Movember Part 1- Prostate Cancer – Base Chakra - Suicide

                                                      Original painting. Sheila Gibbons

To-date, 47,742 Covid deaths have been recorded in the UK. Every year, over 48,000 men are diagnosed with prostate cancer in the UK. Please, put that in perspective for one moment.

Movember 2020. I should be writing about Normanton Grammar school and Featherstone Rover but, again, I find myself distracted by a man thing. More precisely man’s shit! Movember is prostate cancer awareness month. The tradition is to grow a moustache, I’m on the case.

My shit has been around from birth, it flowed effortlessly in those day. As time progressed, I was told, ‘big boys don’t cry, be strong like a man’. So, I stopped crying and tried to become the man my parents, my teachers and peer group expected. I became very good at it, too good in many respects. My shit was there in abundance, life events compounded, compacted and poisoned it further. I just didn’t share it with anyone until... 

The shit hit the fan. Sound familiar? I am of course talking about my metaphorical shit, the mind stuff.  This arrives in many forms; work, family, finances, death, divorce, redundancy and the odd virus. It is also safe to say, I am not the only man to feel this way.

Many men hide their true feeling, we keep a brave face, smile and ingest our emotions. Where do we ingest them to? Our gut, and up our bum is the simplest of answers. Our base chakra is a more scientific response.

Chakra is a Sanskrit work which translates to wheel or disk. There are seven main chakra’s throughout the body, these are known as energy centres which control the invisible energy running through our body. Think of the body as a giant circuit board with seven junction boxes. The chakras are the boxes and radiate energy.  All of our chakras need to be open and balanced for optimum health. Acupuncture uses the same, circuit-board, principle to rebalance the body.

The base, root or fist chakra (Muladara) gives us our feeling of being grounded. In balance we feel confident and ready for life’s challenges. When blocked, we feel unstable, anxious and depressed. For a man this is also the center of his universe, as here lives a nugget of gold which controls his life force energy, his prostate.

The sacral or second chakra (Swadhisthana) is the source of our emotions located just below the belly button. The fizz, that runs through your belly, as your fiancé says she is leaving you, is one I know well. That’s you second chakra in full flow. It also give you that warm feeling in your belly and controls your sexuality. When blocked, lethargy and impotence prevail.

The Solar Plexus (Manipura) or third chakra provides your power, your confidence, your driving force. When open I can build mountains and sail oceans. When blocked I am filled with shame and self-doubt. In the James Bond film, Die Another Day, Bond is doomed, trust and bound as the baddie opens a box of stainless steel instruments, seven chakra removal tools, and requests the removal of James Bond’s third chakra, his source of power.

The Heart or fourth chakra (Anahata) is our source of love. An open heart is capable of both giving and receiving love, compassion an empathy. A closed heart will also close our ability to give and receive love, compassion and empathy.

The throat or fifth chakra (Vishuddha) provides the energy to communicate our personal power. When fully open it allows us to express our feeling truly and openly. When closed we internalise our words. Our unspoken words become our shit and I have already explained where that gets stored.

Third-Eye is our sixth chakra (Ajna). Your vision, as separate from your eyes, is here. Intuition is here,  it often talks to your second chakra and helps proved that ‘gut feeling’ we act upon. It’s your link to the soul. When your third-eye is blocked, life seems a fog and you stumble unable to see.

The Crown (Sahasrara) or seventh sits at the crown of the head, here is your spirituality, your access point to a higher existence, to the universe. Work in progress for me. You?

The seven chakras also have a charge, as in electricity, positive (live) and negative, plus and minus, Yang and Yin. In men, the base, solar plexus and throat chakras are all live or yang. We throw our shit everywhere; we stick out our solar plexus and scream until…

We swallow our words, pull our bum cheeks in and stick a bung up our arse. The shit accumulates, blocking up the very junction box, our base chakra, needed for optimum health. We ignore our bodies, pile in the comfort food, even called shit food and then dehydrate the system with caffeine and alcohol. We put on weight and find a multitude of ways to avoid looking at our shit. I found many ways until, three operations; testicles (benign), bladder (benign) and anal fissure kicked me in the balls.

Whilst all this took place I abandoned the ‘nugget of gold’ my prostate. A walnut is a common description for the jewel in every man’s existence. Without it; no orgasm, no life, no future. Yet we ignore our shit, don’t even visit the doctor when it’s gushing out and then…

48,000 men are diagnosed with prostate cancer every year. Add testicular cancer, bladder cancer, depression, anxiety and …. Men account for 75% of all suicides in the UK.

No cancer for me, so far. Dad, sister, son and wife is close though. My prostate is swollen, I either can't pee or need to go at two minutes notice. I wee four to six times a night and waiting (18 months so far) for a bigger hole to be drilled through it, so my wee can get down the pipe. 

Please Men:

Take care of your shit before your shit takes care of you. 

Om

Click here for Part 2.