Below you will find a summary of what is included in this article. If you’re short on time, you can click straight through to a particular section rather than read the whole article:
- Signs your root chakra is underactive
- Causes of an underactive root chakra
- How to fix an underactive root chakra
In my last article, I gave some signs your root chakra is overactive.
In this article, I want to look at the signs your root chakra is underactive. (Having an underactive root chakra is actually much more common for spiritual people than having an overactive root chakra!)
I’m also going to look at the causes for an underactive root chakra and how this imbalance can be corrected.
But before I go into these, let’s take a quick look at the chakra system and what the root chakra is:
The root chakra is the first chakra, located at the base of the spine and associated with the colour red.
This chakra is concerned with our survival, safety, community & family, money and physical comfort. It’s the stuff at the bottom of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, and it’s our foundation, on an energetic level.
Because this is the foundation, if your root chakra is underactive, everything else in your chakra system will also be adversely impacted. So if you are going to fix an imbalance in your chakras, I recommend you start with the root chakra.
Now, let’s have a look at some signs your root chakra is underactive:
1. Patterns of dissociation and escapism
Dissociation is about ‘zoning out’ from your immediate reality, in order to gain relief from stress, or to escape. Everyone dissociates in some form and it is normal to experience mild dissociation, especially during times of stress. Signs you’re dissociating mildly include forgetfulness, mild clumsiness, or daydreaming.
If you dissociate mildly at times, it doesn’t mean your root chakra is underactive.
A sign of an underactive root chakra would be if you dissociate frequently and/or severely.
This would be if you have a habit that gives you an escape from reality, and you are doing it all the time, to get lost in a fantasy world. So, this could be playing computer games 12 hours a day, or spending whole weekends watching Netflix, and it’s something that you do compulsively to avoid real life.
A sign that you dissociate severely would be that you lose chunks of time when you’re doing something, to the point where you experience memory loss. Like for example, going on a long car trip and when you reach your destination, you don’t have any memory of the actual trip.
Another sign of severe dissociation would be if you are hurting yourself through clumsiness and injury (especially involving your feet, like falls or slipping) and it keeps happening. This is a sign that you are not embodied and that your consciousness is actually outside of your body. Another sign you are dissociated is that you do not know how you feel emotionally and you don’t feel pain but ordinarily you would (e.g. if you hurt yourself.)
So, dissociation is a sign of an underactive root chakra, if it happens a lot or it’s severe (or both.)
Let’s have a look at another sign of an underactive root chakra:
2. You like to ‘check out’ from reality
If you’re the kind of person who doesn’t look at your bank balance when it’s running low, you prefer to let the unpaid bills pile up, your emails pile up and your post goes unopened for long periods, this is a sign that your root chakra is underactive.
Other signs your root chakra is underactive is if you don’t mind going without maintaining your body. Maybe you go whole days without eating or you don’t wash as often as you should. If you’d like to do away with maintaining the body and think it would be more convenient if you didn’t have a body, this is also a sign of an underactive root chakra.
People who have balanced root chakras are able to (and want to) pay attention to reality and the details of life, even if that reality is not pleasant or welcome.
Now let’s move on to the third sign of a weakened root chakra:
3. You are reclusive and physically isolated
If you live alone, lack company and you do not go out much at all, this is another condition that contributes to under-activity in the root chakra. The root chakra prefers that we keep company with other people, and so if you spend most of your time alone, this is going to make it more likely that your root chakra is underactive. For this one to apply, ideally it would be seen together with one of the other signs.
4. You prefer to focus on spirituality
Often when a person’s root chakra is underactive, their third eye and crown chakras will be overactive.
(Let’s take another look at those chakras & where they’re located):
The third eye chakra is the centre of our intuition and connection with astral beings like spirit guides. The crown chakra is the centre of our connection to the Divine. So you can see these chakras are concerned more with spiritual pursuits.
So, if you’re someone who is very sensitive to energy (perhaps too sensitive) and you have a super strong connection to the spirit world and the Divine, this is also a sign that your root chakra may be underactive.
Note that for this one to apply, one of the other signs above should also be applicable to you.
If you have a strong spiritual connection, but none of the other signs apply, this does not necessarily mean your root chakra is out of balance. This could just mean you have a strong spiritual connection, and that’s all there is to it.
But for your root chakra to be underactive, this ‘missing’ energy is going to be concentrated elsewhere, and it usually ends up in the third eye and crown chakras instead, which is why people who have weak root chakras usually have very strong third eye and crown chakras. It’s a pattern that you see a lot, and so it can be characteristic of a root chakra weakness.
Now let’s have a look at the most common causes for an underactive root chakra:
Negative early life experiences
Neglect, abuse and traumas that occur in one’s early years are the most common reason for a underactive root chakra. These sorts of experience can set up energy patterns of destabilisation and dissociation from an early age, and we can carry these into adulthood.
So if you were abused in any way in childhood, or your parents got divorced when you were little, or you moved or uprooted frequently when you were a kid, or anything really that was quite traumatic during childhood, this will have impacted on your root chakra.
Traumas during adulthood can also impact on the root chakra, but those who grew up with long-term trauma and instability usually have the weakest root chakras.
If this is you, don’t worry. There are definitely things you can do to fix the root chakra weakness and I’m going to go into that towards the end of the article.
Now let’s go into some more common causes for a root chakra weakness:
Lots of life changes which occur in a short space of time
This is the second most common reason for having an underactive root chakra.
If you have undergone big life changes in a short period of time, this is going to weaken your root chakra.
A big life change would be something like divorce, contracting a major illness, having a life-changing injury, getting married, having a baby, moving to a new country where you don’t have much support or starting a new business. Anything along those lines.
Often it’s the case that several things that happen all at once, and this perfect storm of events weakens the root chakra and makes us feel ungrounded and insecure in our lives.
Now let’s go into the third most common cause for a weakened root chakra:
Long-term debt & ongoing economic struggles
Another common reason for an underactive root chakra is enduring economic struggles over an extended period. People who go through ongoing challenges in the area of finances (and I’m talking years of not being able to make ends meet) can end up with weakened root chakras, because in that kind of situation, it feels like you haven’t got the foundation you need for the rest of your life.
Now onto the fourth most common cause for a weak root chakra:
You’re naturally ‘ungrounded’
Sometimes souls can have a weakened root chakra because of who they are on the soul level. We all have soul level strengths and weaknesses, and these often result from our soul group of origin.
Your soul group of origin is governed by the place your soul chose for its first several incarnations. Not all souls are native to Earth and these souls are called starseeds or ‘star travellers’. The place where you spend your first several incarnations have quite a big influence on you, because you absorb the energies of the place you choose for your first incarnation. If your first place of incarnation is Planet Earth, you’re going to absorb very heavy, earthly energies which keep you grounded. But if you incarnate somewhere else (like Arcturus, for example) with more high vibrational energies, you are going to absorb those. If you have absorbed very high-vibrational energies, you’re not going to be as grounded and this means the energy in your chakra system is going to be concentrated in your upper chakras and away from your root chakra. So, Arcturian souls tend to have less energy concentrated in their root chakras, compared with other soul groups who incarnate here.
Now let’s have a look at what you can do to fix an underactive root chakra.
The number one thing that fixes an underactive root chakra is healing trauma.
I have given some suggestions for trauma healing in this article: How to Identify & Release Traumatic Stress.
I also go into more detail on healing trauma in my book for empaths – The Empath’s Toolkit.
If your underactive root chakra is caused by long-term debt & economic hardship, I recommend using Dave Ramsey’s snowball method for paying off debt (detailed in his book The Total Money Makeover) and throwing everything you’ve got at it in an attempt to change your situation. I realise this is not always possible for everyone, but if it is possible for you, I highly recommend that.
If your root chakra imbalance is caused by many life changes all at once, focus on minimising the stress caused by all the changes by creating a steady routine that you can rely on. Get up at the same time each day, eat your meals on a schedule, and create a rhythm to your life. The root chakra loves this.
You might also be interested in my Chakra Meditation Kit, which helps you to diagnose chakra imbalances and fix them.
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