Chakras, wheel of life,

In yoga last night our teacher introduced the idea of Chakras. A Chakra is a wheel of energy that resides in particular parts of the body. Some schools of thought identify 7 Chakras, associated with the coccyx,  the testicles or ovaries, the solar plexus, the heart and so on. We practised our yoga with the idea of opening each chakra in turn and releasing the pent up energy. By associating a colour we could concentrate on the colour and at the same time repeat a sound.  As a practicising craniosacral therapist I look for physiological blockages in the body that form barriers. With the hands and fingers placed gently and carefully as a fulcrum, a therapist finds that the clients brain resets the parameters and starts to release blood or craniosacral fluid or lymph or whatever through that blockage. The result is often relaxation, a sense of lightness, healing of tissues and increased mobility. To me that is a physiological change that is measurable. What puzzles me about Chakras is that we are taking an ancient Hindu way of assessing the body and using the terminology but we don't know if anything has really happened. Personally I find that yoga gives the benefits of a stronger more flexible body, a calmer approach to life and a more reflective personality.

In the class when we came to the pelvic chakra, the colour bright orange, I found myself thinking; What shape is a chakra, is it a wheel or a ball? If it is a ball then is it like a garden water feature or does it rotate on an axis. If there is one chakra for the testicles or ovaries what happens if you have your ovaries taken out or one bursts? or if you have one burst. Has the chakra gone with it or been thrown out of balance? Don't you need two chakras, one for each organ? The colours associated with them sound very much like the colours that Neurolinguistic Programmers use. Perhaps NLP borrowed them from Hinduism? The power of imagery is strong and does change our approach to life.

Paddling a canoe on a river gives you the chance to observe the main current as it swings into eddies behind rocks, branches or bridges. The water strongly flows one way then flows into the space created by the obstacle filling it up and flowing the other way. Between the two flows you can see and feel swirls of current called vortexes. They look remarkably like the idea of chakras. Perhaps a chakra is simply an eddy line between the energy current that flows down the spine and the currents that flow back up through the fluid movements in the human body? The Hindu concepts introduced the Ida, the cooling energy that flowed down the left side of the spine and the Pingala the heating energy that flowed up the right side of the spine. I find an distinction between left and right artificial but what they are saying is that the two energies interweave with each other. Fritz Frederick Smith points out that the Western concept sees the spine as a rod with a series of curves. Bend the curve one way and you introduce a rotation. Bend it the other way and you introduce another rotation. This makes the idea of chakras as moveable not sited in one place but changing with the changing positions of our bodies.

Chakras could also co-incide with nerve junctions or an intersecting bundle of nerves called a plexus. The sacral plexus, the lumbar plexus, the mesenteric plexus and the Pekinje fibres in the heart are anatomical terms that did not exist in Hindu mythology so they used terms that were familiar to them.

What surprises me is that in the West we love to think of ideas that sound mysterious and life changing, they make us feel good about ourselves. We don't seem to question whether these ideas are limited in their scope  and could benefit from recent huge strides forwards in how our brains work.