Breathe into Your Power: Releasing Hip Tension and Reclaiming Your Lower Dantien

Breathe into Your Power: Releasing Hip Tension and Reclaiming Your Lower Dantien

Energy Update

When we move stiffly, when our hips feel locked or our lower back aches, it’s more than just physical, it’s emotional, energetic, and ancestral. This month in Chi Flow with Jo, we’re bringing loving attention to the lower Dantien, the energetic centre in the pelvis that is key to vitality, power, and fluid movement.

Together with the incredible Julie Williams, practitioner of Consciousness Medicine and Family Constellations, who will give our Mid Monthly Health talk, we explore how trauma, rigidity, and emotional wounds, especially those from early childhood, can get stored in the sacral chakra and hips, creating tightness in both body and mind.

Emotional Baggage in the Hips

Julie shared from the Ayurvedic tradition, the sacral chakra, located in the lower abdomen, becomes active between the ages of five and eight. Any emotional upheaval or trauma during this period can create a dense energetic “wobble.” It doesn’t spin smoothly, and this disruption shows up as tension in the hips, lower back pain, stiffness, or even a sense of disconnection from joy, pleasure, and creativity.

Julie reminded us during our conversation that this trauma isn’t always ours alone. Much of what we carry is ancestral—deeply rooted emotional patterns passed down through generations. As we age, these patterns can harden not only in our beliefs but also in our bodies. Hips tighten. Shoulders stiffen. We become less flexible—not just physically, but emotionally and mentally too.

But here’s the good news: we can shift it. We can release the trauma. And we can restore flow.

Two Simple Practices to Unlock Hip Flexibility and Emotional Flow

Here are two powerful solutions from our Podcast that you can try today to soften your hips, boost your mobility, and breathe life into your lower Dantien:

1. Creative Expression

Creativity heals. Whether it’s cooking, painting, singing, dancing, or even choosing to wear a joyful colour, creative acts unblock the sacral chakra and invite movement into areas that feel frozen.

You don’t have to be an artist—simply engage in something playful and expressive.

Even something as gentle as pushing a pebble around on a blank page with a pen, letting your hand follow the flow, opens channels of expression. You’re giving yourself permission to move differently—physically and emotionally.

“Whatever we focus on grows. So focus on creation, not just consumption.” – Julie Williams

Start your morning with this mantra: Create first. Consume second. Before you reach for your phone, create something. Morning pages, a smoothie, a sketch. It sets the tone for presence, not reaction.

2. Breath into the Pelvis

Many of us have never been taught to consciously breathe into our sexual organs, the very space where life begins. But this area is a powerhouse of energy, and it’s often shrouded in shame, fear, or disconnection.

By simply placing your hands over the lower belly and breathing deeply into this space, you begin to reconnect with your power. The lower Dantien is where Qi gathers and transforms. It’s the energetic furnace of the body.

Try this:
• Sit or lie comfortably.
• Place both hands over your lower abdomen.
• Inhale deeply through the nose, imagining the breath travelling down to the pelvic bowl.
• Exhale through the mouth with a sigh.
• Repeat for several minutes, sending loving attention to this sacred centre.

Over time, this restores the flow of life force energy, allowing you to access joy, creativity, and mobility in the hips.

Trauma Needs Tenderness

As Julie shared, trauma release must be done with care. Working with a trauma-informed therapist ensures you don’t accidentally retraumatize your nervous system. It’s not about diving deep into the wound. It’s about gently acknowledging it, locating it in the body, and giving it permission to move and heal.

In Consciousness Medicine, practices like timelines, family constellation work, and NLP reframing help you see that you are not your trauma. You are the one who experienced it, and you have the power to transform it.

This Month in Chi Flow with Jo

In our daily Qi Gong practice, we’ll be focusing on hip mobility, pelvic breathing, and cultivating lower Dantien energy. These movements and breath practices help us connect with our power, release stored emotions, and move with grace and ease.

Later this month, Julie Williams will offer a Mid-Month Member Health Talk, diving even deeper into Consciousness Medicine techniques to support emotional release, creativity, and energetic resilience. Her work brings beautiful depth to what we practice each morning in Chi Flow.

You Are Not Just the Trauma

You are a radiant being, creative, powerful, and whole. The emotional body can expand and contract, but the spiritual self remains untouched, always intact. When you move, breathe, and create from this knowing, healing unfolds.

Come move with us. Come soften. Come reclaim your flow.  Sign up for the LIVE Free Class at the end of the month and we’ll send you the recording too.

 

Self-administered acupressure or Chinese Medicine is not a substitute for visits to qualified healthcare practitioners.

Knowing how to treat yourself and your loved ones with complimentary therapies like acupressure can be greatly beneficial and convenient. However, for serious and chronic conditions, you’ll want to visit an Shiatsu therapist / Acupuncturist or other qualified healthcare practitioner who can develop a treatment plan based on your unique medical history and combination of symptoms.  

The information provided should not be considered medical advice.

Facing death at the funfair

Facing death at the funfair

Recipes

I recently took my kids to Orlando, Florida. Normally my kind of holiday is a mediteranean beach with only rocks for company but my kids are about to outgrow each other so I thought I would bring them on their kind of holiday. The added bonus for me was hanging out with an inspirational, creative and gorgeous friend I havent seen in a long time.

There are so many people in the parks at first I found it overwhelming. The first day at Universal Studios my heart was pounding for most of the day. The Harry Potter Quiddich Ride is exceptional at creating thrills but the sheer number of people in Hogsmede all rushing to experience various exciting sensations was overpowering.

At the end of the day I was exhausted and I didn’t feel like me. At first I thought it was because I was experiencing things that just weren’t my everyday cup of tea but when I looked a little deeper at how I felt and how I was acting in the park I was not very comfortable. I found myself constantly judging everybody and everything……. Oh I like this, she shouldn’t be wearing that, that’s a rip off, he shouldn’t be doing that, they shouldn’t have put that there, I want one of those, they’re very fat, she’s very skinny, I like that dress I wonder what it would look like on me…

Constanly swinging from like to dislike, judgement to judgement to keep my own ground. By making judgements I was able to define who I was in this vast sea of souls but this constant pinning down of my reality was exhausting, I had three weeks of this so by the end I was going to be a control freaking nervous wreck. There had to be another way. So I looked to my language of Chinese Medicine to help me find and answer.

The universal truth in Chinese medicine is that everything is energy, constantly changing, constantly flowing. This includes solid objects such as rocks and tables. Eventhough they look unchanging, they are transforming all the time. Rocks change shape and erode over time and my kitchen table wont be here in 200 years. Through our short experience on the planet things look solid but only because our perspective is short-lived and therefore limited.

How we understand that universal energy is through Yin and Yang, which in our western language we would understand as relativity. We understand what is new because we know what old is, we understand hot because we know cold, we know up because we know down. Everything is described and understood through our own unique perception of reality, our own sensation of cold, our knowledge of up and our experience of old. We are our own, unique bundle of Yin and Yang, our perception of reality being relative to our earthly experience.

Within my swinging yin yang judgements I was trying to find a sense of me, who I am in this wave of theme park energy coming at me. In my everyday life I surround myself with the familiar, my comfort zone of quiet home living where I don’t have to re-establish who I am in relation to new incoming sensations or people. Most things under control in a regular pattern of family life but the reality is that everything can change on the turn of a dime. This safe and secure home life is only because I can’t see the bigger picture.

There is no pinning down my energy, no securing who I am. There are new unplanned experiences approaching, unscheduled events will appear, I will wrinkle, I will change and I will die. So there really isnt any point in trying to define who I am in relation to the world because it changes all the time. When I delved a little deeper into the feeling I could sense the fear that drives the judgements so rather than constantly trying to make things safe and trying to define myself I chose to open up to the thrill of the unknown and enjoy the ride of life.

Just like the rollercoasters that surrounded me in Orlando there would be dips and turns, ups and downs but I have to ride them, exhilerated, excited and open hearted in the knowledge that there is no ground, there is no stability.

While I was in Orlando I couldn’t help but spread the word of Conscious Cooking so my wonderful friend Faith organised a talk in the amazing workspace of Catalyst, where many creative and enthusiastic bodies share a working environment. I demonstrated a few of my favourite recipes, one of which was Watermelon & Feta salad which is fantastic for reducing summer heat and clearing any uric acid which may accumulate at the joints causing gout, heat and pain.

Quite a few people bought the book but where disappointed to find that this recipe wasn’t in it, so here it is for all you lovely people who are in hot sunny Florida and in need of the watermelon from a girl sitting on a cold beach, under a grey sky with a cozy fleece on.

  • medium watermelon
  • 100g feta cheese
  • 1-2 red onions
  • handful of fresh basil leaves
  • 2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil

Choose a watermelon that has wide spaces between the dark green lines – theyre sweeter that way. Chop it up into bite size pieces, I think triangles work well. Slice the red onions into thin half moons and sprinkle them along with the crumbled feta onto the water melon. Scatter the basil leaves and drizzle olive oil over the top to finish.

This is such a delicious salad for barbeques but it also goes well with thai curries and an indian dahl as the fruit, salty flavour combines well with spices. It also keeps well refridgerated in a tupperware – enjoy

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Self-administered acupressure or Chinese Medicine is not a substitute for visits to qualified healthcare practitioners.

Knowing how to treat yourself and your loved ones with complimentary therapies like acupressure can be greatly beneficial and convenient. However, for serious and chronic conditions, you’ll want to visit an Shiatsu therapist / Acupuncturist or other qualified healthcare practitioner who can develop a treatment plan based on your unique medical history and combination of symptoms.  

The information provided should not be considered medical advice.