Know Your Chakras

The balancing of our body’s chakras is believed to be important for our emotional and physical health. V Anand Kumar describes the various chakras and how to infuse them with energy

- V Anand Kumar

Chakras are psychoactive energy centres that we find in our astral body. The astral body is nothing but our subtle or emotional body which is not visible to our naked eyes. In yoga these chakras are identified in the astral body. If we dissect a human body we cannot see these chakras. They resemble petals of flowers that rotate constantly within our emotional body. It is believed that we can cleanse these chakras and balance them so that energy will flow through them constantly without any blocks. If these chakras are not balanced and if they are blocked, then one may have trouble in the form of emotional and physical disturbances corresponding to physical and emotional experiences.

The main function of these chakras is to eliminate negative energy from our body by constantly absorbing life energy into it. This can be done by changing our lifestyle, doing meditation, deep breathing, yoga and the chanting of ‘mantras’ with our hands in various ‘mudras’. It is said that there are 72 such energy centres in our body of which seven are of prime importance. They are Mooladhara, Swathisthana , Manipura, Anahatha, Vishudhi, Anja and Sahasrara. These chakras are associated with seven ‘bija’ mantras and seven elements. Detailed below are the various chakras.

Mooladhara