How I Healed My Root Chakra: Finding Stability After Trauma, Addiction, and Generational Fear
The beginning and ending of a yoga class almost always includes a rooted posture, reminding us that we are connected to the earth and to something bigger than ourselves. In yoga and energy healing, the root chakra is located at the base of the spine and associated with the color red—representing health, security, safety, and emotional stability. It is what gives us courage and resourcefulness to live during challenging times. It is our foundation for living.
Savasana, Balasana, and Sukhasana are common yoga poses that help connect us with our root chakra. Because this chakra is the foundation of our physical and emotional body, these poses represent the foundations for our entire practice. When your root chakra lacks alignment, you will lack balance in your practice as well.
In life, an unbalanced root chakra can show up as:
Anxiety
Depression
Eating disorders
Financial instability
Addictions
Chronic fear or insecurity
Difficulty trusting yourself or others
I have learned that when I am lacking balance during my yoga practice, I need to look at the other foundations in my life and how I am maintaining them.
How do I begin and end my day?
What habits create stability in my nervous system?
What are the foundations I have built—and are they strong enough to hold me?
When I started on this healing journey, I asked myself these questions. While yoga was a powerful foundation for me based on my life experiences, I looked deeply at other areas of my life and whether they truly supported my emotional healing and personal growth.
Removing Alcohol: The First Step Toward Root Chakra Healing
When I decided to stop drinking this time, it was out of a deep desire to create stability in my life.
Removing alcohol cut away my ability to manipulate my emotions through toxins in the body. If I wanted to build a stable foundation for my well-being, it had to start with what I allowed into my body—physically, emotionally, and energetically.
For my root chakra in particular, I began eating more red foods like strawberries and tomatoes. Nourishing my body with healthy foods naturally translated into nourishing my emotions. I was learning to regulate my nervous system instead of escaping from it.
I was learning to love my emotions instead of running from them.
And once I stopped fearing my emotions, I stopped needing alcohol to control them.
Alcohol had given me the illusion of control.
Self-awareness gave me actual stability.
Once I could accept and love myself entirely—emotions included—I began to feel safe in the world again.
Why My Root Chakra Was So Damaged
In energy psychology and trauma work, the root chakra develops during the first seven years of life. This is when we learn whether the world is safe, whether people can be trusted, and whether our needs will be met.
Since those early years are heavily influenced by our caregivers, it made complete sense why my foundation felt so unstable.
Not only did I lack a strong spiritual foundation,
I lacked an environmental one too.
Every other chakra is built upon the root. If the foundation is unstable, everything built on top of it will eventually struggle.
The Trauma That Shaped My Sense of Safety
When I was six years old, I was molested at my babysitter's house.
My mother worked part-time, so two to three days a week I had to go there. Beyond the sexual abuse, there was constant exposure to adult issues that left me anxious and deeply uncomfortable. I don’t remember everything about that house, but I remember the energy. It felt unsafe.
My mother was made aware of the assault. Despite the emotional and behavioral issues that showed up in first grade as a result, the situation continued.
I hated going there.
I voiced my fear.
I was told there was no other choice.
So I learned to suppress my emotions.
In our family, we didn’t talk about what happened behind closed doors. We projected an image of success to the outside world. My mother focused on sports, popularity, and academics, as if achievement could cancel out trauma.
But life that looks good on the outside does not equal a life that feels safe on the inside.
Social media has become the modern embodiment of that truth.
Repressed Trauma and the Roots of Anxiety and Depression
The experience became a repressed memory that resurfaced later in high school when I developed anxiety and depression—symptoms my parents couldn’t understand.
At the time, my father was battling cancer and struggling with alcohol abuse. My mother was overwhelmed. My emotional pain was seen as dramatics instead of distress.
When the memory resurfaced in therapy, my therapist confronted my mother about the situation. At first, she denied it. Denial was easier than accountability.
Eventually, she admitted knowing what had happened. But the conversation shifted toward her feeling trapped in her own life circumstances.
Only now am I fully understanding how deeply this experience shaped my subconscious and created the cracks in my root chakra—the foundation of my sense of safety, trust, and identity.
It takes tremendous strength of character to look at yourself without ego and take responsibility for your own healing.
Alcoholics Anonymous: Support Without Emotional Healing
When I came to Alcoholics Anonymous, it gave me structure and community—something I had been missing for years. For the first time, I felt supported.
But support and healing are not always the same thing.
AA can be a safe place to feel accepted and validated. But removing alcohol does not automatically heal trauma, regulate the nervous system, or resolve emotional triggers.
That level of accountability requires deep self-awareness and shadow work. And most of us—myself included—struggle with our ego both in addiction and in sobriety.
With an unchecked ego, a sober person can be just as destructive as a drinking one.
I found it easy to replace alcohol with:
People
Service work
Relationships
External validation
Anything that kept me busy and distracted from my emotions.
And this pattern is incredibly common for people with unhealed root chakra wounds.
The Turning Point: Real Stability Comes From Within
When I truly began healing my root chakra, I realized something simple but uncomfortable:
Stability does not come from people, programs, or achievements.
It comes from self-trust.
To become grounded in myself, I had to release the identities that gave the illusion of strength and embrace the parts of me that were authentic.
If my foundations were not strong enough to hold me, I would continue to live in fear.
Animals in the wild do not have refrigerators full of food to guarantee survival. They rely on instinct, trust, and adaptation.
I had learned over the years that I could always support myself.
Yet every time I left a job, panic would show up.
That panic wasn’t about money.
It was about survival.
Generational Trauma and the Fear of Scarcity
When I looked deeper, I realized my fear wasn’t just mine.
My grandparents lived through the Great Depression, where losing a job meant losing food, security, and safety. That survival fear carried into my parents’ generation—and then into mine.
This is what we call generational trauma.
The circumstances changed.
The nervous system response did not.
Understanding the root of my fear allowed me to release it instead of react to it.
Our root chakra often holds ancestral survival patterns—fear of scarcity, fear of failure, fear of instability. Major world events like war, economic collapse, and pandemics imprint these survival patterns into families and communities.
The COVID era intensified this energy globally. The Great Resignation, rising inflation, social justice movements, and political division all reflect collective survival anxiety.
We are watching the world work through its root chakra wounds in real time.
What Healing My Root Chakra Actually Looked Like
Healing my root chakra was not about crystals or yoga poses.
It was about building a life that felt safe from the inside out.
It looked like:
Setting boundaries
Processing trauma
Regulating my nervous system
Creating financial responsibility
Taking accountability for my choices
Building self-trust
Facing uncomfortable truths
Choosing authenticity over approval
If there is one thing my family and recovery journey taught me, it is this:
People will fail you.
Systems will fail you.
But your relationship with yourself is the one foundation you control.
A stable foundation is not found in other people or external validation.
It is built through self-awareness, emotional regulation, and personal responsibility.
Today, I worry less about how I am perceived.
I focus more on who I am becoming.
I stand in my truth.
I trust myself.
And I believe that healing my own root chakra contributes to healing the collective world around me.
