A Fun Introduction to Chakras, What the Internet is Doing to our Brains, and Tuning in to Our Feminine Bodies.

Here are three books that might help you in your journey as a highly sensitive person or sensitive creative!   

The Complete Guide to Chakras by Ambika Wauters

In her lovely book, The Complete Guide to Chakras, Ambika Wauters talks in a fun, accessible way about the Chakra System and decoding our Chakras (If you are looking for a basic explanation of the Chakra system and how working with them can help HSPs, check out this piece I wrote on Sensitive Evolution.)  

In the book, Ambika talks about the issues and life areas associated with each Chakra as well as how to heal these issues. She also includes affirmations you can do for each chakra. In addition, the book talks about the positive and negative archetypes associated with each chakra. For example: It tells us that the positive archetype associated with the Solar Plexus Chakra (the chakra related to personal power) is The Warrior. The negative archetype associated with it is The Servant. Understanding how we might be playing out these roles can help us transform the energy of the negative archetype into something positive. This book also has fun tidbits that make it in enjoyable read. For example, Ambika talks about the earthly location of the seven major chakras. The earthly location of the Solar Plexus chakra is the U.S. and that of the Crown chakra is said to be India. 

This is an informative, light read if you have always been interested in Chakras and want to learn more about them.  

The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr

This widely celebrated book nudged me to reduce my Facebook use significantly. Now, I use Facebook and other social media once in a while and very consciously. What I found most surprising was how much happier and focused I felt after I changed this pattern. In this book, Carr talks about how people do not just create technology or machines. The machines and technology that we create also create us. The way we use the internet is literally re-wiring our brain. For example: He talks about the first experiment (done at UCLA) that actually showed that people’s brains change in response to Internet use. Carr makes a strong case for why using the internet consciously is so important. While the internet gives us access to reams of information, it is also turning us into “mere decoders of information.” The UCLA study found that book readers have a lot of activity in regions associated with language, memory, and visual processing, all of which  gives us a depth of understanding that reading on the net simply cannot give us.

If you find yourself clicking one link after another in an online article and remembering very little afterwards, this book is for you. It will show you how reactive we can become, almost like lab rats clicking one thing after another, and why this happens. Read this book if you are looking for a healthier relationship with the Internet, and it might change you, just like it changed me.

      Wild Feminine by Tami Lynn Kent 

Wild Feminine is a book specifically for women. For the past few years, I have been thinking about my relationship to the feminine and cleaning it up. I have realized that the feminine meant passivity to me in the past. Many of us have grown up in cultures where women around us don’t have a lot of power, and that’s what being a woman starts to look like. But as I have learnt in the past few years, femininity is not about being passive. Instead, it’s about being receptive. 

As someone who is often in her head, this book reminded me that the feminine is about the body, the ground of our beings, and being in touch with it. Tami Lynn Kent draws from her experiences as a woman’s health physical therapist who works with the physical body and the female energy system. She talks about how using pelvic bodywork, visualizations, and creative exercises can help women can restore physical and energetic balance in the pelvic bowl. They can learn to care for themselves, heal spiritual wounds, and reconnect with the energy of the sacred feminine that lives in their bodies.

I have done some breathing exercises and visualizations from this book, and they have given me a felt sense of being in my body and helped me connect to a deep part of my being. They were also surprisingly quick in energizing and moving this generated energy in my body. I felt like I had come alive.

I would highly recommend this book to any woman, and especially those women who are looking to heal their relationship to the feminine.  Also, this book is, in a way, a study of feminine energy patterns. Because all men have a feminine side, and because HSPs have a holistic way of relating to the world, this book might help anyone find a piece that they are missing in their own search for the feminine.