Chakras and Rooted Intuition

Part of a training session I attended this past weekend involved the study and discussion of chakras. If you're unfamiliar, chakras are essentially energy centers. They are not something you can see or touch, but can be thought of as a way to describe the energy (prana) within your body.

In Sanskrit, chakra means wheel, so these areas are often pictured as spinning circles of energy.

There are 7 chakras that are commonly studied in yoga, each with its own name, color, symbol, and meaning. These chakras begin at the base of the spine and move up through the crown of the head.

In brief, they are:

• Root Chakra - Red - Security/Grounding
• Sacral Chakra - Orange - Creativity/Sexuality
• Solar Plexus Chakra - Yellow - Power/Confidence
• Heart Chakra - Green - Love/Healing
• Throat Chakra - Blue - Communication
• Third Eye Chakra - Indigo - Intuition/Imagination
• Crown Chakra - Violet - Enlightenment

Chakra study can get pretty in-depth, but for this post, we're going to keep it at a high level, as I'd like to focus more on a thought I've been considering about intuition.

There are many ways to bring the chakras into meditation or asana practice. During our training, we participated in a fairly common form of guided meditation where our focus was led from the root chakra up through the crown chakra.

When we reached the third eye chakra, the seat of our intuition, I had a sort of revelation about the concept of intuition.

Even outside of yoga, we've all heard advice to "trust your intuition." That can be good advice, as our intuition, or gut instinct, often seems to recognize important clues about our situation before our thinking brains have a chance to catch up.

On the other hand, relying too much on gut feelings, without weighing them against critical thinking, can also lead to some serious missteps. It's a delicate balancing act.

I tend to think about that balance from more of a neuroscience perspective, comparing what we know about intuitive thinking and analytic reasoning.

Yet during our chakra meditation, I thought about how our intuition resides in the third eye chakra, which is found at the center of the forehead. It's the highest chakra before reaching "enlightenment" at the crown chakra, and it sits above the five chakras located below the head.

When we think of energy rising from our base, or root chakra, we can start to see how our intuition is based on every other aspect of our energy.

Our intuition is rooted in our most grounded physical self (root chakra), influenced by our primal drive and inner strength (sacral and solar plexus chakras), and shaded by our compassion and communication with others (heart and throat chakras), before being processed in our minds (third eye chakra).

Our intuition is not magic that appears from thin air—though it sometimes feels that way. Our intuition is deeply rooted through our body's many senses and various energy centers.

When we trust our intuition, perhaps we are trusting that the energy within our body is working together to help us be more in tune with other people, with our environment, and with our inner selves.

It's only when our bodies are in balance, and our energy is flowing with freedom and connection, that we can begin to reach enlightenment.