Your Energetic Body: The Chakra System

When I was a child, I had an out of body experience.

I had gone to bed and was sleeping, quite peacefully.

I awoke suddenly, stood up and walked to the edge of my bed.

Curious, I looked around my room which had taken on an iridescent glow to it.

I turned around, looked down, and to my surprise I saw my physical body still laying there peacefully asleep in bed.

This was the first time that I became aware of my energetic body as being a separate entity from my physical body.

Years passed and I had all but forgotten about that incident, until much later in my adulthood when it happened again.

This second experience was nearly the same. I had awoken, stood up, looked around and saw my physical body still sleeping.

But, this time I looked down at the form that my consciousness had taken.

I consisted of bright light and deep within my energetic body, were these circular vortexes, quickly spinning away.

The next morning I immediately started researching, diving head first into the world of energy and metaphysics.

Those circular vortexes that I had seen in my own energetic body, I discovered were my chakras.

I quickly realized that they were likely the most important system we, as humans, possess.

What is a Chakra?

At the most basic level, the chakras are the organs of your energetic body system.

The job of the chakra is to regulate and process all of energy that we come in contact with throughout our life.

That’s a pretty big job if you think about it. Every single thing on this planet is made of molecules that produce and emit energy.

To put that into perspective, imagine that you are taking a walk through a park.

You are unknowingly interacting with energies from the people you’re passing by, nature elements like the grass, trees, sun and wind. Perhaps there’s a little stream or river in your park, if so, you’re picking up water energy from that stream.

So far, during our walk, we’ve talked about physical energies. But we’re also picking up emotional energies as well. We do that through color, sound and feeling.

The blue sky, the pink and orange flowers and the green grass. The sound of a bird chirping, or a cricket singing. The sound of a car passing by, or strangers laughing.

How do these interactions make you feel?

As you’re taking in the sights and sounds of the park, do you feel happy and content? Or maybe you have seen something that promotes a sense of unease in you?

Every single piece of information that our senses pick up, come from an energetic vibration. All of that energy is filtered and processed through our energetic body; our chakra system.

Let’s take a look at the anatomy of the chakra.

If you were to observe the chakras with the naked eye, they would appear as rapidly spinning wheels of swirling light.

They have the shape of a cyclone, with a wider perimeter that funnels downward towards the spine.

Typically their movement occurs in either a clockwise or counterclockwise position.

Each chakra has its own unique vibrating energy, which extends outward from the body and that matches the frequency of both sound and color. Thus, each chakra is associated with a color and a tone.

The chakra’s job, is to manage all energy coming into the energetic field that matches their vibration.

To understand this, bring the image of the cyclone back into your mind. The cyclone pulls in wind spinning it into a vortex.

Similarly, the chakra will pull in external energy from your surroundings through the left side of the body.

This external energy then enters our chakras where it is processed and ultimately transmitted outward into the world through the right side of our body.

But our energetic body is a diverse thing and processing external energy isn’t its only job.

Our chakras also play a large role in the proper function of our physical organ systems.

Each chakra governs an area of the physical body by interacting with our nervous system as well as an endocrine gland.

This makes them a direct influence on our biochemistry…the very parts of our body that control everything from our organ functions to our mood.

If a chakra becomes imbalanced, either under or over active, or if it becomes blocked the energetic body ceases to work properly.

Blockages and imbalances can happen due of a myriad of different reasons, but the main causes are either physical or emotional.

• Physical Trauma: If you are in a car accident and experience whiplash, the trauma to your neck and shoulders may also damage or imbalance your fourth or fifth chakras, located in the heart and throat space.

• Emotional Trauma: Let’s say that you know a person who is constantly talking down to you. Over time, the constant demeaning nature of the relationship will cause damage to one or more chakra, likely your third, located at the solar plexus.

A blocked chakra will manifest in the physical body as dis-ease; either emotional or physical illness.

As an energetic practitioner, if a client comes into my studio with hip pain, I know that they have a blockage somewhere in their first chakra.

Similarly, if someone comes to see me and they are experiencing depression, they likely have a blockage in their fourth chakra.

The infographic below gives an overview of the physical and emotional systems that each of the main seven chakras govern.

Over the next seven weeks, we will be exploring each chakra in depth.

I will talk about the signs of blockages in each area as well as things that you can actively do to clear those blockages and restore balance to your energetic system.

Until then, Love and Light.