New York Spirit / Fulfilling Your Chakra Type

Knowing your three-type personality structure does more than add one more factor to your self-image or vaguely support your feelings and intuitions about yourself. When you learn about your constitution, you can harness its powers and direct it toward an ideal fulfillment of your soul design. That is why, at the end of each of the following chapters, you will find suggestions for lifestyle changes that deal with everything from very small and mundane details, to broader emotional, mental, and behavioral issues, to profound spiritual enlightenment. By following these suggestions, you can tune into a fully realized model of your type. You do this by balancing the excesses of your type and encouraging its natural fulfillment.

As a rule, each chakra type wants to do precisely those things that lead to imbalance. And the great irony is that, usually, what seems healthy to a chakra type is precisely what is the most unbalanced. Indeed, balancing your chakra energies may seem a bit like taming your personality type rather than letting it freely spread its wings. But unless you tame your type, it can never properly and safely mature.

Each type has its own unbalancing elements that, when wrongly channeled, can lead to self-destruction and even psychosomatic disorders. That is why learning to harness your tendencies is vital to fulfilling your chakra type. Think of this balancing process as finding ways to express your nature within clear structures. These structures no doubt limit the flow of your expression, but they are, paradoxically, exactly what allows it to stream healthily out of your being—like directing a gushing river into channels that keep the flow active and, at the same time, manageable.

Eating a delicious food is wonderful in reasonable quantities. If you eat a whole cake, however, you may end up with a stomachache. To enjoy an experience, you must limit it. It is a part of the wisdom of life that unlimited or unregulated experience cannot be held or contained. Even your natural energy should best flow only at certain times and for certain uses. It should also ideally be directed less toward immediate forms of fulfillment and more toward genuinely constructive and lasting ends.

Imagine your chakra type as a wild horse that you don’t yet know how to ride. It is not behaving badly; it is just improperly guided. You must find the right way to convince the horse to follow directions. The sections in each chapter on balance answer the following question in different ways and on different levels: What are the healthiest channels I can find to release the excesses of my tendencies and balance them?

Fulfilling the dormant potential of your chakra type is another challenge. In the sections in each chapter on fulfillment, you will find a set of suggestions that are meant to promote in you a genuine self-love—the kind that makes it possible for you to make peace with yourself, accept your constitution, and faithfully develop it despite social pressures to adapt to a more general pattern. These recommendations include individually tailored practices, daily structures and activities, and even spiritual paths that can lead to an acknowledgment of your true inclinations. Think of these sections as a map you can follow to find the most creative and fulfilling ways to express your personality and attain its higher destiny. Following these guidelines can help you transform your own strengths and talents into gifts you can share with the world.

At the core of the psychological structure, each personality type confronts certain challenges that create struggles within themselves and with reality—a kind of constant quarrel or resistance that needs to be recognized consciously and sorted out. Carl Jung called these aspects the “shadow self.” I give each of these shadow selves a name and include them in the personality profiles that are covered in each chapter. The first chakra struggles with what I call the “frozen self,” while the second risks becoming “the butterfly that gives nothing.” The third type can be trapped as a “failure-fearing doer,” while the fourth struggles with their tendency to be “rejected givers.” Fifth-chakra types are threatened by their tendency to be “all-controlling manipulators,” while sixth-chakra types can devolve into “helpless intellectuals.” Seventh-chakra types have a propensity to withdraw that can lead them to become “anti-life meditators.” Since these struggles and challenges are more easily noticed than our more subtle tendencies and attractions, which are sometimes heavily suppressed, recognizing them can be a powerful way to identify, with certainty, your major personality type.

In addition to these shadow selves, each personality type has weaknesses—certain aspects in which they are far less capable because those capacities are missing from the natural constitution of their personalities. To compensate for these weaknesses, we often make them into a matter of pride, as if they represented some great quality rather than a weakness. When we do this, we make our personality type a form of escape from uncomfortable and important challenges in our lives. These weaknesses are discussed with relation to each type in the chapters that follow.

Another component of your personality type relates to the specific emotional shocks and disappointments that each type tends to register more than others. Indeed, each personality type is affected by certain negative tendencies and experiences that other types may not even notice. This is why some memories leave deeply engraved imprints on us, while we dismiss other negative experiences as merely passing inconveniences.

These three components—your shadow self, your weaknesses, and your emotional shocks—lead you to certain psychological attitudes and inclinations that help to define who you are. But the good news is that none of these psychological structures have to remain as they are. Through sincere inner work, you can transform your personality structure in positive ways. That said, don’t be too impatient with your structure. Remember, your main challenges provide the friction that helps you develop a more satisfying life. By constantly attempting to overcome them, you change along the way.

Original post found here.