Chakras (Part 1), Intuition vs. Intelligence (Part 3) and Glennon Doyle
July 21, 2024
8 min read
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{Body}
Are the chakras real?
This is Part 1 of 2.
When I first got into yoga, I was convinced that the chakras were — at best — a clever visualization technique to calm the body and mind. In no way did I believe that they had any materiality.
I’ve since changed my mind.
Chakras (“wheels” in Sanskrit) are energy centers in your spine and brain which enliven your physical and energetic bodies.
The best way to begin understanding them is by acknowledging that your body is not simply a bundle of atoms jostling around in space — it is an atomic vehicle fueled by intelligent, life-force energy (known as prāna in yoga).
Certain areas of your body require more of this life-force than others. For example, your hands have a higher density of nerves than your feet, meaning they need more prāna/energy. Or your brain, which takes up only 2% of your body’s weight but over 20% of its energy consumption (because the cells there perform more elaborate operations) needs a lot of prāna to function effectively.
In the same way, your spine has many nerve plexuses (bundles of nerves) that perform complex physiological tasks, which require a lot of resources as a result.
For instance, you have a “pharyngeal plexus” providing motor, sensory, and sympathetic innervation to the pharynx and soft palate. Or a “cardiac plexus” in charge of coordinating your heart’s intricate behavior. Or a “sacral plexus” which governs how much energy is flowing to your genitals at any given moment.
Basically, you can view the chakras as an energetic representation of these nerve bundles. Or explained succinctly from my guru: “Chakras are astral centers of consciousness and energy through which the life current flows to the different regions of the body. The petals of the lotuses (or the “spokes” of the chakra-wheels) represent the rays and branches of conduction of life current that radiate from the centers to perform various functions in the body.”
{Mind}
How to train your intuition?
Your physical senses — seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting and touching — are fundamentally incapable of making sense of all of reality. There’s simply too much information out there for them to consciously absorb and cognize.
With that, evolution has equipped you with numerous subtle faculties to help you navigate your world.
Intuition is the result of these many perceivable (and imperceivable) channels crescendo’ing into a firm, felt sense of knowing about a particular situation without having any tangible proof of why you know it.
This is how you can sense who is calling before you check your phone. Or how you are able to gauge whether that person is reliable or not before having any “concrete” evidence.
When you confuse your intuition with your instincts you will often be proven wrong, though, so the key to training your intuition is to become an aloof scientist running empirical tests in the laboratory of your mind.
What is an accurate psychic hunch and what is a self-serving desire being projected outward? What is true clairvoyance and what is just a prediction based on past data? You need to run thousands upon thousands of experiments testing and re-testing your hypotheses to distinguish ego from strong, impersonal knowing.
That means performing trials that can be confidently confirmed or denied — ones that can be declared as being either absolutely right or absolutely wrong.
As the simplest of examples, you can ask a friend to think of a number from 1 → 10. Before they answer, bring your awareness to both your body and theirs (rather than on your rambunctious mind) and choose the first number that emerges as a result.
From there, just determine whether you were correct and adjust your tactics accordingly. Did you have the right number at first and changed it? If so, why did you change it? Were you being present? Where was your attention when you got it right — your head? Your heart? Their head? Their heart?
When you do this again and again and again, you will start to get a feel for the unique factors contributing to your own intuitional powers. And over time you will be much better than just getting 1 in 10 correct, which happens when you are purely guessing.
There’s a really delightful, but surprisingly deep, fictional Netflix short film (40 minutes) about psychic abilities. It’s called The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, directed by Wes Anderson. I highly recommend it.
{Soul}
Which of your memories do you believe are too scary to look upon? What parts of you do you believe are irrevocably broken? What pain in you do you believe is not worth feeling?
Naturally, it’s in your ego’s favor to convince you of your weakness and imperfection, for those are the very beliefs that keep it alive.
The idea that your shadow is greater than your light, or that your trauma is bigger than your soul, or that your subconscious is realer than your divinity…those are the only thoughts standing between you and liberation.
Let this serve as a reminder: there is no demon you cannot slay, nor experience you cannot redeem, because there is no force greater than the God-self reflected within you.
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