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.