What Are Chakras?
Before we get to the chakra meditation, it’s important to know a few things about the chakras.
Chakra is a Sanskrit word whose literal meaning is wheel or circle. In a deeper sense, the word describes the whirlpools or vortices of energy in our astral spine. The chakras are part of what might be called our spiritual anatomy. They have many functions, but the primary and most important two are to store energy and information in the form of karma and to distribute prana (conscious, cosmic energy, or life force) to each of the chakras.
It is important to work with chakras as a holistic system. We should never focus only on one or two of the chakras for exclusive or special emphasis, neglecting the others. Therefore, I recommend doing the meditations below in order from the first chakra to the sixth. (The seventh chakra, the crown chakra, isn’t safe to meditate on directly.)
Each of these chakras has an element associated with it, as you will see below. These can be instructive in helping us tune in to the realities of these whirling balls of energy.
If you are curious to know more, I go into more depth about all of this and much more in my book on the Chakras for Starters and my online course Know Your Chakras.
Enjoy these chakra meditations!
The First Chakra – Earth Element
Try meditating on the earth element. Sit upright and close your eyes. Hold your body very still. Feel that you are a rock ⎯ absolutely immobile, stable, and firm. It may even help you to have a rock or a crystal that appeals to you in its shape, size, and color — something that you can touch and look at — as you practice this meditation. Hold it, feel its firmness, and take that sense of communion with whatever you like about it into yourself. Or, if you are able, go somewhere in nature and sit on a large boulder or rock outcropping, perhaps beside or in a river. Sit still and feel the strength of the boulder beneath you, unshakable, though the rivers of change swirl all around you. Even if you cannot physically be in a place like this, go there in your imagination. Consciously draw these feelings and attitudes into yourself.
Repeat mentally several times: I am steadfast, determined, unshakably loyal to truth. I endure all things with calm faith in God.
As you continue to meditate, don’t allow a single muscle to move. Feel the weight of your body pressing down into the chair, the floor, the earth, boulder, or whatever you’re sitting on. The weight of gravity pulls you so firmly to the earth that you couldn’t move if you tried. Now turn that consciousness of firmness, of physical solidity, into determination and fixity of purpose (this is an excellent attitude to adopt at the beginning of every meditation). Concentrate in the coccyx center as you look upward toward the point between the eyebrows. Mentally chant AUM (pronounced Om) at that chakra and direct its energy upward to the spiritual eye. Inhale and lift your consciousness and focus it at the point between the eyebrows.
Now close your meditation by mentally affirming: I am firm in my purpose. I want only Thee. I want only Thee.
The Second Chakra – Water Element
Here are two kinds of meditation for the second chakra:
First, center your consciousness about an inch and a half above the base of the spine.
Mentally chant AUM at that chakra. Look up at the point between the eyebrows. Feel the energy of the second chakra being directed upwards, toward that point.
Imagine yourself to be a flowing stream. As you pass through life, you touch many things but are held by none of them. Your life keeps flowing onward toward the sea, the vast ocean of cosmic consciousness.
Now try it in another way: Yogis sometimes tell their disciples to stand in flowing water up to the neck and to meditate on and identify themselves with, the water passing by them, or to imagine even that the water is flowing right through them.
Imagine yourself standing up to your neck in a river. The river gently flows around you. Whatever comes, let it come. Whatever passes by you, let it pass. You are free. You own nothing; you are owned by nothing. You own no one; no one owns you. Offer everything that you own into that flow, and let it be taken away. Be free and complete in yourself.
You might want to try actually floating on your back in the sea or a lake and abandon yourself mentally to the flow of divine grace. Yogis suggest that when you come to a body of water, whether it’s a stream, lake, river, or the vast ocean, stop and sit for a while and meditate on the qualities of the water. Whether literally immersed or floating on water, sitting by the water, or only visualizing water in any form, feel that you are flowing freely, fearlessly, with the stream of sparkling water. Or see yourself floating on a calm lake or rocking on gentle ocean swells, caring not where they take you, full of faith in the divine will.
Affirm mentally, with a sense of deep inner peace and freedom, I flow ever freely with the tides of grace.
The Third Chakra – Fire Element
In meditation, mentally cast all your limitations—of thought, desire, and self-will—into a divine fire to be melted and purified into cosmic wisdom and love. Affirm mentally, I cast my thoughts, desires, and all past karma into Thy flames of love. Make me whole! Make me pure! Make me one with Thee!
Visualize a fire either outside yourself or at the spiritual eye. Feel that you are offering into that fire all your attachments, all your faults. Review your day’s activities and offer into the flames any wrong thought, any wrong deed. Feel them being burned away, joyfully! There’s no pain in this kind of purifying fire, rather just an offering up through your own will power, of all ego, all fear, all attachment, anger, selfishness, and indifference. Feel your freedom as you release these things.
Search your heart for any kind of attachment. Reach in mentally and take it from your heart and throw it into that fire. Think of a shepherd in the mountains, walking through the brush all day with his sheep, picking up fleas or ticks in his clothing. At night he then has to go through his clothes and find these vermin and throw them into his campfire. Likewise, in the evening go through your heart and see what new attachments you’ve picked up that day. What new feeling of remorse, what new sense of self-identity, what new sorrow, what new desires have attached themselves to you? Then burn them; purify them, offering them all up to God.
Now enter mentally into that purifying fire yourself. From outside it seems hot, but as you get into it, it feels cool, pleasant, and joyful—burning up your pride, burning all sorrows, and all regrets. Everything is going up in flames and becoming free in the skies of Spirit until you feel that you have no definition at all except that infinite bliss.
Affirm mentally: I am a great yogi. I am free. I am bound by nothing. I own nothing; nothing owns me. I own no one; no one owns me. Thou and I are one!
The Fourth Chakra – Heart Chakra or Air Element
Sit upright with a straight spine, shoulders back, and with your chest up and open. To relax your body, first inhale and tense the whole body, then exhale and relax completely. Do this three times. Now, inhale slowly and feel that you’re filling your whole body with air, from the feet up to the top of the head. Exhale, and feel that you’re expelling all tension, all impurity, and all worldly attachment. Inhale, filling the body with lightness and air, from the feet up to the top of the head. Exhale impurities and tension. Do this again, one final time
Think of your heart, and visualize strings of attachment—cables, in some cases, threads in others—going out in all directions towards various objects. You don’t need to think of the objects; just think of all those cords going out, attaching yourself to the things of the world. Imagine taking an ax, a saw, or some scissors (whatever you need) and cutting them away.
Mentally affirm: With the sword of devotion I sever the heart-strings that tie me to delusion. With the deepest love, I lay my heart at the feet of Omnipresence.
Polish the heart till it shines and reflects back to the world only light and love. Then go inside the heart, and whatever little seeds of desire may still be there, pull them out with your fingers and cast them up into the air, allowing the wind to take them away. Your heart becomes as light as a balloon and can soar upward, free from the trammels of earth. Feel your heart soaring upward. All its rays of aspiration are turned toward freedom, toward the sky, toward the Infinite.
Now feel and meditate on the thought of the air element of your body. Your body is made of air; it is as light as air. Think of the freedom of the vast blue sky. Then visualize a balloon filled with helium, so it can fly upward. Think of this balloon as symbolizing all your likes and dislikes, all your worldly desires and attachments. Release the string of ego by which you hold this balloon in your grasp. Watch the balloon soar upward, growing smaller and smaller with distance, until it finally disappears into the air and only the vast blue sky is left. Your whole concentration is on being in the air and having nothing left to concentrate on but air, you become the air itself.
Affirm quietly but joyfully: Nothing on earth can hold me! My soul, like a weightless balloon, soars upward through skies of eternal freedom!
The Fifth Chakra – Ether Element
As your body is the little body, so God’s body is space, and if you want to feel Him you must feel space in the body and all space beyond it. Close your eyes and feel space all around your body, stretching out in all directions to infinity. Feel that space becoming a vast sea of light in which you are floating. Feel that light coming into every part of your body, from the soles of your feet to the brain. Your body is now made of light, merged with the sea of light and space within and all around you.
Imagine yourself leaving this earth, flying upward into the blue sky, upward further still into outer space, toward the dim stars and distant skies lying beyond the eternal stillness of the ether. Joyfully leave everything behind you—all attachments, all that keeps you bound to this world.
Dwell in inner silence and mentally repeat: My silence spreads like an expanding sphere, directionless, everywhere. My silence, like the ether, passes through everything, carrying the songs of earth, atoms, and stars into the halls of His infinite mansion.
Sixth Chakra – Spiritual Eye Meditation
Concentrate at the point between the eyebrows. Visualize there a tunnel of golden light. Mentally enter that tunnel, and feel yourself surrounded by a glorious sense of happiness and freedom. As you move through the tunnel, feel yourself bathed by the light until all worldly thoughts disappear.
After soaring through the tunnel as long as you feel to do so, visualize before you a curtain of deep violet-blue light. Pass through that curtain into another tunnel of deep, violet-blue light. Feel the light surrounding you. Slowly, the tunnel walls disappear in blue light. Expand your consciousness into that light—into infinite freedom and bliss. Now there is no tunnel. There is only the all-encompassing blueness and bliss of infinity.
At last, visualize before you a silvery-white, five-pointed star of light. Surrender every thought, every feeling into this star of absolute, ever-existing bliss.
Mentally affirm:
I awake in Thy Light, I awake in Thy Light, I am joyful, I am free, I awake in Thy Light!
