Get to Know Your Chakras

Getting acquainted with your chakras can help you see visually where your blocks to physical and emotional health are. I wanted to highlight a few of these chakras as they relate to our intimate relationships with others.

But in case you aren’t familiar with chakras, let’s first talk about what they are. In Ayurvedic medicine, chakras are energy centers, often depicted as vortices, which are present on the midline of the body. There are seven of them, and they go in a straight line from the base of the spine to the crown of the head. Their common names, from bottom to top, are the root chakra, the sacral chakra, the navel or solar plexus chakra, the heart chakra, the throat chakra, the third eye chakra, and the crown chakra. If your chakras are “open”, that is, if energy is flowing freely through them, the body systems to which they correspond are said to be functioning well. Chakras can be underactive, which means that energy is blocked in that particular area. Often if you have underactive chakras, you will also have over-active chakras to compensate. The key to balancing the over-active chakras is to open up your underactive ones.

The website Eclectic Energies has a self-test you can take, along with chants you can say to open up your chakras and some instructions for doing them. I highly recommend this website if you’re new to chakras. As long as you answer the test questions honestly, you’re likely to get startlingly accurate results. I also recommend this page on opening chakras from About.com’s Holistic Healing site. It offers some other chakra-balancing suggestions. Though chanting is the best way to open your chakras, it can’t hurt to engage in these other activities at the same time, particularly if one or more of your chakras is very severely underactive.

When you open up your chakras, you’re supposed to chant until you feel a vibration in the part of the body you are working on. I’ve heard people say that the vibration is supposed to be quite obvious especially the first few times you chant. I’ve felt the vibration occur after just a few minutes of chanting. My own personal goal is to chant every day and then re-take the test weekly to see if I’ve made any progress. I’ve already begun to see a little movement in one of my underactive chakras. I’m inching and inching toward balance. It’s definitely a journey I would recommend taking.

In Search of Reading Material

I’ve been seeking books and other reading material on mindfulness, consciousness, and enlightened thinking in relationships. While I do believe that wholly embracing Buddhist philosophy will naturally make our intimate relationships better, I also think that as I am still a novice student of Buddhism, I need a little guidance on the path of bringing mindful thinking to my relationships (or potential relationships). Though I accept that my growth here will consist mainly of experience and consequential course correction, I would like to find some appropriate material to give me some grounding, and I’ve found this material hard to come by. There’s obviously a lot of reading material on relationships, but a great deal of it leaves much to be desired. However, there are a few books that do cover this topic. I was lucky enough to find one in my local library, entitled “How to Be an Adult in Relationships: The Five Keys to Mindful Loving” by David Richo. I’ve already begun reading it, and though I’m not very deep in yet, I believe it will be an important book in my own way of looking at love with mindful eyes. In my next few posts, I’ll report any “aha” moments and give my recommendation as to whether the text is helpful once I finish it.

A Brief Review of The Art of Happiness: A Handbook for Living

I recently read The Art of Happiness: A Handbook for Living, not because I was looking for it to provide relationship advice, but simply because I’ve always wanted to read it. I, like many other people, it seems, was under the impression it was written mainly by the Dalai Lama. Instead I found that it was written by Howard Cutler, a psychiatrist from Arizona, and is about his discussions with the Dalai Lama about happiness. I was a little disappointed in the material, because quite a bit of it seemed very simplistic and banal. When the topic turned to relationships, for instance, one of the pieces of advice given was not to base long-term relationships on sexual attraction alone and to really get to know the person you are with. That seems…well, obvious. However, I don’t want to discount the possibility that there may be people out there who need this simple idea reinforced. I also have to say I found some of Dr. Cutler's insights following his discussions with the Dalai Lama to be uninspiring. They may be better appreciated, perhaps, by someone who has absolutely no knowledge or understanding of Eastern philosophies. Even among that population, however, I’m not sure how pithy they would be.

There are a few gems of wisdom there, however, especially in the last section of the book when the Dalai Lama is discussing anger and ways of dissolving it. I enjoyed reading that from the perspective of remaining physically healthy, we do not need to “get out” all of our anger by screaming or hitting pillows as we are often taught to do. For one, it always returns when we interpret some other event as something we should get angry about. And second, doing so can actually harm our cardiovascular health. Instead we should transform our anger. The Dalai Lama’s frequent prescription for problems is to cultivate compassion, and this can be very effective for transforming anger as well. His thinking on negative emotions—that they are not an inherent, unavoidable part of our psyche—is also refreshing.

But for me, the most important piece of information transmitted by The Art of Happiness was that the Dalai Lama indicated that he is never lonely, because he looks at others with compassion and seeks a certain spiritual or emotional intimacy with everyone. I think that if a monk who has never married and has practiced lifelong celibacy can develop this kind of contentment and peace with himself without having a partner, then certainly it is possible for each of us to do the same.