Chakra Meditation A Guided Visualization with graphics of Chakras (large) included

[MagickMuffin]

by Lonny J. Brown, HHC: from his book Enlightenment in Our Time: The Perennial Wisdom in the New Millennium (pp. 102-115; reprinted with permission)

As you sit erect, your spine in line with the earth's center, envision a vertical double helix of vibrant energy embracing and dancing around your spinal column, magnetizing and polarizing your hollow core. One spiral comes down from above and infuses dense matter with the spirit of life. One spiral draws the power of the earth up to meet the light above your head. Your entire biological existence is a reflection of the balance and play of these two powerful forces, flowing and glowing, between the magnetic poles of your spine.


Muladhara: Root Chakra Affirmation: My root chakra is deeply rooted.

ROOT CHAKRA
Take a deep breath and pull it down through your body to the very base of your spine, the seat of the first chakra. As you release the air, relax all the muscles in your toes, feet and legs. Take in more air and focus on your connecting point to the earth. Now release the air, .. relax down through your body, and continue to send your attention deep into the center of the earth. Picture magnetic lines of force coming from the earth's core, connecting with your own root center. Allow that force to arise within you, from below.

Imagine a feeling of power surging into this "root" center from the deep center of the earth. As it increases, keep your attention on this powerful magnetic energy at the bottom of your spine.
Focusing at the base of the spine, imagine that with each breath, energy collects and builds up there. Continue to relax, and sense the feelings in the coccyx, perineum, anus, and deep inside your pelvic cavity, the foundation of your body. Sensing your root center, breathe as if the earth's energy is coming directly into you from below. Allow the energy to build, like a growing, magnetic force.
Feel the weight of your attachment to the earth: its gravitational pull on your body, through the mass of rock.. dirt.. clay.. and minerals. Sense the huge mass of the planet under you, pulling you down towards dense earth. You are born of this earth, and when you die, your body will return to it.

Earth animal that you are, you eat of the earth and eliminate earth fertilizer. Your awareness is purely biological, immersed in life's ecological cycles. In the womb of creation, you are pulsating flesh, bound by living sinews and fibers. The dominant color is blood red. Smell your own odors. Feel the cool dirt.

Be aware of your pelvic area, legs, and feet. Feel the density of your bones, the core and support structure of your body, minerals taken up from the earth and deposited inside you, compacted by gravity, formed against the pull of the earth.

You are at the most primitive stage of evolution. Your behavior is animal-instinctual and reactive. You are motivated by survival drives, such as hunger and fear. You are isolated and fiercely individual. All you know of reality is physical and self--referent. Like an infant, you identify solely with the body, and exist in a sensory, material realm of stimulus and response. You experience yourself at the center of everything that happens. You love to eat and sleep. You fear pain, and death.

Your sole purpose is self-preservation. Persistent and self-sufficient, you can be greedy or aggressive. Allow yourself to acknowledge your "dark" side, and your potential for "small- mindedness," for it is the necessary lesson of this level of existence. Know yourself as an inheritor of animal instincts, and primitive tendencies. Fully accept that you are a creature of habits and needs, rooted in the earth.
Continuing to breathe in and out through your lowest nerve plexus, allow your body to begin to feel that you are in a safe place. Perhaps you feel secure and comfortable enough to let go of your protection.. to relax, and sigh. You could use the affirmation. "I belong on this earth." (repeat..) or "Here and now, I feel safe." (repeat..)

As your breath pulls up the Earth's energies, picture at your root center, a red square box, filled with dark, rich soil which is moist and cool. Inside, a coiled serpent is sleeping... Your task is to warm the environment, and so wake up the snake.


Swadhisthana: Sacral Chakra Affirmation: My sacral chakra juices are creative and bold.

SECOND CHAKRA: LIBIDO
Keeping the first chakra open, take a long deep breath in, and lift your awareness from your root center, up to the second chakra, the area of your sexual and reproductive organs. Take in more, letting the red energy from below heat up to a glowing orange surge... Now let the air rush out and begin to consciously relax your genital muscles, buttocks, abdomen, hips, and pelvis. Breathe the warm energy into the second chakra, deep inside your sexual center. Allow the power generated below to surge upwards and spread out at this second energy level, like warm, orange lava flowing out of a volcano.

As each breath washes through your sexual center, notice your desires awakening. Moisture softens the earth., it becomes fluid, and the energy of movement develops. Things smell juicy, and you want a taste.

This is the level of sensation, attraction, physical pleasure. It's also the center of regeneration and procreation. Sense the ovaries or testes, prostate, and spleen.. Feel into the very center of your sex. Imagine that each breath you take sensitizes and charges this second level energy center, your reproductive and sexual desire plexus.

Breathe freely through the second chakra as if drawing energy up from the earth, feeling the surge as you release any residual tightness from the genital muscles, anus, buttocks, thighs, and down your legs. Tune into any sense of warmth or vibration, and allow it to gradually grow, while breathing and centering on this sexual-pro-creative power within you, the most powerful biological force in the universe. At this time and place, give in to the urge to feel it totally. Feel the pleasure in your groin and glands.

The natural element is water; it is mutable and not easily contained. You are pulled by the moon, and swayed by emotional tides. You are in the ocean and you are of the ocean. The sea is all around you, as the blood stream permeates you within. Your internal sea of blood bathes the trillions of cells in your body. They swim in a rich warm primal soup of salt and floating nutrients.

Here, the human evolutionary stage is primitive. You are dominated by desire and the powerful urge for physical gratification, driven by the polarity of attraction and repulsion.

Your sexual powers can imprison or liberate. Sex can reinforce the small ego and the illusion of separation, or it can be a gateway to mystical union with the beloved. In the exquisite paradox of creation, your body both entraps and frees you. Accept your own physical needs and pleasures. You are a sexual being surrounded by sexual beings. All of creation is sexy. You can delight in the stimulation of energy, color, gorgeous forms.

Receive and celebrate the gift of your sensuality, and the irresistible vibrations and rhythms of life. Know yourself as a sexual being, with innate personal powers, and outer attractiveness. Open to your own animal magnetism, and the ingenious genetic desire system that keeps our species reproducing.

Picture an upward facing, glowing orange crescent inside you, with the very center where you feel your procreative energy most concentrated and alive. Feel the live, vibrating magnetic energy pulsate in your sex center.

As you breathe more deeply through the second chakra, think of your need for others, and your potential for love within your animal form. Imagine yourself feeling healthy sexual stimulation. To be totally opened in your second chakra, embrace your object of desire with complete passion and abandonment. Make bodily love to your ideal lover. Make love to yourself. Ask for pleasure, then truly receive it, to your depths. Surrender to your exquisite orgasm utterly and completely.. Then fall into the profound contentment and gratitude that follows total physical release.

(Momentarily dip back down to the first chakra, and make sure it's open by relaxing your feet, legs, and buttocks on an exhalation. Breathing in, come back up and do the same at the second level, relaxing the genital and rectal muscles, and opening to the upward flow of your energy.)


Manipura: Solar Plexus Chakra Affirmation: My solar plexus feels mellow and calm.

THIRD CHAKRA: POWER
Now take a deeper inhalation and lift your awareness to the third chakra, the abdominal/solar plexus center in your belly. While exhaling, let your attention settle here in your middle, your center of gravity. The color changes from orange to radiant bright yellow.

Imagine that your breath comes not through your nose, but directly into your belly. Feel the air flowing into your guts. As you meditate on this glowing power center, sense the force within your diaphragm that moves your breath in and out automatically. Allow that innate rhythm free range to determine the depth and pace of your breathing, and feel how it gently affects the surrounding areas. Continue letting all your stomach muscles relax deeper, and feel the entire diaphragm itself relaxing.

The third chakra governs the pancreas and adrenals glands, and the organs of the stomach, intestines, the kidneys, gall bladder, and the diaphragm. Feel these organs inside you. This "solar plexus" energy center controls breathing and digestion, as oxygen and nutrients catalyze and release your body heat.

The belly center, or hara; is your gravitational center and the source of your personal power. It is linked to your body's "fight or flight" mechanism, and reflects your moment to moment dynamics with the outside world: whether you feel vulnerable or trusting; in control or afraid; if you fear - if you are anxious, defensive, or aggressive - it shows up as abdominal tightness and restricted breathing.
So, tell your body that you are in a safe, secure place, and let your belly become as soft as a baby's. Every time you let out a breath, release all muscle tension, along with all remaining negative or protective feelings.

Your belly is the center of control and trust. At the "gut level" we learn to discriminate between friend and foe, distress and exhilaration, and to respond accordingly. From this center you laugh or cry. Both are important.

The color is flame yellow. The energy from below is warming up. Picture a glowing ember being fanned hotter with each breath you take, until a flame appears. Feel the radiant heat from within.
Now you begin to see more of the world and its possibilities. You have discovered others as something more than just food or threat, or sex object. You are developing a social personality. You want the security of belonging. You become concerned with family, territory, politics. You begin to use your will power to affect your environment.

Know yourself as a social being, engaging others as partners and allies, and sometimes, enemies. You can fight for what you want, or compromise for mutual benefit. Now you can sublimate your primal instincts, postpone instant gratification, and instead pursue long--range goals. Now is the time to cultivate your best intentions.

You have the capacity to experience doubt, fear, and inhibition, but you can also be altruistic and heroic. Ambition arises; for status and wealth... yet you can surrender your egocentric view by finding a larger group to give your allegiance, like your family, church, community, or nation. Your behavior is determined by cultural dynamics.

The dangers of this level are self-righteousness and aggression, but you are also learning the value of self-control.

Breathe power into your hara\belly center. Imagine you are lost in a jungle... confused and afraid. Suddenly a cleared path appears before you. The path leads to a cave inside a mountain. In the center of the cave is a fire. Now you recognize your mission is to keep the fire from dying out or raging out of control.


Anahata: Heart Chakra Affirmation: My heart is overflowing with love energies.

FOURTH CHAKRA: LOVE
Take another slightly deeper inhalation and draw your attention up to the center of your chest. Take in more. As you exhale, settle your awareness on this heart center, and imagine it feeling stronger, while at the same time reopening all previous levels in succession.

The fourth chakra rules the heart, lungs, thymus, and adrenals. The native element is air, and the feelings are light and expansive. The color is emerald green, natures own color of life, nourishment, and healing.

The transition from third to fourth chakra is a major evolutionary step, and one that differentiates you from most of the animals. Here, you have the potential for looking beyond your personal ego and melodrama, achieving some sense of balance between yourself and the world.

This is the center of the higher faculties: love, compassion, empathy, forgiveness and self-sacrifice. Here we become conscious participants in our own evolution. The heart is the center of the true calling of all human souls: pure unconditional love.

In your heart, you integrate body, mind and emotions. The outer and inner lives are in dynamic equilibrium. You work more patiently with the duality of things. You discover that mutual cooperation is better than fighting. Your boundaries begin to get softer, and you love it.

The symbol is the six-pointed star, the confluence of the downward and upward power triangles. Fully human, you are halfway between earth and heaven. In the heart chakra, you have the opportunity to choose, to live and work for more than mere individual survival. You discover some principles worth living for.

You can open your heart to others. This begins with taking pleasure in the happiness of loved ones, and evolves, through community service, and ecological awareness, to the direct experience of the larger bodies of beings in which we participate, including the Earth Herself. For the Earth is the heart center of the Solar System.

At the heart, your main motivators are love, compassion, harmony, peace, and cooperation. There is a sense of the interconnectedness of all beings, and a deep, somewhat saddened perception of the prevalence of unnecessary suffering in the world. With an open heart, you learn the higher qualities of goodwill, altruism, devotion, and sacrifice. Now group success is at least as important as personal success.

Fourth chakra energy makes you a natural gardener, good cook, skillful parent and a compassionate mate. You are capable of feeling religious. With love, you can teach and even heal others. You feel life's full complement of human emotions - from grief to joy - and somehow contain it all in a humane and workable way.

If the belly is the center of control, the Heart is the center of the loss-of-control: laughter, the emotional equivalent of orgasm. Both laughter and orgasm are kinds of ego-death. When we let loose with uncontrollable laughter the rigid personality loses hold, the protection mechanism is reset to zero, and excess tension is dissipated. When you laugh, you unblock the emotional center, and fill the heart. (Spiritually, the best thing to laugh about is yourself.)

Now breathe in a relaxed manner, through your heart center, and imagine your beloved appearing before you. Just feel the love coming in and out of your heart with each breath. You can picture it as colored light beams, or symbolic images, like streams of little cartoon valentines. Feel your most gentle nature emerge, as when a mother nurses her infant. Breathe in soothing love (remind yourself that you deserve to receive some of the beneficial loving vibrations in the world) and give it away every time you exhale. See your loved one sitting before you receiving all this most excellent, healing love energy. Wrap your beloved in a blanket of your love.

Now allow your envelope of love to grow to include all the people you know, and all the people you don't know, until your expanding love covers the world, and you feel boundless compassion for all sentient beings in your heart.

Let each exhalation begin by relaxing you physically, and end by opening you spiritually, like a flower unfolding its petals. Know yourself as a kind, generous, loving human being, worthy of giving and receiving the unconditional love that renews your soul. Pray for the welfare of us all.


Vishuddha: Throat Chakra Affirmation: My throat is clear and open, my voice utters truthful words.

FIFTH CHAKRA: CREATIVITY
Now inhale somewhat forcefully and pull all that energy up from the deep red root center, through the orange sexual/regenerative center, and up and through the yellow power plexus, and the green heart level, and into your throat area, which is a beautiful blue color. Hold the air and energy in for a moment while relaxing... take in more. Now relax and soften your tongue, vocal cords, epiglottis, neck muscles, shoulders, arms and hands. With each exhalation, feel the radiant energy in your thyroid at the base of the neck, and throughout your entire upper respiratory tract. Sigh out the sound, "ah..." Open the throat chakra.

The image is an open chalice. The color is azure sky blue. The element is the subtle, highly vibrating etheric. And the human sense is pure thought. In the throat chakra, we truly discover the power of the mind, and the importance of our soul-dreams.

The throat chakra is the seat of personal creativity, and self-healing. The thyroid is a master regulator of the other endocrine glands and many of the body's complex metabolic systems, hormonal balances and the immune functions. Send the message from your mind to your body that all systems may now be in perfect equilibrium.

Visualize crystal cool blue light shining through your neck and throat, clearing out all constriction. Let go of all tension, and relax from the jaw to the shoulders, and replace it with a feeling of open space.

The "voice" center mediates your communication skills, your artistic sense, your use of tools and complex systems, and your capacity for innovation. Know yourself as a sensitive, creative being, with an original contribution to make in the world.

The throat chakra is the origin of our thought-forms, which bear real force in the world. A "word" is a creative union of thought and energy.. a vibration with purpose and meaning, utilizing the primacy of idea and sound in creation. "In the beginning was the WORD and the word was with God". At this level, ideas become thoughts, concepts, language, and your plans take on the energy to manifest in the world, as the actual results of your intent and skill. As Peter Pan said, Think good thoughts!

If you are blocked in the voice center, you may have trouble being heard, or feel inept or unoriginal. To overcome blocks in the creative center, deliberately replace all your negative ideas about yourself with positive ones. Say internally, "I am truly effective and creative."

The medium of the mind is higher thought, and symbolic knowledge. Fifth chakra dynamics are subtle, philosophical, poetic, and reflective. Consciously invoke your sense of purpose, and highest personal aspirations. Bring to mind the example and inspiration of teachers and saints. As you physically and psychically "open" your throat center, know yourself as a creative person, with an innate ability to speak the truth effectively, respond authentically to ideas, and to create and appreciate BEAUTY itself.

As you feel your breath pass through your throat, sigh out the sound "Ahhh.." Picture a pure crystal chalice filled with brilliant, deep blue light. Out of the center, a beautiful white dove emerges, spreads her wings, and lifts into the sky with breathtaking grace. You feel blessed by the vision.


Ajna: Third Eye Chakra Affirmation: My third eye intuits inner knowledge.

SIXTH CHAKRA: INTUITION
With the throat chakra remaining open, take a deeper breath in, and lift your awareness to the psychic center between your eyebrows, in the middle of your forehead. Then relax deeply and imagine that each breath has the effect of opening this "Third Eye" center, like a window opening to a morning sunrise. Allow the brilliant light directly into your forehead center, splashing a rainbow of color through your brain. You feel your head getting more transparent. Now picture a radiant super-natural indigo light flooding in through your eyes and brain, illuminating your consciousness in all directions and dimensions.

Focus on your senses of seeing and hearing. Now realize their psychic dimension: that of inner vision, and hearing the "still, silent voice" of intuition. Tune into your pineal gland, seated deep behind your eyes, just under the forebrain. It's like a tiny radio transceiver. Imagine that by settling into deep meditative perception, you can simply and easily turn on your higher functions: intuition, clairvoyance, telepathy, precognition- your ability to know beyond the limits of your senses. The color is indigo violet, the vibratory ray of mastership.

At the sixth chakra - the inner eye center - you have the potential to rise above your separate, personal identity altogether. Here the essential motivators are Truth, Divine Love, and direct perception of the great unseen forces that shape our world and history. Absolute selflessness enables you to see beyond the ordinary limits of time and space. Your understanding is not a matter of belief, but one of living experience.

Let in through the open window of the inner eye, the universal light that dispels all darkness, all dis-ease, and doubt. Know yourself as a highly evolved soul, reincarnating through this and many other lives, on a cosmic journey towards Enlightenment. Your mission is to liberate yourself and others from delusion and the suffering it causes.

Tune in to the world telepathically; perceiving both the dense and subtle levels of reality. Your third eye is like an x-ray laser beam, probing the astral field, and deeper soul levels of life, seeing the connecting patterns, the underlying universal energy, and the meaning of things. You begin to perceive the Divine connection, and you stand in reverence and grace.

You rediscover your gifts of healing, true dreaming, and spontaneous teaching. You know how to use soul force, and you attract power by giving it away. You can create an atmosphere of serenity at will. The only lesson you have to learn here is the truly infinite nature of your own being.

Look into the deep black space, boundless and empty. Contemplate the potential power of pure consciousness..

You are like an eagle, with keen vision, and regal vantage point. From here, you see that all is connected and united. The world is a shimmering sphere suspended in the space of your mind. Its transformation results from your heightened positive intent, linked with millions of people of goodwill throughout the planet.


Sahasrara: Crown Chakra Affirmation: My crown chakra projects inspiration.

SEVENTH CHAKRA: ENLIGHTENED
Breathe in, and come up. Hold it. Release. The crown chakra.. It is like a thousand-petalled lotus opening upward from the top of your head. This "fontanelle" is where you enter and exit the physical body as a soul evolving through endless incarnations and forms.

The glands are the pituitary and thalamus, deep in the brain. The color is luminous super-natural violet, reaching up to the brilliant white of pure cosmic consciousness itself.
In the throat center, you are knowledge. In the eyebrow center you are intuition. In the crown you are wisdom.

Here are the laws of the universe understood. You see beyond birth and death. You know the universality of awareness that transcends the small self. You perceive on the soul level, and everything is Divine, Infinite, Spiritual.. including this Self.

Beyond language and concepts, insight is complete, understanding vast. Fullness and emptiness are the same, and nothing is lacking. There is no difference between creation and creator. You are fully conscious of your part in the manifestation of reality, in the constant re-creation of this world, and the sustenance of the precious physical vehicle, your body. Bliss is a fundamental truth of existence. The Universe is your home. You are none other than the Ancient One, the pure and full Awareness of God. Nothing is required of this One.

Here is Enlightenment- not something to attain, but what you already are in essence: master of body, mind, and emotions, karma, and destiny. You realize your birthright, the bliss of re-absorption into the Universe, while in this body. Spiritually, there are no needs. A perfect instrument of the Great Plan, you effortlessly contribute to the evolution of humanity and the planet towards Enlightenment. You are fulfilling this destiny right now.

All colors together become white. An iridescent fountain of pure, brilliant white energy surges up from the earth, through your root center. You feel it stimulate your glands, warm your belly, fill your heart, resonate in your voice, vibrate your ears, eyes and brain, and shoot out the top of your head - a brilliant white fountain of pure universal energy - shining from your head into the sky and deep space beyond. You are a wide open conduit, free at every level. You expand your awareness over and around the physical body, remaining connected to the source, and centered in the world.
As you breathe freely, you know yourself as a pure channel transmitting (and transmuting) energy between earth and heaven, in perfect balance and equanimity. You are full of potential power, yet totally comfortable within this center of silence.

A pure and perfect, highly polished, extremely hard diamond crystal, rests in the center of a delicately beautiful, soft pink lotus flower in full blossom. Spontaneously intuiting the union of these two forms, knowing is now from the crown chakra level..

You have traveled long and far, from darkness, fear, and total isolation, through the development of interpersonal relationships and discovery of the world, and ever-expanding dimensions, ever finer states of awareness, until you finally realize your connection - indeed your identity with -the whole of the Universe. Remain open at all levels, and savor in the silence, the experience of knowing your true Self, as infinite, whole and holy.

--from Enlightenment in Our Time: The Perennial Wisdom in the New Millennium--Lonny J. Brown, HHC
http://www.BookLocker.com/LonnyBrown
http://www.LonnyBrown.com


I thought this was an interesting Chakra Meditation technique. I haven't had the opportunity to try it yet, but wanted to share it with everyone who might find it interesting as well. :grouphug:

Namaste,

:loveya:

[kentauros]

1. The symbols are beautiful depictions of the chakras

though it's far more than I can read in one sitting!

The graphics would make for a lovely poster :D

I'll have to try it out too as I tend to both cleanse and visualize counter to what is generally taught about chakras. I attribute my opening up to Spirit in writing that subject into my fiction by doing a chakra clearing "backwards", or from crown to root. I also visualize the chakras as spheres of energy instead of the generally accepted "flowers" facing out to the front of the body. I've only met one other person that did it that way, so I have to wonder how many others have tried things opposite of what is taught, just to see if there is a difference :)

[MagickMuffin]

2. When I first read the Meditation this is what my mind's eye saw

I visualized the two shafts of light entering from the root and crown and that they joined into a double helix. At that point the Meditation starts.

I don't know whether that is what the author intended or not, but that's how I visually pictured it, which is why I was drawn to the meditation. It is rather a long meditation, I'm hoping to try this as soon as I get a chance and when I get around to fixing up my room, right now I don't have an adequate space away from kitties who love to run and play down the hallway.

The pics are very beautiful, I normally edit out the background but have been having trouble with Photo Shop and I was lazy on top of things:blush:


Namaste,

:loveya:

[PuraVidaDreamin]

3. I do something similar in the pranayam meditation with my yoga class

far less elaborate, but I'm working towards jazzing it up, and thank you for posting this.

It's fabulous!

Sat Nam

[MagickMuffin]

4. Let me know how your yoga class works out, if you decided to use this meditation

it would be interesting to find out how people react to it and if they give you any feedback.

Namaste

:loveya: