A spoken presentation by Anodea Judith explaining chakras as energetic centers interconnected by meridians/nadis and arguing that energy ("charge"/prana) underlies mind, body, and spirit. The talk situates modern medicine and ancient energetic practices (acupuncture, yoga), describes how energetic blockages affect thoughts, emotions, behavior, and physical health, and introduces somatic therapy and bioenergetic movements to dissolve blockages. Includes a simple hand-exercise to feel energy and a call-to-action to a free masterclass.
Chapters
Many people think because the chakras have location in the physical body, that they're just about our physical body instead of an energetic expression of who we are. But energy is in everything. It's everywhere. It's all around us. And that includes our bodies. It includes the energy of our emotions. Yogis call it prana, I call it charge. Energy is everywhere and in everything. It's part of what makes us alive and what makes the universe sing. We're all interconnected through energy. And in fact, energy is the connection between mind and body. In the same way that the electricity in your cell phone connects your software and your hardware, society is beginning to look at the person as a whole, rather than just their symptoms. The whole person includes the mind, the body, and the energy of the spirit. Also, how we are immersed in the world around us. We can't separate these things. We have to heal all of them together. Before the microscope was invented in the 1600s, nobody knew that there were tiny germs that were causing disease, things we couldn't see with our naked eye. And then once that was discovered, we began washing our hands. And we knew that we could create medicines to combat the germs that were causing disease. But at the same time, we threw out a lot of ancient healing methods that had been practices for thousands of years. But we now know that germs are not the only cause of disease, that stress and poor diet and inflammation and poor sleep and use of drugs can actually cause harm as well as those tiny little germs. And we also know that energy can heal or cause disease. And just because we can't see the energy doesn't mean it's not affecting us. And just as we can't see germs with our naked eye, many people can't see energy with their naked eye. But acupuncturists have known for 5,000 years that energy travels along hidden pathways called meridians, with points where it comes out to the skin. And that influencing these meridians can contribute to our health and overall balance. Yogis knew this too, and they called the pathways nadis, which is a word that means motion. And there were thousands of them in the body. They also discovered that we have major centers where many of these nadis come together called chakras, and that they contain some of the deep programming of the soul. Think of the chakras as the cities and towns with the meridians or the nadis as the highways that deliver goods to those towns. If something breaks down in the highway, then perhaps that city doesn't get some vital energy that it needs. Energetic blockages along these highways can result in imbalances in the chakras. These imbalances show up in our mind with our thoughts and beliefs. They show up in our body with pain and illness and tension. They show up in our emotions with unbalanced emotions, and in our behavior doing behaviors that simply don't work. When we come to balance our chakras again, we start to correct that deep programming, and everything changes in our life. As a somatic therapist, I study the human personality in terms of the energetic processes of the body. Our personality, both its gifts and defenses, Was formed by things that happened to us. How we had to mediate between the energy around us and the energy within us. Maybe what was around us was toxic and we didn't want to take it in, so we had to shut down and defend. Or maybe we were told, oh, don't be so sensitive. Don't be so emotional. And we learned to hold back what was inside. Well, then we create defenses that block the inner world from connecting with the outer world. And many of these defenses are lodged in the gates of the chakras. So energies everywhere, and it's in everything. Our brains function on energy. Our muscles work with energy. Our emotions carry the energy through the body. Even our thoughts and beliefs, they can be charged with energy or they can be hardly noticeable. Through certain movements, we can direct that energy into places in the body where it's needed. We can dissolve blockages, and we can become more, more alive. Somatic therapy means working through the soma in the body that we actually have issues stored in our tissues. And that as we work on those psychological issues, we move energy in the body, we dissolve body armor and blockages, and we free up our energy for what we really want to use it for creating the life we want. A good way to work with the body is to use bioenergetic movements that stimulate the energy and send it along various pathways to different parts of the body. I call this energy charge because it's something we can all relate to, like having a charge on something. So let me give you a very simple exercise you can do right now to feel what this charge feels like in your hands. So put your hands out in front of you. I like to do one hand up and one hand down. And then open and close your palms very rapidly all the way open, all the way closed several times. Then turn your hands the other way and do it until your hands feel tired, maybe about now. And then relax your palms, Take them apart, and slowly bring them toward each other. And when they get about this far, you can probably feel a subtle field of energy between your hands, almost like a spinning ball of energy or a magnetic field. Maybe your hands are tingling. Maybe even if you take your hands away, you can feel that tingling in the palm of your hands. Well, we have chakras in our hands, and this way of opening and closing the basic pulsation of the universe is a way of stimulating that charge in your hands. We can use that for healing, and we can do it with our seven chakras. Except there it gets a little more complicated. Through understanding key developmental aspects of childhood, you learn to heal the deep wounds of the past and free yourself up for an unencumbered future. By conditioning your body through simple exercises, you learn to heal the physical body and nourish yourself with energy. And then by applying this to your daily life, you'll learn how to work at healing in mind, body, and spirit. If you'd like to learn more, join me in this free masterclass with mindvalley, where you can learn to heal your own chakras and the energy body in which they exist. I'll see you there.
