A Tour of the Chakras
Anodea Judith takes you on a guided tour of the energy centers in your body known as the chakras.
On this guided practice, master teacher and bestselling author Anodea Judith takes you on a guided tour of your chakras, the energy centers within your own body. Through this meditation, you will make initial contact with these centers and explore their contents. You will start to sense the characteristics of each of the chakras and begin to explore how to work with these energies to bring about transformation in your physical health, psychological and emotional wellness, and spiritual evolution.
The chakra system is a map for the journey through life. Its seven rainbow colors represent the full spectrum of human possibility that stretches from the ordinary to the extraordinary, from Earth to heaven, forming a bridge and describing the steps between them. This map is an archetypal formula for wholeness that addresses the full spectrum of human possibility. To navigate its territory is to take an exciting journey of awakening—in body, mind, and spirit.
The Seven Wonders of the Soul
There are many challenges on this journey. Try something new, and you might feel butterflies in your stomach. Try to speak up, and you might get a lump in your throat. Fall in love, and you might feel your heart leap with joy and fear. These are all common activities that happen through your chakras. They occur for most people quite by accident. Sometimes the experiences are better than others.
Learning about the chakras gives you access to your programmed responses so you can minimize their negative effects and maximize their positive ones. But first you need to understand just what the chakras are and how they work in your energy body.
A chakra is a spinning vortex of activity created by the presence of consciousness within the physical body. These vortices exist within what is called the subtle body—a hidden field of energy that carries your urges, emotions, and habits, as well as the imprints of all that has happened to you. As vital portals between mind and body, the chakras can be thought of as chambers in the temple of the body that organize various elements of your life force as it travels through you. Like the rooms in your home, chakras are the areas in the body that take in energy from outside, process that energy internally, and express it back out again. In this way, chakras are the centers of organization for the reception, assimilation, and expression of life-force energy.
Classically, there are seven major chakras whose locations correspond to seven central nerve ganglia branching out from the spinal column. Each of these nerve bundles influences the subtle or energy body as well as the physical body. Some interpretations of the chakra system postulate more or fewer chakras, but for our work together here we’ll stick with the elegance of the seven major chakras that match the structure of the nervous system.
Just as the electricity running through your computer allows your software and your hardware to work together effectively, the mind (software) and the body (hardware) are brought together by the life force running through you. Some call this energy prana, chi, charge, or subtle energy, but these are all words for the same basic life force. It is this vital energy that the chakras organize. The seven chakras, along with the many highways and back roads that connect them, comprise the energy body—that mysterious essence that makes you uniquely alive.
The word chakra comes from the ancient Sanskrit language and means “wheel” or “disk,” as the chakras are commonly experienced as spinning wheels of energy. In the computer analogy, the chakras can be thought of as programs on a floppy disk, installed into our hardware, which influence the flow of the life force.
We each have several programs installed: a survival program that tells us when to eat or rest; a sexual program with our morals and preferences; a relationship program that tells us how to relate to others; a language program; as well as an immense body of data that we have acquired over the years.
Unfortunately, we all have bugs in our programs. Some of us lack imagination, others have trouble concentrating or struggles with finances. Perhaps our relationships fail or we have health problems or emotional turmoil. In working through the chakra system, the “user” (consciousness itself) creates new and better programs, making changes in the software and even the hardware as needed.
We can make changes in our thinking by examining our programming, and we can make these changes in our bodies through yoga, exercise, diet, and healing our illnesses. When we work mind and body together, the basic tasks of life flow more smoothly and enjoyably.
Information on the chakra system far predates our technological history. Its ancient roots originated in India and traveled to the West through the philosophies of yoga. Yoga is a word that literally means “yoke” or “union” and describes a system of practices and philosophies designed to yoke the individual with the divine.
In many ways, the chakra system is the structural aspect of that yoke, as the chakras are stepping stones along the central channel that connects heaven and Earth, mind and body, spirit and matter. This yoke runs through the core of each of us and links our mortal selves to the divine energy of consciousness. You can think of it as your personal Rainbow Bridge.
Currents of Energy
In understanding the centers on the map that we call the chakra system, it is essential to learn about the highways that connect them. In addition to thousands of nadis, or inner pathways of energy, there are four major highways, which I call the currents of liberation, manifestation, reception, and expression.
As an upright creature standing on your hind legs, you walk through life moving forward with your feet on the ground and your head in the air. Thus the main currents of energy within the body flow upward and downward. As we exchange energy with the world outside the body, we engage in horizontal currents of expression and reception.
The upward current, which is most commonly associated with chakra theory, is called the current of liberation. It begins at the earth and rises through the body, step by step, toward ever more awareness, gaining increasing freedom from the limitations of the physical world with each step. The journey to consciousness allows us to wake up to new possibilities and liberate ourselves from constricting or compulsive behaviors. In the ancient texts, this current is called mukti, or freedom.
The downward current, which begins in consciousness and descends toward the earth, is the current of manifestation. Beginning at the crown of the head, thought forms arise and become denser and more specific with each step downward, until they manifest on the physical plane. You might have an idea, then form your idea into images, talk about it to your friends, and give it your energy until you manifest a finished product. The ancients called this downward current bukti, or enjoyment.
I believe it’s essential to have both currents flowing freely to be a balanced individual. You need to be able to liberate yourself from fixed or limiting forms in order to experience the true nature of expanded consciousness.
And you need to be able to manifest your dreams and visions, bringing them into reality in order to influence the world around you. If the upward current is blocked, you may be unable to liberate, meaning that you are limited by constricting or destructive patterns such as health problems, addictions, or compulsive activities. If the downward current is blocked, you may have lots of ideas and talk about them to all your friends, but somehow they never come to completion.
As these two currents pass each other, the mix together and create the vortices known as the chakras. In the higher chakras, we have a great deal of freedom, but little substance. For example, the mind can imagine things that do not exist in the manifested planes. In the lower chakra levels, we have less freedom, but a more solid manifestation. We have structures and forms, things we can touch and see, but they do not have the flexibility of the imagination. If all the chakras are open, these currents can complete their journey and you can experience the full spectrum of your potential.
In addition to the vertical currents, there are two horizontal ones: the currents of reception and expression. You receive energy from those around you in the form of information, emotions, love, or touch. You express what’s inside of you, such as your thoughts, creativity, or your love. If either of these currents are blocked you may be compromised in your social interactions, having difficulty receiving or expressing one or more of the chakra-related aspects.
Excess and Deficiency in the Chakras
While the journey through the chakras may be challenging at times, it’s not as hard as the journey through life itself. And this journey occurs at all chakra levels.
When life hands out its troubles, as it does for all of us, we find ways to cope with them. In terms of energy dynamics, there are two main ways of coping with such difficulties. You can increase your energy in order to deal with the problem or decrease your energy in order to get away from the problem. This is an adaptation of the basic fight or flight response, programmed into our survival instincts.
Examples of increasing your energy would include creating a fever to combat bacteria, gathering your buddies to help fight a bully, or staying up all night studying for a test. Decreasing your energy is a way of trying to get away from a threat—dissociating to minimize pain, running or hiding from the bully, or simply deciding not to care what happens on the test, perhaps by not showing up at all. As you engage in these defenses, over time they become “hard-wired” into your chakra system, meaning they exhibit their patterns unconsciously, whether or not these patterns really work for you.
When used repeatedly over time, these coping strategies create either excessive or deficient chakra imbalances. If you habitually increase your energy, you may find yourself overcompensating for some injury, fixating on something so that it becomes too important, or creating an excessive behavior in a particular chakra. Deficient chakras are created by habitual patterns of avoidance. Typically, some of your chakras take the lead and become excessive, while other chakras retreat and become deficient. It is also possible to create both excessive and deficient characteristics within a single chakra.
For example, if you didn’t receive enough love or attention growing up, you might have adapted by creating behaviors to bring yourself into the center of attention, such as surrounding yourself with friends all the time. This would be an excessive response to a wound in the heart chakra.
Yet another person with the same wound might become a loner and avoid social interactions as much as possible, thereby becoming deficient in the heart chakra. Others might surround themselves with people yet feel very alone, exhibiting characteristics of both excess and deficiency.
In the guided practice session, we’ll take a journey through the general territory of the chakras. Through this meditation, you will make initial contact with your own energy centers and explore their contents. You will start to sense the characteristics of each of the chakras and prepare yourself for more advanced chakra work should you choose to do so.
As part of this meditation, you will have access to detailed images of each of the chakras, as they are traditionally represented. You may find it helpful to look at these images, with as much awareness and concentration as you can—both before, during, and after the meditation. By looking at and contemplating these images, you will make a connection with your own inner energy system and come to a more direct experience of your own chakra system.
Guided Meditation
So for now, turn off the phone, perhaps turn off the lights. Find a comfortable place to sit or lie down. And allow yourself to go on this wondrous journey. Take a deep breath in—and let it out. And pull your attention away from the outer world. And begin to focus on the inner world. The world of the energy body. The place where spirit and matter, mind and body, heaven and Earth, come together within you.
And know that this core within you is unique to you. You are the only one on the planet that has exactly your configuration, exactly your patterns. You are unique and you are awake. And you have an awareness that is capable of exploring your own workings.
So we begin this journey, like any journey, by getting into a vehicle. That vehicle is your body. It’s equipped with everything you might need. It has storage, it has steering, it has ways to see, ways to express itself, ways to remember. Everything you might need to go on this journey. But you only get one per lifetime. So it’s very important to be good to that body. To develop it and make sure it doesn’t break down on the journey.
In fact, the vehicle is so important that without a body, there’s simply a no-body. So to take the journey, we must get down into our body, into our body, into the core, that’s where the chakras reside. And we can’t do any work on our chakras from outside—we must get down inside them.
So allow yourself to come deep into the cells of your body. Here you learn how to drive that body—where the brakes are, where the gas pedal is, where the steering wheel is. We have to learn these things before we can take the journey. We have to make the vehicle our very own. We have to make sure it’s healthy and functioning.
And so we get in the vehicle and we know that that vehicle is on the ground. The journey we take begins on the Earth plane, wherever you are, right now. That means the journey includes the mundane aspects of your life, like cooking food and washing dishes and paying bills and going to work. These are things that each of us does everyday and they must be part of the journey—not something separate.
So on the first chakra, we deal with the element earth. We deal with everything that is practical, physical; everything that is involved in maintaining our survival, maintaining support of the body itself, the vehicle that takes us on the journey. Here we look at roots, for the name of this chakra—muladhara—which means “root support.” It’s the roots that go down into the element earth and the roots that bring us the support, the strength, and the nourishment for our growth.
Chakra illustrations: The Subtle Body
So here at the first chakra is a four-petal red lotus, within which is a square, within which is a downward pointing triangle, saying that the divine energy of the body begins in the earth and rises up into consciousness, expanding as it goes. So feel yourself rooting into the earth, allowing your energy to fall down to the base of the spine, down to the legs and the feet. Down to the earth below you.
Here at the root chakra is where you find your physical identity. That’s the part of you that can identify with your physical body, that identifies when you’re tired or hungry or need exercise or need to be touched. And by identifying with your physical body and its needs, you’re better equipped to keep yourself alive. So the orientation of that physical identity is self preservation. We must meet that requirement in order to go on the journey.
So take a moment to affirm that physical identity as the ground of your being. Allowing it to descend into the roots and anchor you, giving you a firm foundation for the journey.
And once we are in our vehicle, with a firm foundation, the next step on the journey is to get the vehicle moving. This takes us into the realm of chakra two—swadisthana—whose name means “one’s own place.” To get things moving we must stir up the forces within the energy body. And what stirs up the forces is the emotions, the feeling of desire that makes us want something—we literally get up off our butts, the first chakra, and move through life. Pleasure invites us to move and expand. And opening to the sensations, which are gateways between the outer and the inner world.
As these gateways open, information comes into the inner world through the senses and stimulates consciousness. When consciousness is stimulated, it expands, which means it moves. And so from the contracted, earth-bound place of the first chakra, we start to yield and flow with the element of water, in the second chakra.
So here we come into the sacral area of the body. We find a lotus of six petals, a warm glowing orange. In the center of the lotus is a crescent moon, the smile of the second chakra. The smile of the energy body, which occurs when there’s pleasure, when you feel good, when your emotions are positive.
Dropping down into the second chakra, we come into contact with our emotional identity. That means you can identify when you’re angry or scared or excited or happy. It’s important to be able to identify those emotions so we know what we feel, because this is the first level of information coming into the body that tells us which way to move. If something feels good, we tend to move toward it; if something feels bad, we tend to move away.
So the emotional identity is oriented to self-gratification. It’s oriented to making us feel good, which is a way of keeping us in contact with the inner world. Because when there’s pain, that’s when we tend to distance from ourselves. When there’s pleasure that’s when we tend to come down inside the body.
So in the second chakra, we open to the flow of feeling, the waters of emotion, the gateway of the senses. And in our final moments, all these fall into the realm of sexuality, where we take these qualities to connection with another person.
In this chakra, we balance the polarities of the self: left and right, up and down, inner and outer. By balancing these polarities, we come into a unity within the core.
With our vehicle grounded and then moving, the next job is to steer that vehicle. That’s the job of the will and that brings us into the third chakra.
The third chakra is related to the element of fire. It’s our vitality, our get up and go—you might even think of it as the engine of the vehicle as well as the steering wheel. It takes will to get through the parts that don’t flow so easily—the parts that are challenging, the parts that take work and effort. This is the job of the third chakra—the center of personal power.
Personal power comes from the deep interior of the body, where consciousness descends from the top and meets the energy flowing up from the bottom, literally the fuel that is made by matter and movement. And consciousness directs that energy into some kind of activity.
So here you imagine a lotus of ten petals, just like you have ten fingers, of golden yellow, like the yellow of the sun or fire, in which is a downward pointing triangle, again, the triangle of fire rooting itself down into the earth and expanding up into spirit.
The goal of this chakra is to create mastery—so that through practice, through attention, through focus, and through intention in forming your activity, you gradually develop mastery of your energy body in order to achieve your purpose or goals. This is not a matter of control as much as it is of directing. That you embrace the energy body within you and learn to subtly direct it into the places you want it to go. That might mean directing your body in different yoga poses or practicing the piano or running or dancing or whatever form you practice. It might mean directing your energy body to create projects, to finish your tasks. It is the consciousness within that directs this energy coming up from the bottom.
And this is a very tricky chakra as fire transforms matter to heat and light, this chakra is a chakra of transformation, transforming the world around us. It is oriented to the ego identity, our concept of self. The ego identity is the executive identity that decides what to do—who to hire, who to fire, what the game plan is. And its orientation is to self definition. This creates a coherent unity in the self. One that is important at the third chakra level and yet we don’t want to be bound by our self definition. Because if we are then we’re extremely limited and we don’t go any farther on the journey.
So now we come to the midpoint of our journey—the fourth chakra—the chakra of the heart. And if we imagine taking our vehicle and getting it rolling and steering it, you have to have some space to be able to move into. So the fourth chakra opens to the element air, the spaciousness that really allows you to expand.
The name of this chakra is anahata, which means “sound that is made without any two things striking”—meaning unstruck, unhurt. We enter this chakra when we are no longer hurting ourselves or another, and instead open to that divine realm of love, of relationship. Of connection. Of understanding of both self and other at the same time.
This chakra is over the heart area and as the element of air relates to breath, it also includes the lungs and the chest and the inside of the arms and the hands where we reach out to touch another. We work on this chakra largely through the breath, through expanding the chest, and through transcending the ego of the third chakra, in order to get beyond ourselves enough to really embrace another.
The fourth chakra is a green lotus of twelve petals, within which is two intersecting triangles—the downward-pointing chakra which we had in the third chakra, which is spirit coming down, rooted into matter, and the upward-pointing triangle, which is matter expanding up into spirit, piercing the chakras as it goes. And this six-pointed star says that spirit and matter are perfectly in balance at this center point of the chakra system.
So take a breath in and feel the balance within you. Inhaling and exhaling in balance. The inner world and the outer world connected and balanced.
Masculine and feminine, light and shadow, mind and body—all coming into balance within you, which ultimately brings a deep sense of peace.
The identity of this chakra is our social identity. This is where we relate to other people. And in many senses this is the persona that we put on in order to interact socially in the outer world. But underneath that persona is what we call the authentic self. To open the heart chakra is to come into self-acceptance, of our authentic self. And to be able to bring that into relating to others in the outside world in a way that is full of compassion and understanding and joy.
This brings us to the fifth chakra, whose element is sound—the realm of vibration, communication, creativity. Its name, vishuddha, means purification. For it is here that we purify the energy body for the states of higher consciousness in the upper chakras. It is here we filter the many, many thoughts that go on in our minds and distill them down into the ones that we actually speak of and act upon.
In the body it relates to the throat and the neck and the shoulders and the back of the arms. And the neck is literally the bottleneck of the whole system. It is the narrowest place in the chakra system. And so it’s the great distiller, the great translator between mind and body.
It’s a lotus of sixteen petals, and each of these petals are the vowel sounds of the Sanskrit alphabet. And the consonants surround the petals of all the lower chakras. And in the Hindu tradition, the vowels are the energy of spirit. So here’s where we start to transcend the physical world and enter the symbolic world of communication, as a link between the mundane world and the archetypal world of spirit.
In this chakra, you relate to your creative identity. And that identity is oriented to self-expression. Whether you create as a painter or how you set the table or how you dress or whether you write or sing or dance, each of these is a self-expression that is an act of communication from the inner world to the outer.
And in order to really travel into the complexities of our journey, we need to be able to see where we’re going. How else can we join the map to the territory? The role of vision is what helps us navigate on our journey; it helps tell us where we’re going. We pick some place that we want to go and we look at the map and it shows us how to get there. So it has a certain future orientation. We pick our goals and visions.
The element of this chakra is light-light is what enables us to see, whether it is the inner light that occurs within the psyche, within the dreamworld, within our visualizations. Or the light that enables us simply to see where we’re going in the outer world. The name of this chakra is ajna, which means both “to perceive” and “to command.” For it is here where we perceive or see where we are going, to see the patterns, where we say, “Ah, I see.”
In the body, it’s often called the third eye. That psychic place between our two physical eyes deep in the center of the head, where we dream, where we see visualizations when we close our eyes and have imaginings. Where we have insight and intuition. Here we come to a lotus of only two petals. Again, we have the downward pointing triangle, pointing down into the manifested world, within which is the seed sound of the primordial OM, the sound of all creation.
I think of the two petals as the two physical eyes. And the third eye as the center, that perceives through these eyes and makes meaning out of it.
Here we have our archetypal identity, which is oriented to self reflection. It shows us the bigger picture of where we’re going and the mythic meaning of our journey.
And then at last we come to the crowning glory of the whole chakra system: the crown chakra at the top of the head—the thousand-petaled lotus, which is what its name—sahasrara—means. This is related to the element thought, or really consciousness itself. Here we find that consciousness is the awareness that is really operating all of the chakras.
But in the seventh chakra, we encounter that consciousness in its purest form, removed from the mundane aspects of existence; removed from the emotions and what we’re doing and relating to and creating. And opening to the divine realm of consciousness itself. To the divine expansive limitless realm of the heavens.
In the body it relates to the top of the head, the cerebral cortex, the mind, the intelligence. And the inner witness that is behind everything we say or do or see or feel. Here we discover our universal identity, which is the true meaning of self-knowledge. That we know that what we are is a spark in the mind of God or Goddess—however you perceive the divine to be. A universal awakening that is the mystic knowledge of who we really are.
Anodea Judith takes you on a guided tour of the energy centers in your body known as the chakras.
On this guided practice, master teacher and bestselling author Anodea Judith takes you on a guided tour of your chakras, the energy centers within your own body. Through this meditation, you will make initial contact with these centers and explore their contents. You will start to sense the characteristics of each of the chakras and begin to explore how to work with these energies to bring about transformation in your physical health, psychological and emotional wellness, and spiritual evolution.
The chakra system is a map for the journey through life. Its seven rainbow colors represent the full spectrum of human possibility that stretches from the ordinary to the extraordinary, from Earth to heaven, forming a bridge and describing the steps between them. This map is an archetypal formula for wholeness that addresses the full spectrum of human possibility. To navigate its territory is to take an exciting journey of awakening—in body, mind, and spirit.
The Seven Wonders of the Soul
There are many challenges on this journey. Try something new, and you might feel butterflies in your stomach. Try to speak up, and you might get a lump in your throat. Fall in love, and you might feel your heart leap with joy and fear. These are all common activities that happen through your chakras. They occur for most people quite by accident. Sometimes the experiences are better than others.
Learning about the chakras gives you access to your programmed responses so you can minimize their negative effects and maximize their positive ones. But first you need to understand just what the chakras are and how they work in your energy body.
A chakra is a spinning vortex of activity created by the presence of consciousness within the physical body. These vortices exist within what is called the subtle body—a hidden field of energy that carries your urges, emotions, and habits, as well as the imprints of all that has happened to you. As vital portals between mind and body, the chakras can be thought of as chambers in the temple of the body that organize various elements of your life force as it travels through you. Like the rooms in your home, chakras are the areas in the body that take in energy from outside, process that energy internally, and express it back out again. In this way, chakras are the centers of organization for the reception, assimilation, and expression of life-force energy.
Classically, there are seven major chakras whose locations correspond to seven central nerve ganglia branching out from the spinal column. Each of these nerve bundles influences the subtle or energy body as well as the physical body. Some interpretations of the chakra system postulate more or fewer chakras, but for our work together here we’ll stick with the elegance of the seven major chakras that match the structure of the nervous system.
Just as the electricity running through your computer allows your software and your hardware to work together effectively, the mind (software) and the body (hardware) are brought together by the life force running through you. Some call this energy prana, chi, charge, or subtle energy, but these are all words for the same basic life force. It is this vital energy that the chakras organize. The seven chakras, along with the many highways and back roads that connect them, comprise the energy body—that mysterious essence that makes you uniquely alive.
The word chakra comes from the ancient Sanskrit language and means “wheel” or “disk,” as the chakras are commonly experienced as spinning wheels of energy. In the computer analogy, the chakras can be thought of as programs on a floppy disk, installed into our hardware, which influence the flow of the life force.
We each have several programs installed: a survival program that tells us when to eat or rest; a sexual program with our morals and preferences; a relationship program that tells us how to relate to others; a language program; as well as an immense body of data that we have acquired over the years.
Unfortunately, we all have bugs in our programs. Some of us lack imagination, others have trouble concentrating or struggles with finances. Perhaps our relationships fail or we have health problems or emotional turmoil. In working through the chakra system, the “user” (consciousness itself) creates new and better programs, making changes in the software and even the hardware as needed.
We can make changes in our thinking by examining our programming, and we can make these changes in our bodies through yoga, exercise, diet, and healing our illnesses. When we work mind and body together, the basic tasks of life flow more smoothly and enjoyably.
Information on the chakra system far predates our technological history. Its ancient roots originated in India and traveled to the West through the philosophies of yoga. Yoga is a word that literally means “yoke” or “union” and describes a system of practices and philosophies designed to yoke the individual with the divine.
In many ways, the chakra system is the structural aspect of that yoke, as the chakras are stepping stones along the central channel that connects heaven and Earth, mind and body, spirit and matter. This yoke runs through the core of each of us and links our mortal selves to the divine energy of consciousness. You can think of it as your personal Rainbow Bridge.
Currents of Energy
In understanding the centers on the map that we call the chakra system, it is essential to learn about the highways that connect them. In addition to thousands of nadis, or inner pathways of energy, there are four major highways, which I call the currents of liberation, manifestation, reception, and expression.
As an upright creature standing on your hind legs, you walk through life moving forward with your feet on the ground and your head in the air. Thus the main currents of energy within the body flow upward and downward. As we exchange energy with the world outside the body, we engage in horizontal currents of expression and reception.
The upward current, which is most commonly associated with chakra theory, is called the current of liberation. It begins at the earth and rises through the body, step by step, toward ever more awareness, gaining increasing freedom from the limitations of the physical world with each step. The journey to consciousness allows us to wake up to new possibilities and liberate ourselves from constricting or compulsive behaviors. In the ancient texts, this current is called mukti, or freedom.
The downward current, which begins in consciousness and descends toward the earth, is the current of manifestation. Beginning at the crown of the head, thought forms arise and become denser and more specific with each step downward, until they manifest on the physical plane. You might have an idea, then form your idea into images, talk about it to your friends, and give it your energy until you manifest a finished product. The ancients called this downward current bukti, or enjoyment.
I believe it’s essential to have both currents flowing freely to be a balanced individual. You need to be able to liberate yourself from fixed or limiting forms in order to experience the true nature of expanded consciousness.
And you need to be able to manifest your dreams and visions, bringing them into reality in order to influence the world around you. If the upward current is blocked, you may be unable to liberate, meaning that you are limited by constricting or destructive patterns such as health problems, addictions, or compulsive activities. If the downward current is blocked, you may have lots of ideas and talk about them to all your friends, but somehow they never come to completion.
As these two currents pass each other, the mix together and create the vortices known as the chakras. In the higher chakras, we have a great deal of freedom, but little substance. For example, the mind can imagine things that do not exist in the manifested planes. In the lower chakra levels, we have less freedom, but a more solid manifestation. We have structures and forms, things we can touch and see, but they do not have the flexibility of the imagination. If all the chakras are open, these currents can complete their journey and you can experience the full spectrum of your potential.
In addition to the vertical currents, there are two horizontal ones: the currents of reception and expression. You receive energy from those around you in the form of information, emotions, love, or touch. You express what’s inside of you, such as your thoughts, creativity, or your love. If either of these currents are blocked you may be compromised in your social interactions, having difficulty receiving or expressing one or more of the chakra-related aspects.
Excess and Deficiency in the Chakras
While the journey through the chakras may be challenging at times, it’s not as hard as the journey through life itself. And this journey occurs at all chakra levels.
When life hands out its troubles, as it does for all of us, we find ways to cope with them. In terms of energy dynamics, there are two main ways of coping with such difficulties. You can increase your energy in order to deal with the problem or decrease your energy in order to get away from the problem. This is an adaptation of the basic fight or flight response, programmed into our survival instincts.
Examples of increasing your energy would include creating a fever to combat bacteria, gathering your buddies to help fight a bully, or staying up all night studying for a test. Decreasing your energy is a way of trying to get away from a threat—dissociating to minimize pain, running or hiding from the bully, or simply deciding not to care what happens on the test, perhaps by not showing up at all. As you engage in these defenses, over time they become “hard-wired” into your chakra system, meaning they exhibit their patterns unconsciously, whether or not these patterns really work for you.
When used repeatedly over time, these coping strategies create either excessive or deficient chakra imbalances. If you habitually increase your energy, you may find yourself overcompensating for some injury, fixating on something so that it becomes too important, or creating an excessive behavior in a particular chakra. Deficient chakras are created by habitual patterns of avoidance. Typically, some of your chakras take the lead and become excessive, while other chakras retreat and become deficient. It is also possible to create both excessive and deficient characteristics within a single chakra.
For example, if you didn’t receive enough love or attention growing up, you might have adapted by creating behaviors to bring yourself into the center of attention, such as surrounding yourself with friends all the time. This would be an excessive response to a wound in the heart chakra.
Yet another person with the same wound might become a loner and avoid social interactions as much as possible, thereby becoming deficient in the heart chakra. Others might surround themselves with people yet feel very alone, exhibiting characteristics of both excess and deficiency.
In the guided practice session, we’ll take a journey through the general territory of the chakras. Through this meditation, you will make initial contact with your own energy centers and explore their contents. You will start to sense the characteristics of each of the chakras and prepare yourself for more advanced chakra work should you choose to do so.
As part of this meditation, you will have access to detailed images of each of the chakras, as they are traditionally represented. You may find it helpful to look at these images, with as much awareness and concentration as you can—both before, during, and after the meditation. By looking at and contemplating these images, you will make a connection with your own inner energy system and come to a more direct experience of your own chakra system.
Guided Meditation
So for now, turn off the phone, perhaps turn off the lights. Find a comfortable place to sit or lie down. And allow yourself to go on this wondrous journey. Take a deep breath in—and let it out. And pull your attention away from the outer world. And begin to focus on the inner world. The world of the energy body. The place where spirit and matter, mind and body, heaven and Earth, come together within you.
And know that this core within you is unique to you. You are the only one on the planet that has exactly your configuration, exactly your patterns. You are unique and you are awake. And you have an awareness that is capable of exploring your own workings.
So we begin this journey, like any journey, by getting into a vehicle. That vehicle is your body. It’s equipped with everything you might need. It has storage, it has steering, it has ways to see, ways to express itself, ways to remember. Everything you might need to go on this journey. But you only get one per lifetime. So it’s very important to be good to that body. To develop it and make sure it doesn’t break down on the journey.
In fact, the vehicle is so important that without a body, there’s simply a no-body. So to take the journey, we must get down into our body, into our body, into the core, that’s where the chakras reside. And we can’t do any work on our chakras from outside—we must get down inside them.
So allow yourself to come deep into the cells of your body. Here you learn how to drive that body—where the brakes are, where the gas pedal is, where the steering wheel is. We have to learn these things before we can take the journey. We have to make the vehicle our very own. We have to make sure it’s healthy and functioning.
And so we get in the vehicle and we know that that vehicle is on the ground. The journey we take begins on the Earth plane, wherever you are, right now. That means the journey includes the mundane aspects of your life, like cooking food and washing dishes and paying bills and going to work. These are things that each of us does everyday and they must be part of the journey—not something separate.
So on the first chakra, we deal with the element earth. We deal with everything that is practical, physical; everything that is involved in maintaining our survival, maintaining support of the body itself, the vehicle that takes us on the journey. Here we look at roots, for the name of this chakra—muladhara—which means “root support.” It’s the roots that go down into the element earth and the roots that bring us the support, the strength, and the nourishment for our growth.
Chakra illustrations: The Subtle Body
So here at the first chakra is a four-petal red lotus, within which is a square, within which is a downward pointing triangle, saying that the divine energy of the body begins in the earth and rises up into consciousness, expanding as it goes. So feel yourself rooting into the earth, allowing your energy to fall down to the base of the spine, down to the legs and the feet. Down to the earth below you.
Here at the root chakra is where you find your physical identity. That’s the part of you that can identify with your physical body, that identifies when you’re tired or hungry or need exercise or need to be touched. And by identifying with your physical body and its needs, you’re better equipped to keep yourself alive. So the orientation of that physical identity is self preservation. We must meet that requirement in order to go on the journey.
So take a moment to affirm that physical identity as the ground of your being. Allowing it to descend into the roots and anchor you, giving you a firm foundation for the journey.
And once we are in our vehicle, with a firm foundation, the next step on the journey is to get the vehicle moving. This takes us into the realm of chakra two—swadisthana—whose name means “one’s own place.” To get things moving we must stir up the forces within the energy body. And what stirs up the forces is the emotions, the feeling of desire that makes us want something—we literally get up off our butts, the first chakra, and move through life. Pleasure invites us to move and expand. And opening to the sensations, which are gateways between the outer and the inner world.
As these gateways open, information comes into the inner world through the senses and stimulates consciousness. When consciousness is stimulated, it expands, which means it moves. And so from the contracted, earth-bound place of the first chakra, we start to yield and flow with the element of water, in the second chakra.
So here we come into the sacral area of the body. We find a lotus of six petals, a warm glowing orange. In the center of the lotus is a crescent moon, the smile of the second chakra. The smile of the energy body, which occurs when there’s pleasure, when you feel good, when your emotions are positive.
Dropping down into the second chakra, we come into contact with our emotional identity. That means you can identify when you’re angry or scared or excited or happy. It’s important to be able to identify those emotions so we know what we feel, because this is the first level of information coming into the body that tells us which way to move. If something feels good, we tend to move toward it; if something feels bad, we tend to move away.
So the emotional identity is oriented to self-gratification. It’s oriented to making us feel good, which is a way of keeping us in contact with the inner world. Because when there’s pain, that’s when we tend to distance from ourselves. When there’s pleasure that’s when we tend to come down inside the body.
In this chakra, we balance the polarities of the self: left and right, up and down, inner and outer. By balancing these polarities, we come into a unity within the core.
With our vehicle grounded and then moving, the next job is to steer that vehicle. That’s the job of the will and that brings us into the third chakra.
The third chakra is related to the element of fire. It’s our vitality, our get up and go—you might even think of it as the engine of the vehicle as well as the steering wheel. It takes will to get through the parts that don’t flow so easily—the parts that are challenging, the parts that take work and effort. This is the job of the third chakra—the center of personal power.
Personal power comes from the deep interior of the body, where consciousness descends from the top and meets the energy flowing up from the bottom, literally the fuel that is made by matter and movement. And consciousness directs that energy into some kind of activity.
So here you imagine a lotus of ten petals, just like you have ten fingers, of golden yellow, like the yellow of the sun or fire, in which is a downward pointing triangle, again, the triangle of fire rooting itself down into the earth and expanding up into spirit.
The goal of this chakra is to create mastery—so that through practice, through attention, through focus, and through intention in forming your activity, you gradually develop mastery of your energy body in order to achieve your purpose or goals. This is not a matter of control as much as it is of directing. That you embrace the energy body within you and learn to subtly direct it into the places you want it to go. That might mean directing your body in different yoga poses or practicing the piano or running or dancing or whatever form you practice. It might mean directing your energy body to create projects, to finish your tasks. It is the consciousness within that directs this energy coming up from the bottom.
And this is a very tricky chakra as fire transforms matter to heat and light, this chakra is a chakra of transformation, transforming the world around us. It is oriented to the ego identity, our concept of self. The ego identity is the executive identity that decides what to do—who to hire, who to fire, what the game plan is. And its orientation is to self definition. This creates a coherent unity in the self. One that is important at the third chakra level and yet we don’t want to be bound by our self definition. Because if we are then we’re extremely limited and we don’t go any farther on the journey.
So now we come to the midpoint of our journey—the fourth chakra—the chakra of the heart. And if we imagine taking our vehicle and getting it rolling and steering it, you have to have some space to be able to move into. So the fourth chakra opens to the element air, the spaciousness that really allows you to expand.
The name of this chakra is anahata, which means “sound that is made without any two things striking”—meaning unstruck, unhurt. We enter this chakra when we are no longer hurting ourselves or another, and instead open to that divine realm of love, of relationship. Of connection. Of understanding of both self and other at the same time.
This chakra is over the heart area and as the element of air relates to breath, it also includes the lungs and the chest and the inside of the arms and the hands where we reach out to touch another. We work on this chakra largely through the breath, through expanding the chest, and through transcending the ego of the third chakra, in order to get beyond ourselves enough to really embrace another.
The fourth chakra is a green lotus of twelve petals, within which is two intersecting triangles—the downward-pointing chakra which we had in the third chakra, which is spirit coming down, rooted into matter, and the upward-pointing triangle, which is matter expanding up into spirit, piercing the chakras as it goes. And this six-pointed star says that spirit and matter are perfectly in balance at this center point of the chakra system.So take a breath in and feel the balance within you. Inhaling and exhaling in balance. The inner world and the outer world connected and balanced.
Masculine and feminine, light and shadow, mind and body—all coming into balance within you, which ultimately brings a deep sense of peace.
The identity of this chakra is our social identity. This is where we relate to other people. And in many senses this is the persona that we put on in order to interact socially in the outer world. But underneath that persona is what we call the authentic self. To open the heart chakra is to come into self-acceptance, of our authentic self. And to be able to bring that into relating to others in the outside world in a way that is full of compassion and understanding and joy.
This brings us to the fifth chakra, whose element is sound—the realm of vibration, communication, creativity. Its name, vishuddha, means purification. For it is here that we purify the energy body for the states of higher consciousness in the upper chakras. It is here we filter the many, many thoughts that go on in our minds and distill them down into the ones that we actually speak of and act upon.
In the body it relates to the throat and the neck and the shoulders and the back of the arms. And the neck is literally the bottleneck of the whole system. It is the narrowest place in the chakra system. And so it’s the great distiller, the great translator between mind and body.
In this chakra, you relate to your creative identity. And that identity is oriented to self-expression. Whether you create as a painter or how you set the table or how you dress or whether you write or sing or dance, each of these is a self-expression that is an act of communication from the inner world to the outer.
And in order to really travel into the complexities of our journey, we need to be able to see where we’re going. How else can we join the map to the territory? The role of vision is what helps us navigate on our journey; it helps tell us where we’re going. We pick some place that we want to go and we look at the map and it shows us how to get there. So it has a certain future orientation. We pick our goals and visions.
The element of this chakra is light-light is what enables us to see, whether it is the inner light that occurs within the psyche, within the dreamworld, within our visualizations. Or the light that enables us simply to see where we’re going in the outer world. The name of this chakra is ajna, which means both “to perceive” and “to command.” For it is here where we perceive or see where we are going, to see the patterns, where we say, “Ah, I see.”In the body, it’s often called the third eye. That psychic place between our two physical eyes deep in the center of the head, where we dream, where we see visualizations when we close our eyes and have imaginings. Where we have insight and intuition. Here we come to a lotus of only two petals. Again, we have the downward pointing triangle, pointing down into the manifested world, within which is the seed sound of the primordial OM, the sound of all creation.
I think of the two petals as the two physical eyes. And the third eye as the center, that perceives through these eyes and makes meaning out of it.
Here we have our archetypal identity, which is oriented to self reflection. It shows us the bigger picture of where we’re going and the mythic meaning of our journey.
And then at last we come to the crowning glory of the whole chakra system: the crown chakra at the top of the head—the thousand-petaled lotus, which is what its name—sahasrara—means. This is related to the element thought, or really consciousness itself. Here we find that consciousness is the awareness that is really operating all of the chakras.But in the seventh chakra, we encounter that consciousness in its purest form, removed from the mundane aspects of existence; removed from the emotions and what we’re doing and relating to and creating. And opening to the divine realm of consciousness itself. To the divine expansive limitless realm of the heavens.
In the body it relates to the top of the head, the cerebral cortex, the mind, the intelligence. And the inner witness that is behind everything we say or do or see or feel. Here we discover our universal identity, which is the true meaning of self-knowledge. That we know that what we are is a spark in the mind of God or Goddess—however you perceive the divine to be. A universal awakening that is the mystic knowledge of who we really are.
No comments:
Post a Comment