Chakras
Chakra is a Sanskrit word for wheel, used in later tantric and hatha yoga texts for points along the spine that the texts describe as centres in a subtle body. The familiar list of seven chakras, from the base of the spine to the crown of the head, comes mainly from one sixteenth-century text and its twentieth-century English translation.
This page describes the chakras as a system of ideas: what the texts say, and how the picture changed over time. It makes no claim that chakras exist physically or that any practice acts on them. Where the names come up in Yin lessons with a private teacher, they are only a place to rest your attention.
The word
Chakra (cakra) means wheel or circle. In early Indian texts it can mean a chariot wheel, a discus or a circle of people. The sense of a centre in the body comes later.
Where the system comes from
The chakras belong to tantra, a broad family of Hindu and Buddhist traditions that grew over many centuries, and to the hatha yoga texts that drew on them. These texts describe a subtle body, a map of channels (nadis) and centres, which the practitioner is taught to visualise in meditation.
There was never one agreed map. Different tantric texts describe different numbers of centres: some four, some five or six, some many more, placed in different spots and given different names. Buddhist tantra has its own versions.
The seven-centre list that is standard today was shaped largely by the Sat-cakra-nirupana, a text usually dated to the sixteenth century. In 1919 it was translated into English by Sir John Woodroffe, writing as Arthur Avalon, in a book called The Serpent Power. That translation became the main source for how the chakras were understood outside India.
The seven chakras as the texts describe them
In this system, six centres lie along the spine and a seventh sits above the head:
- Muladhara, at the base of the spine.
- Svadhisthana, in the pelvis.
- Manipura, at the navel.
- Anahata, at the heart.
- Vishuddha, at the throat.
- Ajna, between the eyebrows, the centre often called the third eye.
- Sahasrara, at or above the crown of the head, described as a lotus of a thousand petals and often treated as separate from the other six.
The texts describe each centre as a lotus, the flower of Hindu and Buddhist symbolism, with a set number of petals, with its own Sanskrit syllables, element, shape and presiding deity. In kundalini practice, as the texts present it, a force pictured as a coiled serpent at the base of the spine rises through these centres toward the crown.
How modern yoga culture changed the picture
During the twentieth century, writers in Europe and the United States added layers the Sanskrit texts do not contain. The rainbow colour sequence, the pairing of each chakra with an endocrine gland, and the matching of chakras to emotions or personality traits are all modern additions. So are most of the claims about blocked or unbalanced chakras. Scholars of tantra generally treat this later material as a new, Western development rather than a continuation of the older texts.
Knowing that history makes it easier to read modern chakra content for what it is: a recent reinterpretation, not a description found in the old sources.
How chakras can come up in a private lesson
If you are curious about the history, we can talk about it, or about where to read further. In the practice itself, the names can sometimes serve as simple places to rest your attention, such as the throat during a humming breath or the spine during a slow twist. That is a way of focusing, not a claim about what happens in the body. A slow, quiet practice such as Yin leaves time for these conversations, and you can read about my training on the about page.