Everyone seems to know about chakras these days – at least as a concept – but do they really know the ins and outs of activating, balancing, and healing using the model of the Chakra System as the profound formula for wholeness that it is? 

This elegant map to human consciousness is not only a ladder of liberation for achieving higher states of awareness, but an opening into our own deep psyche, with all its issues and illuminations, from its depths to its heights.

Think of it this way: Your body is like the hardware of a computer, while your mind is like the software—programmed into you since the day you were born. The software contains your memories, your beliefs, your habits, and your thoughts. Some of that programming was unconscious, installed before you could even think or question. Some of that programming includes the things you’ve studied, the realizations you’ve had, the beliefs you’ve chosen for yourself. All of that programming runs your life.

What enables the hardware and software to work together is the vital life force, prana, or energy. Without that, the hardware and software, or mind and body, have no way to interface—just like when your cell phone battery goes dead. Without the vital “juice” going through the system, your phone is useless, no matter how fancy the model, or how many photos you’ve loaded onto it. It needs that electricity, just like we need prana to run through our system.

The software or programming tells the energy where to go in the body or hardware—what to access. It may tell us to hold in our belly, to keep quiet, to be careful, or that we’re not safe. This then shapes the hardware, or the body itself, which forms around the energy of the chakras. Most of this is unconscious, yet can be seen in our activities or the way our life works (or doesn’t).

The chakras are organizational centers for the reception, assimilation, and expression of that life force energy. Each one works on a different level, from the root chakra that processes all our survival programs, to our emotions, actions, relationships, communications, visions and beliefs. You could say that each chakra stores programs for these essential levels of being. Just like a computer, these programs can have bugs in them, resulting in problems in your life, and issues in your tissues.

Chakras also contain gateways into and out of your core. They regulate what gets in and what gets out.  Defenses block the chakras by blocking the gates in order to keep energy out or to keep energy in. Then our consciousness gets caught in the blocks, and is no longer in the free flow of awareness and experience. That can render a chakra out of balance, which usually takes the form of being excessive or deficient.

When a chakra is blocked, a person lives in the frustration and suffering of the block and cannot access their core. The internal gears that move and regulate energy up and down the core get sluggish. This creates further defenses, discomfort, and eventually illness, addiction, or dysfunctional behavior.

Chakra Therapy looks at the physical body, the human psyche, and the flow of the life force as a result of our past conditioning. As each of the chakras contains a vital key to unlocking the life force, Chakra Therapy uses tools from Yoga and Bioenergetics, (the healing of the human psyche through the energetic process of the body) as well as models of childhood development, to root out these unconscious programs, move the energy to new places in the body, and bring not only understanding and awareness, but greater aliveness and freedom.