting a full night’s rest, leaving you unprepared for the next day, and on and on until you are an exhausted wreck. Cannabis will not make you forget about your worries, but it will help you recharge at the end of each exhausting day so you can keep your eyes wide open for the next.

Cannabis will not necessarily get you “stoned” We know what you are thinking: I cannot smoke pot under the same roof as my kids. What if they see me? What if there is an emergency in the middle of the night? First off, you do not have to “smoke” cannabis. Instead, you can take a discreet hit from a vape pen and exhale a barely perceptible puff of air.

By Leslie Apgar, M.D. & Gina Dubbe

Second, cannabis will not necessarily make you “high.” The truth is that moms, especially working moms, do not like to feel impaired. We feel obligated to be alert 24/7 in case our kids are in crisis or we need to put out fires at work. So, instead of choosing cannabis with high THC (the chemical compound responsible for cannabis’s psychoactive effects), choose something with higher CBD. This will have a calming effect on your body, but leave you clearheaded. Think of a glass of wine without the mental fogginess or the next-day headache.

Cannabis can help treat a wide variety of conditions Relaxation alone is enough of a reason to consider cannabis, but it is not the only reason. Women are wired specifically for cannabis. In fact, it has been used in female medicine for thousands of years. The reproductive system is densely wired with CB1 and CB2 receptors. Things like infertility, preterm labor, labor itself, breastfeeding and bonding are directly related to our endocannabinoid system.

Inflammatory conditions like endometriosis and chronic pelvic pain plague women all over the globe and cannabis successfully can help alleviate the pain associated with them. It can also help relieve menstrual cramps, headaches and many other frustrations that moms suffer from.

Cannabis has zero calories In addition to the pressures of running a business and raising a child, many entrepreneur moms feel society’s pressure to stay trim. If staying fit is on your list of worries, you certainly do not want to be stress eating or consuming unwanted calories from alcohol. A cannabis vape pen has exactly zero calories, providing a guilt-free alternative to other stress-relief measures.

Additionally, the cannabinoid THCVA can actually curb your appetite. That is right, certain strains actually have the opposite of the “munchie” effect, so you can relax knowing you will

If staying fit is on your list of worries, you certainly do not want to be stress eating or consuming unwanted calories from alcohol. A cannabis vape pen has exactly zero calories, providing a guilt-free alternative to other stress-relief measures.

not binge your daughter’s Girl Scout cookies after consumption.

Cannabis can help with intimacy A working mom must learn to compartmentalize. This can be particularly difficult if you own a business, which can linger in your mind well after business hours. Entrepreneur moms often find it impossible to close all the browser tabs in their mind and focus on themselves. Your kids come first, your business comes second, and if there is time, you might think about yourself and your partner. But if you and your partner neglect each other for too long, it can all fall apart.

Just as home problems affect your work life, work problems can affect your home life, and oftentimes, our sex lives are the first to take a hit when this happens. Cannabis can help in many ways. First, it can activate the desire for intimacy. Second, it can help to relax the body and accentuate nerve endings, enhancing the sensations of sex. Third, it can lessen inhibitions, allowing moms to focus on the intimacy of the moment.

The fact is we have learned a lot about cannabis in the past few years. Turns out it is not nearly as harmful as we have been led to believe. In our experience—and in the experience of many working moms we know—cannabis is a viable wellness solution for adults with real responsibilities.

Dr. Leslie Apgar and Gina Dubbe are founders of Greenhouse Wellness, Blissiva, and authors of “High Heals: How Two Women Found Their Footing in the Medical Cannabis Industry.”