WHAT, WHERE and HOW of CHAKRA🔗

I do not want you to get involved in the esoteric aspects of chakra, related to raising the kundalini and so on; these are not for amateurs. However, you can practice techniques that are very safe to energize yourself and to shed your emotional blocks. This is what we teach in our first-level programs.

Our LBP 1 is about the seven chakras in our mind–body system. The program takes you through each of the chakras in great detail as to which emotional state they are related to, how they get blocked and how they can be energized through a very effective meditation process.

Attending this 2-day program has been a transformation process for many. Nearly 200 ordained teachers now teach these programs in 33 countries all over the world.

No one can open your chakras for you. Whoever claims to do this is trying to make money out of you, that's all. You have to work on energizing your chakras through appropriate meditative practices yourself. Even if I were to help in energizing your chakra, the effect will be temporary; you need to work on it yourself to make the energization long lasting.

By nature, we are designed to experience bliss. As young children, we actually do experience bliss. It is only when our environment conditions us, that we start building a wall around us. We erect a wall of ego and identity, which effectively blocks our access to this experience of bliss. In this program we teach you how to break that wall and start experiencing bliss all over again, as you did when you were children.

This is what happens when you meditate upon these chakras with the techniques that we teach. You are able to drop your mind and ego, the wall that isolates you, and you allow the energy of the universe to recharge you. With the four elements of earth, water, fire and air, you can actually ingest them directly. However, the etheric energy, which is the subtlest and the most pervasive, is not accessible for direct consumption.

The only way to absorb this etheric energy is through meditation.

The muladhara chakra or the root center is at the perineum point, at the bottom of the spine. This center is deeply connected to the earth and is related to our basic survival issues such as food, procreation and so on All the feelings that are centered in this chakra are primal, such as desires, greed, anger, lust and so on. This center is blocked by our fantasies. It gets energized when we accept, understand and act in reality instead of dwelling in fantasy.

We constantly live in the future or in the past. We spend time speculating about the future and fantasizing about what all can happen. From time to time we look back into the past, mostly with regret wishing that we could have lived differently and we could have done that instead of this. This too is a fantasy. We rarely spend time in the present.

Watch yourself or someone else while eating. We do everything else while eating. We talk, we read, we look here and there, we watch television and we keep doing something or the other as if eating is an unpleasant chore that needs to be combined with something more interesting. When we eat, we do everything else except focus on the food; we just swallow the food, as if we wish to get it over with as quickly as possible.

This is what we do with everything else. Our mind is rarely where the body is. When you are at work, you think about pleasure or home. When you are home, you think about work. When you are in a movie or at the beach, you are worried about the children at home or the unfinished work in the office. To be in the present moment is the most difficult thing for our mind to do.

Reality is in the present moment. What is now is what matters. The past is gone, it is history; there is nothing you can do with the past. Regrets cannot undo what has been done. They do not even help you learn not to do what you did to generate that regret. You do not even have the intelligence not to repeat your mistakes!

You may be upset when I say this, but just look back and see how much suffering you have had by doing the same things again and again.

There is nothing that you can do about your future. It is not in your control, however much you may think it is. You cannot even influence your own breath! You never know when it will stop. How can you then influence anyone else? All the speculations and all the fantasies you weave about your future can result only in one thing: suffering.

The only way you can do anything with your future is by doing something now. The future becomes the past through the present.

When you focus on the present and handle the present with awareness, both your future and past are taken care of; there is neither need for regret nor speculation. When you are in the present, you are devoid of fantasies; you are in reality. This is the meaning of the word and the state that is referred to as brahmacharya in Sanskrit. This state is that of the young disciple who the master trains in reality. Brahmacharya literally means walking in reality and that is the first lesson that the young student was taught in the Vedic curriculum. Ganesha is regarded as the ruling deity of this chakra, since he is the ultimate brahmachari.

Muladhara controls the sexual desires and actions. Lust is the primal emotion of human kind designed to ensure its survival through procreation. Lust is an essential emotion and not sinful as made out by religious injunctions. Unfortunately, humans have lost the ability to indulge and fulfill lust as animals do. Humans indulge in fantasies and not in pure lust.

As I said, a blocked muladhara leads to fantasies. In today's world, where media loads you with information, it is easy to get into and stay in a fantasy world.

A young girl, hardly 9 years old, came with her parents to the ashram. I asked her, 'What you would like to be when you grow up?' She said, 'I would like to marry so and so…' She was referring to a famous actor. This man was already married with children and probably 40 years old!

These fantasies lead us into false relationships which we think will lead to love and joy. What we look for is not love and joy; we look for someone who meets some image we have created inside us based on our fantasies. When a man meets a girl or the other way around, each one already has a template in their mind. If there is a superficial resemblance with that template, they get attracted and fall in love.

When the relationship grows in time and the distance reduces in space, true colors emerge. Templates do not fit reality. Marriages break down. Then one starts looking for another image to fit the template. Not only that, the template would have changed by now because more fantasies would have been collected by that time!

How will this ever work? You can keep changing partners and friends and relationships, but as long as what drives you is your fantasy image drawn from media or even the past, things will never work. It is like the woman looking for her father image in a partner, and a man looking for his mother image in a partner. Will it ever work? No! It will only lead to suffering.

Erase that template and start looking at reality as it is. Look at a person as he or she is and learn to accept that person. Otherwise there is no end to suffering.

When the muladhara chakra is energized by meditation, you learn to settle into reality and into the present moment. Primal emotions such as greed, anger and lust become more in control. You start moving up in the evolution of your spirit. The lowest chakra in human evolution is the muladhara, and this is the highest energy location for animals. As long as one is in a blocked muladhara state, one is still controlled by animal instincts. That is why if you wish to use the faculties of awareness and higher consciousness that are the gifts to human nature, you must unblock and energize the muladhara chakra.

People ask me that since humans are evolved from animals and since animals are generally polygamous, isn't it true that humans too by nature are polygamous? They say, that there is nothing wrong in changing partners and indulging in multiple partners at the same time.

It is correct that when a human is born, he or she is born with the mindset of a polygamous individual. However, the human species does not have to end polygamous. The human, out of most living beings, has the ability to move from polygamous to a monogamous relationship. He can further convert this relationship into a non-sexual one.

This is how the life orders are defined in the Vedic system. A young brahmachari stays celibate till he or she gets married. They stay in the monogamous relationship of a couple as grihasta during their sexually productive years. They then move into a non-sexual companionship relationship as a vanaprastha. Some then choose to let go all attachments, possessions and relationships and wander as monks, or sannyasis.

The next energy level above muladhara is the swadhishtana chakra, which is commonly referred to as the spleen chakra. This is located in the groin area between the navel and the genitals. Swadhishtana, when blocked, gives rise to fear and insecurity. All our fears are based on the possibility of non-fulfillment or loss. If we are either fully confident of achieving and retaining something, or totally unconcerned about something, we can never have any fear about it. A poor man living on subsistence income has no fears about losing his millions. Bill Gates should have no fears about becoming homeless.

Fears can be material centered such as about wealth and possessions, emotional centered about our feelings and relationships, intellect or mind centered, spiritual centered and quite often related to things we do not know enough about – like God and Death. Fear of death, which is perhaps the most common and potent fear, is about the unknown, driven mainly by not knowing clearly what lies ahead. It is also about the potential loss of identity, a primal fear that the mind has about losing itself.

Swadhishtana is about 'I', one's identity just the same way muladhara is about 'mine', one's possession and the greed to possess.

Why do you mourn someone's death? The person is gone, he or she cannot hear you. You actually don't cry for that person. You cry for yourself. You cry out of selfishness, out of having lost something that may have continued had the person lived; and you cry out of fear that one day you too will be dead.

When you learn that death is not an end but a passage, this fear will pass. Once the fear of death passes, almost all your other fears disappear too.

Fear can never be overcome by suppressing fear. It will reappear. Fear can only be overcome when faced. Meditating on the swadhishtana to unblock and energize this chakra helps in facing your fears and overcoming them. The meditation that we teach focuses on the fear of death, and once this fear is transcended, all other fears drop.

Above the swadhishtana, situated in the navel area, is the manipuraka chakra. When blocked, this chakra gives rise to worries. Worry is the constant inner chatter that we experience repeatedly, emphasizing all that is negative. Even when everything seems to be going well and smoothly, we are concerned that something will go wrong. Our entire assumption is that we are unfit to enjoy life.

Every silver lining has to have a cloud inside it.

I often place a dark spot on a white background and ask people to tell me what they see. Ninety-nine percent see only the dark spot. One in hundred says it is whiteness with one small spot in it.

How our senses perceive the external world is not what decides our response, it is the way our mind interprets what the senses perceive that decides it. This interpretation is done by the unconscious mind. Unconscious mind is driven by the memories engraved deep into it. These are the samskara that drive us. These deep-rooted memories do not allow you to stay in peace. They are forever driving you one way or another, oscillating you from one extreme to another, producing stress.

Stress and worry are energy drainers. There is nothing positive about them. At least desires including lust and anger are energy expressions. The problem is in our inability to control them and use them effectively. However, we can happily do without worries. It is another fantasy about nothing. I call manipuraka the corporate chakra; so is the vishuddhi chakra that we will talk about later.

No one in the corporate world is without stress. If there is nothing to worry about, they will invent new worries. Because they believe, totally wrongly, that unless you are stressed you will not produce results. So, they create situations that stress you.

I do not know if you have seen any large poultry farm. I am sure there are thousand such poultry farms in the United States. They keep the lights on, powerful tube lights, where the chicken are cooped. I asked why. They said this is to make them stressed, so that they will keep eating all the time, they won't even sleep, and they will gain weight faster. The poultry industry only wants the chicks to gain weight quickly. So, you guys end up eating highly stressed and dis-eased birds.

In the corporate world, all they care about is how much work they extract of you, that is all. That is why you have people burnt out at 30. They nearly go mad, and they have nervous breakdowns. Instead of becoming CEO or chairman, which in any case only one in many thousand can aspire to, these executives end up ruining their lives. I believe they call them salary men in Japan. They live like animals, like the chicken in coops.

In the corporate world, stress is transmitted through time-based targets. If you do not finish something in time, you are a loser. So, they make budgets and forecast profits. I talked to CEOs and they admitted frankly that budgets are never achieved. 'Why then do you prepare budgets', I asked them. They looked sheepish. 'We need directions Swami', they would say, 'We need guidelines and all management experts agree that budgets are the only way.'

First of all, how many management experts have been successful businessmen and are amongst the richest people in the world? Advising other people is easy. Making things happen is very difficult.

I am not telling you not to plan. Please do. But, do not get obsessed with what you have planned. Use it as a directional tool, not as a Judgment Day decision, as a life and death tool. That is what all you corporate people do. And you get stressed out. The mere thought of the budget and time line freezes you in fear.

Focus on the present, focus on the process, not on the future, not on the goal. If your process, if what you do now is right, it will certainly lead you to the right result. However focused you may be on the goal, on the future, if what you do know and do is not right, you will never reach there.

Stress and worry are killers. In the meditation for manipuraka, we teach you how to dislodge and dissolve the garbage that is embedded in you since childhood or before. People actually feel clean and light after this meditation. In fact, this meditation is so powerful that you cannot do it with a full stomach; you will vomit.

The next chakra above manipuraka is the anahata chakra, the heart center. Anahata chakra is the center with which we begin our first-level LBP 1 courses. This is the transition point between the lower centers for animalistic, instinctive emotions and the higher centers for more evolved, humanistic emotions. When the anahata is open, you love people and you attract people to you. When it is blocked, you demand, beg and buy attention.

From childhood, we are conditioned to do what pleases others. Our parents and teachers condition us to do what pleases them, by bribing us with chocolates and outings and what not. They stop us from doing what bothers them by punishing us. So, good children quickly learn how to manipulate others and how to obtain their positive attention, whether they truly wish to do it or not. This is what we end up doing in our lives. We carry notebooks begging others to sign in saying 'Please say I am good'.

All through our lives, this drama goes on. We do what others want us to do, so that we can get their positive attention and feel happy. If someone frowns at us instead of smiling at us, we feel troubled. It is as if we are a box full of labels stuck on it, 'I am this, I am that, I am also this'. It is as if people can appreciate who we are from the labels we sport.

We are bound by other people's opinions because we have no opinion of ourselves. That is the simple truth.

The anahata meditation, which is derived from ancient Tibetan Buddhist practices works at many levels. It builds true self-esteem, not the false 'in your face' attitude that you find so commonly in materialistic societies. It builds a quiet and confident esteem that does not ask for recognition. You know who you are, and that's what matters.

At another level, it allows you to express love without expecting something in return; you learn to respond to every one in whatever way they act toward you from your anahata, from your heart center, with love. Your negativities and judgments drop.

At yet another level, this meditation, known as the mahamantra or the great chant, is a self-healing meditation. Our healers teach this meditation to all those who they heal and who are interested, so that these people can live in harmony with their body just by doing this meditation.

There is a very powerful practical application of the energized anahata. When you attend the LBP 1 courses and practice the meditations, your chakras are energized. You are requested to continue with at least this one meditation every day. It will keep your anahata chakra continuously energized.

By now, you understand the emotional blocks associated with each chakra and you will be able to determine from the attitude of people interacting with you which chakra and which emotional block they are coming to you with.

Someone approaching you in greed or lust or anger interacts with you with a blocked muladhara; one who acts in fear acts from a blocked swadhishtana. Any average person would react to the emotional block with the same or complimentary emotional block: anger with anger and fear with fear.

Once you have understood the mechanism of the energy centers in your mind–body system, and with your energy centers activated, you have the option of responding to all interactions with your anahata. You can respond to all such emotions such as anger, greed, fear or worry with just one emotion, that of unconditional love, from your energized heart center.

The energized anahata makes this possible. Even if it is difficult initially, and it may be difficult especially with those who you are close to, persevere with it along with your meditation practice.

In whatever way anyone approaches you, with whatever emotion they interact with you, respond to them from your energized anahata. The results will be nothing short of miraculous.

Not only does your relationship with all who you interact with change for the better dramatically, but you also feel a deep sense of liberation and bliss within. Unconditional love is the purest and most powerful of all emotions; it liberates you.

Above the anahata at the heart, at the throat point lies the vishuddhi chakra. This energy center called the throat center is the receiving point of all the energy that comes to you through meditation. Most of this energy gets stored in the muladhara. The vishuddhi is related intimately to the thyroid gland that governs your growth. The vishuddhi chakra controls your communication skills, listening and talking. An energized vishuddhi would be of great value to all whose professions are linked to these skills, such as speakers, musicians and so on.

The vishuddhi chakra is blocked by jealousy or envy. Above the anahata, one's emotional blocks go beyond one's inner self. Greed, anger, fear, worry and so on can be self-created. Jealousy needs another person to happen.

If you are the only person on this planet, who can you be jealous of? You have no one to compare with.

When we are very young, we have no jealousy. Young children may react when something is taken away from them or want something else that they see with another child. But the wanting is driven more by curiosity. After a few moments the child will just forget it and move on. But, as we get older, we are conditioned to value ourselves against others. This is the damage to our thinking caused by the present day education system.

Children are ranked on their ability at a very young age, just so that the teachers' job of managing children becomes easier. Our school system builds in this damaging emotional block of jealousy through comparison at a very young age.

Once you rank one child as first and another as second, you automatically consign the rest of them to the dust bin. We say that it motivates them. How?

Is saying 'you are useless' a form of motivation?

This practice of the so-called motivation continues into the corporate world as we grow older. Ask any intelligent mother how she handles her children. Can she do it by comparing one unfavorably with another and hope that the less performing one will do better? If any mother does that, rest assured that the child would be damaged for life. Any intelligent mother will favor and lavish more love on the poorer performing child.

Each of us is unique. Each of us is made by god as an individual being and not as a mass manufactured product. God is a sculptor not a machine operator. He produces each of us from a different mould. What is the point in trying to compare with another? If you are good at one thing, someone will be good at another. No one can be good at everything!

Comparison is the worst waste of one's energy. It achieves no purpose at all. Move with the full awareness of your own uniqueness; you will achieve more. It is like running a race. You need to focus on how fast you are running and try to keep running faster. That is most effective way to win a race, because even if you spend a split second in looking at your co-participants, you have wasted that split second in your own progress!

Energizing the vishuddhi chakra provides you with extraordinary energy at a third level. You may ask what this third level is. Normally you work about 10–12 hours a day based on your stored up energy. After this, your body tells you to rest. You feel sleepy. You have exhausted your first level of energy.

This body message is your conditioning. It is not a real need.

I can tell you for sure that all you need is really only 4 hours of sleep every night, if you know how to sleep. The rest of the time you toss and turn.

Anyhow, if you keep working without listening to your body needs you will find around midnight that you are no longer sleepy; you are wide awake; even if you try to sleep you won't be able to. This is the awakening of your second layer of energy.

Sometimes, you come across situations where you are able to perform mental and physical feats far in excess of your normal capability. When a dog chases you, you will do the mile at less than 4 minutes! Mothers have been known to stop moving vehicles to save their children. Impossible feats can be performed when your life or the life of someone you love is at stake. This happens with a third level of energy when the vishuddhi is activated.

You can raise your third level of energy by linking yourself with the cosmic energy source through the vishuddhi meditation.

The energy center above the vishuddhi is the ajna chakra or the third eye center, located between the eyebrows. Ajna means 'will' in Sanskrit and when this chakra is energized, whatever you will can happen. This center is also the controller of all other energy centers and its related endocrine gland is the pituitary, which is the controller of all glands.

When the ajna is energized and the third eye opens, you perceive everything in a different plane altogether. You are no longer caught in the illusion of day to day life, what the sages call maya, illusion or unreality. You realize that the life that you lead is a psycho drama, and it has a higher meaning than what you have so far accorded it. You become aware of your divine origin.

When people talk of the original sin that Adam and Eve committed and relate it to sexual knowledge, they do not understand the metaphorical meaning of this parable. The original sin of Adam and Eve when they consumed the apple was that they forgot their divine origin. Their feet that were till then above the ground, touched earth and they became ordinary humans. One of the expressions of that loss of knowledge was the experience of lust.

The Ajna chakra is blocked by our ego. Ego is a mask that we wear to perform different tasks. We behave differently at different times. As a father, one behaves differently from what one would as a son. As a master one would behave differently from what one would as a servant. Every time your role changes, you wear a different mask. Each persona is a mask. When we wear the wrong mask, ego becomes a burden. The identity gets fixed and gets mixed up when you play different roles, it becomes inappropriate.

When we drop our identity, our ego, we behave naturally. Whatever we do is appropriate. There is no gap between what we think we are and what we convey to others. In Sanskrit, ego is classified into two parts – ahankara and mamakara. Ahankara is what you express as what you are to others. It is always more than what you really are. You boast, you pretend and you lie to boost your image.

Mamakara is what you really think of yourself when you are by yourself, which is always less than what you really are. People tell me, 'No Swami, this is not true; I have a high opinion of myself.'

I ask them, 'Do you think you are God?' They look down sheepishly; they think I am pulling their leg and say, 'No Swami, not like that.' Let me tell you this: any opinion that you have of yourself that is less than that you are God is a low self-esteem!'

You are divine, that is the truth.

That is why I say time and again that my mission is not to prove my divinity; my mission is to prove your divinity.

The gap between this ahankara, which is high, and mamakara, which is low, is what causes suffering. This is the ego imbalance that leads you into trouble. Dropping the ego is the last step in your evolution. Once you drop your identity and surrender to Existence, you are liberated. You discover your true divine nature. You go beyond the Self, because then there is no longer anything to call Self.

The ego that you project out, the ahankara, is all about taking yourself seriously. Learn to laugh at yourself. Learn to laugh with others at yourself. You will find that their opinion about you rises in direct proportion to how your opinion about yourself decreases.

Technically, ajna is the last chakra. As I said earlier, once the ajna is energized and your ego is dropped, you are truly there. You know the truth. Sahasrara, the chakra on the crown center (top of head), is really a gateway.

Sahasrara is the gateway to gratitude and bliss. When you realize your true nature of divinity, you are filled with tremendous gratitude to Existence, gratitude for the very fact of your being. It is that gratitude borne out of a sense of total surrender that drives you.

Some of my disciples tell me that when they hear my name or think of me, their eyes fill up and they are overcome with gratitude. To them, the master is Existence and their sahasrara energizes whenever they think of the master. It is not imaginary, it is real. They reach the state of true surrender in those moments.

Ramakrishna says that when a devotee's eyes fill with tears at the thought of his master or favorite God, the devotee can be certain that he will not be reborn! He would have had a glimpse of the ultimate truth in this life; this is moksha, liberation.

Beyond all these energy centers lies the ananda gandha, literally the fragrance of bliss. This is the ultimate center that is the convergence of all energy centers. When I initiate our Nithyananda Spiritual Healers, this is the center that I open up and energize. From then on, the healers are in permanent and perpetual contact with the cosmic energy through the master.

Unlike other chakras, which can be opened and energized by you through meditations, ananda gandha cannot be accessed and opened through meditation. This center requires the grace of the master and his initiation.

All Nithyananda Spiritual Healers would have attended three pre-qualification courses. The first is the LBP 1. Here they understand the emotional blocks associated with energy centers in their bodies, the chakras, and how these emotional blocks can be dissolved through appropriate meditations and practice the meditations to energize the chakras.

At the next level, they attend LBP 2, or the Nithyananda Spurana Program (NSP). Here, they understand the process of death and about the seven layers of energy that the spirit passes through when it leaves the mind–body system. The meditations in this program dissolve the samskara, the engraved memories of your conditioning that unconsciously run your life. In a sense, the participant is reborn with no samskara. They are then given a new name to signify this spiritual rebirth, a spiritual name that I choose in line with their calling.

The third level course is the LBP 3, which is the Bhakti Spurana Program BSP in Bharat or the Atma Spurana Program ATSP in the United States. These programs take the participant through deep meditative techniques related to the master–disciple relationship and other energy layers.

Once a person has done these three courses, he or she is ready to be ordained. I open their ananda gandha chakra as part of a personal initiation as a disciple. From then on, their spiritual growth is my responsibility. They are my disciples. The meditation that they now can practice helps them merge with Existence and gives them the power to heal. They become my healing hands.

Healing is a quality of that infinite energy that surrounds us. It is not merely a physical effect as measured by body and mind health; it is something far beyond that takes you into the energy state of the master and Existence, that of nithyananda, eternal bliss.