The Basics of Yoga, Chakras, and Psychic Development
Welcome to a book that will open you to a new world and a new way of thinking. When you experience intuition, you will start to understand the energy that pervades all things, and you will begin to see how all things are connected. You will learn three basic modalities through this book—yoga poses, breathing exercises, and meditation—that are going to lay the foundation for your psychic development. Being psychic doesn’t mean you need to be a fortuneteller. In today’s day and age, it will help you make decisions, figure out what job is best for you, and navigate life from a soul level. We are faced with many injustices and corruption in our world that can make us feel isolated or fearful that we will have to compromise our morals. Developing your psychic abilities opens you to see that is not the case at all and that you are not isolated or powerless.
As you learn about yoga poses, your chakras, and how to begin to open your intuition, you’ll find the universe supports you and guides you. You will find that we are supported in our intuition by a loving energy I like to think of like the Force in Star Wars. That energy is very real, and it will help you sense and communicate with the spirit world, which is always there, working on the other side, to help humanity evolve. As the planet goes through its psychological growing pains, the people who develop a lifestyle that works to connect them to a higher state of consciousness will be the ones that can both enjoy the growth and aid it. While these big ideas may have you scratching your head and wondering how you can help change the planet, know that your energy, no matter how peaceful or angry, is sending out vibrations to the world, and the more you heal your own heart and mind, the more peaceful this world becomes.
So let’s take these big ideas and start to bring them home and apply them to you and your day-to-day life. When you are able to make small decisions each day that will support your psychic development, your life will start to feel like you’re more in control, and you will even be able to know things that will help you become successful, happy, and healthy. That’s a big promise, I know, but it is not unrealistic. There are many people who do not know they are intuitive but are using their intuition all the time. How many times have you heard someone say “it gave me the wrong vibe” or “I had a feeling that would happen”? The truth is, intuition is accessible by everyone, but the mind often distracts us. Because we are raised to value math and science more than art, we have developed the brain’s logical side without much attention to the brain’s creative side. To shift our energy, we can turn to the time-tested practices given to us by the yogis, which helps us start using both sides of the brain and sense subtle energy as if its volume were suddenly turned up like a song on the radio.
This is a very exciting endeavor, and it can help you learn how to overcome fear and handle situations at work, relationships, health, and tragedies. It will help you see how your own energy attracts things to you, and it will help you learn how to manifest by focusing your mind. But before I spoil the surprise, let’s talk about the nuts and bolts: your body and mind. I am not asking you to go through a rigorous boot camp; it’s quite the opposite, actually. This process is about being gentle and getting to know subtle energy by finding stillness. If you felt like you were going to have to study and push and struggle, as you probably are used to from spending years and years in school, well, you just don’t. You actually will be unlearning those habits and shutting your mind off. As you learn how to go into deep states of relaxation, you will begin to hear the voice of your soul, the wisdom of the spirit world, and the support of your own higher self.
An Expanded Understanding of Yoga
To begin, let’s discuss what yoga actually is. It was developed thousands of years ago and has been passed on from teacher to student ever since. It is not just a physical form of exercise; that is actually a common misunderstanding. The meaning of the word yoga is “to yoke.” It essentially allows you to connect to the energy that connects us all so you can flow with it and sense how to harmonize the energy on the planet by reducing pain and suffering. It allows you to align your life with the greater good from an energetic and physical approach. It unlocks the energy in the body so it can flow, and it opens our consciousness to perceive beyond the limits of the mind. Above the mind is supreme consciousness, or a state of oneness where you experience your identity beyond your body. Yoga involves physical poses, breathing exercises, the chanting of sounds to direct the mind, and even meditations to train it. It has branches of philosophical study that provide ideas to help you think more compassionately toward yourself and the world. The difference between yoga and other forms of philosophy is that it allows you to physically experience something instead of just thinking about things.
What you will learn in this book are simple movements, breathing techniques, mantras (chanting), and meditations that, over time, will help to harmonize all the major systems of your body. As you do the exercises in this book, you will start to notice how the energy that keeps your heart ticking has more intricacies. Think of the movements and meditations as keys that will unlock doors to new abilities. Just as we learned to speak and drive cars, we can all learn to be psychic with this ancient system of yoga. The poses are divided into categories based on the chakras they most strongly activate. A chakra is basically a bundle of nerves that links to our emotions and affects the health of the physical organs near it. There are seven main chakras in the body, which are concentrations of our life-force energy. That energy flows in and out of our body through those chakras. These ports of entry and exit move energy through our aura, which surrounds our body. The edge of our body’s energy field is not like a wall but more like a sponge that picks up on the energy around it.
Chanting and using mantras are traditional ways to move energy by creating emotional states with the sound currents that activate specific chakras. There is nothing to fear about chanting or mantras. The sound may feel a bit ominous, and if you were raised in a religious community, you may have been told that yoga was of the devil. However, there is nothing evil about yoga or chanting. Often systems that promote fear of other systems only lack a deeper understanding of those they are putting down. When I was going through my first yoga teacher training, a friend who was a born-again Christian warned me that yoga was of the devil. Having been raised in a religious society, I was familiar with this fear-based perspective. I knew she was coming from a place of compassion but didn’t know what the energy of the body was, nor that yoga could be used to open intuition in a nonreligious way. I have been in clairvoyant classes with people of all religions and yoga classes with people of all religions. Improving your health and intuition can be done in addition to religion, if that is what you choose. It doesn’t have to be one or the other.
Your Chakras: The Doors to Intuition
Here is a basic introduction to your chakras, including the eighth chakra, the aura chakra, that surrounds your body. The first chakra, your root chakra, is the one that connects you to the physical world. It is more primal than all the other chakras, which means it is linked to your need to eat, digest, and procreate, which are the same traits we share with animals. If you were to only have energy in this chakra, you would lack wisdom to make more humane choices. This is the chakra that helps alert you to danger and threats, helping you survive as an animal does in the wild. It is also where your energy and vitality is stored, and it is a necessary chakra because it helps you provide for yourself.
The sacral chakra, the second chakra, still connects to your more primal instincts and houses the energy of the reproductive organs. It essentially is the growing house for your desires. It allows you to enjoy being in your body and connect intimately. It stores a large amount of energy, which we call passion. If you’ve been the object of someone’s affection who doesn’t have other outlets or interests, you’ve felt the energy. If you only activate the energy in this chakra, it can lead to addiction or obsession. It is a necessary chakra because it allows you to use that energy to fuel your goals and even to send your energy out to create the life you desire. It holds your ability to manifest because it is what creates strong emotions and thus strong energy.
The solar plexus chakra is the third chakra in what is known as the bottom triangle. This chakra houses confidence and willpower. If energy is too concentrated here, it can lead to being a dictator, but if the energy is depleted, you will feel incapable of leading your life.
In between what is known as the bottom triangle and upper triangle is the heart chakra, your fourth chakra. This is the gateway to the higher realms of consciousness found in the upper triangle. This chakra allows you to move beyond your primal desires and personal agenda to feel compassion for the world and the suffering of others. If it is depleted or blocked, you will have trouble loving yourself, but if it is overactive, you can give too much of your energy to helping others.
The upper triangle—made up of the fifth, sixth, and seventh chakras—is going to help you awaken your psychic abilities. The throat chakra, your fifth chakra, is what will allow the writers and revolutionaries of our time to share their new ideas for helping society. It is also how we will change things in our own lives by speaking up for what is right and setting healthy boundaries for ourselves. An overactive throat chakra not only leads to talking over people, but it can also mean you aren’t able to listen to others and make them feel you care. An underactive throat chakra means you don’t speak up or you lie or maybe even muddle things so much that it drains your energy and everyone else’s trying to understand what you are conveying.
The third eye chakra, the sixth chakra, is linked to your intuition and sixth sense. It is a major focus of this book, and the techniques you will learn here will help activate it. When underactive, this chakra leads to confusion, paranoia, and decision paralysis. When active, you’re connected to a network of information that can bring your consciousness to new places and levels of understanding reality. It gives you hunches and gut feelings.
The crown chakra, the seventh chakra, is linked to the spirit world and allows you to find a sense of purpose for your life. When this chakra is active, you can navigate for the highest good; when underactive, you feel depressed and alone.
The final chakra we will discuss is the eighth chakra, the aura chakra. Your aura can be diminished in strength by negative thoughts or strengthened by positive ones. Its charge greatly affects what you attract to you and how others perceive you. It is also important to clear it in order to read others clearly without projecting your own energy onto them. It is key to your process of psychic development and is most directly influenced by the breathing exercises you’ll learn in Chapter 2.
You will get to know each chakra as you go through this book, as well as the body parts and symptoms they are tied to. This book will help guide you to sense the subtle energy that starts to become amplified as you practice yoga and get more in touch with your own body, your breath, and your energy. Each chapter has discussions about developing your intuition that will help direct your mind to notice the changes that are taking place. As you are able to move and breathe in a more specific way, your body will work as a telephone to your intuition. When you make a phone call, you have to dial the correct numbers to get the energetic connection. Yoga poses, breathing techniques, and meditations are a system that people have used to call their intuition for a very long time. While there are many techniques and approaches to psychic development, yogic techniques activate and strengthen your energy the fastest. Many processes to activating psychic energy exist today; tarot, plant medicine, and even psychedelics are examples of how people access their intuition. The practice of yoga is essentially like hacking your own energy to strengthen that connection naturally, without harming your brain or risking harming it.
Developing intuition will allow you to sense the intentions of others yes, but it will also be a strong mirror for you of your own intentions. This journey is much more internal than external and you will find that each time you sit to meditate there will be a little more familiarity with the process of going within. You can expect yourself to become more sensitive to energy in this process, so take time to sit with yourself and allow yourself to heal. Often in the beginning phases of psychic development, there can be strong emotions that surface over the course of a couple of years. The reason I bring this up is so that you will be gentle with yourself as you stir the pot of your old emotional wounds so you can clean it out. Just as people who go through a physical detox often experience temporary symptoms of sickness, emotional detox can be just as intense. You may need more time to yourself to process and clear your emotions, which will inevitably free you from them and help you know yourself and your true identity, which is the most important relationship you will ever develop.
Try do something every day from this book—over time, you will digest the information. Talking about your intuition is like learning a new language, and the experiences you have in your own healing process will be a part of that language. As you move your body and develop a stronger breath capacity, you’re essentially changing the frequency you are able to perceive. Think about how in the visible light spectrum, we see certain things, but those colors we see are wavelengths. Our ears can only hear certain wavelengths, or frequencies, although some of the most powerful sounds that can move physical objects are beyond what our ears can hear. You are developing your sense of intuition, which will soon become just as strong as your senses that allow you to taste, hear, and see. Intuition is not a fairytale idea but a very sophisticated and suppressed form of sensing that is recorded in all sacred texts and has been well documented, researched, and proved as real.
Intuition has been used to locate lost children, solve crimes, pinpoint undiagnosed medical conditions, connect to the consciousness of the deceased, and predict major and minor events. The world you are stepping into is going to change your life and transform you. It will help you see your deepest thought patterns and where they came from. It will help you know how you can best guide others to feel better. While you don’t yet know where it will lead you, sense how your heart feels after reading this chapter. Sense the energy you feel even upon reading about this. There is a reason you found this book, and you can be sure it is a good one.
Let’s say someone wanted to develop psychic abilities, but they were a very angry person who was getting into fights with others frequently. While yoga can help release anger, one should focus on developing psychic abilities as a way to heal your own energy and start to understand how to be a more positive person in the way you respond to the environment around you. The more you surround yourself with positive music, kind people, and uplifting words, the more quickly you can shift your own energy from negative to positive. This development of psychic abilities can help us shift to become a more positive person and therefore a more empowered person if we keep the intention to look within to direct our own thoughts and release negativity. As you embark upon this journey, it is best that you turn your thoughts toward positive healing and away from negativity or people or places that provoke fear and other negative emotions in you. You can always visualize a bubble of positive energy around you to clear lower vibrations. You can also state (out loud or mentally), “Only positive energy is allowed around me.”