Seven Windows To The Soul: Understanding The Energy Within Your Chakras

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At the sacred center of each one of us spin seven wheels of vital energy called chakras. Aligned vertically along the core of the body, the chakras organize the way your soul handles its life force. Together, the seven chakras define the architecture of your soul.

You can think of each chakra as a chamber in the temple of your body. Just as the chambers in your home handle different energies, such as preparing food in your kitchen, or entertaining friends in your living room, each chakra handles a different frequency of energy.

The simplest way to describe these different frequencies is by their archetypal elements: Earth at the base chakra, represents solidity and the ability to be grounded in your body. Water in the sacral chakra, represents fluidity, sensations, and emotions. Fire in the third chakra, represents power and will. Air in the heart brings softness and surrender. Sound in the throat chakra is how you communicate. Light in the sixth chakra enables you to see and imagine, and consciousness at the crown, is for understanding all of this!

Each chakra’s function is to handle its own type of energy, whether it’s about being grounded, feeling your emotions, having a strong will, opening your heart to love, speaking and hearing clearly, opening your imagination, or expanding your awareness. By understanding how the chakras manage this energy, you can diagnose and treat imbalances.

But first some background. The word chakra comes from Sanskrit, the ancient language of India, and literally means “wheel” or “disk.” While this was not a metaphor known to the ancients, you can think of these wheels like the floppy disks we once used in our computers, meaning they contain our personal programming. Each chakra handles a different aspect of that programming — such as our relationship program, our language program, our emotional, or survival program.

Chakras exist at the meeting point of mind and body, in what is called the subtle body, yet they have a location in the physical body (see chart). Even though they’re not physical, like an organ or bone, the chakras do influence your experience of the physical body. Butterflies in your stomach, a frog in your throat, or an ache in your back can be attributed to the influence of the chakras in those areas.

What Do The Chakras Do?

We think of chakras as energy centers, but what do they actually do? A chakra is an organizational center for the reception, assimilation, storage and expression of life force energy or “charge.”  

As receivers and senders of energy, the chakras are not wide open portals that take everything in or let everything out. Instead, they are patterns in the soul or being that filter and check energy as it both enters and leaves the body. Let’s look at this in more detail.

RECEIVING As a chakra receives energy, it may filter what comes in. The throat chakra, which processes communication, receives the words someone is saying, the lungs receive breath. But one may selectively listen, hearing only what they want to hear. Or they might not be able to take in a very deep breath, or take in love, even when it’s offered. In the second chakra, we receive sensate experience, but we sort out what feels good versus what feels bad, and filter what comes in.

ASSIMILATING After receiving, chakras assimilate that energy into the body-mind system. They process our experience, information, check it against our beliefs, or absorb emotions, much as our digestive system assimilates our food and turns it into nutrients and calories. If we can’t assimilate what we receive, the energy of the chakra slows down, trying to process it, just like a computer chewing on a big file, or a belly trying to digest a big meal.

STORING Just as calories can be stored as fat, chakras store energy in the form of body structure, emotions, habits, and memory. They can store programming, and make habitual responses. They can store energy in the form of blocks. They can even puff out the body in areas where they have to store too much.

EXPRESSING And finally, chakras express energy. We tell somebody what we’re feeling or we take action after planning our strategy. If we can’t express energy through a chakra, we can’t discharge or let go, and that in turn limits what we can take in.

The chakras are very busy handling energy through receiving, assimilating, storing, and expressing charge. In the process, they get out of balance. They hold on too much, or they let go too much, or they’re conflicted, and hold on or let go in ways that are not helpful. And since that energy can take many forms, both positive and negative, the seven chakras form some pretty complex patterns in the architecture of one’s being. But it all happens on the level of energy.

You can imagine the body as a storage battery for charge, or life force. Just like you charge up your cell phone battery in order to use your phone, we need a certain amount of charge in order to function. A big body stores more energy inside, tending to hold things in, and a little body has no room to store charge, so a person is constantly expressing or discharging.

Chakras, as centers within the body, can store our experiences, memories, habits, and beliefs — all of which have a certain amount of charge. Memories that have strong charge — such as a traumatic memory — create significant blocks in the body and chakras. Energy that is trapped in the body becomes body armor, such as muscle tension, excess weight, or stiffness. When too much charge gets trapped, we experience anxiety. When there is too little charge, it can feel like depression. These are common patterns that result from blocked or unbalanced charge in the body and the chakras.

In this complicated sorting and filtering process, the chakras build up defenses between the inner and outer world. These defenses were originally created long ago to keep unpleasant energy out and to keep vital energy in. If the energy outside is toxic or threatening in any way, we don’t want to let it in. Then the chakras narrow their receptivity in protection of the vital core. On the other hand, if we think what’s inside us is not okay, such as thinking we’re stupid or not trusting our emotions, then the chakras inhibit what is expressed or discharged, and keeps that energy trapped inside.

Excessive And Deficient Chakras

Your ability to properly manage your energy depends on a balanced level of charging and discharging through the chakras. If a chakra is receiving more energy than it can discharge, it would become excessive. If your throat chakra were overcharged, for example, you might talk too much, or maybe the energy would be blocked up in your neck and shoulders. There’s just too much energy in there, and it’s trying to get out.

A deficient chakra constricts the chakra and its location in the body. If we shut down our heart, we might slouch our shoulders forward, collapsing the chest. A deficient second chakra might create tightness in the hips, an inability to feel deeply. Even when there’s a possibility of taking energy in, a deficient chakra is not able to do so — there’s simply not enough room to store it.

We want to be balanced within each chakra, but also balanced between all the chakras overall. If your habit is to live in your head, trying to figure things out intellectually, you will rev up your higher centers creating excessive sixth or seventh chakras, while pulling energy out of your lower chakras, rendering them deficient.

Of course, it’s not always so cut and dried. Some chakras have characteristics of both excess and deficiency at the same time. For instance, the second chakra, which is said to handle both emotions and sexuality, could show a pattern of someone who is highly sexual and not very emotional, or the reverse — highly emotional and not very sexual. This is simply the way that person attempts to balance his or her charge within that chakra.

Both excess and deficiency in the chakras are a result of a defensive strategy that modulates the energy coming in and out. Excess results from a compensating strategy, meaning we compensate for something we don’t get enough of, like not getting enough love or not feeling powerful, so we have an excessive focus on that in our lives. A deficient chakra results from an avoidant strategy. We want to avoid our feelings, or avoid taking action, or speaking up.

There are many aspects to understanding the chakras as managers of energy, with patterns that differ from person to person. It’s not simply a matter of opening a chakra, but requires a nuanced understanding of how people have created their defense structure around avoidance or compensation in a particular area. Much like the human face, where the eyes are always above the nose, there are universal aspects to the chakra system, but each person has his or her own unique expression.

How Do You Know If You Are Excessive Or Deficient In A Chakra?

It’s actually quite easy to self-diagnose your chakras once you understand the function of each one. You can simply ask yourself, “Do I do too much of this, or too little?” In other words, do you have trouble dealing with the earth plane, or are you overly compulsive about it? Are you too emotional, or do you tend to be removed from your emotions? Are you hot and fiery, or do you have trouble getting your energy going? Do you talk too much or too little? Refer to the chart for simple descriptions of functions for each chakra.

However, you can also look at the physical body, which shapes itself around the energy of the chakras. If a chakra is deficient, that part of the body will be tight or contracted. If it is excessive, a person may tend to puff out, perhaps by putting weight on in that area. If you look at a person sideways, excessive chakras tend to jut out in front of the midline, like a protruding belly or a chin, while deficient chakras tend to pull back, as in a collapsed chest.

After looking at your behaviors and your body, you might get a sense of what is out of balance, and which chakras are excessive or deficient. What, then, do you do about it?

The simplest answer is that excessive chakras need to discharge, while deficient chakras need to charge. We charge by taking energy in, by opening our reception. We discharge by letting go, or by expressing, talking, crying, exercising.

Nuanced exercises can specifically focus on different chakras to help them charge or discharge. The result is you feel more alive, yet calm and contained. When things get out of balance, as they inevitably will, you know what to do to bring them back into balance as you become the master of your life force through the seven windows to your soul.

Anodea Judith, PhD, is the author of many best-selling books on chakras, energy, and social change, including the classics, Wheels of Life and Eastern Body-Western Mind, and the book related to this article: Charge and the Energy Body. Her live and self-paced online classes can be found at www.anodeajudith.com.

Find holistic Chakra Healing in the Spirit of Change online Alternative Health Directory.

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