Oh – I am so thrilled to be sharing this quilt… finally! I don’t think I’ve ever had as many hang-ups as I’ve had with this quilt in one project. I’m sure it has everything to do with the meaning of the quilt.
This quilt is part of a series of quilts I started about 3 years ago. As I’m making these quilts, I’m working on clearing emotional baggage that is holding me back in my day to day currently. Each quilt focuses on a different major Chakra system in the body. Chakra’s are energy centers in the body and when they become “blocked” it can cause all sorts of physical issues in the body and mind.
This quilt is the Heart Chakra Quilt. I would say it’s the most intense one (energetically speaking) compared to the others so far – at least for me… or maybe it’s because I just finished it! 😉
The Heart Chakra is where your Spiritual and Physical aspects connect. The center star is made up of 2 triangles – one pointing up to represent the spiritual, and the other pointing down representing the physical nature of one’s self. Where they overlap is our heart. This is the base of our emotional state. I used hexies for this center piece, and everything radiates out from there.
Chakra symbols are prescriptive rather than descriptive. They are meant to be things we focus on in meditation for energetic healing. In the Heart Chakra there are 12 lotus petals, which I show with the outer white triangles. These petals represent the 12 emotional states of the heart that we want to quell:
- Fraud
- Lustfulness
- Indecision
- Hope
- Anxiety
- Repentance
- Possessiveness
- Incompetence
- Discrimination
- Impartiality
- Arrogance
- Defiance
These emotional states are also called: Vittras and are likened to ripples in pools of water. In meditation we want to try to quell or sooth those ripples for a reflective, still pool of water.
In the center of these white triangles, I added a metallic silver thread and sandwiched it between a very thin Swiss Dot fabric and some neon green fabric I had. For me this is to represent the good within – the silver lining.
The 8 inner triangles actually represent a separate and much smaller Chakra near the heart called Hrit. These are considered the different states or conditions of the heart: Resolution, Atomization, Lightness, Largeness, Attaining, Irresistible Will, Control, and Mastery.
I had a few big personal discoveries in the journey of making this quilt. The most important one was connecting my overwhelming feelings of anxiety and fear to base feelings of guilt and shame coming from an upbringing full of judgement.
What I need to do is ‘rewire’ my thinking so that I don’t feel such intense guilt and shame for little things like: eating, or sleeping, or doing things for self-care. This is proving to be much harder than you would think. At least now I’m catching myself when I create these judgements for myself – they are so ingrained! Still a lot of work to get to the point on non-judgement, but I’m on the right path!
It’s this overall stress caused by self-imposed judgements that I believe is not allowing my body to heal. I’m also starting to see a new Naturopath and I’m very excited for some new tests and lab work – but I’m pretty sure that its some sort of gut dysbiosis. That would mean I’m fighting bad bacteria for the nutrition in my food, and that they are expelling toxins that can do things like: inflame the hypothalamus of the brain and mix up insulin signals, or produce hormonal imbalances, and many other detrimental things.
Learning about the gut-brain connection has been my new obsession. There is also a microbiome in your mouth that can interact with both the gut and the brain. It’s all so interesting! If interested, there is more information about SIBO, Leaky Gut, IBS and general Enteropathy out there on paid informational sites.
Another discovery I made on this quilt is that Perfectionism is a type of self-imposed Shame. I had every good intention of keeping this quilt symmetrical and circular – but it was also an improv quilt of sorts. While I had a general idea of how I wanted it to look, I didn’t have any set pattern. That said, there are multitudes of mistakes in this quilt. From piecing to placement to the quilting itself… it’s all over the place. There were many times I cried in frustration of it not being perfect… or at least up to par with my other quilts. It is a direct lesson in rewiring that Shameful thinking into feeling good about finishing a quilt!