6 minute read
Dear reader,
Do you think from your head, your heart or your gut? Chakra are a ripe topic for reflection when considering which part of us is running our lives. Are there forces driving us from unseen places? Or does the energy at different parts of our body (chakra) have no relevance whatsoever on how we think or act?
Are chakra even real?
Commonly described as energy centres along the spine, I always feel strange telling people what a chakra 'is.' If you have never in your life known or felt 'a swirling vortex of energy' along your spine then I would never tell you that you have one! That seems fair to me.
If chakra can be so illusive then why do I teach chakra workshops and use the concepts in my therapy sessions?
Because chakra inquiry can be a powerful way to illicit new perspectives and connect us to physical sensations that might not have been fully felt. This is important, because when what is inside us is not fully felt it is harder to understand ourselves. We limit our understanding of self if we only use moving therapies like yoga asana or talking therapy like counselling. Chakra brings more meaning to both.
Chakra inquiries can also be nourishing for clients as they gain skills to manage pain, build self worth, improve relationships and to connect with oneself.
People have taken a look in and it's working for them.
Here's my working definition of chakra, based on how I introduce the experience:
“A chakra is a physical place in your body. It is place with some significance. So not a limb, wrist or toe. Chakra are a place where meaning happens: a place where we feel our own inner-life”
Why not try with me now? If you put your hand on the centre of your chest and let your mind consider what is felt there, after some time and as you relax, sensations arise: past emotions or yearnings for the future, will present themselves to you. Some sensations may feel stuck or dull, some bubbling to the surface.
Your busy and creative mind will place meaning to those feelings. Including any lack of feelings. That is what we humans do. How else do we know when we love, grieve or experience celebratory rapture? It happens in the physical body, in our tissues, our cells, our organs. And we interpret those sensations with what we know and what we intend. This is a subjective experience. It is personal.
Objective and Subjective Reality
But again, we ask, is there a chakra swirling beneath the experience? Really?
To be able to answer this question we will need to consider subjective knowledge and how it relates to objective reality. You may be surprise how this turns out. If you’d like to, come with me and we will see where enquiry takes us.
Ultimately, to a greater or lesser extent our experience of life will always be subjective. Even before Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, it was acknowledge we know the world through the limited designs of our five senses. Sorry, but there’s no direct link to reality. Throw your microscopes and scalpels away! No amount of reduction or specificity is going to help.
With that in mind, let’s take a look at how a chakra is commonly described. In this case Svadhisthana, the second chakra located around the sacrum behind the lower belly.
Svadisthana Chakra
An image that helps us consider certain qualities within ourselves and about life.
A common description of the qualities of
Svadisthana Chakra
From Yoga Journal
The symbol of the sacral chakra is orange with six petals surrounding the center. The circles in connection with the lotus flower petals represent the cycles of birth, death, and rebirth. The tangential circles also create a crescent moon shape, which reminds us of the connection between creativity and the phases of the moon. According to Sahara Rose, the colors and the symbols associated with the different energy centers are reflective of the vibration of the chakras. When the ancient rishis meditated on the energy of the chakras, these were the colors and symbols that arose in their mind’s eye.
This chakra is associated with sensuality and creativity. The primary function of this energy center is pleasure and overall enjoyment of life. When this chakra is balanced and functioning properly, we can expect our relationship with ourselves and the world to feel harmonious, pleasureful, and nurturing.
The svadhisthana chakra is associated with the element of water, says Snyder. The water element is all about flow, flexibility and freedom of expression when it comes to emotions and sensuality. This energy center, when balanced, offers direct access to flow, flexibility, and fun.
In working with this chakra, you will address your relationship with both others and yourself. Personally, you’ll discover you have unlimited creative power; you’ll learn how to cultivate a healthy relationship to pleasure; and you’ll gain insight into your default reactions and deepest emotions and learn how to sit with the depth of your feelings. You will more freely express your wants, needs, and emotions with others. You will also learn how to express yourself more skillfully and how to begin setting healthy boundaries.
www.yogajournal.com/yoga-101/chakras-yoga-for-beginners/intro-sacral-chakra-svadhisthana/
The seven chakras
This popular image of coloured chakras was only recently developed.
Meaning-making-machines & invisible agreements
So each chakra will have its own: colour, image, element, sound, yoga posture, associated organ and diseases, mudra, mantra, electromagnetic frequency, essential oil and even has a dedicated planet.The Sacral chakra above relates to Jupiter. Naturally.
But if a chakra is a place in my body that senses and feels, then why all the hype?
Again, it is because
1. we humans are meaning making machines, and
2. we forgot we made everything up
We live among a sea of agreements that hold together so invisibly that we believe them to be more real than what they are. Society is made up, money is a concept, even numbers do not exist except for when we create and maintain them. The number zero did not exist for mathematicians until the 6th or 7th century.
So truth, or let’s just say ‘reality’ is much less accessible to us than we think.
The Buddhist perspective and meditation
The Buddhist perspective suggests that when we really look thoroughly at the nature of life, it all end up being an illusion of real. Our daily lives need things to be pretty much bedded down and secure so we can get to work, get paid, pay our bills and have decent relationships. But those definites that make all that possible are not definites. We each day renew the agreement to live with constancy.
If you are willing to strip things all the way back to their simplest forms, which is what happens in meditation, then seeing the illusion becomes easier.
Shall we for now agree that to a great extent things are less real and less certain than we like to pretend?
If you’re into this way of understanding life, then when someone says a chakra ‘ is’ you will understand that to mean: ‘people have elaborated on this place in the body in ways that are meaningful to them and help them to make sense of themselves and this life.’
And that is what anyone with interest in something will do: elaborate.
Pick any passion of yours and you will see how it maintains your attention. And because of that you attach more and more meaning to it and see the world through it. Since I started gardening, I’ve found it is a metaphor for every aspect of life. Others see life through the lens of money and everything is a weighed as cost-benefit transactions. You get my point.
Structures help seperate information and focus our attention
And while on the topic of how our mind streams information: The third thing the chakra system does is help us seperate out our experience into discrete areas for us to name, consider and develop. Life can be overwhelming and having a well established, comprehensive structure to guide our attention is invaluable at those times of confusion or over-load.
Here are the seven areas of life chakra have been popularly divided into:
With the lack of skilful attention paid to our inner experience -our inner life - I welcome the chakra descriptions that others have shared. The associations the ancient rishis made to these places in their bodies aligns well with me. Perhaps you noticed how similar it is to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs?
When the descriptions resonate across generations and cultures they are organically propagated because of this attunement.
It reminds us we really are connected at the deepest level.
So I don’t find myself asking ‘Are chakras real?’
The question is “How do these chakra descriptions and practices serves us?”
When you read the above Yoga Journal quote, your mind was touched by “the moon, cycles of life, creative power, flow, pleasure, deepest emotions, freedom of expression.”
You would have been somehow changed by those images and concepts as you read them. That is an experience you had and otherwise would not be having. It has set cogs in motion in the mind, seeds now sewn in the heart.
I meditate on the sensations I feel at my lower and upper belly and heart. Occasionally throat and third eye. It is an authentic inquiry and one worthy of an expert hand.
I reach with genuine appreciation for the revelatory and healing nature of the process and teach from what I know.
To decrease skepticism I keep my language around the sensations in the body and what a client’s actual experience is. I avoid overlaying it with external, made up ideas that might have no relevance. But when guidance is needed, I have a wealth of delightful images, essential oils, concepts and knowledge to dip into. And if they are into astrology, hey, I can even bring in the celestial planets.
For you: have fun and see how the descriptions of the chakras awaken and enliven you. Will you put on some music you love, get your hips swinging and live with a little flow and expression? Yes please!
We can be touched by what is on offer rather than prioritise truth. With this in hand, it can protect you too, against those who may wish to dupe you. The deepest truths are without form, they need no explanation and they are immediately known as they arise within us.