The Girl from the Jungle and the Muladhara Chakra

When I was six, my parents and my siblings finally came clean – they had spun a lie for the past few years that I was not actually a true family member. Instead, they had told me, I had been found in a rubbish bin in the centre of Bandar Seri Begawan, Brunei. I had been dumped by my Iban family (the name of a tribe from the Borneo jungle) for they could not look after me. You could say that this was the beginning of the blockage to my Muladhara Chakra that governs important facets of your personality, such as identity and sense of belonging. This manifested itself in terrible nightmares that I still remember to this day about my family suddenly all running away from me and me not being able to run fast enough to catch them. I felt like I didn’t belong.

As I grew up, I later battled with issues of identity, being a half-Singaporean and half-English person. I would marvel at how my Chinese grandfather would seemingly shout at my mother when all he was saying was how his day had been. And my Auntie would proclaim that my sister’s feet were “so smelly” right in front of her face. Contrast that with the usual English sensibilities of politeness and reservedness and I was one confused individual when it came to self-expression. This manifested itself in my being terribly shy and self-conscious.

At the age of 18, I travelled alone overseas for the first time to take part in a volunteer environmental project in Spain. There, I began my journey to be released from the weight of a blocked Muladhara Chakra. I met like-minded people from all over the world who had travelled to the project for a common purpose. We undertook back-breaking work, clearing a path in a forest, re-surfacing a village road and re-building a mountain refuge. We sweated together and laughed together. I was able to form a sense of myself that was all me, not influenced by family or childhood friends. I continued my journey at university, where I was lucky enough to find a group of friends who are still like family to me today. 

Having now had children of my own, I feel very much like I belong on this planet as a citizen of the world. We are all one family.

(Kay Vasey, 200hr TTC, January 2017)