Vibrational Healing through the Chakras
Part 1
Vibrational Healing and the Chakras
A true understanding of vibratory energy could lead to the proverbial fountain of youth. The second law of thermodynamics states that all matter progresses from organization to disorganization and then to turmoil. For humans this means that as we get older we become progressively less coherent at a cellular level until we die.
However, Nobel biochemist Ilya Prigogine (1917–2003) discovered that when energy is introduced into any field, its complexity increases. Along with the complexity comes greater refinement, rather than entropy.1 The vibratory tools of light, color, crystals, aromatherapy, and sound, pump energy into the cells, creating greater complexity and thereby increasing longevity.
The ultimate form of Vibrational Healing is to be in nature, charging your brain through the sunlight entering your eyes (especially when you remove your glasses, sunglasses, and contacts), and by the sounds entering your ears and the aromas entering your nostrils. It is especially rewarding if you can be in the presence of natural waveforms, such as moving water and wind.
Drinking water is essential for maintaining your electromagnetic balance. Kinesiologists (see Glossary) cannot get accurate readings if a person has not been drinking enough water because water ionizes salts and provides the optimum environment for efficient conduction of nerve impulses.2 3 So be sure to drink plenty of pure water.
In the early 1970s, Dr.Valerie Hunt was teaching neurophysiology and psychology at UCLA. As a child she had a near-death experience, which may account for why she was so unusually open-minded for a professor of her era. Dr. Hunt developed a method for measuring the human energy field (see “Science of the Chakras” on page 24) and found that it would expand when people were in the mountains or near the sea. “If a person’s field was particularly small, we would send him to the pool to swim or to a cold shower, or have him walk barefoot on the grass. . . These increased his field and improved his feelings. . .”4
Living in Hawaii near the ocean allows me to enjoy these natural waveforms on a daily basis. Even when I was a young woman, working as a secretary on the South Side of Chicago, I managed to go outside and walk on the tree-lined streets during lunch or coffee breaks. When I worked downtown, I walked to the Buckingham Fountain, to watch the dance of colored waters while I sat and ate my lunch.
In Masaru Emoto’s beautiful book, The Message from Water, this Japanese researcher shows photographs of crystal patterns formed in frozen drops of water taken from different locations. Most of the water from relatively untouched natural settings forms exquisite crystalline patterns, whereas most water from polluted cities collapses in upon itself.
Even more remarkable, the water crystals seem to respond to emotions, words, music, and essential oils. Emoto exposed the water to heavy metal music, and it made an explosive pattern without crystal formations. When the water was exposed to the classical and highly symmetrical Bach’s Goldberg Variations, it formed an exquisite geometrical crystal.
Emoto set a container of chamomile essential oil next to the water, and the water crystals formed into amazing crystalline facsimiles of chamomile flowers. The same thing happened with fennel oil.5 Most of these photos can be seen at www.hado.com.
If the water in our bodies is that responsive to music and essential oils, this is clear evidence of the power of the vibratory tools.
Fabien Maman showed that our very cells respond directly to music. In 1974, while working as a professional jazz musician, he observed that certain musical keys would energize both the musicians and the audience. He brought this insight to French physicist Joel Sternheimer, who discovered that elementary particles vibrate in accordance with musical laws. Their combined research indicated that body tissues, organs, and acupuncture meridians each have a musical note.
Maman used Kirlian photography (see Glossary) to photograph the changes in the electromagnetic fields around healthy cells while playing a xylophone to them. He found that the slight difference of a half tone would produce a completely different shape and color in the energy field of the cell. When he played the note C, they became longer; D elicited a variety of colors, E caused them to become spherical, and A changed their color field from red to pink.
Maman took a sample of blood from a subject’s finger and asked her to sing the seven notes of the major scale to her own blood cells. The cells’ energy field changed with each note until she sang the note F, at which point the cells resonated perfectly with her voice, producing a balanced, round shape with vibrant magenta and turquoise colors. He concluded that this note was the fundamental sound of the singer, and that a person’s fundamental sound, produced by his or her own voice, is the most powerful healing tool to harmonize and regenerate the body at the cellular level.6
Physics and Metaphysics
During the twentieth century, science was a kind of god. Now we are experiencing a new way of perceiving the universe. It is a vast change that calls upon us to totally reconfigure the way we look at virtually everything.
The old paradigm is known as Newtonian physics. It presents us with a tidy universe in which Mother Nature performs like clockwork, predictably following laws that can be known and repeated. Scientists of the Newtonian era believed that the mysteries of the universe would all be revealed simply by examining increasingly smaller blocks of matter with increasingly sensitive lenses until eventually they would be able to explain how even consciousness evolved from matter.
Then quantum physics blew that whole worldview apart. The double slit experiment was used to determine whether a photon is a wave or a particle. It employs a screen with two narrow slits side by side, like a booth at the circus where you throw a sandbag through the holes. We know that one sandbag will go through one hole at a time. If the photon is a particle, it will go through just one slit, like the sandbag. If it is a wave, it will go through both slits.
Scientists found that sometimes an electron behaves like a particle and goes through just one slit, and other times it behaves like a wave, passing through both slits at once. Michael Talbot, author of The Holographic Universe, waxes poetic as he describes the behavior of such an electron: “You throw a pebble at a window and it either hits the window and bounces off or it breaks through. You shoot an electron at a barrier and it can hit, bounce off, it can stop just before the window, dematerialize, materialize on the other side, it can stop just before the window and reverse its direction. These electrons were behaving like shape-shifting shamans. The scientists had to conclude that subatomic particles are sometimes particles and sometimes waves, and they can instantly change from one to the other.”7
The term quantum is used to describe something that possesses both particle and wave aspects. So quantum theory is a theory in physics based on the principle that matter and energy have the properties of both particles and waves. What appears to be solid is actually—at the atomic level—more than 99.9999 percent empty space! The protons and electrons are sometimes particles that can be measured (millions of times smaller than the tiniest atom) and sometimes waves of vibrating energy.8
To get a clear image of the size of subatomic particles, imagine a fourteen-story building turned sideways; this is the diameter of the dome of Saint Peter’s basilica in the Vatican. Now imagine an atom that has been blown up to the size of this dome. How big would the nucleus of this atom be? The size of a grain of salt! And the electrons revolving around this grain of salt would be about two thousand times smaller, that is, the size of dust particles. But even a dust particle is a particle. According to quantum mechanics, subatomic particles should actually be called wave/particles because they are sometimes waves and sometimes particles that have “tendencies to exist.”9
In the seemingly stable human body, 98 percent of the atoms are replaced in the period of just one year, according to radioisotope studies conducted at Oak Ridge laboratories in California. Your heart and brain cells are pretty durable, but your liver cells last only a few years, your red blood cells live for just two or three months, and your skeleton is recreated every three months. Most of your skin cells are replaced in just two weeks, and the cells of your stomach are replaced in only a few days.10
The implications of this are almost unfathomable. It’s like giving a kid some blocks and telling him to erect a building. Then, after he has built a whole city, you tell him, “Those aren’t really blocks. They’re just a bunch of empty space with waves that are sometimes particles. We can’t be sure they exist; all we know is they have tendencies to exist.”
This could make a kid (or a Newtonian scientist) feel very insecure. But if you work with energy, and if you know from experience that seemingly miraculous healings do happen almost instantaneously, it can come as a great relief to have a way of explaining and understanding the reality you live in.
Why Vibrational?
Hovering inside the doorway of our Santa Cruz, California home, my son and I held onto each other for dear life. It was 1989 and we were in the middle of the massive 7.2 Loma Prieta earthquake near Santa Cruz, California. It felt as if we were on a sailing ship, but instead of being tossed on the waves of the ocean, we watched in amazement as the very stuff of our living room turned into one big wave that undulated before our eyes. Kids out on the road lamented that they didn’t have their surfboards because the pavement literally turned into a huge rolling wave.
If I ever doubted that solid substance is an illusion, I now had living proof. Scientists have a word for this phenomenon; they call it “liquefaction.” We live in a reality made up of particles that can turn into waves. The concept of something that is sometimes matter and sometimes vibration is crucial to Vibrational Healing.
Allopathic doctors are trained in the old Newtonian scientific paradigm that conceives of the body as a machine that must obey the basic laws of nature. Quantum mechanics reveals a world of subatomic particles that do not obey the same laws. When the will aligns with the mind and spirit and when you can conceptualize the physical body as a highly amorphous entity, you can literally create your own reality. As you remove all mental and emotional obstacles, the body will leave behind all misalignment known as disease and naturally realign to its own healthy harmonic resonance.
With energetic forms of healing we acknowledge the profound role that the emotions play in directly influencing the balance or imbalance of the structures of the body. We also acknowledge the role of subtle forces and subtle fields, including love, touch, prayer, positive thinking, belief, and a desire to live.
The possibilities of using vibrational tools for health and healing are enormous. There are also possibilities for creating illness through the deliberate or inadvertent abuse of vibrational frequencies. For example, animals who graze under high-voltage power lines have stunted growth. Infants exposed to x-rays in utero have a 40 percent increased risk of childhood leukemia and a 50 percent increased risk of all other cancers.11
It has been rumored that diseases can be reproduced vibrationally as “disease signatures,” which can then be sprayed in the air or delivered by way of chemtrails, using harmonics and subharmonics to make them more lethal and infectious.12
We know that certain vibrations create illness. Why is it so difficult to believe that vibrations can create health?
Overview of Chakras and the Human Energy Field
Chakra is a Sanskrit word that means wheel or vortex. The chakras are nonphysical centers of spinning energy. The relative openness of the chakras governs a person’s ability to receive and generate vibratory energy, known as chi, prana, and mana in China, India, and Hawaii, respectively.
The three chakras below the chest are called the lower chakras. Through these centers we receive and transmit sexual, emotional, and social energy. The heart is the middle chakra, through which we experience unconditional love. The three chakras above the chest are the higher chakras. Through these centers we receive and transmit psychic and spiritual energy.
There are seven levels of openness at each chakra. You must have at least one level of openness in each chakra to maintain life.13 Most people have a moderate amount of openness at each chakra, with a higher degree of openness at one or two of them. Those who have the gift of clairvoyance explain that when a chakra is relatively closed, the color relating to that chakra becomes dim or obscure. When a chakra is completely open, the corresponding color predominates in that person’s aura. When all the chakras are wide-open, the aura becomes white.
Of the many different chakra arrangements, I prefer the rainbow system, which identifies seven major chakras. When counting the chakras, most systems begin at the bottom and go to the top. Each of the seven major chakras is located in the vicinity of the spine, near a major nerve plexus, a major endocrine gland, and one or more internal organs. The chakras convert higher subtle energies into the cellular structure of the physical body, stepping down energy of one form and frequency to a lower level energy. This lower and more substantial energy is then translated into hormonal, physiologic, and ultimately cellular changes at the physical level.14
As an example of how this works, I have a client (I will call her Annette) who had Graves’ disease, a form of hyperthyroidism in which the thyroid glands (located on either side of the Adam’s apple in the neck) produce too much thyroid. This condition is believed to occur because of a blood defect in suppressor T lymphocytes, or T cells. Metaphorically, her blood lacked a certain kind of warrior cell that would normally hold the production of thyroxin in check.
Annette’s doctor wanted to remove her thyroid gland surgically or destroy it with radioactive iodine, which is standard treatment for Graves’ Disease. He warned her she would die if she did not follow one of these procedures.
When she came to see me, I did not encourage her to go against her doctor’s advice. But Annette was determined to follow her own intuition, and I followed her lead. I do not cure diseases. I simply guide a client to explore what led to the imbalance, and then I support her in expressing, releasing, and resolving those issues. When I combine this work with the vibrational tools, most diseases improve or clear up quickly, particularly if the client is highly motivated. I believe that the healing (or lack of it) is the client’s responsibility. Annette was a good example, as this story reveals.
I used my long thin crystal wand to feel the spin of energy at Annette’s chakras, including the subchakras at each hip. The left hip holds the energy of the mother during the first three years of a child’s life and prenatally, and the right hip holds the energy of the father during the same period.
As I felt the spin of energy at Annette’s left hip I felt my awareness merge with the emotional body of Annette’s mother while Annette was an infant. Her mother seemed preoccupied and unenthusiastic about being a mother. At Annette’s right hip I felt for the energy of her father, but he was not present.
The energy of the other chakras was not remarkable until I came to her third chakra, the center of power and self-worth, which was distinctly weak. I placed a yellow citrine at her solar plexus. Her heart chakra felt normal.
When I came to the throat chakra I could feel an irregular energy. It felt jerky and thin. I put a drop of blue German chamomile oil at the hollow of her neck, which is calming and soothing. Then I placed a smooth round azurite-malachite stone at her throat. Green malachite stirs up the emotions and brings them to the surface; blue azurite stimulates the voice box so a person feels the impulse to speak about her emotions.
I told Annette what I perceived at each chakra, and she replied that she was the last of five children; she was the accident. Just before she was born, her father abandoned the family. “My mother was a basket case for years.”
As a small child, Annette realized that the best way to get approval was by being perfectly quiet. She was rarely allowed to talk, and certainly could not sing or shout, or the punishment would be severe. Annette brought this repressive pattern into her adulthood. She was a docile and highly supportive woman who never contradicted anyone. “Everyone says that I’m very easy to get along with.”
The thin feeling at Annette’s throat came from her inability to express herself. The jerky feeling came from her suppressed emotions, as if they were chomping at the bit to be released.
I encouraged Annette to scream. I gave her an 18-inch length of heavy-duty industrial rubber hose, urging her to get in touch with her resentment and anger by hitting the mat with all her strength. She confided that before she came to see me, she made up her mind that her survival depended upon opening her throat and releasing her rage. Finally she found the courage to open her mouth, and she released forty-nine years of repressed fury.
It took only one session to bring her body back to normal. I believe that the azurite-malachite opened the door that allowed her to scream, which then allowed the energy to move through her throat chakra, stimulating her thyroid gland and causing the T cells to wake up and resume their function of blocking the excess production of thyroxine.
Annette returned once a year for three years. Gradually she stopped taking her medications, and her body returned to normal (though her eyes still had the popped-out appearance characteristic of Graves’ disease).
The chakra system provides a practitioner with the most comprehensive holistic method for diagnosing illness. It gives information about the body (through the lower chakras), mind (through the third and sixth chakras), emotions (through the lower and
middle chakras), and spirit (through the higher chakras). In Annette’s case, we began with a physical ailment. Though she gave me a brief personal history, it wasn’t until I felt the energy at her hips (her parents), her third chakra (center of power), and her throat chakra (center of communication) that she and I both understood the underlying cause of her illness. In Part 2, I will explain how to feel the energy at the chakras.
Annette’s relationship with her mother led to a repression of energy at her throat chakra, causing a blockage that contributed to the thyroid disease. Once Annette was able to use the vibratory vehicle of her voice to express her suppressed rage, the flow of energy at her throat was released, and the T cells were jump-started so they could begin working properly.
Most medical doctors do not look for the underlying emotional cause of a physical disease. Even if Annette had been referred to a psychotherapist, it would have taken many months of talk therapy to sort out the problem, and even then, unless she was encouraged to scream, her thyroid glands would probably have remained dormant.
The goal of Vibrational Healing, as I see it, is to reach a perfect harmony of all seven chakras, in which the lower chakras of the physical body are open and balanced, the middle chakras of the emotions and personal power are open and balanced; and the higher chakras of intuition and spirituality are open and balanced, with no single chakra in control—except at appropriate times. Then the energies can move up and down the spine freely and the individual can be energetic, vitally alive, in touch with his emotions, and at peace.
In Annette’s case, her hips gave information that helped me understand the origins of her disease. Her throat chakra began closing down when her spirit was broken as a small child. Her low self-esteem resulted from feeling that no one cared about her and being unable to express herself. Once she had permission to scream and release her pent-up feelings, she reclaimed her spirit and strengthened the energy at her throat chakra, which stimulated her T cells and drove out the disease.
The Vibrational Healer
Machines have been developed that will give you a complete analysis of the colors that are missing in your energy field and the sounds that are lacking in your voice and body. These machines will bombard you with colored lights and sounds that are perfect for your body, and you will go away feeling better. Right?
Not necessarily. Some of these inventions are wonderful and can certainly contribute to your sense of well-being. But having a caring, compassionate practitioner is an essential part of healing. When you choose a Vibrational Healer, you must feel comfortable with that person. He or she should feel centered and balanced to you.
An understanding healer will be willing to meet with you on the phone or in person before you commit to a session. You should feel that you can talk about anything without being judged. If all of these qualifications are met, half the healing is already
accomplished.
Russians Semyon and Valentina Kirlian developed a technique known as Kirlian photography that makes use of high-voltage spark discharges to provide a picture of the energy fields, which are often photographs taken from the thumbs of individuals being tested. Researchers found that when healers were at rest the corona of light around their thumbs were large and bright, whereas the patients had smaller coronas. During and after a healing, the auras of the healers actually decreased, while the auras of the patients increased sharply. This seems to indicate that there is a transfer of energy from the healer to the patient.15
You simply cannot do this work until your own chakras are reasonably cleansed, balanced, and aligned. The training for becoming a practitioner of this art is primarily Physician Heal Thyself. It is truly a journey of the soul.
It is essential for a practitioner to be willing to cancel a healing session if he or she is ill or “having a bad day.” This is part of being human.
History, Locations, and Numbers of Chakras
Various chakra systems exist, with different numbers, colors, and locations of chakras. Historically, there are various schools of thought about the locations of the chakras. Yet the basic four or five chakras are consistently placed in the same locations by all sources. The other chakras are found above, below, or between these basic chakras. Less powerful energy centers called lotuses or minor or extra chakras can be found at the feet, hands, knees, elbows, hips, shoulders, ears, and other places.
The use of the Sanskrit word, chakra, to describe spinning wheels of energy on or around the body first appeared in the ancient Hindu Upanishads around 200 b.c.e. The Brahma-Upanishad describes the four purushas (places occupied by the soul) at the navel, heart, throat, and head.
Tibetan Buddhism (Vajrayana Buddhism) acknowledges the same four centers as the Hindus, with the head center associated with the body, the throat center related to the dream state, and the heart center related to deep meditation. Other Tibetan systems mention five, seven, or even ten chakras. A painting from eighteenth-century Nepal, in south-central Asia, shows seven chakras, with the seventh clearly above the head.16
The Rosicrucian Order is believed to have been started in the 1400s by The Highly Illuminated Father C.R.C., a German by birth who at the age of sixteen traveled to Damascus in Syria when it was capital of the Islamic empire. There he was initiated into the secrets of Arabian adepts, including how to communicate with the elementals (nature spirits). When he returned to Europe, he translated a book called M that he brought back from his travels. But after being ridiculed, he gathered a secret society of eight followers who agreed to transcribe the teachings but to remain unknown to the world.17
The concept of energy centers was first brought to Western literature in the Theosophia Practica by the German Bavarian mystic Johann Georg Gichtel (1638–1710). Gichtel was a student of Jacob Boehme, who was probably a Rosicrucian. Gichtel, who had the gift of clairvoyance, saw the seven force centers through inner sight. He correlated them with the sun and the planets, placing the sun at the heart center. He founded a mystical Christian movement. In 1670 he was banished from Bavaria and took refuge in Holland.18
Between 600 and 800, the Roman Empire gave way to the Catholic Church, and Christianity became the ruling power in Europe. When religion combined with government, an unholy alliance was formed, and it became dangerous to use any form of healing not condoned by the church. People were no longer at liberty to choose their own religious or spiritual practices. Anything that interfered with the effectiveness of the church was considered an offense against God.
The fact that Gichtel was banished from his home in Bavaria and had to flee to Holland in 1670, and that a secret society formed in Europe during the Middle Ages is not surprising, given that the inquisition and the torture and burnings of so-called witches stretched from the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries in Germany, Italy, Spain, France, and then in England and New England. This era of repression had deep repercussions in the areas of healing, as well as science and philosophy.
According to neuroscientist Candace Pert, the old idea of the mind being distinct from the body began with philosopher René Descartes (1596–1650). The mind/body separation “just goes back to a turf deal that Descartes made with the Roman Catholic Church. He got to study science, as we know it, and left the soul, the mind, the emotions, and consciousness to the realm of the church.”19
Before the inquisition, women who were midwives and herbalists were the primary healers. Their services were available to poor and rich alike. These women were often great lovers of nature, gathering in small groups, to observe seasonal rituals that honored the power of the moon and the changes of the seasons. That was their religion.
The church considered these women heretics. Their power to heal was considered evidence that they were witches in league with the devil. All forms of healing used by these women were believed to be witchcraft, and it became the duty of monks in service to the pope to encourage villagers to reveal the presence of these so-called heretics so they could be punished and their souls could be saved. Some writers have estimated the total number killed to have been in the millions, though documented cases indicate 14,000 to 23,000.20, 21
While so-called witches were being tortured and burned, a new male medical profession was created and funded by the royalty, and universities were set up that excluded women. University-trained male doctors worked hand-in-hand with the church, calling in priests to aid and advise them, and refusing to treat patients who would not take confession.
The doctors of medieval times studied Socrates, Aristotle, and Christian theology, along with the works of the ancient Roman physician Galen, who wrote about “complexions” and “temperaments.” Leeches were used for bleeding, along with certain foods, incantations, and rituals. Experimentation was not practiced, and there was no practicum and no apprenticeship. Surgery was performed by barbers, and dissection was virtually unheard of.
Towns and cities were filthy, and knowledge of hygiene was nonexistent. The Black Death killed one-third of England’s population between 1340 and 1348. The cause of the Black Death according to Guy de Chauliac, a French doctor, was the convergence of three great planets, Saturn, Jupiter, and Mars, which was considered a clear sign of wonderful, terrible, or violent events.
Medieval peasants were taught by the church that illness could be a punishment from God for sinful behavior. Physicians charged well for their services, and only the rich could afford them. One of the most famous physicians was John Arderne who wrote “The Art of Medicine” and treated royalty. His cure for kidney stones was a hot plaster smeared with honey and pigeon dung.22
In 1875 in New York City, Madame Blavatsky (1831–1891) founded the Theosophical Society. The Theosophists believe in the presence of life and consciousness in all matter, the ability of thought to affect the reality we live in, and a concern for the welfare of others. Theosophists make use of meditation, and often support animal protection, ecology, and the rights of women and minorities.
Madame Blavatsky encouraged the study of Western mystical traditions such as gnosticism, the kabbalah, Freemasonry, and Rosicrucianism, as well as Buddhism. In 1878 she traveled to India. In 1884 she was defamed by the Society for Psychical Research (since repudiated by the Society) and moved to London. Later advocates of Theosophy include Annie Besant, Rudolf Steiner, and C. W. Leadbeater.
The Theosophical Society published Leadbeater’s classic book, The Chakras, in 1927. His book included colored drawings of the seven chakras as Leadbeater saw them clairvoyantly. The swirls of colors in his drawings roughly follow the rainbow, with red hues at the first chakra, orange at the second, and so forth.
Sir John Woodroffe traveled from England to India, and when he returned, in 1928, he brought the Hindu interpretations of the chakras to the west by translating from Sanskrit two classic works on Laya-Yoga, the Sat-Cakra-Nirupana (1577) and Paduka-Pancaka (c. tenth century c.e.) in a book called The Serpent Power, published under the pen name of Arthur Avalon. His interpretations of the seven chakras and their locations concurred with those described by Leadbeater, and they became the model for the Theosophists. The Theosophists also ushered in the concept that the chakras are energy vortexes that have an independent objective existence associated with particular endocrine glands and nerve plexuses as well as specific vertebrae.
In his comprehensive study of the chakras, M. Alan Kazlev makes a distinction between those described by the Hindus, Buddhists, and Tibetans, which he calls Primary Chakras, and the Secondary Chakras described by the Theosophists and subsequent New Age proponents. Kazlev points out that in the Indian and Tibetan teachings, the yogi creates the chakras as part of his mental exercise, as a kind of visualization. Chakras are considered inactive until awakened through yoga. As the adept moves up through the chakras, the lower chakras close down as one attains full awareness at the higher chakras. On the other hand, what he calls the New Age or Secondary Chakras makes use of the rainbow system, in which the optimum goal is to be open at all the chakras.23
In The Chakras, Leadbeater also describes seven chakras in similar positions to those described by Woodroffe. He and other Theosophists agreed on the following names, vertebral locations, and nerve plexuses for these chakras:
First (coccygeal) at the fourth sacral—coccygeal plexus
Second (spleen) 20 at the first lumbar—splenic plexus24
Third (navel) at the eighth thoracic—solar plexus
Fourth (heart) at the eighth cervical—cardiac plexus
Fifth (throat) at the third cervical—pharyngeal plexus
Sixth (brow) at the first cervical—carotid plexus
Seventh (crown)—not related to the vertebrae or the plexuses25
In his exhaustive Layayoga—an Advanced Method of Concentration Shyam Sundar Goswami (1891–1978) describes the Shakta Theory of Chakras. The founder of the Goswami Institute of Yoga in Sweden, the first Indian institution of its kind in that country, he uses the same seven chakras found in The Serpent Power, adding six minor chakras, for a total of thirteen. He describes two chakras at the heart. I wonder if one might be the thymus gland, located several inches above the heart? He places another at the roof of the mouth. This is an important point in Chinese medicine, where the Yin Conception Vessel and the Yang Governing Vessel meet.
Goswami places two chakras at the forehead. This makes sense, since some sources show the third eye between the eyebrows and others show it at the center of the forehead. Finally he has three chakras at the crown. He places the Nirvana Chakra at the top of the head, the Guru Chakra above the head, and the Sahasrara Chakra also above the head. Most other systems place the Sahasrara Chakra at the very top of the head.26
Sri Aurobindo (1872–1950), a philosopher, yogi, and teacher in India, was educated in England and influenced by the Theosoph-ists. He returned to India and developed Integral Yoga, the yoga of the whole being. He described the seven chakras found in Serpent Power and related each one to an aspect of psychology. For example, he indicated that the first chakra governed “the physical down to the subconscient [subconsious]”.27
Other sources describe chakras above the crown. Some call these the transpersonal chakras, and they are often related to the higher vibrations of light and sound. Yet another system has twenty chakras, including two below the base chakra that link to the earth and others above the head that link to the cosmos.
The Hesychastic tradition in the Eastern Orthodox or Byzantine Church combines breathing techniques with prayer in a form of contemplative Christianity. They practice concentrating on four different parts of the body: 1) the eyebrows (related to thought);
2) the base of the neck (related to conversation); 3) the upper and median region of the chest (related to thought and emotions); and 4) a little below the left breast (the physical site of perfect attention).28
Chakras can be found in the teachings of Jesus Christ. When Joseph and Mary were escaping from Herod they fled to Egypt. It is not unlikely, as some sources claim, that Jesus was educated in the Far East. In Luke 11:34 Jesus said, “The light of the body is the eye: therefore when thine eye is single, thy whole body also is full of light; but when thine eye is evil, thy body also is full of darkness.” The third eye is the sixth chakra, which is known as the Christ Consciousness Center.
In Olga Kharitidi’s book, Entering the Circle: Ancient Secrets of Siberian Wisdom Discovered by a Russian Psychiatrist, she describes her initiation with a Siberian shaman. Kharitidi claims that many original religions were influenced by an ancient civilization that flourished in Siberia when the weather was warm, before a sudden change in climate. These include people who later gave birth to Zoroastranism in Iran, the Vedic tradition of India, Tantric Buddhism in Tibet, and the Celts in England.29 It is interesting that some Hopi Indians trace their migration to North America back to ancient times when they came across the Siberian Straits, when the continents were connected.30
The Hopi Indians brought the knowledge of the chakras to the West long before the Theosophists. In Frank Waters’s Book of the Hopi, Oswald White Bear Fredericks, himself a Hopi, interviewed 26 Hopi spokesmen. The Hopi speak about four worlds.
The first world came to an end when few of the original people lived by the laws of Creation. “More and more they used the vibratory centers of their bodies solely for earthly purposes.” In a story that sounds remarkably like the Wise Men of the East following the star to the Christ Child, the few who continued in the old ways were told, “You go to a certain place. Your kopavi [vibratory center at the top of the head at the seventh chakra] will lead you. This inner wisdom will give you the sight to see a certain cloud which you will follow by day, and a certain star, which you will follow by night.” When all the people arrived from different places, the chosen ones went down and lived in the ant kiva (a round underground room) while the rest of the world was destroyed.
The Hopi describe five vibratory centers. In remarkable agreement with the Hindus, they begin on top, with the soft spot, kopavi, the “open door” through which a person receives life and communicates with his Creator. It remains closed until his death, “opening then for his life to depart as it had come.”
The second center corresponds to the brain. The third center, at the throat, is a center of communication in both cultures. The fourth center is at the heart. The Hopi say, “In his heart man felt the good of life, its sincere purpose. He was of One Heart. But there were those who permitted evil feelings to enter. They were said to be of Two Hearts.”
The fifth and last Hopi chakra is located at the navel. In other systems this chakra is described as being directly at the navel, or an inch or two above the navel. It is associated with personal and worldly power. For the Hopi “it was the throne in man of the Creator himself. From it he directed all the functions of man.”31
In Serpent Power, Sir John Woodroffe mentions that some of the Sufi fraternities use the kundalini method (see glossary) as a means to realization, and he also draws correlations with the Mayan scripture, the Popul Vuh, as containing references to the kundalini and the chakras.32
In her book Sacred Contracts, Caroline Myss, a medical intuitive, describes the archetypes that she perceives as the organizing principle for the life contracts that we assume prior to birth.
She perceives these universal archetypes as coming through a location above each person’s head that she describes as the eighth chakra.33
I experience a strong similarity between the first and second chakras, and also between the sixth and seventh chakras. So it does not surprise me to find systems that describe only five chakras.
Some systems talk about a chakra at the navel, and others talk about a chakra above the navel. I feel that the one at the navel is the same as the third chakra above the navel.
The heart chakra stands alone. It does not merge with the others. Virtually every system agrees that there is a chakra at the center of the chest. There is even agreement about the sound ah at that chakra. Most systems agree on the colors green and/or pink for the heart chakra.
All systems concur that there is a chakra at the third eye. Some place it between the eyebrows; some at the center of the forehead; some a little higher. When a crown chakra is identified, some say it is at the top of the head, and others say it is above the top of the head.
Barbara Ann Brennan began seeing energy fields as a child. Later she became a research scientist for NASA at the Goddard Space Flight Center. In 1972 she began to work with the human energy field, and in 1987 she wrote Hands of Light.
According to Brennan, a different energy can be felt at the back of each of the chakras. One can visualize a beam of energy shooting through the body from the front and emerging out the back. Brennan describes these energy centers as bulging out in front and back of the body at the chakra centers, with the crown and base chakras being opposite ends of one long double megaphone.34
Some sources, however, say that the back of the sixth chakra is at the base of the skull, at the medulla oblongata.
Don’t let these discrepancies bother you. Choose a system that works for you, use it repeatedly and then be willing to deviate from it, just as you might learn to play scales on a musical instrument and then learn to improvise. You might even play overtones—notes that aren’t actually on the keyboard or in the musical notation. In fact, there are many different scales: chromatic, diatonic, and pentatonic. That doesn’t mean only one scale is right (though the others may sound peculiar to your ear, and may not resonate for you). There are different ways of perceiving reality and different systems for ordering the universe.
Colors of the Chakras
Dr. Valerie Hunt worked with eight aura readers while recording chakra frequencies with her highly sensitive equipment. She writes:
Often aura readers reported. . . . red in the coccyx, orange in the abdomen, yellow in the solar plexus, green in the heart, blue in the throat, violet in the third eye, and white in the crown—although this was not always the case. . . .
Furthermore, the sensor readings from chakra locations corresponded directly with aura readers’ descriptions of amount of energy, its color, and the dynamic quality. In addition, there seemed to be a close relationship between these measures and the emotional states, imagery, and interpersonal transactions of the subjects.35
It is difficult to assign colors to the chakras. They are not stable and constant like the red, amber, and green of traffic lights. Clairvoyants describe the chakras as shimmering, fluctuating, constantly changing. Some say they follow the colors of the rainbow. But the Indians and Tibetans used red, white, blue, smoke, and so forth.
Let’s look at some descriptions of the chakras, as seen by those who have the gift of clairvoyance. C.W. Leadbeater referred to “The brilliant colouring and the rapid and incessant movement of the chakras. . . . When quite undeveloped they appear as small circles about two inches in diameter, glowing dully in the ordinary man, but when awakened and vivified they are seen as blazing, coruscating whirlpools, much increased in size, and resembling miniature suns.”
To see these emanations, says Leadbeater, is “to make oneself sensitive to vibrations more rapid than those to which our physical senses are normally trained to respond.” He describes “a series of wheel-like vortices which exist in the surface of the etheric double of man. All these wheels are perpetually rotating, and into the hub or open mouth of each a force from the higher world is always flowing. . . The primary force itself, having entered the vortex, radiates from it again at right angles, but in straight lines, as though the hub of the vortex were the hub of a wheel.”36
Most sources agree that the colors change as the emotions change, and at any given moment they can be clouded over, brilliant, or obscured. For the sake of simplicity, I speak of seven colors, but in truth, there are a wide variety of colors that each chakra can display.
Dr. Hunt said, “I use red, orange and amber [together] because the spectrum is so close that you really can’t separate them. . . . It modulates.” She also spoke about a merging of blue, mauve, and violet in the higher chakras.37
There are many instances of people who have seen the chakras, even when they had no previous concept of their existence. One doctor who inadvertently discovered his own clairvoyance was W. Brugh Joy, a heart and lung specialist from the University of Southern California. “I was examining a healthy male in his early twenties,” he explained. “As my hand passed over the solar plexus area, the pit of the stomach, I sensed something that felt like a warm cloud. It seemed to radiate out three to four feet from the body, perpendicular to the surface, and to be shaped like a cylinder about four inches in diameter.”38 Apparently he was feeling the third chakra.
In the 1960s, neurologist and psychiatrist Shafica Karagulla found that she could see the human energy field. She began interviewing other medical professionals including famous surgeons, Cornell University professors of medicine, heads of departments in large hospitals, and Mayo Clinic physicians. Karagulla met doctor after doctor who had this ability. As she explains in her book, Breakthrough to Creativity, they would describe an “energy field” or a “moving web of frequency” around and interpenetrating the body. One described “vortices of energy at certain points along the spine, connected with or influencing the endocrine system.”39
The Rainbow System
The rainbow system that I use consists of seven chakras, from the tailbone to the top of the head. They follow the colors of the rainbow: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo (or violet), and violet (or white). When a person has achieved enlightenment, or is fully integrated and balanced, all the chakras are fully open, and the color of the aura is white (the combination of all colors). This is depicted by Christian artists as a halo around the heads of saints and holy figures.
Primarily through the higher chakras we receive energy from the light body and from All That Is. Primarily through the lower chakras we receive energy from the earth. Primarily through the middle chakras we exchange energies with other people and animals.
Here are the locations and colors of the seven major chakras in the Rainbow System:
First—Red (at the tailbone)
Second—Orange (below the navel)
Third—Yellow (above the navel, at the solar plexus)
Fourth—Green & Pink (at the heart)
Fifth—Blue (at the throat)
Sixth—Indigo or Violet (at the center of the forehead)
Seventh—Violet or White (at the crown of the head)
The lower two chakras (first and second) open when in the presence of nature or through yoga and other pleasurable forms of exercise and lovemaking. The third chakra opens through a sense of personal fulfillment. The fourth chakra opens when you can give and receive unconditional love. The fifth chakra opens during communication. The sixth chakra opens when you enter into communion with the psychic and spiritual realms. The seventh chakra opens with deep meditation and when you feel connected with Spirit.
The relative openness of the chakras determines your ability to receive and generate energy. Each of the chakras is governed by a particular vibration, which may be interpreted as a color or sound. The aura is a reflection of the combined frequencies of the chakras and is generally predominated by one or two colors, which flow from the strongest chakras. When all the chakras are open, and all the colors/vibrations run together in relatively equal proportions, the aura becomes white.
Science of the Chakras
The chakras exist in the energy field, which is nonphysical; it is constantly fluctuating, vibrating, ephemeral. It interacts with people and with the environment and with the observer. So nothing absolutely objective and conclusive can be said about the chakras. Yet there are scientists who are finding evidence for their existence.
In the early 1970s, Dr. Valerie Hunt openly encouraged her physiology students at the University of California, Los Angeles to explore the parameters of consciousness, including the para-psychological. She was taken aback by the overwhelming interest her students showed in these areas. Then a graduate student asked Dr. Hunt to run tests to help her understand what happened when she went into an “altered state” while dancing.
“At that time,” explains Hunt in her book, Infinite Mind, “an altered state seemed unreal to me, for there were no guidelines as to how to record consciousness, and no agreement even as to what it was.”
Instead of stating—as most scientists did in the 1970s—that there was no such thing as an “altered state” (a highly unscientific attitude), she gave it a lot of thought. A few weeks later she came up with a plan.
Possibly the neurological level of muscle stimulation held a clue to consciousness levels. Timidly, I placed the electromyographic (EMG) recording electrodes on her lower arm, her upper arm, and her back muscles, each area primarily stimulated by a different level of the spinal cord and brain. Intuitively, in a playful mood, I placed one electrode on top of her head, although I knew nothing about chakras. . . .
in five minutes the recordings remarkably changed. The muscular signal from her lower arm stopped. The baseline activity characteristic of all living tissue was absent on the scopes. Next, the upper arm recording dropped out. The engineer believed there was no equipment failure, although there was no ordinary energy in the arms. Soon she sat down in a “tailor position”. . . . Next, electromagnetic energy poured from the top of her head with intensity beyond what our equipment could handle. This state lasted for seven minutes, followed by a reverse sequence of reactivating the spine, upper arm, and lower arm muscles. . . . I was at a total loss to explain, but I could not forget these happenings.40
Later Hunt received a grant to study the energetic effects of Rolfing, a form of deep tissue bodywork originated in the 1940s by Ida P. Rolf. Dr. Hunt knew that ordinary equipment was incapable of detecting the minute signals of the energy field, so she approached an engineer who developed highly sensitive telemetry systems for NASA to record astronauts’ heart and muscle activity while in space. She asked him to build the unique instrument that she used for her experiments.
Telemetry is a radio broadcasting system that intercepts and projects the body’s electrical activity. Surface sensors pick up the body’s electrical signals by FM radio frequency carrier via a miniature, battery-operated radio transmitter and amplifier attached to the subject by a belt. The airborne signal is then picked up by a radio receiver and recorded on tape or disk. Dr. Hunt’s data were analyzed by data analysis procedures such as Wave Shape Analysis, Fourier Frequency Analysis, and Frequency Spectrogram, all of which produced consistent results.
The telemetry instrument enabled Dr. Hunt to record regular, high-frequency electrical oscillations coming from the chakras that had never been previously recorded or reported in the scientific literature. Traditionally scientists thought of biological energy as that which takes place in the activity of the brain waves, or in the shortening and lengthening of the muscles, including the beating of the heart. Brain wave activity is measured by an electroencephalogram (EEG, between zero and 200 cycles per second (cps). The heart’s electrical activity is recorded by an electrocardiogram (EKG), which creates a larger and faster wave at about 225 cps. The electrical current produced when a muscle shortens can be recorded by an electromyogram (EMG), with a wider range, from zero to 250 cps.
Conventional recordings are taken by inserting needle sensors or probes into a nerve or muscle, which gives a reading only for the very local electricity. Dr. Hunt attached the electrodes to the surface of the skin where there was a larger signal. She amplified the baseline on the oscilloscope and filtered the data to remove the brain, heart, and muscle frequencies. She discovered a void of electrical activity between about 250 and 500 cps, and then she discovered a continuous activity from 500 to 20,000 cps (the highest capacity of the instrument at the time.)41
In one of Hunt’s studies, Emilie, who was a healer, worked with a congenitally brain-disturbed young man who had been evaluated as having abnormal brain waves. An aura reader, Rosalyn Bruyere (who has since become quite famous—the movie Resurrection is based on her life) was brought in to read the colors and describe activity that she observed in the energy field.
Dr. Hunt applied surface sensors on the young man’s skin over the areas that were alleged to relate to the chakras. A data-tape was set up to record Emilie’s shamanic chanting, Rosalyn’s descriptions, and Dr. Hunt’s narration of the healer’s movements. For three hours, “Emilie performed esoteric movements around his body and shouted into his kneecaps. She shook rattles and bells, and waved crystals around his body, but she never touched him.”
At the end of three hours the young man’s brain waves had stabilized into a normal pattern. When all the data were analyzed, there was only one firm relationship.
There was a very close correlation between what the aura reader said and the gross happenings in the electrical activity of the man’s auric field. For example, when Rosalyn reported energy entering his arm, the amplitude of the recordings increased. She described that energy had entered his feet and progressed up his legs, “shooting the Kundalini” and “getting balled up in the heart chakra.”
These unscientific descriptions were nonetheless synchronized with the electronic data showing sudden energy flowing up both legs with an increased amplitude in the lower abdomen, or Kundalini, and stopping in the heart chakra. The chart showed a two-fold increase in the amplitude of contraction with no change in the rate.
Rosalyn’s next description convinced me that some unknown energy was flowing when she described that Emilie had released the energy from the heart which spurted out the crown chakra on top of the head in bursts of white light. The spurts were in sync with the sudden energy bursts which came from the crown electrodes, and the frequencies of these data were the highest recorded during that session.
The sensor readings from the chakras corresponded directly with the aura reader’s descriptions, including amount of energy, color, and dynamic quality.42
In another study, Dr. Hiroshi Motoyama of Japan speculated that since the chakras are believed to be transformers that bring energy into the body and transmit energy out of the body, it seemed reasonable to assume that highly aware persons could consciously project energy out of their chakras. While Motoyama had no way of measuring the primary subtle energy of the chakras, he hoped to measure secondary energy, such as electrostatic fields.
Choosing subjects who were advanced meditators and those with previous psychic experiences, he placed electrodes in front of chakras that the subjects claimed had been awakened. By measuring the amplitude and frequency of the electrical field at the presumed chakras, Motoyama found that the level of energy at these locations was significantly greater than the recordings made at the corresponding areas of the control subjects.
Motoyama also monitored the energy that the advanced meditators claimed to be able to project through their chakras. He documented significant electrical field disturbances emanating from the activated chakras. These results were repeated by Motoyama over a number of years and later by Itzhak Bentov, author of Stalking the Wild Pendulum, who successfully used similar equipment to duplicate Motoyama’s findings.43
Copyright © 2006 by Joy Gardner
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