The Benefits of Chakra Medicine
No problem can be solved from the level of consciousness that created it.
Albert Einstein
Chakras make good medicine—medicine being defined as any activity that moves us toward health, satisfaction, and harmony. Because chakras are so interwoven with all aspects of our being, any shift we make within a chakra causes exponential transformation. Because chakras are connected to one another, to benefit one is to improve all others. And because chakras are subtle organs with rapidly vibrating energy, when we perform chakra medicine, we can work quickly.
This chapter explores a variety of ways in which chakra medicine can improve your life physically, psychologically, and spiritually. I’ll first outline the “chakra consciousness profile,” a quick look at the seven main benefits of learning to work with and through your chakras. Then I’ll present terms you’ll find throughout this book that describe some of the methods for performing chakra healing—terms that appear in “chakra circles” but aren’t always explained. These include concepts such as healing, manifesting, ego, true self, opening, balancing, clearing, blocks, attuning, and aligning. These ideas will appear again and again as you continue reading, so it’s vital to have a sense of what they mean.
As you will discover, chakra knowledge is critical for anyone who wants to achieve a higher state of consciousness while making significant changes in their own and others’ lives. It can achieve the great and the small—and, as the enlightened person knows, there is little difference between the two.
The Far-Reaching Benefits of Chakra Medicine
How does someone who lives a life devoted to chakra medicine look and act? In general, they are balanced in body, mind, and soul. But there are specific benefits that you can expect will follow the application of the chakra knowledge, principles, and medicine I share in this book. As you will see, incorporating chakra work into your daily life will powerfully support you in several ways. With practice, you will:
Increase Clarity: Chakras store your memories. They also store the energies of others, and you must clean out these energies in order to know what you really think, believe, and need in the present.
Clear Out Negative Beliefs and Emotions: Destructive beliefs set you up for negative attitudes, relational problems, lack of prosperity, and emotional havoc. You can also fall prey to harmful emotions such as envy, resentment, hatred, or betrayal, which can cause everything from self-hatred to physical illness.
Clear Out Trauma, Both Psychological and Physical: An unaddressed trauma will continue to occupy and affect you until you deal with it.
Access Insights: Each chakra communicates via a different psychic style and is therefore an avenue for spiritual guidance—something we all need if we are to walk this world in a good way.
Reduce Stress: Between 75 and 90 percent of all doctor’s visits result from stress, which leads to everything from physical illness to mood disorders.1 By bolstering your chakras, you boost your ability to handle whatever life presents you.
Strengthen Immunity and Boundaries on All Levels: Your chakras interact with your auric field—the layers of energy beyond your skin—to provide protection and boundaries. These energetic boundaries, as they are called, enable you to prevent adverse energies from entering your body and to share positive instead of self-defeating messages with the world.
Clear and Keep Out Others’ Energies: I believe that up to 80 percent of our problems are caused by the energies of others. Chakras store this energy, but they are also able to release it, and when our energetic boundaries are intact, they can keep it from coming back in.
As you explore these seven main benefits of applying chakra medicine, keep in mind that chakra work can benefit you so greatly because chakras operate inside form and outside it—just as you do. You can’t change when you remain trapped inside a problem. When you work with your chakras, you can stretch beyond the problem. You can reach for the skies and find a star to illuminate a new way.
Chakras Increase Clarity
There are numerous reasons you might need to work within the chakras to gain clarity. The main reason the chakras are such powerful vehicles for choice and decision making is that, at a primal level, chakras are organs of storage. Inside each chakra are the memories, traumas, misperceptions, emotions, and misinformed conclusions relating to that chakra’s concerns. Unless you release yourself from the stored energy of the past, you can’t clearly see the present or plan for the future.
As I mentioned, chakras store more than just your own energy; inside each chakra is also a collection of energies you have collected from others. As I discuss in the upcoming “Why Do We Take In the Energies of Others?” section, it is very common to absorb energy from other people, yet you cannot process energies that do not match your own unique vibrational imprint, and this is why other people’s physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual energy can get trapped in your energy bodies. Once embedded, it clouds your perceptions and causes confusion: the state of being “con-fused,” or fused with others. You must release this energy if you are to wholly occupy yourself.
Your own stuck energy, as well as energies you hold for others, can block your meridians and damage your energetic fields, which can become perforated, thickened, or too thin. Clarity is hard to come by when your life energy isn’t moving, is leaking, is being used by someone else—or when you can’t access it yourself.
Chakras can also be adversely affected by yet another energetic mechanism: energetic attachments and bindings. We all make a variety of energetic agreements with others that create limitations, loss of energy, or the absorption of their energies. These “contracts”—which exist in the subtle planes but can affect us physically, psychologically, and spiritually—can also link us to otherworldly entities, beings, and groups.
When you release or transform the unsuitable energies your chakras hold, you can attune to yourself and be better able to make decisions based on inner integrity.
Chakras Clear Out Negative Beliefs and Emotions
Negative beliefs can cause everything from a poor self-image to bad health. Every chakra records a specific set of beliefs, many of which are life enhancing, reflecting and earning goodness, but then again, many of the beliefs loaded into our chakras are destructive.
Substantiating this statement is research on the number of negative beliefs we have each day. Of the 60,000 or so thoughts we have in a day, almost 80 percent are negative.2 Perhaps even worse, most of these are thoughts we had the day before—and the day before that.
In chapter 13 we will further explore ways to transform these negative beliefs through the chakras; this is one of the most important goals of chakra medicine. Negative thoughts produce negative effects, as was revealed in a recent study at Oxford University showing that poor expectations of a treatment overrode the expected effects of a powerful pain-relieving drug.3
It’s equally important to access or substitute positive beliefs or emotions to replace the negative ones. In-depth research by Rolin McCraty through the Institute of HeartMath, has shown that negative emotions, such as anger, frustration, and anxiety, cause increased stress, immune challenges, mood issues, cognitive problems, and other physiological dysfunctions. On the other hand, positive emotions, such as appreciation, love, and compassion, improve our physical and psychological functioning.4
Because they store both negative and positive beliefs and emotions, our chakras are ideal vehicles for psychological healing. It’s not enough to release negative emotions; we must also open to the positive ones.
Chakras Release Trauma
By the time we reach adulthood, most of us have incurred damage from varying types of traumatic situations. Trauma occurs when we experience distressing or disturbing circumstances, but the effects linger when we are unable to clear or recover from the trauma. It’s especially useful to approach trauma from an energetic point of view, since it involves subtle as well as physical energies.
Trauma stems from many causes. These include physical accidents, illnesses, and abuse; addictions or being in relationship with an addict; emotional, mental, or verbal abuse or the witnessing of the same; neglect; exposure to a short- or long-term stressor such as losing a job, the illness or death of a loved one, and more.
There are other sources of trauma beyond those that traditional medicine recognizes. Our soul can carry past-life trauma into this life. We can also be subjected to abuse and attack from other people’s or entities’ subtle energies, a subject first introduced in the aforementioned section“Why Do We Take In the Energies of Others?”
Our chakras are interdimensional, exist across time, and access energy from all time periods, as well as our own genealogical roots. This means that they are reservoirs for past lives, this life, ancestral traumas, and even potential future events. They also hold our emotional and mental reactions to all experienced or even potential traumas, psychic attacks, and energetic attachments. Sometimes we can clear a this-life trauma through therapeutic means, but often a this-life trauma mirrors our soul or past-life issues or an ancestor’s situation. This is one of the reasons dealing with trauma through a chakra can be so powerful: we can clear all situations and energies related to the trauma at the same time.
The other reason chakra medicine is so effective is that trauma has an enormous subtle energy component. Forces are subtle as well as physical, and the best way to explain how subtle energetic forces endure, and can continue to wound us, is through an illustration.
Imagine a boy threw a runaway baseball that hit you on the head, and as a result you incurred a traumatic brain injury. Examine the situation and you will discover that the baseball shot through the air via an energetic force. When it hit your head, so did that force.
One component of the force can be measured physically, in terms of intensity and vibration, but there are also subtle energies intertwined in the physical force. The subtle force might contain the feelings of the boy who threw the ball or the beliefs of the umpire who was chastising the boy at the time. Maybe the force even carried that boy’s history or his love (or dislike) of baseball. All these elements enter your body and continue projecting into it even as the baseball bounces off.
An emotionally charged event, a mean word, the cursory glance: these and all other interactions involve physical and subtle forces that affect your body and can become stored in the correlating chakras. Several subtle-body scenarios are possible when this happens:
- • The force travels directly through the body, leaving an entrance and exit wound. You will have problems in both areas and in the chakras pertaining to them.
- • The force enters and then gets stuck. You will incur issues at the entrance wound and at the stuck spot, as well as their related chakras.
- • The force enters and hits a part of the body (like a bone), a chakra, or an issue-
infested area, then bounces out of the body in an off-kilter direction. You will have problems in the entrance and exit wounds as well as the place of impact and all related chakras. - • The force bounces off, leaving a problem in an auric field and the related chakra.
As we briefly discussed in chapter 1, chakras enable access to our physical, psychological, and spiritual energies and are therefore ideal working sites for healing trauma. Most of the exercises in Part 3 can be used to resolve trauma through the chakras.
Chakras Access Insight
Every chakra is a psychic center that can communicate with subtle or psychic information using its own particular style. Much as we do using our five physical senses, chakra communication involves receiving, holding, interpreting, and sending energy. Of course, the difference is that our chakras access energy that moves faster than the speed of light and doesn’t conform to the clock. This means that every one of your chakras is able to communicate using information from your own and others’ pasts, futures, and concurrent time periods.
As a vehicle for insight, each chakra has its own specialty. For instance, the first chakra manages information that is physical in nature. It might “read” another’s illness, financial distress, or sexual inclination. It can also send information to provide others with physically related insights. In response to another’s bodily pain, this chakra might send physical healing. In reaction to their money woes, it might psychically suggest ways to become more prosperous.
We are born with every one of the core chakra abilities, yet sometimes one chakra is more open than others, or more psychic than its mates. As we mature, it’s important to focus our self-development activities, including our use of kundalini, to clear out the chakras and expand our abilities so they work at an optimum level. Over time, they become less “psychic,” or open to the subtle energy around us, and more “intuitive,” or mindfully managed. Once we’ve edged closer to self-realization, which the Hindu system calls enlightenment, our abilities transform into full spiritual gifts: the siddhi powers discussed in all Hindu and tantra systems. We will discuss the insight gifts of the chakras much more thoroughly in following chapters.
Chakras Relieve Stress
As I mentioned earlier, stress—our reaction to life events—is one of the main causes of physical issues and conditions, as well as emotional and mental health disorders. Scientists have discovered that when a person encounters a stressor, the body part that first notices the problem passes the signal to the brain, most notably to the hypothalamus and thalamus. The brain alerts our nervous and endocrine systems, and every part of our body responds, turning on our “flight, fight, or freeze” responses. In turn, our heart rate, breathing rate, and metabolism accelerate, our arteries dilate, and our anxiety goes through the roof. We go on “red alert” so we can deal with the presenting stress.
Chronic or repetitive stress perpetuates this condition, causing significant injury, including lowered immune response, increased blood pressure, tension, sleep issues, and emotional and mental distortions. Endure too much chronic stress and you dramatically increase the potential for life-threatening diseases and dysfunctions.5
Recall that every major chakra interacts with the nervous system as well as a hormone gland. As well, your nadis (or meridians) flow through every organic system, and your auric layers serve to protect the same biophysical systems. This means that healing through your chakras and other energetic systems can effect physical change as well as subtle change.
And there is yet another dimension: chakras contain your spiritual consciousness, not only a record of events and interactions. Any tension or stressor in your system or life is automatically registered in a chakra, thus potentially calling forth the shift in consciousness necessary to address, confront, or transform the stress. As perceptual filters, chakras hold the “secret of life”: the ability to change your perception and therefore bypass or transform your survival reactions. This means that chakra work provides the ultimate balm you need to recover from or reframe stress.
Chakras Strengthen Immunities and Boundaries
Chakras express themselves outward into the world in three main ways, each of which could be defined as an energetic boundary:
- • They operate like swirling vortexes that extend beyond your physical body, front and back sides.
- • They interact with (and perhaps even form) your auric layers, which compose a major two-way subtle energy filtering system; according to your chakra programs, this system sends out subtle messages, attracting people and situations to you and deflecting energies.
- • They engage with and affect your electromagnetic fields—the bodily fields generated from your cells, organs, and overall self.
Stress is linked to our perceptions of what happens within and around us. The people and systems outside us program the information in our chakras, as does our own soul. This information, which also vibrates, instructs our auric and electromagnetic fields as well as our brain in how to handle stressors—but it also tells the world, to some extent, what stressors to throw at us.
This means that shifting our chakra energy can strengthen our physical, psychological, and spiritual selves and other parts of our energetic anatomy so as to provide more permanent protection and better boundaries.
Chakras Clear and Keep Out Others’ Energies
It’s vital to get to the bottom of the reasons we might capture the energies of other people and to figure out where those energies might be. Chakras hold the information about both factors.
There are a number of different scenarios that compel us to hold on to others’ energies. We might feel like we must do so in order to adapt to our family’s system. We might take on the energy of a person, school, culture, race, or religion in order to fit in. We might also absorb another’s energy in order to stabilize an unstable situation. For instance, a child in an alcoholic family system, in which one parent is an alcoholic and the other codependent, might take on the addict’s anger to reduce the chance that they will drink again or, if drunk, will act cruelly.
It is possible to soak up just about any type of energy, including physical toxins and illnesses, emotions, beliefs, needs, and even goals. This is because these energies always have a subtle component, a fast-moving energy that doesn’t stop at walls—or skin. Rather, subtle energy can move through any and all barriers, or at the very least go around the corners. Usually we take on others’ energies because it helps us survive and fit in.
Another motive, however, centers on love. We might take on Mother’s depression, Dad’s physical malady, a sister’s pain, a friend’s romantic stress, or any other issue because we care about someone and want to spare them pain. One of the reasons we conduct chakra-based healing work is to figure out not only the source of the energy but also the initial reason we unconsciously took it on. To release the reason is to release the energy.
It’s important that we never blame ourselves for absorbing energies from others. Quite often, we were trying to cope with a situation that was bigger than we were, one that seemingly presented no other solutions. At other times we might have been “forced,” yielding to a sort of energetic bullying from another person. Forgiveness is key in any healing process and certainly in this one.
It’s also vital to figure out where the interjected energy lies within and outside of our bodies. Because every chakra regulates a bodily area, working with the chakras is ideal. Chakras also relate to different auric fields; energy can be trapped in fields as well as chakras. By locating the chakra that correlates with the trapped energy, we can use chakra medicine to eradicate the energy and rebuild the affected parts of our body, chakra, and energy field.
Chakras are also ideal organs for this healing process because each develops at a different age. For instance, the first chakra develops from in utero to six months of age. If a part of the body related to the hips seems affected by another’s energy or displays the symptoms of this potential, we know that something might have occurred during these early ages and so we can focus our work there.
Chakra Medicine: Your Lexicon of Terms
Throughout this book, you’ll be learning various ways the ancients used chakra knowledge to transform challenges, raise consciousness, address healing needs, and improve relationships. These same wondrous opportunities are available to us today. Toward this end, it’s important to understand the terms that will show up relating to chakra medicine or the application of chakra wisdom to improve our lives. Following are a few of these often-seen concepts:
Healing: To heal is to “make whole.” It involves recognizing the innate wholeness latent in the body, mind, or soul and calling it forth into the physical world. This process may or may not restore us to a state of perfection or create a state not experienced before, but it will help us shift into greater joy and acceptance. Healing often involves making an issue “disappear” so it no longer occupies us.
Manifesting: To manifest is to bring what we desire (or what the Divine desires for us) into physical existence. From a subtle energy perspective, manifesting involves transforming energy from its subtle state into a physical state.
Ego: This term, often used interchangeably with personality or false self, is the part of us that develops in order to adapt to our external environment. This acquired identity is often a shell infused with subtle energy so as to bring it to life. We might have several ego-based selves, which could be based in our childhood or past lives. Healing and manifesting often involve gently releasing the subtle energy from these ego selves, much like we would let air out of a balloon, so they don’t run our lives anymore.
True Self: Each of us is an immortal spirit, an essential self that comprises our true identity. While our ego selves believe we are separate from the Divine, our true self knows that we are always connected and is therefore able to link with the Divine to perform healing and manifesting. Our chakras contain the germs of our ego selves but also access the entirety of our true self.
The true self is to be distinguished from our soul, which is the part of ourselves that travels across time and space, often reincarnating, to learn about love. Unlike our spirit, or true self, our soul believes itself to be separate from the Divine, as well as its own spirit, and it can therefore incur wounds and need healing. Our mind is like a computer loaded into our soul; it catalogues our beliefs and experiences. While our mind is nonlocal and journeys with our soul, our brain is local and serves as the vehicle through which our mind operates while we are alive.
Opening the Chakras: Energy workers often use the term “opening the chakras” to describe methods for keeping the chakras operational. A closed chakra isn’t fully shut but is contracted and therefore not extended as far as it should be beyond the physical body. This will leave it blocked or inhibited by the issues stored within it. (One of the reasons we activate kundalini is to clear these physically, emotionally, mentally, or spiritually induced blocks.) An open chakra has a wide vortex swing and reaches far into the immaterial universe. It is therefore able to interact interdimensionally.
Unblocking the Chakras: A block is the subtle energy inhibiting the full function of a chakra. By releasing blocks—whether they were imbedded physically, emotionally, mentally, or spiritually, or are composed of one’s own or another’s energies—we free our true self so it can operate through the corresponding chakra. The process of letting go of a block is often called “releasing the block.” The other terms often used include “clearing the chakras” or “cleansing the chakras.” Both phrases describe the releasing of chakric blocks.
Balancing the Chakras: Balancing a chakra involves putting a chakra into working order. This can involve making sure the front and back side of the chakra mirror each other, that the swing is appropriately wide and circular, and more. Balancing the chakras involves working with multiple chakras to ensure that they are operational and interacting well with each other.
Another phrase for balancing the chakras is “aligning the chakras.” This latter phrase emphasizes the need to make sure that there is an appropriate and equal distance between each chakra, that they are flush along the spine, and also that they are each spinning at matching speeds.
Attunements: A chakra attunement involves energetically calling a chakra or all of the chakras into their optimum state. It often involves clearing and balancing the chakras and then activating and amplifying their energies. Some practitioners use the term “charging the chakras” to indicate the addition of subtle energies so a chakra can better operate.
We work with chakras because they link physical and subtle realities. This juxtaposition enables them to transform physical reality and open us to the spiritual realms. As you have learned, the practice of chakra work is called chakra medicine, emphasizing the traditional meaning of medicine as tools that improve our lives at every level—physically, psychologically, and spiritually.
Toward this end, chakra practices can increase clarity, clear out negative beliefs and emotions, release trauma, open you to insights, reduce stress, strengthen your immunity and boundaries, and free you from the energies of others. These invisible organs just might be the most powerful tools for healing we have!
Now that we’ve fully explored the promises of chakra medicine, let’s jump into the deep end of the pool of chakra knowledge and learn how to practice chakra medicine.