Balance in The 7 Chakras

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Yoga is the path, and the chakras are the map.
​- Anodea Judith

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One of the best aspects of yogic philosophy for me is the integration of the head and the heart.  Having spent so much of my early life “trapped in my head,” delving deeper into yoga both challenged me to get out of my head and into my body (or heart) and liberated me from experiencing the world in only one dimension.

By that I mean yoga is a pathway toward more heartfelt living but is grounded in real, physical experience.  As westerners, we sometimes forget how much knowledge the western medical world has only learned relatively recently, has been passed down in eastern medicine for centuries.  

It is always a big treat to talk shop with other eastern medicine practitioners, such as Chinese medicine, shiatsu, etc., because so many of the concepts overlap with the traditional Indian view of medicine and the body.  I am always flabbergasted by how similar the energy channels in Chinese medicine are to their Ayurvedic representation.  

Now, in western medicine, we are learning that there are subtle channels of communication in a living body that have been unobservable in cadavers.  Only recently has western medicine started to realize the wisdom that comes from eastern traditions.
It is this way with the Chakras too.  It would be understandable if a person thought that the Chakras were woo-woo.  It’s true that some unscrupulous people pretend that simply placing the correct rock over the area of a chakra will act as a panacea.  These people do eastern medicine a disservice by simplifying what should be the personal study of a lifetime to something you can pay someone else to unblock in a few hours.

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