A chakra is a centre in the body where energy is understood to gather and turn. The word is Sanskrit and it means, plainly, wheel or disc. Almost everything else people believe about chakras is more recent, and more Western, than they think.
Where the idea comes from
Chakras belong to the tantric and yogic traditions of India, where they are described as centres along the subtle body through which vital energy moves. They are not primarily anatomical claims. They are a map used inside a practice, in the way a musician’s map of a scale is not a claim about the physics of air.
The text that shaped almost every English-language account is the Ṣaṭ-cakra-nirūpaṇa, the “description of the six centres”, attributed to Pūrṇānanda. In 1919 Sir John Woodroffe, writing under the pen name Arthur Avalon, published it in translation as The Serpent Power. That book was the first serious English scholarly publication of a chakra system, and it is the root of the tree.
The part almost nobody tells you
The seven chakras in rainbow order, red at the base rising to violet at the crown, is the image everyone recognises. It is also the newest part of the whole system.
In 1927 Charles W. Leadbeater published The Chakras through the Theosophical Society. He gave the centres non-Sanskrit names and associated them with the nerve plexuses of Western anatomy. The rainbow scheme itself came together later still, through colour therapists working across the 1920s to the 1950s, and was synthesised into the version we now take for granted by Ken Dychtwald in 1977.
The historian Kurt Leland traced this lineage in detail for the Theosophical Society’s Quest magazine. The conclusion is worth sitting with: the rainbow chakra chart on the wall of your yoga studio is roughly fifty years old, not five thousand.
Does that make it worthless?
No, and this is where I part company with people who use this history as a demolition. A map made in 1977 can still be a good map. What the history does is change the kind of authority the system has. It is not a revealed anatomy handed down unchanged. It is a working language, assembled over time, that turns out to be unusually good at helping people locate what they are feeling.
When someone tells me they have a weight in the chest that has nothing to do with their lungs, or a knot in the throat that appears whenever they are about to say something true, they are describing something real. The chakra system gives that experience a name and a place. That is what it is for.
The seven, in the terms I actually use
I work with the centres, but I rarely name them in a session, because the name matters less than the sensation. If it helps to have the frame:
- Root. Safety, ground, whether you feel entitled to take up space.
- Sacral. Appetite, creativity, pleasure, what you allow yourself to want.
- Solar plexus. Agency and will. Where shame tends to sit.
- Heart. Attachment, grief, the capacity to let something in as well as out.
- Throat. Expression. The gap between what is true and what gets said.
- Third eye. Perception and discernment.
- Crown. Connection to something larger than the personal story.
You will notice these are psychological as much as energetic. That is not me softening the tradition for a sceptical audience. It is how the work actually goes.
What the evidence says
There is no scientific evidence for chakras as physical structures. There is no instrument that finds them. The US National Institutes of Health, writing about the related practice of Reiki, states plainly that “there’s no scientific evidence supporting the existence of the energy field” these practices describe.
I would rather you hear that from me. It changes what a chakra can honestly be called: a phenomenological map, tested by centuries of practitioners against their own experience, not a discovery of physiology. Used that way it is useful. Used as a medical claim it is not.
What this looks like in a session
I do not run down a list of seven centres in order. I work with what is loudest, and the body is usually unambiguous about where that is. Sometimes a centre is congested and needs to move. Sometimes it is depleted and needs feeding. Sometimes the trouble is not in a centre at all but in the flow between two of them, which is a distinction the rainbow chart is too tidy to show.
The shape of a session is described here, and the tools I work with are here.
Sources
- Sir John Woodroffe (Arthur Avalon), The Serpent Power, 1919, a translation of the Ṣaṭ-cakra-nirūpaṇa attributed to Pūrṇānanda.
- Charles W. Leadbeater, The Chakras, Theosophical Publishing House, 1927.
- Kurt Leland, The Rainbow Body: How the Western Chakra System Came to Be, Quest, Spring 2017.
- National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health, Reiki: What You Need To Know.