There is a common practice among spiritual practitioners, called cord cutting. When we are born, there is a cord that connects us to the place where it happened. There is a silver cord that connects us to the Earth while we are living. And there are cords to our family, which are tied very strongly.
We cord to people all the time. When we are having a conversation, we are mingling our energy fields and cording to each other's chakras. This is how empaths feel other people's emotions, they pick up energy from others' emotional fields and by cording to their chakras.
The usual chakras involved are to the heart, solar plexus, and sacral, or belly chakra. The heart is our emotional center, and the solar plexus is where we feel joy, and anger, and the sacral chakra is where we feel pleasure. Occasionally we will cord to someone in their root chakra (at the base of the spine), this happens when there is an exchange of money taking place, or a sexual attraction. If we are cording to the crown chakra, at the top of the head, we are literally having a meeting of the minds.
We usually unconsciously cut cords to people we will no longer see, like our server at a restaurant, or the bank teller. We keep cords from those we are friends with, and want to be connected to. But what about the unhealthy cords? We can form dark or black cords to those we don't like, argue with, and have a toxic interchange with. These are the cords that are most commonly cut by spritiual pracitioners.
However, as we advance our chakra system from the seven chakra system to the twelve chakra system that came online in 2012, I have seen that there are other ways to connect. We don't always have to cord to someone. We can simply connect our fields or our spiritual bodies. And I have also found that there are cords we shouldn't cut.
I had an energy worker try to cut a cord for me from my ex-boyfriend. We had a tumultuous relationship, and it turned toxic. It started to release, and then I did a releasing ceremony on my own. A few months after that I started to crave the same relationship, actively looking for it in the people around me, wanting the same energy that had been there. I was trying to replace the relationship that I had cut a cord to, unconsciously.
Now we could say that if I had healed the pattern, the craving wouldn't have come back. Let me use another example. I have a friend who is a spiritual worker, whose birth mother was causing a lot of chaos in her life. She cut cords and did an herbal ritual to rid herself of her mother's energy. However, I often found myself nurturing this friend like a parent would. She would look for that energy in others.
I have come to think that perhaps, we should keep the cords we have to siginificant relationships, even if they're difficult. This is the way we learn, and if we erase that part of our history, we will recreate the same relationships. We can try to heal as much as possible by changing ourselves, even if we can't heal the other person. And we can distance ourselves, making the cord thinner and longer (literally), so that they don't have the same effect on us.
Or we can cut them. Cords that are cut will reform and reattach if it is a significant relationship. I ended up re-cording to my ex because I didn't want to crave that relationship, and it had been a big one in my life. The hole it left was just too big. The choice is ours, and we must be ready to heal the patterns that created the relationships we corded to, if we are going to cut them permanently.