Chakras: What They Are and How They Affect Your Everyday Life!

Based on the Teachings of Salem Through Diandra

By Clarence Deigel

July 06, 2006

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Chakras have been known on the planet for thousands of years, but few people understand what the chakras are and how they affect their life. Understanding and working with the chakras are key to healing your fears and limitations, thereby, opening your life’s possibilities and freeing you to achieve your dreams.

What are the Chakras?

The word “chakra” has its roots in the Sanskrit language coming from the Hindus thousands of years ago. The Hindus thought of the chakra as a wheel of spinning energy, or energy center, where consciousness resides governing various attributes of individual physical and spiritual aspects. The chakras are not physical but part of the “subtle anatomy” or what you may simply think of as an energetic point of consciousness within the body where the spirit and physical worlds meet.

There are seven major energy centers or chakras with five aligned vertically along the spine and two residing in the head area. The base or survival chakra resides at the base of the spine and connects or grounds you to the earth. The crown chakra, at the top of the head, is partly not within the body but in the “spiritual essence” serving more as a gateway to everything that is, Divinity, or God. The other major chakras are the sexual-creativity chakra in the naval area, the emotional chakra in the solar plexus area, the heart chakra in the heart area, the throat chakra in the throat area, and the third-eye chakra in the middle of the forehead. Each of these major chakras uniquely influences various physical and spiritual aspects of your life.

What is the Purpose of the Chakras?

Originally, the chakras were created for the sole purpose of defining experience and allowing expression within the physical dimension. As humanity became concerned with its ability to exist within the physical, fear raised its head and means were created in an attempt to insure safety. The consciousness of humanity began to live and process experiences within time: forming perceptions of experiences to be used as a basis for evaluating how one’s safety may be affected by present or future experiences.

For this process of evaluation of experiences based on perceptions to work, a place was required for storing the perceptions and making them readily available for evaluation. The chakras were adapted to serve also as containers for storing the perceptions of your life’s experiences.

Besides the seven major chakras, there are minor chakras as well. Your body is filled with little energy centers or perception containers. For instance, there is a perception container for beauty, but you are not going to hear of a beauty chakra. All of these little energy centers are connected and pour into the seven major chakras like tributaries of a river. The perception of every thought, every experience, every action you have feed somewhere into your chakra system so you can retain your perceptions and have them to live by.

How the Chakras Affect Your Everyday Life

Perception is simply the result of how you have determined an experience or similar experience has affected you in the past. You then carry over these preconceived ideas or perceptions, based upon your past experiences, into your present experiences. You may think, “What is wrong with that?” At times nothing, but this system of evaluating your existence from the perceptions of past experiences can very much limit the creative possibilities you allow within your life, for you no longer experience in a pure, undistorted, manner free of the affects of how you have perceived your past experiences.

Realize that perceptions are not rock bed reality. For instance, two people can participate in the same event, but it is not likely their perception of the event will be totally the same. In fact, at times, the perceptions can be quite different. It goes without saying that we have all encountered plenty of incidences when people do not see eye-to-eye.

Now if your perceptions help you to relax from your everyday survival considerations, then those perceptions go without much notice and you are content. But if you perceive something to be threatening, even indirectly, then that perception can begin to limit your life.

Say you have had, what you consider to be, two or three painful experiences within a short period of time. The perceptions from those experiences can become so strengthened that you become out of balance. You may become fearful, looking over your shoulder so-to-speak, and begin to close off possibilities because you anticipate similar experiences will have the same result. Those perceptions then become strongly entrenched in your chakras. So within your chakras, you have some pretty strong perceptions that have been reinforced over many experiences causing you to focus on a very narrow part of your present experience missing other opportunities and possibilities in your life.

The chakras also affect the decisions you make in your life. The conscious portion of you comprises only about ten percent of your decision-making process. The subconscious is connected to the chakras and draws from the perceptions of every experience you have ever had. Many times before you have consciously looked at a situation, the perceptions within the chakras, working with the subconscious mind, has already filtered through information the conscious mind no longer remembers and strongly influences the decisions you make. It is important to recognize that what happens as you experience life is not just a thinking process. You can only hold a thought for a limited period of time, but your perceptions continually work behind the scenes affecting your life.

The chakras affect you in many ways, but what is important is how your perceptions stored within the chakras can limit you, affecting how you experience your life and the possibilities you allow in your life.

Expression

Your mind may think what is existence but experiencing it. There are other dimensions and possibilities to existence. Time allows you to place your experiences in a linear framework so the mind can analyze and understand them. But if time diminished (speeds up as some think is now happening), so would experience, and you would begin to exist as existence itself and not from experience.

Now, if you can flow for a moment and think of existing at this moment with all possibilities, not experiencing them, but rather BEING the existence. To BE the existence, the possibility, the creation, is different than experiencing it: you are simply existing in all of the intangible wonder of existence. If you closely examine your life, you will find, at times, you tap into these other possibilities of existence, if only for a brief moment, and thus realize there are other ways to live life than from experience.

If you desire to move from living your life from experience, the next step is to live from expression. Expression merely means you experience without limitation. It is still a world of experience. But if you can let go of your perceptions of your experiences, then you can evolve to living from expression. Living from expression is living in the fullness of the experience without judgment, without attachments, without need, and in the fullness of the now moment. Living from expression is a giant leap, but if you live your existence as an experience, you will live your experiences in a richer, fuller, manner without being limited, feeling fear or pain, or reacting to life from your emotions.

You may say, “How can I ever live the richness of experience without emotions?” Rather than living from emotion, you will live from what you really are, which is peace, harmony, joy, and love. Those are not emotions. Those are states of existence. In those states of existence, you are not limited; instead, you are free to use your creative powers for your emotions can severely restrict those powers.

Remember, the chakras, besides defining experience, allow expression within the physical. That role, however, is diminished by the effect of your perceptions within the chakras. The perceptions block and distort the free flow of Divinity—your connection to and expression of your higher self and Spirit—through the chakras. Therefore, the perceptions not only affect how you experience life but also function as energy blockages within the chakras inhibiting your ability to express.

What Can You Do To Change This?

First recognize what is occurring and understand how perceptions affect your life and your desires: how you are living your life from your perceptions, and then wondering why you are experiencing what you do in your life; how your perceptions hinder your ability to express and distort the connection to your higher self and Spirit—who you really are.

When you get so wrapped up with the concerns of daily life (deadlines, perceived important issues) that your energy becomes knotted through the perceptions of worry, fear and doubt; you take yourself out of the flow with Spirit and weigh yourself down. You can become argumentative, have less patience, and begin to view things as wrong (judge). These are signs that you are weighed down and need to transform so you can come from Spirit and flow. Coming from Spirit is coming from peace, joy, harmony and love. One way to lighten this heavy vibration is through clearing the chakras.

Therefore, step two is to work with the chakras (clear them) to heal the effects of your perceptions on your life. Clearing the chakras is a process where you take the perceptions and blockages stored within the chakras and transform them: lightening up your energy and making it easier to come from Spirit. The more you align with Spirit the less you will judge, and the more you will be in harmony with everything around you. You will not take what people say as personal. You will be following you and be safe within that knowledge.

There is no way you can begin to live from expression until you clear the perceptions stored in your chakras. When you give yourself permission to release the blocked energy, allowing it to be transformed, then the chakras begin to take on the richness and fullness they had originally. When the chakras are clear, their original function is unhampered; and your ability to center yourself in the power that you are, recognizing your unlimited being-ness and the possibilities of your creative existence, is once again restored.

It is well worth your time to work with and clear your chakras. Begin to remove the effects of your perceptions on your life. As you do, you will not be as bound by past experiences. You will begin to feel lighter and think in terms of possibilities being realities that before were only vague possibilities. You will begin to see the expansiveness of life, because you are not experiencing from the limiting influences of your perceptions. You will begin to allow yourself to see and perceive beauty in every moment of your life, to expand and live from the expression of who you really are!

Clarence Deigel
Author: Experiencing Life Through the Chakras

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