Whatever benefit you’ve received, from whatever source, is real if you say it is. ‘I've benefited so much from Anodea Judith’s book and others like it, don't take that away from me!’ I won’t and I can’t. Books on the chakras based on sound comprehension of the original Sanskrit sources so far exist only in the academic world. Leadbeater’s The Chakras, 1927) 2) John Woodroffe’s flawed 1918 translation of a text on the chakras written in Sanskrit in 1577 (see below for more on this) and 3) 20th-century books by Indian yoga gurus which are themselves mostly based on sources 1) and 2). You see, if you read a book like Anodea Judith’s famous Wheels of Life or suchlike, it's important to realize that you are not reading a work of yoga philosophy but of Western occultism, based on three main sources: 1) earlier works of Western occultism that borrow and adapt Sanskrit terms without really understanding them (like Theosophist C.W. Okay, I'll give it to you straight: for the most part, Western yoga understands almost nothing about the chakras that the original tradition thought was important about them. Since at this point it is nearly impossible to find a form of yoga in India not influenced by Euro-American ideas about it, when I use the term 'Western' I also include most of the teachings on yoga in India today that exist in the English language.) (Above I said that the West has so far failed to understand chakras. Let me clarify that by ‘the West’ I mean not only Euro-American culture but also the aspects of modern Indian culture that are informed by the Euro-American cultural matrix. They are conceptual structures yet are phenomenologically based, since they tend to be located where human beings experience emotional and/or spiritual energy, and since the form in which they are visualized reflects visionary experiences had by meditators. cakra) are focal points for meditation within the human body, visualized as structures of energy resembling discs or flowers at those points where a number of nāḍīs (channels or meridians) converge. If you're short on time, you can skip the contextual comments I'm about to make and go straight to the list of the six fundamental facts about the chakras that modern yogis don't know.įirst off, how do we define ‘chakra’? In the Tantrik traditions, from which the concept derives, chakras (Skt. This post seeks to rectify that situation to some extent. Yet, as with most other concepts deriving from Sanskrit sources, the West (barring a handful of scholars) has almost totally failed to come to grips with what the chakra-concept meant in its original context and how one is supposed to practice with them. Over the past hundred years, the concept of the chakras, or subtle energy centers within the body, has seized the Western imagination more than virtually any other teaching from the Yoga tradition. The six most important things you never knew about the Chakras
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