Chakra History

sort of pyramid

Think of your bodily chakras stacked up like a sort of pyramid – with the lowest one, your first chakra creating the wide and heavy base of the pyramid (or root), and the highest one in your body, your sixth chakra, representing the highest tip of the pyramid (or crown). It’s light and airy and easily mutable, while the first chakra is dense and heavy and more difficult to change (in fact, the first chakra represents and strengthens stability, so its very nature is the opposite of change.

Each chakra also relates to a sense and an element, like this:
First chakra = smell/earth
Second chakra = taste/water
Third chakra = sight/fire
Fourth chakra = touch/air
Fifth chakra = hearing/sound
Sixth chakra = “sixth sense”/light

Seventh chakra is off the body and unrelated to the sensory world, so it has no associations, except to pure consciousness.

So, for the first chakra, the best, long term healing comes from very physical activities – like hatha yoga, because the first chakra is the densest and most related to the physical body. Smell-oriented treatments, like aromatherapy, work well too because this chakra is related to your sense of smell. Gemstones are great for first chakra healing as well, because stones are from the earth, the element of this chakra.

For the second chakra – which is still very dense and physical – hatha yoga is good – especially tantric-oriented yoga that plays with intimacy. Healing with chakra foods is good for this chakra since it’s related to taste, and doing aquatic bodywork – like watsu (http://www.watsu.org.nz/) – is really good too, because the second chakra is related to the water element.

For the third chakra – Visual therapy, like working with yantras is very good here, as are affirmations and Byron Katie’s “Work” (http://www.thework.com/index.php”, because our conscious, mental reasoning ability and our self-image are both associated with the third chakra. Sun bathing is good, because the third chakra is related to the fire element, and it’s located in the solar plexus.
And if you’re up for it, fire walking will stoke your third chakra in a major way.

For the fourth chakra – the bridge between the lower (more “physical” chakras) and the upper (more “spiritual” chakras), touch is good. Studies show that babies thrive when nurses and nanny’s hold them, and so do adults. Humans need hugging. Hugging –even self-hugging (do it now!) is one of the simplest ways to boost and balance heart chakra energy. EFT – the process of tapping ) http://eft.mercola.com/ )– is great for this chakra too, as is breath work, because we breathe in and out of this chakra and the element here is air.

For the fifth chakra – sound healing takes the cake. You can use this technique two simple ways – putting sound out, in the form of mantras, chanting, and seed sounds (or even just singing a favorite song that makes you feel good) and taking sound in, in the form of crystal bowls, mantras or again, a favorite song.

The seed sounds (shortest mantras) for each of the chakras are:
1st – Lam
2nd – Vam
3rd – Ram
4th – Yam
5th – Ham
6th – Om
7th – Silence (again, pure consciousness

For the sixth chakra – visualization is the best tool, since our third eye is ground zero for all our dreams and visualizations. This is the place where we spin our visions.

For the seventh chakra, meditation – pure, silent, thoughtless openness is the best. Just opening to the space that we are, with nothing added.

Now, this is not to say that meditating won’t help the first chakra, it can. But we’re talking about a super subtle technique being used on a super dense chakra (kind of like “hammering” a nail with a pencil).
It may cause a shift in the energy field of the first chakra, but for it to stay for good; lots of repetition and consistency (both qualities of the first chakra) are needed. Getting into the actual body – tissues and bones – works much better for creating long-term, positive, first chakra shifts.
And conversely, for the sixth or seventh chakras to be greatly affected by something as physical as hatha yoga, you need to make sure you’re paying equal attention to your subtle energies while doing your physical practice.
It’s a tradeoff.

Try lots of different modalities so all your chakras can be affected positively by their most compatible modality.
Be aware that you will tend to avoid the modality you need the most.
Here’s why… If you need more first chakra energy (more earth energy), then you tend to “live” more in your upper chakras, which means you are not deeply inhabiting your body. It also means that you like to float around, not being consistent, and not committing to things.

Unfortunately, the way to balance and “heal” such an issue is to do what you don’t want to do – go into the body with yoga or conscious bodywork — and commit to going in there deeply and consistently.
So another rule of thumb is don’t just do what you like to do. A popular new age adage is “Do what you love.” While that’s certainly good some of the time, it’s not good all of the time. More of the same cannot create positive change. If you want things to change, you need to change the things you do.
The general rule of thumb is: Use more meditative-type techniques for the upper chakras, and do more physically-oriented techniques to best effect the lower chakras.