How To Open Your Chakras: A Comprehensive Guide
When you learn how to open your chakras, your soul will shine brightly from within your body.
When your chakras are unblocked you’ll feel happier, healthier, and more balanced — emotionally, physically, and mentally.
Your body is so beautifully and magically designed, a perfect vehicle in which to evolve your soul. All you have to do is illuminate it and let divinity flow, or rather swirl through you — and your chakras.
To start off, what are chakras?
The chakras are energy wheels up and down the length of the spine that are vibrating, spinning, and literally swirling with vital life force energy.
They are areas in the spine where subtle energy pathways intersect and create vortexes of energy.
Translated from Sanskrit, the word "chakra" means "wheel." And these wheels of subtle energy each hold a certain level of consciousness and awareness.
So, how do you open your chakras?
Learning about and bringing more awareness to the idea of these energies centers in your body is the first step in how to open your chakras.
Each chakra has it’s own unique qualities, and part of this awareness includes understanding the negative and positive expressions of each one.
When you become aware of negative expressions and heal those patterns to a positive expression, your chakra will open.
Your spine and these spinning wheels are your electrical circuits for your aliveness. Each chakra vibrates at a certain frequency. Together, they hold the key to your wholeness and personal evolution.
Therefore, learning how to open up your chakras will bring you to a feeling of wholeness — emotionally, physically, and spiritually.
Your chakras are the areas in the body where you assimilate and process your life experiences.
The seven chakras and their significance.
There are seven chakras (there are more in the total system) and each has a yogic or Sanskrit name. Each chakra holds within it areas of potential maturation.
- Root chakra (Muladhara): Your ability to feel safe in the world. Located at the base of your body.
- Sacral chakra (Swadhisthana): Your ability to express creativity. Located in your sex organs.
- Solar plexus chakra (Manipura): Your ability to feel your self-worth. Located at the navel.
- Heart chakra (Anahata): Your ability to love yourself and others. Located at your heart center.
- Throat chakra (Vishuddha): Your ability to speak your truth. Located in your throat.
- Third eye chakra (Ajna): Your ability to follow your intuitive guidance. Located at on the forehead between your eyebrows
- Crown chakra (Sahasrara): Your ability to feel connected to spirituality. Located on the crown or top of your head.
When you unblock your chakras, you have access to the level of consciousness that each chakra contains.
When babies are born, they have the soft spot on the top of their head which eventually closes up as they grow older. Their seventh chakra is wide open.
Babies just come from the spirit world and, therefore, their seventh chakra — their connection to spirit — is still very strong.
Animal and spiritual expressions within the chakra system.
The chakras located lower in the body express your instinctual animal side, and the chakras located higher in the body express your spiritual side.
The middle chakra is the heart where these two worlds meet.
Each chakra has various levels of activity as they spin. Some can be more open than others. Some chakras can completely shut down in certain situations.
Open, balanced chakras are healthy chakras.
When your chakras are open, unblocked, and balanced, they function in a healthy way that makes you feel vitally alive.
We can’t live solely in our heads nor in the clouds, in a state of spiritual bliss. Well most of us can’t… right?
We also can’t solely operate on a physical level. Or, at least, it’s not fun to do so.
To make life more fulfilling, you have to have a higher side to your consciousness. Bringing spirit into this material world makes life more magical. Otherwise, you would be no more evolved than an animal.
I’m not implying animals are not evolved. Sometimes, it seems they're wiser than we are.
But we would not have the higher intelligence that we have if we didn’t have these higher centers open, bringing in higher wisdom and evolving our consciousness as a species.
We are the only sentient beings on the planet that walk upright on two legs, which gives us access to higher spiritual energies. We hold a spiritual responsibility to bring those higher energies into the physical world.
Do you have overactive or underactive chakras?
Ideally, to live a healthy, balanced life you want to have all of your chakras equally open, balanced, and unblocked. However, due to stress, belief systems, and daily life, chakras can get out of balance.
You can have an underactive chakra. To compensate, other chakras may become overactive.
- Underactive root chakra: If you've been doing a lot of computer or mental work, you’ll lose the openness in your root chakra, and you may find it hard to calm down and fall asleep at night.
- Underactive third chakra: Your third chakra, which houses self-esteem, is shut down and you overuse your second chakra — the sex chakra — to navigate in this world. You use sex to fill your need for love and acceptance, but it’s an empty promise.
- Overactive Heart Chakra. The heart chakra of a people-pleaser is overactive — giving to much — and their throat chakra is underactive — not speaking their truth and setting healthy boundaries.
Learning how to open your chakras is a multi-faceted process.
Each chakra carries its own unique level of consciousness, even if they all fit together in your soul's journey. Opening your heart chakra requires a different awareness then opening your third eye.
In addition, various types of health problems can occur if the chakras stay chronically out of balance, either too active or too underactive.
The illness can develop in the area of the chakra that is out of balance and in the gland that is associated with that chakra.
For example, women are much more likely to develop hypothyroidism than men, due to their people-pleasing conditioning and hard time speaking their truth. In other words, saying "yes" to something when they really want to say "no."
Open your chakras and feel the bliss.
Opening the chakras requires having them spin in the right direction. Each chakra is like a spinning wheel.
When it spins clockwise, it's spinning in a direction that allows consciousness and divinity to flow through your body. When a chakra is spinning counterclockwise, your energy is blocked and there's something you’re resisting or not aware of.
Keeping the chakras unblocked and open is very important. Otherwise, you'll feel stuck in your life, unmotivated, and have low energy — depending upon which chakras are out of balance.
One of the keys to open and activate your chakras is through breath, movement, and sound. Whatever form of exercise that allows you to do all three is great to keep your chakras open and healthy.
A skilled energetic healer is also helpful, especially if they can help you become aware of behavior patterns that cause your chakras to shut down.
When all the chakras are spinning in a healthy direction and are open, you feel healthy and centered in your body.
Notice people when they talk and see if you become aware of which chakra they're communicating from. It's a fun thing to become aware of.
Before you can do that, you need to be familiar with each of the chakras and their specific characteristics.
We are evolving humans. We are, just now, evolving into our fourth chakra: the heart.
When we were primitive humans, it was all about survival (the first chakra). Then, we started to populate the Earth and know different countries and cultures outside of our immediate geographical area (the second chakra).
And now, we're moving from the third chakra to the fourth, understanding how to honor ourselves and others. We have more chakras to evolve into!
So to put it all together, knowing how to open all your chakras and understanding them on a deeper level will create a healthier happier life for yourself.
Anna-Thea is an author and Certified Divine Feminine Educator. She educates people on how to claim their bodies as sacred no matter what age, shape, size, or gender. If you’d like to learn more make sure you check out her Guided Chakra Meditation.