Connecting to Your Second Chakra: Advice From a Doula
The second chakra seats our womb. However, many of us can often feel disconnected from our wombs, some of us even finding the word itself challenging. Yet, our wombs hold powerful potential for healing, connecting with our intuition, and creativity. To learn more about this part of our female bodies, Catalina Cipri, doula and birth worker, shares her insights for women at every stage of life.
What have you found to be the biggest challenges modern women face with connecting to their womb?
For many, anything related to the womb seems intimidating or synonymous with fertility.In my practice, I've seen how a disconnection to the womb space has often led to many things, including: lack of trust, disconnection to intuition, painful menstruation, stress, and creative or emotional blockages. And this disconnection has often stemmed from our modern practices of looking outside ourselves to learn about ourselves.
Our bodies house all the information that we need to know. We have to learn how to listen to and understand these messages. Our wombs can birth anything we want, we just have to tap into this power.
What do you wish women knew about cultivating a relationship with their womb?
This is an invitation to turn inward and build an intimate relationship with yourself and can support you in feeling more connected to your body and living in an embodied way. Often, women wait until they are ready to conceive to access this part of themselves. However, connecting to the womb is helpful for anyone at any stage — whether you're trying to balance your creative power, fertility, preconception journey, prenatal care, or postpartum.
What are some practices you’d recommend?
Start by committing to a few moon cycles. Be honest about the current state of your womb space. Keep a daily journal where you note how you feel physically, energetically, spiritually, and creatively. Some prompts to get you started include noticing what you are desiring, fixated on, or moving toward. Honor the things that you are pulled towards without judgement.If you connect with the moon, include the moon phase and the way it syncs with your cycle. Also, take note of the amount of time you’re spending in nature to feel connected to the rhythms of the natural world. Add anything else you'd like that feels relevant, as long as it is something you can continue to practice and check-in with.Through this, you will start identifying patterns or areas that arise and see yourself in these cycles. The important part is to be truthful and to allow yourself to feel and be connected.Some types of patterns you may identify are craving certain foods during a part of your cycle, craving an activity under a moon phase, or even feeling a similar emotion while exposed to nature.From here, it's helpful to continue observing how you can support yourself to sustain or undo these patterns depending on how they make you feel. Depending on your goals, this is where you may want to be accompanied by a womb healer or birthworker to identify ways in which you can nurture your body and what you have learned.
What have you seen from working with women in this area?
As a healing artist and birthworker, I work with people across a full spectrum on how to build conscious connections. I’ve seen people heal not just themselves, but their families transgenerationally, and their relationship to the community.
Learning to connect with the womb has resulted in many women building greater self-advocacy, creative practice, and personal nourishment.
I believe that everyone has an individual journey to understand their womb and it's important that each person learns how to move within their own rhythm.
Why do you see connecting with our wombs as an important practice in womens’ healing?
In the modern world, we are constantly saturated with stress factors. The predominant narrative has not taught us the skills to self-regulate our bodies. However, our individual and collective wombs have birthed life and created huge abundance from life itself from art to conscious businesses. We now have an opportunity to actively celebrate, respect, and find joy in connecting to our internal sacred space. Through this, we can heal ourselves and inspire others to connect deeper with their bodies' innate wisdom.Catalina Cipri is a healing artist, birthworker, and founder of Reciprocate Studio. You can connect with her on Instagram. If you’ve tried some of the activities in this piece and want to learn more, are simply interested in exploring the ways that colors are taking shape within you, or would like to explore healing modalities to balance color, reach out to Catalina for an individual session or check out her offerings for healing with color available at www.reciprocate.studio.
